Evergreen Post: Who Is the Proxy We Can Count On?

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak to a group of Global Affairs Canada (Canada's State Dept that changes its name every few years) who were taking a short course on security issues.  My job was to discuss the various flavors of multilateralism that Canada can choose from--NATO, coalitions of the willing, UN--when intervening around the world.  Of course, I talked the most about NATO since that is the one that I know the most.

Anyhow, in the course of conversation, one of "favorite" topics came up: in reaction to a question about Responsibility to Protect (a UN 'norm' that Canada promoted), I suggested that we have two choices when an R2P situation arises: regime change or come up with some kind of deal that leads to power-sharing or its alternatives.  And the regime change option is mostly dead these days because we have learned that we are good at breaking regimes but not replacing them.

I have been calling for humility lately precisely because the lessons of Afghanistan and Libya include: the local leaders appointed or sponsored or supported by the outsiders have their own agendas.  Whenever I hear folks criticize Obama and others over Syria, I ask: who should we have supported and how? What are the alternatives to ISIS or Assad?  The Kurds?  That gets complicated fast and only resolves who rules in relatively small spots, not in the entire countries of Syria or Iraq. 

The good news is that folks are more aware of this problem.  Hence an article on the next steps in Libya with the basic question being asked: who do we send the arms to?  Good start, but even if we find suitable proxies, how do know or ensure that they use the weapons in ways that we intend?

As always, we have lousy choices.  As long as we know they are lousy, we can go in with eyes wide open and try to figure out who we can support, what kind of support would be least problematic if it gets into the wrong hands (hence no ground to air missiles), and perhaps what measures to take to incentivize our "friends" to do what we would like and not do what we would dislike.

Deja Vu: Multilateral Military Cooperation Ain't Easy

I wrote a piece for the Monkey Cage today applying the book's lessons from Libya and Afghanistan to the new effort in Iraq/Syria.  Check it out!

Virtual Book Tour, U of O edition

Here is the video of my talk on the Dave and Steve book at the University of Ottawa:


Why buy the book?  This talk is just a taste of the arguments and barely gets into the cases, which are chock full of goodness.  See the back cover blurbs!

Deja Vu Prison Break Edition

The past week or so has seen dramatic prison breaks in Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan.  I cannot help but have flashbacks not just to the movies and TV shows of my youth but to more recent events: the prison breaks in Kandahar in 2008 and 2011.  Like the more recent ones, hundreds of extremists (and other folks) were freed in attacks upon the prison (break number 1) and tunnels (break number 2).  Like the recent ones, the prisons in Kandahar were in the hands of the indigenous folks.  It astonishes me that anyone would look to the US when thinking about the Abu Grhaib break since the US has been out of Iraq for a few years now.*  Same for the other places.

*  The original sin, of course, still is American--choosing to continue to use a prison that was used by Hussein to torture people and then where American abused occurred.  They should have closed that place down after Hussein fell...

In Kandahar, one could wonder about whether the Canadians should have faced some blame even though the prison was in the hands of the Afghans.  So much effort was made by the Canadians to improve the prisons--in terms of treating the prisoners better.  Not so much in keeping them in the prison.  The first break could be seen as surprising--that the Taliban could coordinate and plan better than expected.  The second?  This was not the first time someone tried to tunnel out of a prison.  Plus it was clear then as it is becoming clear in the case of the Abu Grhaib prison that there was significant inside help. 

Anyhow, as people keep talking about the three big prison breaks of July, I cannot help but think of the Saraposa prison in Kandahar.  That and whether we should use the theme from The Great Escape or from Hogan's Heroes?  This silly suggestion is actually a reminder that none of this is very new.

How Syria Is Unlike Libya

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that NATO is unlikely to intervene in Syria.  He argued that the differences between the two include:

"In Libya we took responsibility for the operation based on a United Nations mandate to protect the Libyan population against attacks from its own government...and we had active support from the countries in the region," he said.
"None of these conditions are fulfilled in Syria, there is no United Nations mandate, there is no call on NATO to intervene in Syria, even the opposition in Syria does not ask for a foreign military intervention," he said.

Of course, the lack of a UN mandate did not stop NATO when it came to Kosovo, and I am sure there are opposition folks who would like a foreign military intervention.

