The West, Russia & Syria: Foreign policy is rarely a zero-sum game

Aaron Ellis 6.12am

It is perfectly possible for one country to argue with another over a controversial issue at the same time as co-operating with them on several others - as long as they both get their priorities right and are diplomatic in explaining their differences publicly.

Unfortunately, both Britain and the United States have failed to do this with regard to Russia: they have given more attention to Syria, where they disagree with the latter, than to the many more important issues on which they share common interests. The way British and American officials have explained their differences with their Russian counterparts has also been appallingly undiplomatic and, unsurprisingly, counterproductive.

If London and Washington want to withdraw from Afghanistan, negotiate an end to the Iran crisis, reduce nuclear weapons, and expand NATO, they must give less ‘airtime’ to Syria when dealing with Moscow. If they want to stop the violence there, they must be more respectful of Russia’s views, no matter how heartless they believe them to be. Otherwise, the Kremlin will take a zero-sum approach to the issues listed above, making the world a considerably more dangerous place.

Anyone familiar with the history of Anglo-American relations with Russia knows how difficult it can be to get them on your side, no matter how obvious it is that your approach to an issue will benefit them as much as it would benefit yourself. Russian foreign policy is characterised by interplaying contradictions. Its practitioners can be refreshingly honest one minute, deceptive the next; they can play the aggrieved party in a dispute when they are actually the aggressor; and can alternate between undermining the international order and being one of its key pillars

Yet there are best practice principles that can be teased out of our difficult history with the Russians.

One, respect their interests and treat them the way a great power ought to be treated, even if it is obvious they’re not one. Two, be honest about your own interests and don’t try to trick them, though they may be trying to trick you. Three, don’t be a hypocrite, no matter how hypocritical you think they are behaving. Essentially, keep in mind Ronald Reagan’s dictum: trust, but verify.

If this is “best practice”, both the United Kingdom and the United States have badly mishandled the Russians during the Syria crisis. They have not tried to safeguard their interests in the country should Bashar al-Assad fall, nor have they taken seriously their view of the crisis, as Giles Marshall argued they should in these pages last month. Rather than be diplomatic about their differences, some Western officials have publicly attacked Russia, as the US Ambassador to the UN did in February.

Some of the British and Americans’ actions have just been tin-eared: for example, leaking that David Cameron thought about using Special Forces to stop a Russian ship from allegedly taking weapons to Syria.

For months now, the conflict has preoccupied Anglo-American diplomacy, yet there are many other issues that are much more important to us than Syria and which require Russian support – or at least acquiescence. If we continue to bungle things with the Kremlin, it will become less cooperative on Iran and Afghanistan, even taking a zero-sum approach. One official said as much yesterday, warning that “if Russia doesn’t like the outcome” in Syria, it will start selling long-range surface-to-air missiles to Iran.

Given that Russia is part of one of the two routes via which NATO supplies troops in Afghanistan, its support will be vital over the next two years as we withdraw, as the only other route out of the country is through Pakistan…

British and American officials are understandably exasperated with Russia’s Syria policy, for it is cold, self-interested, and hypocritical. Vladimir Putin attacked humanitarian interventionism a few months ago, yet he justified the war with Georgia on the same as grounds as those calling for military action in Syria. Unfortunately, the terrible things happening there simply aren’t important enough to us to risk an open breach with the Kremlin and losing its cooperation on much more vital issues.

Much of what Otto von Bismarck said over a hundred years ago holds true today, not least his belief that the secret of foreign policy is to make a good treaty with Russia…

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

The UK could learn from Turkey

Alexander Pannett 10.40am

As the chaos of Europe continues unabated and dangerous economic winds lap at Britain’s shores, I recently decided to escape all the incessant doom and gloom and head to Istanbul for a delightful city break. 

Rich with history and a modern dynamic energy that draws comparisons with London, the Queen of Cities is a magnificent testimony to the plurality of dreams that humans can envisage. 

Situated on the Bosphorus, Istanbul is the only city in the world that bestrides two continents.  It is also the only city to have been the capital of two distinct, successive empires, Byzantine and Ottomon, that both dominated their respective faiths of Christianity and Islam. 

