Sideshow in the Desert

I've got a new piece up at DNI about the Israeli airstrike on Syria. My attempt with this is to look at it from the perspective of Israeli security.

UDPATE:

Dan Tdaxp comments:

Isreal is a small country surrounded by hostile regimes. The only way such a state can continue to exist is if her neighbors distrust her neighbors more than they distrust her. (The United Arab Republic was so dangerous because it suggested that the Arabs would put aside their mutual animosity to finally destroy Israel.) The break-up of the Palestinian Authority into Fatah and Hamas controlled territory is a wonderful improvement for Israel, because it creates a revolutionary state whose main objective is the overthrow of her other neighbors. Yet A.E. considers such progress "counter-productive."

This is based on the assumption that Hamas poses a threat to Israel's neighbors. It doesn't. Unlike Al Qaeda, which seeks the overthrow of all "apostate regimes," Hamas desires to strike at Israel itself. Even if it wanted to, it's hard to see how it could do so given that it has little reach outside of Israel. Despite Iran's patronage of Hamas, its identity rests as an essentially Palestinian guerrilla group. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has operated outside of Lebanon as far as South America.

Dan professes to be sometimes "puzzled" by my analysis. This is natural, as we approach the issue from strikingly different theoretical and political places. However, I feel that such a clash of views is ultimately beneficial towards both of us improving in our own thinking.

Of Interest

-Enjoying Shloky's new blog, Naxalite Rage. We had a conversation earlier about publishing the results of his research in a political magazine, but this seems like a much better format (especially given the subject matter).

-Air Force takes the lead in cyber-warfare. Looking to do a longer article on this once I read the manual referred to in the article.

-Egypt's security dilemmas.

-Soob takes a skeptical look at Hillary Clinton's Iraq withdrawal plan. He also issues a warning against "buying a sexy dress" for Helen Thomas and Oscar De La Hoya.

Hayden and COIN Pt. II

Sarah Sewell, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was one of the academics attacked in Tom Hayden's anti-counterinsurgency article in The Nation. She and several of her colleagues respond in the Harvard Crimson:

“The Carr Center’s mission is to make human rights principles central to the formulation of public policy,” Sewall said. “Civilian protection in war is premised on core human rights and has become a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. Helping to ensure that international humanitarian law is fully embraced in military doctrine will contribute to human rights protection.”

In recent articles for the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, Sewall highlighted the lack of instruction given to U.S. troops when dealing with civilians.

She said she hopes this new manual will fill this educational gap in the soldiers’ training.

As to Hayden’s concerns that “counter-insurgency, being based on deception, shadow warfare and propaganda, runs counter to the historic freedom of university life,” Sewall said that, as a knowledgeable outsider, it was her role to help educate the military about humanitarian concerns.

“Academia has a unique responsibility and opportunity to apply its research and insights to public policy challenges,” Sewall said.

Sewall’s colleague, Carr Center Faculty Affiliate Jonathan Moore, echoed the sentiment about whether a university should be able to advise the military, calling Hayden’s argument “worse than nonsense.”

“If the scholarship is serious and thorough and knowledgeable, or at least has a base of knowledge that it attempts to expand,” Moore said, “it should not restrict itself by a narrow interpretation of the mandate of the organization it stems from. You do not let an ideology distort your scholarly efforts.”

Nina M. Catalano ’09, co-president of the Harvard College Human Rights Advocates, wrote in an e-mail from Bogota, Colombia that the Carr Center and similar institutions cannot afford to remain isolated from important world events.

“The human rights movement did not win a place on the global stage just by engaging other like-minded organizations,” Catalano wrote. “While Hayden fears the Carr Center may be succumbing to what he dramatically calls ‘the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind,’ he offers no alternate, ‘clean’ opportunity for human rights defenders to influence wartime policy.”

Though she said her organization has not taken an active stand against the war in Iraq, Catalano wrote that, “one need not accept the validity of war as a political option or the premises of the current war to appreciate the desperate need for strong legal and moral guidelines for warfare.”

Sewall said she thought it was absurd for people to think that collaborating with the military went against the Carr Center’s mission.

“How can you hope to change the conduct of war without engaging those who practice it?” Sewall said. “We should all hope to live in a world without war, but there are many steps we can take to minimize war’s horror along the way.

Although this is an reasonable defense, it's also wishy-washy. Hayden attacked counterinsurgency itself as an inherent evil, and her "changing the system from the inside" answer does not rebut that. It almost seems that Sewell is afraid of defending the military doctrine she (among others) helped create.

Adrian of Politics and Soccer's comment on this sums up the problems with Hayden's thinking:

Sounds like Hayden's reasoning against COIN is a democratic one based on a few assumptions:

1) that in order to exist or flourish, insurgencies require the support of the population,
2) that support is giving freely, and
3) if a government is in the position where it has to ask for outside assistance in a COIN effort, it probably doesn't deserve to survive anyway.