What else is different?  I can think of three:

• Syria is not producing the same kind of threat of refugees to Western Europe that Libya did.  No folks washing up on Italian and French shores to motivate those that fear the rise of xenophobia.
• Austerity, austerity, austerity.  The easiest way to cut budgets is not to spend on new operations.  These things get very expensive, especially if boots on the ground might be necessary.  Given the chemical weapons in Syria, more boots would be necessary than in Libya (a few SOF boots/sneakers). Hollande is proposing to cut the French military quite severely.  Sarkozy, he is not.
• Syria is after. Folks learn and adjust.  Not all learning leads to more.  Sometimes learning leads to less.  Libya has had a variety of consequences that some folks might want to avoid--Mali, Benghazi, etc.

So, these are both fruit, apples and oranges that are highly comparable, but we ought not to expect same old, same old NATO intervention.  Countries discriminate in international relations, they really do.

Non-Buyer's Remorse

There has been a lot of gnashing lately about the failure of the US/NATO to stop the flow of arms from Libya.  Well, given the "no boots on the ground" components of the UN resolutions and of the policies of the NATO countries, how could the outsiders have done anything to stop the flow of arms.  NATO has been trying to stop the flow of arms into Afghanistan for the past decade (plus or minus) without too much success, and it has had a heap of troops in the neighborhood plus much in the way of intel and air assets nearby. 

My basic point here is a simple one: the flow of arms beyond Libya is not a surprise, but very few folks were advocating a serious NATO deployment two years ago.  So, we now have some remorse that more was not done, but it was quite unrealistic to expect outsiders to do much/enough to make a dent the past few years.  It is not that we forget about Libya, it is that we didn't care enough about Libya to invest sufficient resources to affect the flow of arms.  After two American wars in the Mideast, the US was not up to another war (again, my concept of a war cap seems to apply).  NATO, exhausted by Afghanistan, was not going to send enough troops to make up for the missing Americans. Who was left?  Exactly. 

Of course, the funny thing is that when the US did focus its effort on a country, it still messed up on containing the weapons, but I blame that on Rumsfeld.

Anyhow, I am waiting for someone to figure out how one can stop the flow of weapons without putting troops on the ground.  Anyone?

Gambling at Ricks? Part 34

The Montreal Gazette is running a series of stories about "NATO's secret war against Qaddafi."  Yep, those bombs were mighty stealthy last spring and summer.  The series is asserting that NATO took sides and sought regime change, not just civilian protection.  I am shocked.  Shocked I say.  Or not as I labeled a blog post "Standard Libya Post" to address the false dichotomy of civilian protection vs regime change. 

Yes, NATO let arms reach the rebels.  Yes, members of NATO did some of the arming directly.  Yes, NATO targeted Qaddafi's forces and not the rebels.  Why is any of this all that shocking in 2012? 

There is a larger question that this story does not seem to address and something that the R2P folks need to figure out: how do you responsibily protect people from an irresponsible government?  Can you do it without changing the regime which has proven to be unable to restrain itself from killing its people?  Folks who get indicted by the International Criminal Court perhaps might not be fit to be leaders anymore, so if you are going to protect civilians, what do you do about the indicted politicians who remain in power (not just Qaddafi but thinking these days of the people running Sudan)?

R2P logically implies regime change much of the time, which is why China and Russia are opposed to applying R2P to Syria (well, this is over-determined).  Pretending otherwise is just silly.  Yes, NATO sent mixed messages because its mandate to protect was clearer than its mandate to change Libya's government.  I dare anyone to tell me how NATO could have protected the Libyans beyond the shortest term without changing the regime of Libya.  Of course, the situation now is problematic, as there was no coherent alternative government to walk in and put all the militias back in the box.  Yes, NATO ended up supporting folks who were less restrained and likely to engage in revenge.  In these situations, you have to dance with the folks who are at the dance or you can stay home. 

Which raises questions about R2P and its implementation since the realities of intervention are always going to be far from pristine--siding with militias, supporting regime change, using violence.

And Libya was the easy case, by the way.

Roland Paris is Smart (not news)

Roland Paris, soon to be a neighbor (I am moving his way), is a sharp guy, and has posted in various places some interesting stuff, including this look back at the NATO effort over Libya.  I don't always agree with him, but that is because I tend to be a stubborn and agreement is boring.

