Is It a Civil War? Not Yet

 Things are truly awful in the US, so is this the time to get pedantic?  Well, maybe.  I posted on bluesky that I was more worried about events in Minnesota than in/re Greenland.

 

In the ensuing discussion, I got some pushback--that the US is already in a civil war and any suggestion that it isn't means that I am minimizing what is going on here.  This is giving me flashbacks to the Jan 6 is a coup or not a coup arguments.  In the aftermath, I argued that the events of January 6th were an insurrection and, yes, an autogolpe (self-coup) and not a coup d'etat.  The latter has two dynamics that were not present that day--the involvement of significant elements of the coercive arms of the state (military, secret police, etc) and an effort to change who is in power.  I argued that this put the attention in the wrong places as the focus should have been on the White House and Congress, not the military.

This time?  Why is this not a civil war?  Again, two key ingredients are not yet present with one more important than the other.  First and not quite as important: scale.  Thus far, the violence is quite limited even as it is appalling and awful.  Civil wars are large scale things, and, yes, we social scientists usually use numbers to distinguish between categories of events.  For inter-state wars, we tend to use 1000 battle deaths.  For civil wars, we use all kinds of numbers, but even if we set it as low as 25, I am not sure we are there yet.  Second, and most importantly, civil wars are two-way affairs (or more so, as we saw in Bosnia and Syria and elsewhere), and the violence in the US has been an entirely one-sided thing--the state is engaging in much violence against protestors, but the other side of this, the anti-Trump, anti-ICE forces are not using any significant violence against the government's forces .... thus far.  

Which makes what is happening in Minnesota, Chicago, Portland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere state repression (you can call it state terrorism). And that is truly awful and part of the US becoming an autocracy (although democracies repress as well).  Again, this is important for both social science reasons and accountability reasons.  For political scientists, it allows us to compare this to similar events in the American history and around the world (Tianamen Square?) to note key dynamics and make predictions and policy recommendations.  For accountability, calling it a civil war suggests there are two sides that may have some responsibility here.  And, damn it, we know that this is being entirely driven by Trump and his regime.  The violence is very one-sided, with all of the responsibility for the bloodshed in the hands of Trump, ICE/DHS, and the Republicans (as they hold power in the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court).  

Does this mean this is not serious, that I am minimizing the event?  I sure as hell don't think so--when the power of the state is being used to kill and kidnap and deport without any due process, so very capriciously and so much by one ethnic group aimed at others, it is very, very serious indeed.

If people want to use "civil war" for rhetorical purposes, go right ahead.  It is not my job to tell people how they should resist these abuses of power, this persecution, and, yes, these massacres (are massacres a scale thing? I am not sure).  I am not going to tone police folks, but I am also not going to change how I talk about this stuff online.  I seek to analyze, to explain, to compare, and to contrast.  And being consistent with the usual scholarly use of terms is helpful in those efforts. 

Civil War 2: Electric Bugaloo

If there is anything that does not need a reboot or a sequel, it is the American Civil War.  Trump is now retweeting those who think that impeachment not only will cause a second civil war but should.  This is, of course, awful.  That a President would prefer a civil war over his own removal makes it even worse. 

But let's be clear, this new civil war won't be like the old one.  A better parallel would be the 1990s where far right extremists blew up a federal building, robbed banks, and did other nefarious stuff.  No one claimed the US was in the middle of a civil war.  One might hesitate to call the 1990s a period of insurgency, but, well, it kind of was.  And it was mostly put down by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.  Yes, it led to more radicalization in the prisons--because that is where one puts white supremacists who engage in violence, but better there than out in the streets (or in the White House). 

A few friends of mine who study extremism have been saying for quite some time that no matter how the Trump Administration ends, there will be violence.  That the white supremacists will either be upset by the change in power or opportunistic to use that transition--be it by resignation, impeachment, lost election, or the end of a second term*--and engage in acts of violence.  As in shooting cops and other law enforcement, attacking federal buildings, etc.

Some militias might be sufficiently organized to attempt insurgency rather than random acts of terrorism.  So, yes, people will die.  But it will not be blue vs. gray or blue vs. red armies fighting long campaigns.  Why?  Because the situation is not the same.  A new Democrat in power will not lead to the loss of people's property (remember the stakes of the Civil War?) nor are states themselves the key actors.  So, there will be far fewer resources, far less support, far less intelligence (have you seen these guys tweet?) behind the anti-government side.

