Nearly all eyes in the western media have been on Pakistan. (And in the US media, most of the concern has been of a cloyingly US-centric nature: Should “we” continue pushing for early Pakistani elections? How will this affect “our” campaign in Afghanistan? What should “we” do about any threats to the Pakistani nukes? etc., etc.)
Meanwhile, China and Japan have been undertaking a very serious-looking entente. Check out what Xinhua has been loading onto its English-language newsfeed on Chinese foreign policy over the past couple of days…
Just one little item about an Assistant Foreign Minister going to deliver his condolences on Benazir Bhutto’s death at the Pakistani Embassy. Nothing else yet about Pakistan. (That doesn’t mean that deep in the bowels of the CPC headquarters they aren’t discussing the assassination in some depth, and most likely with considerable concern.)
But I rather liked the photos on this page of “Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (L) and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pos[ing] for a photo during playing baseball at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China, on Dec. 29, 2007.”
It seems they were only playing catch with their mitts there– no sign of a bat, or a batter. No word on any scores, either.
Xinhua also tells us that Fukuda will “visit the hometown of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong Province, before wrapping up his four-day China tour on Sunday.”
“Winnability” in Iraq and Afghanistan: what does it mean?
For some time now (and certainly, long before last Thursday’s killing of Benazir Bhutto), I’ve been intending to write a post here about the concept of “winnability”, as it applies to the US-led COTW’s campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What does it mean to “win” in either country? How could we define it? How could it be achieved? In general, though, I’ve been moving much closer to the view that neither of these campaigns are actually “winnable” in the ways and the political frameworks within which they are currently being waged. I’m increasingly of the view that, if these campaigns are to be “won”, then they simply cannot be won under US leadership, for a number of different reasons.
We could give a first approximation of “winning” in either country as comprising the restoration of calm throughout all or nearly all of the country and and the emergence and consolidation of the key elements of good governance there. That’s a pretty minimalist definition, though it is one in which I have tried to keep the interests of the citizens of the two countries front and center, which is where they need to be.
But who could say, after the experience of six years of a US-led COTW running an occupation in Afghanistan, and 4.5 years of the US-led COTW occupying Iraq, that continued US “leadership” of of these occupation/pacification efforts could in any way be a formula for “winning” in these terms?
I’m not writing this as a “self-hating American”. I just think that the US (a) is too militarized and violence-prone as a society for most of its leaders even to know how to start thinking about winning a complex politico-military campaign in today’s unprecedentedly interconnected world; (b) lacks the political vision, administrative capabilities, political commitment, and– last but not least–troop numbers to be able to win either of these campaigns, let alone both of them together; (c) lacks the global political legitimacy that would be required to mobilize other countries to contribute meaningfully to these campaigns under its leadership; and (d) lacks the political legitimacy within, specifically, the world Muslim community to be able to lead a winning pacification campaign either of these two majority-Muslim countries.
Some further questions arise. First of all, if not the US, then who?
Answer: the United Nations, with all its flaws… But at least, regarding the global legitimacy question, the UN is infinitely preferable to the US. Real UN leadership of the pacification/nation-building campaign is the only way forward I see in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Second: might not the US be able to win one or both of these campaigns under some different, post-Bush president? I don’t think so. Bill Richardson, Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich have all vowed they will pull the US troops out of Iraq. That is an excellent start to reframing the US’s engagement with the world. But then, what about Afghanistan?
Even with the best will in the world, and most visionary kinds of policies emanating from both the next administration and the next Congress, I still don’t see that in January 2009 any US President can re-tool the whole way the country’s foreign policy and particularly its military works within the required time-frame. Despite the recent surface innovations introduced in some parts of Iraq by Gen. Petraeus with his new COIN manual, the vast bulk of the US military– and many of its NATO allies– remain focused on very heavy use of lethal weapons– the “bludgeoning” approach that seeks to bring about either the complete obliteration or the complete submission of “the enemy.”
But as the Israelis discovered in Lebanon in 1993, 1996, and 2006, that is a highly anachronistic view of warfare.
The US-led COTW forces are learning that in Iraq and Afghanistan every single day, too. But there’s not much, really, that they can do about it. You can’t change the whole way the US interacts with the rest of the world and the way the 1.4-million-person US military has been trained and indoctrinated for several generations now, within just a few months.
The chronically war-burdened peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan need a new, non-militarized– and preferably also intentionally anti-military– concept. And they need a new decision-making framework within which it will be pursued. Real national independence would be a good starting-point for that framework. But insofar as the societies involved may still be unable to reach internal agreement on the particular political form of that independence, there would be an important role for the UN in helping to mediate the negotiations required to reach that formula; in delivering vital services, including public security, for each country until its national government can take over; and in providing other forms of support to these war-stressed countries. The UN played a generally helpful role in helping midwife the great waves of decolonization that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. And now, a UN that is potentially a lot more capable than it was then could play a similar role in both these countries today.
