Monthly Archives: June 2011

Since everyone seems to have hated Obama’s Afghanistan speech last night, it’s my job to tell you why it was a heck of a good speech, and one worth paying attention to.

By ordering a faster-than-expected troop withdrawal, Obama has signaled that the United States is moving decisively into the drawdown phase of the war, and hence of the “decade of war,” as he called it, since 9/11. Obama said of Iraq and Afghanistan, “These long wars will come to a responsible end.” And more expansively, “The tide of war is receding.”

Before you dismiss this as political hyperbole, consider some facts. U.S. troops will be out, or nearly out, of Iraq by the end of this year. They wrecked the country but did some good, leaving behind a messy democracy. The same will follow in Afghanistan in the next three years.We will leave behind an unfinished situation. But with this speech, for the first time, it is clear that the “surge” really was temporary, that we will not keep escalating in Afghanistan as we did in Vietnam, and that we have moved irrevocably toward a long but terminal end-game.

Nor is any other big war around the corner for the United States. Quite the opposite. Meanwhile the U.S. has pulled 65,000 troops from bases in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America in the past decade. And U.S. defense budgets are slated for at least 5 percent reductions (Obama’s proposal), perhaps much more, in the coming years. So the tide of the war decade does indeed seem to be receding. This comes at a time of declining armed conflict around the globe, with Iraq and Afghanistan being exceptions (see my new book on that subject).

Critics on the right, and apparently many of the military commanders, feel the withdrawal is too speedy, with the risk of losing the recent gains. Delaying the big withdrawal planned for next summer, even just by a few months, would give the force one more fighting season to cement gains against the Taliban, they say. But that’s the point – Obama did not want to give them one more fighting season, another season of dying Americans and spent dollars. Anyway, if the Taliban come back after this fighting season, might they not come back after the next, or the next?

The surge did what it was supposed to – shifted the momentum of the war. It was not intended as a permanent occupation force. Pulling it out after a couple of years is completely appropriate. The fact that it happens during a presidential election and might benefit Obama’s chances does not mean it’s a bad idea.

Critics on the left say Afghanistan is not worth any American lives. They blame Obama for the surge in the first place and wish he would pull everyone out today or, better, yesterday. Not only is this difficult from a practical and logistical perspective, but it would not be responsible to make abrupt military moves in a turbulent neighborhood still filled with extremely dangerous and combustible elements. “Responsible” was the word Obama used, and a good one.

Can American political discourse on either the left or the right envision an end to the decade of war? Have we all become so used to being at war that we can no longer imagine peace? Obama’s speech should spur us to use our imaginations again!

Well, I laid it all out about war costs last Saturday, and today’s NY Times has war costs in the top spot on the front page. The cost factor seems to have played a major role in President Obama’s decision to withdraw more troops, more quickly, from Afghanistan than had been expected.

The decision to be announced tonight will reportedly call for a reduction of the 100,000-ish U.S. troop level in Afghanistan by 10,000 this year and another 20,000 by the end of next summer. If you haven’t studied calculus recently, that’s an accelerating pace of withdrawal, and means that the 2014 target for being out, or pretty much out, is likely to stick.

The death of Bin Laden will be a central talking point in explaining this withdrawal, but money is the big subtext. A recent report quotes this source:

“From a fiscal standpoint, we’re spending too much money on Iraq and Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said. “There’s a belief from a fiscal standpoint that this is cannibalizing too much of our spending.”

There are two big dangers in making Afghanistan policy, and perhaps not that much room to maneuver between them. If you stay too long you exhaust political support at home, try the patience of our allies, raise suspicions in Pakistan, and contribute to our money woes. If you leave too quickly, you waste the gains won in blood and sweat since the 2009 “surge,” and invite trouble back to a country that for better or worse has become a central focal point of the international community’s efforts to combat terrorism. Twice before, we abandoned Afghanistan to its fate — after the Soviet Union was defeated and again after we got distracted by Iraq — and both times it came back to bite us.

What, then, is the perfect compromise to navigate this strait without crashing? Probably something like 10,000 troops this year and 20,000 more by the end of next summer. Making the best of a bad situation all around. There will be a lot of mixed opinion on this, though. See Phil Arena’s take, Juan Cole’s view, Daniel Serwer’s analysis, and a good interview with Ambassador James Dobbins at CNN.

The news that matters most is coming from Sudan, where fighting continued Friday. The northern army reportedly advanced a bit into the south, but was repelled, and the north shelled a town on the southern side of the border, near Abyei. Talks continue in Ethiopia’s capital, and there are now reportedly 113,000 people displaced by the new fighting in Abyei and another 60,000 in South Kordofan. Sudan’s leader is planning to visit China later this month, and both the United States and human rights groups hope the Chinese will influence him to change his behavior. China buys oil from Sudan and has been more supportive of its government than the rest of the world has. The UN Security Council got a briefing on the north-south fighting, and on Monday will hear a report on the progress of negotiations.

In Libya, the airwar continues while Gaddafi remained defiant. In Syria, 24 more nonviolent protesters were killed after Friday prayers. The protests are not losing steam but neither are they getting closer to dislodging President Assad.  In Yemen, nothing has changed enough to warrant a report. Stay tuned…

Violence escalated in Southern Kordofan Wednesday. The Nuba people in that area fought on the southern side in the Sudanese civil war but now will find themselves on the northern side of the international border come July 9. It appears that the Sudanese government is trying to “ethnically cleanse” this hostile population off its land and subdue the province, figuring that it can get away with a lot since the south does not want to upset the independence process. Many people are worried that this subduing action could mean Darfur-style genocide. The besieged UN peacekeeping base in Southern Kordofan is running short of supplies. Meanwhile fighting has reportedly resumed in Abyei.

