CBC.ca
Muzzling scientists impedes global problem-solving.
daryl.copeland
What Canada’s Security Council Loss Says About Us
The Mark
With the glory days of Pearson’s internationalist foreign policy behind us, Canada needs a new narrative
United Nations Security Council Elections and the Canadian Brand: The End of the Illusion?
On October 12, 1957 the Nobel Committee announced that Lester Pearson would be awarded the Peace Prize for his role in addressing the Suez Crisis. Fifty-three years later to the day, Canada lost out to Portugal – a small, former colonial power – in its bid for election to the United Nations Security Council.
To my mind that irony, and those bookends provide compelling testament to the fact that Canada’s place in the world has a come a long way in half a century.
Wherever this country is now, it is certainly not where we were then.
War and Diplomacy – Part III
In the past two posts, using the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have tried to show that in today’s highly conflicted world, diplomacy matters more than ever. That said, the world’s second oldest profession is underperforming and faces a crisis of relevance and effectiveness. Diplomatic institutions and practices have not adapted well to the challenges of globalization, and diplomacy’s image is too often negative.
For these reasons and more, diplomacy has been largely ignored, and not infrequently ridiculed by journalists, think tanks, and international relations scholars. Perhaps most surprisingly, even governments – if expenditure priorities are any indication – have chosen to invest elsewhere. That neglect, I believe, has proven costly, as foreign policy has become increasingly militarized and as states have continued to rely on armed force as the instrument of choice. The results have been calamitous, not only in themselves, but because the more profound threats and challenges facing the world, most rooted in science, driven by technology and having little to do with political violence or religious extremism, have not received the attention they deserve.
Diplomacy’s problems can be remedied, but the necessary transformation will require a fundamental rethinking of some key elements of international relations, “security” and “development” foremost amongst them. Most of all, the entire “diplomatic ecosystem”, consisting of the foreign ministry, foreign service and the diplomatic business model, will have to be reconstructed from the ground up. But don’t hold your breath. Fixing diplomacy, and getting from fighting to talking, from diktat to dialogue and from coercion and compulsion to compromise and negotiation is going to be one tough slog.
Afghanistan: Seven Steps Towards Peace
The Mark
There are no military solutions to Afghanistan’s complex problems of bad governance and severe underdevelopment.
War and Diplomacy – Part II: A Way Out of Afghanistan?
Afghanistan is a crossroads of civilizations and an almost bewilderingly complicated place.
Over the past few centuries, however, it has more often than not been treated as a pawn in the “great game”. The country has also developed a reputation as the “graveyard of empires”, not least because outsiders’ forces have never succeeded in pacifying the place. Internal stability, such as it has ever existed, has been predicated typically upon de-centralized, and frequently shifting political arrangements between a weak centre and roiling periphery.
Reeling from the shock of 9/11 and in the absence of adequate reflection, in late 2001 NATO in effect took sides in a complex ethnic, tribal, sectarian, and geographically rooted civil war. Nine years later, the coalition not only has failed to prevail, but the continuing presence of foreign forces, viewed widely as occupiers by the population, has exacerbated the conflict. The Russians learned the same lesson not long ago, and at great expense.
Such is the burden of history. Yet today – if it ever was – Afghanistan is no longer the epicentre of transnational terrorism. That pretext for contemporary Western involvement no longer exists, and indeed, was achieved by early 2002. Al-Qaeda camps had been dismantled and the membership dispersed . The Taliban, for their part, had and still have mainly national goals with neither the capability nor the intent to threaten international security. The two organizations should never have been conflated.
The Lesson of Iraq
The Mark
One hundred years after “the war to end all wars,” diplomacy remains in the margins of international policy. Will Iraq help us see our error?
War and Diplomacy – Part I
The media has been littered over the past week with reports concerning the departure from Iraq of the last US combat troops. On the margins of that coverage, and to a greater extent in the think tank press, questions have been posed about the conduct of the war, its costs, what may have been achieved, whether or not it is really over, and what lies ahead.
More remarkable, however, is the speed and extent to which the Iraq war, like a bad dream the morning after, has faded from public consciousness.
* * * * * * * * * *
While doing the research for Guerrilla Diplomacy, I came across an especially poignant quotation attributed to the Roman senator and historian Tacitus. He wrote:
They created devastation, and called it peace.
Much the same could be said about Iraq in September 2010. By the time the shock and awe campaign began in the spring of 2003, it had become clear that in the USA, foreign policy had in large part become an instrument of war, rather than vice versa.
GD Selected as AFSA Book of the Month for August 2010
The American Foreign Service Association has chosen Guerrilla Diplomacy as its Book of the Month for August.
How To Stop An Insurgency
The Mark
NATO has only one realistic counterinsurgency option for Afghanistan: negotiating a political settlement.
Listening to Lawrence – Part II
By my reckoning, history suggests that at the end of the day there are only three ways to successfully counter an insurgency.
The most obvious technique is that referred to rather disparagingly by T. E. Lawrence and set out in the previous post: suffocate the spark of resistance under the sheer weight of massive military occupation. Estimates vary, but the experience suggests that effective suffocation requires a ratio of counter insurgent soldiers to units of local population somewhere in the range of 1:10 to 1:100 or more, depending on the severity of the resistance encountered. For example, troop requirements in 2004 during the second battle for Fallujah, Iraq would have been on the high side of this scale, while in rural Malaysia, even at the height of the emergency in the mid-to-late 1950s, they would have been much lower.
Lawrence of Afghanistan
The Mark
NATO leaders could learn some useful lessons on counterinsurgency from T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia).
Listening to Lawrence – Part I
Last Sunday, August 1st, the Dutch began a low key, unceremonious withdrawal from participation in the NATO/ISAF mission to Afghanistan. With 24 dead, 140 wounded, and over a billion euros expended, Holland is the first major member of the ISAF coalition to head for the exit. This event, however, was almost lost in the Canadian mix of news coverage over the holiday long weekend, despite the fact that Afghanistan remains among Canada’s top international priorities.
As the number of outside military forces active in Afghanistan shrinks – Canada, and likely Germany are set to follow the Dutch example next year – the US is more than compensating with a troop surge which is now in full swing. These developments, in combination with the record number of casualties, may serve to encourage more public and media attention and give rise to a broad consideration of the way ahead.
A Better Way to Do International Policy
The Mark
Why do governments still rely on costly and counter-productive military solutions in addressing global problems?