(It goes without saying that this should be a UN that is truly an equal effort of all the powers on the Security Council– and not just a face-saving facade for the US-UK condominium, as it was in Iraq in the 1990s.)
But truly, I still can’t see a US-led COTW “winning” in either Iraq or Afghanistan…
Pakistan as an issue in Asia
Benazir Bhutto’s killing was horrific. At a personal level I can only hope she didn’t suffer too much as she died. But she had already shown herself to be an extremely courageous leader. It is true– though it is not nearly sufficient– to say that assassinating her was a cowardly act. And western commentators are quite right to point out that this assassination pushes Pakistan further and faster on the path it already seemed to be on, towards an even more serious political crisis and perhaps state failure of a catastrophic kind… This, in a country that (a) has nuclear weapons, and (b) is an absolutely crucial part of, and location for, the US-led campaign against Al-Qaeda and its supporters.
But where most western commentators have it wrong, I think, is when they assume that this is just about all that is at stake in Pakistan. That is an extremely solipsistic, occidocentric viewpoint.
Hey, people! Pakistan is located in Asia. So is Afghanistan. And developments in those two countries are not simply of concern to the US-led west. In fact, other major world powers including China, India, and Russia, have far greater stakes in the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan than do the US or its western allies, and correspondingly greater concerns about the threat of political meltdown in those two countries.
We could remember, first of all, that Pakistan received some key assists in the development of its nuclear weapons program from China (and also some from the US, I seem to recall.) That happened at a time when China was not unreasonably concerned about India’s development of nuclear weapons. At that time, India had a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union (and yes, there still was a Soviet Union.) And Russia and the Soviet Union were in serious strategic competition with each other.
So there is, for starters, a very tight historical nexus among the nuclear-weapons stances of the four large Asian countries…
Well, that was back in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, relations among these and many other Asian countries have shifted significantly. Today’s China has much better relations with Russia and India than it did back then. All three of those countries have reason to be extremely concerned indeed about any further eruption and consolidation of violent Islamism in and from central Asia, such as might well ensue from further social/political breakdown in Pakistan and Afghanistan. China, India, and Russia probably all feel themselves to be in the front rank of those threatened by any Taliban/Qaeda resurgence in Central Asia– much more than distant America, or Europe.
So what is the logic of having the US and NATO play such a prominent role in the anti-Qaeda campaign in Afghanistan, and having the US play such a prominent role in it, in Pakistan? Especially given the political toxicity of the US and its western allies in Muslim societies at the present time… This really does not make any sense to me.
(I found this article, by BBC producer Ben Anderson, who was embedded with the British forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province last summer, very informative. The bottom line I took from it was that even 5.5 years into the West’s anti-Taleban campaign inside Afghanistan, its leaders still didn’t have any clue as to how they might succeed, and in the interim were relying only on loosing massive amounts of deadly ordnance into the country and its people.)
But at a broader political level it doesn’t make much sense, either. Unless, I suppose, you were a wily Russian or Chinese strategic planner and you saw the military and power-projection capabilities of the US and its NATO allies being rapidly and very expensively attrited there in the mountains of Afghanistan. But it strikes me that if such planners exist, their joy at seeing NATO and the Taleban slugging at each other there in the mountains would not be unbounded, or endless. Especially because the West’s position in the fight now seems so very, very precarious, bringing us closer to the point where its forces might actually need to be bailed out if the whole world– including of course, those front-line Asian nations– is not to be faced with a massive growth of Taleban/Qaeda-style power.
I have tried to think like a Pentagon planner, too. Pakistan is crucial to the US-led fight against the Taleban– not just because it has its own Talebs and provides a safe haven for the Talebs from Afghanistan, but also because a huge proportion of the military and support materiel the Western forces in Afghanistan rely on is shipped in along the land routes through Pakistan. (75%, according to this November report.)
Alert JWN readers will recall this post I published here December 17, taking note of and commenting on the report the WaPo ran that same day, to the effect that planners in the US military were already starting to call for a hastened shifting of focus and troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Bhutto’s killing will probably make such a shift seem even more urgent. However, all the questions I raised in that earlier post about whether simply adding more US troops into support of a pacification campaign in Afghanistan that does not look designed or headed for success– and may indeed be actually unwinnable in the way it is currently being waged– still stand.
