General Leakey: EU Civil-Military Operations and Their Effect on NATO

General David Leakey, Director General of the European Union Military Staff, spoke at Yale on April 20. He is in the US on an official trip to meet with UN and American officials.

 

General Leakey described himself as a Euro-skeptic Brit, who nontheless has spent most of his career working in NATO. He has doubts about the vision and power of the EU, but believes in its utility, because the US can’t police the world alone. Because of hostility, there are places where American power – and therefore NATO, and even the UN – are unwelcome. The EU has a role to play as an autonomous force and another option in the array of multilateral instuments for stability in the world.

The European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) had its impetus in the Balkans crisis of the ’90s. Since implementation in 2003, it has undertaken 23 missions. Of these, most are civilian. The most prominent missions are the 2,000 civilians who took over from the UN in Kosovo, and the 200 person (and soon growing) force of policemen training the leadership in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior. Of the 6 military missions, 3 are in Africa, 2 in the Balkans, and the last is working on counter-piracy in the Indian Ocean. These missions represent a lot of activity – more than NATO has done in 60 years.

General Leakey was the commander of the EU force in Bosnia beginning in 2004. He commanded 7,000 soldiers, who took over from the NATO force that had been stationed there since the 1995 Dayton Accords. Leakey described the doubts that people had about this switch: why did the name have to change, since the same countries would be involved? The answer had to do with legitimacy: the future path to stability for Bosnia has to be as a part of the European Community, so simply changing the logo and marketing the force differently was important. There is also the factor of unified leadership. With the EU having a big presence in its giant European Commission embassy, a police mission and a High Representative, it only made sense to have everyone reading from the same hymn sheet.

What role did the troops play? Their primary function was to act as a deterrent, something which, when done successfully, means sitting still. Looking for a more active role, General Leakey went back to his orders. They were to support the High Rep.’s Mission Implementation Plan, yet this plan didn’t look like it included any military tasks. Then he remembered that EU Secretary-General Solana had told him to be “new and distinct” and to “make a difference”. What needed to be done in Bosnia? Jobs and justice are the most important things in a post-conflict zone, and 9 years after the war, both were lacking. The reason was institutional corruption. How could the military fight this? He decided to get his 7,000-man labor force involved in policing things like the fuel imports and the timber industry, and succeeded in scaring people into paying their taxes. This was unpopular with the national commanders, but there really wasn’t any other instrument availible to do the job.

General Leakey echoed Lord Ashdown in saying that he would have happily traded 2,000 soldiers for 200 Bosnian-speaking auditors. Ashdown and Leakey worked closely together in Bosnia, and seemed to have seen eye to eye. Leakey recommended Ashdown’s book Swords to Ploughshares and echoed his point about the utility of postponing elections.

In Leakey’s opinion, the big lesson of Bosnia is that good governance is important above all else.

Comments:

Leakey and Ashdown both represent a pragmatic, technocratic way of approaching post-conflict reconstruction. In this view, fixing broken states is a slow and uncertain process, yet one that follows certain rules. Lessons learned in one country can be applied in the next, and global institutions can be built that possess the necessary power and know-how to intervene in each situation. This attitude is at odds with commentators who stress the limits of external players’ abilities to shape reality on the ground. Some experts, like Rory Stewart, point out the importance of unique complicating factors like culture, religion and tradition. To what degree can legitimate democracy be imposed from without? Are all attempts at nation building doomed from the start, or have they simply been mismanaged? These questions are commonly asked about the US invasion of Iraq, but they have a wider significance to the debate over Afghanistan, and about Western power in general.

Yale Globalist Article

A plug here for the piece I wrote in the most recent issue of the Yale Globalist. It’s called “In Their Own Hands” and focuses on Rory Stewart’s Turquoise Mountain foundation and Sarah Chayes’ Arghand Cooperative, the work the organizations are doing in Afghanistan, and a bit about their differences in opinion on policy. It’s short, too!

Afghanistan News: Week in Review

Andrew, my colleague at the Yale Afghanistan Forum, has been creating a weekly round-up of news from and about Afghanistan. I highly, highly recommend his work!

Zbigniew Brzezinski: A Historically Relevant Foreign Policy

Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under Carter and currently at John Hopkins, spoke at Yale on April 9. His lecture was entitled “A Historically Relevant Foreign Policy”. He did not address Afghan issues at length; however, he did frame the region within a wider strategic context for US policy. As usual, my notes are followed by my comments.

