Is Montenegro Irrelevant? NATO Invitation Edition

To borrow from Bill Simmons, when considering membership in NATO, the question to ask is: how much does potential member x bring to the table versus take off of the table?  What kinds of contributions to NATO capabilities/geographic position/whatever does a country bring?  What kinds of problems, such as domestic conflicts, extending NATO credibility too far, risk of international adventures, does the potential member bring?

While I have not done a close study of Montenegro's military capabilities and likely defense spending, I am going to guess and say that it does bring much to the table.  Montenegro seems to have all of one infantry battalion, two patrol boats, maybe some planes, and not much else.  It is already well under the 2% of GDP for defense goal at 1.3%.  Montenegro does not occupy a key position in the world (however defined) except perhaps as a handy location for smuggling stuff into Europe (untaxed cigarettes is or was a big income earner). 

But it does get NATO closer to having a map of Europe that is whole and free and happy and blue--that the only parts of Eastern Europe that are not in NATO are Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia. Only the last is not in some real or mythical line to get into NATO.  Having a map without any holes (except for Switzerland and some micro-states) has been a key objective of some folks.

What does Montenegro take away?  Given its location, it is unlikely that NATO would have to defend it from an attack, so it does not stretch the credibility of Article V.  That is one of the key reasons why membership for Ukraine or Georgia is a bad idea.  Adding a weak, probably corrupt Eastern European country to NATO does not change things much--NATO already has Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, so Montenegro does not change things much on that score.

So, is Montenegro's membership status entirely irrelevant?  Not at this moment.  Why?  Because it gives NATO a chance to stick it to Russia*, who has opposed the inclusion of Montenegro in the alliance.  This shows that NATO membership is not subject to Russian vetoes.  And that is a good thing. 

So, for the moment, Montenegro is slightly relevant.  And if it tried to block decision making at the North Atlantic Council, it could make some noise.  But Montenegro does not add much to the alliance nor does it really stretch the alliance.

* This article says that NATO does not allow in members that have border disputes, but that is mostly not so true.  The key for Georgia and Ukraine is that their border disputes are with Russia, and that their inclusion in NATO would stretch the credibility of the NATO commitment to the breaking point.  

Progress On One Front

Despite what I said yesterday about not liking change, arresting Ratko Mladic, who commanded the troops at Srebrenica (biggest case of mass murder in Europe since World War II), is change I can believe in.  Indeed, as the tweets of the morning indicate, not a bad May (Bin Laden, Mladic) and not a bad 2011 with Mubarak and others losing power.

Mladic was THE most wanted war criminal from the Bosnian conflict.  And his arrest, along with that of Karadzic, means that the folks in ye old Balkan Pit of Despair (the J-5's desks on the Balkans) will have to change the talking points about the "redlines" of engaging Serbia.  Serbia has satisfied a crucial set of conditions--picking up the most wanted PIFWC's (Persons Indicted for War Crimes).  I have not been following Serbia closely to see how it is doing otherwise, but this is a big, big step, probably more so than Karadzic since Mladic had strong ties to Serbia's military.  Indeed, this is a real test/accomplishment for civilian control of the military.  Being able to do this (and hopefully not getting shot for it) shows that President Tadic is in command and not the military.

I can only ponder a world in which Serbia seems far more functional than Pakistan.

Of course, Serbia has other problems than this, but it is a good day for Serbia, for Bosnia, and for the international community after way too many bad days in the first half of the 1990s.  I'll leave it to the real experts on Bosnia to judge whether this matters anymore for Bosnia's present and future.

One last thought--just before the G8?  Is this timing accidental?  Or does Serbia want to get on major powers' agenda in a good way for a change?

PIFWC's and Red Lines

A PIFWC is a person indicted for war crimes.  A red line is a key condition that must be satisfied.  Together, during my time in the Pentagon, this jargon served as a key limit on interactions with Serbia.  Unless Serbia helped with the capturing of key PIFWCs, especially Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the US would not be able to develop complete relations with Serbia, and this also applied to NATO and EU, preventing Serbia's admission.  Kardzic is now at the Hague, but the NYT reminds us that Mladic is still hiding in Serbia. 

