Observer: Top British commander says West must see job through in Afghanistan

The Observer today broadcasts the opinion of the ranking UK commander of British armed forces working with ISAF regarding the West's Afghan encounter:

The most senior British commander in Afghanistan says the Taliban cannot "assassinate their way to power" and too many lives have been lost over the last 10 years for the west to flinch in its campaign against the insurgents.

In an interview with the Guardian, Lieutenant General James Bucknall said the UK had made "an investment in blood" and that now was not the time for western nations to turn their back on the country.

He claimed that the Taliban had been pushed back everywhere and that relentless special forces operations are killing 130 to140 insurgent leaders every month. He conceded that too often over the last decade the military had "over-promised and under-delivered". Bucknall said he understood why politicians, the public and the armed forces themselves felt war-weary. Mistakes, he admitted, had been made.

"We almost owe it to those who have gone before to see the job through," he said. "Having made this investment in blood, I am more determined. If I didn't think we could do this I would take a very different view but I am confident we can do it."

Bucknall's comments come on the eve of an international conference in Bonn to discuss the future of Afghanistan. There is mounting concern about the amount of aid that Afghanistan will receive and a growing political clamour in the US and UK for western forces to speed up their withdrawal. But Bucknall said critics of the military campaign should ask whether the Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been able to achieve any of his goals over the last two years.

"Let's mark [his] work. If he was serious about overthrowing the government and grabbing a portion of Afghanistan for his own, you have to do three things. You have to secure your own heartland in Kandahar and central Helmand. Is he doing that? No. They lost their safe havens around Kandahar in 2010 and they didn't take them back in 2011. They are not holding their own heartland.

"Secondly, you have to spread your influence around other areas. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere in Afghanistan that they are doing that. Thirdly, you have got to affect the seat of government. There have been lots of headlines, but Kabul has about 20% of the population and less than 1% of total violence in the country. Not only is the seat of government unaffected, but Kabul is a flourishing capital city that is much safer than Karachi."

The Taliban had been reduced to a terrorist group, adopting terrorist tactics, said Bucknall.

"I have not seen any insurgents who have assassinated their way to power. One hundred and forty [Afghans] have been assassinated this year. In the press that is painted as the government cannot survive this. But we are taking out 130-140 mid-level Taliban leaders every month. Sometimes it is worth turning the egg-timer on its head. They have been driven to this much vaunted tactic of assassinations."

He said that the idea the Taliban would sit and wait until western forces had left suited Nato well because it would allow Afghan police and army more time to get up to strength.

Bucknall has just finished an 18-month tour in Kabul, during which he was in charge of all British forces, and second in command of the International Security and Assistance Force – the military coalition now commanded by the American general, John Allen. Bucknall oversaw the "surge" last year in which an extra 30,000 American troops began an offensive to push back the insurgency – a tactic that reduced attacks in some areas, but raised questions about whether progress could be sustained by Afghan police and army when NATO forces began to pull out.

The West has said none of its forces will be fighting after 2014.Bucknall admitted that Afghanistan's security was still fragile and expressed frustration that certain factors that would determine Afghanistan's future – such as diplomatic efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table – were out of the military's control.

The western coalition had to stick together over the next two years during the pull-out – a coded warning to countries that might want to "run for the exit door". Pakistan had to be "part of the solution in one way or another", said Bucknall.

"These are the two top ingredients. We have to stick together. We went in together, and we go out together. Managing a coalition in a draw down requires an awful lot more work than managing a coalition during a surge."

Intervention, Libya, and the Future of Sovereignty

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, previously the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department and dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, writes today in The Atlantic regarding the significance of NATO's current intervention. Professor Slaughter (great name!) believes that "International law -- and the governments that bring it into being -- are (in) the process of redefining the definition of sovereignty"....

Guardian: NATO faces dim future, warns Pentagon chief

The Guardian reports today on an extremely hard-hitting speech by US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates on the (possibly) precarious future of the NATO alliance (full article follows):

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has launched a blistering attack on European defence complacency, saying Nato has become a "two-tiered" alliance of those willing to wage war and those only interested in "talking" and peacekeeping.

