by Richard Gowan | Sep 30, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
Readers will know that I have an unhealthy interest in the supply of helicopters for peace operations. There aren’t enough of them, and those that do exist aren’t always reliable – one crashed in Darfur yesterday, with four fatalities. So you might have imagined that I’d welcome the news that the EU is about to get four Russian transport helicopters, complete with ground crews, for operations in Chad:
The EU force commander, General Patrick Nash, says talks about the Russian helicopters are “very advanced”. The operation – called Eufor Chad/CAR – has been hampered by a shortage of helicopters, needed to reach refugees scattered over a vast area of desert.
The Russian helicopters – expected to arrive in November – will boost by one-third the number available to the EU forces in Chad, Gen Nash said. “With 3,500 troops in an area of operations the size of France, you cannot have enough air assets,” he told a news conference on Monday.
That’s true, but there’s obviously a bigger question at stake here: should the EU be accepting Russian support in one peace operation just when it is deploying monitors for another in Georgia? As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a risk that the EU guys watching South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be seen as stooges for the Russians. Today’s IHT reports that the Russians are setting new limits on the EU observers even as they arrive. This news from Chad may not help improve that picture.
Of course, it’s arguable that working with Russia in conflict areas outside its self-declared sphere of interest may be one way to stop it detaching from the international community altogether. Before the Georgian war, French officials were musing on how involving Russia more closely in Western-led operations – including Afghanistan – might improve ties with the Kremlin. Now European and American diplomats are on the look-out for signs that Russia wants to heal scars left by Georgia. The agreement of a pretty anodyne resolution on Iran at the UN last week was duly welcomed as proof that Moscow doesn’t want to lose touch.
I don’t want to be a miserable bugger, but I’m not convinced that we have the optics right here. Getting Russia to provide limited help in Chad, or say the right things without serious consequences on Iran, is smooth diplomacy. But does it compensate for Russia’s behavior in Georgia? And is the fact that Moscow has four helicopters out in the desert going to alter its geopolitical priorities? The answer to those questions is, in essence, “ha ha no”. Our excitement about getting Russian choppers to sustain our – still fumbling – mission in Chad makes us look weak.
I’m not saying that the international community should refuse all Russian help. I believe that the UN, meant to promote collective security efforts among countries that don’t necessarily share common viewpoints, does have a significant interest in keeping Russia in the peacekeeping game. But the EU is not just the UN for White Guys (as I’ve just shown for ECFR, the EU is gradually losing its power to shape the UN’s agenda). It’s an alliance that will be taken seriously if it projects some power in its own interests. If it’s going to mount serious military operations, it needs to show that it’s self-sufficient, and not reliant on potential and/or actual competitors.
I hope the Russian helicopters are helpful in Chad, but they shouldn’t be there.
by Charlie Edwards | Sep 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Menzies Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats is the latest member of the establishment to call for a review of British defence policy. Following in the footsteps of the Conservative’s Forsyth Commission the Campbell Review says very little we don’t know already, offering up the same concerns over the military convenant, describing the armed forces as “overstretched” and the defence budget as being in crisis. The review still made the news – criticism of the military fills column inches, and it didn’t matter that pretty much everything Sir Menzies said on the Today programme had been said before either by the Conserviatve Party or by Anthony Forster and Tim Edmunds last year. But will this latest review have any effect? There are reasons to be both optmistic and pessimistic.
First, political consensus is now firmly in favour of a review at some point in the future. Campbell was wrong to suggest that the Strategic Defence Review did not predict the costs of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that wasn’t the point of the review – the aim of the review was to codify what had already happened in the 1990s – hence why we are in the mess we are in now.
Second, there is a worrying lack of capacity in Westminster and Whitehall to think innovately about defence policy. The Government have been pretty poor in thinking strategically about the future of defence, while the MoD (considering it is supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been woeful – and much of the responsibility for this lies with Ministers and senior officials.
Third, we must challenge the assumption that the MoD has the capacity to think creatively and strategically about the future. It doesn’t. The best work is being done in the FCO, HSC and PMSU. The new post of Director of Strategy at the MoD is timely and very welcome – capacity will need to be built up internally.
