By MATTHIAS BASANISI
Bern, Switzerland
THE United Nations, facing criticism that it has failed to police itself in Congo, has hit back in recent days. Press officers insist that there is no problem. Based on my own experience, I disagree.
The BBC and Human Rights Watch have both brought forward evidence that the United Nations covered up evidence of gold smuggling and arms trafficking by its peacekeepers in Congo. The peacekeepers are said to have had illegal dealings with one of the most murderous militias in the country, where millions have died in one of the bloodiest yet least visible conflicts in the world.
Last month, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services at the United Nations, told the BBC that her investigators drew the right conclusions based on the evidence they found: that there was little that warranted prosecution or further investigation.
I wish that were true. I was the investigator in charge of the United Nations team that in 2006 looked into allegations of abuses by Pakistani peacekeepers in Congo and found them credible. But the investigation was taken away from my team after we resisted what we saw as attempts to influence the outcome. My fellow team members and I were appalled to see that the oversight office’s final report was little short of a whitewash.
The reports we submitted to the office’s senior management in 2006 included credible information from witnesses confirming illegal deals between Pakistani peacekeepers and warlords from the Front for National Integration, an ethnic militia group notorious for its cruelty even in such a brutal war. We found corroborative information that senior officers of the Pakistani contingent secretly returned seized weapons to two warlords in exchange for gold, and that the Pakistani peacekeepers tipped off two warlords about plans by the United Nations peacekeeping force and the Congolese Army to arrest them. And yet, much of the evidence we uncovered was excluded from the final report released last summer, including corroboration from the warlords themselves.
I resigned from the Office of Internal Oversight Services in May 2007. But that does not mean I am alone in my concerns. Former colleagues of mine who recently investigated similar allegations against Indian peacekeepers in Congo are worried that some of their most serious findings will also be ignored and not investigated further.
What’s more, two outside management reports have been critical of the oversight office and its work. Ms. Ahlenius, who has been in charge of the office since 2005, says that she agrees with those criticisms. Secretiveness, she told The Washington Post earlier this month, “serves us extremely poorly.”
Indeed. So why does it continue under her watch?
The oversight office hires experienced investigators. Those investigators are required to respect the highest standards of integrity. And yet the office has done little to ensure that management lives up to its own standards. One likely reason for the watered-down reports is that Pakistan and India are the largest contributors of troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions and no one wants to offend them.
I met and worked with many of these peacekeepers and found the majority of them to be professional soldiers willing to risk their lives to bring peace to countries like Congo. But if peacekeepers of any nationality are found to have committed serious crimes, the United Nations must say so. The organization cannot close its eyes and ears to evidence of misconduct. Such behavior undermines peacekeeping efforts everywhere.
It would be shocking to think that the United Nations’ own investigative body is reluctant to act on evidence of cooperation between peacekeepers and alleged war criminals. The United Nations must be prepared to deal with crimes by peacekeepers in the eastern Congo; it must also be prepared to tell the truth.
Matthias Basanisi was the deputy chief investigator with the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services in Congo from 2005 to 2007.
Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23basanisi.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
This mini-league of nations would cause only division
Shashi Tharoor
Amid the continuing brouhaha about issues of race and gender in the US presidential campaign, we may be in danger of losing sight of the most important question that has arisen in the candidates' skirmishing over international affairs. That relates to John McCain's advocacy of the establishment of a "league of democracies", and the mounting clamour for Barack Obama to espouse the same idea as his own.
McCain says he'd establish the league in his first year in office: a close-knit grouping of like-minded nations that could respond to humanitarian crises and compensate for the UN security council's tendency to be hamstrung by the likes of Russia and China when it needs to take decisive action against the world's evil-doers. Neocon guru Robert Kagan, an avid proponent, says: "The world's democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN security council cannot reach unanimity." The league's strength would be that it "would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world's other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would [therefore] have even greater legitimacy".
The idea has also been embraced by many Obama supporters, notably Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy adviser to the Illinois senator, and Anthony Lake, his senior international affairs adviser. "Crises in Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Darfur," Lake writes, "not to mention the pressing need for more efficient peacekeeping operations, the rising temperatures of our seas and multiple other transnational threats, demonstrate not only the limits of American unilateral power but also the inability of international institutions designed in the middle of the 20th century to cope with the problems of the 21st." In other words, the institutions so painstakingly built up out of the ashes of the second world war have passed their use-by date, and it's time to move on.
One doesn't have to be a starry-eyed devotee of the UN to ask everyone to take a deep breath before the runaway popularity of this idea becomes consensual in Washington. No one disagrees that our international institutions need reform to make them reflect the realities of a post-American world, but that's not where the advocates of an alternative are coming from.
The world has just, less than two decades ago, come out of a crippling cold war. We are moving fitfully to a world without boundaries, one in which America's biggest potential geopolitical rival, China, is also its biggest trading partner. If we were to create a new league of democracies, who would we leave out? China and Russia, for starters - a former superpower and a future one, two countries without whom a world of peace and prosperity is unimaginable. Instead of encouraging their gradual democratisation, wouldn't we be reinforcing their sense of rejection by the rest? Might the result be the self-fulfilling prophecy of the emergence of a league of autocracies with these two at the helm?
But would all democracies even join such a league? Not if the price were the alienation of vital trading partners, resource suppliers or simply neighbours who happen to be non-democracies. Democracies like India and France have proved prickly in the past about countries like the US or Britain assuming that their internal political arrangements would necessarily govern their foreign policy choices. Many democracies have other affinities that are as important to them. India, for instance, may count solidarity with other former colonies, or with other developing countries, as more important than its affiliation with a league of democracies; southeast Asian democracies might prefer their regional alliance with autocracies in Asean. The American notion that a collection of democracies would inevitably be an echo-chamber for an American diagnosis of global problems is a fantasy.
The claim that a league of democracies would be less likely to be paralysed into inaction over, say, sanctions on Iran, than a security council with the likes of Russia or China on it, overlooks the basic fact that it is in the nature of democracies to differ, to argue among themselves, and to be responsive to the very different preoccupations of their own internal constituencies. Had a league of democracies existed during the apartheid years, would Washington have been persuaded by a democratic majority to intervene against Pretoria? The very question points to the risibility of its premise.
The advocates of a league of democracies argue that it would intervene more effectively in cases like Darfur or the cruel indifference of the military regime in Burma to the sufferings of its cyclone victims. That is a delusion. Such interventions have not occurred because they are impracticable. Humanitarian aid could not have been delivered effectively in the Irrawaddy delta in the teeth of active resistance by the Burmese junta, or in Darfur by going to war with the Sudanese army, unless the countries wishing to do this were to be prepared to expend a level of blood and treasure that democracies rarely risk for strangers. It is one thing to march into a chaotic, government-less Somalia to protect the delivery of aid, quite another to confront the organised military force of a sovereign state defending its own territory.
It is also specious to argue that collective action by a group of democracies (when the UN is unable to act) would enjoy international legitimacy. The legitimacy of democracies comes from the consent of the governed; when they act outside their own countries, no such legitimacy applies. The reason that decisions of the UN enjoy legitimacy across the world lies not in the democratic virtue of its members, but in its universality. The fact that every country in the world belongs to the UN and participates in its decisions gives the actions of the UN - even that of a security council in urgent need of reform - a global standing in international law that no more selective body can hope to achieve.
This is the time to renovate and strengthen the UN, not to bypass it. As the post-cold war "unipolar moment" slowly but surely makes way for a world of multiple power centres and a rising new superpower, there has never been a greater need for a system of universally applicable rules and laws that will hold all countries together in a shared international community. We all hope that, in an era of instant communications and worldwide information flows, this community will be an increasingly democratic one. Subtracting today's democracies from it will have the opposite effect.
· Shashi Tharoor is a former UN under-secretary general shashitharoor.com
About this articleClose
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday May 27 2008 on p27 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:05 on May 27 2008.
Amid the continuing brouhaha about issues of race and gender in the US presidential campaign, we may be in danger of losing sight of the most important question that has arisen in the candidates' skirmishing over international affairs. That relates to John McCain's advocacy of the establishment of a "league of democracies", and the mounting clamour for Barack Obama to espouse the same idea as his own.
McCain says he'd establish the league in his first year in office: a close-knit grouping of like-minded nations that could respond to humanitarian crises and compensate for the UN security council's tendency to be hamstrung by the likes of Russia and China when it needs to take decisive action against the world's evil-doers. Neocon guru Robert Kagan, an avid proponent, says: "The world's democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN security council cannot reach unanimity." The league's strength would be that it "would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world's other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would [therefore] have even greater legitimacy".
The idea has also been embraced by many Obama supporters, notably Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy adviser to the Illinois senator, and Anthony Lake, his senior international affairs adviser. "Crises in Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Darfur," Lake writes, "not to mention the pressing need for more efficient peacekeeping operations, the rising temperatures of our seas and multiple other transnational threats, demonstrate not only the limits of American unilateral power but also the inability of international institutions designed in the middle of the 20th century to cope with the problems of the 21st." In other words, the institutions so painstakingly built up out of the ashes of the second world war have passed their use-by date, and it's time to move on.
One doesn't have to be a starry-eyed devotee of the UN to ask everyone to take a deep breath before the runaway popularity of this idea becomes consensual in Washington. No one disagrees that our international institutions need reform to make them reflect the realities of a post-American world, but that's not where the advocates of an alternative are coming from.
The world has just, less than two decades ago, come out of a crippling cold war. We are moving fitfully to a world without boundaries, one in which America's biggest potential geopolitical rival, China, is also its biggest trading partner. If we were to create a new league of democracies, who would we leave out? China and Russia, for starters - a former superpower and a future one, two countries without whom a world of peace and prosperity is unimaginable. Instead of encouraging their gradual democratisation, wouldn't we be reinforcing their sense of rejection by the rest? Might the result be the self-fulfilling prophecy of the emergence of a league of autocracies with these two at the helm?
But would all democracies even join such a league? Not if the price were the alienation of vital trading partners, resource suppliers or simply neighbours who happen to be non-democracies. Democracies like India and France have proved prickly in the past about countries like the US or Britain assuming that their internal political arrangements would necessarily govern their foreign policy choices. Many democracies have other affinities that are as important to them. India, for instance, may count solidarity with other former colonies, or with other developing countries, as more important than its affiliation with a league of democracies; southeast Asian democracies might prefer their regional alliance with autocracies in Asean. The American notion that a collection of democracies would inevitably be an echo-chamber for an American diagnosis of global problems is a fantasy.
The claim that a league of democracies would be less likely to be paralysed into inaction over, say, sanctions on Iran, than a security council with the likes of Russia or China on it, overlooks the basic fact that it is in the nature of democracies to differ, to argue among themselves, and to be responsive to the very different preoccupations of their own internal constituencies. Had a league of democracies existed during the apartheid years, would Washington have been persuaded by a democratic majority to intervene against Pretoria? The very question points to the risibility of its premise.
The advocates of a league of democracies argue that it would intervene more effectively in cases like Darfur or the cruel indifference of the military regime in Burma to the sufferings of its cyclone victims. That is a delusion. Such interventions have not occurred because they are impracticable. Humanitarian aid could not have been delivered effectively in the Irrawaddy delta in the teeth of active resistance by the Burmese junta, or in Darfur by going to war with the Sudanese army, unless the countries wishing to do this were to be prepared to expend a level of blood and treasure that democracies rarely risk for strangers. It is one thing to march into a chaotic, government-less Somalia to protect the delivery of aid, quite another to confront the organised military force of a sovereign state defending its own territory.
It is also specious to argue that collective action by a group of democracies (when the UN is unable to act) would enjoy international legitimacy. The legitimacy of democracies comes from the consent of the governed; when they act outside their own countries, no such legitimacy applies. The reason that decisions of the UN enjoy legitimacy across the world lies not in the democratic virtue of its members, but in its universality. The fact that every country in the world belongs to the UN and participates in its decisions gives the actions of the UN - even that of a security council in urgent need of reform - a global standing in international law that no more selective body can hope to achieve.
This is the time to renovate and strengthen the UN, not to bypass it. As the post-cold war "unipolar moment" slowly but surely makes way for a world of multiple power centres and a rising new superpower, there has never been a greater need for a system of universally applicable rules and laws that will hold all countries together in a shared international community. We all hope that, in an era of instant communications and worldwide information flows, this community will be an increasingly democratic one. Subtracting today's democracies from it will have the opposite effect.
· Shashi Tharoor is a former UN under-secretary general shashitharoor.com
About this articleClose
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday May 27 2008 on p27 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:05 on May 27 2008.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The uses and abuses of intervention
Simon Tisdall
Burma's intensifying agony is confronting the "international community" with further uncomfortable evidence of its own impotence in the face of man-made humanitarian disaster. As if Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe were not shaming enough, the lethal blocking by Burma's generals of most external aid for the victims of Cyclone Nargis is another chastening reminder of the limitations imposed by status-quo politics and national self-interest.
