Tag: Afghanistan
Preventing mass atrocity after Assad
Reuters (http://reut.rs/WMw240) published this piece today:
As the second anniversary of the Syrian uprising approaches, close to 80,000 people have been killed, a million are refugees and several million are displaced. The Syrian army and air force are under severe stress and attacking civilian populations, the revolutionaries are increasingly radicalized in a Sunni Islamist direction and Lebanese Hezbollah as well as Iranian Revolutionary Guards are getting deeply engaged in the fight.
It may seem superfluous to worry about what happens to the Alawite community — the mainstay of Bashar Al Assad’s regime – after he falls. But revenge killing is common after an uprising of this sort, and few regimes born in mass atrocity survive as democracies. A massacre of Alawites could be prelude to state collapse, an extremist regime and regional warfare far worse than the spillover we have seen thus far.
How can mass atrocity in the aftermath of the Assad regime be avoided? Above all, it is Syrians who will need to make sure it does not happen. The Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces has already made clear that it intends to construct a multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic and democratic regime post-Assad. What needs to be accomplished to achieve that goal?
A lot. Here are just a few of the options that need to be considered:
- A negotiated end to the regime. Atrocities will be far less likely if there is a clear, well-constructed and well-communicated end to the Assad regime, with a roadmap to a future democratic constitution that will respect minority rights. A chaotic collapse of the regime will make mayhem much more likely, including a possible “stay-behind” insurgency like the one in Iraq after the American invasion.
- International supervision. The roadmap could be implemented with oversight from a “contact group” that includes the main international powers with influence, including neighbors and regional powers. The big issue here is whether Iran is in or out, which depends on Tehran’s attitude toward any negotiated settlement.
- An international intervention force. There will be many armed groups in Syria, however the conflict ends. A strong, legitimate international intervention force of both police and military could separate warring parties, establish a safe and secure environment and protect minorities. The big question is: Who would provide these troops and police? Iraq’s neighbors have all been parties to the conflict. The Arab League is inexperienced at stabilization and peacekeeping. The United States and Europe are trying to stay out.
- New security forces. Assad’s army, police, intelligence and other security forces will be thoroughly discredited once the regime is gone. It will be necessary to reconfigure, retrain and reform the security forces so they can reestablish a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence accepted by both former regime elements and rebels. It was the failure to do this effectively that has made a mess of post-Qaddafi Libya. Training of a small Syrian “stabilization” force could begin even now outside Syria, for deployment into liberated areas.
- Accountability and justice. It is never possible to punish all those who have supported a dictatorial regime, but victims will be looking for satisfaction. This can initially be offered in a well-articulated plan of action for holding a clearly defined and limited number of senior regime figures accountable for abuses, as well as a broader reconciliation effort to give victims an opportunity to voice grievances and seek eventual redress.
- Outreach by the new leaders to communities that have not supported the revolution. Few countries are blessed with a Nelson Mandela, but even lesser figures could try to reassure those who have supported the regime and provide credible guarantees of security. They might even invite in foreign forces to establish a “safe and secure environment” for particular communities at risk.
- Basic human needs. Many Syrians are lacking food, water, sanitation and shelter. The country will need a rapid infusion of vital humanitarian assistance that is distributed fairly and transparently by a duly constituted authority.
- Quick stabilization of the economy. The Syrian economy will be in free fall. The country will be unable to pay its debts and will need relief from international obligations. It may also need a new currency and a credible central bank. It will certainly need jobs, especially for the many youth already unemployed before the war. They will otherwise find employment with militias unlikely to be sensitive to human rights.
- Local community development. Major development projects will have to wait. They will require a well-functioning government and a credible sovereign guarantee to reopen lending by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A well-targeted reconstruction effort that local communities help plan and monitor, like the successful National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan, would be a good start, provide livelihoods and contribute to mitigating the likelihood of violence.
- Dispute settlement. As people return to their homes, disputes will break out over property, much of which will be badly damaged and destroyed. It is important to establish a relatively quick administrative procedure for settlement of disputes and recovery of private property, in particular real estate.
