Global Peace Operations 2012

The United Nations Security Council authorized two new peacekeeping missions during 2011—the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA)—the first missions since the joint UN-AU Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was established in 2007.

The Council also authorized the use of force to protect civilians in Libya, clearing the way for a NATO air campaign that divided members of the Security Council. Following the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, the Security Council mandated the civilian UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), a political mission, to help reestablish state authority.

Brought to you by NYU's Center on International Cooperation, the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations covers both UN and non-UN peace operations during 2011. The latest edition focuses on the role of peacekeeping operations in extending and consolidating state authority in post-conflict and post-crisis states.

This edition covers a year that saw continued overall growth in peacekeeping operations, albeit at a slower rate than past years. However, UN peacekeeping experienced a decline in the deployment of uniformed personnel, the first such decline since 2003. This is despite the two new peacekeeping missions.

 Peacekeepers in 2011 were tasked with responding to a number of rapidly changing environments including supporting the referendum on South Sudan, and supporting its establishment as an independent state; elections in Haiti, Liberia and Democratic Republic of Congo; the post-electoral crisis in Côte d'Ivoire; and wresting control of Mogadishu from Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

All of these activities occurred against the backdrop of intense debate on the cost of peacekeeping, with increasing pressure to draw down a number of missions. The preoccupation with mission costs and the lighter footprint of these missions may indicate that a decade of large multidimensional peacekeeping missions may be coming to an end.

 

Global Peace Operations 2012

Seven Pillars of Small War Power

How might we think differently about a “center of gravity” in an environment where asymmetric strategy dominates and power is diffused? Insurgencies and movements of resistance are dynamic, living systems powered by social dynamics.Successful insurgent movements leverage their available sources of power to gain the sympathy of the broader population and to mobilize a small cadre of armed forces. For the insurgent, these dynamics—the power of rising expectations, the power of the people, the power of the underdog, the power of agility, the power of resistance, the power of security, and the power of belonging—become the pillars of small war power. For the counterinsurgent, each of these pillars presents both a potential hazard and an exploitable vulnerability.

The full article from Military Review is available for free download HERE.

UN Peace Operations - Year in Review 2010

The United Nations (DPKO) has 15 current Peacekeeping Operations around the globe involving nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel (i.e., troops, police, and military observers) from 115 contributing countries, and another 20,000 civilian personnel.

The UN has involved itself in the "peacekeeping" business since 1948, with a cumulative cost over those 65 years of about $69 billion and nearly 3000 fatalities.

2010, they describe as a "watershed year" making significant progress in the longstanding operations in Liberia and Timor-Leste, and facing escalating challenges in theaters such as Chad, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Côte d’Ivoire.

This report - UN Peace Operations - Year in Review 2010 - reviews the nature and scope of this past year's operations, and includes a section with "facts and figures" for the following:

• United Nations peacekeeping operations
• United Nations political and peacebuilding missions
• Peacekeeping contributors
• Top 10 contributors of uniformed personnel
• Surge in uniformed UN peacekeeping personnel from 1991-2010
• Top 10 providers of assessed financial contributions

Conflict, Security, and Development

More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict. The World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development examines the changing nature of violence in the 21st century, and underlines the negative impact of repeated cycles of violence on a country or region’s development prospects. Preventing violence and building peaceful states that respond to the aspirations of their citizens requires strong leadership and concerted national and international efforts. The Report is based on new research, case studies and extensive consultations with leaders and development practitioners throughout the world.

Part I: The Challenge

Chapter 1, Repeated violence threatens development, explores the challenge: repeated cycles of organized criminal violence and civil conflict that threaten development locally and regionally and are responsible for much of the global deficit in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

Chapter 2, Vulnerability to violence, reviews the combination of internal and external stresses and institutional factors that lead to violence. It argues that capable, accountable, and legitimate institutions are the common “missing factor” explaining why some societies are more resilient to violence than others. Without attention to institutional transformation, countries are susceptible to a vicious cycle of repeated violence.

Part II: Lessons from National and International Responses

Chapter 3, From violence to resilience: Restoring confidence and transforming institutions, presents the WDR framework, or “virtuous cycle.” It compiles research and case study experience to show how countries have successfully moved away from fragility and violence: by mobilizing coalitions in support of citizen security, justice, and jobs to restore confidence in the short term and by transforming national institutions over time. This is a repeated process that seizes multiple transition moments and builds cumulative progress. It takes a generation.

