Gazprom and Serbia

Check out this post by Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros. I know next to nothing substantive about Eastern European/Balkan politics. I do know enough to say that Russia's dealings in the Balkans, Kosovo's drive to independence, the West's desire to expand NATO, and the ever-complex world of Russian energy resources deserve more public attention and public debate than they have been getting. Enjoy.

Stare in Pace Romano Prodi

And the ever-dysfunctional, ineffectual government of Romano Prodi has now fallen. Will something better replace it? Beppe Grillo and I doubt it.

Realism, the Commentariat, and Variety in Political Thought

Eugene Gholz at Across the Aisle has posted a worthwhile critique of an excellent article at Salon.com by Stephen Walt, in which Walt bemoans the lack of realists in the popular foreign policy commentariat. Starting with the recent hiring of William Kristol at the Times, Walt laments that, in the popular press, there is little analytical variation regarding the United States' appropriate global role. He sees columnists and others basically split between liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, both of whom support the notion of the United States as a transformative global leader, ready to project (and at times enforce) its will and values upon the Globe. Walt (and Gholz) argue that the differences between these groups are peripheral: they advocate different policies because they disagree on priorities and means, not because their worldviews are fundamentally at odds. Walt argues that realists need to have a greater voice in public discourse, and that if the Times really wants to hire someone with a fresh voice, it should look to proponents of the realist school.

I'm not a realist (frankly I'm not really sure that I'd call myself an anything at this point), but I'm basically in agreement with Walt. I take issue with Gholz's assertion that there aren't any good candidates because most realists exist in academia. Where else should good public intellectuals come from? Paul Krugman's an academic. Teaches at Princeton. He doesn't seem to have a problem banging out a couple of columns every week. More to the point, though, I agree that public discourse - again, in the popular press, not just in Greek-letter academia - would benefit from the realist perspective. While, during my time as an undergraduate, realism was often presented as the most violent, bellicose way of looking at international relations due to its emphasis on balance-of-power politics, I have come to appreciate the humility with which realists approach the international system. The kind of transformational, almost messianic fervor with which neoconservatives often approach foreign policy questions could stand to be tempered a bit.

I don't agree with everything Walt and his ideological colleagues say. In particular, I tend to think that spreading Democracy (intelligently) is a major strategic interest of the United States, not a dangerous pie-in-the-sky diversion. I also think Walt overemphasizes the similarities between the neoconservative and liberal internationalist worldviews. Still, a perspective like his would be interesting and beneficial to get on a more regular basis. Maybe he can submit his resume to the Salzburgers when Kristol's tenure is up next year.

The Planning of "Ethnic" Violence

Today's BBC has a worthwhile article pointing out Human Rights Watch allegations that much of the "ethnic" (I'll explain the quotes in a second) violence ravaging Kenya is being planned and directed by political elites there. Again, worth reading, but hardly surprising to anyone who has looked at historical patterns of communal violence.

The nature of media coverage of such strife is a persistent complaint of people who study ethnic conflict and ethno-nationalist politics. By framing violence as "ethnic," without adding much context to the term, reporters unwittingly frame it as a result of ancient, hardened, immutable social divisions that spontaneously flare up from time to time (I - along with many others, prefer the term "communal," because it leaves open the possibility for boundaries to change). Furthermore, by using the word "riot" to describe the actual incidents, reporters conjure up images of pent-up anger, randomly exploding into wanton destruction (in the context of Africa, it also unwittingly reinforces racist stereotypes about tribal conflict). Recent history - from the Kristallnacht to the Rwandan Genocide to the 2002 Hindu-Muslim clashes in Gujarat - has shown that such violence is nearly always planned and directed by communal elites. "Pogrom" might be a more appropriate term.

The extent to which elites are responsible for such action (and, conversely, the extent to which the people "on the street" who actually engage in much of the destruction and killing can be viewed as sheep who follow their leaders blindly) remains a matter of debate. Personally, I'm not willing to pin all the blame on those who stoke the conflict. The dynamics by which communal identity is constructed and directed are too complex for such simplistic explanations. Still, it is good to see that some media outlets finally point out the calculated nature of communal violence.

