This evasive war management comes in different shapes on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the United States the challenge for presidents is not to defer to the generals. President Bush started the war on terror and expanded it to Iraq, and on this he was in control. However, he then started deferring to his generals, arguing that his job was to make sure the generals had the resources they needed to execute their mission. To the contrary, his job was to get involved and make sure that what the generals did actually corresponded to the U.S. national interest: it was to make strategy, not to be a supply agent. President Obama has fallen into the same trap. His surge in Afghanistan was bold but ultimately took place without his sustained engagement, and in turn his generals could design a counter-insurgency campaign that became too big and wide for everyone.
European states do not run these big wars and so have few superstar generals such as McChrystal and Petraeus. Europe’s challenge instead comes in the shape of legality. European leaders, tied down by interdependence and integration, have ceased to talk about the national interest. They instead talk about legality and justice. The just cause of war is something they look to the United Nations to define. The just conduct of war must increasingly take place in respect not only of the standard laws of war (no torture, no unnecessary harm to civilians, humane treatment of prisoners etc.) but increasingly the full spectrum of human rights (freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, right to fair trail, gender identity etc.). War thus becomes governance – the kind of activity that states undertake when they send police forces and social workers into bad neighborhoods.
Clausewitz is telling us that we should not mistake war for social work because we will end up with two bad outcomes. One is that we ultimately lose our wars because our opponents easily can make us look bad on the battlefield (there is no freedom of speech!) and in turn erode popular support for the war effort. Another is that we delude ourselves into thinking that war is actually not all that bad. We make war popular: it is social work, and everyone knows that social work is what the non-Western world needs! And off we are to build better societies by armed means in faraway places.
When Clausewitz tells us that war is the continuation of politics by other means, he is also telling us that we must take control of war by politics. Political leaders must define ends of war that are realistic, based on the national interest as much as any ideal. And leaders must remain engaged to ensure that ends and means remain connected as the war evolves. Neither generals nor laws of war can do this, only political leaders. This is why we as analysts and observers must “speak truth to power,” as the saying goes – why we must demand of our leaders the restraint that comes from sober thinking. As war in Mali unfolds, and perhaps a wider war in the Sahel, it would not be a bad thing to do.
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January 8, 2013
If there is one thing that will determine the fate of the main security challenges in 2013, it is money. It is not complicated math. The United States is hitting its debt ceiling and has barely managed to veer off from the fiscal cliff that threatens to seriously cut its public budgets; while in Europe public expenditure is caught in the grips of a continental currency crisis. We are in both cases dealing with a – longstanding – failure to tackle structural deficits. And neither the United States nor Europe can hope to conduct serious, long-range security policy if they do not get their house in order.
The problems are connected but the epicenter is in Europe. How so? The currency crisis – in the shape of a Euro that markets no longer fully trust and which therefore provides no cover for Europe’s underlying political diversity – has moved the power to shape European affairs from Brussels to Berlin. If there is one country that can save the Euro, and by saving the Euro also rescue the EU claim to provide peace by integration, it is Germany. There are other players involved, naturally, but Berlin is the center of gravity.
With Berlin in the lead we are facing an old question in European affairs: how to reconcile Europe and a big Germany. Historically, big Germany – from 1871 to today – has sought to promote three policies that were not always easy to reconcile. One is a “continental policy” of building of a European preference for a certain conservative economy (this goes all the way back to the Junkers). Another is a “world policy” of competing with the best and brightest, making the most of Germany’s modern export industries. And the third is a “national policy” of claiming influence.
The Cold War was fantastic because it allowed people to forget the “national policy” option and made possible a combination of “world policy” and “continental policy” – as in the combination of a U.S.-led global and liberal system and the building up of the European Communities.
All this is history. Germany is now being pushed to become more active – develop a “national policy” – because the United States is losing control of the global economy and because the Euro crisis so vividly threatens the EU fiber. There is no question that Germany will seek to reconcile the global and continental, and that it will seek to avoid the ghost of national assertion and blame of “dictatorship”. However, a prolonged crisis in weak European societies resentful of imposed savings – from Greece to Portugal and beyond – will fan the flames. Moreover, a transatlantic divide on trade and finance – witness the impossible WTO trade negotiations – will only help to undermine Germany’s effort to reconcile its policies.
It could force Germany to choose between Europe and the world, and Germany would only make this choice, quite naturally, once it had developed a firmer sense of its “national policy”. It is not something we should hope for. The best thing that could happen would be transatlantic agreement to move forward together. It would prevent the basic bargain of security from 1949 from coming apart, but it is not an easy thing to achieve when money is short.
Happy 2013!
November 27, 2012
Is Africa – the forgotten continent – destined for a better future or more trouble? The Arab Spring bodes well but is also a cause of concern. Egypt’s president, Mohammed Mursi, has a popular mandate to develop Egypt’s democracy, but he is now accumulating powers at a pace that has unhinged the stability of the country. Moreover, Mursi’s Egypt must offer support for emboldened Hamas in Gaza, reassure Israel that their peace treaty remains valid, and bridge Saudi-Iranian differences on the civil war in Syria – which is very hard to do.
