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Stevenson’s army, August 17

– Political Washington is already rehearsing various narratives to use about Afghanistan. Republicans want to blame Biden; Democrats want to blame Trump; many want to say there was an intelligence failure;  even those who favor withdrawal blame the administration for poor contingency planning.

-A lot depends on what the pictures are during the next two weeks. If there’s rape and pillage, the administration suffers. If there’s chaos but mostly safe withdrawal of foreigners, different lessons will be offered.

– Be sure to ignore the “what this means for Biden’s legacy” stories, for the time being. Remember, neither Jerry Ford nor either party suffered because of the dramatic “fall of Saigon.” Reagan recovered from the Beirut barracks bombing; Clinton recovered from Blackhawk down;  Bush recovered from the 9/11 attacks.

– Meanwhile, I recommend the new Post article summarizing the reports and oral histories in their “Afghanistan Papers.”  CRS had a longer summary 2 years ago.

– And for the Congress course, look at CRS report on what Congress has been doing about Afghanistan.

– I also found interesting this from Small Wars Journal.

– And while WSJ says the IC missed the speed of collapse, I remembered Ernest Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy, which applies here: “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).

Russia is an option, but not a good one

While I’ve had lots of agreement about my assertion last week that there are no good American options for Syria, some of my friends are still hoping for the US and Russia to make progress on the political front. This idea certainly makes sense in principle. The Russians are a strong military force inside Syria and have lots of political clout, not only with President Assad but also with what is left of the Syrian opposition, the Kurds, the Turks, and the Iranians. Their main interest in Syria would appear to be maintaining their bases there, which the Americans have never really opposed. Having spent a good deal, they also want to benefit from Syria’s reconstruction. Unlike the Iranians, Russia does not threaten Israel, though there is rumint that they are shifting towards blocking its bombing inside Syria.

But that is too narrow an assessment of Moscow’s interests. The Russians would like a stronger role throughout the Middle East and want to make trouble for the West while protecting autocrats. They like the higher oil prices their cooperation in OPEC+ with Middle Eastern oil producers has brought. They see economic and political opportunities in American withdrawal from the region. And they want to re-assert the sovereign rights of leaders who, like Vladimir Putin, don’t have genuine support from their people. Preventing “regime change” has become the Russian equivalent of Biden’s “promoting democracy.”

Moscow is not going to defenestrate Assad, or even open the window so that the Syrian people can do it. While they talk smack about him to any Westerner who will listen, they in fact have supported him even when he undertook military offensives they had advised against. Moscow doesn’t see anything better (for its interests) than Assad on the horizon. If the Russians had any intention at all of seeking alternatives, they had an excellent opportunity to signal that during the UN Security Council debate this month on cross-border aid, which the West favors because it provides assistance to Assad’s opponents without requiring his approval. The Russians by contrast took a hard line and allowed only one cross-border point to remain open for six months, or maybe a year.

Is there anything the West could do to change Moscow’s behavior? We can try. The Biden Administration has shut down work by a US company that was planning to help the Kurds in eastern Syria produce and refine oil production from one of Syria’s main fields. The Kurds as a result will have to continue to sell a good part of it, one way or another, to the regime, which controls the only remaining refinery in the country. Not surprisingly, a Russian-controlled company has now indicated it is willing to return to Syria to produce some of that oil. It is hard to believe the Americans didn’t understand the consequences of their move in shutting down the US company.

The question is this: what did Biden’s people get in exchange for giving a Russian company control of a major source of Syria’s oil? So far, the answer seems to be “very little,” perhaps only the UNSC resolution holding that one cross-border assistance point open. Could they have gotten more? It is hard to tell, but my guess is not much more. The Americans just don’t have enough bang in Syria, where their troops are hunkered down providing intelligence, logistical, and other assistance to Kurdish-led forces who are trying to deal with Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, local issues, and sometimes the Turks.

American and European policy on Syria has focused on sanctions and holding back reconstruction assistance until there is an “irreversible” way forward on a political solution. That position is holding for now, but not producing any significant diplomatic results. In the meanwhile, Syrians suffer the consequences. Assad is careful to feed his supporters before the opposition and to throw any reconstruction contracts the Iranians and Russians are willing to fund to their companies and to his own cronies. He hasn’t survived more than 10 years of civil war without figuring out what it takes to stay in power. Moscow occasionally plays a mediator role in negotiating a ceasefire here and there but shows no sign of pressuring him to prepare a political transition.

I’ll be glad to be surprised. But at least for now, Russia is not a good option.

Time for EU and NATO to get real with Serbia

To his credit, Serbia’s President Vucic is acknowledging the “Serbian world” concept as his own. Serbia’s borders are inviolable he says, and “we don’t care about other people’s borders.”

Vucic wants Serbs to be united in a single political space and state, without violence. Fat chance. Serbia has eight immediate neighbors. All have Serb minorities, though Bulgaria’s is small. Six are NATO members (Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Romania). Two others host EU and NATO troops committed to their territorial integrity (Bosnia and Kosovo). What happened when Serbia tried in the 1990s to extend its political space and unite some of those minorities in one state? War with Slovenia, war with Croatia, war with Bosnia, war with Kosovo, and war with NATO. The result: Serbs fled to Serbia from neighboring countries, but not a square inch of the neighboring countries was ceded to Serbia.