Fourth, we need to challenge the false choice made by political parties that ‘the armed forces should either do less and differently, or increase in the defence budget.’ If you start the process by thinking about institutiuons or budgets you will not achieve transformation but are most likely to make short term decisons which have negative consequences down the line (anyone got a spare pound for the carriers?).
Fifth, communications, or the almost complete lack of it. There are a handful of individuals in Main Building, and the military who get this, they are the exception. MoD communications, as we have made reference to before, are weak, utterly reactive, and often fail to get the message across clearly and coherently. There is a limit to how many times you can appear on Top Gear!
Above all Menzies Campbell’s review calls for a public debate on the future of defence. It’s unlikely to happen unless political parties admit they don’t have the answers and start listening and the MoD opens up and starts communicating to Whitehall and the rest of the UK about what defence is for in the 21st century.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 24, 2008 | North America, Off topic
In New York, Sarah Palin found something to talk about with Hamid Karzai:
While being photographed, they could be overheard discussing the Afghan leader’s son, who was born in January 2007. “What’s his name?” Palin asked.
“Mirwais,” Karzai said. “Mirwais, which means the light of the house.”
“Oh, nice,” said Palin, who was seen patting her heart and smiling.
There you go: a statesperson speaks. But I am disappointed that Palin did not build on this diplomatic opening by describing how she named her own five kids. A name-by-name analysis is here, but let’s go straight to Number 5:
Trig Paxson Van Palin is the couple’s youngest child and second son. According to the governor’s spokesperson Sharon Leighow in a statement made shortly after the baby’s birth, Trig is Norse and means “true” and “brave victory.” Paxson is a region in Alaska the couple favors. Van is a nod to the rock group Van Halen; before Trig’s birth, his mother had joked about naming her son Van Palin after the band.
I’d like to see Karzai top that. But if Palin told him that she wants to see victory in Afghanistan, he may have thought she just meant bringing Trig along for a trip.
by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Listening to Gordon Brown’s speech today, Philip Stephens notes that “Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone”:
Though he set out the challenges Britain faces in a period of tumultuous global upheaval, Mr Brown did little to challenge his audience’s preconception that the present mess was all the fault of greedy capitalists.
Reading that brought to mind another Labour Conference speech in times of global upheaval: Tony Blair’s back in 2001. Remember this?
This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.
I re-read the whole thing this afternoon, and was struck by a) its brilliance, b) its insight, c) how it soars compared to Brown’s speech today and d) the extent to which – in retrospect, with all that’s happened since – it shines with an eerie messianic fervour. It’s well worth another look: full text below the jump.
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by Daniel Korski | Aug 21, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America
In 2006 the U.S national security establishment “re-discovered” counter-insurgency, as General David Petraeus fresh from having published the Army/Marine COIN doctrine – set about implementing a COIN strategy in Iraq and his fellow-travellers in the State Department like David Kilcullen pushed for a COIN handbook to change the strategic way the US government does COIN.
Now it’s time for another re-discovery – namely of the proxy war. Proxy wars were common in the Cold War, and proxies were used in conflicts in Greece, Angola, Korea, and Vietnam.
But these wars have now come back. In the Caucasus NATO’s fighting Russia through Georgia, in Iraq the U.S is really taking on Iran, while Israel aims at Tehran but shoots at Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Asia Pakistan uses the Taliban inside Afghanistan to hit at India.
Meanwhile, conflict in the Horn of Africa is escalating rapidly as power struggles within Somalia are exacerbated by the military support that both Ethiopia and Eritrea give to the opposing parties there.
The West used to be good at these proxy wars. First, because of the “soft” power of democratic capitalism, which drew people to a cause not just a country. But in the new world where the enemies are often Salafist Islamists does the U.S and its allies have the necessary universal language and universal appeal?
Second, successful proxy wars depended on the proxies being authentic representatives of at least parts of their societies. Where they were not, they failed. Today, does an alliance with the U.S automatically exclude one as a legitimate representative?
As proxy wars look likely to be one of the predominant modes of warfare in the 21st century, the U.S will need to find answers to these questions and, as with the development of its COIN capabilities, gear its diplomatic, military and economic instruments to deal with the new challenge.