Burma's internal opposition, outside pressure groups and individuals, desperate to prevent a crisis becoming an epic catastrophe, are turning to revolutionary answers. Echoing Vladimir Lenin, they ask: "What is to be done?" And in the case of the All Burma Monks Alliance and the '88 Generation student movement, the reply is insurrectionary.
"To save thousands of lives before it's too late, we urge the UN and foreign governments to intervene in Burma immediately to provide humanitarian and relief assistance directly to the people of Burma without waiting for the permission of the military junta," the opposition alliance said in statement. Individual countries need not wait for a UN go-ahead, either, they said. Just come now.
Similar calls for unilateral action have been heard in France and the US but so far lack official backing. Asked about using US forces to help the aid effort, as after the Asian tsunami, defence secretary Robert Gates said he "could not imagine" doing so without prior Burmese government agreement.
David Cameron predicted at the weekend that if the generals continued to make difficulties, "the case for unilateral delivery of aid by the international community will only grow stronger". Britain's Conservative opposition leader may partly be responding to grassroots pressure. John Moger, writing in yesterday's Guardian letters page from the Tory heartlands of Eastbourne, said it was time to forget the UN. "Think big and send in the navy," he urged. Fortunately for Cameron, such a decision is not (yet) his to make.
Despite or perhaps because of his fierce verbal criticism of the junta, David Miliband also risks accusations of ineffective posturing. Burma's thwarted "saffron revolution" last autumn was his first big crisis as foreign secretary. It quickly became plain then that there was next to nothing Britain could do to prevent the ensuing military crackdown on the mass protests. But that did not stop Miliband, in a speech in Oxford in February, declaring that Britain and others have a duty to support pro-democracy "civilian surges" and oppose authoritarian regimes by all means at their disposal.
"There will be situations where the hard power of targeted sanctions, security guarantees and military intervention will be necessary," Miliband said. "In extreme cases the failure of states to exercise their responsibility to protect their own civilians from genocide or ethnic cleansing warrant military intervention on humanitarian grounds."
Former Labour minister Denis MacShane argues passionately that is exactly what is happening in Burma now. "By any definition there is a crime against humanity being committed by the Burmese junta against the Burmese people," he said in a letter to Miliband. "When in Rwanda or Darfur governments did nothing to prevent the deaths of scores of thousands of their own people, we rightly called such action genocide. Are the Burmese generals guilty of anything less?"
Pressure is growing on Britain, current chair of the UN security council, to seek authorisation for tougher, collective action. But to the Brown government's probable tacit relief, China and Russia, as in the crisis over Zimbabwe, can be counted on to block or veto any move towards direct intervention.
The democratically-challenged rulers of Moscow and Beijing fear a precedent. After all, if the UN moved to bypass and perhaps unseat Burma's bosses, what might be the effect of such action on restless Tibetans, Uighurs or Chechens? Ironically, China, Burma's biggest, most influential trade and business partner, is probably the only country that could force the generals to change tack without physically pushing them out of the way.
While direct western or other intervention in Burma currently appears unlikely, it is inaccurate to say that intervention never works - rather that as a tool of international statecraft, it is applied to the "wrong" sitautions at the "wrong" times. Tony Blair evolved a whole philosophy of uninvited humanitarian intervention - the Chicago doctrine - and saw it implemented to initially beneficial effect in Sierra Leone and East Timor. But the Blair approach, problematic in Kosovo and ineffective in Sudan, fell apart in the crucible of Iraq, leaving a legacy of nervousness about intervention in principle.
Despite Blair's post-facto justification for the Iraq war - that it was morally right to save Iraq's people from Saddam Hussein - Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory "western security". If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.
Opponents of US "war on terror" policy fear that recent, limited unilateral interventions, such as Israel's bombing of a supposed nuclear reactor in Syria and US air strikes against Islamist militants deep inside Somalia, could yet presage another larger-scale convulsion - namely, a Bush administration attack on Iran. In such a situation, the White House would hardly worry about first gaining Tehran's permission.
In other words, interventionism is too often mistaken in its priorities and misdirected in its targets. And thus are those who scorn the international will, such as Rangoon's heartless generals, emboldened in their brutish defiance.
Source: The Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2008/05/the_uses_and_abuses_of_intervention.html
Burma's intensifying agony is confronting the "international community" with further uncomfortable evidence of its own impotence in the face of man-made humanitarian disaster. As if Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe were not shaming enough, the lethal blocking by Burma's generals of most external aid for the victims of Cyclone Nargis is another chastening reminder of the limitations imposed by status-quo politics and national self-interest.
Burma's internal opposition, outside pressure groups and individuals, desperate to prevent a crisis becoming an epic catastrophe, are turning to revolutionary answers. Echoing Vladimir Lenin, they ask: "What is to be done?" And in the case of the All Burma Monks Alliance and the '88 Generation student movement, the reply is insurrectionary.
"To save thousands of lives before it's too late, we urge the UN and foreign governments to intervene in Burma immediately to provide humanitarian and relief assistance directly to the people of Burma without waiting for the permission of the military junta," the opposition alliance said in statement. Individual countries need not wait for a UN go-ahead, either, they said. Just come now.
Similar calls for unilateral action have been heard in France and the US but so far lack official backing. Asked about using US forces to help the aid effort, as after the Asian tsunami, defence secretary Robert Gates said he "could not imagine" doing so without prior Burmese government agreement.
David Cameron predicted at the weekend that if the generals continued to make difficulties, "the case for unilateral delivery of aid by the international community will only grow stronger". Britain's Conservative opposition leader may partly be responding to grassroots pressure. John Moger, writing in yesterday's Guardian letters page from the Tory heartlands of Eastbourne, said it was time to forget the UN. "Think big and send in the navy," he urged. Fortunately for Cameron, such a decision is not (yet) his to make.
Despite or perhaps because of his fierce verbal criticism of the junta, David Miliband also risks accusations of ineffective posturing. Burma's thwarted "saffron revolution" last autumn was his first big crisis as foreign secretary. It quickly became plain then that there was next to nothing Britain could do to prevent the ensuing military crackdown on the mass protests. But that did not stop Miliband, in a speech in Oxford in February, declaring that Britain and others have a duty to support pro-democracy "civilian surges" and oppose authoritarian regimes by all means at their disposal.
"There will be situations where the hard power of targeted sanctions, security guarantees and military intervention will be necessary," Miliband said. "In extreme cases the failure of states to exercise their responsibility to protect their own civilians from genocide or ethnic cleansing warrant military intervention on humanitarian grounds."
Former Labour minister Denis MacShane argues passionately that is exactly what is happening in Burma now. "By any definition there is a crime against humanity being committed by the Burmese junta against the Burmese people," he said in a letter to Miliband. "When in Rwanda or Darfur governments did nothing to prevent the deaths of scores of thousands of their own people, we rightly called such action genocide. Are the Burmese generals guilty of anything less?"
Pressure is growing on Britain, current chair of the UN security council, to seek authorisation for tougher, collective action. But to the Brown government's probable tacit relief, China and Russia, as in the crisis over Zimbabwe, can be counted on to block or veto any move towards direct intervention.
The democratically-challenged rulers of Moscow and Beijing fear a precedent. After all, if the UN moved to bypass and perhaps unseat Burma's bosses, what might be the effect of such action on restless Tibetans, Uighurs or Chechens? Ironically, China, Burma's biggest, most influential trade and business partner, is probably the only country that could force the generals to change tack without physically pushing them out of the way.
While direct western or other intervention in Burma currently appears unlikely, it is inaccurate to say that intervention never works - rather that as a tool of international statecraft, it is applied to the "wrong" sitautions at the "wrong" times. Tony Blair evolved a whole philosophy of uninvited humanitarian intervention - the Chicago doctrine - and saw it implemented to initially beneficial effect in Sierra Leone and East Timor. But the Blair approach, problematic in Kosovo and ineffective in Sudan, fell apart in the crucible of Iraq, leaving a legacy of nervousness about intervention in principle.
Despite Blair's post-facto justification for the Iraq war - that it was morally right to save Iraq's people from Saddam Hussein - Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory "western security". If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.
Opponents of US "war on terror" policy fear that recent, limited unilateral interventions, such as Israel's bombing of a supposed nuclear reactor in Syria and US air strikes against Islamist militants deep inside Somalia, could yet presage another larger-scale convulsion - namely, a Bush administration attack on Iran. In such a situation, the White House would hardly worry about first gaining Tehran's permission.
In other words, interventionism is too often mistaken in its priorities and misdirected in its targets. And thus are those who scorn the international will, such as Rangoon's heartless generals, emboldened in their brutish defiance.
Source: The Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2008/05/the_uses_and_abuses_of_intervention.html
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Pax Corleone
By John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell
IT IS ONE of the most well-known scenes in cinematic history. Don Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York's organized-crime families, walks alone across the street from his office to buy some oranges from the fruit stand. He mumbles pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his attention to the task at hand. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of running feet and multiple gunshots--and he is left bleeding to death in the street, as his son Fredo cradles his body.
By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His two other sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, as well as his consigliere, Tom Hagen, an adopted son himself, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next--and how to respond to the attempted assassination of the don by Virgil "the Turk" Sollozzo. This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. However, given the present changes in the world's power structure, the movie also becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times.
The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of cold-war American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11. Even more intriguingly, each of his three "heirs" embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought--liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism--vying for control in today's disarranged world order.
The Consigliere
AS VITO'S heirs gather, the future of the Corleone dynasty hangs in the balance. The first to offer a strategy is Tom, the German-Irish transplant who serves as consigliere (chief legal advisor) to the clan. Though an adopted son, Tom is the most familiar with the inner workings of the New York crime world. As family lawyer and diplomat, he is responsible for navigating the complex network of street alliances, backroom treaties and political favors that surround and sustain the family empire. His view of the Sollozzo threat and how the family should respond to it are outgrowths of a legal-diplomatic worldview that shares a number of philosophical similarities with the liberal institutionalism that dominates the foreign-policy outlook of today's Democratic Party.
First, like many modern Democrats, Tom believes that the family's main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to "reclaim its proper place in the world." The "proper place" Tom wants to reclaim is a mirror image of the one that American politicians remember from the 1990s and dream of restoring after 2008--that of the world's "benign hegemon."
This is the system that Tom, in his role as consigliere, was responsible for maintaining. By sharing access to the policemen, judges and senators that (as Sollozzo puts it) the don "carries in his pocket like so many nickels and dimes," the family managed to create a kind of Sicilian Bretton Woods--a system of political and economic public goods that benefited not only the Corleones, but the entire mafia community. This willingness to let the other crime syndicates drink from the well of Corleone political influence rendered the don's disproportionate accumulation of power more palatable to the other families, who were less inclined to form a countervailing coalition against it. The result was a consensual, rules-based order that offered many of the same benefits--low transaction costs of rule, less likelihood of great-power war and the chance to make money under an institutional umbrella--that America enjoyed during the cold war.
It is this "Pax Corleone" that Sollozzo, in Tom's eyes, must not be allowed to disrupt. In dealing with the new challenger, however, Tom believes that the brothers must be careful not to do anything that would damage the family business. The way to handle Sollozzo, he judges, is not through force but through negotiation--a second trait linking him to today's liberal institutionalists. Like more than one of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency, Tom thinks that even a rogue power like Sollozzo can be brought to terms, if only the family will take the time to hear his proposals and accommodate his needs.
Throughout the movie, Tom's motto is "we oughta talk to 'em"--a slogan which, especially since the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, is the line promoted by the lawmakers and presidential hopefuls of the Democratic Party, who now say that immediate, unconditional talks with America's latest "Sollozzo" (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) are the only option still open to Washington for coping with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
The party's growing veneration of diplomacy as the sine qua non of American statecraft rests, as it did for Tom, on two assumptions: first, that despite their aggressive posturing, the Sollozzos of the world would rather be status quo than revolutionary powers; and, second, that the other big families have a vested interest in sustaining the Pax Corleone and will therefore not use the family's distraction with Sollozzo as an opportunity to make their own power grabs. Working from these assumptions, today's consiglieres have prescribed the same course of action regarding Iran that Tom prescribed for dealing with Sollozzo: a process of intensified, reward-laden negotiation that they believe will pave the way for his admission as a normalized player into the family's rules-based community.
This near-religious belief in the efficacy of diplomacy brings Tom into bitter conflict with those in the family, led by Sonny, who favor a military response to Sollozzo. To Tom, as to many Democrats, Sonny's reveling in the family muscle runs counter to the logic of institutionalized restraint that Vito used to build the family empire. In the world that Tom knows, force is used judiciously and as a last resort: only on the rarest of occasions, and after repeated attempts at negotiation, would the don dispatch Luca Brazi to cajole and threaten an opponent--"To make them an offer they can't refuse"--and even then, it was usually with the foreknowledge and multilateral consent of the other families. By contrast, the street war Sonny launches against Sollozzo is an act of reckless unilateralism, which, unless ended, threatens to upset Tom's finely tuned institutional order and squander the hard-won gains of the Pax Corleone.