- Funding for civil society. Syria under Assad lacked the vigorous nongovernmental organizations that provide advocacy, serve as watchdogs and help protect human rights and minorities in open societies. Funding and empowerment of grassroots organizations committed to a democratic outcome and organized across sectarian and ethnic lines, including the revolutionary local administrative councils that have spontaneously appeared in liberated areas, can strengthen social cohesion and prevent violence.
- Safe havens for particular minorities. Odious though it may be on other grounds, temporary separation of ethnic and sectarian groups in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict can help to prevent violence and reduce risks to vulnerable minorities. Many Syrian neighborhoods are more or less segregated. It may be best to keep them that way for a time, but to move once trust is re-established in the direction of much more sectarian and ethnic integration.
Syrians will have to decide for themselves what they want to take advantage of, or not, from this laundry list. They may well also discover some new tricks. But the country will be far better off in the long term if Syrians and internationals start thinking now about what to do to prevent the worst from happening after Assad falls.
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Listen to Karzai
The American press is so anxious to parse what Afghan President Karzai said Sunday, and to interpret it as anti-American, that it is hard to find an actual text. This is the closest I’ve found, not surprisingly from the Australians.
What is Karzai saying, and why? There are two basic assertions:
- Taliban attacks keep the US in Afghanistan;
- the US and the Taliban are concerting against the Afghan state.
The first is unquestionably true and often asserted by Americans. If the Taliban had stopped attacking, the US would have drawn down its forces in Afghanistan long ago. In the negotiations over the post-2014 security agreement, the Americans are arguing that a substantial residual presence is still needed after 2014. The reason for this is the inability of the Afghan forces to deal with the Taliban. As Karzai put it:
It is their slogan for 2014, scaring us that if the US is not here our people will be eliminated
The more the Taliban attacks, the more apparent it is that Afghan security forces cannot control the situation and that NATO (including US) forces are still needed.
The second is the more dubious proposition, but it is important to look at the situation from Karzai’s perspective. Karzai suspects the Americans are dealing with the Taliban outside Afghanistan, while the Taliban continue to refuse to deal with him. If his premise is true, it is not such a big leap for him to conclude that the Americans and Taliban are colluding against him.
So are the Americans and Taliban talking outside Afghanistan? Official Americans deny it. I’d be surprised if the denials are completely true. The CIA maintains a major role in the fighting in Afghanistan. All that kerfuffle over Afghan forces not under Kabul’s control has been denied by the US military. But I’d put good money on the existence of Afghan forces under CIA command.
Whatever its role inside Afghanistan, the CIA would be less than diligent if it were not also pursuing “reconciliation” with at least some Taliban. Inside Afghanistan this has likely become difficult. Karzai won’t allow it, because he is trying to get the Taliban to deal with him. So is it so unlikely that the CIA has contacts with the Taliban outside Afghanistan and is trying hard to win over at least some of them to giving up the fight? Of course this is not the same as colluding with the Taliban to undermine the Afghan state, but it might have that effect, or appear to have it from Karzai’s perspective.
In any event, listening to Karzai tells us something important about what is going on in Afghanistan: he and everyone else is adjusting to an Afghanistan where the Americans will be less important and the Taliban more important than for the last 12 years. He needs somehow either to weaken the Taliban (hence the accusation that they are conspiring with the Americans) or neutralize them (hence his own willingness to negotiate with them, even as he tries to block the Americans from doing so).
Of course we react badly to the assertion that we are conspiring with the Taliban against a government we have supported with more than 2000 lost lives (including at least a dozen CIA). But we also need to recognize what Karzai knows: we have fought this war in our own interest, mainly to counter al Qaeda rather than the Taliban. As we draw down, the temptation to make a separate peace with as many Taliban as possible will be great, but Karzai cannot be expected to share our pleasure in it if he is cut out of the deal.