Anyhow, a couple things to add to his analysis:

First, regarding his third asterisk: Russia learned from its mistake, just as the USSR learned not to boycott UN Security Council meetings when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950.  Russia is not going to let any resolution that authorizes force against any country for R2P kinds of stuff anymore.  NATO/UK/France/US got their one shot.  Lesson learned.  Oh, and China learned the same lesson.

Second, Roland over-estimates the intra-NATO struggling towards the end of the campaign.  Yes, countries wobbled, but once the conflict becomes defined as "we need to do this not so much for country x, but for the credibility/survival/future of NATO," there is enough rallying of support to continue and even escalate (US starts making ground campaign noises in June 1999).  So, NATO permits much alliance discord but sallys onward anyway.

The funny thing on this second point is that Liberal IR types (especially institutionalists) tend to argue that institutions become not just the means but the ends of policy.  NATO is a perfect example of this.  So, does that make me a better Liberal than Roland?  Certainly not, just a snarkier one.

Short Memories and Forgotten Realities

This piece in the German press suggests that Canadians are flummoxed by the German stances in Afghanistan and Libya.  The idea is that the Canadians did lots of heavy lifting and risk-taking and the Germans did not do so much, entirely opting out of Libya.

There is some truth to all of this, but the piece ignores a few key realities:

• Canada did not pay the highest price per capital in Afghanistan.  That would be the Danes, followed by Estonia and then the Brits. 
• More importantly, the Canadians did have significant restrictions on their forces deployed to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, and before that in missions elsewhere (Bosnia).  So, Canada is not new to the Caveat game.  
• Yet even more importantly, Canada now has forces in Afghanistan that are far more restricted than the Germans--a training mission that keeps the Forces behind the wire in and near Kabul, Herat and up north.  So, it is kind of funny that a country that pulled out early and only came back to a highly restricted mission is smug about the Germans, especially when:
• The Germans did evolve over time do to more, to risk more.  While German troops are still not operating in the hardest parts of Afghanistan (South and East), the North has gotten more challenging and the folks back in Berlin have given some more discretion to the troops on the ground to engage in combat.  
• However, Germany did not participate in the Libya mission, even pulling out its contribution to NATO's AWACS planes (they compensated by providing more help to the AWACS flying over Afghanistan, but still this was challenging given the leading German role in the NATO AWACS program).

So, Canada did sacrifice a great deal and can be proud of the contributions it made, but this is not particularly good time to be too critical of other countries' caveats and other limitations in Afghanistan.

The Song Remains the Same

No, not that one--this one: You Can't Always Get What You Want.  David Rieff, among others, is unhappy with how R2P played out over the skies of Libya.  I never really followed the origins of R2P, but I have to ask those who want the world to address cases where states do not treat their citiziens responsibly: how can one enforce R2P without regime change? 

How can abusive governments credibly commit to treating their populations better?  How can the international community compel abusive regimes without the use of force?  Unless the targeted population is potentially secessionist a la Kosovo or South Sudan, in which case the outsiders can facilitate secession, how do you get an irresponsible government to become responsible?  Particularly if there is a record of broken promises?  Thus, R2P logically implies regime change. 

Of course, the bigger problem is that countries will not do intervene everywhere governments are being irresponsible.  So, if you think R2P is de-legitimatized if it is applied selectively,  then R2P was doomed at birth.  Countries do not have infinite capabilities, attention and interest.  Yes, intervention occurred in Libya because Europeans had greater interest and because it was easier than elsewhere.  No intervention for Syria or Yemen, and under-intervention in Congo/Sudan.  So, yes, countries discriminate in International Relations.  We have known that since 2002.  No principle will be consistently applied to every case. 

R2P might still be relevant, rather than epiphenomenal, as this justification for intervention might create larger constituencies in support of intervention and cement existing coalitions supporting involvement due to other interests.

Of course, at the end of the day, I am a norm-skeptic, but I find this gnashing by R2P fans about Libya to be self-unserving.

So Soon They Forget

I have been slow in catching up on the coverage of the Canadian effort over the skies of Libya.  But I just had to react when I saw this piece.  It addresses a key theme--the influence Canada gets when it "punches above its weight" in NATO missions (yes, do drink). 

But the authors, John Ibbitson and Daniel Leblanc, then make a big mistake:

With a Canadian general in charge, Canada couldn’t have red-carded missions even if it wanted to, which is why Canadian CF-18 pilots often found themselves in the most dangerous skies.

