book review of book on libya

TOPPLING GADDAFI: LIBYA AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL INTERVENTION 
By Christopher S. Chivvis 
Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 2014, pp. 249, Rs. 495.00
http://www.thebookreviewindia.org/articles/archives-4427/2015/April/4/ethics-of-liberal-intervention.html
VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 4 April 2015

Christopher Chivvis is the quintessential policy wonk having rotated in and out of government and the academia, so typical of the career profile of public intellectuals in the United States. Given that he needs the government for access to information and the policy high table, as much as the government needs his brains, it is inevitable that he would write up a favourable account of the US role in toppling Gaddafi. Billeted in the RAND Corporation that has over the decades provided the strategic community in America grist for its incestuous debates, he is as much an insider as a bystander. Consequently, it is entirely understandable that he concludes: ‘The results are far from perfect and postwar stabilization has faltered, but ultimately the choice to intervene was the right one (p. 205).’

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The book is an account of the events in 2011 in which the French and UK supported by the US initially launched Operation Odyssey Dawn to be followed soon thereafter by the NATO’s Operation Unified Protector. It covers the events leading up to the intervention; the diplomacy that attended the intervention; the military operations of the NATO; and US policy choices during the war. It makes the case that the regime’s actions in Benghazi in early 2011 created conditions for the intervention under the framework of the new fangled concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). As a slim volume priced affordably, it has something for everyone. But it is unlikely that readers in the region will find in it much to agree with.
In particular, the author’s answer that the intervention was right is rather glib. At the time of writing of this review three years after the intervention, primetime news has it that Tripoli’s airport has been shut down because of fighting between rival militia groups in the vicinity. This cannot but be attributed to the influx of weaponry and perfunctory training given by Special Forces troops to the tribal militias that sprung up in wake of the intervention. It shows how easy it is to engineer the conditions that can then be used to legitimate premeditated operations citing R2P. Similarly, regimes were displaced in Afghanistan and Iraq and there is a concerted move underway to displace the one in Syria. The human cost in volved has been borne by the societies subject to the ‘liberal’ attention of the West, but more likely subject to its incessant quest for strategic and commercial advantage.
In Kosovo, where liberal intervention made its debut, the Albanians continue to remain at odds with the Serbs both in Serbia and within their own state, now with a considerably thinned down Serb population. Kosovo, with runaway unemployment and poverty by European standards, even a decade and half since the liberal intervention there is far from a success story. The US ignominiously quit Iraq and TV screens today tell us in no uncertain terms the outcome. It is in the process of leaving Afghanistan and it is inescapable that an Iraq like future awaits that benighted state.
Therefore, the author’s conclusion that the outcome cannot be taken to gauge that an intervention is untenable. In fact, discerning the possible consequences is a prerequisite to intervention. Indeed it is a just war precept that the possibility of success must be considered prior to resorting to military means. The first precept in humanitarian affairs is ‘do no harm’, or do not proceed with anything that can make a bad situation worse. By this yardstick intervention was not only illegitimate but also immoral.
It is by now well known as to why this was so in the case of Libya. Though Gaddafi had mended fences with the West, yet the eagerness of France and UK to attack and displace him requires explanation. It is now common knowledge that the Libyan dictator had reportedly funded the campaign for Presidency by Sarkozy, detained at the time of writing of this review for political corruption. It is no wonder the French led the coalition, with the US in this instance ‘leading from behind’. ‘Old Europe’ was in the lead, with Germany keeping out due to reservations on the advisability of the intervention. That the author notes this as a useful extension of NATO’s out of area operations, begun in Kosovo and later extended to Afghanistan, itself is clue as to the motives behind the intervention. To then claim that this owed to liberal principles is to stretch credulity a bit.
A tenet of R2P that was violated was in such interventions ceasing when the conditions that give rise to them are reversed. Even if it is assumed that Benghazi was about to fall to the dictator’s atrocities, the threat to Benghazi had receded within a week of the intervention. However, continuing with the intervention was necessary. This was easily provided with the initial intervention itself providing the rationale for further protection necessary for the rebelling population at multiple centers across Libya. Easily fanned, these rebellions attracted Gaddafi’s military action, thereby providing cover for continuing operations and mission creep that culminated in displacement of Gaddafi as the aim of the operation, even though this was not envisaged in the enabling UN resolution. The regime’s chances of survival were sealed with NATO’s airpower dominating the airspace as were the hopes of any conflict resolution initiative, such as by President Zuma on behalf of the AU.
The author situates the intervention in the context of the unfolding Arab Spring that had by then rocked both neighbours of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. He reasons that it was necessary in order to preserve the Arab Spring’s momentum lest it be suppressed by dictators. By that yardstick what the Bahrainis did, with Saudi backing, and Saudis do to keep any fresh breeze out of their sheikhdoms should invite western liberal attention. Selectivity further vitiates the liberal intervention paradigm.
Clearly, if there are such potent arguments against the concept and its precedence setting practice by the West, there needed to have been greater engagement with these counter arguments by the author. By instead faithfully regurgitating what his Pentagon and Foggy Bottom informants feed him, the author has lost credibility. The crux of the matter encapsulated by the subtitle of the book— the limits of liberal intervention—remains unaddressed. Even in military matters, the book provides limited insight since the choice of the dictator to displace was made by the US-NATO combine: an isolated dictator earlier already defanged of his nuclear ambitions.
Clearly, the book is a propaganda tract, an example of how the academia-strategic community embrace in the US. This is important to register in India in the midst of a strategic partnership with the US, lest India’s intellectual distance from the US, that endlessly irritates the US, dissipates under the onslaught of not only such tracts but also of their universities and think tanks set to open doors into India.

