Why we are losing the long war
The United States went to war with Islamic extremism in the aftermath of the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11, when its adherents were largely concentrated in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration called this the Global War on Terror (GWOT), a term that misleadingly included the invasion of Iraq. The Obama Administration has abandoned that appellation but continued what others now term the “long” war, which has spread throughout the Greater Middle East into Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Syria, Egypt, Libya and into sub-Saharan Africa, even as it has subsided in Indonesia, the Philippines and other parts of Asia.
Even this rudimentary description suggests we are not winning. It isn’t even clear what “winning” means, but it almost certainly does not entail spreading the enemy to a dozen or more additional countries, where they are challenging established governments. The geographic spread makes this a tougher fight. Our military much prefers to concentrate forces on a center of gravity whose defeat spells the end of the war.
But now it is no longer clear where the center of gravity is: we used to think it was Al Qaeda Central, holed up in Peshawar or somewhere else along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. But Osama bin Laden’s death did nothing to stem the jihadi tide, even if Al Qaeda Central has lost significance. Today the press would have us believe the center of gravity is with the Islamic State (ISIS), somewhere in eastern Syria or western Iraq. But defeating it there will all too obviously not defeat Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Yemen and Mali, or the ISIS affiliate in Sinai.
Islamic extremism, despite ISIS’s claim, is still more an insurgency than a state. Insurgencies do not need to win. They only need to survive.
This one is not only geographically resilient but also demographically resilient. I know of no indication that anything we have done for the past decade or more has seriously limited recruitment to Islamic extremism. To the contrary, efforts to repress it using military force seem to make recruitment easier, not harder. New leaders have far more often than not stepped into the roles of those we have killed. Nor have any of our propaganda/psychops efforts worked. There is on the contrary lots of anecdotal evidence that ISIS propaganda efforts do work, at least to recruit cannon fodder.
So we’ve got an enemy that is difficult to locate, whose center of gravity is unclear, and whose psychops are better than ours. What should we do about it?
First is to keep a sense of proportion. For Americans, trans-national terrorism is a vanishingly small threat. The odds are one-ninth those of being killed by a policeman, and comparable to those of being killed by an asteroid. Ninety-nine per cent of the time no American need really fear terrorism outside a war zone, and those who enter war zones do so knowing the risks.
Second is to recognize that if we want to reduce the risk–in particular reduce the risk that the risk will grow in the future–military means are proving massively inadequate and inappropriate. Islamic extremism was far less likely to grow like topsy when confined to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan than it is now, dispersed in at least a dozen weak states. Those cats are out of the bag. We are not going to be able to force Islamic extremists back to where they came from. But we should be cautious about continuing to bombard them with drones wherever they appear. We may think the risks of collateral damage are minimal, but the people who live in Yemen don’t. For those who join extremist groups because of real or imagined offenses to “dignity,” drone strikes are an effective recruiting tool.
This brings us third to the fraught question of countering extremist narratives. I know of no evidence that direct government efforts to counter extremist narratives have been successful. There is evidence that former terrorists and their families can have some influence, working with local communities. But that requires the existence of a relatively free civil society in which religious institutions and private voluntary organizations are at liberty to organize. Community policing is also an effective strategy. But community policing requires the existence of a legitimate and inclusive state that uses security forces to protect its citizens rather than itself.
It is no wonder that we are losing the long war. We are using our strengths, which lie in technology and military action rather than in the far messier (and more difficult) tasks of building civil society and legitimate governance. It is arguable that our technology and military are actually making the task of countering violent extremism even harder. Drone strikes don’t encourage people to think their government is committed to protecting them. Nor do they encourage former terrorists and their families to speak out against extremism, as community-based civil society organizations might.
If the long war is worth fighting, it should be fought to win. For now, we are fighting it in ways bound to make us lose.
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Scraping the bottom of the barrel
With the likes of Josh Landis predicting more of the same (fragmentation, radicalization, impoverishment, displacement) in Syria, it would be more daring than I am to predict improvement. But it is still interesting to ask what could possibly make a difference and turn things in a more positive direction?
There are two propositions on the table at the moment.
One is the UN-proposed “freeze” for Aleppo. This is intended to be more than a ceasefire. It would freeze the warring forces in place, thus preventing them from simply being redeployed to fight elsewhere, as well as initiate local governance on a cooperative basis between the opposition and the regime. Monitoring would initially have to be local, with international observers deployed in due course. In the absence of effective monitoring, the regime would be likely to use any such freeze to redeploy its forces (including intelligence cadres and paramilitaries) to the south, where the opposition is making headway. It is much harder for the opposition to follow suit, because its fighters generally focus on their home areas and its supply and logistical support is far less developed.
The second proposition is a Russian proposal for intra-Syrian dialogue. This will supposedly convene January 26-28 on the basis of the June 2012 Geneva communique, which calls for an interim governing body with full executive powers. Moscow, Tehran and the Syrian regime view this formula as allowing Bashar al Assad to remain in place and preside over a “national unity” government. The opposition and Washington say it means Bashar has to exit, or at least give up all executive power (which if implemented would mean that he would consequently exit sooner rather than later). There is no sign that this difference of interpretation has been bridged.