The German analogy, of which Vucic is fond, is nonsense. Germany was not re-united by absorbing the territory of a neighboring state. East Germany was not part of another state. It was part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union, which was unable to maintain its autocratic control. Reunification did nothing to violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Germany’s neighbors. Everyone in Belgrade forgets to mention Austria, which lives happily as a separate, German-speaking state, despite Hitler’s ambitions. Not to mention German minorities in several other European states.

Vucic’s avowal that not a single shot will be fired in his effort to unite Serbs in a single state is as hollow as the German analogy. If he believed it, he wouldn’t be re-arming Serbia with Russian and Chinese weapons. Serbia faces no military threat from its eight neighbors. He is figuring that if Serbia gets strong enough and creates enough brouhaha, its neighbors will cede territory rather than risk a fight. There is no reason to think that will happen, or that Serbia will not resort to arms if it thinks, like Milosevic, that it can win.

One of the requirements of EU membership is good neighborly relations. Not caring about other states’ borders is the epitome of bad relations with neighbors. Vucic is ready to give up on retaking all of Kosovo and all of Bosnia. All he wants are the Serb slices, 15% or so and 49% respectively. He would be happy for a slice of Croatia as well. Eastern Slavonia? He wants all of Montenegro. It is high time Brussels told him the EU will no longer pretend that membership is a possibility for a country harboring territorial ambitions and disrespect for its neighbors’ borders. And it is time for Washington to signal clearly that NATO will defend all of Serbia’s neighbors from Belgrade’s unneighborly intentions.

It is time for the EU and NATO to get real with Serbia.

Good riddance, Afghanistan, you deserve better but aren’t likely to get it

President Biden has it half right. There is no longer any point in US troops remaining in Afghanistan. There hasn’t been much point for the past decade. The Americans killed Bin Laden, our primary reason for invading Afghanistan, in 2011. By then we had already spent the better part of a decade trying to rebuild Afghanistan into something resembling a modern state. It wasn’t easy. Desperately poor and isolated, Afghans were also largely illiterate and already brutalized by decades of civil war. The warlords who ran much of the poppy-based economy had no interest in a modern state. Nor did their most important neighbors–Iran and Pakistan–want us to succeed. They provided safe haven and support to multiple Afghan forces resisting the state. Willing local elites and cooperative neighbors are two vital ingredients for successful state- and peace-building. Afghanistan had neither.

But Biden is also half wrong. There is a real possibility the Taliban will retake not only the provincial centers they are already seizing but also Kabul, though little likelihood they can do so without facing serious resistance both before and after. Neither ordinary Afghans nor the warlords are going to like the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan any better than they liked the nominally Westernized state that Presidents Karzai and Ghani have produced. Much better armed and organized than in the past, warlord armies will likely clash among themselves as well as with the Emirate. The outcome of civil war will be more civil war, without the Americans and other NATO forces tilting the balance toward Kabul.

This terrifying outcome will be particularly bad for those Afghans who tried to help the American project. That includes not only the thousands of interpreters the US Army required, but also many more thousands of civil society and activists, many of them women who fear the return of Taliban discrimination and abuse. Many are now desperately trying to leave, along with their extended families. The US State Department has nowhere near the resources needed to process them all before the end of August when the troops will all be gone, so evacuation to third countries where they can await visa decisions seems likely. That evacuation will cause panic among a wider circle of Afghans, people who were not necessarily directly associated with the American project but who sympathized with it. The Taliban won’t treat them well either.

We may not see–I hope we will not see–anything like the helicopters evacuating the US Embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. It is precisely to avoid such a scene that Washington continued the fruitless war until President Trump decided on a conditions-free withdrawal. Now Washington is planning a force of 600 or so troops to protect the Kabul Embassy. But the diplomats in that Embassy, who haven’t gotten out much in the past 20 years, will get out a lot less. If the Emirate takes over, President Biden will need to reconsider. Does he want to keep an Embassy in a capital taken by a force that has failed to abide by the agreement it reached with the US, or does he want to close that shop and wait for more propitious circumstances?

The Taliban agreement with the US required negotiations with the Ghani’s government for a political solution as well as a clean break with terrorists prepared to operate internationally. Gaining on the battlefield, the Taliban have been unwilling to negotiate seriously with the Kabul government. Even Biden, the man with the rose-colored aviators, would find it surprising if there were anything like a serious negotiated solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. In Moscow yesterday the Taliban declared they would not allow terrorist operations against other countries from bases in Afghanistan. They are rivals of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and no doubt hope for international assistance, so they have some incentive to at least appear to rein them in. But will the Taliban risk the wrath of Al Qaeda and ISIS once the Americans are gone?

Afghanistan deserves better. There are lots of well-intentioned Afghans who merit the peaceful, prosperous, democracy they worked to construct for two decades. I met more of that variety in Kabul than in many other conflict capitals, where ethnic, linguistic, and religious fervor is far more prevalent. Afghanistan doesn’t lack good intentions. It lacks the capacity to translate good intentions into reality. It’s the old story: if you want to go someplace good, you shouldn’t start from here. Hope is not a policy, but I do hope Afghanistan someday recovers. In the meanwhile, the Americans have little reason to stay and most will be prepared to say “good riddance.”