I see that a researcher at the usually very sober Congressional Research Service wrote in this recent (PDF) report on the NATO campaign in Afghanistan that
- The mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Afghanistan is seen as a test of the alliance’s political will and military capabilities. The allies are seeking to create a “new” NATO, able to go beyond the European theater and combat new threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Afghanistan is NATO’s first “out-of-area” mission beyond Europe…
What the researcher there, Paul Gallis, does not specify is who is doing this “seeing”. Member-states of NATO, obviously; but equally clearly, other states around the world, too, who might not have any particular interest in seeing NATO succeed at developing an “out of area” capability.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think there are some interesting geostrategic parallels between the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In both, you have the US leading an intentionally non-UN “coalition of the willing” (COTW) that is fighting a non-winning pacification campaign in the middle of a country marked by huge political complexity, very high levels of violence, and state bodies that are not able to deliver any services at all to the vast majority of the country’s national territory.
In both countries, too, you have the leaders of other nearby countries sitting by, watching with some degree of satisfaction as the US-led COTW grinds itself deeper and deeper into the quagmire– but these countries also don’t want the US’s most determined opponents in either country to win, either… So there is some careful calibrating that these neighbors need to do. Above all, they don’t want to make it impossible for the US to “ask” them to come to its aid if the present COTW’s situation should start to fall apart very rapidly– which it might, in either Iraq, or Afghanistan.
In Iraq, the main neighbors sitting in this position are Iran (and Syria.) But in Afghanistan, it seems to me the geostrategic stakes are even higher, since China and Russia are both among the neighbors who are currently sitting there in “watchful waiting” mode…
Christmas, Solstice, and New Year’s holiday wishes
We Quakers do not observe any liturgical calendar. (Nor do we have a liturgy.) But here in the US we are part of a culture that is very Christmas-oriented, and it anyway feels good here in the northern hemisphere to mark the turn of the solstice and the fact that the days will now, finally start to get longer again.
Let there be light!
Anyway, according to the traditional western-church calendar, we are now in Christmas Season– on the Third Day of Christmas, indeed. So can I wish a Happy Christmas and/or a Cool Yule, or a Light-filled Solstice, or (belatedly) an Eid Mubarak or Happy Hannukah to all JWN readers.
Bill and I have been blessed to have a house full of family for the past few days: Nine people in all. Being able to hold regular family get-togethers is such a privilege, I know. Our family members came here to Charlottesville, Virginia from Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dorset (UK.) All that bad, high-emissions air travel…. sorry about that.
Anyway, I’ll try to get back to more frequent blogging either later today, or tomorrow.
May 2008 be a great year for all readers, and especially may it bring about the radical de-esclation or resolution of the many conflicts now burdening humanity. (Sadly, not good news today from Pakistan, about Benazir B’s assassination.)
Israel: a ceasefire with Hamas, or more militarism?
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer yesterday became the third member of the Israeli government– after Shaul Mofaz and Ami Ayalon– to support the idea of negotiations with Hamas over a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. Ben-Eliezer also told Israel’s Army Radio that he thought Olmert might well be open to such a deal.
Like Mofaz, Ben-Eliezer is also a former high-ranking IDF officer and a former defense Minister. He was also, 2001-2002, leader of the Labour Party when it was in a coalition government led by Ariel Sharon. (Ayalon). For his part, Ayalon was the head of Israel’s naval forces and later head of the Shin Bet spy service. These men are notably not soft-‘n’-fuzzy peaceniks. Okay, well maybe Ayalon has become a bit of one over the ones. But neither Mofaz nor Ben-Eliezer is.
In an eery example of what the Indian peace mediator Dr. Ranabir Samaddar recently noted was a common pattern in negotiations between a government and a non-governmental group, several men in the IDF’s current leadership have been arguing that “Hamas is only open to negotiations because we have started hitting Gaza; therefore we should hit even harder!”
Mofaz is the only former-Likudnik Kadima Party person among the three pro-negotiations ministers; the other two are from Labour. Meanwhile the leader of the Labour Party, current defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Labour’s Methuselah-like State President (and former war-launching PM) Shimon Peres are reported to remain opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
The question of whether there or are not ongoing ceasefire talks, and if so, whether they will lead anywhere, remains murky. From the Israeli side, the government has come under considerable pressure in recent months to “do something” about the primitive but occasionally damaging home-made rockets that (mainly non-Hamas) militants in Gaza have been launching against locations inside Israel– and about the 18-month holding by Gaza militants of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. But as PM Olmert and all of Israel’s military and political leadership learned in Lebanon in 2006, it is not easy to figure out what you can “do” against a determined, well organized population, to decisively and lastingly win you your desired political goals, if the only weapon you have is a bloated and mega-lethal military force.
Can Israel step up its air or naval attacks against Gaza? Not easily– and especially as long as Bush and Rice seem determined to keep alive the picture that they are “seriously engaged” in brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace.