Ask Rick Hillier about this.  I am sure he would be steamed.  In 2004, Hillier, then a Lieutenant General, was the Canadian who commanded the entire NATO effort in Afghanistan as COMISAF (commander of ISAF).  He did not control the Canadian contingent that was deployed at the same time.  He would have to ask a Canadian colonel if he wanted the Canadians to do anything, and, frequently the Colonel would say no.  At the time, the ground forces deployed from Canada to Bosnia and Afghanistan had very restrictive rules--caveats--and so Canadians earned the nickname "CANTBATs" (as opposed to CANBAT for Canadian Battalion) for saying no frequently.

When I interviewed Major General Pete Devlin (now Lt.General Devlin, head of the Canadian army) about his experience as the NATO commander of the forces in Kabul, he rated the Canadians as being in the middle tier when ranking countries by reliability.  Again, this was when Hillier was commanding ISAF.

So, to be clear, just having a command role does not mean that a country has less restrictions (um, ask the Germans about that).

This is your media error correction piece of the day.

Whose Boots on What Ground?

Countries often rely on Special Operations Forces [SOF] not just because these folks are capable but because they are covered in secret sauce.  Well, I have had an on-going discussion with some folks on twitter as a result of a statement by the Spanish Minister of Defence:

Spanish Defence Minister Carme Chacon on Tuesday said Spain would withdraw its troops from Libya as soon as Nato formally announced the end of its operations there. “As soon as Nato formally confirms the end of this operation, Spanish assets will be immediately pulled back to Spanish territory,” she told a press conference.  “This means that all the troops that we have today in Libyan territory will be in Spain before October 31,” she added. “The efforts carried out during these seven months have borne fruit,” Chacon said.

Does this mean that Spain had some SOF in Libya or that this was a mistake, as she was referring to the planes flying out of Sardinia and the troops on Sardinia supporting the sorties?  We have no idea since SOF guys can be quiet and secret.

I would be surprised if Spain had SOF on the ground since it never seemed to be enthusiastic about the mission--Spain did not drop bombs on Libya as far as we can tell, unlike the ambivalent Italians that started out refusing to bomb but then got more invested in the outcome, including the deployment of SOF.  Still, sending SOF is somewhat less risky/less costly/more likely for a hesitant country since the secret sauce allows for deniability. 

Update:  This story clarifies the Spanish situation.  Not only no boots but nice rhetoric to suggest that only 30% of the flights were air strikes so that the effort elsewhere (no fly zone,embargo) was heaps of heavy lifting:

The Minister for Defence said that of all the efforts undertaken by NATO on this operation, only 30% of the missions were launched to neutralise terrestrial targets. The remaining 70% of the missions were related to establishing and maintaining the no-fly zone and the naval arms and mercenaries embargo on Libya. "And the Spanish contribution to these objectives was considerable", said Carme Chacón.

What is the Spanish for punching above one's weight?  Insert smiley face here.  So, Spain is quick to announce a withdrawal of forces that did not take part in the kinetic side of things but in a statement that emphasizes the contribution. 

I am back to feeling comfortable about how predictable this is playing out.

NATO's Record: Better Than Expected

There has been an emerging discussion on twitter about whether Qaddafi's death and the overthrow of his government counts as a NATO success.   Academics then have to ponder what success looks like--output, effects or outcomes (thanks, Stephanie C.).  Output would be things like air strikes.  Effects would be things broken.  Outcomes is where the game is at--and are related to the goals of the effort.
 
To cut to the chase, let's focus solely on immediate outcomes, with the long term up for grabs.  That is, we cannot say whether Libya will be a happy and stable place in one, five or ten years.  Besides, we need to be fair to the goals of the operation: protect civilians/regime change.

In that narrow formulation, NATO, by aiding the rebels, achieved its goal of changing the government of Libya and protecting many (not all of the citizens) from Qaddafi's threats.  And this would be NATO's fourth big win of the post-Cold War era:

• NATO bombing (not UN) and IFOR/SFOR ended the Bosnian wars and kept the peace until NATO left (well, the US and Canada left), letting the EU take over.
• NATO bombing (not UN blessed) and KFOR stopped the massacres of Kosovar Albanians and kept the peace since, with a few bumps along the way.  Now, we can ponder whether this was a good or bad thing, as the KLA and its successors did not have clean hands.  But the goal was to impose an agreement on Serbia.  Three months later: voila.
• NATO intercedes quickly in a brewing conflict in Macedonia between Albanians and Macedonians, providing the military cover for a EU monitoring mission and some incentives for respecting the Ohrid accords.
• NATO bombs Libyan targets in support of rebels, leading to regime change.