Separately, neither of these propositions seems likely to succeed. The Americans and Europeans are allowing both to move along, faute de mieux. The question is whether together they might be more likely to produce some sort of positive outcome.
I’m not seeing it yet. The missing ingredient is enforcement. Only if and when the international community gets together behind a UN Security Council resolution that makes it clear Bashar will suffer irreparable damage to his hold on power will he be willing to countenance a serious ceasefire in Aleppo that blocks him from redeploying his forces. This would require the Americans to be prepared to execute air strikes if there is a violation. As for creation of an interim governing body with full executive powers, enforcement would rely heavily on Russian willingness to cut Bashar’s military and financial supply lines if he transgresses. Putin has given no indication he is prepared to do that. Even if he were, Iranian support might keep Bashar afloat.
This brings us back to the inevitable: there is no diplomatic solution in Syria in the current military situation unless Washington and Moscow come to terms and agree on one, including a mutual commitment to enforcement. They certainly have a common strategic interest in a negotiated settlement. Both capitals want the Islamic State and Jabhat Nusra, the main jihadi extremist organizations, defeated. They differ mainly on whether Bashar al Assad is a bulwark against the jihadis or an important cause of their presence.
Richard Gowan suggests there might be room for the US and Russia to reach a “dodgy” grand bargain based on a trade-off between Ukraine and Syria: Moscow would temper its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine (and get some sanctions relief) in exchange for Washington backing off its demand for Bashar to step down. The trouble with this idea is that Washington has already backed off, because it gives priority to fighting the Islamic State. It might be more likely the other way around: Moscow could back off support for Asad and temper support for separatism in Ukraine in return for Washington allowing some sanctions relief.
Like Russia, Iran props up Asad because it sees him as an ally against Sunni extremism, but Tehran has also needed Asad as a reliable link in the “resistance” chain that it has forged with Hizbollah and Hamas. There is no sign Iran is prepared to abandon Damascus. Even under sanctions and with lower oil prices, Tehran is providing ample men, weapons and financing. A nuclear deal this year would make that easier to sustain, as multilateral sanctions are at least partially lifted.
Freeze, intra-Syrian dialogue, grand bargain: we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. There may be something there that will work, but the odds are not good.
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Happy New Year Balkans!
A Kosovar friend provides this New Year’s view of Vienna, expressed through Albanian music:
Trying to be politically correct, I found this Serbian 2013 New Year’s celebration:
Happy New Year to all!
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Even good things won’t make 2015 a good year
Mark Leon Goldberg wrote just before Christmas that 2015 might be one of those rare years that shakes up the international system, he thought for the better. His hopes are based on
- adoption next September of the Sustainable Development Goals and
- conclusion of a treaty on climate change before the end of the year.
I’m not optimistic, even if both these hopes are realized.
Mark is correct that the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, have been a significant success. But unfortunately that is unlikely to be repeated with the follow-on Sustainable Development Goals. Success has encouraged overreach. The MDGs were restrained and reachable. There were only eight of them:
The current draft of the SDGs is ridiculously over-ambitious and unrealistic. They start with “end poverty in all its forms everywhere.” They repeat that sweeping over-ambition for hunger, health, education, gender equality, water, energy, economic growth, employment, infrastructure, inequality (within and between countries), cities, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, justice and sustainable development. Seventeen goals in all. This is a catalog of the developed world’s current concerns, not a set of achievable goals for countries and organizations with limited capacity and even more limited resources.
Unless a real effort is made to prune and prioritize, the SDGs risk irrelevance or worse. There is certainly no risk they will be achieved if they remain in their current formulation. A real effort should be made in the next few months to pare them back, both in number and ambition. A tighter and shorter set of goals would bode much better for implementation.
I too am optimistic about a climate change treaty concluded in 2015. But unfortunately there is no hope it will be strong enough to avoid truly serious impacts of global warming. We are well on our way to breaching the 2 degrees centigrade rise over pre-industrial levels that is generally regarded as a benchmark, albeit an arbitrary one, signalling serious problems due to irreversible melting of major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The way I read this World Bank report, we are likely to double that figure before the end of the century. You have to believe that countries will all meet their current pledges and tight new ones will be made in order to avoid it.
I’m not a climate disaster monger. But I do have a long memory. What I remember is that the “greenhouse effect” (which is what causes the fossil fuel contribution to global warming) was already an issue at the 1972 (first) UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. I was a young staffer on the secretariat and amazed that human activity could affect the entire planet. Our collective failure to do anything serious about it in the more than forty years since suggests that we will need some real disasters before acting. New York City is building up its coastal defenses, in response to the massive flooding that occurred due to Hurricane Sandy, and other big cities have invested heavily (London has floodgates, Venice is getting them). The Netherlands has its dikes. But much of Asia is at serious risk, as are lots of islands. Bangladesh, Mauritius and Vietnam can’t afford the defenses that New York and the Dutch build.