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Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan post-2014
George Washington University’s Pakistani and Afghan Student Associations co-sponsored Thursday’s panel discussion of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan post-2014, when NATO troop reduction spells uncertainty for Pakistan as well as for Afghanistan. The discussion focused mainly on the effect of the drawdown inside Pakistan.
Deteriorating security
Zubair Iqbal of the Middle East Institute projected that the Afghan government will have to decrease government spending as international funding declines, leading to increased unemployment, socio-economic strain and security challenges. Without foreign support, Afghan security forces will encounter difficulties in maintaining security in southern and eastern provinces, including Kandahar. Taliban resurgence in southeast Afghanistan would have serious consequences also for the Pakistani state, which faces its own terrorist insurgency.
What Jonathan Landay of McClatchy characterized as a “defacto economic and security partition” between northern and southeastern Afghanistan could trigger a significant influx of refugees into Pakistan, with serious economic, political and security implications. Adding a refugee crisis to the strain of fighting an insurgency will spread thin the reduced resources of a Pakistani government accustomed to receiving fat stacks of military aid. The upcoming civilian elections will make little difference in Pakistani policy towards Afghanistan. Military preferences will prevail, as they have in the past.
Threats to Pakistan
Pakistan fears US abandonment of the region like in 1989, when US interest declined following the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. Decreased US interest in the region reduces Pakistan’s leverage, which derives in part from its role as the main transit route for military supplies to Afghanistan.
Shuja Nawaz, Director for the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, highlighted that no single Pakistani point of view exists. The Pakistani army has a “schizophrenic” position on US withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Although some elements of the ISI remain distrustful of US intentions in the region, others fear the reduction of US military aid. When the US draws down in Afghanistan, Pakistan could be forced to rely on deficit financing to support its army. This would lead to inflation and undermine the army’s struggle against Pakistan’s internal terrorist insurgency. If Pakistan cedes territory to the Punjabi Taliban and chaos erupts in Afghanistan following the NATO drawdown, the Pashtun Taliban may take over the border and use Afghanistan as a base to attack the Pakistani state.
Landay laid out another, not mutually exclusive, scenario for Pakistani involvement with Afghanistan post 2014. With the departure of NATO forces, the Pakistani military will revert to seeing India as a lens through which to formulate policy in Afghanistan. To ensure pre-eminence there, Pakistan might indiscriminately back a Pashtun strongman in Afghanistan, an approach that brought the Taliban to power in the first place, when Afghanistan had no serious security forces to resist the maneuver. Today, the well-armed, US-trained, multi-ethnic Afghan army increases the risk of such a strategy.
Pakistan’s inability to absorb Afghan refugees
Today’s Pakistan is characterized by greater insecurity and economic fragility than the Pakistan of the 1980s and 1990s that managed to absorb three million refugees from Afghanistan. Landay claimed that an injection of refugees into the already over-crowded Af-Pak border camps would increase the porousness of the border, providing the Pakistani Taliban with an “inverse sanctuary” from which to access Afghanistan and draw recruits.
The influx of refugees might also exacerbate tensions between Afghans and Pakistani Pashtuns in competition for Pakistani state resources. Iqbal predicted that tensions could lead to Pakistani calls for forced Afghan refugee repatriation back across a border that many in the region view as a bureaucratically contrived boundary.
Nawaz went as far as to claim that “refugees” was not a term applicable to the region, since many individuals on either side do not recognize the legitimacy of the line. He claimed that the only solution to the current and future Afghan refugee problem lies in giving the refugees Pakistani papers and absorbing them into Pakistani society.
Pakistan’s internal terrorist insurgency
According to Ahmad Khaled Majidyar, a Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute, Al Qaeda remains a network and an ideology in Pakistan, despite Bin Laden’s death. Pakistan and its economy fail to satisfy the demands of its young population, two-thirds of which is under 30. The 20,000 madrasas that often represent the only form of education available to impoverished youth raise the likelihood of extremism. The problem of militants requires a societal solution, not a military solution.
