Day: December 14, 2012
The homefront
PS: Here is what he is what he is up against:
And for those of you who (like me) missed the NRA “press conference” Friday:
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The EU kicks the can
Carl Bildt, Sweden’s long-time and much-followed Foreign Minister, tweeted earlier this week from the General Affairs Council of the European Union:
Finally everything done. Cyprus presidency, Stefan Füle and Cathy Ashton moved all EU enlargement issues successfully forward. Off we go.
I wondered at the time what this meant. Now I know.
It meant nothing: no date for Serbia or Macedonia to begin accession talks, no date for Kosovo to negotiate a Stabilization and Association Agreement. Croatia’s membership next year is expected to proceed on autopilot (with some corrections in Zagreb’s course requested) and Montenegro will continue accession talks. Albania still awaits for a date to start accession negotiations.
Admittedly it is difficult to get too excited about anything in the Western Balkans these days. Syria is imploding. Egypt is turning its judicial system over to religious supervision. Iran is making progress towards nuclear weapons. North Korea is successfully launching a longer-range ballistic missile, disguised as a space-launch vehicle. Afghanistan and Iraq are teetering. Al Qaeda is setting up shop in Mali. The euro is going down the tubes. Who cares what the Greeks want to call Macedonia or whether the former belligerents who run Serbia and Kosovo get dates to begin negotiations (Belgrade for accession, Pristina for a Stabilization and Association Agreement) with Brussels?
The people who live in those places do, that’s who. However insignificant the Balkans look these days from Washington, which is busy with its own domestic quarrels above all else, the region is important to those who inhabit it and has the potential to make life difficult for the rest of us, as it has proven repeatedly over the past 100 years.
A closer reading suggests that things might unfreeze in Brussels in the spring. Macedonia at least can expect a framework for negotiations then, provided it delivers on reforms in the meanwhile. Likewise Serbia, which is asked specifically for
…irreversible progress towards delivering structures in northern Kosovo which meet the security and justice needs of the local population in a transparent and cooperative manner, and in a way that ensures the functionality of a single institutional and administrative set up within Kosovo.
Also important is
…the agreement of the two Prime Ministers to work together in order to ensure a transparent flow of money in support of the Kosovo Serb community…
While couched in the EU’s usual obscurantist language, we see emerging here a detailed understanding of the real challenges that have so far blocked reintegration of the north with the rest of Kosovo. Bravo to the EU for acknowledging them!
Some of the same perspicacity is evident in the discussion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the EU finds the need to reiterate
…its unequivocal support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU perspective as a sovereign and united country enjoying full territorial integrity.
It’s not good news when Brussels kicks off this way, though I’d be the first to admit that its subsequent suggestions of what needs to be done to fix the problem are thoroughly inadequate.
Pristina gets a pat on the back for its engagement in the talks and language identical to that addressed to Belgrade on northern Kosovo, plus a recommendation to develop an outreach plan.
Don’t get me wrong: it is correct for the EU to insist on specific reforms and benchmarks in dealing with the Western Balkans. Unfortunately, it is still true that conditionality is what moves things forward in many of these countries. In most of them, I expect the EU carrot will bring real changes, albeit in fits and starts. The most concerning is Bosnia, where the EU acknowledges the challenges to sovereignty that Milorad Dodik and Republika Srpska pose but fails to offer adequate responses and continues to quarrel with Washington over whether the High Representative should stay or go.
The EU has kicked the can down the road. The best we can hope for is a spring thaw.
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What can go wrong?
I am a great fan of Fred Hof’s Seven Key Points on Syria elaborated yesterday at the Atlantic Council. While I might quarrel on particular points, he lays out clearly what he thinks has to be done to make Syria come out reasonably well from the American perspective. What he recommends would also be good for the vast majority of Syrians.
But of course that means he also implies the inverse, all the things that can go wrong. They are at least as many as his seven points:
- The end of the Asad regime could still take a long time. This would mean not only more death and destruction, but also more polarization and radicalization. The Syrian state might well fail if this goes on for weeks, never mind months, more.
- Since there is no silver bullet, we are going to have to do a lot of things at the same time to hasten the regime’s end. Sanctions tend to erode with time. Even if they are maintained, the regime will learn how to evade and exploit them. Washington has to try to get the Russians on board, even as we work with Friends of Syria to do things that will offend Moscow. The Americans also have to manage Iran–stopping its nuclear program is arguably more important to Washington than winning the day in Syria.
- The new Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces will need to get an alternative government up and running quickly. It is hard to picture much more difficult conditions in which to do this. The opposition is still politically fractious, large parts of it are lacking in funds, communications are difficult and it will need to incorporate many new faces as the regime starts to crumble.
- If guns decide the outcome, extremists are likely to come out on top. They will not only have earned in combat the admiration of parts of the population. They will also be in a position to distribute resources and intimidate opposition.
- The Americans are late supplying arms. Even if they move expeditiously now, they are behind the curve. And Washington will want to provide arms only to those who offer guarantees in return that they will not be used against the civilian population or transferred to extremists. Conditions, however justified, will slow the process and make it far less efficient than Saudi and Qatari distribution of hard cash.
- The messiness of the post-Asad period will make it hard to understand what is going on and also hard to mobilize resources. Parts of the state–the secret services in particular–are likely to collapse, sectarian sentiment will run high, revenge killings will happen, the international community will be slow out of the gate and the political horizon will be cloudy. It is difficult to picture where the troops for an international stabilization force would come from. Hof’s suggestion that Turkish forces protect the Alawites may be unwelcome both in Istanbul and Latakia.
- Resources are not likely to arrive quickly. They rarely do, and Syria is a poor country (more like Egypt than like Libya in terms of natural resources). The standards for accountability and transparency that the international community levies will not be easy to meet.
This is not a pretty picture. A collapsed state with extremists on top, sectarian warfare in many places and inadquate resources from the international community could make Syria look something like Iraq in 2006.
I am an enthusiast for the Syrian opposition, which has been through difficult trials and always bounces back fighting. They are going to succeed in toppling Bashar al Asad. But success in bringing down Asad quickly and the subsequent transition will require a much more concerted effort than we have seen thus far by the Syrians, and by the international community.
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