Modern trams intersperse ancient buildings as this teeming city of 15 million continues to attract merchants and talents from throughout Asia and Europe, much as it did a thousand years ago when it was known as Constantinople. 

Turkey is similar to the UK in many ways. Situated on the periphery of Europe, it acts as a conduit for trade, energy, migration and ideas into Europe from other major economies.  It is a multi-ethnic country with an imperial past containing Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. It sees itself as a staunch ally of the US and a leading member of NATO. It is also outside the Eurozone. 

Unlike the UK, the Turkish economy is in rude health. Figures released on 2 April  showed that Turkey’s GDP rose by 8.5% in 2011 after a 9% increase in 2010. According to a survey by Forbes magazine, Istanbul, Turkey’s financial capital, had a total of 28 billionaires as of March 2010 (down from 34 in 2008), ranking 4th in the world behind New York City (60 billionaires), Moscow (50 billionaires), and London (32 billionaires). 

Whilst the global financial crisis has affected Turkey, with its current account deficit averaging 10% of GDP last year and inflation at 10.4% in March, it has responded to the downturn much better than most across the world. It was one of a few countries that actually saw its credit rating upgraded during the crisis. 

The Economist has commented: 

Turkey has weathered the credit crunch better than other emerging economies. Partly thanks to tough regulation, not a single Turkish bank has gone under. That is also because, unlike many Western banks, they have few toxic assets and limited mortgage exposure. So the government has not had to divert public money into rescuing banks. 

For these reasons Turkey can offer some important lessons to the UK in how to take advantage of its geostrategic position between Europe and Asia, just as London lies between the US and Europe geographically, and between Asia and the US temporally.

Turkey has looked to Europe for much of its economic trade, in 2005 59% of exports and 51% of imports were with the European Union. But it has also diversified, looking at economies from wider afield, especially Russia and Japan but also emerging markets in central and eastern Asia. Considering that by 2015, 90% of the world’s trade will be generated outside Europe, this diversification seems eminently sensible. 

Turkey has also not been a poodle to US foreign policy. It refused to allow its territory to be used as a staging post for the Iraq invasion and has pursued a doggedly independent approach to its Kurdish insurgency and relations with the wider Middle East. 

Whilst there are still some worrying problems in Turkey, with reported human rights abuses, an overly political military and susceptibility to erratic international capital flow, to name but a few, the future looks much brighter in Anatolia than it does in other peripheral European nations. 

The UK should learn from Turkey’s courting of both Europe and emerging markets to boost its growing economy. It should take heart from what can be achieved economically by staying outside of the Eurozone and that it pays to take a more independent approach to foreign policy that is in line with core strategic interests. 

Both countries have a long history behind them and both will need to look away from Europe and towards the wider world to ensure a prosperous future lies ahead.

Follow Alexander on Twitter @alpannett

The West’s half-hearted efforts will not end Syria’s civil war

Dan Trombly 10.23am

The pressure has increased for more forceful intervention in Syria. Despite the presence of international observers, the Assad regime refuses to adhere to a ceasefire demanded by the UN.

Whether it involves arming the rebels or a repeat of the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995, the ongoing strife in the country calls for further action, and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry recently urged consideration of both options. Yet despite the frustration of diplomatic efforts, military options seem bleak.

Those who argue that past success in Bosnia could be replicated in Syria both ignore the history of the Bosnian war and its differences with the current conflict. The UN’s attempts to create “safe zones” resulted in the horrific massacres of Srebrenica and elsewhere. The Bosnian war was ultimately won when the numerically superior combined force of Croatian and Bosnian troops launched ground offensives, not when NATO began air strikes.

Similar attempts to implement “safe zones” in Iraq following the first Gulf War required the threat of ground assault in the south of the country, and the tactic failed frequently in the north, such as at Irbil in 1996. Even after the Desert Fox bombing campaign, forces withdrew once a Baghdad supporting faction secured that area. Notably, Saddam Hussein’s rule was not ended until troops fought their way to the capital in 2003, despite “safe zones” having been declared alongside frequent US air patrols and strikes.