President Obama told the Sudanese government via Voice of America that “There is no military solution. … The government of Sudan must prevent a further escalation of this crisis by ceasing its military actions immediately, including aerial bombardments, forced displacements and campaigns of intimidation.” Talks continued at the ministerial level but made little progress on the sticking point of whether an Ethiopian peacekeeping force in Abyei should have a strong mandate to use military force if needed (as the south wants).

Chicken games are always scary and dangerous, and there’s a big one playing out today on the border of north and south Sudan.

While talks go on in Ethiopia (background in earlier post), the north — Sudan’s central government under indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir — intensified a military assault on Nuba tribes in South Kordofan province. They bombed an airstrip serving as the last main lifeline for relief supplies to reach civilians in the area, which is north of the new border but whose population fought with the south in the civil war. The bombing led to speculation that Sudan’s government is trying to ethnically cleanse the area ahead of the coming split on July 9. A refugee crisis has ensued.

The UN peacekeepers are cut off and hunkered down at their base, surrounded by thousands of displaced civilians, under imminent threat of violence from surrounding armed forces.

Meanwhile at the negotiations the north has presented an ultimatum to the south on the sharing of oil revenue after southern independence — reach a deal on revenue-sharing before July 9 or lose access to the north’s infrastructure of pipelines and ports without which neither side can export the oil. That this threatened action would hurt the north as much as the south, at a time when the north is economically squeezed by debts and international sanctions, is another indication that the game of Chicken is at work here.

Developments in Sudan are reaching a turning point and will soon lead either to the birth of the UN’s 193rd member state or the resumption of a civil war that killed millions.

As events continue in a holding pattern in Syria (bloody crackdown), Yemen (talks in the capital, fighting with Islamists in the south), and Libya (closing in on Gaddafi), let’s consider the importance of Sudan. It has oil, but not so much as to make it strategically important. It was the scene of the world’s most recent genocide, in Darfur around 2004, so it’s on the map for human rights concerns. But the current crisis derives from Sudan’s location straddling the divide between the mostly Arab and Muslim north of Africa (above the Sahara desert) and the mostly Black and Christian or animist sub-Saharan Africa. That divide also runs through Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and the Somalia-Ethiopia conflict, among others.

In Sudan, this conflict underlay a decades-long civil war that killed tens of thousands directly and reportedly led to as many as two million deaths indirectly through displacement, disease, and famine.

Finally in 2005, with a diplomatic push from the United States and others, the north and south reached a cease-fire agreement. Southern rebels were given positions in Sudan’s government, though sadly their leader died in a helicopter crash as the process was just getting under way. The two armies began exercising together, and the two political leaderships began hashing out details of a transition that was to lead to a referendum in the south five years later. The United Nations put in a peacekeeping force of 10,000 troops, supplemented by European peacekeepers, and the fighting died down, notwithstanding periodic flare-ups of fighting between armed local groups, as when recurring thefts of cattle led to clashes and even massacres.

Borders were poorly defined in the peace agreement, and fighting occurred around the disputed border town of Abyei in particular. The two sides sent the border issues to an international court in the Hague, Netherlands, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and both agreed to abide by the court’s decision which gave the best oil fields in the area to the north but other desirable territory to the south.

In January 2011 the referendum finally arrived, as planned five years earlier. Against the predictions of many observers, it came off successfully and peacefully. Southerners voted overwhelmingly, by almost 99 percent, to secede and form a new country, South Sudan. The central government in the north, under international pressure and wishing to improve its standing, indicated it would accept this result. A separate referendum was to have been held in the border town of Abyei, where the situation was complicated by a seasonal influx of herders allied to the north while the permanent residents favored the south. That referendum has not happened.

In recent weeks, the government of Sudan has sent military forces to mass near the border, and has attacked and seized Abyei. Two other provinces that belong to the north but whose population fought on the side of the south during the civil war — South Kordofan and Blue Nile — have also been swept up in new fighting. South Sudan alleges, credibly, that the north has twice used air strikes on the southern side of the border as well.

The northern and southern leaders are meeting in Ethiopia yesterday and today, with Hillary Clinton arriving today to give things a push. The hope is to have the north agree to withdraw from the town and bring in Ethiopian peacekeepers there.

Conventional wisdom holds that the north and south depend on each other. First, most of the oil is in the south, but the pipelines run through the north, so neither side can profit from it without cooperation (nor can the Chinese and Sudan’s other oil customers).  Second, the civil war was devastating and neither side can benefit from its resumption.  In this case, the conventional wisdom is probably right.

So the recent fighting can be seen as essentially a Chicken game, a really nasty and violent one but nonetheless a case of brinksmanship. The north is trying to push the situation to its advantage, without actually provoking a war. The south is yelling about it but basically suffering some losses in service of the larger goal, a successful independence day, which will come on July 9 — God willing.

Update — later in the day the two sides agreed to withdraw Sudanese troops from Abyei and to bring in Ethiopian peacekeepers under the UN flag. Talks continue on the difficult substantive issues of how to administer the town after South Sudan’s independence.