It is easy to make fun of these folks, but the battles will be deadly serious.  Still, this is mostly, if not entirely, a job for the FBI, the ATF, and other law enforcement agencies.  I have seen plenty of tweets asking what the US military thinks about Trump's civil war tweets.  My answer is that unless the white supremacists actually develop into a serious insurgency, it ain't the US army's job.  The FBI and the others can thwart, at some cost, these extremists.  Again, it will be bloody, but the more this is kept a law enforcement problem and not a job for the US military, the better off we all are. 

Of course, I could be wrong.  I just don't us thinking military first when we should be thinking law enforcement.  Folks might say that the FBI is tainted by who is running the Department of Justice, but, guess what, who is running the US military?  The same President.  So, I am just betting on folks at lower levels doing their jobs.  All I know is that we need to start preparing for an escalation in violence as the inciter-in-chief is not going to go down peacefully.

*My bet remains on the 2020 election or heart attack/stroke.  I don't think the Senate will convict.

Afghanistan Shenanigans

There is always temptation to mock Donald Trump, so let's try to put into perspective this whole "hey, let's bring the Taliban to Camp David* a few days before 9/11 anniversary to make the Deal of the Century; oops, let's not!" thing.

First, some basics:

• No, the Taliban didn't organize the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and target #3 which became a hole in Pennsylvania farmland.  Nope, that was Al Qaeda, which the Taliban government of the time permitted to run around their country, organizing terrorist campaigns against the West.  
• It is ok to negotiate with the opponents in a civil war (Afghanistan has long had a civil war, so folks who say that one will start anytime soon are missing the cold, hard reality) as civil wars end either by one side defeating the other or by negotiation.  Victory by the Afghan government and the NATO folks was never very likely, and we all gave up on that with the withdrawals in and around 2014.  A bargain would potentially stave off the defeat of the Afghan government, as its troops and its civilians are facing a very high price every day to continue the war.
• But the war continues in part because of international support and in part because folks remember how the Taliban ruled before.
• Which makes any deal pretty difficult to arrange, since there is no trust for the Taliban.  Again, this is mostly normal--that it is hard to negotiate these days and they usually need some kind of third party guarantor to punish those who cheat.  Who would that be in this case?
• Didn't Jimmy Carter bring the Israelis and the Egyptians to Camp David to negotiate an agreement which stands to this day, despite assassinations, coups, and other political unrest in Egypt?  Yeah.  But Trump ain't Jimmy, and it is not clear there would be a Sadat in the room.
• Sometimes, violence continues while the bargaining goes on.  I can't recall situations where the violence escalates in the final stages, but it might make sense from a Taliban perspective to get Trump to sign any deal.  Given that Trump often indicates he will take any deal, just to get a deal (see negotiations with North Korea, ultimately the revision of NAFTA fits in this category as well), the Taliban may have pushed a bit too hard.  But that is what happens when one develops a reputation for being a paper tiger.

Ok, with that out of the way, how do we make sense of the tweet about cancelling the meeting of Taliban officials, the President of Afghanistan, and Trump at Camp David?  The stories in the past few weeks focused mostly on the phased withdrawal of American (and maybe NATO?) troops from Afghanistan in exchange for ..... um .... Not clear.  There was definitely a sense of a "decent interval" which refers to the way the US got out of Vietnam--by Kissinger making a deal that doomed South Vietnam, but would have a bit of time--a decent interval--between departure of the US and collapse of South Vietnam.  The pics from the fall of Saigon make that interval look not so decent AND the Nobel Peace Prize that Kissinger earned (and that Trump may covet) quite tainted since it was less a treaty and more a surrender.

So, excuse the Afghans who are thrilled this thing didn't happen.

 “A lot of Afghans are happy about Trump’s tweets because they may stop a bad deal with the Taliban, but they ignore the fact that there is a fundamental lack of strategy in Afghanistan that could prolong and exacerbate the bloody conflict,” tweeted Haroun Rahaimi, a law instructor at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. “I fear for what may come next!”

They know what Kissinger did for South Vietnam, and they have long been suspicious of being sold out.  And, yes, Trump is not the most credible of negotiators or third party guarantors.  President Ashraf Ghani was not involved in the talks, so he and his supporters worried about what the deal would mean.