In Syria, as in Bosnia and Iraq, neither protection of civilians nor regime change can be assured without superiority on the ground. Even air strikes would require a bombing campaign larger than in Iraq in 2003.

And enormous obstacles stand in the way of arming the Syrian rebels. In Bosnia, for instance, it was Croatia’s invasion that brought about a Serb defeat, not Bosnian forces. In Syria, without a ground invasion of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of troops - from Turkey, the Arab states, or the West - Syria’s rebels will remain woefully outmatched in conventional capabilities. Indeed, Turkey rarely conducts cross-border raids against PKK terrorists without several thousand soldiers.

The Syrian rebels need artillery batteries, armour and air support, not just man-portable anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry.

Even with Western air support, the rebels would likely continue to use the guerilla tactics befitting the outmatched force that they are, avoiding pitched battles and ceding territory to draw out hostile forces. While these might be effective tactics in a long-term insurgency, they are unlikely to result in regime change or effective protection of civilians in the short-term. Even the maintenance of a safe haven for rebel forces would need to be done outside Syrian territory, rather than in “safe zones”.

Simply arming rebel forces is more likely to cause a protracted civil war than a quick victory. The United States and others learned this is Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan during the Cold War. But in those cases, there was thought to be some value in attrition, and supporters of proxy groups were relatively indifferent to civilian casualties and the collateral damage of prolonged conflict. In Syria, such outcomes are unjustifiable on humanitarian grounds, nor on strategic aims (seeing Assad depart quickly).

Moreover, an influx of arms leaves lasting consequences. The behaviour of Libyan militias is a case in point.

An authoritarian regime such as Assad’s can hold on until hostile armoured columns roll on Damascus. Therefore the only strategically feasible option for a quick victory in Syria is a full-scale invasion. Yet no Western state is willing to undertake such a mission and a Turkish or Arab effort seems very unlikely.

Ultimately, Syria’s civil war will drag on. In the meantime, Western powers must work with Syria’s neighbours to prevent WMDs and other arms from leaving the country; they must provide aid to refugees that manage to escape Syria; and continue to exercise diplomatic options to the best of their ability.

Unless Western policymakers can convince their own populations and their Middle Eastern allies that an invasion is justifiable, providing military aid or half-hearted intervention can only worsen the consequences of Syria’s conflict - for both that country’s neighbours, and the interests of the West.

Dan Trombly is a student of International Affairs at George Washington University. He blogs at Slouching Towards Columbia.

Talking to the Taliban will not solve our problems in Afghanistan

Aaron Ellis 10.34am

The debate over Afghanistan is like a boom & bust economy: repeatedly rocked by speculative financial bubbles that promise to end the war quickly.

As with financial bubbles, these get-peace-quick schemes show good returns initially but soon collapse under the weight of their own hype. Their investors - politicians, media pundits et al - are left feeling cheated, and so begin looking for the next big idea. The cycle continues.

In 2009, many ‘investors’ bought into population-centric counterinsurgency (P-COIN). That bubble burst when the following year when President Obama fired ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal, the architect of the P-COIN strategy in Afghanistan. If you’re looking for the proverbial get-peace-quick investment today, the smart money’s on talking to the Taliban.

Like bubbles before it, talking to the Taliban is not a solution to our Afghan problems. It will not achieve our stated objective of stopping al-Qa’ida from returning to the country and using it as a safe haven from which to plan attacks on the West.

David Cameron signed a strategic partnership with President Hamid Karzai in January, which states that both their governments:

“…recognise the threat posed by terrorism and violent extremism, particularly from Al-Qaeda, and will strive unceasingly to ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven for any insurgent or terrorist group…”

The West’s strategy is two-fold. First, we will build up the country’s security forces so that they can expel al-Qa’ida if they try to return after our troops leave in 2014. Second, we will persuade the Taliban to break from the terrorist group by luring them into a power-sharing deal. The Prime Minister mentioned this during his press conference with President Karzai.

Regrettably, this strategy is conceptually flawed.

