In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who’s cast as the goodie and who’s the baddie is not a small one. So who’s winning the narrative high ground over South Ossetia?
Until the fighting began, the answer – in western Europe and the US, at least – would clearly have been Georgia. Look at the regular stories over the past few months of Russian sabre-rattling towards Georgia, including YouTube footage that seems to show Russian fighters downing a Georgian UAV.
Those stories dovetailed perfectly with a growing mood of suspicion towards Russia on many fronts; as Jules’s post on Friday observed, the image of Russian tanks rolling in to South Ossetia immediately prompted “dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin”.
But a couple of pieces of commentary over the weekend suggest a growing backlash against Mikheil Saakashvili among the centre left European commentariat. In Saturday’s Guardian, Mark Almond tersely dismisses the idea of “plucky little Georgia” standing up to the Russian leviathan: “the cold war reading won’t wash”, he says. Instead, he argues, the conflict in South Ossetia
…has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain’s widely unexpected military response with the comment: “No great power retreats for ever.” Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev …
Anyone familiar with the Caucasus knows that the state bleating about its victim status at the hands of a bigger neighbour can be just as nasty to its smaller subjects. Small nationalisms are rarely sweet-natured …
Thomas de Waal, writing in today’s Observer, agrees. While Russia is behaving badly, he says, the same’s true of Georgia too:
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about [South Ossetians] than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law …
Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice.
The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire.
The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting ‘Georgia fatigue’. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat – the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia’s Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit.
Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…
This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.
Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.
It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.
Partly to deflect criticism of his call for a withdrawal from Iraq, Senator Barack Obama has said the U.S “should seize the moment” to build up its presence in Afghanistan. His rival John McCain agrees; when Obama called for two additional U.S brigades to be sent to Afghanistan, McCain demanded that three brigades be deployed i.e. 15.000 more troops. They also agree on taking a harder line vis-à-vis Pakistan.
But rather than lead to a chorus of support, something else has stirred. Voicing a concern I’m told is felt by several top Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia, told the Financial Timesthat the US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan.
In a break not only with the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda, but also a post-2002 cross-party consensus that U.S should help rebuild failing and failed states, Senator Webb said the U.S
can’t create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can’t be our objective.
For now, the kink in the bi-partisan consensus on helping build failing and fragile states is small. But it also has a British variant in the Conservative Party and, I predict, will grow over time.
Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic “paradigm shifts”. The comparison to foreign policy ideas is, I admit, not straight (and our view of scientific development has moved on), but it is straight enough. And we may be about to witness a paradigmatic shift away from state-building. But what replaces it?
So…The US is hassling Pakistan to crack down on its border regions. But it wants the Pakistanis to use the same tactics that it failed with in Afghanistan (and Iraq, of course). Yes, it’s another episode of the dysfunctional US-Pakistan relationship.
All this comes, according to the LA Times, after the new, and beleaguered, Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yusaf Raza Gillani, “got an earful from both the White House and Congress about the need to act far more aggressively in the tribal areas.” Their response? Send in the Special Forces. A US-trained and equipped commando division is being sent to the tribal region, we are told. Its mission – to put the insurgency to the sword.
I am sure this is a heady stimulant for the armchair warriors in the White House, but it flies in the face of the US counterinsurgency doctrine, which states flatly that “the military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents.”
But conventional war has long been the strategy of choice for Pakistan to deal with its internal problems (problems that could eventually lead to total state failure). Look at what happened back in 2004, when the US bullied General Musharraf into a disastrous attack on the tribal areas:
The tribesmen considered the military action as an attack on their autonomy and an attempt to subjugate them. Attempts to persuade them into handling over foreign militants failed and, with apparent mishandling, the military offensive against suspected al-Qaeda militants turned into an undeclared war between the Pakistani military and rebel tribesmen. Anger grew as government forces demolished the houses of members of the defiant tribes as collective punishment and seized their properties, even in other parts of the province.
The result was humiliation. One Colonel took shelter in a mosque and emerged with the Koran on his head, begging for mercy. Tribesmen stripped him of his uniform, and sent him on his way. In the end, the army signed a truce with the militants – a move that was widely (and rightly) interpreted as surrender.
In 2004, there was some excuse for this. The US, after all, was still learning some very hard lessons in Iraq, lessons that led David Petraeus to come back to the US believing that:
Success in a counterinsurgency requires more than just military operations. Counterinsurgency strategies must also include, above all, efforts to establish a political environment that helps reduce support for the insurgents and undermines the attraction of whatever ideology they may espouse.
Five years on, however, and the US’s Pakistan policy remains stuck in the dark ages. One of the most fragile countries on earth continues to be used as a political football in Washington (with Obama a willing participant, sadly).
The US’s field manual on counter-insurgency is selling well on Amazon (who would have predicted that a few years ago?). It described counterinsurgencies as ‘learning competitions’. At the moment, that’s one game we’re clearly losing.
Can I suggest that someone in Washington RTFM and reads it soon?
I can’t be the only one scratching my head at the Conservative Party’s summer holiday reading list. It’s week 2 of silly season, I grant you, and journalists will take pretty much anything on offer, but this just smacks of column filling (that said perhaps some of the larger tomes will act as wind breakers and/or sun shades on the beach).
According to the Sunday Times the reading list was chosen by Keith Simpson, a shadow foreign affairs spokesman and a former lecturer at Cranfield and Sandhurst. This is clearly reflected in his choice of reading material as 24 of the 38 books are on military history, geography, and terrorism. Nudge, the book currently feted by all three political parties looks like a definite afterthought.
What I find so puzzling is the choice of books on offer. I really can’t believe Cameron will be leafing through Empires of the Sea or Five Days in London on his hols.
There are no decent books on China (the more recent by Will Hutton, Charles Grant and Mark Leonard). What about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; Diplomacy by Henry Kissenger, or Thomas Rick’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005? The list of good books is endless – this list is meaningless.
MPs have approximately 11 weeks off, so here’s how they might spend their summer holiday (according to Keith Simpson):