Again, the discussions did not seem to focus on power-sharing, on how to include the Taliban's armed forces in the Afghan military or how to demobilize them, or any of the usual topics of an effort to end a civil war.

The big problem here is not bargaining with the Taliban, but doing the work to make this happen.  That is, it requires a significant amount of expertise, discipline, and planning to figure out how to use whatever declining leverage the US has left (signaling one is leaving ASAP is not great for leverage, as Obama found out) to get a deal that at least has some pretense to guaranteeing that the side the US/NATO have been supporting is not betrayed.  All the stories about these negotiations indicate that the US "process" is a shitshow as the National Security Adviser has been left out of it (the schadenfreude about John Bolton being sidelined is offset by empathy for the Afghans), that it is run by an agent (Zalmay Khalizad) who may not be coordinating with anyone, and with Trump thinking he can go with his gut once he gets in the room with the Taliban officials.

Mostly, this tweet was about Trump's ego--that he tried to make a big deal because he thinks he can make big deals even though he didn't do any of the work to make a big deal likely and then he got upset when the Taliban continued to keep up the pressure.

I guess people have been thinking all along that things could be worse because he hasn't screwed up everything.  Maybe not, but I'd say he is working on it except that Trump doesn't work.  He is too damned lazy.




*  Camp David is on the same mountain/hill in Maryland as the summer camp I went to for all of my teens, and there is a reunion going on there this weekend that I could not attend.  I wonder how the folks who are attending are feeling about the turmoil over on the other side.

Saideman Spews The Obvious

See my latest TV appearance (via phone) on the Red Cross saying the Syrian Civil War is, well, a Civil War.  I do love that the ad before it is of a Canadian celebration of the War of 1812.

Anyway, my basic take has been that it has long been a civil war and that the outsiders have few good options. And, no, the ICRC is not going make Assad re-think.

Back to working on my new garage.

Update: As a result of tweeting this set of attitudes, I got interviewed by an Associated Press reporter via email.  My one paragraph about this not affecting Assad or the various rebels is now syndicated across the planet.  Pretty cool.  Of course, they focused on the part I know least--Syria--rather than the part I know best--the unlikelihood that this will move the US and its allies into doing anything.

Defining Civil War Again, FFS!

CNN has a post today pondering whether Syria is or is not a civil war.  It almost gets things right and then cites a bunch of people with strange ideas.  I have posted about this before, but because there seems to be much confusion and it is so easy to crap all over the CNN post, here we go.

The post does mention folks reporting the classic definition: two or more sides (that each has killed at least 100 so that it is not just a mass killing [genocide/politicide may co-exist with civil wars but are not the same thing]) of some severity.  The 1000 battle death total is arbitrary--it could be 100 or 500 or 10000.  1k was borrowed from the inter-state war scholarship because it made for less measurement error.  Using a lower threshold, like 25, might mean missing heaps of conflicts and maybe mis-coding things that are not really civil wars.

But the point is that a civil war is a violent set of events involving two or more sides, contesting the governance of a country.  It can be separatist--the contest is over who governs a spot of territory within the country.  It can be about regime change.  It can be revolutionary--who gets to re-shape the social and political order.  The goals are political--not just an outburst of violence aimed at another ethnic group--that would be a riot.  Two or more sides, violence, who governs. 

A popular uprising may or may not be enough to be a civil war--depends on whether there is two-sided violence that is more than just a single outburst.  So, this line is not entirely right:

"Syria did not start out as a case of civil war because the opposition to the government mainly took the form of a popular uprising in March 2011," she said. [Anuradha Chakravarty, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina,]

One could say that it started out as repression and then become a civil war once folks started fighting back.   Which is what Chakravarty then says.  So she is very much on target as are Stephen Biddle and James Fearon who are also cited in this article.

Other folks?  Not so much.
Assad?  Well, we don't expect him to get it right.  A sectarian conflict can be a civil war if the state is the target.  Two groups fighting with each other is often called communal conflict and may not be a civil war, like the battles between Hindus and Muslims in India are violent, but not aimed at the state.  But plenty of civil wars are "sectarian" if that means ethnic or religious--that groups with different identities combating to control the government is very much a civil war.  Sectarian conflict and civil wars are not mutually exclusive.