Professor Brzezinski began by pointing out the difficulty of predicting what the crucial issues of the 21st century will be. President Bush’s statement in his last State of the Union that Islamic terrrorism is the defining ideological struggle of the century seems presumptive. Eight years into any previous century, predictions about the coming decades would almost certainly have been wrong.

In a broad strokes, however, we can say that for the first time the world will be dealing with truely global issues (poverty, the environment, proliferation) against a background of increasing social and political turmoil. Brzezinski spoke about the “global political awakening” and shift of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The central question is: will the world end up coming together or falling apart?

The immediate challenges are 1. the financial crisis (which has the potential to create unrest within nations and antagonism between them) and 2. “The Global Balkans”, the area of 550 million people East of Egypt and West of China, that is in the throes of the most intense part of its political and religious awakening.

The region cannot be handled in the old imperial way, when 4000 Britons ruled 250 million Indians. The other option – brutality like in Chechnya – is forbidden by our self-restraints. There must be a way to overcome resistance in this region to America and the West, and for this we need strategic clarity. Other than Iran, and the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict, this means a new plan for AfPak.

Brzezinski largely approved of Obama’s reassessment. Severing links between the Taliban and Al Qaeda with limited reconciliation is good, because it seperates the local issues from the global. The weakness is still in the Pakistan policy. The use of more military force is a bad idea, and usually backfires. He suggested looking at the national interests involved, and bringing in India. He remained vague on what a new understanding of the strategic issues would involve, however, other than to say that the US must be careful not to become bogged down in local disputes forever.

The real question will be how Obama turns his good understanding of the issues facing the world into concrete action. His conceptual realignment of American foriegn policy must be turned into an operational framework.

Comments:

In my understanding, Brzezinski’s comments boiled down to: AfPak is crucial; we have to do something to fix it; this needs to happen quickly so we can move on to the other crucial things we have to fix.

Other than being rather obvious and non-specific, such an attitude risks the same problems that Western intervention has been facing all along: a frantic feeling of urgency, without a strategic sense of how harness the attention productively. It’s the kind of thinking that risks trying to do everything, and does nothing well, that keeps one foot out the door but doesn’t allow for local legitimacy to develop either. This may be a harsh reading, since he only intended to lay out the outline for a future plan, however the vagueness was worrying as a policy recommendation.

-Anna

More on Ashdown

To follow up on the last post, here is some further background on Lord Ashdown vis a vis Afghanistan.

Ashdown was quoted in the Telegraph (UK) in October 2007 as saying that NATO had already lost the war in Afghanistan, and that success there would be unlikely. These comments were made in advance of a NATO summit at which Britain and the United States pressed for more military commitment from the other member nations. Dire warnings of chaos engulfing the entire region may have been intended to scare up more troops.

Ashdown seems to have backed away from these views when he was considered for the post of UN “super envoy” early last year. This (unsuccessful) plan would have created a new position that combined the roles of NATO and UN representatives in single official. The envoy would have overseen the reconstruction efforts of the various international organizations involved in Afghanistan. However, the centralization of power was seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the Afghan government, and the idea was scrapped after it came under attack from President Karzai. In his role as the UN High Commissioner to Bosnia in 2001-2006, Ashdown had had sweeping powers, including the ability to overrule the government at times. The position in Afghanistan would have been more limited, but the precedent may have been alarming to Afghans.

Though the super-envoy idea was dropped, the problem of coordination still lingers today. With the announcement that few European countries will be committing substantial troops to the NATO mission, it looks more and more the same as the US operation. It will continue to be difficult to create an effective fighting force out of a patchwork of nations with various limitations on combat roles. The purely military side is hard enough, but the counter-insurgency has to be integrated into the work of the UN, the State Department, the NGOs – and the efforts of the Afghan ministries and local officials themselves. Who makes sure that donor countries live up to their promises, and that the resources are fairly distributed? Who makes sure that corruption and simple bureaucratic ineptitude won’t continue to destroy progress?

Its was a tempting idea to have an Afghan “tsar” to introduce transparency, efficiency and coherence into the process of reconstruction. But, as Ashdown said on withdrawing his bid for the envoy post, “This job can only be done successfully on the basis of a consensus within the international community and the clear support of the government of Afghanistan.” The trust in the international community and its legitimacy
is lacking precisely because of the failures the post was intended to correct.

