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April 15, 2009

Rethinking David and Goliath

Filed under: Defense/Military, Europe, General, National Politics, New Kid on the Bloc — Zachary Sniderman @ 2:15 pm

The news media failed to accurately and objectively evaluate the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer (2008), and have done little to ease lingering tension. To be certain, the story was not ‘missed,’ coverage of the assault littered news programs. However, half of the story has bee ‘neglected.’

This half has to do with Georgia’s responsibility for the conflict, and more specifically the responsibility of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

There is a disturbing tendency and near-enthusiasm to depict Russia as a marauder. This half of the story received a fair amount of coverage with John McCain claiming ‘today we are all Georgians,’ and Obama echoing these statements from his home in Hawaii. While the media was quick to jump on the familiar story of David (Georgia) versus Goliath (Russia), certain balancing facts were not given their fair shake.

Points for: Russia is a much larger country with an admittedly bad history of exerting force on its smaller, previously sovereign countries. Elements of the Russian offensive were perhaps too violent in their scale – such as refusing to leave Georgia after the conflict had been resolved, including the false-withdrawal of troops from Abkhazia. But these aspects were, for the most part, covered.

Points against: While countries like Ukraine have a distinct population, Georgia does have a significantly large population with claims to Russian citizenship (the controversy surrounding the Orange Revolution is a prime example of tension over sovereignty). The division of Ossetia into North and South is reflective of many years of political separatism. Granted, relations between the two halves have been largely peaceful, excluding Soviet pressure levied in the early 1920s and a more violent separatist attempt by South Ossetia around the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. However, the division is an artificial border in the sense that many people in Georgia are considered Russian citizens and hold Russian passports. The tension between Russian nationals and the admittedly brash Georgian government has been on going, well before the 2008 attacks. Georgian government has banned the broadcasting of Russian television stations and even resorted to violent restraint on the more vocal Russian and separatist communities living in Georgia. Saakashvili’s claim of Russian aggression neglects his own authorized attacks against Russian nationals. This oversight panders to the sympathies of the United States government, whom he expected would support Georgia militarily.

While Saakashvili was unable to win the support of the government, the American public was largely persuaded – helped by the media – that Georgia was the victim of Russian aggression.

This doesn’t mean that Russia was right, or even that it was not an aggressor. The need for Russian military – as opposed to diplomatic – action is debatable, and the delayed withdrawal of troops is a certain indicator of post-conflict aggression, but this is not the full story. The media largely neglected to cover the pre-conflict situation in Georgia and the legitimate history of violence between the Georgian government and a Russian-based division of its population.

Rather than provide this historical context, the media adopted a narrative: small nation menaced by large nation. But this is not the whole story. To be sure, Russia cannot be justly absolved from its actions – but to neglect the actions of Georgia is to neglect, at very least, one half of the story.

Author’s Comment: Several corrections have been made to this article to better match historical accuracy.

April 13, 2009

Fifteen Years After The Zapatistas

Filed under: General — Jason Lakin @ 1:12 pm

Last Friday, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard sponsored a conference to reflect on the fifteen years that have transpired since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The conference featured academics from both Mexico and the United States. It attempted to describe and debate the nature of political, social and economic change in Chiapas, as well as other poor states, in Mexico since 1994.

The conference was motivated by a central puzzle: since the Zapatista revolt, Chiapas, by most measures Mexico’s poorest state, has undergone massive political transformation, just as the broader country has. And yet the day-to-day lives of poor Chiapanecans seem to have changed relatively little by comparison. How is this possible?

It is worth rehearsing in detail some of the breathtaking political changes noted above. The Zapatista revolt itself enjoyed a certain political success, catching the authoritarian PRI regime off-balance, and leading to a substantial increase in federal financial flows to the state. The Zapatistas also achieved international fame and brought new NGO money and foreign aid to the region.

Indirectly, the rebellion achieved even more. Both Zapatista and non-Zapatista groups took advantage of the insecurity surrounding the revolt to press claims for land reform, resulting in a tremendous redistribution of land from large landholders to small peasants between 1994-1998. Indigenous peasants began to play a more active role in local and state politics as well, as various municipalities elected their first indigenous mayors, and CIOAC, a left-wing peasant group, dominated by indigenous Tojolabales, participated in the state government for the first time.

In 2000, the PRI was swept aside not only at the national level in Mexico, but also at the gubernatorial level in Chiapas. The relationship between the Zapatistas and electoral change has always been ambiguous, since the militants have generally distrusted electoral politics. But peasants who had supported the guerillas in the past opted to vote for change in 2000, and did play a role in the state’s democratic transition. Today, Chiapas is a highly competitive, multi-party state. In 2007 local elections, for example, 8 parties competed.

By any normal standards, this constitutes seismic political change. Yet the peasants of Chiapas today face bleak economic conditions. State GDP has largely been stagnant since the 1990s, and the poor states of Mexico’s South have, as a result, fallen further behind the rest of the country. The solution for most young, male peasants, is increasingly migration to the United States. Chiapas has moved from the bottom third to the top third of states receiving international remittances during this period.