Can Israel do more to impose economic collective punishment on the people of Gaza? Not easily.
Can Israel send in the ground forces to rapidly “root out” all the Palestinian militants, and rescue Shalit in some kind of heroic, Entebbe-like way? Clearly not. If they had had any confidence they could use ground forces for either of these missions, they certainly would have done so a long time ago… Instead, the repeated, relatively small-scale ground-force raids they have made into Gaza (1) have not succeeded in either silencing the rocketeers or rescuing Shalit, and (2) have apparently persuaded the IDF’s leaders that a bigger ground-force raid would not succeed, either.
Also, as the IDF and political leaders seem clearly to judge at this point, mounting a complete physical re-occupation of the whole of Gaza at ground level would be several bridges too far for the IDF (and the country.) So the options available to Olmert and Co. seem to be limited to two:
- either (a) continued maintenance of the current “business as usual”– that is, the tight economic noose of collective punishment plus relatively small-scale (though still lethal and terrifying) military raids,
or (b) try to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas that would restore some calm to the Israeli communities around Gaza– and would necessarily involve allowing the people of Gaza to also have a more normal life.
Of course there are questions as to whether Hamas would be prepared to actually conclude, as opposed to talking about concluding, such an agreement, and also whether it would be capable of enforcing its side of any such deal.
On the latter question, the Crisis Group has recently published this very thorough report on one of the major issues in internal Gaza politics, that is the power-balance there between Hamas and the many local “families” or clans whose feuds and vendettas have often in recent years dominated the Strip’s (in-)security situation.
The inter-“family” violence remained particularly virulent in Gaza so long as those big clans there could try to maneuver between the Fateh and Hamas militias’ presence. (I wrote about this some here, in 2004.) Indeed, the ICG report also makes clear that Fateh played quite a large– if not always intentional– role in increasing the armament level of the families quite considerably. However, after the Hamas takeover in Gaza in June, Hamas moved quickly to try to contain and disarm the families. The report notes that these moves met with some resistance. But it also says, (p.16),
- The stabilisation and pacification was widely welcomed by the public. The sight of clans receiving their come-uppance delighted many…
We could nlote the strong analogy here between Hamas’s anti-warlord activities in Gaza, and those launched by the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia in 2005-2006.
And now, we should also remember that it is almost exactly a year since the Bush administration worked actively with the Somali warlords and the government of neighboring Ethiopia to send in an Ethiopian military force to oust the ICU from power.
Since December 2006, the situation in Somalia, which had become somewhat stabilized under the ICU, has deteriorated catastrophically…
UN-OCHA reported yesterday that the number of people “displaced from Mogadishu since the end of October due to ongoing conflict between Ethiopian/Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces and anti-government elements” has now reached 265,000… Read the whole of that report
to learn more about the human costs suffered by some of the world’s most indigent and hardest-pressed communities when the US pursues its militarized (and warlord-supporting) form of anti-Islamism at their expense.
Hamas-Israeli ceasefire ahead?
AP’s Sarah el-Deeb has an intriguing story on the wire today with background about a ceasefire proposal that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh transmitted Tuesday to a reporter for Israel’s Channel 2 t.v., Suleiman al-Shafi. This, while Haaretz reports today that Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz– who was previously first the IDF chief of staff and then briefly Defense Minister– has said publicly that, “Israel should not rule out indirect negotiations with Hamas in an effort to halt Qassam rocket fire at southern Israel.”
Interesting if the ceasefire overture should work out, huh? I shan’t hold my breath for it– yet. Defense Minister Ehud Barak still seems to be making some fairly hard-line noises about Gaza… But who knows?
Deeb writes:
- Al-Shafi told The Associated Press that the Hamas leader complained that Israeli attacks have foiled his attempts to halt the rocket fire. Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, has been responsible for most of the rocket fire out of Gaza since Hamas seized control of the area last June.
“I am always trying to stop the rockets from all factions, especially Islamic Jihad, but Israel’s assassinations always catch me off guard and spoil my attempts,” the reporter quoted Haniyeh as saying.
Al-Shafi said he was surprised by the phone call and was unable to record the conversation…
For Israel’s government, the “ungovernability” of Gaza since PM Sharon undertook his intentionally un-negotiated withdrawal from the Strip in 2005 has always been a problem. (As, in Lebanon, after a slightly different form of ungovernability problem, after then-PM Barak undertook his intentionally un-negotiated withdrawal in 2000.)
In both cases, those Israeli leaders were arrogant enough to think that if, after having the IDF/IOF rule over great chunks of other people’s lands in a very brutal way for many years they just upped and pulled their troops out in an un-negotiated way, then they would thereafter be bound by none of the form of international commitments that would have been involved had they sought to negotiate their departure… And thus, they would retain considerable flexibility to be able to re-enter the evacuated terrain at will or use other violent methods against it in an attempt to quash the emergence of any bodies seeking revenge or even just some plain accountability for the many preceding years of suffering, or using violent means to continue to pursue some of their significant but still notably unaddressed grievances against Israel.