The first part assumes that Osama bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the 1990s because it was a defenceless failed state. The second part assumes that if the Taliban agree to keep al-Qa’ida out of the country then they will be able to impose their will on local powerbrokers in a way no Afghan government has been able to do since the Iron Amir in the nineteenth century.

Both assumptions are undermined by the Haqqani network, which is allegedly responsible for the attacks in Kabul on Sunday.

When Osama bin Laden was kicked out of the Sudan in 1996, he did not flee to Afghanistan because it was a failed state; he fled there because of the protection offered by his close relationships with local powerbrokers like Jalaluddin Haqqani. Indeed, the grizzled guerrilla leader was crucial to al-Qa’ida, according to a paper published last July by West Point’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Haqqani provided al-Qa’ida with space to develop.

The CTC paper warns that Haqqani’s network retains strong ties to al-Qa’ida, suggesting it is unlikely the former will meaningfully disengage. If we are to contemplate talking to the Taliban, we have to understand the important role the Haqqanis play in the war. They are the most militarily effective force among the insurgency and the only conduit for the Taliban to project power in the direction of Kabul and south-east Afghanistan.

It is likely that the Haqqani network orchestrated the attacks on Sunday, as well as similar attacks in the Afghan capital last September. These ‘spectaculars’, as they are called, are meant to convey the simple message that the Taliban (via the Haqqanis) can strike anywhere irrespective of how secure an area seems.

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Afghanistan, captured the insurgents’ dynamic when he commented tartly: “The Taliban are very good as issuing statements, less good at fighting.”

The historian Thomas Barfield explains, and is worth quoting at length:

“…[t]hose Afghan leaders who would best succeed during the [twentieth] century employed a ‘Wizard of Oz’ strategy. They declared their governments all-powerful, but rarely risked testing that claim by implementing controversial policies.

Conversely, the leaders who were most prone to failure and state collapse were those who assumed that they possessed the power to do as they pleased, and then provoked opposition that their regimes proved incapable of suppressing.”

Afghanistan is perhaps the most complex conflict in history. It contains all the problems of modern warfare and is the sum of decades of internal strife and great power politics.

The downside to this is the difficulty in finding solutions. “In Afghanistan, things are rarely as they seem,” General McChrystal once said. “If you pull the lever, the outcome is not what you have been programmed to think.”

This applies to the many get-peace-quick schemes that have dominated the Afghan debate, whether in counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, or talking to the Taliban. All produce outcomes that their many ‘investors’ do not anticipate, so putting the war effort at risk.

If we truly want to achieve our stated objective in Afghanistan - a relatively stable  country that can block al-Qa’ida’s return - then our solutions need to be as nuanced as the war is complex.

And of course, more and more governments are concluding that this just isn’t worth the effort.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Better relations with Iran could be key to solving Afghanistan

Aaron Ellis 10.42am

You can’t govern properly by just reacting to events. But that is what the Government’s lauded National Security Council (NSC) does, putting day-to-day crises into a larger context and shaping a strategic response to them.

Speaking in Washington, D.C. several months after its creation, William Hague boasted that the NSC had already made Britain’s policy in Afghanistan strategically “coherent”.

Yet our handling of Iran suggests otherwise. The Iranians ought to be our allies in Afghanistan but Western sabre-rattling towards the Iranian nuclear programme undermines our efforts there. If the Government truly wants to resolve these crises, it must adopt a truly strategic approach. It cannot just react.

It was reported this week that Iran may have tried to exacerbate anti-American riots in Afghanistan in February, after careless US soldiers burned copies of the Qur’an.

The typical reaction of hawks to these stories is to see Tehran’s mischievousness as a sinister bid for global mastery - rather than defensive measures to deter Western military action against them. When Iranian weapons allegedly destined for the Taliban were seized in Afghanistan last April, the former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, said:

“This confirms my often repeated view of the dangers that Iran poses not only through its nuclear programme, but its continuing policy of destabilising its neighbours. Supplying weapons to help the Taliban kill [ISAF] soldiers is a clear example of the threat they pose.”