Strategic Inanity

Ever the font of useful information and analysis, BBC News has an excellent summary of many of the energy issues facing the emerging economies of China and India currently up on its website. As I was reading through, most of it seemed informative, if pretty standard for anyone who has been following the issue of global energy supplies over the last few years. Standard, that is, until I came upon the following quote:

China is eager to exploit clean coal technology, but Western companies are not that keen to part with it for hard-nosed commercial reasons.

"What if China got all this clean coal technology and their economy would develop even faster? What would happen to the big economies like the USA and India?" says the BBC's China editor Shirong Chen.

Really? Seriously? We're really worried about giving the Chinese access to clean coal technology because we want to slow down their economic growth? As though China continuing to belch CO2 and sulphur into the atmosphere isn't going to adversely affect our economic growth? As though un-checked global warming isn't going to create security challenges that make the conflict in the Taiwan Strait look like a game of footsie? Can the American business community and the American foreign policy community really be this shortsighted?

Okay, deep breath. This is the BBC's China editor, not the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Commerce or State. Shirong Chen isn't the official mouthpiece of U.S. energy policy. Still, this comment just illustrates the perversity of "realist," zero-sum strategic thinking when it is divorced from all context and perspective.

Yes, it's true, helping China develop clean energy technologies will have the side effect of assisting the economic development of a strategic competitor. If we don't provide such help, though, and China supplants the United States as the world's exhaust pipe, the global instability created by widespread drought, crop failure, famine, natural disasters and all the rest of the near-Biblical consequences of global warming that climatologists have identified will dwarf any threat that China poses to U.S. economic and strategic interests. It bears mentioning, for example, that the Muslim world with whom the U.S. is having such difficulty rests almost entirely within the equatorial regions that will be hardest hit by the crisis.

Rather than be nervous about helping a rival, the United States ought to view the cooperative devleopment of renewable and clean energy as a potential boon to stability in Asia. The United States, Japan, China and India will consume the vast majority of the world's energy in the coming decades. They have a strategic interest in applying their collective intellectual capital (which is formidable) towards a solution to the problem, rather than fighting over the table scraps of the global hydrocarbon economy while vainly trying to insulate themselves from the larger consequences.

This kind of foolishness needs to stop.

Securing Private Security

This charming recent piece in the New York Times provides yet another reminder - as if we needed one - that modern societies need to seriously re-think the roles played by private military contractors like Blackwater. It would appear that, in a 2005 incident, Blackwater forces attempted to use riot gas to clear traffic from an intersection in Iraq, in blatant and serious violation of U.S. military policy and (quite likely) international chemical weapons treaties. In addition to causing havoc and injury among local Iraqis who were doing nothing more provocative than commuting, the release of CS gas in this instance functionally disabled a group of U.S. soldiers manning a nearby checkpoint.

Stepping back from this one specific breach of sane conduct, this incident highlights, it would seem, much of what is wrong with the way private military contractors are currently used. The soldiers at the checkpoint, for example, apparently had no means of communicating with either the Blackwater helicopter that was dropping CS canisters, nor the convoy for which they were trying to clear the way. Everything I have read would indicate that, for all intents and purposes, private contractors operate as functionally separate from the Coalition forces in Iraq. It should come as no surprise, then, that the two groups often step on each other's toes. Because they are, evidently, only loosely integrated into the Coalition military command structure, they often take actions that are strategically counterproductive to the larger war effort. Looking again at the CS gas incident, the use of chemical weapons, and even smoke grenades, makes life harder for the Coalition by feeding enemy propaganda that the Americans are engaging in chemical attacks on Iraqi civilians. U.S. soldiers may make distinction between themselves and their private counterparts. The Iraqi populace, for the most part, does not.

As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last year realizes, this is hardly the first time that the relative impunity with which private contractors in Iraq operate has caused problems (indeed, by the standards of some recent events, the CS incident is pretty benign). Some have proposed significantly scaling back the use of private contractors in war zones, saying that the regular military should be able to do more of the job. I am not entirely convinced that, in the long term, that is the right solution.

Some of the very structural issues that can make the use of private contractors problematic also make them potentially valuable assets for global peace and stability. As the World, or at least the Western World, begins to move into a post-modern age in which great power wars are of decreasing concern and the ability to raise and employ mass citizen armies is politically constrained, the ability of governments to augment their forces with private contractors provides an important buttress to the capacity of the state. It allows leaders to avoid the political costs of employing vast numbers of regular troops, most of whom have little choice in the matter, while still accomplishing policy goals.