At first blush, Tom's critique of Sonny's militarist strategy sounds reasonable. Compared with the eldest son's promiscuous expenditures of Corleone blood, treasure and clout, Tom's workmanlike emphasis on consensus building has much to recommend it; if successful, it would permit the Corleones to resume their peaceful hegemony to their own and the other families' benefit. But the hope Tom offers the family is a false one.
For in order to be successful, the consigliere's diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses. Tom no longer has the luxury of always being the man at the table with the most leverage. The era of easy Corleone dominance is over. Power on the streets has already begun to shift into the hands of the Tataglias and Barzinis--the mafia equivalent of today's BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Like the current international system, the situation that confronts the Corleone family is one of increasing multipolarity--a reality that is lost on Tom, who thinks he is still the emissary of the dominant superpower (a delusion that many Democrats apparently share).
But even if Tom doesn't know the world is shifting, Sollozzo does. Like the two-bit petty tyrants that challenge Washington with mounting confidence in today's world, Sollozzo senses that fundamental changes are underway in the global system and knows that they give him greater latitude for defying the Corleones than he had in the past. As Sollozzo tells Tom, "The old man is slipping; ten years ago I couldn't have gotten to him." The consigliere is wrong about Sollozzo. He is not, like challengers in the past, out to join the Pax Corleone. He is an opportunist who will take things as they come--either as a revolutionary power or a status quo power, but certainly as one out to accelerate and profit from the transition to multipolarity. The other families have no more incentive to thwart his maneuvers than Russia and China have to thwart those of Iran. And because Tom fails to see this, his strategy is the wrong one for the family, and the wrong one for America.
Shoot First and Ask Questions Later
SONNY'S SIMPLISTIC response to the crisis is to advocate "toughness" through military action, a one-note policy prescription for waging righteous war against the rest of the ungrateful mafia world. Disdaining Tom's pleas that business will suffer, Sonny's damn-the-torpedoes approach belies a deep-seated fear that the only way to reestablish the family's dominance is to eradicate all possible future threats to it. While such a strategy makes emotional sense following the attempted hit on his father, it runs counter to the long-term interests of the family.
The don himself knew that threats against his position were a fact of life; while his policy revolved around minimizing them, he knew well that in a world governed by power, they could never be entirely eliminated. As he put it to Michael, "Men cannot afford to be careless." By contrast, Sonny's neoconservative approach is built around the strategically reckless notion that risk can be eliminated from life altogether through the relentless--and if necessary, preemptive--use of violence.
In Sonny, Tom is confronted with the cinematic archetype of the modern-day neoconservative hard-liner. Their resulting feud resembles the pitched political warfare between Democrats and neoconservatives that has come to dominate the American political landscape:
Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: "We oughta hear what they have to say."
Sonny, the neocon: "No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. … And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up--just help me win alright?"
Where Tom sees Sollozzo as a reasonable if aggressive businessman whose concerns, like those of previous challengers, can be accommodated through compromise and conciliation, Sonny sees an existential threat--a clear and present danger that must be swiftly cauterized, no matter what the cost. Sonny wants to "stop being weak" and doesn't want to "waste time"; showing any opposition to using force confirms for him that "I knew you didn't have the guts to do this." (One can imagine that Sonny's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach would meet with the firm approval of arch-neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen, given their stance on how to deal with Iran.)
So, by starting a gangland free-for-all in the wake of the hit on his father, Sonny unwittingly severs long-standing family alliances and unites much of the rest of the mafia world against the Corleones. The resulting war is one of choice rather than strategic necessity. Sonny's rash instinct to use military power to solve his structural problems merely hastens the family's decline.
For as the past few years have shown, military intervention for its own sake, without a corresponding political plan, leads only to disaster. Yearning for the moral clarity that the Corleones' past dominance had given them--a dominance not dissimilar to that enjoyed by America during the cold war--Sonny cannot begin to comprehend that the era that made his military strategy possible has come to an end. Blinded by a militant moralism bereft of strategic insight, he proves an easy target for his foes. Unwisely, and against the advice of his mother, Sonny attempts to arbitrate the escalating domestic disputes between his sister, Connie, and her abusive husband, Carlo Ricci, failing to see that the beatings his sister endured from Carlo came at the behest of Don Barzini, the Corleone's closest peer competitor. For Sonny's reaction to all the evils of the world, whether beyond his ability to solve or not, is entirely predictable: "Attack." Unilaterally rushing to avenge his sister by pummeling Carlo, Sonny is struck down by his legion of foes, his body riddled with bullets. As has proven true for the neoconservatives over Iraq, there is a depressing logic to his hit. In place of understanding the world, Sonny based his strategy on accosting it; the world striking back, as happened in Iraq, is an obvious conclusion.
Michael's Realism
THE STRATEGY that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat and equips it for coping with multipolarity comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don's sons. Unlike Tom, whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny, whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family's interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today's foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.
Viewing the world through untinted lenses, he sees that the age of dominance the family enjoyed for so long under his father is ending. Alone among the three brothers, Michael senses that a shift is underway toward a more diffuse power arrangement, in which multiple power centers will jockey for position and influence. To survive and succeed in this new environment, Michael knows the family will have to adapt.
First, Michael relinquishes the mechanistic, one-trick-pony policy approaches of his brothers in favor of a "toolbox," in which soft and hard power are used in flexible combinations and as circumstances dictate. While at various times he sides with Tom (favoring negotiation) or Sonny (favoring force), Michael sees their positions as about tactics and not about ultimate strategy, which for him is solely to ensure the survival and prosperity of the family. Thus, he is able to use Sonny's "button men" to knock out those competitors he cannot co-opt, while negotiating with the rest as Tom would like. This blending of sticks and carrots ensures that Michael is ultimately a more effective diplomat than Tom and a more successful warrior than Sonny: when he enters negotiations, it is always in the wake of a fresh battlefield victory and therefore from a position of strength; when he embarks on a new military campaign, it is always in pursuit of a specific goal that can be consolidated afterwards diplomatically. Can any of the. Iran policies currently being advocated by the leading candidates of both parties be said to proceed from these assumptions?
Second, Michael understands that no matter how strong its military or how savvy its diplomats, the Corleone family will not succeed in the multipolar environment ahead unless it learns to take better care of its allies. Like America after the Iraq War, the mafia empire that Michael inherits after the hit on Sonny possesses a system of alliances on the brink of collapse. Having flocked to the Corleone colors when the war against Sollozzo broke out, the family's allies--like America's in the "New" Europe--have little to show for the risks they have undertaken on the family's behalf. Exhausted by war and estranged by Sonny's Rumsfeld-like bullying, they have begun to question whether it is still in their interests to backstop a declining superpower that is apparently not interested in retaining their loyalty.
For all his talk about diplomacy, Tom believes in the family's dominance; like today's liberal institutionalists, he assumes that allies will continue to pay fealty to the family as a matter of course, as they have in the past. Similarly, Sonny assumes that other powers will gravitate toward the family or risk irrelevance; like most neocons, he Sees allies as essentially disposable. By contrast, Michael intuitively grasps the value of family friends and the role that reciprocity plays in retaining their support for future crises. Thus, he is seen offering encouragement and a cigarette to Enzo, the timid neighborhood baker, whose help he enlisted to protect his father at the hospital. In this, he is imitating his father, Vito, who saw alliances as the true foundation of Corleone power and was mindful of the need to tend the family's "base" of support, not only with big players like Clemenza and Tessio (Britain and France) but with small players like the cake maker and undertaker (Poland and Romania), whose loyalty he is seen cultivating in the opening scenes of the movie. As Michael knows, even small allies could potentially prove crucial in "tipping the scales" to the family's advantage, as they will for America, once multipolarity is in full swing. Relearning the lost Sicilian art of alliance management will be necessary if Washington is to regain the confidence of the growing list of allies whose blood and treasure were frittered away, with little or nothing to show in return, in the sands of Iraq.
Finally, while addressing the family's immediate need for a more versatile policy tool kit and shoring up its teetering alliances, Michael also takes steps to adjust the institutional playing field to the Corleones' advantage on a more fundamental, long-term basis. Where Tom sees institutions as essentially static edifices that act as sources of power in their own right and Sonny sees them as needless hindrances to be bypassed, Michael sees institutions for what they truly are: conduits of influence that "reflect and ratify" but do not supplant deeper power realities. When the distribution of power shifts, institutions are sure to follow. As the Tataglias and Barzinis gain strength, Michael knows they will eventually overturn the existing order and replace it with an institutional rule book that better reflects their own needs and interests. Evidence that this process is already underway can be seen in the ease with which Sollozzo is able to enlist the support of a local precinct captain--the mafia equivalent of a UN mandate--when police loyalties formerly belonged to the Corleones. Similarly, Washington increasingly finds the very institutions it created after World War II being used against it by today's rising powers, even as new structures are being built (like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) that exclude the United States as a participant altogether.
Rather than ignoring this phenomenon like Tom or launching a frontal assault against it like Sonny, Michael sees it as a hidden opportunity. For Michael knows that if the family acts decisively, before the Tataglias and Barzinis have acquired a commanding margin of power, it can rearrange the existing institutional setup in ways that satisfy the new power centers but still serve vital Corleone interests. This he does through a combination of accommodation (dropping the family's resistance to narcotics and granting the other families access to the Coreleones' coveted New York political machinery) and institutional retrenchment (shifting the family business to Nevada and giving the other families a stake in the Corleones' new moneymaker, Las Vegas gambling). In this way, Michael is able to give would-be rivals renewed incentives to bandwagon with, rather than balance against, the Corleone empire, while forcing them to deal with him on his own terms.
A similar technique could prove very useful for America in anticipating and preparing the way for the emergence of its Tataglias and Barzinis, the rising and resurgent powers. Such an effort at preemptive institutional regrouping, with decision making predicated on new global power realities, is vital if America's new peer competitors are to eschew the temptation to position themselves as revolutionary powers in the new system. Doing so now, while the transition from the old system to multipolarity is still underway and before the wet cement of the new order has hardened, could help to ensure that while it no longer enjoys the privileged status of hegemon, America is able to position itself, like the Corleones, as the next best thing: primus inter pares--"first among equals."
CAN ANY of the candidates vying to become the next president of the United States match Michael's cool, dispassionate courage in the face of epochal change? Will they avoid living in the Comforting embrace of the past, from which both Tom and Sonny ultimately could not escape? Or will they emulate Michael's flexibility--to preserve America's position in a dangerous world?
John C. Hulsman is the Alfred von Oppenheim Scholar in Residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, Germany. He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest
Source: The National Interest
IT IS ONE of the most well-known scenes in cinematic history. Don Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York's organized-crime families, walks alone across the street from his office to buy some oranges from the fruit stand. He mumbles pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his attention to the task at hand. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of running feet and multiple gunshots--and he is left bleeding to death in the street, as his son Fredo cradles his body.
By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His two other sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, as well as his consigliere, Tom Hagen, an adopted son himself, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next--and how to respond to the attempted assassination of the don by Virgil "the Turk" Sollozzo. This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. However, given the present changes in the world's power structure, the movie also becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times.
The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of cold-war American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11. Even more intriguingly, each of his three "heirs" embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought--liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism--vying for control in today's disarranged world order.
The Consigliere
AS VITO'S heirs gather, the future of the Corleone dynasty hangs in the balance. The first to offer a strategy is Tom, the German-Irish transplant who serves as consigliere (chief legal advisor) to the clan. Though an adopted son, Tom is the most familiar with the inner workings of the New York crime world. As family lawyer and diplomat, he is responsible for navigating the complex network of street alliances, backroom treaties and political favors that surround and sustain the family empire. His view of the Sollozzo threat and how the family should respond to it are outgrowths of a legal-diplomatic worldview that shares a number of philosophical similarities with the liberal institutionalism that dominates the foreign-policy outlook of today's Democratic Party.
First, like many modern Democrats, Tom believes that the family's main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to "reclaim its proper place in the world." The "proper place" Tom wants to reclaim is a mirror image of the one that American politicians remember from the 1990s and dream of restoring after 2008--that of the world's "benign hegemon."
This is the system that Tom, in his role as consigliere, was responsible for maintaining. By sharing access to the policemen, judges and senators that (as Sollozzo puts it) the don "carries in his pocket like so many nickels and dimes," the family managed to create a kind of Sicilian Bretton Woods--a system of political and economic public goods that benefited not only the Corleones, but the entire mafia community. This willingness to let the other crime syndicates drink from the well of Corleone political influence rendered the don's disproportionate accumulation of power more palatable to the other families, who were less inclined to form a countervailing coalition against it. The result was a consensual, rules-based order that offered many of the same benefits--low transaction costs of rule, less likelihood of great-power war and the chance to make money under an institutional umbrella--that America enjoyed during the cold war.