The article talks about the tradeoffs between moving on and the commitment to human rights.  Among his many crimes, Mladic was on the scene and in command at Srebenica, where the Bosnia Serbs overran a UN safe area (oxymoron?) and selected out and executed thousands of Muslim men and boys.   

If the EU lets in Serbia without Mladic being turned over, I guess that is the last nail in conditionality's coffin.  That is, I (with Bill Ayres) have argued in my second book and elsewhere that these conditions for applicants to NATO and the EU are not as strict as often asserted.  Cyprus got into the EU without setting its border dispute.  Romania and Bulgaria got in despite having severely flawed rule of law (that is, big time corruption problems).  Letting in Serbia even if it handed over Mladic is questionable since it probably does not mean many of the other enunciated standards (border disputes, anyone?  Oh yeah, that Kosovo thing.  Never mind). 

Although the European Union halted accession talks in 2006 when Serbia failed to arrest Mr. Mladic, Dutch diplomats say they are now the lone holdouts for an arrest as a prerequisite for resuming the discussions. They are hoping to forestall action until December, when Mr. Brammertz issues his annual report evaluating Serbia’s effort in the manhunt. In the last few days, to the consternation of some E.U. officials, he has called for more aggressiveness.

Why are the Dutch holding the line on this?  Because their units were present in Srebrenic in 1995 and got to witness genocide up close and the Dutch feel a responsibility for the event, having failed to prevent or stop it.  A report about Srebrenica caused a Dutch government to collapse in 2002.  So, the Dutch take Srebrenica more seriously than the rest of the EU. 

Is it right to delay admission based on the plight of just one guy?  Perhaps not.  But perhaps it is if the pursuit is inhibited by parts of the government, raising questions about the extent of civilian control of the military.  That is an essential ingredient of democracy, so I guess it really depends not just on the sincerity of Serb promises but the quality of Serbian democracy. 

“This game has been going on now for five to six years,” a Western diplomat said. “They are either waiting for him to die — a stroke or kidney problems — or hoping to get into the European Union without doing anything.”

I actually think the conditions should matter, just that they have not.  I'd like to see Serbia kept out until it demonstrates enough control over its own security apparatus, and sending Mladic to The Hague would be a suitable demonstration.

Too Clever For Own Good

Nice to see that Ratko Mladic, genocidaire at Srebrenica among other places, is probably going to be hanging himself as well as a bunch of other folks due to his retention of heaps of data/docs.  Apparently, a little foreign aid in the form of a camera that can see through walls plus some hard work did the trick. 

The find — 18 notebooks of General Mladic’s wartime military diaries, 120 sound recordings, cellphone cards, computer memory sticks and a pile of documents — provides some of the most compelling evidence yet of the close, top-level coordination of the Bosnian Serb Army and Serbia, a connection both parties always denied.

Very nice to see some of the key lies to be contradicted:

Specialists said that the notes and recordings would link Serbia more explicitly to the war. They cite numerous meetings with Mr. Milosevic, who always insisted that the actions of the Bosnian Serb Army and of Serbian rebels in Croatia were spontaneous local events.

Hard to have truth and reconciliation work without the truth part.  Folks can still deny, deny, deny, but it will be hard for anyone to believe them.

Not only Serbs will have their sins revealed by this documents:

These include what prosecutors describe as details of secret deals between Serbs and Croats to divide Bosnia and drive the Muslims out of many areas. General Mladic recorded a meeting on Feb. 3, 1994, also including Mr. Karadzic, in which the Bosnian Croat leader Jadranko Prlic is quoted as saying: “We need to agree on 2-3 things today. Muslims are the common enemy. There are 2-3 ways to keep them down (first, militarily, by breaking their backbone).”

 Of course, we still need to capture Mladic himself.  But the info he has provided will help convict Karadzic and perhaps other war criminals, as well as maybe convincing more Serbs of their government's complicity.