Michel Weiss is simply wrong:

"Civil war suggests the previous state that exists all but failed and collapsed," he said. In some regions, the government lacks control and there is a "growing equalization" of forces, he said.

The article had just cited Fearon's example of the US Civil War, where the US was hardly a failed state in the north.  Indeed, most civil wars are between various groups and a government that still exists.  The contest is often uneven and "equalization" is hardly inevitable.  Indeed, many contenders to the throne government lose.  Biafra lost its battle to secede from Nigeria--it did not become equal, it got crushed.  Many civil wars can be sustained for a very long time, especially if one side chooses to engage in an insurgency.  Not all insurgencies are civil wars, not all civil wars are fought via insurgency. 

Steven Heydermann suggests there is some threshold that has not yet been crossed.  Where is that threshold?  For most scholars of civil war, a civil war exists if it is in one part of a country--it does not have to be all over the place.  If Libya and Lebanon are the "models" for civil war, it is not clear why Syria is not, as he insists, given the size of the opposition in Libya last year vs Syria this year.  Now I am really confused.

Jeff White, a fellow at an institute, at least makes it clear that this is his definition (which is a good thing since it is not one shared by many):

"My definition of civil war is a situation which is characterized by conflict between two, or more, segments of society. I still see the situation in Syria as one of fundamentally an armed and unarmed insurrection against the government. That is, the people are fighting the state, not each other."

Um, huh.  So, the American Civil War is not a civil war, since the South fought the US government?  One of the problems with fixations about failed states and the ethnic security dilemma (sorry about that) is that governments do not disappear once the firing starts--they are combatants.  Not just any combatant but the one with the most guns and most capability much of the time.  What would Jeff White call this thing where people fight the state, if not a civil war?  What was Libya last year?  Oh, and by the way, when people are fighting the state, the state is made up of people who fight back.   White's entire definition is not of civil war but of ethnic conflict.  Not all civil wars have ethnic cleansing.

This is all reminiscent of Rwanda where folks avoided calling it a genocide since that seemed to require an international response.  BUT there is a convention against genocide that requires a response.  Responsibility to Protect is not nearly as established, but perhaps may be responsible for some of this hedging about the Syrian civil war.

I read this piece because someone complained via twitter--did we really need such a long piece defining civil war?  No, we didn't.  The article could have stopped after Biddle's quote, Chakravart's or Fearon's.  Oy.

More Expertise on Political Violence

There is a new blog on the block: Political Violence @ a Glance.  I would recommend it even if I were not one of the bloggers.  I am in great company as the folks who will be blogging here are a bunch of sharp people who study political violence--IR scholars and Comparativists and especially those who dwell at the intersection of these two fields.

Hope is Not a Plan But We Have No Plan

My weekly post at CIC--this one is on Syria, explaining my pessimism.

Bad Choices for Syria

This morning's twitter feed is chock full of very smart people being very frustrated by the bad choices that face the international community as it seeks to address Syria:

• Dan Drezner invokes Sherlock Holmes and the mantra about eliminating the impossible leaves you with the improbable: arming the Syrian opposition.
• Daniel Trombly at Slouching Towards Columbia has a longer post that exhausts the options and takes a look at the bright side of a Syrian civil war serving as a drain on Iran.  The conclusion: "When faced with the choice between assuming unacceptable risk or making a grand scheme dependent on events largely out of our control, nothing beyond limited means for limited ends is an responsible use of U.S. power."
• Marc Lynch argues that arming the Syrian rebels is a bad idea. 
• Joshua Foust argues it is a really bad idea.

I really do not know what to advocate (the folks I consider to be very smart are in serious disagreement).  Yes, I supported the effort in Libya, but it seemed at the time and was eventually shown to be the case that it was possible to end the Qaddafi regime without invading.  I guess I am just more skeptical about the utility of force in this case.  All I am certain of is that this is a really hard problem and no simple solutions or even convoluted ones are likely to be all that appealing.

All we can really do is be smug that the Russians and the Chinese come out looking like fans of autocracy.

It is Not Just Me

Check out this piece at Foreign Policy.com which applies the logic of post-conflict politics/policy recommendations to the aftermath of the War Against the Dark Lord.  See, I am not the only scholar of conflict that is excessively obsessed with Harry Potter.  I have heaps of company, and this particular piece is a particularly useful exercise.