Iqbal suggested addressing the sectarian discord that lies at the core of the Pakistani terrorist insurgency. He claimed it falls to the army — as the country’s most ethnically representative body – to seek out a representative constituency of the warring groups willing to voice their concerns and to mediate a path towards a solution.
US drone strikes will shape the future of Pakistan’s domestic insurgency. The strikes eliminated the Taliban’s middle ranks. A new generation of young men inculcated with what Landay characterizes as “bin Ladenism” replaced them. Today’s Taliban does not pursue nationalist goals but rather ascribes to re-establishment of the caliphate advocated by Bin Laden. The drone strikes do not solve the issues underlying extremist militancy. They may, however, have contributed to dispersing militants, as recent events in North Africa and the Sahel indicate.
The Pakistani military distinguishes between a “good” and a “bad” Taliban, characterizing Taliban elements that conduct missions against NATO forces in Afghanistan as “good” and those that attack the Pakistani state as “bad.” This shortsighted policy fails to recognize the shared mentality that will unite the groups against the Pakistani state.
Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan
The panel offered many possibilities for how NATO troop drawdown in Afghanistan may destabilize Pakistan, but little concrete insight on Pakistan’s future role in Afghanistan. Nawaz did offer one remedy: the best role for Pakistan in Afghanistan is no role. Pakistan should look inward and focus on embracing its pluralism, instead of fanning the flames of sectarianism.
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Why US foreign policy keeps failing
SAIS master’s student Solvej Krause reports:
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, influential international relations scholar and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” delivered a damning assessment last week at SAIS of the failure of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Highlighting the ever-present tension between ambitions and capabilities in US foreign policy, Walt offered a realist view of what he perceives as an activist, overreaching foreign policy agenda promoted by both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in consecutive administrations.
“We forgot that there might be limits to what we could do,” he said, referring to the extraordinarily powerful geostrategic position of the US in the international system since 1990. Walt advocates greater restraint in American involvement abroad and a drastic reduction in the US military footprint, especially in the Middle East. His call for more restraint has important implications for post-conflict scenarios. Given the troubled experiences with state and nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the current administration’s appetite for complex and costly post-conflict involvement has diminished.
Between 1945 and 1950, a small group of foreign policy makers achieved extraordinary results, including the Marshall Plan and formulation of the policy of containment. They created key arrangements that influenced foreign policy for the coming decades.
Post-Cold War foreign policy legacy is by comparison “terrible,” despite the lack of a geopolitical rival. The US should be doing much better than it actually has, given the enormous growth of the foreign policy apparatus (more staffers, more academic research, greater diversity among officials) since 1990. But the US has failed to secure peace in the Middle East (Israel-Palestine), failed to prevent Rwanda, and has not managed to build a lasting relationship with Russia. 9/11 was mostly “a reaction to perceived sins of US foreign policy in the Middle East.” The Balkan wars were ended successfully but in a lengthy and costly process. The situation there is still precarious.
Walt identifies two sources of US foreign policy failure: problems arising from the structural (geostrategic) position of the US in the international system and problems arising from inside the American foreign policy establishment. The internal problems should be fixable, says Walt, but it won’t be easy.
Outside the system – Structural problems
The US foreign policy agenda is “perennially overcrowded.” The primacy of the United States in the international system makes it difficult to set priorities and pick battles wisely. Since the US alone has the power to intervene and prevent atrocities, it becomes very hard not to act. Since the scope of US foreign policy is global, the military has divided the entire world into regional military commands (Africom, Centcom). “We forgot that there might be limits to what we can do,” says Walt. British historian Paul Kennedy said that one reason why the British Empire lasted so long was that they were smart at picking their battles.
There are no more “easy” foreign policy problems left. The issues left today that have not been solved over the past century are the “really hard residuals.” Today’s agenda is filled with problems we don’t know how to solve without great costs, e.g. Israel-Palestine, Iran, North Korea. They are almost intractable. Some require social engineering in ethnically heterogeneous societies, which is hard for anyone to do.