It is this "Pax Corleone" that Sollozzo, in Tom's eyes, must not be allowed to disrupt. In dealing with the new challenger, however, Tom believes that the brothers must be careful not to do anything that would damage the family business. The way to handle Sollozzo, he judges, is not through force but through negotiation--a second trait linking him to today's liberal institutionalists. Like more than one of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency, Tom thinks that even a rogue power like Sollozzo can be brought to terms, if only the family will take the time to hear his proposals and accommodate his needs.
Throughout the movie, Tom's motto is "we oughta talk to 'em"--a slogan which, especially since the publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, is the line promoted by the lawmakers and presidential hopefuls of the Democratic Party, who now say that immediate, unconditional talks with America's latest "Sollozzo" (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) are the only option still open to Washington for coping with the Iranian nuclear crisis.
The party's growing veneration of diplomacy as the sine qua non of American statecraft rests, as it did for Tom, on two assumptions: first, that despite their aggressive posturing, the Sollozzos of the world would rather be status quo than revolutionary powers; and, second, that the other big families have a vested interest in sustaining the Pax Corleone and will therefore not use the family's distraction with Sollozzo as an opportunity to make their own power grabs. Working from these assumptions, today's consiglieres have prescribed the same course of action regarding Iran that Tom prescribed for dealing with Sollozzo: a process of intensified, reward-laden negotiation that they believe will pave the way for his admission as a normalized player into the family's rules-based community.
This near-religious belief in the efficacy of diplomacy brings Tom into bitter conflict with those in the family, led by Sonny, who favor a military response to Sollozzo. To Tom, as to many Democrats, Sonny's reveling in the family muscle runs counter to the logic of institutionalized restraint that Vito used to build the family empire. In the world that Tom knows, force is used judiciously and as a last resort: only on the rarest of occasions, and after repeated attempts at negotiation, would the don dispatch Luca Brazi to cajole and threaten an opponent--"To make them an offer they can't refuse"--and even then, it was usually with the foreknowledge and multilateral consent of the other families. By contrast, the street war Sonny launches against Sollozzo is an act of reckless unilateralism, which, unless ended, threatens to upset Tom's finely tuned institutional order and squander the hard-won gains of the Pax Corleone.
At first blush, Tom's critique of Sonny's militarist strategy sounds reasonable. Compared with the eldest son's promiscuous expenditures of Corleone blood, treasure and clout, Tom's workmanlike emphasis on consensus building has much to recommend it; if successful, it would permit the Corleones to resume their peaceful hegemony to their own and the other families' benefit. But the hope Tom offers the family is a false one.
For in order to be successful, the consigliere's diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses. Tom no longer has the luxury of always being the man at the table with the most leverage. The era of easy Corleone dominance is over. Power on the streets has already begun to shift into the hands of the Tataglias and Barzinis--the mafia equivalent of today's BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Like the current international system, the situation that confronts the Corleone family is one of increasing multipolarity--a reality that is lost on Tom, who thinks he is still the emissary of the dominant superpower (a delusion that many Democrats apparently share).
But even if Tom doesn't know the world is shifting, Sollozzo does. Like the two-bit petty tyrants that challenge Washington with mounting confidence in today's world, Sollozzo senses that fundamental changes are underway in the global system and knows that they give him greater latitude for defying the Corleones than he had in the past. As Sollozzo tells Tom, "The old man is slipping; ten years ago I couldn't have gotten to him." The consigliere is wrong about Sollozzo. He is not, like challengers in the past, out to join the Pax Corleone. He is an opportunist who will take things as they come--either as a revolutionary power or a status quo power, but certainly as one out to accelerate and profit from the transition to multipolarity. The other families have no more incentive to thwart his maneuvers than Russia and China have to thwart those of Iran. And because Tom fails to see this, his strategy is the wrong one for the family, and the wrong one for America.
Shoot First and Ask Questions Later
SONNY'S SIMPLISTIC response to the crisis is to advocate "toughness" through military action, a one-note policy prescription for waging righteous war against the rest of the ungrateful mafia world. Disdaining Tom's pleas that business will suffer, Sonny's damn-the-torpedoes approach belies a deep-seated fear that the only way to reestablish the family's dominance is to eradicate all possible future threats to it. While such a strategy makes emotional sense following the attempted hit on his father, it runs counter to the long-term interests of the family.
The don himself knew that threats against his position were a fact of life; while his policy revolved around minimizing them, he knew well that in a world governed by power, they could never be entirely eliminated. As he put it to Michael, "Men cannot afford to be careless." By contrast, Sonny's neoconservative approach is built around the strategically reckless notion that risk can be eliminated from life altogether through the relentless--and if necessary, preemptive--use of violence.
In Sonny, Tom is confronted with the cinematic archetype of the modern-day neoconservative hard-liner. Their resulting feud resembles the pitched political warfare between Democrats and neoconservatives that has come to dominate the American political landscape:
Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: "We oughta hear what they have to say."
Sonny, the neocon: "No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. … And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up--just help me win alright?"
Where Tom sees Sollozzo as a reasonable if aggressive businessman whose concerns, like those of previous challengers, can be accommodated through compromise and conciliation, Sonny sees an existential threat--a clear and present danger that must be swiftly cauterized, no matter what the cost. Sonny wants to "stop being weak" and doesn't want to "waste time"; showing any opposition to using force confirms for him that "I knew you didn't have the guts to do this." (One can imagine that Sonny's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach would meet with the firm approval of arch-neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen, given their stance on how to deal with Iran.)
So, by starting a gangland free-for-all in the wake of the hit on his father, Sonny unwittingly severs long-standing family alliances and unites much of the rest of the mafia world against the Corleones. The resulting war is one of choice rather than strategic necessity. Sonny's rash instinct to use military power to solve his structural problems merely hastens the family's decline.
For as the past few years have shown, military intervention for its own sake, without a corresponding political plan, leads only to disaster. Yearning for the moral clarity that the Corleones' past dominance had given them--a dominance not dissimilar to that enjoyed by America during the cold war--Sonny cannot begin to comprehend that the era that made his military strategy possible has come to an end. Blinded by a militant moralism bereft of strategic insight, he proves an easy target for his foes. Unwisely, and against the advice of his mother, Sonny attempts to arbitrate the escalating domestic disputes between his sister, Connie, and her abusive husband, Carlo Ricci, failing to see that the beatings his sister endured from Carlo came at the behest of Don Barzini, the Corleone's closest peer competitor. For Sonny's reaction to all the evils of the world, whether beyond his ability to solve or not, is entirely predictable: "Attack." Unilaterally rushing to avenge his sister by pummeling Carlo, Sonny is struck down by his legion of foes, his body riddled with bullets. As has proven true for the neoconservatives over Iraq, there is a depressing logic to his hit. In place of understanding the world, Sonny based his strategy on accosting it; the world striking back, as happened in Iraq, is an obvious conclusion.
Michael's Realism
THE STRATEGY that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat and equips it for coping with multipolarity comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don's sons. Unlike Tom, whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny, whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family's interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today's foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.
Viewing the world through untinted lenses, he sees that the age of dominance the family enjoyed for so long under his father is ending. Alone among the three brothers, Michael senses that a shift is underway toward a more diffuse power arrangement, in which multiple power centers will jockey for position and influence. To survive and succeed in this new environment, Michael knows the family will have to adapt.
First, Michael relinquishes the mechanistic, one-trick-pony policy approaches of his brothers in favor of a "toolbox," in which soft and hard power are used in flexible combinations and as circumstances dictate. While at various times he sides with Tom (favoring negotiation) or Sonny (favoring force), Michael sees their positions as about tactics and not about ultimate strategy, which for him is solely to ensure the survival and prosperity of the family. Thus, he is able to use Sonny's "button men" to knock out those competitors he cannot co-opt, while negotiating with the rest as Tom would like. This blending of sticks and carrots ensures that Michael is ultimately a more effective diplomat than Tom and a more successful warrior than Sonny: when he enters negotiations, it is always in the wake of a fresh battlefield victory and therefore from a position of strength; when he embarks on a new military campaign, it is always in pursuit of a specific goal that can be consolidated afterwards diplomatically. Can any of the. Iran policies currently being advocated by the leading candidates of both parties be said to proceed from these assumptions?
Second, Michael understands that no matter how strong its military or how savvy its diplomats, the Corleone family will not succeed in the multipolar environment ahead unless it learns to take better care of its allies. Like America after the Iraq War, the mafia empire that Michael inherits after the hit on Sonny possesses a system of alliances on the brink of collapse. Having flocked to the Corleone colors when the war against Sollozzo broke out, the family's allies--like America's in the "New" Europe--have little to show for the risks they have undertaken on the family's behalf. Exhausted by war and estranged by Sonny's Rumsfeld-like bullying, they have begun to question whether it is still in their interests to backstop a declining superpower that is apparently not interested in retaining their loyalty.
For all his talk about diplomacy, Tom believes in the family's dominance; like today's liberal institutionalists, he assumes that allies will continue to pay fealty to the family as a matter of course, as they have in the past. Similarly, Sonny assumes that other powers will gravitate toward the family or risk irrelevance; like most neocons, he Sees allies as essentially disposable. By contrast, Michael intuitively grasps the value of family friends and the role that reciprocity plays in retaining their support for future crises. Thus, he is seen offering encouragement and a cigarette to Enzo, the timid neighborhood baker, whose help he enlisted to protect his father at the hospital. In this, he is imitating his father, Vito, who saw alliances as the true foundation of Corleone power and was mindful of the need to tend the family's "base" of support, not only with big players like Clemenza and Tessio (Britain and France) but with small players like the cake maker and undertaker (Poland and Romania), whose loyalty he is seen cultivating in the opening scenes of the movie. As Michael knows, even small allies could potentially prove crucial in "tipping the scales" to the family's advantage, as they will for America, once multipolarity is in full swing. Relearning the lost Sicilian art of alliance management will be necessary if Washington is to regain the confidence of the growing list of allies whose blood and treasure were frittered away, with little or nothing to show in return, in the sands of Iraq.
Finally, while addressing the family's immediate need for a more versatile policy tool kit and shoring up its teetering alliances, Michael also takes steps to adjust the institutional playing field to the Corleones' advantage on a more fundamental, long-term basis. Where Tom sees institutions as essentially static edifices that act as sources of power in their own right and Sonny sees them as needless hindrances to be bypassed, Michael sees institutions for what they truly are: conduits of influence that "reflect and ratify" but do not supplant deeper power realities. When the distribution of power shifts, institutions are sure to follow. As the Tataglias and Barzinis gain strength, Michael knows they will eventually overturn the existing order and replace it with an institutional rule book that better reflects their own needs and interests. Evidence that this process is already underway can be seen in the ease with which Sollozzo is able to enlist the support of a local precinct captain--the mafia equivalent of a UN mandate--when police loyalties formerly belonged to the Corleones. Similarly, Washington increasingly finds the very institutions it created after World War II being used against it by today's rising powers, even as new structures are being built (like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) that exclude the United States as a participant altogether.
Rather than ignoring this phenomenon like Tom or launching a frontal assault against it like Sonny, Michael sees it as a hidden opportunity. For Michael knows that if the family acts decisively, before the Tataglias and Barzinis have acquired a commanding margin of power, it can rearrange the existing institutional setup in ways that satisfy the new power centers but still serve vital Corleone interests. This he does through a combination of accommodation (dropping the family's resistance to narcotics and granting the other families access to the Coreleones' coveted New York political machinery) and institutional retrenchment (shifting the family business to Nevada and giving the other families a stake in the Corleones' new moneymaker, Las Vegas gambling). In this way, Michael is able to give would-be rivals renewed incentives to bandwagon with, rather than balance against, the Corleone empire, while forcing them to deal with him on his own terms.
A similar technique could prove very useful for America in anticipating and preparing the way for the emergence of its Tataglias and Barzinis, the rising and resurgent powers. Such an effort at preemptive institutional regrouping, with decision making predicated on new global power realities, is vital if America's new peer competitors are to eschew the temptation to position themselves as revolutionary powers in the new system. Doing so now, while the transition from the old system to multipolarity is still underway and before the wet cement of the new order has hardened, could help to ensure that while it no longer enjoys the privileged status of hegemon, America is able to position itself, like the Corleones, as the next best thing: primus inter pares--"first among equals."
CAN ANY of the candidates vying to become the next president of the United States match Michael's cool, dispassionate courage in the face of epochal change? Will they avoid living in the Comforting embrace of the past, from which both Tom and Sonny ultimately could not escape? Or will they emulate Michael's flexibility--to preserve America's position in a dangerous world?