In Lebanon, that “un-negotiated withdrawal” tactic worked– to a degree. After the 2000 withdrawal a form of mutual deterrence rapidly emerged between Israel and the Hizbullah forces that had been responsible for making Israel’s lengthy occupation of the country too painful to be continued. But we can also note that, though there were never any formal negotiations between Israel and Hizbullah, in fact in both 1993 and 1996, Israel was only able to extricate itself from very damaging military positions inside Lebanon by concluding indirect ceasefires with Hizbullah that had been negotiated through the good offices of the governments of the US, Lebanon, and Syria.
Regarding Gaza, Israel has remained generally steadfastly opposed to concluding any kind of similar indirect negotiation with Hamas. Heck! It was even quite unwilling to do so with Pres. Mahmoud Abbas when he was still in charge of Gaza back in 2005.
Regarding Gaza, there is an additional question over how any indirect negotiations could be conducted. I highly doubt that Abu Mazen would want to be the conduit for them; but the Egyptian government might well be ready to do that.
As for the US, whose illustrious president is going to be visiting Israel very soon: what could we expect his attitude to be to the prospect of Israel engaging in some form of indirect negotiations with Hamas? Well, you could (re-)read the opening paragraphs of my recent Nation article on the need to talk to Hamas and Hizbullah to see what I think about that…
Note for readers using Internet Explorer
Two or three of you have recently written that you can’t get the whole JWN front page when using the upgraded IE browser, which I guess is IE-7. I don’t know what to suggest you might do. I vaguely recall a while back some readers had a similar problem with IE, and other readers suggested a fix for it. All I can suggest is to steer clear of IE and use Firefox, my own browser of choice.
If anyone else has suggestions, please post them as a comment here. Thanks!
Israeli strategic analysts on the 33-day war
I had a 3-hour-plus bus-ride this afternoon from Charlottesville to Washington DC, so I had a good chance to read the weighty study titled The Second Lebanon War: Strategic Perspectives that my friends at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (formerly the Jaffee Center) mailed to me. One of the co-editors in Shlomo Bron, whose previous work has usually seemed to me to be pretty clear-eyed, forward-looking, and non-ideological. And taken as a whole this latest volume lives up to his reputation.
The INSS’s decision to publish the report now is notable because the Winograd Commission, which is Israel’s official commission of enquiry into the leadership shortcomings revealed during the war, recently indicated that it has postponed publication of its final, definitive report, for a second time. The report, which is now expected to be made public “within a few weeks”, is also expected to have broad political repurcussions inside Israel, most likely including stepped-up efforts to bring down PM Ehud Olmert.
In the INSS book I was delighted, first of all, to see that basically, the key judgments made by its authors about what the war was about, and what its outcome was, tracked almost exactly with the judgments I made in this article on the topic, that I wrote in September 2006 and that appeared in the Nov-Dec 2006 issue of Boston Review. (Note to BR editors!! Please can you get the typo in that sub-title fixed!!)
Here’s what I wrote there:
- A careful examination of the course of the war reveals that, at its core, it was about two central issues: reestablishing the credibility of each side’s deterrent power and achieving dominance over the government of Lebanon.
Both sides won the first contest. The ceasefire that went into effect August 14 has proved remarkably robust. Given that no outside force has been in a position to compel compliance, that robustness must reflect the reemergence of an effective system of mutual deterrence.
In the second contest, however, Nasrallah has emerged the clear winner. Indeed, not only did Olmert fail completely in his bid to persuade Beirut to crack down on Hizbullah, but the destructive power that the Israeli air force unleashed upon Lebanon significantly strengthened Hizbullah’s political position.
Of course, the authors represented in the INSS volume, nearly all of whom are retired luminaries from the apex of Israel’s national-security, military, and intelligence bodies, have access to a lot more firsthand information than I could ever dream of amassing. And some of what they share here is very helpful indeed in rounding out our picture of what happened during the war. I found the contribution by Giora Romm (former deputy chief of the Israeli Air Force) particularly informative.
For example, on p.50 he spelled out that, “The Israel Defense Forces was the entity that proposed the list of political goals to the government.” Interesting, huh? (On p.29, Giora Eiland, who had been head of the National Security Council under Sharon, made clear that, “In the government meeting held on July 12, 2006, immediately after news of the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah, the IDF presented its recommendations. Government ministers were placed in a situation where they had only two options: either approve or reject the military’s proposal. Non-approval meant not doing anything, something which on that day was perceived as
impossible. The outcome was clear…”)
Anyway, Romm also presented what seems to be a verbatim version of this list of goals. Here it is:
- 1. To distance Hizbollah from the border with Israel.