Two other NATO ops are not yet code-able: Afghanistan and piracy.  NATO may or may not fail in Afghanistan, depending on whether Afghanistan is at all ready in 2014 (not betting on it).  Of course, the four successes can be outweighed by a big failure in Afghanistan, but comparisons might suggest that NATO, although dysfunctional in a variety of ways, can still function enough to make a difference.  Indeed, NATO did make a big difference where other multilateral organizations have failed (UN, EC to be quite specific).  Piracy is going to be on of those "war on drugs" kind of things--hard to be successful at eliminating a form of behavior.

So, we can think about the similarities and differences among these apples and oranges.  Two were preventative--Macedonia and Libya.  In four of the five, NATO pretty clearly took sides--just not in Macedonia so much.  One involved serious counter-insurgency (Afghanistan), two involved supporting an insurgency (Kosovo, Libya), and two involved enforcing a peace agreement (Bosnia, Macedonia). The one with the most significant commitment in terms of $$, casualties and general willingness to engage in a ground campaign--Afghanistan--is, counter to our notions about resolve and commitment, least successful thus far.

Anyhow, NATO is 4 and 0 in its post-cold war missions with two missions yet to be decided, but even a 4-2 record will still be better than my media record of this week where both interviews paid little attention to the NATO-related script and asked questions about Libyan politics, of which I know bumpkus.

Rumors of His Death Have Not Been Exaggerated

Qaddafi has lost his contest with Hussein and Bin Laden for hiding the longest from US/Allied/Local searches.  Lots of folks will make much of this event, as they should.  I have already seen a great tweet/blogpost by Spencer Ackerman predicting everyone's responses.

What would my readers predict of me?  Woohoo?  Well, sure.  That NATO made a difference despite being hamstrung by the dynamics of coalitional bargaining within and between countries?  Indeed.  That much of the effort and all of the sacrifices (except for tax $$) were paid by Libyans?  Yes.

What does Libya teach us about NATO that we didn't know before?  Given that I have spent a few years on NATO at war in Afghanistan, the Libyan experience more confirms my beliefs (confirmation bias alert!) than teaches me anything new.  And experts on Kosovo might say that Afghanistan just made things clearer.

We did see how xenophobia can cause even a fragile coalition government to become more enthusiastic about a military mission--Italy's increased assertiveness as 2011 went on.  We also saw that an absence of government (Belgium on day 4xx of caretaker government) means that no veto points means assertive efforts, at least here.

Once again, the fear that NATO might fail re-energized efforts and commitment so that NATO would not fail (with lots of help from the Libyan rebels).  I ended up making a claim yesterday in class that none of the places NATO has spent heaps of dollars, lives and time really matter that much intrinsically.  Bosnia became a NATO mission not because the US cared about Bosnia but that it cared about NATO.  Folks kept on the Kosovo mission for fear of NATO failure.  Every NATO member showed up to some degree in Afghanistan not because they cared about Afghanistan but because they cared about NATO.  Libya shows that NATO matters in that countries needed NATO legitimacy to participate.  And the US wavering efforts from beginning to end really hinged on how much the US cared about the alliance more so than the lives of folks in Libya.  Which does distinguish Libya, where NATO became relevant, from Syria and Yemen.  Once NATO countries got involved in Libya, the stakes for the US and lots of other countries changed.  France and the UK forced others to get involved via NATO.

And, yes, NATO also matters because the doing of seven or eight months of patrols and strikes and refueling and intel sharing and all the rest requires heaps of military interoperability.  Political interoperability may vary across the alliance, but the practice of coalition warfare requires, well, heaps of practice.  NATO for sixty years has meant that the militaries are more or less in tune with each other.  As we have seen yet again with no stories of mid-air refueling mishaps, for example.

Qaddafi is gone, raising questions about Libya's future.  I am actually pretty confident that NATO's future will be ... more of the same.

A Warning We Should All Heed But Will Not

From http://yfrog.com/kll8olgj

My only real question with this: English?  How many folks with guns read English in Tripoli?

Late Summer Tour of NATO

Happy NATO Day!  Okay, this is not an anniversary of anything NATO-esque.  But heaps of posts a-twitter about NATO, its members and so on.  So, some semi-random shots at some semi-random NATO members and NATO in general.