The hawk-talk about Iran in Afghanistan adds another stroke to the war drums beaten over Iran of late, but it also undermines the Government’s goals in both countries. It is unlikely that Iran will participate in a regional settlement if we persist in branding it a malign actor. Any solution to the nuclear impasse also grows more difficult to find.

Instead of reacting to these crises separately, the Government must adopt a combined approach. Sound strategic thinking involves reappraising Iran’s role in Afghanistan, recognising that our actions towards one impact the other, and taking various diplomatic steps to achieve the various goals stated above.

Though some actions suggest different, Iran’s interests in Afghanistan coincide with Western objectives. The Government has to be mindful of this. One former senior diplomat has noted, correctly, that Tehran has no “rational interest in continuing instability in [the country], or in a Taliban victory.” This point was covered in great detail in a RAND paper last year.

Given this, why the Iranian mischief-making? The RAND paper’s authors, Alireza Nader and Joya Laha, point out that Iran’s enmity towards the US determines its interests in Afghanistan.

Iranian leaders view the US and coalition presence in Afghanistan with great anxiety, especially in light of the US military threats against Iran’s nuclear facilities. As it has reportedly been employed in Iraq, Iran’s asymmetric strategy would use proxy insurgent forces to tie down and distract the United States from focusing on Iran and its nuclear program, and provides a retaliatory capability in the event of US military action.

The Government has to rethink its rhetoric about Iran, and recognise that country’s involvement in Afghanistan is defensive rather than offensive. We can forget any regional settlement post-2015 if we exclude one of the region’s biggest stakeholders. We must also restart diplomatic dialogue between Tehran and London.

This means first reopening the embassy in Iran. As former diplomat Mark Malloch-Brown has written, “Without embassies the basic function of diplomacy - keeping some kind of dialogue going even when views are diametrically opposed - is essentially suspended.”

Then Britain must begin talks with Iran about how we can co-operate over Afghanistan. If we persuade the Iranians to help, not hinder, the winding down of the war there, it might be easier to negotiate a solution to the nuclear impasse.

Mr Hague once said that the National Security Council would not only minimise the risks we face but also “look for the positive trends in the world, since our security requires seizing opportunity as well as mitigating risk.”

Yet with Iran and Afghanistan, the Government has emphasised risk over opportunity. If we want to achieve our goals, this emphasis must change.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Western decline is not inevitable as long as we learn from our mistakes

Aaron Ellis 12.13pm

The West has had a tough time these last few years, flying from one crisis to another as if in a pinball machine and some of the levers seemingly controlled by the Chinese.

Some believe that the ongoing sovereign debt crisis is not only a crisis of globalisation but also one of Western identity. Given the alarm with which many in Europe reacted to the possibility of Beijing coming to their financial rescue late last year, they might be onto something.

Yet it is not the rise of countries like China that is dispiriting. Rather it is the self-pity that their rise has engendered in the West. Our public discourse has a melancholic tone, often combined with morbid humour: such as the gag that Chinese leaders only visit the United States to collect the rent. This kind of talk about Western decline is exaggerated and I reckon that we can reverse our relative decline by learning from some of the mistakes of the last decade.

First, we need to take a step back from the West’s day-to-day crises and look at the bigger picture. Professor Julian Lindley-French, an associate fellow at Chatham House, has done this, and in the passage below he displays typical common sense:

Whilst it is certainly the case that the emergence of China, India and others on the world stage is leading to a new balance of power, neither the West nor Britain are in terminal decline.

However, unless the despond of defeatism that seems to affect and afflict much of Europe is overcome decline could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy…[T]he zero sum game and with it the idea that if power rises on one part of the planet it must by definition decline elsewhere, is a compelling and neat academic treatise. Unfortunately, it is wrong.

There is no automatic reason why an increase in the power of China, India et al should automatically lead to a loss of Western power. Power and its wielding are subject to many factors.

In the context of American decline vis-à-vis China, an interesting article has pointed out that…

… Many studies note that the growth rates of China’s per capita income, value added in high technology industries, and military spending exceed those of the United States and then conclude that China is catching up. This focus on growth rates, however, obscures China’s decline relative to the United States in all of these categories. China’s growth rates are high because its starting point was low. China is rising, but it is not catching up.