Why the Third Matrix Movie Sucked

Because it ended with an incredible bargain: that the computer and Neo would just agree to an unenforceable bargain with plenty of room for either side (especially the computer) to cheat and renege.  Why do I raise this now?  Because the government of Sudan seems to be pretty fixated on violating the accords that were to end the conflict.  The big question was always the oil-rich territories on the edge of North and South.  Now, Sudan is sending troops into this region.  So much for playing by the rules.

External guarantees really don't solve the problem when civil wars are ended, because it merely moves the credibility problem from between the actors in the country to the actors outside.  Given how much resentment there is in Libya towards the half-hearted NATO [new acronym--Nothing After Take Off]*, you can see why the government of Sudan is not deterred by the possibility of an outside intervention.

*  Reminds me of what folks would say about ISAF [I Saw Americans Fighting] and the CPA of Iraq [Cannot Produce Anything].

The warning lights are blinking, the alarms are sounding for Sudan and South Sudan.  Not that it matters much.

A Pretention of Pretense?

Alan Kuperman's take on the Libya mission is getting a heap of play on the internets: he essentially argues that there was no looming humanitarian catastrophe that US/UK/France and their NATO pals needed to prevent.  He blames the rebels for manipulating the outsiders.  Had anyone wanted to, they could have written the piece for Kuperman since it is very consistent with his previous writings on Rwanda and elsewhere.

The temptation here is to deploy Emerson's quote about foolish consistency, but I have to admit that I tend to see ethnic ties (from my first book) and xenophobia (from my second book) everywhere and perhaps more than they are relevant.

Others, especially Jon Western, have done a great job of arguing that there was something there to stop--that is, there was a real risk of a mass killing to prevent.  I would only add to that one of the pieces of social science that is relevant: we know that overwhelming victory tends to end civil wars more durably but also more bloodily.  That is, when one side wins outright, they tend to engage in large scale killings of their opponents.  So, if we abstract away from the particular case, we can still expect that Qadaffi would killed lots of folks had the outsiders not stepped in to prevent the fall of Benghazi.

Of course, the title of the piece, pretense, suggests that there is an ulterior motive.  While we can speculate about Sarkozy's interests in terms of domestic political strategies (wag the chien),* for the US and UK, the domestic gains are less obvious.  If one wants to say anything about oil, the reality is that the old strategy has always been the best one for cheap oil--support the autocrat.  Indeed, one of the problems in the Marxist-type arguments about resources and intervention is that outsiders usually can get resources from the regime or its opponents, so it is often not so obvious that supporting the rebels is the best way to get the resources.  Given that US relations were at the best with Qaddafi before this wave of dissent and repression, it is hard to say that Obama needed to support the rebels due to a thirst for Libya's oil.  The Europeans could be more concerned about access to Q's oil, but again it is not clear why supporting the rebels would be the way to go.

*  See Roger Cohen's piece that puts France and Germany into perspective.

And this is here I only partially embrace my own foolish consistency.  I do think that some of the motivation here is immigration prevention--xenophobia.  But I recognize that the interventions of many are motivated and/or justified by the real concern about watching dissidents get killed.  What Kuperman fails to highlight is that Qaddafi's opponents did not start by fighting but with protesting.  They fought back after getting shot at.  No small distinction there.  Again, I am contradicting my own earlier work by suggesting something was contagious here.  The decisions to support the Libyan rebels are linked to the positions taken by Obama and others with regard to Tunisia and Egypt (and even Bahrain, sort of).

Thresholds and Definitions: Civil War or What?

"With escalating hostilities bringing Libya closer to civil war, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces struck back at his opponents on three fronts, with special forces, regular army troops and, rebels said, fighter jets."NYT

If this is not a civil war already, what is it?  Well, this is actually a pretty important distinction in the scholarly work on political violence.  It could be just a massacre or mass killing.  The difference in the datasets is that a civil war is a conflict within a state where there are more than 1000 battle deaths AND the weaker side is responsible for at least five percent of the casualties.  The idea is that there is something distinct between a government killing its people and a war between groups for control of the state.  I am sure the NYT folks were not thinking carefully about coding decisions, but from the coder's point of view, the question is: have the regime's opponents been fighting back hard enough to inflict serious casualties. 