In his bluntest warning in nearly five years as the Pentagon head under two US presidents, Gates announced that Washington's fading commitment to European security could spell the death of the 60-year-old alliance.

In a valedictory speech in Brussels three weeks before retiring, Gates bristled with exasperation and contempt for European defence spending cuts, inefficiencies and botched planning, and read the riot act to an elite European audience.

Nato faced a "dim, if not dismal" future, consigned to "collective military irrelevance", Gates said, warning for the first time that the organisation was living on borrowed time and that a new young generation of US leaders could abandon the key pillar of transatlantic security, established in 1949.

"If current trends in the decline of European defence capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders – those for whom the cold war was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America's investment in Nato worth the cost," he said.

He attacked Europe's conduct of the bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, told the Europeans to forget any notions of pulling their troops out of Afghanistan in a piecemeal manner, and said the big new factor raising questions about Nato's survival was the "political and economic environment in the United States".

"The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country," Gates said of the Anglo-French led campaign in Libya.

"Yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference."

The US share of Nato military spending had soared to 75%, much more than during the cold war heyday when Washington maintained hundreds of thousands of US troops across Europe, he said.

He warned that the US taxpayer would not stand for it much longer – the US Congress and "the American body politic writ large" would rebel against spending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defence budgets".

Nato had degenerated into an alliance "between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of Nato membership but don't want to share the risks and the costs", Gates said.

Noting that he was 20 years older than President Barack Obama, he said Washington's security guarantees to Europe, embodied in the Nato alliance, were fading. His peers' "emotional and historical attachment" to Nato was "ageing out", he said, adding: "You have a lot of new members of Congress who are roughly old enough to be my children or grandchildren."
Generational change, economic hardship and European refusal to take responsibility for their own security were all feeding Nato's decline and possible end, he warned.

"The drift of the past 20 years can't continue," Gates said. "In the past, I've worried openly about Nato turning into a two-tiered alliance, between members who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks, and those conducting the "hard" combat missions ... This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are there today. And it is unacceptable."

In March, all 28 Nato members had voted for the Libya mission, he noted. "Less than half have participated, and fewer than a third have been willing to participate in the strike mission," he said.

"Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can't. The military capabilities simply aren't there."
In a withering attack on the European defence establishment, he blasted allies for slashing defence budgets, but admitted there was little chance of reversing the trend.

"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defence," he said.

Economist: Responsibility to protect - The lessons of Libya

Outsiders had good reason to intervene in Libya. But their cause may suffer from it.

So fears The Economist newspaper today in a useful article reviewing the ongoing intervention in Libya by NATO forces:

For those who back muscular humanitarian intervention, both the words and deeds of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi provided absolute moral clarity. “Come out of your homes, attack [the opposition] in their dens,” he told his supporters on February 22nd. He called the protesters “cockroaches” and “rats” who did not deserve to live: language chillingly reminiscent of the broadcasts of Radio Mille Collines, which spurred on the perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.

As he spoke, his forces had set their sights on Benghazi, their adversaries’ stronghold. According to Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, government forces had already killed 233 people in the preceding week. A bloodbath beckoned, in a city of 700,000 people. The United Nations Security Council invoked a fateful formula, urging the regime to meet its “responsibility to protect” its people. On March 17th the council, “expressing its determination to ensure the protection of civilians”, ordered air strikes.

That set the stage for the first full-blown test of a principle that the UN adopted in 2005 and has been refining since. The doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (R2P) holds that when a sovereign state fails to prevent atrocities, foreign governments may intervene to stop them. Human-rights advocates say it saves lives. Sceptics see it as too easily misused to be useful: a cover for imperialism, or even an incentive to kill (because even if a massacre is not looming, an unscrupulous warlord might be tempted to engineer one against his own people to spur outside support).

Previous uses of R2P have been solo ventures. In 2008 Russia used it to justify attacking Georgia, and France cited it after the cyclone in Myanmar, implying that humanitarian aid might have to be brought in by force if the regime persisted in stonewalling (it backed down). But before this year, no mission had been authorised by the UN Security Council that so explicitly cited the new principle.