There are things we can do in the West to overcome the challenges we face in the 21st century. For example, there needs to be a fundamental change in the way the United States leads the Western Alliance.

American hegemony is a Good Thing, in my view, but it has also had two harmful effects on Western cohesion. The almost universal power of the US military is a disincentive for the British and Europeans to spend money on defence with their security more or less guaranteed by others. Dan Trombly explained this point in more depth some months ago.

Because of the US hegemony, Washington also excludes NATO governments from its policy-making; the US decides on a policy – after bitter bureaucratic struggles – and informs its allies of the decision after it has been taken. This process wastes NATO governments’ expertise, leads to miscoordination and prevents British and European co-ownership of US policies.

President Obama has begun to remedy the first problem with his decision to “lead from behind” in Libya, but Afghanistan and the New START negotiations are perfect examples of the second one. A more inclusive policy making process will help the West overcome the challenges ahead.

There also must be clearly defined national interests separate from Western ones.

Western malaise is partly caused by an acute sense of overstretch, which was partly caused in turn by what I have called on these pages the “internationalisation of the national interest”.

This is the belief that the world is so globalised and interconnected that every crisis is a threat to our security and it is vital we are involved in sorting out the problem. Try having a coherent foreign policy with this belief as your framework!

If the Western Alliance is to be strong and united on the issues that matter to all its members then we also must appreciate there are issues where our interests are not at stake and cooperation must be more flexible. Germany’s position on Libya and, to a lesser extent America’s, is a perfect example of this.

It has been said that self-pity destroys everything except itself. The self-pity of many in the West about our supposed decline is destroying our chances of being relevant in the multipolar world of the 21st century.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Talking with the Taliban

Alexander Pannett 7.45am

On Tuesday the Taliban announced that they had agreed to open an office in Qatar.  This comes after years of failed attempts by Western diplomats to seek a negotiated end to the decade long war in Afghanistan.  The recent breakthrough is the result of a concerted effort by American and German diplomats to convince the Taliban to establish a talking shop in a neutral country.

This achievement is impressive considering the concept of peace talks appeared to have been killed off with the assassination of President Karzai’s peace envoy, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in September.

The deteriorating relationship between the US and Pakistan had made it unlikely that negotiations could have been held that included all the major interests in the conflict.  Pakistan has a large degree of unofficial control over the Taliban, playing host to most of its leadership and allegedly providing logistical support and training.  Without Pakistani acquiescence, negotiations with the Taliban would have few fecund consequences.

It has been reported in the Guardian that the establishment of a diplomatic office will come at a price.  Several high-ranking Taliban officials will be released from Guantanamo Bay in return.  Allegedly, these Taliban will include Mullar Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, and Noorullah Noori, a former governor in Afghanistan.

Whilst the diplomatic development should be applauded, there have been many previous soporific starts when dealing with the Taliban.  Michael Semple, a former UN official with more than two decades of experience in Afghanistan, was expelled by President Karzai for attempting to open negotiations with the Taliban as this allegedly undermined the authority of one of Karzai’s brothers. One Taliban impostor infamously stole thousands of dollars in cash incentives for entering into talks.

It is also unclear as to whether the Taliban officials who arrive in Qatar will be able to vouch for the entirety of the Taliban.  Increasing “decapitation” attacks by Western special forces that have targeted the Taliban leadership have been very effective in mitigating insurgency operations but it has also eroded the Taliban based in Pakistan’s control over commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.

The Taliban are not comprised of a centralised and homogenous organisation but an affiliation loosely unified by its Pashtun ethnicity and bound by adherence to similar ideological beliefs. Many of the fighters who follow the Taliban’s cause are influenced by myopic issues local to their village or town. The heroin trade also accounts for much of the insurgency in Afghanistan as well as a dislike of non-Pashtun government officials having control over Pashtun areas.  None of these issues will be resolved by negotiating with Taliban leaders exiled in Pakistan.

Despite the potential failures and unlikelihood that the new diplomatic initiative will reach a political settlement in the short term, it must be heralded as a new chapter in the war in Afghanistan. 