Perhaps that is not the right question to ask, but the larger issue is still unsettled: whether this is a mass killing in progress or something else.  It does not take the opposition winning to call this event a civil war, just that they are fighting back.

Lots of folks saying Qaddafi is going to be gone soon or later.  Well, that is true of Fidel Castro or Dan Snyder, too, but there is nothing inevitable about regime change.  And as the other cases in the region remind us, replacing one guy is not equal to a social revolution.  It can be merely a coup.  Too soon to tell what is going to happen here, as repression sometimes works.  Civil wars can go on for years, as well.  I would still bet on Qaddafi losing power, but we, the public/mass media, have gotten way too impatient.  Politics is not like the world of Harry Potter--we cannot simply wave wands and make things change (oh, and it took four years for Harry to defeat the resurrected Voldemort, sorry for the spoiler). 

The US did not jump on this because the administration was more worried about the Americans there than the Libyans.  That might sound ruthless, but the last time I checked, the American government was elected by Americans.  Plus it takes a while to get the assets into theater and get the diplomacy straight.  No aircraft carriers in the Med (I think) means that the options have been limited. 

One last note:  The Russians seem likely to oppose a UN resolution on a no-fly zone:

But as Western powers debate the possible imposition of a so-called no-fly zone — similar to those enforced in Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein — Russia ruled out the idea on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported from Geneva, quoting Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov as saying the proposal was “superfluous.”

Which reminds me of my favorite taunt of Canadian students:  the UN Security Council as a source of legitimacy when votes on human rights issues always bump up against the Russian and Chinese vetoes (and the occasional American one). 

Is Geography Destiny, part two

In response to my previous post, an anonymous commenter posted a link to a NYT map:

This map nicely illustrates that the Europeans drew up the borders of Africa with little regard to the distributions of linguistic groups, not to mention religious or racial composition.  We can see a mixture of colors in some new and old conflict zones like Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and, of course, Sudan.  The problem is that this would cause us to overlook other places that have seen lots of violence that do not appear to be all that "colorful":

• Somalia: always the exemplar of homogeneity breeding conflict, as Somalis speak the same language, worship in the same way (Islam), and are of the same race.
• Both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia appear more homogeneous than they really are.  Of course, Ethiopia's borders were not drawn as much by the colonial powers since it was only conquered by the Italians in the 1930's.  
• Angola had heaps of conflict in the aftermath of the Portuguese, but you would not guess it from this map.
• Rwanda and Burundi have both seen heaps of violence over the years, and the colonial powers (Belgium) did heaps of damage here, but boundaries are not really the issue.
• Zimbabwe would not appear to be problematic, but Robert Mugabe has more to say about that than the lines drawn.

I don't want to minimize the colonial inheritance.  My point is simply there is heaps of variation across the continent, both in terms of the diversity of populations and the levels of conflict (ethnic and not so ethnic)--and they do not co-vary.  Indeed, one of the critical mistakes made by lots of scholars studying civil war is to toss into their quantitative analyses an indicator for ethnic fractionalization (how diverse is the society) and usually find no statistical significance.  Since few scholars of ethnic conflict actually make claims that more diversity leads to more conflict, this is not surprising. 

The key is how ethnicity interacts with political institutions.  Sometimes, institutions mitigate ethnic conflict and sometimes they exacerbate it.  I used to study this question, and hope to come back to it soon (problems with data sets should be fixed soon).  The importance today is to remember that borders are not destiny and the past only shapes but does not completely determine the future.  Southern Sudan's diversity can be a strength if it can be like Tanzania, which has always been one of the most diverse countries on the planet .... and has had very little violence.

Plan B for Bad

I don't have to spend much time blasting Robert Blackwill's Plan B for Afghanistan.  General (ret) Barno does it for me in a Tom Ricks column.  Blackwill calls for partition of Afghanistan, giving the Pashtuns/Taliban the South and East while allowing the government of Afghanistan to hold on to the rest, more or less.  Partition has heaps of problems, as the literature well documents, but also seems to be the simple solution espoused by folks who apparently don't think about the politics or the consequences.  Otherwise, partition is pretty cool, right?

