by Richard Gowan | Aug 22, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America
With each day that passes, members of the commentariat out-bid each other with explanations of how events in Georgia signify the decline of the West. Comparisons to the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechosolvakia abound. And South Vietnam, obviously. It takes a brave skeptic to argue that this is not the start of “Cold War II”. So I expect to be consigned to the “insane” file when I say this: Russia has fought a successful, rather classical, limited war and won a tactical victory that may yet turn into a strategic defeat for Moscow.
I’m not saying that’s certain, but it’s a real possibility. To see why, it’s necessary to get past the images of Russian armor grinding up Georgian roads. There’s no doubt that the war went Moscow’s way. But remember: in 1968, nearly 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw pact troops poured into Czechoslovakia. Today, we worry because Russia may leave 2,000 soldiers on Georgian soil. That’s 2,000 too many, but the imagery shouldn’t obscure the numbers. This was a small war.
And a small war that hasn’t necessarily ended exactly as Russia hoped. Mikhail Saakashvili is still in office. He is receiving a stream of visitors: Rice, Cameron, etc. Now think back. In 1968, Alexander Dub?ek didn’t get to meet a similar cast of characters – as you ask, the equivalents would have been Dean Rusk and Edward Heath. He got flown to Moscow (in fairness, the last leader of South Vietnam was allowed to return home and grow orchids).
So what we’ve discovered over the last weeks is that Russia can conduct a small victorious war on its immediate border, but that the West is still able to project enough political influence to prevent a total rout there. By itself, this puts Russia into a similar league to Rwanda, which can destabilize the eastern Congo all it likes but still has to put up with U.S. and UN meddling there. Go the Red Army!
This point is not lost on the Russians. They are making it themselves. From the West, this looks like an attack on the West. From Russia, it’s Grenada. I don’t deny that this is not only a tragedy for Georgia, but also a shock to the (post-Cold War) system. But will the long-term effects on that system necessarily favor Russia? Here are two reasons to think that they might not.
Reason #1 is that Russia has compounded growing Western business mistrust. That hurts. Daniel Drezner excerpts the following from the FT:
Investors pulled their money out of Russia in the wake of the Georgia conflict at the fastest rate since the 1998 rouble crisis. Russian debt and equity markets have also suffered sharp falls since the conflict began on August 8, with yields on domestic rouble bonds increasing by up to 150 basis points in the last month.
Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, said the capital flight had largely subsided and would be more than made up for by projected inflows. Russia’s foreign currency reserves, at $581bn, are the world’s third largest. But the ebbing of foreign investor confidence will make it harder for Russian companies to raise debt and equity finance since foreign sources account for a disproportionate share of long-term capital for Russian corporate borrowers. “The market is vulnerable to foreign capital flight,” said Kingsmill Bond at Troika Dialogue, the investment bank. “The major Achilles heel of the Russian market is that there is very little domestic long-term capital.”
Of course, Russia is an energy superpower and all that, but the idea that it is now immune from foreign financial forces is overstated. Reason #2 for thinking all may not be going Moscow’s way is geopolitical. U.S. commentators are reviving the Vietnam-era domino theory with a Eurasian twist: after Georgia, Ukraine will be next, then the ‘stans and so on. Maybe so, but again it’s not inevitable. The BBC notes that many former Soviet states have shown support for Georgia (or at least the West) or stayed quiet during the crisis. That’s not just Ukraine. It’s Belarus:
Only a few years ago Russia was such a close ally, there was talk of the two countries merging, so one might have expected [Belarusian mini-Stalin President Lukashenko] to back Russia’s action in the Caucasus. But Belarus has had a series of bad-tempered rows with Russia over energy supplies and has recently shown more interest in improving Western contacts.
The initial response from Minsk to Russia’s intervention in Georgia was decidedly ambivalent – so much so, that the Russian ambassador there even publicly expressed his displeasure. President Lukashenko travelled to Sochi to reassure President Medvedev that Moscow’s military operation had been conducted “calmly, wisely and beautifully”.
