Coalitions of the Standing Around

Today, President Obama is having a press conference on the anti-IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh War.  It is good timing for me as I am finishing a paper that looks at the coalition.  As always, the coalition is claimed to be bigger than it really is:

“Our 66-member coalition, including Arab partners, is on the offensive.”-@POTUS. https://t.co/7lR4tSfJu1 pic.twitter.com/dWDDFZdexs

— WH National Security (@NSC44) April 13, 2016

My task in the paper is to not just note that only 22 countries are doing something in the theatre, but to explain the variation among the contributors.  I am not going to give away my findings, but I will provide one hint:

The Dave and Steve explanation of multilateral military operations does so-so.

Anyhow, back to the press conference, where we give heaps of kudos to countries doing the least they can do or even less than that.

Canada is Left Out?

Last night, we learned that there is going to be a meeting about the future of the anti-ISIS effort by the significant contributors to the current effort, and Canada is apparently not invited.  The natural questions to ask are: why and so what?  It is easier to answer the second than the first, but I will try my hand at both.

Before starting out, one thing needs to be clear: this is not the first time Canada has been left out of a major meeting aimed at figuring out the future of an allied effort.  In 2002, there was a meeting of the "Quint" to set NATO's agenda about the future of the various Balkan missions (Bosnia/Kosovo/Macedonia).  The Quint included the five largest providers of troops--US, UK, France, Italy and Germany.  During Afghanistan, things had changed quite a bit as it was no longer about the size of the force but where the countries' troops were and what they were doing.  As a result of Canada's key commitment, Canada was at the table and some of the bigger contributors were either not invited or simply not that relevant (Italy, Germany).

With that caveat in mind--that this is nothing new, what is going on now?  My first question, when I heard the news, was were the Australians invited?  Why?  Because their force posture is not that different at the current moment.  While considered the second largest after the US, it is composed of 300 soldiers, Special Operations Forces, six F/A-18s, a tanker and an airborne warning and control aircraft.  Canada has a similar air package--six CF-18s, a tanker and two Aurora recon planes--69 or so SOF, and heaps of logistics people but no other soldiers.  Basically, if it is about current commitment, then the Canadians should be there.  And then I learned the Dutch were also going to this meeting, and they have 8 F-16s but not much else as far as I can tell.

So, yes, there is something going here besides the old Balkan rules about the size of the deployment.  Everyone is pointing to the US being upset about Trudeau's commitment to pull out the CF-18s, including Matthew Fisher who is citing highly placed sources in Europe.

@smsaideman @CTVMercedes Oz,Italy,Holland,Germany,UK,France.Solid Euro source says US much angrier over CF18 withdrawal than is acknowledged

— Matthew Fisher (@mfisheroverseas) January 19, 2016

I had not heard that the US was this miffed.  I don't remember similar upset when Canada pulled out of the much more significant contribution in Kandahar.  But if the US is this upset, I am still surprised that it would exclude Canada, since the Canadian commitment decision is still in the air.  Excluding Canada might lead to a much smaller, less helpful Canadian training mission.  Still, given that other similar players are included, it does seem likely that the exclusion here is about the Cf-18s and perhaps that the Canadian government has taken longer to figure out the next steps than its allies would like.

How significant is this exclusion?  Not much and very.  Not much since Canada was always going to be in the position of a strategy taker and not a strategy maker in this campaign--the contribution was always going to be small and risk averse, so either the old Balkan rules or the newer Afghanistan rules of who matters would limit how much the Canadians would be heard.  Very in that it is a sign that the US-Canadian relationship is strained, even if the Prime Minister is about to have a state dinner with the American President.  It will ramp up criticism of the government--that the honeymoon is over.  That latter part, of course, we knew already.

Given that this government promised to improve relations with the US after years of Harper hectoring about pipelines, this is not a good start.  Should the government have made a faster decision?  I am not sure, since calls for passion and impatience are just, um, dumb, and this government had to spend its first month running off to four summits.  Still, figuring out a training mission is on the low end of the complexity spectrum.  Harper announced one in 2010 with little of the homework actually being done--Kabul only became Kabul-centric ultimately.  So, this government could have made some kind of decision and figured out some of the details later.

In sum, this dynamic of excluding lesser players from the strategy sessions is not new, Canada has been excluded before, but this is still pretty strange and quite unfortunate.  Trudeau and his team have some explaining to do....

Oh, and I had been downplaying the significance of the CF-18 pullout on US-Canadian relations.  I am starting to think I was wrong about that.

Predicting Canada's Next Moves in Mideast

Lots and lots of speculation about what the new Canadian government will contribute to the anti-ISIS mission.  I have speculated much myself.  The Globe and Mail has a nice list of options that have been given to the Prime Minister/Defence Minister/cabinet:

1. Retaining surveillance and refuelling aircraft in Kuwait;
2. Sending up to 150 special forces to train Kurdish peshmerga fighters;
3. Using regular Canadian army trainers for Iraqi security forces;
4. Training Iraqi troops in nearby Jordan;
5. Training Iraqi police and increasing humanitarian assistance;
6. Using elite Joint Task Force 2 commandos in black ops in Iraq and Syria like Canada did in Afghanistan.