We’ve likely already seen some of the disasters and their consequences. Climate variation caused heightened conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in Darfur and drought in Syria, where an influx of farmers into urban areas was contributed to the rebellion against Bashar al Assad. We are going to see a lot more such climate-induced violent conflicts as competition for resources–especially water–grows and productive land area shrinks. The United Arab Emirates can afford to desalinate sea water. Egypt much less so, but its needs will soon exceed what the Nile will provide.
So no, I am not sanguine. Even good things won’t make 2015 a good year.
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Looking for improvement
Armend Kadriu of Pristina daily Kosova Sot asked me to contribute once again a New Year’s piece scheduled for publication in Albanian today. Here it is in English:
2014 was not a great year for Kosovo. Implementation of its agreements with Belgrade lagged. International recognition slowed. June elections produced a lengthy standoff between a party with a plurality and a coalition with a majority. The government that eventually emerged has a lot of familiar faces. Only two of Kosovo’s many serious women were included in the cabinet. We’ll have to wait and see if it is a forward-looking coalition ready to clean up corruption and move the country snappily towards its European future.
Kosovo’s governance record since independence in 2008 is mixed. The World Bank says there has been progress in some areas but stagnation or worse in others. “Voice and accountability,” “rule of law” and “government effectiveness” have marginally improved but “political stability and absence of violence” has taken a dive. “Control of corruption” and “regulatory quality” have worsened. Citizens have noticed. Seventy-three per cent said corruption increased between 2007 and 2010. In 2014, Kosovo ranked 110 out of 175 in the Transparency International Corruptions Perception Index, sharing the lowest score in the Balkans with Albania.
Kosovo has not yet made the transition from what Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic calls the “heroic politics” of national identity to the “boring politics” of providing quality and cost-effective government services that meet constituents’ expectations. Kosovo’s biggest infrastructure project so far, the road from Durres in Albania to Pristina, is a monument to Albanian nationalism and American contracting. It is ironic but fitting that the best bet to make it economically more beneficial is extension to Nis, where it would benefit from flows to and from the Serbian marketplace.
Kosovo is still a young country, even if its majority Albanian population can claim to be an ancient people. States are not made overnight, or even in a decade or two. Certainly there has been progress since independence in 2008: street crime is low, economic growth has been good, relations with the few remaining Serbs are much better than many imagined they could ever be, and the first Kosovo-wide election with their participation in June was well run. Pristina, once a grim capital unable to erase its Socialist frown, now smiles, at least when the sun shines. Unlike most of the graying Balkans, young parents and their children enliven the main street, which echoes with their laughter and aspirations.
I can hope that 2015 will be better year for that post-war generation, their parents and grandparents. The government will be under a lot of pressure to deliver improvements from a vigorous opposition. The international community will press for creation of a special court to try war crimes. Transparency and accountability should increase. The new power plant the country needs badly should begin to get built. The many agreements with Belgrade should start functioning on all cylinders. So too should the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU. I hope Kosovo will join the Schengen visa liberalization. Its youth will start visiting Europe more. And Europe’s long recession should begin to come to an end.
If I am even half right, that will make 2015 a serious improvement over the year that is ending.
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Tehran’s interest in Havana
Hamid Bayati of the Tehran Times asked me some questions about Cuba. I answered:
Q. After more than 5 decade US end his invade policy toward Cuba, how do you evaluate this event?
A. I think this is a good development. It ends a policy that wasn’t working and raises the odds of a peaceful democratic transition in Cuba, which is very much in the interest of both Cubans and Americans.
Q. US president said the policy to isolate Cuba do not have any specific results but why [doe]s Washington has same policy toward Countries such as Russia, Iran or N. Korea?
A. The Cuba embargo is a unilateral policy. Other countries don’t participate or support it. The sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea are widely supported and therefore have a much stronger effect.
Q. Why [do] Republicans in US criticize Obama decision to normalize relation with Cuba?
A. Some Republicans (and some Democrats) see the decision as rewarding the autocratic Castro regime. It certainly will provide the regime with some marginal benefits, but it will also encourage the private sector and relieve a good deal of individual suffering.
Q. Some experts say Obama wants to end his presidency with good events and changing diplomacy toward Cuba happened in this frame, what is your idea on this issue?
A. The President had loosened restrictions on travel and trade with Cuba a great deal already. Normalization of diplomatic relations was a natural next step. It is also a politically savvy one, as younger Cuban Americans strongly support it.
Q. Some experts say the US has been to blame for Cuba’s economic problems, which include crumbling infrastructure, low levels of foreign investment and …. Does this event (new relation between US and Cuba) help Cuba improve economy?
A. It may mean some marginal improvements in the economy, but Cuba’s economic problems are mostly due to its own mismanagement, lack of respect for property rights, restrictions on foreign investment and lack of respect for the rights of Cubans. Until those things change, there won’t be a big change in the economy.
Q. Raúl Castro, Cuba President, said this new relation does not change Cuba old policy especially on socialism, so is it possible we see change in Havana policies in coming years?
A. Everything the Castros do is done in the name of socialism. That is a bit of a joke. Raúl has allowed the growth of a vibrant private sector. That is likely to prevail over the state sector sooner rather than later, but Cubans overwhelmingly want to preserve some aspects of socialism: their free health care and education, for example. That is their right, though it is unclear whether the state will have the resources required.
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