John C. Hulsman is the Alfred von Oppenheim Scholar in Residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, Germany. He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest
Source: The National Interest
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Resolving the Baloch National Question: aspects of a negotiated settlement
Dr. Naseer Dashti
Introduction
The Baloch and the Pakistani state relations can easily be termed hostile since 1948. The history of relationship between the Baloch and the Pakistani state establishment is the history of violent conflicts. According to the Baloch perceptions, their national resistance is their response to cultural and economical domination and political subjugation. Crude military power has been the only way adopted by almost every Pakistani Government in dealing with the Baloch discontent. During all conflicts, the Baloch masses and their leadership suffered heavy losses in men and material. The ongoing military campaign is the bloodiest one causing internal dislocation of thousands of Bugti and Marri tribesmen. The brutal murder of one of the towering figures of the Baloch national movement, Nawab Akber Bugti and the mysterious death of the revered resistance fighter Nawabzada Mir Balaach Marri are the most important happenings of the present conflict. In addition, kidnapping of hundreds of the Baloch by security agencies is another unprecedented hallmark of the 5 years long, low intensity war of resistance and political mobilization in Balochistan. In the wake of a democratic dispensation in Pakistan, talks of a negotiated settlement of the conflict between the Baloch and the state are being heard from various quarters. Is a negotiated settlement possible between the Baloch national resistance and the state establishment? This essay is a brief discussion on the nature of the Baloch and the state relationship, dimensions of the Baloch resistance and the possibility and parameters of a peaceful settlement within the Pakistani Federation.
Aspects of Baloch- State Relations
The primary aspect of the Baloch and the State relations has been the dispute over the legitimacy of accession of the Baloch State of Kalat with Pakistan. In the wake of British withdrawal from South Asia, the Baloch declared their independence on August 11, 1947. Immediately elections were held for a bicameral Legislature, beginning a new democratic political system in Balochistan. However, with the help of British colonial administration in India, a portion of the Baloch Land, which was leased out by the Baloch State of Kalat to the British Government during and after Anglo-Afghan wars, was incorporated in to Pakistan under the pretext of a controversial referendum. Protests against this action were totally ignored by the colonial administration in New Delhi. Soon Pakistani establishment began to employ different pressure tactics for coercing Kalat State to merge in to newfound religious state of Pakistan. When in March 1948 Pakistani troops entered Balochistan from north and south, the ruler of the Baloch State had no option but to sign an agreement of accession with Pakistan. This was against the will of the Baloch people expressed by both Houses of their parliament. In a Baloch perspective, it is the illegal occupation of their land without their consent.
The second aspect of Baloch-Pakistan relations is the irrational rather politically perverse doctrine of ‘Islamic brother-hood’ and strong centre tradition. Legal, cultural, social and economic systems put in place by the State ignored or contradicted pre-existing social, political and cultural systems of the Baloch and other minority nationalities in the newly created state. According to Baloch perceptions, the concepts of Islamic brother-hood, Pakistani Islamic Nation and strong centre doctrine adopted by the state were used as tools for subjugating the Baloch and other nationalities and for undermining their cultural, linguistic and social traditions.
Coercive military presence tends to be a permanent feature of the Baloch and the state relations. The soldiers were the first to arrive in Balochistan followed by civilian administrators and settlers. Over a period of time, it became the sacred task of the Pakistani army to protect the backward and politically ‘immature’ Baloch people from the “exploitation, tyranny and corruption” of their tribal, social and political leaders. Army as the protector of so-called “ideological boundaries” of the state was declared a sacred institution. Any discussion even academic about the role of army, Islamic nation-hood and strong centre were regarded sins as big as blasphemy and treason. The Pakistani army, perceiving the Baloch nationalism as a grave threat to the state, launched major military offensives in Balochistan during 1948, 1958, 1962, and 1973. Extra judicial killings of the Baloch by the army, paramilitary and state intelligence agencies, harassment, kidnapping and inhuman torture of the Baloch political activists and intellectuals during the sustained military campaigns are the other permanent features of the state and Baloch relations. The recent military aggression in Balochistan is the continuation of that policy; nevertheless, it surpasses all previous military operations in its intensity and ruthlessness.
Once the military control was established in 1948, a system of 'indirect colonial rule' was employed in Balochistan in order to gradually gain comprehensive economic, cultural and political control. A small, carefully selected group of the Baloch who were loyal to the state establishment exercised limited powers in the province on behalf of the centre. The state intelligence agencies selected, instructed and often co-opted these figureheads who have no political, social or cultural identity in Baloch society. Beginning from 70s a new and previously unknown breed of elite, the ‘religious leaders’, was created in a secular Baloch society and was also incorporated in the schema of ruling Balochistan by proxy. This internal colonizing tactics is yet another gloomy aspect of the state and the Baloch relationship.
One of the hallmarks of hostile relationship between the state and the Baloch is the settlement of people from other parts of the country in to various regions of Balochistan in order to bring state sponsored demographic changes. Consequently, many townships in Balochistan are increasingly becoming settler dominated. The Baloch identity of many towns including capital city Quetta has been replaced by the identity of a settler society. The exploitation of oil and petroleum reserves and the recognition of Gwadar Port as a potential economic and commercial centre has encouraged a whole range of planned colonization schemes to attract investors and migrants to the region. According to the Baloch perceptions, the objective of this colonization process is to counter the Baloch national aspirations by a drastic shift in the population.
The systematic developmental aggression is yet another feature of the Baloch and the state relations. The state establishment often tried to legitimize its claim that it is the state, which brings development and progress to the underdeveloped Balochistan. They consider it to be part of their ‘sacred duty’ to ‘promote’ to the well-being of the Baloch who were ‘'not yet able’ to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern socio-economic and political expansion. According to the propaganda rhetoric of rulers, only the State represents modernity vis-à-vis the 'backward' Baloch population. The underlying assumption is that the state dominated by a particular nationality is in a better position to define and fulfil the needs of the Baloch people. Under this elusive perception, the process of expropriating the natural resources of Balochistan is going on from the very beginning. First, they extracted the natural gas resources of Eastern Balochistan at the extent of exhausting the reserves. Then was the turn of mineral wealth of North Western Balochistan. Now the rulers want to accelerate the exploration processes in Mari area and Jhalawan regions. Above all is the hurriedly initiated mega project of developing port town of Gwadar in to a shipping port with land transit facility on international standard.
Cultural exploitation of the Baloch is another characteristic of the Baloch and the state relations. Alien cultural traditions and language are being imposed at the expense of traditional Baloch social values, which have, strengthen the Baloch beliefs that their socio-cultural and political systems are being destroyed or corrupted in a systematic and organized way. According to the Baloch perception, the ‘sacred mission’ of the Pakistani army and the civilian establishment to ‘civilize’ the ‘uncivilized’ Baloch is the cultural counterpart of the economic exploitation and political domination. It is to encourage or coerce Baloch people to become 'perfect Pakistani Muslims'. An important aspect of this mission is the language and education policy of the state in which it has deliberately imposed an Indian language (Urdu) on the Baloch as national language and language of instruction in educational institutions. In their zeal of creating an artificial Islamic culture, the establishment ignored the fact that destruction of a culture inflicts real harm not only on the group or the nationality but also devastate and hurt the individual human beings. One culture cannot simply be removed and another transplanted without committing a violation of the dignity and integrity of that group, nationality or individual.
As a manifestation of classical colonial mentality, organized attempts were made by state establishment to bring religion into a prominent position in a secular Baloch society. In this regard, large numbers of religious schools were funded by the state. Tablighi (preaching) sessions were patronized in every corner of Balochistan to convert the 'ignorant Baloch' and save them from ‘eternal damnation’. A culture of ‘kawalis’, ‘naaths’, religious narrow mindedness and other alien traditions of northern India is being imposed to promote an alien cultural codes at the expense of Balochi traditional social values. This 'colonisation of the mind' has important implications. Replacing a traditional belief and social system of a people by an alternative frame of reference often amounts to changing the entire identity of a people. According to the Baloch perceptions, as the distinct secular identity of the Baloch is a vehicle of nationalist aspirations, these efforts were used as a means of diluting their political resistance to domination and subjugation. They perceive that the concept of ‘Muslim brotherhood’ and of making the Baloch ‘perfect Muslims’ is in fact intertwined with the colonial concept of economic development and classically has often been invoked in order to justify the exploitation of the natural resources of captured territories in the colonial era.
Violation of basic human rights of the Baloch is the most painful aspect of the Baloch-Pakistan relations. Extra judicial killings, harassment, kidnapping and inhuman torture of the Baloch leaders; political activists and intellectuals are the normal state responses to the Baloch political mobilization and expression of Baloch national aspirations.
It is obvious that the Baloch National Question in Pakistan cannot be reduced to a single dimension. It comprised of many interlinked characteristics. According to the Baloch view, the socio-political and economic situation in Balochistan in terms of Baloch national identity remains grave and alarming. It is the universal perception among the Baloch that they are living a life at the gunpoint in the shadows of inhuman atrocities by the most atrocious state establishment in the contemporary world. They believe that their very survival as a Nation is threatened by the distortion of their history, and colonization through forced occupation, militarization, and systematic efforts and designs aimed at submerging them in the culture and national identity of the dominant nationality. According to the Baloch, all the parameters indicate a colonial relationship between Pakistan and Balochistan. The Baloch after 1947 found that after the partition of India they had simply traded one set of oppressors, the British for another, Pakistan. The lives of uncounted millions of the Baloch people are characterized by oppression, exploitation, violence, and injustice. The result of this is that many of these people have been forced to seek some form of defence against these experiences. In this context, the Baloch resistance whether it is political mobilization or armed resistance is by all means defensive in nature.
Dynamics of Baloch National Resistance
As described above the marginalization of the Baloch, ruthless and frequent military operations and the Baloch vigorous resistance for national rights are the main characteristics of the Baloch and the state relations. The Baloch national resistance is complex and in order to understand it should be placed within its specific historical, cultural, geographical and economic context.
The Baloch define them as a nation based on common ancestry, history, society, institutions, ideology, language and territory. Their existence as a nation is ancient - that is, there have been mention of the Baloch as a group of people as long as some 3500 years before. For many among the Baloch, their resistance is the continuation of efforts for national salvation beginning from the Sassanid period. The history of Balochistan in a sense is the history of resistance against alien occupation and cultural invasion. The Baloch resistance against Sassanid, Arab invaders, Afghan plunderers, Qachar and Pehlavi dynasties were a manifestation of their endeavours for retaining their national identity, dignity and honour.
In Pakistan, the Baloch masses have been expressing their strong opposition to subjugating measures in different forms including fierce armed struggle, on political plan equality and inclusion in the state power structure. It may be mentioned that during the last many decades, the Baloch conflict with the state was confined to some extent to tribal pockets and could not gained status of a mass national resistance movement. Some analysts believe that ideologically, it wavered from the demands of independence, confederation, to implementation of 1940 Lahore Resolution and greater provincial autonomy. Things changed during 70s with the inclusion in the politics of national resistance of some elements among the Baloch educated class and the creation of a low profile Baloch bureaucracy in the newly created province of Balochistan. Today the context of the Baloch resistance is very different from its early or formative years. Now it has acquired many dimensions that are necessary for a national resistance movement to flourish and survive. These new dimensions can be summarized as follows:
1. A significant change can be witnessed in Baloch social and economic context. Emergence of a Baloch upper class of relatively rich businesspersons and retired bureaucrats is an important development. Many among this new rich class are aspiring to replace the artificially created ruling elite in Balochistan. It has been presumed that the Baloch resistance is getting substantial funding and moral support from the so-called would be ‘Baloch National Bourgeois’.
2. The development of a modern communication network in Balochistan is not only helping the state machinery to counter the armed activities, it is also providing much assistance to resistance groups in their efforts to unite, consolidate or coordinate their actions.
3. Development of a growing middle class in search of social identity and economic privileges is providing the movement with political agitators and propagandists. The same class is also providing manpower to a limited extent to armed groups.
4. A vocal Baloch community in many European countries has been able to draw attention of international media and some political and pressure groups towards the plight of the Baloch people.
5. A growing number of jobless students and youth volunteers are reportedly joining the resistance movement in cities and mountains.
6. The perception of running out of time among the Baloch intellectuals and opinion makers is fuelling the sentiments of ‘national salvation in our life time’ among the Baloch politically conscious elements. The Baloch universally share the belief that as a nation they are at the verge of being extinct.