First, France is the best-est ally ever!  Lots of people linking to this article.  Yes, the Libyan adventure certainly raises France's profile as an active contributor, assertive military and the rest.  But to be fair to the French (yes, completely out of character for me, given how easy it is to make jokes in my big lecture class), the Libyan crisis is not the first time that the French have been assertive. 
       During the Afghanistan war (which, by the way, is still an on-going NATO mission), France moved from being relatively restricted to being quite willing to take risks.  When Sarkozy replaced Chirac, we all got a NATO-friendly (to say the least) President.  Sarkozy moved some and then nearly all of French combat forces from the safety of Kabul to the more dangerous areas of Kapisa. 
        Postwar French have never been pacifists--they just have been known for pursuring their own interests.  A lot of those interests were in Africa, with Qaddafi serving as a critical obstacle to French ambitions.  So, the French are so very bold now, taking the lead in the effort, even willing go without NATO.  Still a fun time and an interesting contrast to:

Second, the Germans look more feeble than ever, when the Foreign Minister (for at least a few more days) Westervelle* said that Qaddafi is falling due to economic sanctions.  Now, we have German politicians across the spectrum from Helmut Kohl to Joshcka Fischer saying that Westerwelle is as bad a foreign minister as Colin Powell Condi Rice they can imagine. 

*Unless you are Italy, having a Foreign Minister named Guido is always going to raise questions about credibility.

Here is Fischer's first question and answer:

SPIEGEL: What is it about Germany's current foreign policy and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle that bothers you?
Fischer: Pretty much everything. As the former foreign minister myself, the lack of fundamental convictions pains me. This is fundamentally much worse than losing your compass. We are being governed by those who have lost touch with reality and are denying what's obvious to everyone else.

I am sorry, but Fischer is being oblique.  I really wish he could open up and say what he is really thinking.  Fischer then goes on:

No, the behavior of Germany's government during the Libya conflict, its abstention in the UN Security Council (vote in March on whether to impose a no-fly zone in Libya), was a one-of-a-kind debacle and perhaps the biggest foreign policy debacle since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. Our country's standing in the world has been significantly damaged.

Okay.  Now, Fischer is being a bit less opaque.  Actually, this entire interview makes me want to vote for the guy.  Anyhow moving on:

Third, I found this on twitter: "Dutch Defence Minister calls for pooling and sharing military capabilities in Europe."  Sure, smaller means working harder and smarter.  Sharing and pooling would be smart, but we can only pool and share with countries that will release the forces (troops, planes, ships, whatever) to the multinational effort with few conditions.  That is: NO CAVEATS and few requirements for phone calls home for permission. 
Maybe it is not wise to write here one of the conclusions for the forthcoming book on NATO and Afghanistan, but one of the implications of the Afghanistan experience (and of the Libyan one and so on) is that countries will rarely give up national control of their militaries even when they are delegated to the most institutionalized, robust, interoperable alliance on the planet.  So, if you build a military so that it can only do certain things and needs to depend on others to fill critical gaps, you have to gamble that when you are deployed, you will be partnered with countries that have pretty loose rules.  Otherwise, you might be asking for, say, helicopters to extract your troops from a battle but the helo pilot has rules about not being close to the battle or it being night-time or whatever.  You cannot pool if the other guy cannot be counted on to pool right back. 

No wonder Napoleon apparently said: I would rather fight a coalition than be in one.  On the other hand, he lost to a series of coalitions, right?  So, there is really no alternative for the Dutch or the Germans or the Canadians or, with their latest cuts, the French and the British, to working together.  But don't expect it to be easy, simple or efficient.

Defense budget cuts make sharing and specialization sensible.  The politics of participating in alliance warfare make sharing and specialization very, very problematic. 

SOF, NATO, and the 140 Character Problem

I have been having a twitter conversation with Roland Paris about the presence of special operations forces [SOF] on the ground in Libya that are from NATO member countries (UK, France) but not part of the NATO effort.  Roland suggested that this was essentially a fudge so that NATO folks could claim that NATO has no ground troops.  I pushed back, saying that there is more than symbolism here since countries will often not want to put some units under NATO, especially SOF, because they want to retain command and control of these folks.