2. To strike a significant blow against Hizbollah’s military capability and status, and thereby put an end to terrorism originating from Lebanon.
3. To strengthen the deterrence vis-à-vis Hizbollah and the entire region.
4. To correct the prevailing system in Lebanon, based on an effective enforcement mechanism that is supported by international involvement (this was later changed to “have the Lebanese government use the Lebanese army to impose its sovereignty over its entire
territory”).
5. To foster auspicious conditions for freeing the kidnapped IDF soldiers.
6. To accomplish these ends while keeping Syria out of the war.
Romm also gives more information than I have ever seen pulled together before about the sheer volume of the IAF’s operations during the war. He writes (pp.53-4):
- 1. The total number of sorties during the fighting was only slightly fewer than in the Yom Kippur War.
2. The total number of attack missions flown during the fighting was greater than in the Yom Kippur War.
3. The total number of combat helicopter missions flown was double the number flown in the first Lebanon war [1982], Operation Accountability [Lebanon again, 1993], and Operation Grapes of Wrath [Lebanon yet again, 1996] combined.
4. The air force depleted its supply of certain types of armaments, resulting in a need for immediate stocks from overseas. [Oh, guess where from!]
But here’s the thing. Even with this massive rate of operations sustained over 33 days, Romm is quite frank in admitting that the IAF was still quite unable to destroy all the rockets Hizbullah had ready to fire against Israel, from South Lebanon. Indeed, he writes that, “The marginal effectiveness of the air force combat missions declined steeply as the fighting progressed.” The IAF was able to take out all or nearly all of Hizbullah’s long- and medium-range rockets. It was the short-range, Katyusha rockets that were stored and ready to use in the zone very close to Lebanon’s southern border that they couldn’t destroy. That was because these rockets have a very short “exposure time”– plus, their launchers are light and agile and easy to move around and/or hide.
On p.52, Romm presents what is presumably the IDF’s official count of how many Katyushas were fired against Israel on each day of the war. The daily average was probably a little over 100. What is notable from this chart is also that (1) There were indeed two days– July 31 and August 1– when Hizbullah fired no rockets; (there was an attempt at a humanitarian ceasefire in that period. Hizbullah kept to it. Israel did not.) Also, (2) There was apparently no rocket-firing after the Resolution 1701 ceasefire finally went into effect at dawn on August 14, but on the 13th, Huzbullah ramped up a sizeable “last salvo” of 250 rockets– presumably as a way to hammering home the “deterrent message” it wanted to send to Israelis, very similar to the hard-hitting one that the IDF tried to deliver to the Lebanese people in the last 48 hours before the ceasefire went into effect.
What that record also shows quite clearly is that throughout the whole war, and until and after its end, Hizbullah’s command-and-control systems continued in operation, essentially undented by the assault Israel had launched against them. (Several of the authors remark on that fact.)
In Appendix 2, Yiftah Shapir writes that the Israeli police reported that a total of 3,970 rockets landed on Israel during the war. On p.223, he adds that 52 “home front people” were killed by these rockets. A total of 2,412 “home front casualties” were reported, of which 1,318 were cases of clinical shock.
… Well, there is a lot more fascinating material in the book, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to tell you about it all right now. Still, because the full text is available (as a PDF) there online, you can go and read it yourselves, and we can carry on discussing it here.
Bottom line: Raw military superiority just ain’t as effective now as it used to be. Hey, friends in Israel, maybe negotiating workable final peace agreements with all your neighbors would be a better way to proceed??
US military finally has “Dannatt moment” on Iraq/Afghanistan?
The Bush administration finally seems to be waking up to the need to (1) find a more effective policy in Afghanistan, and (2) if necessary, recalibrate its commitments in Iraq in an attempt to salvage/stabilize the situation in Afghanistan. (Read further down this post to learn why I judge that this latter task can’t actually be accomplished.)
In an important story in today’s WaPo, M. Abramowitz and P. Baker indicate very clearly that in Washington the pressure for an Iraq/Afghanistan recalibration is coming primarily from within the US military. This makes the decisionmaking process in Washington DC look strikingly like that in London in fall 2006, when British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt spoke out forcefully in public in favor of a swift shifting of British troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
(Except that Dannatt seemed to have more guts and self-confidence in speaking out openly than anyone in the US military leadership currently seems to have.)
Britain handed over control of security in Basra province to the Iraqi “government” yesterday, retaining only a small British force at Basra airport. Read this commentary from Patrick Cockburn on why Britain’s five-year-long mission in Basra could never have succeeded, and on the damage it inflicted on the people of the province– and on Britain’s own military reputation.