In Egypt we detect the kind of balance between hope and despair that seems to afflict Africa. Libya’s 2011 revolt against Qaddafi was hopeful, but Mali is now in despair because rebels and fundamentalists have pushed south to create mayhem in the northern part of the country. The United Nations Security Council has asked for a concrete plan for military intervention to be drawn up before the end of 2012, and action could well follow sooner rather than later.
Sudan offered hope of peaceful conflict resolution when South Sudan in mid-2011 was allowed to secede and become independent. South Sudan and Sudan proper have failed to agree on bits of territory and flows of oil, however, and low intensity conflict is now a harsh reality, matching the misery of Darfur where a declared peace fails to hold up. These are not the only troubles facing Sudan. Israel is reported to have attacked both shipments and factories in Sudan because Iran (allegedly) is using Sudan as a staging point for supplying Hamas with weapons. Which in a way brings us back to Egypt, the old suzerain of Sudan and Israel’s troubled partner in peacemaking.
Part of the research we do at the Center for War Studies concerns military conflict management in Africa and the partnership that the European Union is building with the African Union. It is an ongoing research concern. Friday 30 November there is an occasion to engage researchers and especially our guest on the topic of security and development in Africa. Our guest is Pekka Haavisto, special representative of Finland in African crises specializing in Sudan and Somalia. Mr. Haavisto will be giving a public talk, and we hope to see you there.
For more information, please consult this website.
November 8, 2012
From Afghanistan the good news is that a date for the presidential elections now has been set: April 5, 2014. The bad news is that President Karzai remains reluctant to allow foreigners to sit on the Electoral Complaints Commission, may be conspiring to set up the elections to favor his next of kin (Karzai has served two terms and cannot run), tried to shoot the messenger of political problems – the Independent Crisis Group that on October 8 reported that the 2014 elections were heading for trouble – and then reacted with notable reservation at the news of President Obama’s reelection.
We should worry because the combat mission of international forces is coming to an end – the process is under way but will not finish until December 2014 – and because a lack of proper governance could throw Afghanistan back into civil war. The Taliban remain strong, as does the Northern Alliance that has dominated Kabul politics since 2001. Worryingly, the Northern Alliance may gain control of the new Afghan army, trained by Western forces and numbering up to 300,000 troops. It would be an awesome tool of war, and its use against the Taliban would undoubtedly draw Pakistan into a wider regional war. It is not something we should wish for.
There is still much to learn from this conflict. The Center for War Studies therefore invites you to engage two events to learn more about NATO and Afghanistan.
One is a November 14 debate with journalist Charlotte Aagaard, intelligence analyst Peter Dahl Thruelsen, and former chief of Danish defense, Jesper Helsø. They will engage my recently published book, NATO in Afghanistan, criticize it and offer their view of what we can learn from Afghanistan.
Another is a November 16 event with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The Sec Gen will talk about NATO and Afghanistan and will then be submitted to an oral examination by clever students. He will be graded, naturally!
Details about these events can be found elsewhere on this CWS site. We look forward to seeing you.
September 2012
The pulse of international conflict is beating, and here some eleven years after the September 11 terrorist attacks it seems that the forces that unleashed the War on Terror have morphed into a wider struggle for civilization in the broader Middle East and beyond. This is worth keeping in mind as politicians and pundits eagerly stumble to turn the page and “pivot to Asia.” The Great Game of power competition between China and the United States is opening, for sure, and it will be easier to grasp because it focuses on these two eminent powers. However, in the meantime there is a wider struggle going on, which is sometimes very bloody, and which is of great consequence to international relations.
Among the things that now have become apparent are these. The West as a force in international relations is suffering, and not only because of the financial crisis. NATO is caught in a crisis of identity that is essentially political: NATO remains militarily powerful but is unsure of what it is there to do – of power’s purpose. The EU is posing as an alternative but is severely constrained in getting a policy of impact going in the heartland of Africa where its ambitions meet new political realities.
The character of war is changing, though. Drones are much-derided weapons of war but also an excellent window through which we can see how war is not either human-centric or technology-centric: it is both. You can shoot missiles easily but it takes human skill to identify proper targets and not least gauge the impact missiles will have on your campaign and politics. To manage war and structure the peace that will follow it, therefore, one must have capable governments – political leaders, generals, and bureaucrats who organize their actions and care about legitimate action. In this respect Western states are not at a particular disadvantage, and they may be better positioned than most to draw support from international institutions as they engage in questions of peace and war.
We know this in part because research at CWS has borne it out. We do research related to questions of war and peace, and we communicate our results and observations. We are not constricted by disciplinary boundaries but follow the big questions that war and conflict pose. It is that simple.
We – the CWS team – would welcome your engagement in our continued quest for new knowledge and insight. Take a look at this homepage and perhaps you will find a reference to a publication that you simply must read, or an event that you will not want to miss out on. If you have ideas for how we could improve things, let us know.