In Afghanistan, the numbers each country has deployed does not match up neatly with the NATO figures for all kinds of reasons, but especially because countries will not put all of the troops in theater under NATO command.  Yes, countries do put some SOF under NATO command (having talked to an Aussie who served as ISAF SOF commander last year, I do know that he had some folks to command), but not all of them.  The most obvious instance would, of course, be the SEALs who took out Bin Laden, as they did fly from Afghanistan.  These guys and dog were not under NATO command, and I would hazard a guess that while many US SOF have been under NATO command, few of the top echelon folks ever have been.  Indeed, one of the messes in the spaghetti chart that is the command structure in Afghanistan has been the separate line from Special Operations Command back in the US to the special operators in Afghanistan.  That was supposed to have been simplified under LTG Rodriguez, but it is my semi-informed guess that this was not entirely fixed. 

In Bosnia, I know that there were American SOF doing stuff that was not under NATO command (no specifics since this is an unclassified channel), and they were commanded by the senior Americans under their American hats, not their NATO hats.  Indeed, the current Dave and Steve project started out pondering the dynamics of dual-hatting--how officers will have to report to two different chains of command and how they manage that.  Anyhow, SOF folks in Bosnia clearly operated under the American chain, even though there was no need for optics to confuse the situation since there were at the start 25000 American boots on the ground for all to see.

Anyhow, when NATO sends out a mission to someplace (Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Libya), it has to come up with a set of rules that all members to which all members must agree.  I am not sure how the OPLAN and such worked for the Libyan operation, but the general standard operating procedure has tended to have countries put only some/most of their troops under NATO command and control and reserve others for national command and control for situations/realities where they expect NATO rules to be less convenient.  Or just that they want to have additional discretion about how their folks are used. 

In the Libyan case, NATO agreed to deploy air and sea power.  Countries wanting to do more would have to do it on their own--France and the UK.  NATO has much experience "de-conflicting" the nationally controlled SOF and the multilaterally controlled everyone else.  So, they can and do communicate with each other even if legislators back home insist on caveats that limit cooperation between them (for Afghanistan, politicians wanted to draw a distinction between US-led ad hoc Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO-led, UN-blessed multilateral adventure that is ISAF).

While it is certainly true that is allows NATO to deny having troops on the ground (one of the key joys of SOF is their plausible deniability), I don't think this was the intent of deploying French and British SOF and not NATO SOF.  I think at every step of this operation, the French in particular but also the British have shown more enthusiasm than anyone else, so they have been willing to do more than their NATO pals.

While it may look like a dodge to some (like Roland), this is a pattern that has happened again and again even when the rest of NATO was willing to throw in tens of thousands of troops.  So, I think I can explain a constant pattern of behavior with a constant--the way NATO and its members always operate--rather than explaining a constant with something that varies in this case--the desire to avoid appearing to have boots on the ground.  While there are many differences among the various NATO operations, there has been some significant continuity as well, including having SOF on the ground controlled by their home countries and not under the command of NATO.

Short Attention Spans ... What?

Ok, we have been warned not to make predictions.  Let me make a few anyway. 

Unless Qaddafi is found, the Libya story will face from North American media outlets, as the focus turns to the breakup of Derek Jeter and Minka Kelly Hurricane Irene.  East Coast bias in US media is always present, but is amplified when NYC, Boston, and DC are threatened.  Already my facebook status feed has shifted from Libya to hurricane preparations.  I never did expect the class flirt from my old high school to become an expert on Hurricane preparation, but she has lived in Florida long enough to go through this enough times.

And Irene, if it is not quite as bad as it is feared, will soon be overcome in media by 9/11 anniversaries.  I did my first few interviews yesterday, and have already prepared a column for Currrent Intelligence (probably to be posted in the first week of September). 

The media has a short attention span and so do we (nobody is forcing my FB friends to shift their focus).  Plus local emergencies will, of course, crowd out distant crises.  The strange part will be the obsession about a round number (10) that gives more weight to an historical event than to current ones. 

I am not saying we should not mark the anniversary, and I will be thinking about that day and year much over the next couple of weeks (well, that and where to find good beer while in Seattle for the annual American Political Science Assn meeting).  I am just noting that we have a short attention span, and there are a few distractions up ahead from the events in Libya.  So, squeeze out the blog posts, tweets, op-eds and such now because the focus will be turning away from Libya if I know my international crises media coverage.