Lord Ashdown: Iraq and Afghanistan: Will We Ever Intervene Again?

Lord Paddy Ashdown spoke Monday, March 30 at the MacMillan Center at Yale on the topic “After Iraq and Afghanistan: Will We Ever Intervene Again?”

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon is the Former High Representative and European Union Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2002-2006), and a former Member of the British Parliament and leader of the Liberal Democratic party from (1988-1999). In 2008, he was a candidate to be the UN envoy to Afghanistan, but withdrew after opposition from the Karzai government. 

What follows is a summary from my notes. My comments can be found at the bottom of the post.

Ashdown’s response to the question “Will We Ever Intervene Again” was affirmative, and he began by quoting the Kipling poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man. /There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. /That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, /And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;

Ashdown compared the international community to the burned fool, because we do not seem to be able to stop ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past. The situation in Iraq was the result of the triumph of “hubris and amnesia”. Ashdown’s main point was that, rather than saying “never again”, we should learn from the successes and failures of the past, so that when we intervene, we did it well. Overall, the world will be getting more turbulent in coming years, and the ability to, in the wide sense, bring governance to globalization will determine how well we weather the times ahead.

Since 1992, the UN has sanctioned an intervention every 6 months on average, and about 60% of them have been successful by the measure of having prevented a return to conflict in the next five years. Conflict in general has fallen to half the level it was during the cold war. These interventions have by and large had a positive effect on the peace and stability of the world.

So why did these interventions succeed, and the much more visible efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan become so difficult and costly? There are 6 steps to success:

1. Prevent the war if possible, by strengthening institutions, giving aid, practicing diplomacy, and scanning the horizon for future problems. This will be far less costly than fight the war.

2. Plan for the peace – an obvious lesson (in retrospect) to draw from the Bush administration’s interventions.

3. Security comes first. For the average citizen, this will be the most important thing. Rumsfeld’s dismissal of the looting of Baghdad as “stuff happens” is the kind of thinking that led to Iraqi people turning to the insurgency for security, and it’s the reason that Afghans are increasingly turning to the Taliban. Basic security can often mean that more troops are needed to win the peace than to win the war.

4. Establish the rule of law. Don’t do deals with the powerful, because after a war they are nearly always the most corrupt. Stand for the rule of law. This doesn’t just mean police, but also judges, prosecutors, and legal codes.

5. The economy. Rather than big infrastructure investment, focus on small business so people have a reason to feel hopeful about their future prospects.

6. Democracy. Democracy is more than elections; it’s about civil society. The longer one can wait to hold elections, the better the results will be since there will be more time for steps 3, 4 and 5 to take hold. The example of Germany, where there was no national election until 1949, is a case in point. Elections are often held early because we think that it will allow us to withdraw quickly, but that doesn’t happen. Ashdown did admit that postponement is difficult to do in an insurgency situation where legitimacy is under attack. 

Ashdown also spoke about “mission creep”, and why interventions tend to drag on past their intended end point. In his opinion, the need to justify to soldier’s families the reason for their sacrifice leads to grandiose mission aims – i.e. spreading freedom, rather than containing the Taliban. 

Ashdown expressed cautious approval for President Obama’s recently announced strategy for Afghanistan. Limiting the mission to achievable goals is a necessary correction, but he worried that domestic support for the involvement would be hard to sustain without a noble-sounding justification.

Ashdown finished by speaking forcefully about the impossibility of imposing democracy at the point of a gun. Once people have safety, opportunity and rule of law, they’ll choose democracy of their own account. It might not look like Western democracy, but it will be a natural outgrowth of the culture. For example, Afghanistan has a Western constitution governing in theory, and a tribal structure governing in fact, and this disconnect leads to abuse and dysfunction. It would be better to allow bits of Sharia law to be included, even though we don’t approve of some of its aspects, in order for the structure to have legitimacy.

Comments: Ashdown seemed to be walking a fine line between a belief in the necessity to intervene on high-minded principle and a more limited, pragmatic view of Western ability to intervene successfully. This difficult balance left some questions in my mind:

What does one do if providing immediate security means dealing with warlords and war criminals, and therefore would undermine the rule of law?

Many people believe it was a mistake to not hold immediate elections in Iraq. True, institutions are necessary, but where do they get legitimacy from, if not democracy?

Does respecting local customs, and not imposing western norms mean that we abandon promises to uphold the rights of women, or ethnic and religious minorities?

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