With all its weaknesses and contradictions, the struggle waged by resistance movements and their allied political groups can be termed genuine and widely supported by the Baloch masses. Facing absorption and subjugation, the Baloch seem to have had no other choice than to resort to arm. They have chosen the option to fight to be alive rather being submissive to be extinct. Baloch national resistance by no means can be termed the activities of small groups of isolated individuals, though state authorities frequently describe them as such. Many analysts believe that the Baloch resistance is invariably a defensive reaction to oppression and cultural genocide - attempts to wipe out their culture through forced assimilation. The struggle so intense and pervasive is not sudden or impromptu outburst but born out of popular discontent, and emerged over long periods of time not only to combat oppressive conditions but simultaneously to express aspirations for a different and more just society. In general, the Baloch national resistance seeks to control their affairs and destiny - economically, politically, socially, and culturally.
The state’s sequential policies of assimilation and integration strategies have failed to suppress the cultural and linguistic aspirations of the Baloch and have effectively stressed the need for the Baloch people to resist the subjugating manoeuvres of majority nationality. Today, the Baloch national resistance whether it is political mobilization or armed insurrection is more widespread, more organized and universally appreciated among the Baloch. The mass support for the resistance is seemingly unprecedented. The resistance has increased its degree of political organization and armed mobility as well as its theoretical and ideological poise. Armed resistance groups with different nomenclature and with different areas of operation are emerging as well- organized clandestine movements unprecedented in the history of the Baloch national struggle. While the Baloch resistance gained ground, the endeavours to suppress the Baloch with ruthless military force, the establishment has lost its moral support even from the intelligentsia of the ruling nationality in Pakistan.
The process of reconciliation
No remedial measures had ever been initiated in the past to narrow the gap in the perceptions of the Baloch and the state. Instead of identifying resistance fighters as patriots battling oppression and injustices and seeking the emancipation of their people, the state establishment usually refer to them as "miscreants or terrorists." The reactions of the state to nationalist and secular demands ranged from the bloody and ruthless suppression of dissent by the use of military muscles to the mass imprisonments and curtailments of political activities or violation of civil rights of the Baloch people. The state establishment has been justifying these actions by claiming that the suppression of dissent is necessary to protect the population at large against a “handful of irresponsible, ignorant and anti-development elements” led by some tribal chiefs. The state agencies and their chosen nominees in the province often characterize the Baloch demands as unrealistic or blackmailing tactics of some tribal chiefs, whom they prefer to refer as “war lords”.
The Baloch access to the political process has been deliberately suspended, to the detriment for conciliation and co-existence with the state. During the last sixty years, only three provincial governments with a semblance of Baloch representation were allowed to function for nearly 3 years in all. First was the NAP coalition in 1973 for nine months led by Sardar Ataullah Mengal, second was the government of Nawab Bugti and the third was a coalition government headed by Akhthar Mengal in 1997-98, which was allowed to function for fifteen months. During the remaining period, the province was ruled by centre through proxy. People were hand picked by the central government who governed the province without any moral or political authority among the Baloch masses. The state functionaries have been promoting non-entities as alternates to Nawab Marri, Sardar Mengal and Nawab Bugti, which not only proved to be a futile exercise, but also engendered the hostility of Baloch masses. By all accounts, it appears that the policy makers have been facing the Baloch problem without any genuine desire to appease the Baloch and address their legitimate apprehensions on social, political, economic and cultural issues.
To understand the Baloch national struggle, it is necessary to strip away the camouflage terms and explanations that the state establishment use to hide its true nature. In this context, the Baloch describe their resistance as a patriotic duty. The Baloch political leaders of all nationalist groupings are presenting their resistance whether it was armed or political as their struggle for human rights, honour, identity and national salvation. The conscious circles amongst the Baloch believe that armed resistance was adopted when all acceptable peaceful solutions - appeals, legislative and judicial actions, and the resources of the ballot box - have been proved worthless. In this context, their armed resistance can be termed as an extension of their political mobilization.
Resistance to oppression is the consequence of the oppression itself. When the state violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. The general impression among the Baloch is that the state is trying to overwhelm the nationalist forces who are engaged in a political battle for the Baloch national identity and cultural survival, by the use of ruthless state power. Using military muscle in conflict resolution in a multinational state like Pakistan is least acceptable today as a modus operandi given the new concept of international legitimacy (human rights, rule of law, pluralistic democracy and minority protection) and particularly the Western sensitivity on such issues. The most appreciable means have been identified for conflict resolution are dialogue processes and through peaceful means. As the conflict between the Baloch and the state is a direct result of oppression, and there is only one-way that the products of oppression can be dissolved, and that is to stop the oppression and the settlement of the dispute with a fair reconciliation process. In Baloch context in order to make the negotiation fruitful adopting a comprehensive strategy is imperative. The genuine process of reconciliation has been experimented in different parts of the world with positive results. The reconciliatory processes always include:
· Confidence building measures
· Suspension of hostilities
· Negotiating the issue
Confidence building measures
The prerequisite to any dialogue should necessarily be based on the recognition of the hard fact of the nature of the Pakistani state and the extent and character of the Baloch grievances. Soon after take-over of power by a civilian dispensation, redressing the Baloch political grievance and social injustices and ending the cycle of death and destruction in the province, is being discussed openly in the political and military circles of the country. This is perhaps because the policy of military operation failed to suppress, manage or contain the Baloch resistance. However, there are important factors, which are fundamental and must be considered before a meaningful negotiation between the Baloch and the state establishment should begin. The major obstacles, which can jeopardize an attempt of attaining a peaceful atmosphere in Balochistan, could roughly be grouped into three categories. First, is the denial of the acknowledgment of the real Baloch national leadership as the genuine representatives of the Baloch masses and second is the absence of visible will of recognition and redress of personal, tribal and national grief and loss resulting from the use of ruthless military power. The third obstacle into a meaningful dialogue is the arrogant behaviours of the powerful the state establishment. Without overpowering the arrogant and short-sighted mindset of the ruling elite, no model of reconciliation in Balochistan can be of any substance.
In any reconciliatory move of such a nature where mistrust has been the hallmark of the entire 60 years of relationships between the Baloch and the state establishment, substantial and meaningful confidence-building measures are supposed to be necessary before any serious attempts of a negotiated settlement between or amongst the stakeholder. In this context a few pre-requisite are mentioned below:
Ø The first step on behalf of the powers, which are running affairs of the state, should be the open and loud acknowledgement of all injustices committed to the Baloch people by the state machinery. As an expression of intent, this would constitute the minimal recognition of the loss; it should also include a public expression of regret or apology by the Parliament and the government.
Ø Immediate release of political workers and tribal people languishing in secret service dungeons and prisons without any trial for the last many years. To find out everything possible concerning the fate of all missing Baloch arrested during action and other victims would in itself provide recognition of the suffering and loss endured by the Baloch.
Ø Although the memories of the brutal murder of one of the towering personalities of the Baloch national resistance are very painful; nevertheless, revealing the facts regarding the murder of Nawab Bugti and Mir Balaach Marri is essentially fundamental before a dialogue process could be started.
Ø A comprehensive rehabilitation of Mari and Bugti tribes in a fair program of compensating individual victims and the tribes as a whole of violence and destruction perpetrated by the government agencies provides yet another confidence building measure.
Ø A dignified and honourable rehabilitation of Nawab Bugti’s family should also include the acceptance by the establishment of the declared heir to the Martyred Nawab, as the recognised chief of the Bugti tribe.
Ø The Baloch considers the Marri levy force and groups of Bugti tribesmen or organizations of the settlers armed by the agencies, as a divisive tactics by the establishment, fomenting intra-tribal animosities. Similarly, the state secret services have grouped together, armed, and supported to certain criminal elements as bands of dacoits and proxy killers in various areas of Balochistan. The Baloch will welcome the disbandment of these armed groups as a reconciliatory gesture by the state.
Ø The government should announce the suspension of building cantonments in Balochistan.
Ø Thousand of acres of land acquired by the army in the disguise of defence needs in various districts of Balochistan should be handed over to the provincial government.
Suspension of hostilities
After adoption of some important confidence building measures the next step should be the cessation of hostilities or suspension of all violent activities from both sides. The confidence building measures and a visible ceasefire from both sides will pave the way for a negotiated settlement of the Baloch national question in a cordial atmosphere.
Negotiating the Baloch National Question
After creating a positive environment, the negotiation on actual demands for Baloch rights should begin. However, it is fundamental to identify the players in Baloch nationalist struggle. If the state establishment is seriously thinking of a political and peaceful solution of the Baloch Question then negotiation should be between those who really represent the Baloch masses and those of the state establishment. The most powerful institution of the state for the moment is the National Security Council. It is composed of not only the army chiefs but also political chiefs of federal and provincial governments. It is imperative that negotiation with the Baloch leadership should be conducted through National Security Council or their declared representatives.
Identifying the Baloch Representatives
The major stakeholders in the Baloch National Resistance can be categorized into three distinctive; nevertheless, overlapping categories.
1. Baloch National Leadership/Personalities
2. Political parties or groups
3. The armed Resistance Groups
After the tragic loss of Nawab Bugti, for many among the Baloch it is believed that Nawab Marri and Sardar Mengal are the only remaining towering personalities, which can influence the outcome of any negotiation. However, this fact cannot be denied that after the martyrdom of the Nawab, Nawabzada Mir Brahamdag Bugti, as the declared political and tribal heir of Nawab Bugti, showed such a degree of resilience, courage and steadfastness that he is now undoubtedly one of the leading political personalities of the Baloch National Struggle. These personalities enjoy such a tremendous degree of support among the Baloch masses and opinion leaders that without their consent no negotiation can be fruitful. This fact perhaps at first instance may be hard to digest for the short-sighted low calibre personnel in the state establishment which receive their wisdom of state craft mainly from the intelligence reports of their mediocre informants and think-tank. Nevertheless, recognizing their status in Baloch society, dialogue with the recognized Baloch nationalist leadership is politically unavoidable. Inclusion of Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleiman Daud, being the nominal Khan of the Baloch, in the negotiating process can also be helpful in achieving positive results. It may be mentioned that the surviving two symbols of the Baloch national struggle, Nawab Marri and Sardar Mengal are expressing their mistrusts in any dialogue process with the establishment. They can be justified in their apprehensions taking into account the lack of trust between the Baloch and the state establishment. However, if substantial guarantees are provided and adequate confidence building measures are taken which should clearly indicate that the state is quite serious in the resolution of the Baloch National Question in Pakistan by peaceful means, the Baloch leadership can be persuaded to join the negotiating process either directly or thorough their representatives.
The other players in the Baloch nationalist politics include the four political parties or groups, which have been in the forefront of the political mobilization in Balochistan. The political struggle has been spear headed by Jamhoori Watan Party, Balochistan National Party, Baloch National Front and the National Party. Taking into confidence of these parties is of primary importance as these parties, not only are mainstream nationalist parties and as such have mass support but with few exceptions, some of them have some sort of affiliations with one or the other armed resistance groups in one way or the other. Thus these parties can easily influence the underground armed resistance movement for negotiating the issue with the state.
The most important phase of the reconciliation process would be bringing the militants or armed resistance groups to the negotiation table. B.L.A (Balochistan Liberation Army), B.L.F (Balochistan Liberation Front) and B.R.A (Balochistan Republican Army) are the known armed outfits engaging the state forces in Balochistan. Although, for the moment it appears to be very difficult to get their agreement for talks, however, after developing some measures of trust after some strong confidence building measures by the Government, and after taking into confidence the Nationalist parties and political leadership, the armed resistance movement can be persuaded to be part of peace processes. It may be noted that the State of Pakistan can not be persuaded to negotiate any geographical change of the countries borders, nor the Baloch Resistance Movement can easily withdraw their demands for an independent and Sovereign Balochistan, but both the parties to the conflict can go to negotiation table without compromising the stated positions on the issue. This is an acceptable position for conflict resolutions throughout the world. It may also be mentioned that in any reconciliation of such a nature, usually a third party guarantor is been involved. In many conflict resolution situations a neutral country or countries volunteer to mediate or offers to be a guarantor with the consent of both parties. Such a course can be adopted in Baloch-Pakistan talks.
The Agenda for the Negotiations
The needs and interests of the state establishment and the Baloch are in many ways diametrically opposed to one another. The Baloch are fighting for their cultural, historical, geographical and economical rights while the state is concerned with making an artificial Islamic nation, political marginalization of the Baloch and ruthless exploitation of the Baloch resources. The past few decades have witnessed a massive acceleration in the rate at which the Baloch have been deprived of their lands and livelihoods by imposed development programs characterized by unchecked resource exploitation. It is obvious that the fallacy of ‘Islamic brotherhood’ is a façade behind the plunder and control of resources of the Baloch and other minority nationalities. In confronting and challenging the legitimacy of policies resulting in forced assimilation, development aggression and the introduction of alien language and cultural values, and the perpetuating a state of terror by the security agencies, the Baloch have targeted the source - the meaning of development itself. The Baloch do not simply oppose development or progress. Instead, they are asserting the right to define and pursue development and progress in a manner compatible with their own cultural contexts and their national identity.