Let the Credit Taking/Blame Casting Begin

With the fall of Tripoli, it is time for everyone to take credit and cast blame.  There is a triumphant piece in the National Post where the Canadians take credit for providing a disproportionate contribution to the bombing effort.  Depending on what one considers to be the denominator of the ratio of x/y to determine proportionality, nearly every country that dropped bombs on Libya could probably be viewed as providing more than it share with the possible exceptions of the US, Italy, and maybe the UK.

Clearly, the Danes, Norwegians (who re-deployed their planes back home in August), and the Belgians (assertive defense policies are easier when one does not have a government?) played a bigger role than their population sizes, defense budgets or expectations would have predicted.  And, yes, the Canadians, too.  France's 1/3 of the load certainty is punching above its weight, to use the phrase everyone uses in these circumstances.  Italy's 10% or so and Britain's 10% or so (before the last few weeks) are probably about right for the larger economies/populations/militaries of Europe.  The US did not do as much as folks ordinarily expect but given its relative military power, it certainly carried a very significant load, particularly providing much of the stuff needed to facilitate the bombing--intel, communications, satellites, re-fueling, ammunition, etc.

It seems that Qatar really punched above its weight with Special Operations types helping the rebels.

The disproportionalities are not only a function of who gave but who did not--Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and most of the East European members of NATO. 

Given this pattern, it is fun to see both those pieces that are triumphant about NATO by past NATO officials (Abshire) and scathing about the European Union which once again failed to be relevant in a crisis near Europe.  Actually, there has been lots of debate over the past few days about NATO's value.  It is more than just that a handful of Europeans and the Americans joined France and Britain in their quest.  NATO as an institution provided all kinds of experience, practices, assets, headquarters, personnel and more to provide the glue among the many planes, ships, and other forces in the region so that the planes could reach Libya and then hit rather precisely the targets that had been identified (and still are being identified).  But NATO has never been a place where all countries agree all the time, as the above piece by Abshire remind us.  Burden-sharing always has been and always will be a topic if debate when you have sovereign countries with disparate interests trying to agree to do something.  Someone should write a book about this .... perhaps to be published in the next year (yes, Dave and Steve are nearly done, but now must revise conclusion to address Libya).

And the EU, well, I have long been a Euro-skeptic, especially when it comes to defense issues.  Not much more to say than the piece linked above. 

Of course, the real burden-sharing/avoiding will be in the days ahead--who does what in post-Qaddafi Libya?  The experts (Marc Lynch and others) want NATO out of it, and I think NATO is likely to agree--exhausted by Afghanistan.  But the African Union is not a serious alternative.  We may see stabilization by the willing and perhaps not even an institutional figleaf.  No predictions yet thanks to Rathbun's admonition.  At least, not until I forget his post.

Libya and a War of Definitions

I tend to be less precise and less insistent about definitions than some folks, but I do want to make a few un-bold assertions about the state of play in Libya (and nearby) based on my understandings of the key concepts.

First, the war is, indeed, a civil war.  Some folks want to call it something else like a rebellion or a revolution (more on that in a second), but a civil war, to most scholars, involves two-sided combat between combatants within a country.  Usually, one of the combatants is the government.  If only one side is killing the other, as in mass killings and/or genocide, then it is not a civil war.  Perhaps the Libyan conflict started out as a mass killing, in an effort to repress the protestors, but the rebels have been fighting back, killing Qaddafy's troops for about six months now.  If one wants to get supra-technical, the usual standard is 1,000 battle deaths.  No doubt that we are beyond that. 

Second, it is far from clear that this will produce a revolution.  I think I might have mentioned this last spring at some point, but, in my mind, a revolution involves more than just a change in leadership.  We do not know yet what the form of the new government in Libya will be.  The constitution of the rebels is vague at best, and will only be worth more than the paper if folks follow through.  Looking at the other "revolutions" of the Arab Spring, it is not clear yet that significant political change will be occurring.  Egypt is still led by its military, so thus far we would code that case as a coup d'etat and not a revolution. If we want to go all Skocpol on this, a revolution involves changes in the shape of society and how government changes to match.  Just changing the guys at the top is not sufficient for a revolution and perhaps not even really for regime change, which suggests a change in the type of political system, not just the two or three goons at the top.

We need to be realistic and patient (six months from beginning to end of the civil war would not be a bad outcome at all).  We do not know what will emerge here and how long whatever does emerge will last.

This is the end of the beginning, as they say.