So why haven’t all of these political changes made more of a difference to the lives of ordinary peasants? The conference participants suggested a few reasons. First, even the most ardent supporters of the Zapatistas admitted that the militants, who have largely given up violent struggle, have not replaced it with a realistic alternative tool of social change. Zapatistas today continue to experiment with the creation of “autonomous” zones of power in Chiapas, where they have set up parallel institutions of governance. Panelists disagreed about the efficacy of these institutions in political and juridical terms, but not in economic terms: the Zapatistas have not created a viable model of economic autonomy for poor peasants. At the same time, the turn inward, and away from the state, has rendered the Zapatistas less effective at reforming the Mexican state. While some panelists saw the Zapatista experiments as noble efforts to create alternative political structures that are more democratic than those of the wider society, others argued that the Zapatistas had missed an opportunity to build a broad movement to reform the state.

But of course, the failure of development in Chiapas goes far beyond the Zapatistas. The land reforms of the mid-1990s have not brought economic self-sufficiency, because the redistributed land is of low quality, and has been sub-divided into plots that are simply too small to yield enough for survival. All of this has happened at a time when the Mexican state has offered little in the way of subsidies to small farmers, and has also failed to offer an alternative development path that would move Chiapas up the value chain.

Electoral changes are also, to a certain degree, more apparent than real. A common theme to emerge from the panels was that, in spite of changes in political institutions, such as democratic elections, or decentralization, political practice at the state level in Mexico continues to be dominated by patron-client relationships and high discretion on the part of politicians. Thus, even though the PRI has been humbled, and new resources have been made available to Chiapas, and even though indigenous peasants have entered politics, dysfunctional institutions and corruption persist. The result is a failure to ameliorate basic inequalities. These findings are consistent across states as different as Oaxaca, Mexico and Chiapas.

The failures of the Zapatistas, the government, and other less radical opposition groups has resulted in an increasingly significant flow of migrants out of the state. Sadly, these flows, which are in part caused by the absence of a serious political project to redistribute resources and spur development, probably also contribute over time to the absence of such a project. After all, the support base for a pro-development coalition ought to be young peasants who see no future in the current economic model. But these are the same people who are not around to support such a coalition.

Is a different world possible? The panelists were not particularly optimistic. But, in my view, Mexico is slowly developing a civil society with a broader agenda of state transformation. This agenda should continue to focus on transparency and redistribution, as well as empowering the judiciary and other watch dogs to prevent abuse. Today, this coalition consists of a few small but dynamic groups, like FUNDAR. Over time, it is to be hoped, there will be more groups, particularly at the sub-national level. The road is long, but the journey has begun.

April 8, 2009

Mr. Obama’s Pitch to NATO

Filed under: Defense/Military, South Asia — Harvard International Review @ 1:08 am

By Guest Authors Michael Barton and Gabriel C. Lajeunesse

General David Petraeus testified last week that militant extremists in Pakistan could “literally take down their state” if left unchallenged. Meanwhile, suicide bombers continued to strike unabated in Afghanistan, even as the international community committed their support to the fledgling democracy at the Hague. The President now has a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It wisely marshals resources by centering on a core goal: fighting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qa’ida and their supporters. This strategy also hedges against European NATO members’ reticence to offer additional combat forces by providing them the “out” of instead providing trainers, funding, and other military support.

The real challenge to this strategy will be in the execution. This battle, much like the battle for Baghdad during the Iraq surge, will be won or lost by Commanders on the ground, soldiers in the field, and their civilian counterparts. In the years since 9/11 the U.S. has demonstrated the capability and willingness kill or capture senior al-Qa’ida operatives in Pakistan. The network of low-level facilitators, however, is an order of a different magnitude, with its geographic area and scope too vast for a conventional mission with only 21,000 additional troops.

With these additional troops, Generals David Petraeus and David McKiernan can focus on identifying and destroying the al-Qa’ida facilitation networks near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. These networks remain the backbone of al-Qa’ida, moving people, passing information, and acquiring equipment to enable the targeting of civilians and American, coalition, and Afghanistan troops – as well as U.S. supply routes. These networks also use criminal and narcotrafficking enterprises as force multipliers in their efforts to co-mingle with civilians, which remains one of the single most important elements of any successful terrorist organization. A significant amount of intelligence is needed to effectively dismantle such an extensive network, and it will only come as the Afghans begin to trust that the security gains are not fleeting. To be successful, this requires a targeted and fully resourced counterinsurgency effort.

After years in Iraq our Soldiers and Marines are seasoned in counterinsurgency and the community policing that it entails. Living among the civilians, protecting them, and demonstrating our commitment to them as individuals and improve the quality of their lives. Successes like those seen in Brigadier General Shawn MacFarland’s Anbar, or Colonel David Sutherland’s rough and tumble Diyala, will only be seen if the new U.S. forces and partnered Afghan forces are concentrated along the key pipelines that al-Qa’ida depends upon for its survival. Once forces in Iraq moved from secure forward operating bases to exposed combat outposts in the heart of troubled areas, security there improved. One year after applying these techniques in the Iraq surge, violence had decreased 70%. Weapons cache seizures – a good indicator of a cooperating population – increased 60%. The Pakistani’s likewise must learn to adopt these approaches and training missions if they are to build a capable counterinsurgency force. Without such capability, Pakistani leadership and civilians will continue to be picked off, and the Pakistani Army’s status of guarantor of national security will be even further eroded.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan counterinsurgency approach is a means to an end. The goal has never been to establish a Switzerland in Central Asia, rather, it has been to deny al-Qa’ida a base from which it can freely plan and execute terrorist attacks. Applying these additional forces to attack al-Qa’ida’s vulnerability will keep them running, hiding, and on the defensive until the backbone of this network is broken for good.

Mr. Barton served at the White House from 2003-2006; Mr. Lajeunesse is an associate at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and is a former Air Force Special Agent.