Chapter 4, Restoring confidence: Moving away from the brink, reviews lessons from national experience in restoring confidence by mobilizing ‘inclusive-enough’ coalitions of stakeholders and by delivering results. Collaborative coalitions often combine government and nongovernmental leadership to build national support for change and signal an irreversible break with the past. Restoring confidence in situations of low trust means delivering some fast results, since government announcements of change will not be credible without tangible action.

Chapter 5, Transforming institutions to deliver security, justice, and jobs, reviews national experience in prioritizing foundational reforms that provide citizen security, justice, and jobs—and stem the illegal financing of armed groups. In moving forward institutional transformation in complex conflict settings, case studies emphasize that perfection should not be the enemy of progress—pragmatic, “best-fit” approaches should be used to address immediate challenges.

Chapter 6, International support to building confidence and transforming institutions, turns to lessons from international support to national processes. While registering some notable successes, it argues that international interventions are often fragmented, slow to enter, quick to exit, reliant on international technical assistance, and delivered through parallel systems. The chapter considers why international action has been slow to change. International actors have to respond to their own domestic pressures to avoid risk and deliver fast results. Different parts of the international system—middle-income versus OECD actors, for example—face different domestic pressures, undermining cohesive support.

Chapter 7, International action to mitigate external stresses, provides lessons from international action to combat external security, economic, and resource stresses that increase conflict risk. The stresses range from trafficking in drugs and natural resources to food insecurity and other economic shocks. The chapter also addresses lessons from regional and cross-border initiatives to manage these threats.


Part III: Practical Options and Recommendation

Chapter 8, Practical country directions and options, provides practical options for national and international reformers to take advantage of multiple transition opportunities, restore confidence, and transform institutions in countries facing a range of institutional challenges, stresses, and forms of violence.

Chapter 9, New directions for international support, identifies four tracks for international action. First, to invest in prevention through citizen security, justice and jobs. Second, internal agency reforms to provide faster assistance for confidence-building and longer term institutional engagement. Third, acting at the regional level on external stresses. Fourth, marshalling the knowledge and resources of low, middle, and high-income countries.

Internally Displaced Persons in 2010

Human displacement is one of the tragic – but often less visible- consequences of pervasive armed conflict. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) released its latest report, titled: Internal Displacement: Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2010. At the UN’s request, the Norwegian Refugee Council established the IDMC in 1998. Since then, it has become the leading monitor of internal displacement around the world. Here are just a few highlight from the 2010 Report:

• The number of IDPs globally rose from the end of 2009 to reach 27.5 million.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, Africa – as a region – has the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world. There are more than 11 million IDPs on the continent and highly concentrated in Sudan, accounting for about 40% of the world total.
• New displacements in Yemen boosted the figures for the Middle East region, which reached 3.9 million at the end of 2010.
• By individual country, Colombia, Sudan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Somalia each reported more than a million IDPs. Although humanitarian and development agencies tend to focus on rural IDPs in rural areas, in most countries, significant numbers are also living in urban areas
• People from a minority group were at greater risk displacement and had less access to formal and informal support and security/protection.
• Attacks or threats against humanitarian workers continued in many situations including Darfur in Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Colombia.

You can read the full report HERE.

Social Conflict in Africa Database

The Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) is a resource for conducting research and analysis on various forms of social and political unrest in Africa. It includes over 6,000 social conflict events across Africa from 1990 to 2009, including riots, strikes, protests, coups, and communal violence. By tracking forms of conflict not covered in traditional datasets on civil and interstate war, SCAD gives policymakers and researchers new tools to analyze conflict patterns. The database includes information on the location, timing, and magnitude of social conflict events, as well as the actors, targets, issues of contention, and government response.

The SCAD research team compiled the data from Associated Press (AP) and Agence France Presse (AFP) news wires. Each event record contains information on start and end dates, the type of event, the actors and targets involved, the number of participants, the number of fatalities, use of government repression, event locations, and issues. While other data sources contain rich information about armed conflict in Africa, the goal of the SCAD project is to provide researchers, journalists, NGOs, and the policy community more detail about other forms of social conflict.

SCAD is part of the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. The CCAPS program is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, a university-based, social science research program focused on areas of strategic importance to national security policy. The SCAD team is based at the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Austin.

The team has made every effort to provide a comprehensive resource on social conflict in Africa, based on AP and AFP news wires. However, no honest research project can claim to have accounted for each and every instance of unrest. While civil wars and insurgencies are recorded, based on information from the Uppsala University Armed Conflicts Database, SCAD does not provide a comprehensive account of armed conflict. Please see the methodology page and codebook for more information about data limitations and compatibility with other data sources.

