Is the post-9/11 moment on military intervention now over? Alex Evans
July 21, 2010 | More on Conflict and security, Global system | 2 comments
Just by way of kite-flying, here’s a hypothesis I tried out this morning at a seminar that Chatham House hosted for the US National Intelligence Council:
“Over the next 10 years, neither the UK, nor any other EU governnment, nor any Democrat Administration in the US will embark on any major military intervention for reasons of counter-terrorism or humanitarian peacemaking.” *
(* Where ’major’ means a large scale deployment of land forces – say of at least brigade strength. Drone strikes, air strikes, covert special forces deployments, non-military actions etc. don’t count.)
The reasoning underpinning this hypothesis basically goes like this:
- Following Iraq and now Afghanistan, UK, EU and US publics are war-weary, and have more or less concluded that their governments have no real strategy for winning such conflicts. The political space for another Afghanistan-style deployment is simply not there.
- So while policymakers argue for NATO’s continued presence in Afghanistan on the basis that “we can’t allow terrorists safe havens”, the fact is that other safe havens – Somalia, Yemen, the federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan – are being handled instead through a policy of containment (drone strikes, special forces – but no major land deployments by western governments).
- On the humantarian intervention side, meanwhile, the Responsibility to Protect was stillborn, as Darfur showed. By and large, the US and EU are willing to support UN and AU peace enforcement missions with kit and a few specialised soldiers (e.g. to beef up command and control capacities), but again, not with large scale troop deployments.
- The hypothesis implicitly admits the possibility of US or EU troops being deployed for peacekeeping (as opposed to peace enforcement) missions, where key interests are at stake; or of US troops fighting in order to support security guarantees to key geopolitical allies (e.g. to counter a salafist takeover in Saudi Arabia, or in a scenario of war on the Korean Peninsula).
- But as far as new large scale US or EU land deployments designed to counter terrorist safe havens or widespread atrocities go, the only circumstances in which this hypothesis sees that happening in the next decade are under a Republican President - and even then without UK or EU support. The post-9/11 ‘moment’ on military intervention, in other words, is now over.
That’s the hypothesis I put forward. I’m not sure I agree with it myself, but it’s at least plausible.
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Some of us have been saying this for years! Well, something like it:
http://ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_gowan_eur...
http://ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_gowan_esh...
Alex, "beefing up" AU in Darfur with C2 sounds like sense but the delivery has been less than the promise – ask Gen Martin Luther Agwai. The rouble with C2 is that there has to be a communications infrastructure (tactical radios and strategic communications + bandwidth), a will to share information, a structureed process to elicit information needs and to collect it and some repository to collate and fuse it. That is something most western armies are weak at. I doubt their "beefing up" will do much for the AU because essential parts will be missing.
On the same theme, now that Iraq operations have changed their character and are to be led by diplomats (President Obama today 2 Aug) I fear an outcome will be a greater lack of visibility as to who is doing what, why, what the effect is and any coherence to the delivery of development support without a well structured capability to monitor, advise, decide and deliver that can share multi source information.