Strategic Trust-Building

If I was the Supreme Leader, I would be preparing now for a military attack against several of the country’s nuclear facilities. The warning signs of such an attack are mounting. My planning would proceed on several levels – diplomatic, intelligence, military and, most importantly, domestic politics.

After years of threat and sanctions against Iran, intelligence analysts face a problem in understanding just when and where the attack might happen. Richard Betts captured the essence of this problem in his 1982 book Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning, by reference to the term “wolf at the door”. After long periods of hostile rhetoric and diplomatic or military mobilization (the “wolf is at the door” and strategic warning of attack is clear), it becomes very difficult to identify the moment when (or if) the operational plan of attack is to be put into place.

The intelligence analyst is forced back on intuition and even more careful analysis. The search intensifies for the “diagnostic” keys – the pieces of evidence that the long announced threat to attack is about to executed. Timing is everything. On 6 June 2010, The New York Times reported that in February, Israel had briefed China on the severe economic consequences for it of an Israeli attack on Iran, could be one “diagnostic” key. The source was clearly an Israeli official, but does the timing of the leak have any significance?

The news story presented the secret and high level briefing as part of the diplomatic effort to convince China to support a new sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council. But the significance could lie elsewhere. The leak may have been intended to let people know that China has been briefed on the attack and to imply a degree of co-option or acquiescence. This has diplomatic potential to reinforce pressure on Iran but is more importantly another sign that the window for diplomacy is all but closed.

The escalating diplomatic pressure over more than five years has failed. The Israeli “wolf” is at Iran’s door. If attacked, what is Ayatollah Khamenei’s plan for mobilizing his divided country, a condition he admits (and is plain for all to see)? In a speech of 8 June on the importance of national unity, yet another one, he warned of a rare and new sensitivity to the international situation that would affect the world for generations to come.

Then comes the news that an Iranian plan to send a humanitarian aid ship flotilla to Israel would be cancelled. The Revolutionary Guards let it be known publicly on 14 June that they would not defend the ships, in spite of a promise by Khamenei’s personal representative to the Guards on 6 June that they would. A proposed mass visit of 200 Iranian members of parliament to Gaza is reportedly reduced to just be three members.

Looking for the diagnostics on Iran’s responses to the “wolf at the door”, it is possible – one can never be certain with access to so few sources of evidence – that Iran has just blinked after years of escalating threat.

Why would Iran back down now? The threat from Israel to Iran’s leaders is personal. While Israeli bombs may not target Iran’s civilian leaders individually, an Israeli attack on the country may well unseat them in the most unceremonious way. A famous study from the Cold War by Hannes Adomeit (Soviet Risk Taking and Crisis Behaviour, 1973) noted that as Soviet leaders became more politically insecure at home, they became more conservative on the international stage in terms of risk. Does this now apply to Iran?  Is it starting to think about pulling back from the looming confrontation? 

"Obama’s decision has revealed a near fatal fracture between the civilian and military leadership on the counter-insurgency strategy (COIN)," Sidhu writes, suggesting that the civilian perspective emphasizes counterterrorism with few additional troops and a clear exit date of mid-2011, while the military perspective is based on "additional boots on the ground, strict rules of engagement, and a 'need to stay the course until the job is done' attitude."

Such a rift is a major impediment to any counterinsurgency strategy, Sidhu argues. "The strategy will succeed only if military and civilian components are in sync—this has not been the case in Afghanistan," he writes.

The divide between civilian and military leaders is particularly problematic in Pakistan, where the U.S. is losing an essential struggle for influence. "Pakistan’s elite, particularly the military, has been equally taciturn, if not obstructive, in supporting the U.S. COIN efforts, especially against key elements of the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network," he writes. "Worse, there is a resignation and helplessness in Washington regarding Islamabad’s counter-COIN strategy. The McChrystal fiasco has only exacerbated this situation and weakened Washington’s influence over its alleged ally."

"With a bickering US security establishment, a resurgent Taliban and a treacherous ally, Obama’s Af-Pak war strategy is at risk of coming apart," Sidhu concludes. "Only concerted effort at the highest levels and a lot of good luck might make this motley choir sing from the same sheet. But this might prove to be an impossible mission even for a totally focused Obama."

Click here to read Sidhu's column on livemint.com

The discussion touched upon:

• United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929, the June 2010 resolution imposing new sanctions on Iran, as the basis of new coordinated national and international measures;
• The impact of the Iran's recent agreement with Brazil and Turkey and its effect on international efforts to engage Iran; and
• The potential role of missile defense systems in the context of Iran’s evolving missile program.

Europe’s eastern frontier (now in the heartland of Asia) has exploded in the news with almost 200 people killed in communal violence in the Osh region of Kyrgyzstan. The country is a member both of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), set up in 2002 on the basis of a 1992 treaty. The Secretary General of CSTO, Nikolai Bordyuzha, a leading Russian military and political figure, has been coordinating the main international military and security response to the Kyrgyz crisis, culminating as of June 14 in provision by CSTO of intelligence, mobility and law enforcement assets to support local authorities.