Source : The University of Texas at Austin // The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law // Climate Change and African Political Stability Program via Human Security Gateway

New Armed Conflict Resource!

The Global Governance Monitor is a product of CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance (IIGG) program. They have online interactive modules on Nuclear Proliferation, Finance, Oceans, Climate Change, Public Health, and now - most recently - Armed Conflict. Though interstate wars have been on the decline since the 1990s, civil armed conflicts remain a pernicious problem. More than a quarter of a million people around the world die each year in armed conflicts.

The Global Governance Monitor's new interactive module illustrates the range of conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and rebuilding problems. They have a mini-documentary video on the challenge of conflict prevention,and several other interactive multimedia guides, including:

• An interactive map detailing violent conflicts worldwide, as well as the corresponding international agencies attempting to reduce the violence.
• A mini-documentary showing the obstacles to improving conflict prevention and response.
• An interactive timeline tracing the history of initiatives seeking to mitigate violent conflict, from 1814 through the present.
• An issue brief summarizing the status of the multilateral conflict prevention and response regime (including gaps and related U.S. policy).
• A matrix cataloging all relevant international agreements, mechanisms, institutions, and initiatives, including coverage, strengths, and shortcomings.
• A list of resources, including foundational texts, essential documents, recent articles, and relevant CFR scholars on the subject.

A very worthwhile effort from CFR's IIGG. Please make time to take a look HERE.

Guide to Armed Groups in DR Congo

DRC: Who’s who among armed groups in the east

Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks | UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

KINSHASA, 15 June 2010 (IRIN) - Armed groups have caused severe suffering in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) over the years. Below are listed some that are active in the Kivu region. This information is gathered from various sources:

Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)

The FDLR was formed by Rwandan Hutus linked to the 1994 genocide and includes former members of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s army and Interahamwe militia. After they were routed by President Paul Kagame’s troops following the genocide, they regrouped in DRC to plot a return to power in Kigali, forming an armed group that eventually became the FDLR.

Former DRC President Laurent-Désiré Kabila formed an alliance with the FDLR to battle Kigali’s influence in eastern Congo after 1998 and some joined his army. But Kabila’s son Joseph, now DRC president, allowed Rwandan troops to enter Congo in 2009 and hunt the FDLR. UN security sources estimated the number of FDLR at 3,000, down from 6,000 in 2009.

The group has an armed wing, FOCA (Forces Combattantes Abacunguzi) , which is active in South Kivu. FDLR has allied with other groups, such as Michel Rukunda’s Republican Federalist Forces (FRF), a South Kivu militia claiming to defend the interests of the Banyamulenge (Congolese ethnic Tutsis) and some Mai-Mai groups.

Mai-Mai groups

Its fighters, who spray themselves with “magic water to protect themselves from bullets”, are essentially self-defence militias formed on an ad-hoc basis by local leaders who arm young men in villages, often along ethnic lines.

Some of the larger ones are better known, such as the Congolese Resistance Patriots (PARECO) or Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo (APCLS), which joined the peace process in March 2009, promising to transform into peaceful political parties.

On 2 June, 500 members of the Kifuafua Mai-Mai group returned to their positions in Walikale in North Kivu, claiming that their agreed integration into the army had been delayed for too long. Most Mai-Mai groups are local forces known by the name of their leader. The Yakutumba group, which bears the name of the “major-general” at their helm, kidnapped eight aid workers in South Kivu in April.

National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP)

The CNDP threatened to invade Goma, capital of North Kivu, in November 2008. Later, Rwanda placed its leader Laurent Nkunda under house arrest. Bosco Ntaganda, who is indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), replaced Nkunda and agreed to steer the group towards peace. In March 2009, the CNDP became a political party and 3,000-4,000 of its fighters joined the Congolese army. Some 1,000 to 2,000 are resisting integration.

Most observers believe the CNDP retained its chains of command within the army. The group administers much of Masisi district and is involved in a range of activities in North Kivu, from artisanal mining to charcoal trafficking and extortion. It is accused of organizing the transfer of its Rwandan supporters to Masisi, raising friction between Rwandese in DRC and other ethnic groups.

Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC)

The group, active in North Kivu, is led by General Gad Ngabo, who crossed into the Congolese district of Rutshuru from Uganda recently. Sources say he is recruiting across ethnic lines, gathering potential to compete with CNDP for control of some North Kivu areas. The group is estimated to number a few hundred fighters.