Its success will be marked by the concessions that both sides will now be prepared to make.  NATO will have to show increased temperance in its bombing of the Taliban and in return, the Taliban will have to reform some of its more unpalatable ideological demands, especially its treatment of women. 

The road to peace will be long and hard, but as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland shows, even the most bitter and long-divided of enemies can reach compromises for the sake of the communities that they serve.

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Does Libya absolve Interventionism of its sins?

Alexander Pannett 6.45 am

The death of Colonel Gaddafi heralds the end of his dictatorial regime and another chapter in the Arab Spring uprisings.

For many it will be the culmination of a successful Western intervention that demonstrated the effectiveness of military action with humanitarian objectives.

For others, it will represent a fortunate escape from another potential foreign quagmire that may have bled Western societies of blood and gold without ever achieving the quixotic management speak of “nation building”. 

At a time when the West is facing a existential crisis by increasingly questioning its own democratic and economic structures, it seems a genuine question as to what type of values we are trying to bring to “failed states”?  What type of world are we trying to propulgate or are we merely following airy platitudes about freedom due to an inertia about our own established political and economic truths?

Rory Stewart, the Conservative MP and a contributor to this website, and Gerald Knaus have released a new book, Can intervention work?, which evaluates the dichotomy of the arguments for or against Western interventionism.  He has argued that interventionism can be a useful tool in promoting humanitarian goals but that it must be tempered by a pragmatism about the capacity of the West to help and directed by a rigorous localism that understands the languages, traditions, values and aspirations of the society that will be receiving Western assistance. 

Mr Stewart’s argument is a valuable addition to the debate surrounding interventionism and deftly exposes the hubris that has underlined some of the more spectacular failures of Western foreign policy in the last two decades.  Rory Stewart has particular criticism for the management speak that has pervaded NGO’s and diplomatic circles that take a top down approach to “nation building”.  He also reserves criticism for the optimism of British Generals whose famous “can do” approach has possibly led to far too ambitious a prognosis of what the British military can achieve in countries such as Afghanistan.

Libya must be counted as a success in that the intervention prevented a massacre of civilians by Gaddafi forces, was (just about) carried out with the backing of a UN resolution, avoided large scale Western intervention at the ground level and was not designed to impose a Western style political structure. 

It could, however, have gone otherwise had the NATO airstrikes not been so effective.  With military advisors on the ground we were beginning to see the type of mission creep that led to the full-scale intervention of Vietnam and Afghanistan.  I will not be surprised if we soon hear that Western special forces played a much more active role than has previously been disclosed.  If so, we should not confuse the fortunes of war that have given us success with the inevitability of an interventionist ideology whose scientific application cannot be applied universally. 

Rory Stewart is right that the West must be much more realistic about its capabilities for doing more harm than good.  That we must be pragmatic about whether our values can truly help a society that may be hostile to perceived threats to its traditions and beliefs.

We should also be wary about the wisdom that we impart to non-Western societies that we have learnt from our own political development.   Too often we have approached other societies with answers or solutions when we ignore the main strength of Western political institutions, which is the capacity to evolve as people’s needs change.  Flexibility in order to listen, tolerate, question and serve its people’s changing needs is surely one of the greatest strengths of Western liberal democratic experimentation.  The “answers” that we currently have merely reflect the current choices and aspirations of our current generation of citizens.  These aspirations and traditions may vary greatly with those of citizens of another society or indeed from future or past generations of Western citizens.  Our current navel-gazing about the narrative of Western values is yet another example of our great capacity to re-invent ourselves along new values that better serve our rational sense of our place in the world. 

As the Middle East embraces more democratic forms of government, we should not be surprised or alarmed if such governance forms a democratic system that is different to that of Western democracy.  They will tolerate their people’s various dogmas much as ours tolerate such dogmas as the “right to bear arms” or the belief that a growing prison population reflects a healthy and just society.

Libya has again shown that interventionism can promote humanitarian goals, but it must be used wisely, with pragmatism, localism and a humility about our own values that we seek to spread.

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