A tempting argument for those who believe in democracy. However it is wrong because:

1) insurgencies do not require the support of the population to survive or flourish, such as the examples you gave using child soldiers - furthermore, instead of a unified population there can be many divided populations (Shia, Sunni and Christians in Lebanon, Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Turkmen in Iraq, etc.),
2) even when insurgencies have the cooperation of the population, that population is not necessarily given out of free will,
3) therefore, deserving governments can require outside assistance.

(h/t Duck of Minerva)

Grand Strategy (or lack theorof)

Wiggins briefly reviews Thomas P.M. Barnett, John Robb, and William Lind's ideas about grand strategy. I agree--with the caveat that if we're looking at alternative strategic theory, leaving out Chet Richards' ideas in Neither Shall the Sword is a pretty big omission. Especially given his explicit use of the containment/rollback framework in reference to Barnett.

What about the other authors in the alternative strategic theory canon? Robert D. Kaplan doesn't as much advocate a grand strategy as a change of basic American values. There is irony in that the farther he travels, the more his writings focus on the nature of domestic virtue. Martin Van Creveld's scholarly writings are more descriptive than proscriptive, although his popular writing is broadly similar to Lind's.

I first was introduced to alternative strategic theory through Robert D. Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy. I had never heard of him before, but I saw his book on a Barnes and Noble shelf and bought it based on the cover blurb. I was blown away by the radical nature of his analysis. At a time when the highest national priorities were the Bill Clinton impeachment scandal and Elian Gonzalez, Kaplan was predicting ethnic fragmentation, terrorism, and global environmental catastrophe! Additionally, he also recommended Van Creveld's The Transformation of War. Kaplan also referenced William Lind, et all's "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation."

However, it all seemed like science fiction until 9/11 happened. Then it became all too real. Since then, the most depressing part has been the lack of a grand strategy that effectively deals with changing global conditions. For all of the way people have been struggling to distance themselves from the neoconservative grand strategy, I agree with Wiggins that few have proposed anything that makes a radical break from current Washington orthodoxies. As bad as Bush has been, replacing his ideas with outdated and staid strategies of the past will not be too great of an improvement.

Algiers, Grozny, Baghdad, and Washington

New article up at the Huffington Post. I make the argument that the Iraq war's inherent lack of legitimacy and delusional political objectives make building legitimacy through counterinsurgency impossible. Mountainrunner's article in Good Magazine actually served as the inspiration for this one, as well as Anthony James Joes' Urban Guerilla Warfare and thisarticle in Parameters. It is largely intended as a corrective to the "incompetence dodge," but it doesn't solely focus on Iraq--there is some discussions of the Algerian and Chechen insurgencies as parallels.

Strategizing about Burma

Via Eddie, a Ralph Peters essay I can finally agree with:

China regards Myanmar as a satellite. Beijing wishes it could just grab the country the way it seized Tibet, but believes the geostrategic cost would be too high. So it supports the junta as the next-best option and develops Myanmar as an economic colony.

Why does China see Myanmar as absolutely critical to its future? After all, it's a bitterly poor country of 55 million, where time didn't just stand still for the last half-century - it actually went backward. And neither the ethnic Burmans (half the population) nor the up-country tribes like the Chinese one bit.

The answers are straightforward:

* Myanmar offers 1,200 miles of coastline on the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, bordering the Indian Ocean. And those waters are a strategic lifeline for China, carrying trade westward and bringing back desperately needed oil from the Middle East and Africa.

China knows that we own the Pacific militarily, but hopes that - in the event of a Sino-U.S. crisis - it could face us down in the Indian Ocean, its backdoor to the world. When I was in Myanmar 11 years ago, the Chinese were already modernizing docks and eyeing the development of new harbors.

* Myanmar offers the promise of its own oil and gas deposits, while its magnificent hardwood forests are being clear-cut to feed China's industrial appetites. (The ecological devastation is stunning.) And Beijing sets the terms of trade.

* The advent of a pro-Western government in Myanmar would mean that, in wartime, China would have no direct access to the Greater Indian Ocean. The equivalent would be for the United States to lose access to the Caribbean - or worse.

China wants to minimize the ugly headlines from Myanmar, but it's not going to pull its support for the junta just to keep the U.S. water-polo team in the Olympics.

One can see China eventually acting to clamp down on its patron if the security threats from Burmese drug production, refugees, and Burma's unstable border grow too severe. But in the short term, action from any of the regime's enablers in Beijing (and to a lesser extent, Moscow, New Delhi, and Bangkok) seems unlikely. Yet China has to understand that if it hopes to be taken seriously as a responsible great power, it cannot keep propping up genocidal dictators--either in Burma or Sudan. Perhaps, if China's basic military and economic interests are assured by both internal pro-democracy forces and Western powers (as well as the credit for a peaceful Burmese transformation), there might be a chance of them grudgingly moving to pressure SLORC. As to what would compel them to do so, I'd confess that East Asian security specialists like Eddie and Robot Economist (before State Dept ordered him to ice his blog) would know better than I do.