Allied Democratic Forces/National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF/NALU)

Ugandan rebel leader Jamil Mukulu founded a Muslim militant group in the early 1990s, despite converting back and forth between Islam and Catholicism. Under pressure from the Ugandan army, he recruited officers from former dictator Idi Amin’s regime and amalgamated the NALU, another Ugandan rebel group believed to harbour supporters of former president Milton Obote.

The militia crossed into DRC in the mid-1990s and has remained in the Beni area of North Kivu. Analysts consider the group “dormant” with about 1,300 men. Peace negotiations between ADF/NALU, Uganda and the DRC began in 2009 with UN facilitation, but in April, the Congolese army blamed a deadly attack on a military training centre near Beni on a coalition of ADF/NALU and local Mai-Mai fighters.

Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)

Joseph Kony founded the “Holy Spirit Mobile Force 2” in northern Uganda in 1987 after a rebel group by the same name was crushed while opposing President Yoweri Museveni’s government. In 1989, Kony renamed the militia the Lord’s Resistance Army, claiming that his objective was the establishment of a Christian-inspired theocracy in Uganda.

The LRA first moved into Southern Sudan in the mid-1990s but the 2005 Sudanese peace agreement and the indictment of Kony by the ICC forced the group to cross into DRC’s Garamba National Park.

In December 2008, Ugandan, Southern Sudanese and Congolese armies launched a joint offensive in Garamba, but failed to wipe out the LRA leadership. The group, which is divided into small groups, move on foot across the Uélés districts of northeastern Congo, the east of the Central African Republic (CAR) and parts of Southern Sudan.

Between December 2007 and April 2010, the group is believed to have killed 1,796 civilians and abducted 2,377 in Congo. It is particularly notorious for forced recruitment of child soldiers, turning boys into killers and girls into porters or sex slaves. It also mutilates lips and ears to terrorize the population.

Front for Patriotic Resistance in Ituri/Popular Front for Justice in Congo (FRPI/FPJC)

FRPI and its splinter group FPJC are active in the southern part of Ituri, where they battle government forces and UN peacekeepers. FRPI’s former commander Germain Katanga is on trial at the ICC with two other Ituri militia leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the recruitment of child soldiers, mass murder and rape. Analysts describe the group as “residual” yet its humanitarian toll remains high.

In 2009, about 5,000 people fled into the Mokato-Ngazi forest after fighting between the DRC army and FRPI/FPJC militants. When government forces and humanitarian agencies accessed the area three months later, an unknown number had starved to death. Jean-Claude Baraka, an FPJC leader, was recently arrested. But FRPI chief “Colonel Cobra” Matata, who had agreed to integrate the national army, reportedly deserted earlier this month to rejoin his militia in Ituri.

Enyele/Independent Movement of Liberation and Allies (MILIA)

Ethnic tensions dating back to the colonial era flared up last November in northwestern Equateur province. Members of the Lobala group, known as “Enyele” after the name of the village where the violence erupted over fishing rights, first attacked the border town of Dongo and defeated police sent to quash them. Civilians fled across the river to the Republic of Congo, and only 20,000 residents have returned.

Adopting the acronym MILIA, they moved southwards across the jungle and stormed the provincial capital, Mbandaka, on 4 April. They also disrupted supplies as far as the eastern city of Kisangani.

On 5 May, the DRC arrested Ondjani Mangbama, the Enyele leader, but his status remains unclear. The Enyele insurrection began in former Congolese ruler Mobutu Sese Seko’s Equateur home province, now a stronghold of Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC opposition party.

Armed forces of the DRC (FARDC)

The FARDC has been accused by human rights groups of involvement in criminal activities, but the government denies the accusations. In 2009, its 213th brigade was cited in the deaths of civilians in Lukweti, North Kivu, during the UN-backed Kimia 2 offensive against the FDLR.


Report can be found online HERE

Droning On About UAVs

Droning On About UAVs

At just about the same time last year, there was a flurry of debate about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - commonly referred to as "drones" – to target enemy combatants. Now, there is another flurry with the same arguments, and fundamentally the same debate.

While much of the back-and-forth involves arguments about the challenges and potential failures of the UAV program, its advocates have also documented their success in removing otherwise inaccessible bad guys from the battlespace, while keeping U.S. and ISAF troops out of harm’s way and averting nasty exchanges of gunfire. So-even if it’s complicated - their potential value should not be dismissed lightly.