The Baloch grievances against ruling elite of the country are cultural, economical and political in nature. It is obvious that in a negotiating process, the agenda should encompass all those issues, which can be termed as the Baloch demands for cultural, economical and political autonomy and guarantees for their survival as a distinct nation. The peace and harmony can be negotiated on the following issues;
1. The recognition of the Baloch as a national entity
2. Re-demarcation of the Baloch boundaries on historical, cultural and linguistic context
3. Guarantees that in future military will not be used in the disputes between the Baloch and the state.
4. The nature of constitutional relationship between the Baloch and the Federation of Pakistan.
It should be kept in mind by both sides that there is no shortcut in any reconciliation process of such a complicated nature where a nationality within the boundaries of multi-national state should be seeking political sovereignty. Talks therefore, should continue as long as it takes to reach a workable mutually acceptable settlement.
Conclusion
There is the widespread perception among the Baloch conscious elements that the Baloch national identity is more at peril than ever before. Economically, they believe that their land is rich while they have been kept poor by the state. Politically, the Baloch believe that their secular democratic mind set is not compatible with religious fundamentalism and dictatorial behaviour of state’s ruling elite.
The Baloch resistance is gaining ground and is not controllable for long by police, armies, intelligence agencies, or fomenting intra-tribal or inter- tribal disputes among the Baloch, and other tried and untried formulae of state control and terror. The Baloch national struggle is controllable only by eliminating the root cause – the subjugation and oppression and accepting the Baloch as a national entity having their own culture, language and territory and accepting that they have the inborn right of controlling their own natural resources and destiny.
If democracy means rule of the people, by the people, for the people, then it also follows that no one nationality may rule another. Management and resolution of the Baloch and the state confrontation is possible mainly by upholding the charter of international human rights commission by the state elite and extending cultural, economical and political rights to the Baloch people. The perception is gaining ground among the Baloch that in this religious state controlled by the army of a single nationality, there is no scope for a democratic and peaceful struggle for the achievement of national rights of the Baloch people. The proponents of this theory argue that by going through history, it is an undeniable fact that the Pakistani ruling elite only understand the language of force. The Baloch are fully convinced that the state establishment is not voluntarily going to relinquish its hold on power. Neither it is ready to give the national rights of the Baloch people in a silver platter. Nevertheless, it is a historical fact that every violent conflict ends up in a negotiated settlement. The failure of a negotiated resolution of the conflict can bring catastrophic results for both parties. Continued state intransigence and non-accommodation of genuine Baloch demands for cultural, economical and political rights will ultimately lead to the possible dissolution of the federation of Pakistan.
Dr. Naseer Dashti is a Baloch scholar based in Balochistan. He has written several articles on Baloch politics. His two recently published books, The Voice of Reason and In a Baloch Perspective have been banned by Pakistani authorities.
'Europeans Hide Behind the Unpopularity of President Bush'
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 84, has thrown his support behind John McCain. SPIEGEL spoke with Kissinger about Germany's Afghanistan mission, tepid European commitment to combatting Islamist extremism and whether direct talks with Iran should go ahead.
SPIEGEL: Dr. Kissinger, you have endorsed Senator John McCain as your choice for the White House. McCain, though, has said he would be prepared to stay in Iraq for another 100 years. Are you sure he is the right man for the job?
Kissinger: John and I have been friends for 30 years. I have great confidence in him.
SPIEGEL: Most Americans would like to see a rapid withdrawal from Iraq and possibly Afghanistan. But McCain has made his motto "No Surrender."
Kissinger: He was trying to make a distinction between American military forces in a country where they were there as part of a civil war and military forces that are part of an alliance accepted by the population, such as in Germany after World War II. He did not say we should stay in Iraq in a combat mission. He was trying to make exactly the opposite point.
SPIEGEL: The Democrats have promised a rapid withdrawal. Is this a realistic option?
Kissinger: The issue is: Are American forces withdrawn as part of a political settlement? Or are they withdrawn because America is exhausted by the war? In the latter case, the consequences of an American withdrawal would be catastrophic.
SPIEGEL: Do you think there would be another eruption of violence?
Kissinger: There would be a high possibility of killing fields. Radical Islam won't stop because we withdraw. A rapid withdrawal would be a demonstration in the region of the impotence of Western power. Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida would achieve a more dominant role, and the ability of Western nations to shape events would be sharply reduced. The virus would have huge consequences for all countries with large Muslim populations: India, Indonesia, and large parts of Europe.
SPIEGEL: That is not how many Europeans see it.
Kissinger: Some Europeans do not want to understand that this is not an American problem alone. The consequences of such an outcome would be at least as serious for Europe as for the Americans.
SPIEGEL: What does Europe not understand? Paris, London and Berlin do not see the "war on terror" as a common challenge for the West?
Kissinger: I don't like the term "war on terror" because terror is a method, not a political movement. We are in a war against radical Islam that is trying to overthrow the moderate elements in the Islamic world and which is fundamentally challenging the secular structures of Western societies. All this is happening at a difficult period in European history.
SPIEGEL: Difficult why?
Kissinger: The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states which developed over several hundred years. There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out. Now the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly.
SPIEGEL: Thirty years ago, you asked for one phone number that could be used to call Europe.
Kissinger: ... and it happened. The problem now is: Nation-states have not just given up part of their sovereignty to the European Union but also part of their vision for their own future. Their future is now tied to the European Union, and the EU has not yet achieved a vision and loyalty comparable to the nation-state. So, there is a vacuum between Europe's past and Europe's future.
DER SPIEGEL
Kissinger would like to see more German involvement in Afghanistan.
SPIEGEL: What do you expect from European leaders? Should German Chancellor Angela Merkel step up and ask the Germans to make sacrifices in the fight against terrorism?
Kissinger: I think Angela Merkel, like any leader, has to think of her re-election. I have high regard for her. But I do not know many Europeans who would deny that the victory of radical Islam in Baghdad, Beirut or Saudi Arabia would have huge consequences for the West. However, they are not willing to fight to prevent it.
SPIEGEL: For example in Afghanistan. Does NATO need more German troops in the southern part of the country?
Kissinger: I think it is obvious that the United States cannot permanently do all the fighting for Western interests by itself. So, two conclusions are possible: Either there are no Western interests in the region and we don't fight. Or there are vital Western interests in the region and we have to fight. That means we need more German and NATO troops in Afghanistan. What I am not comfortable with is that some NATO members send troops primarily for non-combat missions. That cannot be a healthy situation in the long term.
SPIEGEL: Many Germans say we have to stand up to the terrorists, but that Germans can't do the actual fighting, partly because of our history. You are intimately familiar with German history -- your family left Germany when you were nearly 15 years old. Is it fair for today's Germany to refer to the constraints of history?
Kissinger: I understand it, but it is not a sustainable position. In the long run, we cannot have two categories of members in the NATO alliance: those that are willing to fight and others that are trying to be members à la carte. That cannot work for long.
SPIEGEL: Do you think the Germans can be persuaded to change their approach?
'The Bush Administration Made Several Mistakes'
Kissinger: The Germans have to decide that for themselves. But if they stick to that attitude, Germany would be a different kind of nation than Britain or France or others.
DDP
German troops have largely focused on reconstruction in the relatively peaceful northern part of Afghanistan.
SPIEGEL: Isn't German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
SPIEGEL: Will the next president of the United States ask for a greater European commitment?
Kissinger: It is not impossible that a new administration will say that we can't go on without more European commitment. And that they would use this as an excuse for withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't think John McCain would do that, though.
SPIEGEL: Barack Obama also says the conflict in Pakistan is the war Americans really need to win. Is he right?
Kissinger: You can always say there is some other war I would rather want to fight than the one I am in. What does it mean to fight the war in Pakistan? Should we use military power to control the tribal regions in Pakistan and to conduct military operations in a region which Britain failed to pacify in over 100 years of colonization? Should we use military force to prevent a radical take-over of the Pakistani government? Should we prevent the Pakistani state from splitting up into three or four ethnically based groups? I don't think we have the capacity to do that.
SPIEGEL: What about pushing for more military action against al-Qaida terrorists in the border regions with Afghanistan?
Kissinger: The audience listening to such exhortations believes that there is a master plan to bring another government there and that this democratic government will fight the tribal regions. In the short-term, this is an illusion.
SPIEGEL: What would be your advice for dealing with radical Islam and the governments in the region?
DPA
Talking to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should only come after painful sanctions, says Kissinger.
Kissinger: You cannot simultaneously attempt to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan in the name of democracy and fight radical Islam. The democratization processes and the war against radical Islam have a different time frame.
SPIEGEL: Is it time for a strategic reassessment? You have experience with that: In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and you stunned the world by flying to China and sitting down with the Communist dictator Mao.
Kissinger: We did not wake up one morning and say it would be beautiful to talk to Mao. Nixon and I both believed we needed to bring China into the international system. We tried to connect objective reality with moral considerations. And objective reality was changed by the Sino-Soviet tensions and the consequent commitment by Beijing to coexistence.
SPIEGEL: Times have changed, but such moral considerations still exist. Should the new US president fly to Tehran and sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Kissinger: Some believe that the mere act of conversation will alter the tension. I believe that negotiations succeed only if they reflect an objective reality. The key issue with Iran is whether it sees itself as a cause or as a nation. If Iran wants to be a respected nation-state in the region without claiming religious or imperial domination, then we should be able to come to some form of understanding. But we will not reach that goal unless Iran realizes that this is not a historical opportunity to resurrect Persian dreams of glory.
SPIEGEL: And the Iranians need to feel Western pressure to come to that conclusion?
Kissinger: We need a mixture of pressure and incentives. We must realize that painless sanctions are a contradiction.
SPIEGEL: Sounds like the old game of carrots and sticks. You think the US president should meet with an Iranian leader only after painful sanctions?
Kissinger: You would never start with such a step. Nixon sat down with Mao three years after we had initial contact. I think a meeting with an Iranian president would be at the end of a process, not the very beginning.
SPIEGEL: But looking at legacy again, will historians look back one day and write: The Iraq adventure prevented the US from focusing on other strategic challenges -- such as the rapid rise of India and China? Is the Superpower distracted rather than over-stretched?
Kissinger: I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won't succeed with any of them. The rise of Asia will be an enormous event. But we cannot say that we should therefore keep other challenges, such as the fight against radical Islam, in abeyance.
SPIEGEL: Is China still a partner or primarily a rival?
Kissinger: China has to be treated as a potential partner. We must use all ingenuity to create a system in which the great states of Asia -- which really are not nation-states in the European sense but large conglomerates of cultures -- can participate. We have no choice.
SPIEGEL: Does the fact that "guided democracies" like Russia or China are currently more successful in economic terms undermine the attractiveness of Western-style democracy? Is that a new model that is becoming attractive for young people?
Kissinger: The problem of guided democracies is that they have great difficulties solving the problem of succession and of giving access to the widest possible pool of talent. China has come closer to solving that problem than any other undemocratic system. I believe that the democratic model is better and more durable for the future but not automatically. It depends on our vision and determination.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Kissinger, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us.
Interview conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz and Gabor Steingart in New York
Source: Spiegel online
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,535964,00.html
SPIEGEL: Dr. Kissinger, you have endorsed Senator John McCain as your choice for the White House. McCain, though, has said he would be prepared to stay in Iraq for another 100 years. Are you sure he is the right man for the job?
Kissinger: John and I have been friends for 30 years. I have great confidence in him.
SPIEGEL: Most Americans would like to see a rapid withdrawal from Iraq and possibly Afghanistan. But McCain has made his motto "No Surrender."
Kissinger: He was trying to make a distinction between American military forces in a country where they were there as part of a civil war and military forces that are part of an alliance accepted by the population, such as in Germany after World War II. He did not say we should stay in Iraq in a combat mission. He was trying to make exactly the opposite point.
SPIEGEL: The Democrats have promised a rapid withdrawal. Is this a realistic option?
Kissinger: The issue is: Are American forces withdrawn as part of a political settlement? Or are they withdrawn because America is exhausted by the war? In the latter case, the consequences of an American withdrawal would be catastrophic.
SPIEGEL: Do you think there would be another eruption of violence?
Kissinger: There would be a high possibility of killing fields. Radical Islam won't stop because we withdraw. A rapid withdrawal would be a demonstration in the region of the impotence of Western power. Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida would achieve a more dominant role, and the ability of Western nations to shape events would be sharply reduced. The virus would have huge consequences for all countries with large Muslim populations: India, Indonesia, and large parts of Europe.
SPIEGEL: That is not how many Europeans see it.
Kissinger: Some Europeans do not want to understand that this is not an American problem alone. The consequences of such an outcome would be at least as serious for Europe as for the Americans.
SPIEGEL: What does Europe not understand? Paris, London and Berlin do not see the "war on terror" as a common challenge for the West?