Once you’ve read that, expand the concept of “Basra” to the level of “the whole of Iraq” and you can see that the US’s campaign in Iraq could similarly never have succeeded— and also that the damage it has inflicted on the people of Iraq and on the US’s military reputation (and its raw capabilities) have all been correspondingly much larger in scale than what happened to the Brits in Basra.
Back in October 2006, I was hopeful that the “Dannatt effect” had already, back then, started to spread to the US generals. Maybe it did, somewhat, in terms of their own internal analysis of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the corresponding need to shift emphasis from the former theater to the latter. But in terms of infusing the US Joint Chief of Staff with the courage needed to stand up for their professional standards and the confidence they had in their analytical/strategic judgments? No. Sadly, no serving US military leaders has shown anything like the forthright courage that Dannatt displayed last year.
In Baker and Abramowitz’s piece, for example, no serving military officer is quoted by name as saying anything that indicates a need to draw resources and attention away from Iraq to Afghanistan. The only relevant reference to statements coming from a named, serving officer is this one:
- U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, is asking for an additional three battalions of troops from NATO countries — the equivalent of another brigade combat team — but colleagues believe that would not be enough…
“Colleagues”, huh? Un-named, un-identified.
Well, be that as it may, there is obviously a lot that needs to be said about the realization that is now, finally, starting to dawn within the Bush administration that invading Iraq may well all along have been, at a strategic level, a very damaging “bridge too far”— even for the world’s (now rapidly declining) Uberpower.
We need to look carefully at these key aspects of this issue:
- 1. Can increased troop levels, on their own, bring about the US-led stabilization in Afghanistan that most US commentators now seem to be urging? And if this is not enough on its own, what else is needed there? (Also, as a further corollary, we should examine the validity of the calls that several US presidential candidates, from both parties, have been making for increasing the size of the US military as a solution for all our ills.)
2. The validity of the judgment-call so many people seem to be making that the US-led effort in Afghanistan should take priority over the US-led effort in Afghanistan. What, actually, are the geostrategic issues at stake in each theater? Can the US hope to “win” in Afghanistan by a continuation of its current “Coalition of the Willing” approach there?
3. If the US does draw down its force level in Iraq significantly faster than Bush has so far been planning, what are the prospects for the strategic balance of the Persian Gulf region?
Make no mistake, these are extremely important issues. The way they get resolved will determine many key aspects of the global political/strategic balance for the next 50-70 years.
On the first question, this post that Barnett Rubin had over at the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog over the weekend contains some useful background information.
He notes the recent calls that some people have made for a new, and possibly non-US “high-level coordinator” to be appointed for Afghanistan. (Is Paddy Ashdown, my sister’s former MP from in Somerset who was thenthe “high level coordinator” for Bosnia, running activelyfor this job?) But then, Rubin comments:
- calling someone a “high level coordinator” does not enable him to produce high-level coordination. The position is reported to include being appointed both UN SRSG [Special representative of the Secretary-General] and the NATO Senior Civilian Representative and perhaps eventually EU Special Representative as well. But the UN SRSG has no budgetary authority over the UN agencies, let alone the bilateral donors (led by the U.S.) that provide aid through their own parallel (and very wasteful) channels. The NATO SCR has authority over neither military activities nor the civilian assistance provided by the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The EUSR has no authority over the aid provided by the European Commission. Unless the “coordinator” presides over a pooled international budget for Afghanistan, including security sector reform, development aid, and counter-narcotics, he will just become another agency that needs to be coordinated. Inevitably, he will be tempted to spend his time hectoring the Afghan government rather than coordinating the international actors.
This is wise analysis, as far as it goes. However, Rubin would have done better to have spelled out more emphatically than he did that the “security” (or insecurity) presence inside post-2001 Afghanistan is specifically not a UN presence. Instead, it is yet another example of that strange– and intentionally UN-sidelining– phenomenon in global affairs called the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” (COTW.) Specifically, in Afghanistan there is both the US-led “ISAF force”, to which many NATO members and also deputy sheriff Australia all contribute, and a direct US “Special Forces” presence tasked with huntin’, shootin’, and killin’ terrorists, both real and imagined.
(In the comments section on Rubin’s post, Don Bacon writes pithily: “Multilateral armed Euro-centric colonialism. Once they work the bugs out it’ll be coming to a theater near you… “)
In contrast to Bacon, far too many western commentators still think and write about Afghanistan and related matters in a totally west-centric and self-referential way.
Just remember, dear readers, where Afghanistan lies on the map. It has a short direct border with China, and a long border with the former Soviet Union– that is nowadays occupied by a clutch of “Stans” that act as, essentially either buffer-states or zones of contention and competition between the US-led COTW forces in Afghanistan and the Russian Republic itself.