Every anti-drone commentator clearly describes the contours and texture of the elephant part that she or he is currently touching. At the risk of drastically over-simplifying a complex set of issues, drone opponents seem to have three basic points of concern – but the empirical evidence in support of these points is less than completely clear:

1. That drones inflict an unacceptable and disproportionate number of civilian casualties;
2. That targeting specific individuals for these attacks is tantamount to assassination or execution; and
3. That America’s use of attack drones is unpopular and breeds resentment toward the U.S. – perhaps even igniting a surge in homegrown radicalization.

If one accepts the assumption that killing an enemy during war is at least sometimes justified, points 1 and 2 seem somewhat related. When using lethal kinetic force in contemporary combat operations, most state forces seek to maximize the selectivity with which enemy combatants are killed, while avoiding or minimizing harm to the civil population.

Of course, in insurgencies, this is much more easily said than done. Innocents and combatants do not wear different colored hats as they meander about. And, in reality, the dualistic civilian-combatant distinction is often … shall we say… fuzzy. Beyond that, I will leave the legal and ethical parsing and comparisons to others who are much smarter and better informed about these things than I am.

Regarding the notion that drones inflict an unacceptable number of civilian casualties, Christine Fair has observed that no real “data” have been presented about drone-inflicted civilian casualties. The Pakistani Taliban - whose motives might be in question – are the only source of reporting to the local Pakstani press – and the Pakistani press reports are the source for most of the international news outlets. So newspaper reports may be a less-than-optimal data source. She notes, personally, that “high-level Pakistani officials have conceded to me that very few civilians have been killed by drones and their innocence is often debatable.”

Regarding the assertion that America’s use of attack drones is unpopular and breeds resentment toward the U.S. – perhaps even igniting a surge in homegrown radicalization, this again may be difficult to discern – for at least two reasons. First, local sentiment about drone attacks and their effects mostly come from local reporting and “word-of-mouth.” Even if they are unpopular, the reasons (and there may be many) for that unpopularity may or may not have any basis in fact. Second, survey results – some of which are available - depend heavily on how the questions are framed. So if someone asks you if you hate the U.S. drone attack program – you might ask yourself: “relative to what?” Face-to-face firefights between ISAF forces and Pakistani Taliban are certainly no less likely result in collateral casualties, and the Pakistani people already are reported to fear the Pakistani army's tactics. Fair states:

What is clear enough, however, is that the drone strikes, however unpopular they may be, are likely to be more popular than the realistic alternatives: the Taliban's violence or the Pakistani army's operations, which have displaced millions. Mosharraf Zaidi, a Pakistani journalist and commentator, vividly captured the complex reality in his May 11 piece in The News: ‘The relative popularity of drones is almost as emphatic as their absolute unpopularity. Pakistani military operations have a reputation in the region now, for being so brutal, that entire parts of towns are destroyed. Drones that destroy one or two homes at a time, obviously represent less damage, and therefore, an option that is preferable to the military's artillery campaigns.’

We need to understand empirically the challenges associated with UAV attacks not just anecdotally argue about them. In my post last year, I posed the following:

In the current era of "effects-based operations," shouldn't the moral (in the Clausewitizian sense) costs and benefits of drone attacks be explicitly anticipated, measured, and weighed as part of operational planning? USJFCOM defines an “effect” as "the physical and/or behavioral state of a system that results from an action, a set of actions, or another effect. A desired effect represents a condition for achieving an associated strategic or operational objective, while undesired effect could inhibit progress toward the same objective" (I-3).

Charli Carpenter suggested in a recent posting that “It’s Not About the Drones, It's About How We Use Them.” I think neither drone technology nor popularity is the real issue here. The intelligence-driven targeting process and decisions about who should be killed where and how can be debated from ethical and legal perspectives, but the UAV is simply the delivery system of lethal force – it is not the “decider.”

Moreover, if we could get reliable data, we might still conclude that UAV attacks are unpopular among the Pakstani population. But popularity is not the issue – legitimacy is the issue. Popularity doesn’t drive defense policy. I’m sure lots of things in war are unpopular, but if the actions are lawful, then the interest of the state using that force is primarily not to undermine its own legitimacy.

This leads to the second facet of the problem that we need to get a handle on – the perceptions. That the Pakistani Taliban can control the “narrative” of U.S. drone attacks may be at least as big of a problem as any actual effects of those attacks in shaping what people think of America. The “buzz” about UAVs may primarily be an instrument of TTP’s informational power.

Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local

Recent decades have seen a dual and simultaneous shift in conflict trends. With the end of the Cold War and superpower support, conflicts have become increasingly intrastate and increasingly localized, dependent for their sustenance upon local assistance and national resources. Yet this localization of conflict has coincided with the increasingly international aspect of conflicts, with humanitarian intervention and UN peacekeeping becoming ever more prevalent. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding these shifting relations between the global and the local. This is accomplished through an analysis of actor-network theory and its rejoinders to reductionist understandings of conflict. Rather than reducing the eruption of violence down to greed, grievance, or ancient hatred, actor-network theory aims to examine conflict networks and their specific composition of local, material, and global actors. Three aspects of these networks are highlighted in particular: the personal networks of local individuals, the material actors, and the conflict network as a system. With these clarified the final section turns to an analysis of some of the primary modalities through which global actors relate and embed themselves within local networks.

You can read the full article HERE

Top 10 Themes from USF Af/Pak Conference

Top 10 Themes from USF Af/Pak Conference
(Just from my perspective, of course)

#10: Afghanistan and Pakistan are more complicated than you think (even if you already think they are complicated).

#9: Afghanistan is not Iraq.

#8: The interests and policies of neighboring countries - perhaps especiallyPakistan, India, & Iran - are vital considerations for Afghanistan's long-term success.

#7: Aristotle was right. It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war.

#6: Effective governance is probably the biggest and most important infrastructure challenge for Afghanistan.

#5: There is no effective “one-size-fits-all” national governance solution for Afghanistan.

#4: Never underestimate the power of tribes.

#3: The Taliban is neither static nor monolithic.

#2: Available electricity is perhaps the greatest practical challenge for economic development.

#1: Afghanistan could ultimately be a model for how the US and Iran might cooperate toward shared interests. A fascinating proposition offered by Dr. Mohsen Milani, the conference ooordinator.

Bonus Theme:

“The state that does not govern, abdicates its power to those who will.”

SOCOM Commander Sees & Understands the Big Picture

I continue to be impressed by Adm. Eric Olson's deep and sophisticated understanding of contemporary armed conflict. When I have made this observation before, some have responded to me that his conclusions are actually rather obvious and so widely shared that they hardly merit recognition. What I find so encouraging, however, is that the leader of the world's most elite and lethal kinetic force understands that - in his words - "it’s the nonkinetic that will be decisive." In a large organization where those wielding hammers tend to see nothing but nails, Olson both understands and acts on the fact that a full array of tools are needed to get the job done. In my view, that is commendable and distinctive.

Yesterday (1/20/10), Olson testified before The House Armed Services Subcommittee On Terrorism And Unconventional Threats where he highlighted some of the following points

• Regional AQ affiliate groups are a growing concern. The networking of affiliate groups has two pernicious effects: (1) it extends AQ’s global reach, posing an increasing threat to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, India, Southeast Asia, and again in the United States; (2) it provides a more diversified infrastructure for recruitment and training.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is a rising affiliate group that is benefiting from this process and whose leadership ranks are made up in part from Saudi and Yemeni extremists who have been released from detention or escaped from Yemeni jails.

• The network is still largely built on personal connections and relationships developed during the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s. Its growth and resilience are enabled by a convergence of instability, crime, corruption, and disruptive migration in the region.

The network sustains its operations mainly through individual relationships that are rooted in the 1980’s Afghanistan jihad against the former Soviet Union. The strength and tenacity of this network is due to the environment in which it functions. It is woven in the fabric of multi-ethnic communities, working with legitimate companies and charities while simultaneously exploiting the criminal networks to move people, money, and supplies around the world. Al-Qaida thrives on sources of friction created by a growing nexus between extremism, crime, and migration.

• AQ affiliate groups are increasingly stepping into ungoverned or under-governed spaces where they can more easily leverage a base of population support through aid or coercion.

The problems we must be prepared to address include the inability of nation states to deal with increasingly complex challenges and to meet the needs and expectations of their populations. These challenges are exacerbated by the growing number of non-state actors who have strategic effect in a networked and interconnected world. In the vacuum created by weak or failed governments, non-state actors have achieved greater influence over benign populations by addressing their basic needs and grievances, and by intimidating and sometimes brutalizing them into submission. When governments fail to address the needs of the population, they become irrelevant and the people will make choices that are shaped by their own immediate needs for survival.