The first option, one that I have been promoting, seems to be a done deal as the article suggests, especially this is the one option that the US has specifically requested. 

The second option is somewhat likely, as the Kurdish fighters have been pretty successful.  However, we may be nearing the point in the conflict where the Kurds are not going to be that relevant.  How so?  They are interested in their territory and not much further, and they have been mostly successful at retaking the territory ISIS had grabbed.  So, training more Kurds might be a sympatico kind of thing to do, but it is unlikely to lead to ISIS losing more ground in the future. 

The third option is regular army trainers for the Iraqi forces?  This fits what the Canadians did in Afghanistan, and it is the piece of the puzzle that needs perhaps the most work.  That is, if ISIS is going to be pushed and kept out of Iraq, it is going to be done by the Iraqi security forces.  On the other hand, whatever success the Iraqi forces have hinges on the Iraqi government.  Um, yeah.

The fourth option is training in Jordan?  Safer but seems to add more complexity to the effort.  The forces to be trained reside in Iraq, so moving them to Jordan just seems strange.  So, no on that one.

The fifth is training Iraqi police and humanitarian assistance.  Maybe and yes.  The latter meets the campaign rhetoric quite well.  The former?  So very hard to attain any degree of sustainable success.  Hugely important, but the political context may be even more important for this than for the military.  Hmmm.

Finally, more SOF stuff?  Probably not.  Risky, heaps of potential news stories and fights in Question Period if things go awry.  Plus if this government is shy of combat (despite the fact that every one of these options, including police training, facilitates combat by others), then doing SOF stuff is just too kinetic for them. 

So, my best guess is 1, 2, and 5.  What would I recommend?   1, 3, 5: planes, training and training.  These are where Canada can make significant contributions for the ISIS war and help the allies.  2 is too late, I think.  4 is trying to do the right thing in the wrong way.  6 is just more than this government is going to want to do. 

Discussing Post-Paris in Toronto: Ye Olde Students Rock

I went to Toronto yesterday to be part of a panel on the events in Paris and the reactions to it.  Most of my reactions to this event have to do with my old students:

• Within five seconds of arriving in the room, I got to talk to a former research assistant from my McGill days.  She was part of a large team that coded diaspora data, and it was great not just to see her but hear a bit about her internship at the Canada's Embassy to Libya, currently located in Tunisia.
• The next student up was one from my last big Intro class, who is now finishing her MA at Munk.  She had nice things to say about how my class set her on this path, which was really nice to hear even though I know that IR is simply inherently interesting.
• My wife informed me that whenever she bumped into a student from my Intro to IR class (the joy of having a distinctive last name meant that the students would be pretty certain she was Mrs. Spew/Mrs. Prof of Intro to IR), they all cited the same lecture--apples and oranges.  My question, of course, is: do they remember the point of that lecture?  Hmmm.

• The next student was, of course, Aisha Ahmad, a former Phd student of mine, who now teaches at U of Toronto.  She wrote a terrific piece for the Globe and Mail (web now, print maybe this weekend or Monday), arguing that the refugees play an important role in this battle with ISIS, and the smart way to fight ISIS is to accept these refugees.  It would undermine their ideology, their recruitment base, and their financing.  Just a sharp argument articulately made.  And then, of course, she was the one with the best line of the night:

Ahmad: take away #ISIS territory and it "starts to look like every other crappy #jihadi org." in the world #MunkTalks

— CERES at Munk School (@CERESMunk) November 21, 2015

The other panelists--Randall Henson of U of T Poli Sci, Paul Cohen of U of T History, Lorne Dawson of U of Waterloo Sociology, and Stephen Toope, Director of Munk--all had stuff to say that was incisive and made me think seriously about the past week's events and where to go from here.

One other thing: I loved, loved, loved the organization of the event.  The key pieces were:

• Nice array of people: an IR guy (as the NATO guy, I thought I would not have much to say but then I realized I was an IR/Canadian defence guy), a Europeanist, a Islamist politics expert, a sociologist who works on radicalization, an historian, and an international law prof.  We didn't repeat each other much, contradicted each other only sometimes but provided many different angles on the issue.
• We each spoke for only five minutes so that max time could be dedicated to answering question.  We probably could have gone on for another half hour as there were plenty of questions we could have still addressed.
• The various assistants collected questions from the audience on cards they were given, and tweets were also transcribed onto these cards.  Toope then organized the cards and would use a few to ask a thematic question that some of us could address briefly.  This was so smart because:
• It avoided the speechifying problem where folks make long-winded statements that are more comments than questions.
• It avoided the audience just asking one or two panelists questions.
• It integrated the tweets well.
• It keep things moving.

I will definitely be stealing this idea.

Anyhow, always great to see former students, always great to have a dynamic interchange of ideas, and always confused about the next steps ahead.

Oh, and I had the chance to hang out with a friend of mine who went to the same grad school as me but about 15 years later.  Good beer, very good poutine, and great company.