US primacy encourages obstructive behavior by allies and non-allies: Non-allies Russia and China oppose intervention in Syria because they went along with the US in the Libyan case, allowing the US to pursue a mission aimed at regime change, not only humanitarian protection. The dominance of the US encourages “reckless driving” by smaller, weaker states, such as Georgia, Israel and Taiwan. This leaves the US vulnerable to blackmail. For example, President Karzai in Afghanistan can do pretty much everything he wants because he knows that he is the only game in town.
Inside the system – Internal problems
Within the US government, groups that favor activist foreign policy dominate groups that favor more restraint. There is little difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in this regard. Both are activist. Realists are an endangered species in the foreign policy apparatus.
The same is true for think tanks: the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, Carnegie – all favor favor American leadership in the world and lean towards interventionist, activist policies. On the other end of the spectrum you have the Cato Institute, which favors greater restraint, but these institutions have less money, fewer people and less influence than the activist institutions.
There is a dangerous tendency in the foreign policy establishment to inflate threats in order to convince the public that involvement is necessary. Walt cited NSC-68, which ushered in the McCarthy era by exaggerating the threat of Communist infiltration in the US government and society. He finds parallels to today’s inflation of the Iranian threat and the threat of Al Qaeda. “Remember: Iran’s defense budget is $$10 billion per year.” What is called “Al Qaeda” are a bunch of loosely affiliated criminal groups that adopt the AQ brand like Baskin Robbins. The entire “war on terror” was misconceived. AQ should have been framed as international criminals, not combatants in a global war. The inflation of threats makes us “collectively stupid,” says Walt.
There is a lack of real debate about American foreign policy. The range of disagreements in the foreign policy establishment is not very broad. Most think tanks lean towards activism. Politicians show enormous deference towards military leaders. To be credible in the foreign policy establishment you have to sound hawkish.
There are three taboo issues where absolutely no open debate in Washington is possible:
US policy towards Iran: For decades the US has employed threats of military action combined harsh sanctions. “We’re effectively blackmailing Iran.” This approach is not working. “Threatening others with regime change is not very effective. But anyone who proposes a different approach is treated as a policy pariah.”
The US relationship with Israel: Any criticism of it will end your career. There were 178 mentions of Israel during Chuck Hagel’s hearings.
The US drone program: The problem is excessive secrecy. How can we judge the efficacy of the drone war if we don’t know what is going on? What if you have created more terrorists than you have killed?
Walt also worries about the precedent that the US is setting in using cyber warfare so generously.
The problem with these taboos is that they force policy leaders to say things they don’t really believe in. But being deadly wrong or incompetent does not harm your career. Being right can end your career. Given how Iraq turned out, you’d think that the makers of the Iraq policy would be discredited now. But they are still highly influential, e.g. Bill Kristol, Elliott Abraham, Paul Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks. If you get it right, your career suffers. The most common reason why American military leaders are fired is sexual misconduct, not misconduct on battlefield. There is too much blind deference to military leaders. There is a corrupt, co-opted relationship between politicians and those who are supposed to hold them to account.
Academics, afflicted with a “cult of irrelevance,” are not doing their job. They should be using the protection of tenure to challenge foreign policy dogma. But instead they are getting caught up in “simplistic hypothesis testing.” The gap between the world of academia and world of policy is too wide.
We have the “worst possible system for staffing the executive branch you can imagine.” Civil service employees are few, so there is a large turnover every four years. The appointments process has gone off the rails, leaving important positions unfilled for a long time.
The presidential term lasts four years while the election season lasts for over one year. This means that the President is preoccupied with campaigning for at least 25% of his term, which is extremely bad for good policy-making.
The problem with advances in military technology that make a “light footprint” approach (drones, special forces) possible is that they make interventions cheaper and easier – both in terms of costs and lives lost. All of a sudden, there are many reasons to intervene. But the US cannot be everywhere. The American military was not designed to do nation-building, and there are many reasons why it is not well-suited for it.