Adm. Olson concludes with the following:

We believe that SOF must simultaneously focus on the environmental dynamics and root causes that create today’s and tomorrow’s threats and adversaries. This belief requires an approach that is integrated with our interagency partners to foster US credibility and influence among relevant populations. We clearly recognize that deterring, disrupting and defeating terrorist will require a whole-of-government and international approach.

You can read the testimony in its entirety HERE.

The Future of Human Security

The Future of Human Security

Human Security is often defined by two of FDR’s “four freedoms”: (1) Freedom from fear and (2) Freedom from want. Threats to those freedoms and the nature of their effects are as fluid and dynamic as everything else in our global security environment.

Dr. Charli Carpenter, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UMass-Amherst (and “Duck of Minerva” maven), and her research team have been working to understand why some of these threats make their way onto the advocacy agenda, while others do not. Their work on transnational agenda setting is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

In the Summer of 2008, they asked the following question to about 6,000 Human Security advocates:

Name three or more specific issues that come to your mind when you think of human security today. An issue means something that human security specialists are actively concerned about.

Using the cloud-like visual display so popular these days, the results looked something like this, where the size of the word corresponds to the frequency with which the issue was mentioned:

Carpenter and her colleagues have recently completed a follow-up study using six focus groups with people around the world who are active in the Human Security network. With an eye to the future, they asked the focus group participants:

Which important global social problems in these thematic clusters had received too little attention by human security professionals to date?

The top 12 answers were as follows:

1. Opthalmic Care in Developing Countries.
2. Gangs. Going beyond the traditional concern about terrorist and insurgent groups, there is a growing threat from local-level, nonstate armed groups that compete with one another, and challenge state sovereignty and governance.
3. Indigenous Land Rights. Many participants suggested this issue will become even more prominent with the advent of forthcoming initiatives to mitigate effects of climate change.
4. Space Security. Concerns both about orbital debris and the possibility of new spaces extra-global spaces for human occupation. Can you say “lunar colony”?
5. Role of Diasporas in Conflict Prevention. In particular, the impact of outsiders, particularly diasporas, in intractable conflicts worldwide.
6. Workers' Right to Organize.
7. Waste Governance. We all know that “S*** rolls downhill” and apparently in developing areas it comes to rest nearer to the population than one would like, creating a myriad of health and environmental problems. As Dr. Carpenter says: “It's not sexy like climate change but it’s a significant environmental issue for billions of people worldwide.”
8. Sexual Orientation Persecution.
9. Water. Sometimes referred to as “Blue Gold,” the important of usable water has been on the Human Security radar from quite some time, but is viewed as an increasingly pressing concern for development, health, and perhaps for armed conflict.
10. Familization of Governance. Not only “Ol’ Boy” networks but “Ol’ Family” networks tend to dominate politics in many areas of the world, which hampers efforts at political reform and impedes initiatives to reduce corruption.
11. International Voting Rights. Participant advocates spoke for a need beyond promoting state-level democratic processes and institutions, to highlight more specifically need for international or global representation
12. Impunity for Death by Neglect. The notion here is that states ought be held more accountable for deaths resulting from governmental neglect (such as the 11 million children under five who die from preventable diseases each year), not just for those resulting from intentional acts of state violence.

WarThinker's Digest - Issue #4

WarThinker's Digest is a feature of theScience of Global Security & Armed Conflict blog that scans the scholarly literature from academia, government agencies, and major think tanks, highlighting new reports and documents bearing on the complexity of conflict and future trends in warfare. A must-read feature for defense and security strategists from all sectors interested in honing their "actionable intellect."


Obama's COIN toss

In Afghanistan, we have a plan -- but that's not the same as a strategy

By Eliot A. Cohen
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Excerpt:

Strategy is the art of choice that binds means with objectives. It is the highest level of thinking about war, and it involves priorities (we will devote resources here, even if that means starving operations there), sequencing (we will do this first, then that) and a theory of victory (we will succeed for the following reasons). That is the job of wartime presidents; it’s why they have the title commander in chief. Obama set out his objectives for Afghanistan, focused on thwarting al-Qaeda, and enumerated some of the means, chiefly a 30,000-troop, 18-month surge. But what about the hard part: setting priorities, establishing a sequencing and laying out a theory of victory?