As NATO prepares its new security concept in coming months, we will begin to hear much more about Osh, the CSTO and Bordyuzha than we might have were it not for these unhappy events. Coolness in the diplomatic relationship between CSTO and NATO until now was at the background of a June 15 article in the International Herald Tribune. In a co-authored op-ed, former US Ambassador to Russia, Jim Collins, called on NATO and the United States to “look beyond old stereotypes” and offer “full cooperation and partnership with both the CSTO and OSCE” in addressing the security problems of Central Asia and Afghanistan. The authors described the CSTO as a “natural regional partner” of NATO and the United States. Collins knew to whom he was speaking. Leading officials in the Obama administration have argued forcefully against any move to closer relations with the CSTO. Many strategic analysts in the United States believe that NATO reasons for “not recognizing the CSTO are self-evident”, as an American academic commentary as recent as June 13 argued.

Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, had complained on June 9 just days before the violence in Osh erupted, that “we do not understand those who say the CSTO represents only Russia's interests and can therefore have no contact with NATO”. The interesting dilemma is that in NATO parlance, there are grades of partnership, defined largely by where a state sits on the spectrum of full democracy. Many in NATO attach such political significance to the term “partner” that any relationship between NATO and CSTO would be like “sleeping with the enemy”. (Some CSTO members do not meet the standards NATO sets for the highest level of partnership based on degree of protection of basic political rights.) In addition, for many members of NATO, CSTO is seen as Russia-dominated and a proof that Russia has not abandoned Soviet-era imperialist ambitions toward its near abroad.

The report issued by Madeleine Albrights’s “twelve apostles” on the future NATO security concept said rather pointedly that “on the list of NATO partners, Russia is in its own category”, mentioning later that “some governments are more sceptical than others” toward Russia.

The Albright report did however urge the alliance to “forge more formal ties” with regional security organizations including CSTO. This was the second last sentence in a nine-page section on NATO partnerships, even though CSTO is NATO’s approximate counterpart in the far east of Europe.

Political relations between this or that regional organization, even military organizations, can be rather formalistic affairs. So why does it matter whether NATO and CSTO spend much time talking with each other? The answer has three parts: heartland Asia will remain vital to the security of “old Europe”; NATO does not have the political stomach to stay there militarily; and the CSTO is an emerging security actor there. One could conclude that the reasons for stronger NATO-CSTO relations are more self-evident than the arguments against.

The Smolensk tragedy was an event of enormous importance for the Poles, and may also be a key event for the EU as it awaits the results of the Presidential election. How will the deaths affect the result of this vote brought forward by three months, which at one point had looked like a shoo-in for the ruling Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski?

He is now facing the late Lech Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw, whose PiS party had looked out of the running until Lech’s death boosted it in the polls. Jaroslaw’s campaign slogan is “Poland is the most important.” Komorowski is far more pro-European, and wants early adoption of the euro single currency.
The accident has brought two fomer sworn enemies closer: Poland and Russia, and one of the stated ambitions of Poland’s EU presidency, in a year’s time, is to improve relations with the east.

“The Poles feel this acutely, the need to stabilise their relationships with the east, particularly with Russia, and to bring Russia into a more regular dialogue with the European community, with NATO,” says the EastWest Institute’s Andrew Nagorski.

Poland has long been considered pro-American above being pro-European. It hosts US missiles, and its EU membership in 2004 came five years after joining the NATO club. But that is not the whole picture says Poland’s representative at the EU

Jan Tombinski;
“The EU is where our future challenges lie. NATO membership was dictated more by our past fears, but both represent our integration into the western world’s institutions.”

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski agrees;

“I think the circumstances have changed. The USA no longer feels threatened by a European defence identity, quite the contrary, they would like to see a more capable europe to share the burden.”

Poland’s European identity is also bound up in its adoption of the Euro. Warsaw had previously said it would like to make the change in 2012, but the economic crisis has pushed that date back.

Jan Tombinski explains why;

“Two years ago we committed to announcing a timetable but today we’d prefer to wait a little while to benefit from a more stable and confident eurozone, and build the best entry conditions we can. I also don’t think that today the eurozone is ready to take us in.”Where Poland stands in Europe depends to a large extent on Sunday’s election, because the Polish presidency can veto legislation, and has power in the realms of defence and foreign affairs.

Copyright © 2010 euronews

The EPG is a group of former high-ranking political and military figures from countries in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The idea to set up the EPG was a recommendation of the EWI Experts Group and EWI's influential 2009 policy paper, Euro-Atlantic Security: One Vision, Three Paths.

The mandate of the EPG:

1. To gain acceptance at high political levels within the OSCE and/or among its member states of new approaches to existing security disputes within the OSCE area;
2. To identify appropriate responses, possibly through the creation of new mechanisms, to address security threats to OSCE members in a way that recognizes the principle of indivisible security across the OSCE area;
3. To reconcile the demands of traditional security while addressing emerging threats, such as cyber attacks and other physical threats to international economic resilience (e.g. uncontrolled migration or bio-attack).