Many people would say that is precisely the problem. Leader's shouldn't be able to mask the true cost of military conflict by outsourcing the fighting, but rather should have to prove to their populations that a particular military operation is worth sacrificing for. I am sympathetic to this argument. Certainly, the current administration's extensive employment of private contractors has allowed it to (badly) conduct a war that would have otherwise been politically unviable. That said, the smart use of private contractors could solve many of the problems traditionally associated with drumming up support for humanitarian missions and collective security. The Clinton Administration's reluctance to go into Rwanda in 1994 stemmed directly from the experience in Somalia. Casualties sustained by the military in Mogadishu had made humanitarian intervention unpalatable to the American public, and so the genocide was allowed to spin out of control, eventually engulfing all of central Africa in the bloodiest conflict since World War II. The hemming and hawing that accompanied other (marginally) more successful security missions in places like Bosnia and Kosovo stemmed in large part from the same issues, as has the anemic global response to the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

The reputation of many private military contractors - the detractors of whom make no bones about calling them "mercenaries" - has now been seriously damaged due to their association with various atrocities in the U.S.-occupied Middle East. In order to sufficiently rehabilitate them in the eyes of the world, and in order to ensure that they behave as professional soldiers, accountable for their actions, a global legal regime must be established to govern their use. I would suggest, for example, that they be subject to the military justice system of whatever legitimate military authority operates in their theater of war (in the case of the United States, this means the Uniform Code of Military Justice). Furthermore, steps need to be taken to be sure that there is a proper integration of private contractors into the military command and control structure, at least to the extent that it is compatible with their specific contracts. This would ensure that they do not operate as a force unto themselves and undermine the mission that they are hired to support. The UN, in particular, needs to formulate the institutional capacity to effectively, and safely, use private contractors in its security missions.

The world is changing, and I believe that the privatization of at least some state security functions in the twenty-first century is not ipso facto a bad thing. We must, though, adapt our military and legal institutions to face this new reality.

Oy! Another One

According to the New York Times, another strongman may emerge in Pakistan over the next few months. Evidently the U.S., grasping at straws, is beginning to put their hopes for stability in Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has replaced Musharraf as Army chief. Look, I know we don't have any good options in Pakistan, and certainly we'll have to deal with whoever heads up the Pakistani security forces - the Army simply has too much power there not to - but could we please begin to deal with Pakistan as a country, rather than simply looking to cultivate relationships with the boss-of-the-moment?

Kristol at the Times

By the way, is anyone else as baffled as I am that the New York Times has named Bill Kristol as a regular columnist?

Krugman on Pakistan

My my, it's been a while hasn't it? First off I'd like to apologize to any of my readers who were wondering if I'd started a new life as a hermit in the mountains of central Asia. I can offer no good explanation for my long absence, save a hectic holiday season and the fact that the Muses, fickle creatures that they are, have paid me few visits of late. I make it my New Year's resolution to resume something resembling a regular blogging schedule from here on out.

I am moved to comment on this blurb written a few days ago by the Times's Paul Krugman. Dr. Krugman is a man whose views I greatly respect. I think he is one of the most clear-headed and relevant voices of liberal thought in America today, and he is a better economist than I could ever hope to be. All that said, his comments on the recent Bhutto assassination in Afghanistan reflect a unidimensionally ideological approach to foreign policy that I find quite troubling. For those of you who couldn't be bothered to follow the link, here's the key quote:

This isn’t about you; in fact, as far as I can tell, it isn’t about America. It’s about the fact that Pakistan is a very messed-up place. This has very bad consequences for us, but it’s hard to see what, if anything, it says about US policy.

If you’re a tough guy (or gal) who believes in exerting US power — never mind, there are just too many heavily armed people in Pakistan for anyone but Norman Podhoretz to believe that we could throw our weight around. If you believe you can bring new understanding to the world through your enlightened outlook — sorry, there are too many people in Pakistan who don’t want to be enlightened. If you believe that we’d have more influence in the world if we hadn’t squandered our resources and good will in Iraq (which I do) — well, sorry, that influence wouldn’t extend to being able to bring peace and light to Pakistan.

This isn’t about us, and it’s out of our control.