C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan
By Scott Shane
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2009

Excerpt:

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”

Reconstruction Under Fire: Unifying Civil and Military Counterinsurgency

By: David C. Gompert, Terrence K. Kelly, Brooke Stearns Lawson, Michelle Parker, Kimberly Colloton
RAND Corporation

Effective civilian relief, reconstruction, and development work can help convince people to support their government against insurgency. Knowing this, insurgents will target such work, threatening both those who perform it and those who benefit from it. Too often, the result is a postponement of efforts to improve government and serve the population until contested territory has been cleared of insurgents. This can lead to excessive reliance on force to defeat insurgents — delaying or even preventing success. A RAND team with combined security and development expertise set out to learn how civilian counterinsurgency (civil COIN) (essential human services, political reform, physical reconstruction, economic development, and indigenous capacity-building) could be conducted more safely in the face of active insurgency, when it can do the most good. The authors propose the following to improve the security of civil COIN under fire: a concept for setting priorities among civil COIN measures; a way to allocate security forces optimally among various civil COIN activities, as well as between them and other COIN security missions (e.g., direct operations against insurgents); new, integrated concepts of operation (ICONOPS) that military and civilian leaders could employ during COIN campaigns to manage risk and produce best results for COIN as a whole; and general requirements for capabilities and corresponding investments to secure civil COIN, derived from ICONOPS.

The New Counterinsurgency Era
By David Ucko

Confronting insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has recognized the need to “re-learn” counterinsurgency. But how has the Department of Defense with its mixed efforts responded to this new strategic environment? Has it learned anything from past failures?

In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko examines DoD’s institutional obstacles and initially slow response to a changing strategic reality. Ucko also suggests how the military can better prepare for the unique challenges of modern warfare, where it is charged with everything from providing security to supporting reconstruction to establishing basic governance—all while stabilizing conquered territory and engaging with local populations. After briefly surveying the history of American counterinsurgency operations, Ucko focuses on measures the military has taken since 2001 to relearn old lessons about counterinsurgency, to improve its ability to conduct stability operations, to change the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and to account for successes gained from the learning process.

Given the effectiveness of insurgent tactics, the frequency of operations aimed at building local capacity, and the danger of ungoverned spaces acting as havens for hostile groups, the military must acquire new skills to confront irregular threats in future wars. Ucko clearly shows that the opportunity to come to grips with counterinsurgency is matched in magnitude only by the cost of failing to do so.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, USA (Ret.)
Introduction
1. Framing the Reorientation
2. A Troubled History
3. Revisiting Counterinsurgency
4. Innovation under Fire
5. Counterinsurgency and the QDR
6. FM 3-24 and Operation Fardh Al-Qanoon
7. The Ambivalence of the "Surge"
8. Innovation or Inertia
Conclusion: Kicking the Counterinsurgency Syndrome?



Counterinsurgency – a much failed strategy?
By Patrick Lang

Excerpt:

Conclusion:

COIN is a badly flawed instrument of statecraft: Why?

- The locals ultimately own the country being fought over.

- Such COIN wars are expensive, long drawn out affairs that are deeply debilitating for the foreign counterinsurgent power.

- COIN theory is predicated on the ability of the counterinsurgents to change the mentality of the “protected” (read controlled) population. The sad truth is that most people do not want to be deprived of their ancestral ways and will fight to protect them.

- In the end the foreign counterinsurgent is embarked on a war that is not his own war.

- For the counterinsurgent the commitment of forces must necessarily be much larger than for the insurgents.

What should we do?

- Hold the cities as bases to prevent a recognized Taliban government until some satisfactory (to us) deal is made among the Afghans.

- Participate in international economic development projects for Afghanistan.

- Conduct effective clandestine HUMINT out of the city bases against international jihadi elements.

- Turn the tribes against the jihadi elements.

- Continue to hunt and kill/capture dangerous jihadis,

How long might you have to follow this program? It might be a long time but that would be sustainable. A full-blown COIN campaign in Afghanistan is not politically sustainable.

Civil War Outcomes
By Roy Licklider
Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
Saltzman Working Paper No. 11
November 2009


This paper attempts to summarize the rapidly expanding literature on civil war outcomes, organizing it around three central questions, all of which remain under debate: (1) what are civil wars, (2) how do we know when they end, and (3) what can outsiders do to help end them and prevent their recurrence? It focuses on the normative and ethical issues involved in negotiated settlements to civil wars: do they reduce violence or not, do they encourage democracy or not, the conflict between amnesty and justice which they often raise, and, if they are seen as desirable, when are they likely to occur and how, if at all, can outsiders support them.



Third-Generation Civil--Military Relations

by Frederik Rosén
Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 6, 597-616 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0967010609350633

Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil—military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than ‘conventional’ civil—military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term ‘third-generation civil—military relations’ to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan’s reconstruction.