What I do know is that in the last ten years, China, Russia, and developing nations in Asia and Africa have formed an effective deterrent to UN intervention in human rights. Part of it is counter-balancing against American power, which has become linked in the public eye with humanitarian intervention. There's also the long memory of colonial era violation of national sovereignty. But it's mainly self-serving cover for domestic human rights violations. Finding a way to convince them to stand aside is the great challenge for human rights activists of the future.

Hayden, Realism, and COIN

Two nights ago, I saw Tom Hayden speak to a packed audience. It wasn't the first time, and the contrast between the two speeches could not be greater. The first time, he had just returned from the "Battle of Seattle" and seemed bitter and exhausted. I don't remember much of what he talked about save his imaginative re-enactment of what it felt like to be beaten by riot police. Hayden's recent speech dealt with the war on Iraq--and he was calm, measured, and cautiously optimistic. Perhaps the biggest surprise was Hayden's withdrawal plan, crafted with the assistance of former CIA head John Deutch. Hayden's plan hewed pretty closely to the model established by the Iraq Study Group, save for his insistence on total one-year withdrawal.

During the 1960s, no self-respecting anti-war radical would admit to collaboration with the head of a government political-military organzation. This is not to suggest that Hayden somehow has "sold out." Instead, its a sign of an interesting ideological convergence between realists and the left. As New America Foundation head Steve Clemons related in a lecture at UCLA last week, The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuval told him at a DC cocktail party that "realism is the new ideology of the left." Hayden did not just lambaste Bush administration's catastrophic foreign polices but also noted without reservation that a genuine terrorist threats exists. He told the audience of his own fear on 9/11 and his hope for a just and effective counter-terror strategy. Hayden also tossed out a series of balance-of-power arguments about Iran and China that reminded me of Zbigniew Brzezinski's work.

On another note, though, I feel Hayden is wrong about counterinsurgency. In an Nationarticle and a Huffingtonpost blog Hayden attacks modern COIN (and academic participation in it) as a mix of colonialism and "deception, shadow warfare and propaganda." Although Hayden justifiably exorciates the immorality and futility of the Bush administration's war plans, he goes too far to condemn counterinsurgency itself as inherently racist and corrupt. Hayden's main point that since the goal of counterinsurgency is to defeat insurgent challenges to government authority, practicing COIN means shoring up illegitimate foreign occupation or domestic tyrannies. Since the premise of COIN is inherently corrupt, Hayden reasons, its methods will always belie the high-reminded rhetoric contained in counterinsurgency manuals.

Yet what happens when a legitimate foreign occupying power or national government is confronted by a internal or foreign irregular threat? Would that not necessitate the use of something resembling counterinsurgency? For example, say that a large, multinational United Nations peacekeeping force under mandate to stabilize a desperate, war-torn region finds itself under attack by a disciplined insurgency (Somalia 1992-1993), Afghanistan 2001-present)? What happens when a legitimate African state is terrorized by a tenacious guerrila army known for its use of mutilation, torture, rape, and the employment of kidnapped child soldiers (Uganda, LRA)? What should a legitimate South American state do when confronted by a Maoist terrorist organization seeking to overthrow the established order and establish a radical Communist regime (Peru, Shining Path)? Lastly, what advice would Tom Hayden have given to Algerian villagers wiped out en masse by Armed Islamic Group insurgents during 1992 to 1998?

One can definitely seek to bring the practice of counterinsurgency into accord with international norms. One can also rightly denounce states that use counterinsurgency as an excuse for repression and genocide. But to denounce COIN itself as inherently immoral is short-sighted. Governments under siege by irregular forces seeking their overthrow have a right to self-defense. And I suspect that Hayden's opinion about counterinsurgency may change if the proposed UN peacekeeping force set for deployment to Darfur comes under attack by either the janjaweed or the Darfuri rebel factions.

Moscow Crude

Looks like Russia is using Gazprom as a tool of political influence again. Given Russia's declining military power and shrinking population, petropolitics is its greatest form of leverage. Again, its target is another former client state growing too big for its britches.

I feel that the constant comparison between Putin's Russia and the Soviet Union is very inaccurate. To some degree, what we're seeing is 19th century imperial policies with a modern geo-economic twist.. Russia is doing whatever it can to maintain power over what it views as its traditional zone of control. The most prominent example of this is the quasi-colonial occupation of Chechnya--which comes complete with a pliant local strongman (Kadyrov) who seems to have bribed enough rebels to temporarily stall the Chechnyan insurgency.

Given Putin's association with the Shanghai Cooperative and Iraq's weakening of American power, it's understandable that Russia is riding high right now. But, given Russia's dimmer long-term geopolitical trends, for how long?