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Talk is cheap
Calls for negotiated solutions are all the rage. Secretary of State Kerry wants one in Syria. The Washington Post thinks one is possible in Bahrain. Everyone wants one for Iran. Despite several years of failure, many are still hoping for negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ditto Israel/Palestine. Asia needs them for its maritime issues.
It is a good time to remember the classic requirement for successful negotiations: “ripeness,” defined as a mutually hurting stalemate in which both parties come to the conclusion that they cannot gain without negotiations and may well lose. I might hope this condition is close to being met in Syria and Bahrain, but neither President Asad nor the Al Khalifa monarchy seems fully convinced, partly because Iran and Saudi Arabia are respectively providing unqualified support to the regimes under fire. Ripeness may well require greater external pressure: from Russia in the case of Syria and from the United States in the case of Bahrain, which hosts the US Fifth Fleet.
It is difficult to tell where things stand in the Afghanistan negotiations. While the Taliban seem uninterested, Pakistan appears readier than at times in the past. The Americans are committed to getting out of the fight by the end of 2014. President Karzai is anxious for his security forces to take over primary responsibility sooner rather than later. But are they capable of doing so, and what kind of deal are the Afghans likely to cut as the Americans leave?
Israel and Palestine have one way or another been negotiating and fighting on and off since before 1948. Objectively, there would appear to be a mutually hurting stalemate, but neither side sees it that way. Israel has the advantage of vast military superiority, which it has repeatedly used as an alternative to negotiation to get its way in the West Bank and Gaza. A settlement might end that option. The Palestinians have used asymmetric means (terrorism, rocket fire, acceptance at the UN as a non-member state, boycott) to counter and gain they regard as a viable state.
The Iran nuclear negotiations are critical, as their failure could lead not just to an American strike but also to Iranian retaliation around the world and a requirement to continue military action as Tehran rebuilds its nuclear program. The United States is trying to bring about ripeness by ratcheting up sanctions pressure on Tehran, which fears that giving up its nuclear program will put the regime at risk. It is not clear that the US is prepared to strike a bargain that ensures regime survival in exchange for limits on the nuclear program. We may know more after the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China + Germany) meet with Iran February 26 in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Asia’s conflicts have only rarely come to actual violence. China, Korea (North and South), Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and India are sparring over trade routes, islands, resources and ultimately hegemony. This risks arousing nationalist sentiments that will be hard to control, driving countries that have a good deal to gain from keeping the peace in some of the world’s fastest growing economies into wars that the regimes involved will find it difficult to back away from. Asia lacks an over-arching security structure like those in Europe (NATO, OSCE, G8, Council of Europe, etc) and has long depended on the US as a balancing force to preserve the peace. This has been a successful approach since the 1980s, but the economic rise of China has put its future in doubt, even with the Obama Administration’s much-vaunted pivot to Asia.
This is a world that really does need diplomacy. None of the current negotiations seem destined for success, though all have some at least small probability of positive outcomes. Talk really is cheap. I don’t remember anyone complaining that we had spent too much money on it, though some would argue that delay associated with negotiations has sometimes been costly. The French would say that about their recent adventure in Mali.
But war is extraordinarily expensive. Hastening to it is more often than not unwise. That is part of what put the United States into deep economic difficulty since 2003. If we want to conserve our strength for an uncertain future, we need to give talk its due.
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Peace Picks: February 11-15
Mid-winter is a good time to be indoors with the policy wonks:
1. Elections and Politics in North Africa—A Panel Discussion
Date and Time: February 11 / 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Address: Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20052
Lindner Family Commons
Speakers: Ellen Lust, Lindsay Benstead, Matthew Buehler, Marc Lynch
Description: Three leading political scientists will discuss elections in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt.