Kissinger: I don't like the term "war on terror" because terror is a method, not a political movement. We are in a war against radical Islam that is trying to overthrow the moderate elements in the Islamic world and which is fundamentally challenging the secular structures of Western societies. All this is happening at a difficult period in European history.
SPIEGEL: Difficult why?
Kissinger: The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states which developed over several hundred years. There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out. Now the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly.
SPIEGEL: Thirty years ago, you asked for one phone number that could be used to call Europe.
Kissinger: ... and it happened. The problem now is: Nation-states have not just given up part of their sovereignty to the European Union but also part of their vision for their own future. Their future is now tied to the European Union, and the EU has not yet achieved a vision and loyalty comparable to the nation-state. So, there is a vacuum between Europe's past and Europe's future.
DER SPIEGEL
Kissinger would like to see more German involvement in Afghanistan.
SPIEGEL: What do you expect from European leaders? Should German Chancellor Angela Merkel step up and ask the Germans to make sacrifices in the fight against terrorism?
Kissinger: I think Angela Merkel, like any leader, has to think of her re-election. I have high regard for her. But I do not know many Europeans who would deny that the victory of radical Islam in Baghdad, Beirut or Saudi Arabia would have huge consequences for the West. However, they are not willing to fight to prevent it.
SPIEGEL: For example in Afghanistan. Does NATO need more German troops in the southern part of the country?
Kissinger: I think it is obvious that the United States cannot permanently do all the fighting for Western interests by itself. So, two conclusions are possible: Either there are no Western interests in the region and we don't fight. Or there are vital Western interests in the region and we have to fight. That means we need more German and NATO troops in Afghanistan. What I am not comfortable with is that some NATO members send troops primarily for non-combat missions. That cannot be a healthy situation in the long term.
SPIEGEL: Many Germans say we have to stand up to the terrorists, but that Germans can't do the actual fighting, partly because of our history. You are intimately familiar with German history -- your family left Germany when you were nearly 15 years old. Is it fair for today's Germany to refer to the constraints of history?
Kissinger: I understand it, but it is not a sustainable position. In the long run, we cannot have two categories of members in the NATO alliance: those that are willing to fight and others that are trying to be members à la carte. That cannot work for long.
SPIEGEL: Do you think the Germans can be persuaded to change their approach?
'The Bush Administration Made Several Mistakes'
Kissinger: The Germans have to decide that for themselves. But if they stick to that attitude, Germany would be a different kind of nation than Britain or France or others.
DDP
German troops have largely focused on reconstruction in the relatively peaceful northern part of Afghanistan.
SPIEGEL: Isn't German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
SPIEGEL: Will the next president of the United States ask for a greater European commitment?
Kissinger: It is not impossible that a new administration will say that we can't go on without more European commitment. And that they would use this as an excuse for withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't think John McCain would do that, though.
SPIEGEL: Barack Obama also says the conflict in Pakistan is the war Americans really need to win. Is he right?
Kissinger: You can always say there is some other war I would rather want to fight than the one I am in. What does it mean to fight the war in Pakistan? Should we use military power to control the tribal regions in Pakistan and to conduct military operations in a region which Britain failed to pacify in over 100 years of colonization? Should we use military force to prevent a radical take-over of the Pakistani government? Should we prevent the Pakistani state from splitting up into three or four ethnically based groups? I don't think we have the capacity to do that.
SPIEGEL: What about pushing for more military action against al-Qaida terrorists in the border regions with Afghanistan?
Kissinger: The audience listening to such exhortations believes that there is a master plan to bring another government there and that this democratic government will fight the tribal regions. In the short-term, this is an illusion.
SPIEGEL: What would be your advice for dealing with radical Islam and the governments in the region?
DPA
Talking to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should only come after painful sanctions, says Kissinger.
Kissinger: You cannot simultaneously attempt to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan in the name of democracy and fight radical Islam. The democratization processes and the war against radical Islam have a different time frame.
SPIEGEL: Is it time for a strategic reassessment? You have experience with that: In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and you stunned the world by flying to China and sitting down with the Communist dictator Mao.
Kissinger: We did not wake up one morning and say it would be beautiful to talk to Mao. Nixon and I both believed we needed to bring China into the international system. We tried to connect objective reality with moral considerations. And objective reality was changed by the Sino-Soviet tensions and the consequent commitment by Beijing to coexistence.
SPIEGEL: Times have changed, but such moral considerations still exist. Should the new US president fly to Tehran and sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Kissinger: Some believe that the mere act of conversation will alter the tension. I believe that negotiations succeed only if they reflect an objective reality. The key issue with Iran is whether it sees itself as a cause or as a nation. If Iran wants to be a respected nation-state in the region without claiming religious or imperial domination, then we should be able to come to some form of understanding. But we will not reach that goal unless Iran realizes that this is not a historical opportunity to resurrect Persian dreams of glory.
SPIEGEL: And the Iranians need to feel Western pressure to come to that conclusion?
Kissinger: We need a mixture of pressure and incentives. We must realize that painless sanctions are a contradiction.
SPIEGEL: Sounds like the old game of carrots and sticks. You think the US president should meet with an Iranian leader only after painful sanctions?
Kissinger: You would never start with such a step. Nixon sat down with Mao three years after we had initial contact. I think a meeting with an Iranian president would be at the end of a process, not the very beginning.
SPIEGEL: But looking at legacy again, will historians look back one day and write: The Iraq adventure prevented the US from focusing on other strategic challenges -- such as the rapid rise of India and China? Is the Superpower distracted rather than over-stretched?
Kissinger: I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won't succeed with any of them. The rise of Asia will be an enormous event. But we cannot say that we should therefore keep other challenges, such as the fight against radical Islam, in abeyance.
SPIEGEL: Is China still a partner or primarily a rival?
Kissinger: China has to be treated as a potential partner. We must use all ingenuity to create a system in which the great states of Asia -- which really are not nation-states in the European sense but large conglomerates of cultures -- can participate. We have no choice.
SPIEGEL: Does the fact that "guided democracies" like Russia or China are currently more successful in economic terms undermine the attractiveness of Western-style democracy? Is that a new model that is becoming attractive for young people?
Kissinger: The problem of guided democracies is that they have great difficulties solving the problem of succession and of giving access to the widest possible pool of talent. China has come closer to solving that problem than any other undemocratic system. I believe that the democratic model is better and more durable for the future but not automatically. It depends on our vision and determination.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Kissinger, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us.
Interview conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz and Gabor Steingart in New York
Source: Spiegel online
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,535964,00.html
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Ideology's Rude Return
By Robert Kagan
Ideology matters again. The big development of recent years is the rise not only of great powers but also of the great-power autocracies of Russia and China. True realism about the international scene begins with understanding how this unanticipated shift will shape our world.
Many believe that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But Chinese and Russian rulers, like past rulers of autocracies, do have a set of beliefs that guide their domestic and foreign policies. They believe in the virtues of strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system. They believe strong rule at home is necessary if their nations are to be respected in the world. Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats. They believe in autocracy.
And why shouldn't they? In Russia and China, growing national wealth and autocracy have proved compatible, contrary to predictions in the liberal West. Moscow and Beijing have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. People making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off if they don't. New wealth gives autocracies a greater ability to control information -- to monopolize television stations and control Internet traffic, for instance -- often with the assistance of foreign corporations eager to do business with them.
In the long run, rising prosperity may produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have strategic or geopolitical relevance.
In the meantime, the power and durability of these autocracies will shape the international system. The world is not about to embark on a new ideological struggle of the sort that dominated the Cold War. But the new era, rather than being a time of common values and shared interests, will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of democracy and those of autocracy.
If autocracies have their own set of beliefs, they also have their own set of interests. China's and Russia's rulers are pragmatic chiefly in protecting their continued rule. Their interest in self-preservation shapes their approach to foreign policy.
Russia is a good example of how a nation's governance affects its relations with the world. A democratizing Russia, and even Mikhail Gorbachev's democratizing Soviet Union, took a fairly benign view of NATO and tended to have good relations with neighbors that were treading the same path toward democracy. But Vladimir Putin regards NATO as a hostile entity, calls its enlargement "a serious provocation" and asks "against whom is this expansion intended?" Yet NATO is less provocative and threatening toward Moscow today than it was in Gorbachev's time.
So what is it that Putin fears about NATO? It is not the military power. It is the democracy.
The post-Cold War world looks different from autocratic Beijing and Moscow than it does from democratic Washington, London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels. The "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine, so celebrated in the West, worried Putin because they checked his regional ambitions and because he feared their examples could be repeated in Russia. Even today he warns against "jackals" in Russia who "got a crash course from foreign experts, got trained in neighboring republics and will try here now."
American and European policymakers say they want Russia and China to integrate into the international liberal order, but it is not surprising if Russian and Chinese leaders are wary. Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?
Afraid of the answer, the autocracies are understandably pushing back, with some effect. Autocracy is making a comeback. The modern liberal mind at "the end of history" has trouble understanding the enduring appeal of autocracy in this globalized world. But changes in the ideological complexion of the most influential world powers have always had some effect on the choices made by leaders of smaller nations. Fascism was in vogue in Latin America in the 1930s and '40s partly because it seemed successful in Italy, Germany and Spain. The rising power of democracies in the last years of the Cold War, culminating in communism's collapse after 1989, contributed to the global wave of democratization. The rise of two powerful autocracies may shift the balance back again.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, welcomes the return of ideological competition. "For the first time in many years," he boasts, "a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas" between different "value systems and development models." And the good news, from the Kremlin's perspective, is that "the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization process."
All this comes as an unwelcome surprise to a democratic world that believed such competition ended when the Berlin Wall fell. It's time to wake up from the dream.
Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050102899.html
Ideology matters again. The big development of recent years is the rise not only of great powers but also of the great-power autocracies of Russia and China. True realism about the international scene begins with understanding how this unanticipated shift will shape our world.
Many believe that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But Chinese and Russian rulers, like past rulers of autocracies, do have a set of beliefs that guide their domestic and foreign policies. They believe in the virtues of strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system. They believe strong rule at home is necessary if their nations are to be respected in the world. Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats. They believe in autocracy.
And why shouldn't they? In Russia and China, growing national wealth and autocracy have proved compatible, contrary to predictions in the liberal West. Moscow and Beijing have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. People making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off if they don't. New wealth gives autocracies a greater ability to control information -- to monopolize television stations and control Internet traffic, for instance -- often with the assistance of foreign corporations eager to do business with them.
In the long run, rising prosperity may produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have strategic or geopolitical relevance.
In the meantime, the power and durability of these autocracies will shape the international system. The world is not about to embark on a new ideological struggle of the sort that dominated the Cold War. But the new era, rather than being a time of common values and shared interests, will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of democracy and those of autocracy.
If autocracies have their own set of beliefs, they also have their own set of interests. China's and Russia's rulers are pragmatic chiefly in protecting their continued rule. Their interest in self-preservation shapes their approach to foreign policy.
Russia is a good example of how a nation's governance affects its relations with the world. A democratizing Russia, and even Mikhail Gorbachev's democratizing Soviet Union, took a fairly benign view of NATO and tended to have good relations with neighbors that were treading the same path toward democracy. But Vladimir Putin regards NATO as a hostile entity, calls its enlargement "a serious provocation" and asks "against whom is this expansion intended?" Yet NATO is less provocative and threatening toward Moscow today than it was in Gorbachev's time.
So what is it that Putin fears about NATO? It is not the military power. It is the democracy.
The post-Cold War world looks different from autocratic Beijing and Moscow than it does from democratic Washington, London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels. The "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine, so celebrated in the West, worried Putin because they checked his regional ambitions and because he feared their examples could be repeated in Russia. Even today he warns against "jackals" in Russia who "got a crash course from foreign experts, got trained in neighboring republics and will try here now."
American and European policymakers say they want Russia and China to integrate into the international liberal order, but it is not surprising if Russian and Chinese leaders are wary. Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?
Afraid of the answer, the autocracies are understandably pushing back, with some effect. Autocracy is making a comeback. The modern liberal mind at "the end of history" has trouble understanding the enduring appeal of autocracy in this globalized world. But changes in the ideological complexion of the most influential world powers have always had some effect on the choices made by leaders of smaller nations. Fascism was in vogue in Latin America in the 1930s and '40s partly because it seemed successful in Italy, Germany and Spain. The rising power of democracies in the last years of the Cold War, culminating in communism's collapse after 1989, contributed to the global wave of democratization. The rise of two powerful autocracies may shift the balance back again.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, welcomes the return of ideological competition. "For the first time in many years," he boasts, "a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas" between different "value systems and development models." And the good news, from the Kremlin's perspective, is that "the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization process."
All this comes as an unwelcome surprise to a democratic world that believed such competition ended when the Berlin Wall fell. It's time to wake up from the dream.
Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050102899.html
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