But he took steps to clear the way for better relations with the US and Europe. In the last few days the final three political prisoners in Belarus have been suddenly released – the beneficiaries, it seems, of an unexpected presidential pardon.
One has hallucinatory visions of McCain’s International Freedom Express steaming into Minsk in 2009, with Son of Liberty Lukashenko offering anti-missile facilities…
OK, it’s unlikely. But it’s striking that Russia’s neighbors and investors aren’t all buying into the “New Russian Dawn” rhetoric pervading the op-ed pages. The real question is whether Western governments are ready to take advantage of these openings to gain strategic leverage over Russia, or whether they’ll pass. Over on the ECFR website, Daniel offers the hawkish take. Russia’s actions have “made the West’s embrace of both Georgian and Ukraine more rather than less likely.” I’m not so sure. But the essential point is that Georgia was only a tactical win for Russia: like France in 1940 for the Germans, and Iraq in 2003 for the U.S., a quick victory involving lots of tanks may invite longer-term failure.
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.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 20, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
In early August, Daniel wrote a punchy post entitled “After state-building”. Looking at American debate about what to do in Afghanistan and Iraq, he concluded “we may be about to witness a paradigmatic shift away from state-building. But what replaces it?” I’d come to a parallel conclusion for the UN: “the idea of large-scale, multi-dimensional UN missions overseeing countries stumbling out of conflict may have run out of road.” But I didn’t have an answer about what comes next.
And I still don’t. But I’ve outlined some initial thoughts in a piece over on the Guardian website, timed to pre-empt the arrival of the UN’s new peacekeeping boss – Alain Le Roy – next Monday. I run through the current list of short-term UN woes (where are the helicopters?), but then turn to “longer-term, strategic challenges”:
These aren’t about management. They involve adapting to a less American, more multipolar world. The current scale of UN peacekeeping is a product of the last, all-too-American decade. The Bush administration favoured hefty UN missions to stabilise places where it did not want to get bogged down itself: Haiti, Liberia, Darfur.
UN officials, shaken by their impotence over Iraq, have often felt obliged to look “relevant” elsewhere. The result has been a trend towards bigger peace operations with ever-more ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, mandates to rebuild these shattered states. In private, many of the organisation’s experts worry that they cannot fulfil these mandates – almost all would prefer less expansive alternatives with realistic targets.
But the greatest obstacle to effective peace operations is that tensions between the US and its rivals can reduce the UN to paralysis. China has ensured that the UN mission in Darfur cannot push back much (if at all) against pressure from the Sudanese government. Throughout 2008, Russia has stymied efforts to transfer UN peacekeeping responsibilities to the EU in Kosovo. UN observers in Georgia evacuated as Russian troops advanced this month.
If great power tensions increase further, the chances for more UN missions can only decrease. That would be tragic for the vulnerable who rely on the UN from, Port-au-Prince to Kinshasa. It might be dangerous for the great powers too. Without the UN to provide basic security, the odds of small flare-ups escalating into big crises will grow.
So as Alain Le Roy looks beyond his first round of crises, he may decide that his overarching strategic task is to build up a minimal consensus between the US, its allies and its rivals about what UN peacekeeping is for in an age of tensions between them.
Minimal consensus, eh? What might that look like? Stand by for answers sooner or, more probably, later. But I have started to spot quite a few symptoms of a “new minimalism” around the UN of late. These include its first ever peacekeeping doctrine, which is sharp and thoughtful document but feels conservative relative to earlier UN statements on peacebuilding and statebuilding (there’s textual analysis in my recent International Peacekeeping article, if you like that sort of thing).
It’s also worth checking out the state of debate on the Responsibility to Protect – Ban Ki-moon’s staff have been rather skillfully guiding discussions, emphasizing “soft” aspects of R2P like conflict prevention over “hard” military interventions. It’s worth having a close read of this really good report on the subject from the International Peace Institute. Now, a couple of policy documents do not equal a new ideology, but I think we’re seeing the first signs of a deeper minimalist trend…
by Daniel Korski | Aug 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
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 Times that 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?
by David Steven | Aug 4, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America, South Asia
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?
(Via Juan Cole.)