Register for this event here: https://docs.google.com/a/aucegypt.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGRVSlNPbG1QNUtfX3djYzg4cW9reXc6MQ
2. The Role of Azerbaijan’s Post-Conflict Narrative in Limiting Refugees’ and IDPs’ Integration into Mainstream Society
Date and Time: February 11 / 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Address: Woodrow Wilson Center
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20004
Speaker: Jennifer S. Wistrand
Description: Nagorno Karabakh is often referred to as one of the former Soviet Union’s “frozen conflicts” with little explanation of how the conflict “froze” or might “thaw.” Jennifer S. Wistrand, Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute draws upon twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Azerbaijan, shedding light on some of the socio-cultural factors impeding both the peaceful resolution of the status of the region on a geopolitical level and the “successful” integration of Azerbaijan’s refugees and IDPs into mainstream society. Particular attention will be paid to the long-term socio-economic and mental health consequences of not resolving the status quo, especially for refugee and IDP youth.
Register for this event here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-role-azerbaijan’s-post-conflict-national-narrative-limiting-refugees’-and-idps’
3. Training for War and Fragile Peace
Date and Time: February 12 / 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Address: Reserve Officers Association
1 Constitution Ave NE Washington, DC
Speakers: Bob Feidler, Paul Hughes, Ferdinand Irizarry II, Lauren Van Metre
Description: With the U.S. Army taking on an advising and mentoring role in Afghanistan as Afghan security forces take the lead, U.S. troops are taking on fundamentally different missions than those for which they were trained. How can we best prepare the military for these operations in fragile states? Should the military do security force assistance differently in fragile states as opposed to developing states? Please join the Reserve Officers Association and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) for a program that will explore new education and training approaches used to help U.S. troops better prepare for these complex operating environments. Brigadier General Ferdinand Irizarry II, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, will provide an inside look into how the military is adapting their training to prepare for the new mission in places like Afghanistan. Dr. Lauren Van Metre, dean of students in USIP’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, will discuss USIP’s efforts to help the military address these challenges. Having recently been called on to work with a unit of the 101st Airborne that will deploy to Afghanistan to develop a specialized education program, Dr. Van Metre will talk about programs with the military, which emphasize USIP’s conflict management work at the community level with an in-depth understanding of the local Afghan context.
Register for this event here: http://www.usip.org/events/training-war-and-fragile-peace
4. Deterring Hezbollah: Lessons from Israel’s 30-Year War
Date and Time: February 13 / 12:00pm
Address: Georgetown University
37 St NW and O St NW, Washington, DC
Copley Hall Copley Formal Lounge
Description: Israel and the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah have been at war for 30 years. Over the course of those three decades, Israel has relied on deterrence as a central strategy in coping with the Hezbollah threat. Has this strategy succeeded? What is the future of the Islamist-Israeli Conflict as Islamists gain power throughout the Middle East? What lessons can be drawn from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict for states engaged in asymmetric warfare in the 21st Century?
Register for this event here: http://events.georgetown.edu/events/index.cfm?Action=View&CalendarID=349&EventID=101269
5. Evaluating Legal and Political Reform in Burma
Date and Time: February 13 / 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Address: Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Ave NE, Washington, D.C. 20002
Lehrman Auditorium
Speakers: Frank Jannuzi, Tom Malinowski, Jared Genser
Description: The ongoing war between the Burmese government and Kachin is a stark reminder that reforms in Burma are far from complete. How exactly is Burma doing in its political reform process? American officials and key figures in Congress have stressed that reform there is not irreversible. What are the prospects for reform continuing and becoming institutionalized? What are the prospects for backtracking? And is the U.S. policy of broad engagement properly calibrated and flexible enough to respond appropriately to set backs? Does Congress still have a role in setting policy? Our eminently qualified panelists will address these questions and many more as they evaluate political and legal reform in Burma.
Register for this event here: http://www.heritage.org/events/2013/02/burma
6. Schieffer Series: Foreign Policy Challenges for President Obama’s Second Term
Date and Time: February 13 / 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Address: Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20006
B1 Conference Room
Speakers: Bob Schieffer, David Ignatius, Thomas L. Friedman, Margaret Brennan
Description: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism invite you to the next session of The CSIS-Schieffer Series Dialogues
Register for this event here: http://csis.org/event/schieffer-series-foreign-policy-challenges-president-obamas-second-term
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