Pardon my French Dr. Krugman, but [DELETED: Expletive referring to the excrement of a large farm animal]. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but only a bit. For the sake of fairness, I will acknowledge that Krugman's analysis - to the extent that it merits the term - of the Pakistani political crisis hits on some important realities. For example, it is true that we cannot use the first infantry division to make Pakistani politics less volatile. I know of nobody, Podhoretz included, who advocates such a policy. We live in a definitively post-Imperial age in which global populations are too politicized to use as pawns in Georgetown living room chess games. The political direction of Pakistan will ultimately be set by the Pakistanis, and it is delusional to think that U.S. policy can "fix" the myriad political problems there.

Krugman, though, takes this advisable humility to its illogical extreme, arguing that events in Pakistan "[aren't] about us, and [are] out of our control." Pakistan is officially designated a Major Non-NATO Ally by the U.S. government. We have sold them over $10 billion in military equipment since 2001. Pakistan borders Afghanistan, Iran, and India, is currently serving as al-Qaeda's principal base of operations, and is a nuclear-armed state. Again, out of fairness, Krugman implicitly acknowledges Pakistan's strategic importance, but I am puzzled as to why he thinks American policy is irrelevant to events there. American negotiators were important to the (flawed) agreement that brought Bhutto back to Pakistan in the first place. American aid to the Pakistani military - particularly aid that allows it to maintain strategic parity with India - helps maintain Musharraf's support within his own army. To argue that the U.S. has no leverage in Pakistani politics strikes me as a bit small minded.

Part of the problem is that Krugman sets up straw men by grossly oversimplifying American policy options. He seems to think that we can either bomb Pakistan, or we can try to use moral suasion to direct political outcomes there. He's right that neither strategy would be particularly effective, but we have more nuanced options. Were the United States to start engaging Pakistan as a country, rather than just as a political regime, we could very likely have a positive effect both with regard to Pakistan's stability and our own security. The strategy outlined by Senator Biden in recent months, for example, would begin to repair America's image in Pakistan, help state-building there, and provide political actors with incentives to both strengthen democracy and go after violent extremists in a committed manner. Despite Krugman's infantalizing dismissal of Pakistani political culture ("there are too many people... who don't want to be enlightened"), my reading has indicated that the majority of the Pakistani population is either secular or moderately islamist. They don't need to be "enlightened," they need a political system that responds to their desires. The United States can help by investing in Pakistan, rather than whichever strongmen/women happen to be sitting in Islamabad at any given moment.

After fifty years of (largely frustrating) experience managing global politics, it is understandable why Dr. Krugman and many of his generation have given up on the notion that American power can be used effectively half a world away. While such humility is a welcome contrast to the overreaching doctrines of recent years, it is overly pessimistic of the leadership that America is yet able to provide.

Pakistan: What Now? (Part Two)

The big news out of Pakistan today, apart from the Musharraf government's continued beatings of street protesters, is Benazir Bhutto's call for large-scale anti-government demonstrations this coming Friday. The article touches on two important points. First, Ms. Bhutto is key to any acceptable solution to the current crisis, as she is the only one capable of mounting a large-scale political assault on Musharraf's government. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that her popularity, combined with U.S. pressure, will keep her from being detained by Musharraf any time soon, so she now stands as the primary locus of viable opposition. Second, the article mentions that her planned march "runs more than 160 miles from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad, the heart of Punjab, the country’s largest and most powerful province... The vast majority of the country’s army hails from Punjab, and the military has hesitated in the past to fire on civilians in the province. Widespread popular unrest there could cause senior Pakistani army commanders to turn on General Musharraf and ask him to resign..."

In other words, Ms. Bhutto has (it would seem) concluded that the best way to strike at Musharraf is to undermine his legitimacy within the ranks of his own military. This echoes comments made by Senator Biden on Sunday's Face The Nation, where he suggested withdrawing the high tech military aid (F-16 fighters and such) that allows the Pakistani military to keep pace with that of India in order to convince others within the army that Musharraf has become a liability.

My suggestion, then, is this: come Friday, at the height of Bhutto-led protests through Punjab, the Administration ought to announce the indefinite suspension of all military aid to Pakistan, offering to resume it only once Pakistan is put under functional civilian leadership legitimized through free parlimentary elections. The simultaneous internal and external pressure, if timed correctly, might just create the tipping point necessary to break the deadlock.