Giving the Pashtuns a starting point for a greater Pashtunistan would be upsetting to the Pakistanis for one thing.  Second, there are plenty of folks in these areas that are not Pashtuns--what happens to them?  Partition advocates always seem to think population movements are easy or forget about minorities as they are so inconvenient.  Who would want this?  What problems does it solve?  Blackwill seems to argue in a Rummy-esque manner that we could retreat and then come back if necessary.  Remember, Rummy pretty much said that we didn't have to fix Afghanistan as we could always come back again and again to break it.

We are seeing heaps of plans for Afghanistan these days.  While I am no expert on Afghanistan (although I play one on TV), the things to ask of each plan are:

1. The Underwear Gnome Problem: How do you get from step A to step C?  If the plan is entirely unattractive to one or more of the key players involved, how do you get these folks to agree to it?
2. Don't forget the neighbors.  This might be a collorary to the first rule since Pakistan is clearly a key player. Even if we do not want to give Pakistan a veto over any deal, it is clear that we need to figure out a future that deals with the reality of Pakistan.  This is one of the rare assessments that builds the neighbors in.
3. Can you sell the plan at home to countries that have paid significant costs?  "We fought for this?" would be the refrain one should expect to hear.  The key concern is what is the answer to that criticism?
4. What happens to the guys who have the guns after the agreement?
5. How is the deal self-reinforcing? Or if only kept credible by outside guarantees, how credible are those?
6. No deal will involve all elements of the opposition.  And many deals will create new bases of opposition (the former Northern Alliance).  So, the proposed plan will have to be clear-eyed about who is in, who is out, and who is going to be violently opposed to the deal. 

The funny thing is that even a good piece that assesses the current state of affairs quickly becomes entirely too idealistic very quickly.  Ahmed Rashid has an excellent piece in the New York Review of Books, but once he gets to the steps to peace, it unravels quickly.  Here is step 6:

"India and Pakistan enter into secret talks between their intelligence agencies in order to make their presence in Afghanistan more transparent to the other and end their rivalries. Later the two governments come to agreements that would allow each one to tolerate the other’s embassies, consulates, rebuilding activities, and trade interests in Afghanistan. Both pledge not to seek a military presence in Afghanistan or to use Afghan soil to undermine the other."

In what world does this happen?  Violates my number 1 rule.  Any takers?

I Hate Slideshows

That is, other than the definitive Don Draper plug for the Kodak carousel.  I hate lists that require fifteen or sixteen clicks when you can get just one page.  So, in my 2011 effort to simplify, here is Foreign Policy's 16 likely hotspots for 2011 with commentary from your Spew-master.

1. Cote d'Ivoire.  More proof that elections cause as many problems as they solve.  Makes the 2000 US election look like a picnic.  So, definitely a conflict, but is it likely to spread or attract outside intervention?  Not so sure.
2. Colombia.  I guess this raises the question of: is it a prediction to predict something that has been on-going for decades?  As long as Americans are willing to consume heaps of cocaine, I have little confidence in Colombia becoming peaceful.  Lootable resources (blood diamonds, drugs, whatever) may not cause conflict, but they probably do prolong it (see Michael Ross on this).
3. Zimbabwe.  Mugabe is the gift that keeps on giving and reminds us that Milton was right about how some people think: "Better to reign in hell."  Again, elections may not be a solution.
4. Iraq.  Really?
5. Venezuela.  All the trends look bad here (and that is about as much as I can say about Latin America as I have never focused in that direction).
6. Sudan.  Um, what is the order of this list?  It is certainly not by likelihood or by size of likely consequences as Sudan would be near the top or at it.  We will be quite lucky if this one does not blow up.  Again, it gets back to the basic question of when will commitments be kept and when institutions will bind behavior?  And as this piece notes, an independent Southern Sudan will have a lot of work to do to be more than a failed state.
7. Mexico.  Speaking of failed states, Mexico is not one, but it is starting to resemble many African countries that control their capitols but not much else.  30,000 deaths in a drug war?  The US will eventually start to get serious about this, not necessarily a good thing as the US can damage more with good intentions than anyone else. 
8. Guatemala.  More drugs, more elections.
9. Haiti.  Kind of feels like the Emmys when the same shows always get nominated.  Haiti can enver get a break.  Bad weather, disease and an election.  "Haiti is on the verge of a social breakdown."  If this is what the verge looks like ....  