Afghanistan is many thousands of miles from the US and Australia, and also pretty darn far from Europe.
The thinking in Washington and Brussels currently seems to be trending toward the idea that the COTW needs to cut its losses so that it can then go on and “win” in Afghanistan. I certainly support the idea that the COTW needs to withdraw completely, and speedily from Iraq– though for very different reasons.
However, I also judge that the idea that the COTW can “win” in Afghanistan is completely chimeric– for a number of reasons, including these:
- 1. Afghanistan is huge, hard to control, and far distant from the COTW’s homelands or supply bases; also, the COTW is deeply dependent on Pakistan to be able to sustain its presence in Afghanistan, and Pakistan itself is in an extremely problematic state.
2. The COTW has certainly not yet shown that it has the leadership skills– including the internal-coordination skills, the “vision”, or the raw counter-insurgency skills– that would be needed to “win” in Afghanistan.
3. It is anyway very hard to define what it would mean to “win” there. Stabilization? Democratization? Eradication of the Taliban? Their successful inclusion in the governing coalition? Other?
4. Russia and China are rising powers that both have strong interests in the Afghanistan region and veto power on the Security Council. What is their incentive to see a US-led COTW “win” in Afghanistan? Would they not, almost certainly, prefer to be “cut in” on a deal to stabilize Afghanistan and to do so through a pan-UN initiative rather than a Washington-dominated COTW? And so long as they (and the UN) are marginalized from any effective role in decisionmaking regarding Afghanistan, why would they not prefer to see NATO pull itself part there, and US power-projection capabilities similarly being degraded there?
In sum, therefore, I think it virtually impossible that any set-up like the current COTW can “win” in Afghanistan– even if it has many thousands more troops, even if (miraculously) Washington and the European capitals could all come to agreement, even if they came up with a truly compelling vision of how to “win” and a sound plan for achieving that victory.
Bottom line: even if the COTW took all its forces from Iraq and sent them to Afghanistan, even if the US public and economy were able to raise an additional 100,000 troops to send there or NATO countries were somehow able to come up with that number of new troops– the COTW still can’t on its own “win”in Afghanistan.
We might remember, too, that for most of the 19th century, Afghanistan was the key locus of the contest between Russian, Chinese, and British (in India) power called the “Great Game.” In the 1980s, it was the key locus in the global Cold War. It will most likely play a similarly crucial role in the global politics of the 21st century. It’s time that the US punditocracy stopped thinking in such an unrealistic (and provincially minded) way about the place.
Time, too, that the US political elites as a whole stopped living with the dangerous delusion that projection of military power to distant places is an effective way to secure our people’s true national interests…
Okay, on reviewing this, I see I still haven’t even started to deal with a number of the points raised in the above survey. (Including but not limited to the question of what happens in the Gulf region after a US withdrawal from Iraq.)
Basically, the analysis I’m starting to come to is that, just as there are now increasing numbers of people talking about the need, at the level of the Gulf and the greater Middle East, to explore the terms of a possible US-Iran “grand bargain” that would address and resolve all the many remaining issues of contention/concern between them, so too is there a need at the broader level for an entirely new US-world “grand bargain” that would address the many thorny security/political problems outstanding between “the west and the rest” concerning the Gulf, Afghanistan, and many other issues.
This is, as it happens, one of the big themes that I address in my upcoming book, on US foreign policy after Bush. But maybe the acuity of the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan means we need to do a lot more rigorous thinking about this issue right now.
Ever On, Dan Fogelberg (1951-2007)
(Note – this is Scott writing.)
Independent thinkers, activists, and peacemakers have lost a friend in the passing yesterday of Dan Fogelberg. Just 56, Dan “the artist” Fogelberg succumbed to a long battle with prostate cancer.
To be sure, Dan Fobelberg is most famous for his soft-rock hits: tales of loves (Longer, Since you’ve asked); loves lost (The Long Way, Tell me to my face); and greed gone bad (Sutter’s Mill). Dan will also likely be “immortal” for tributes to New Years (Same Old Lang Syne); to the Kentucky Derby horses (Run for the Roses); to Geogia O’Keefe (Bones in the Sky); to under-appreciated fathers everywhere (The Leader of the Band); to abandoned seniors (Windows & Walls) and to the renewing power of nature (To the Morning).
Fogelberg’s range across 20 albums was extraordinary; he could do sappy (Wysteria), driving rock (As the Raven Flies), classical (Netherlands), jazz (Holy Road), or blue grass (High Country Snow).
I encountered his music long before he became a pop icon, via a progressive free-spirit who prized his early albums.