The Exit from ‘AfPak’: Don’t Blame Pakistan

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/06/27/the-exit-from-afpak-dont-blame-pakistan/

by Ali Ahmed

June 27, 2012

New Delhi — At its Chicago summit, NATO read out what has been the writing on the wall all through Obama’s first term. It is that its departure from Afghanistan is inevitable, with the addition being that it is now imminent. That this has not unfolded according to script is cause for some hand wringing among commentators. Ashley Tellis, Christine Fair and Robert Kaplan have in quick succession sought to point to Pakistan as spoilsport, with the former dwelling on Pakistan’s impending strategic defeat. Will his hope materialize?

All through the war in its vicinity, Pakistan has been scalded, but has avoided being burnt. The much reviled Musharraf took a wise decision by siding with the west. In retrospect, it seems as though it was the only choice he had. The blame for the west’s inability to push through its agenda of peace-building has been laid at Pakistan’s door. Its provision of sanctuary to the Taliban is taken as a willful challenge. Yet again Pakistan may have had little choice in this since it would have been unable in any case to wrap up the Taliban and their Pakistani affiliates. If the west could not succeed despite the ‘surge’, it is too much to expect of the Pakistan army to have had a better showing. From these two strategic choices made by the Pakistan army, based on a clear understanding of its limitations, it is clear that Pakistan can be credited with doing at least some things right.

So where does the responsibility lie? It is with Obama’s inability to convert the military surge into political gain. The surge was meant to represent the stick as part of a carrot and stick policy. It was to be supplemented by Pakistani army actions on its side of the Durand line, thereby choking the Taliban. In the event, the Taliban by forging a joint front with its ethnic fellows in Pakistan and Punjabi extremists, has been able to confront Pakistan with a dilemma: the more close it got to finishing the Taliban off in keeping with the desires of the west, the less stable it would get. The terror bombings in the later part of the last decade suggest as much. Pakistan, valuing its own survival above any doles the west could spare for its efforts, chose strategic prudence. Its holding out for an apology over the killings of 24 of its soldiers by U.S. forces at best provides a cover.

The gratuitous advice it has been at the receiving end of assumes that it could have gone the distance in taking on the Taliban. The west had got India on board to wind down tensions over time, after the spike in wake of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. This was to enable Pakistan to transfer its attention to the western front. Could the Pakistan army have succeeded as per western expectations?

Firstly, the terrain is forbidding. It has been seen in Kashmir where the going is easier and the foe is less formidable, that it takes considerable troop strength. Pakistan does not have those levels of troops, even if it could spare them entirely from the eastern border. Secondly, the tentacles that the Taliban has acquired due to anti-Americanism in Pakistan and religious extremism enable it to expand the arc of instability at will to include Lahore and Karachi. This would have stretched Pakistan’s suppressive capabilities to the extent of challenging their institutional integrity by internal ethnic and ideological fissures. If the Pakistan army cracked, then Pakistan could have gone under, there being no forces of equivalent strength in polity. This would have been to the advantage of extremists. That the Pakistan army judged the possible outcome and refrained from provoking it, is to its credit.

The expectation that Pakistan not playing ball has led to dissipation of the promise of the surge is therefore not a fair one. If Pakistan could arrive at a conclusion that it could at best be supportive and not hyperactive, the possibility should not have escaped Pentagon planners. To compensate they really should have weighed the carrot part of the strategy appropriately. This means that the peace process needed to have been an equally significant prong of strategy. It was instead geared to create fissures in the Taliban between the ‘good’ and irreconcilable Taliban. It was outsourced to the Karzai regime, with its notable legitimacy deficit as far as the intended interlocutors, the Taliban, were concerned. Their attitude was evident from the efforts of Karzai’s pointsman, Burhanuddin Rabbani, being rewarded with assassination. Only later, did U.S. special envoy Marc Grossman, the successor to Richard Holbrooke, get into the act; a case of too little too late. While it cannot be said for certain that the Taliban would have proved responsive, persistence with the military option, in the tradition of the actions post 9/11, foreclosed any possibility of finding out.

The US was either a victim of its own hubris or strategically ineffective due to its internal politics and institutional fights. Obama, having wound down the Iraq war, perhaps needed an arena to prove he was tough. The bureaucratic tussle, set off by the reaction to 9/11, between Foggy Bottom, Langley and Pentagon, played out in dysfunctional policies towards ‘AfPak’. The responsibility for a suboptimal outcome can hardly be laid at Pakistan’s door, even if, in election year, Obama needs a fall guy.

Highlighting this is important, since the refrain in the commentaries cited and extant largely is that Pakistan has stabbed the west in the back, despite receiving $ 20 billion as incentive. A consensus over the consequence for such double dealing is being built up in terms of pushing Pakistan over the brink, the euphemisms used being ‘containing’, ‘isolating’ etc. Pakistan needs being wary of an embarrassed superpower.  It can safely be predicted that the ability of the army to hold steady despite internal political disarray, demonstrated in weathering a decade long storm along both its external and internal axes, will now be sorely tested.