Underestimating the Costs of War

A few days ago, this article came out, documenting the costs of one of Canada's worst days in Afghanistan.  It both replicated and undermined one of the basic tendencies when it comes to modern war--that we measure costs in terms of killed in action when far more people are hurt than killed.  This is a political reality and a journalistic one.  The article reports:

In late 2008, the Department of National Defence chose to stop publicizing battlefield injuries, in a stepped-up effort to deny mission intelligence to the Taliban. As a result of this – one of multiple restrictions that bind reporters who embed with the Canadian Forces there – precious little is known about many of the wounded.

The cynic in me wonders with this is due to a concern about battlefield intelligence or about domestic politics.   Given that the enemy can see the wounded in front of them being airlifted out, it would seem that the only folks left out of the loop would be the publics back home.  We know the exact number of Canadians killed in Afghanistan (154 soldiers, one diplomat, one journalist) but not the numbers of Canadians (or Americans or Brits or Danes or Aussies or Dutch, etc) who come back home alive but severely wounded.

In my research, I have come across information that suggests that countries may be imposing restrictions on their troops that are aimed more at limiting KIA (soldiers killed in action) but not so concerned about WIA (wounded).  This restrictions may be honestly imposed to reduce risks overall and to benefit the soldiers, but I cannot help but think that the focus on deaths rather than lives that are irreparably damaged might be a product of the narrow attention spans of politicians and journalists.  Not everything that counts can be counted as a smart man once said or was misquoted.

Oh, and I am aware that I am ignoring for now the damage caused to the Afghans and others in the neighborhood.

Aargh, Matey, Where Are Your Loyalties?

We should not be surprised that the Somali pirates take both sides (or don't take sides at all).  The folks involved in trafficking drugs, cigarettes, guns, women, etc. tend not to be terribly ideological, but capitalists in the purest form.  A dollar is a dollar is a dollar.  So, we should not be surprised by such stories.  This development should also remind us of two things about the funding of conflict:

• there are many ways to fund a civil war/insurgent organization, not just diamonds and lootable resources;
• that the presence of such resources probably do not cause conflicts but perhaps make them harder to end.

Off to my first APSA appointment--my first PhD student who is now a prof.

Bad News is Good News?

Interesting op-ed today in the New York Times to mark Memorial Day.  Evolving technology and increased attentiveness has meant that the unknown soldier may not exist in future wars.  That is, in the past, there would be unidentified remains, but the last few wars have had no such casualties due to DNA analysis.  So, all those we mourn now are known.  Certainly an improvement but I guess it is up to the sociologists to tell us whether unknown soldiers resonate more or less with the general public as a reminder to the costs of war.

Speaking of the costs of war, the article had this picture:

Help, Help, I am Being Repressed

A joke for a post title, but repression is serious business.  Governments kill and harm people far more than war does and even more than civil war.  Moreover, one key cause of civil war is repression.  The relationship between repression and violence is not well understood, so it is a good thing that Christian Davenport is trying to bring together information and scholars around this issue at www.staterepression.com.  He has built this website to try to move the study of repression forward.  He even has a contest where one can get $$ for providing some innovative thinking.  


So, let's do a tour of the website:
First, Davenport builds on his previous work to clarify what the topic is.

repression involves the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions (Goldstein 1978, p. xxvii). 

He goes on to delineate what repression is and is not.  As such, it is a very useful model of conceptualizing as we cannot accumulate knowledge unless we have a concept that is clear, intuitive and bounded.  Governments can do other bad stuff to people, but threats to their ability to engage in politics is significant enough, and, by the way, influences everything else.  

The Other Side of State Capacity

One of the themes I have been pursuing the past few years has been the tradeoff between having governments that are too weak and those that are too strong.  If the government lacks the capacity to deter potential rebels, then violence will increase.  But if government is too strong and too unrestrained, then the people will have something to rebel about.  So, the core question in Iraq is not whether the army and police will exist, but whether they act more or less appropriately and not be seen as a threat to any ethnic group or as predators preying upon the society.  The NYT has a good piece today addressing exactly this issue.

Which is more disturbing?  That the ministries are corrupt and messed up so that the barracks are unlivable.  Or that there is significant fear that the Prime Minister might use his capacity as commander in chief to do a recount?  I vote for the latter, in a close race.