At first it looked likely that the doctrine would either triumph or die in Libya. But two months and thousands of air strikes later, war’s messy reality has merely hardened views on both sides. On one hand, the decision to go to war was made in good faith at a time when the risk of massacres seemed real. As Mats Berdal, a professor at King’s College London, points out, the world’s leading powers had good reason to think they were “avoiding a Srebrenica”—the massacre of Bosnians which UN forces failed to avert in July 1995.

But as the war drags on and NATO strikes more widely, sceptics also feel their case has been bolstered. “For those of us who feared that R2P was just a warrant for war, our fears have been vindicated,” says David Rieff, an advocate-turned-critic.

Responsibility to protect gained ground after ghastly mass killings in the late 20th century, including massacres by the Khmers Rouges in Cambodia in the 1970s; the use of chemical weapons in Iraq in 1988; and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In 1999 NATO unleashed an air war, without a UN blessing, to stop a Serbian campaign in the province of Kosovo. It argued that the need to protect civilians was an overwhelming moral imperative. The UN gave a sort of retrospective blessing by endorsing an international tutelage for the territory, led by Bernard Kouchner, a French pioneer of humanitarian intervention.

But the terrible civil war in Iraq that followed America’s invasion in 2003—portrayed as intervention against tyranny—shrivelled support for the doctrine. A possible result of that may have been hesitancy in intervening to stop the Sudanese government’s genocide in Darfur.

Seeking to restore liberal hawkishness’s good name, a group led by Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister, pushed the UN’s 60th anniversary conference in 2005 to endorse the idea that the world has a “responsibility to protect” civilians. Eventually 150-plus countries agreed to allow armed intervention through the Security Council “should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

So much for the theory. What about the practice? Colonel Qaddafi provided an all-but-unique test. Regional leaders loathed him and readily dumped him. The Arab League’s support for the intervention stopped Russia and China wielding their vetoes. And the concentration of the rebels in the east, combined with flat desert terrain, at first made the regime’s forces easy bombing targets. “The stars were well and truly aligned in the Libya case,” says Mr Evans. “All the criteria were satisfied.”

The immediate goal of protecting Benghazi from massacre was achieved within days. Having destroyed Libya’s air defences, Western bombers and missiles pummelled the advancing troops into a speedy retreat.

Harder decisions followed. Libya’s army continued to shell other rebel-held cities, and its snipers were plainly targeting civilians. Protecting all Libyans, not just those in the east, would require the end of Colonel Qaddafi’s rule—an outcome that both Western and Arab governments had already called for. NATO stepped up its military campaign, bombing retreating columns as well as advancing ones, and attacking command-and-control centres frequented by Colonel Qaddafi and his family. On April 30th an air strike killed one of his sons. The line between curbing atrocities and an air war for regime change blurred—though a land operation is ruled out, for the moment.

Both sides of the debate will eagerly cite Libya the next time mass murder seems imminent. It shows that a modest dose of air power can save lives; but also that the rhetoric of civilian protection can be stretched to justify a creeping mission. Power politics decides which lives get saved, and which policy aims triumph.

Mr Rieff decries a “two-tiered system of interveners and intervened upon”, where the “old imperial powers” make the rules. But which powers exactly? The Libyan vote passed only because non-Western Russia and China withheld their Security Council vetoes: all but unimaginable until recently. Both countries are now getting cold feet, claiming misuse of the resolution’s elastic language. For different reasons Mr Evans bemoans excess zeal too: he wants to preserve the purity of R2P, and fears an interpretation that allows for “all-out aggressive war”. A lot rides on this war—and not just for the Libyans.

Telegraph: Nato mission in Afghanistan as long as Soviet occupation

The Telegraph points up a significant way point for NATO's involvement in Afghanistan, due tomorrow:

The Nato-led mission in Afghanistan has now lasted as long as the Soviet army's doomed occupation during the 1980s.

Coalition troops, including 9,500 British, will on Saturday surpass the nine years and fifty days which the Red Army spent unsuccessfully trying to build a socialist state.

The milestone comes as Nato has 140,000 troops deployed in the country and levels of violence are at their highest since the US-backed ousting of the Taliban in October 2001.

A useful article, contrasting motivations, methods and possible outcomes of the intervention. Read it!