The main purpose of the EPG is to offer fresh ideas on Euro-Atlantic security to political leaders in private and sometimes in public. The EPG will operate both as a group that meets occasionally to discuss progress and as a cluster of individuals in conversation with other political leaders on a one-on-one basis to stimulate new ideas.

It seems the lawmakers in Belgium are "fiddling while Rome burns." In April this year, 136 members of Belgium’s lower house voted to ban the burqa in public, while two abstained. No one voted against the measure. The move followed by one week the collapse of the country’s government over electoral boundaries based on language criteria, forcing the country to new elections.

With a national debt equal to 100 percent of GDP, this is an interesting set of priorities. Statistics on how many women in Belgium wear burqas are unavailable, but in nearby Denmark, the parliament there stopped its move toward a burqa ban when, according to Der Speigel, it found there were only a handful of women in the country who actually wore a burqa. 

There is reason to beleive that the near-simultaneous actions of Belgian politicians to deepen their linguistic disputes while banning burqas are intimately connected. According to Belgian political scientist, Jean-Michel de Waele, commenting on the new elections in an interview for EurActiv, political parties in Belgium have been taken hostage by extremists.

What accounts for this cultural extremism in Belgium? It may actually have been aggravated simply by the "invasion" of the country by foreigners. Even though non-nationals in Belgium account for only 9 percent of the total population, among EU countries Belgium is near the top of the list for the percentage of its population represented by nationals of other countries.

In Belgium's case, according to Eurostat, the larger share of these foreigners are from other EU countries – most notably Italy (17 percent of the foreign population), France and the Netherlands (around 13 percent), and Spain (around 4 percent). Moroccans make up only 8 percent of the foreign population (or less than one percent of the total Belgian population).

This dominance of non-nationals in the Belgian population mix is not caused by its being host to the European Institutions. According to Eurostat, the European Union as a whole has a "relatively high net migration rate, which in 2008 was almost three times higher than the rate of natural population growth."

Europeans are on the move. EU internal migrants across national borders are increasing in percentage terms faster than immigrants into the EU from outside. Belgium's population is one of the most adept in Europe when it comes to foreign languages. What explains this contradiction between openness to the outside world evidenced by foreign language use and extremism centred on linguistic "purity"?

Look to the demography of the capital city. Over several decades, the Flemish-speaking population of the Belgian capital has been squeezed out or has chosen to move out, as the non-national population has grown dramatically. In London, there is a similar picture. Based on one analysis of the 2001 census, in large swathes of the north of the British city, the share of foreign-born population is higher than 34 percent. (This figure strangely includes children of immigrants.) Non-national population growth in Barcelona and Madrid has also been spectacular in recent years.

As Belgium this week contemplates its constitutional future and community-based divisions, it and the rest of Europe might ponder just how much the changing face of the capital city under pressure of internal EU migration was the cause of that. The other big factor is that local people are being squeezed out of the property market in their own capital cities by the property boom associated with this more lively market and more open investment regimes.  There is a lesson in the demography of Brussels for the future of other EU capitals. All should note, however, that the immigrants who have changed the capital’s demographics and its politics most are not those very few women wearing burqas.

Barack Obama's National Security Strategy is similar to George W. Bush's, Sidhu suggests, in that they recognize the need for and the limitations of American leadership in the world. "Both acknowledge that while the U.S. will continue to provide global leadership, it can no longer carry the burden of all global challenges by itself and will build cooperation with other centres of influence," he writes.

But Sidhu suggests that the U.S. has not yet acheived this balance. “This assertion reflects an inherent tension between the growing recognition in Washington of the limits of its global leadership and its inability or unwillingness to allow others to provide this essential leadership,” he writes. Pointing to U.S. reluctance to accept the Iran-Turkey-Brazil nuclear deal, he adds: "While it is clear that all of the U.S.-led efforts to address the Iranian nuclear challenge have been largely ineffective, Washington is unable and unwilling to accept that other countries might be in a better position to deal with this issue and it should give them a chance to provide this necessary leadership."

Sidhu sees similar complications in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. "While clearly recognizing and articulating the need to view the Afghan conflict in a regional context and to engage Afghanistan, Pakistan and their neighbours, Washington has been singularly unsuccessful in engaging one of the most critical countries in the region—Iran," he writes.

“All of these drawbacks actually underline the salience of the NSS and the need for any administration to align its actions more closely with the guidelines set out in the document,” he concludes. " Other aspiring global powers, such as India, might do well to undertake a similar exercise."

Click here to read Sidhu's column in livemint.com

The city of Sevastopol captures modern Europe’s history in a tantalizing way. The city’s past links the easternmost reaches of the continent to its west in a way no other city does. It also speaks to the future in no uncertain terms. Europe has a date with history in Sevastopol.

The Crimea is the farthest east inside Europe that British soldiers fought and died in large numbers, some 5,000 killed in action and some 20,000 dead from disease in Britain’s “Russia War” of 1854-56.

Sevastopol also reveals with sharp clarity the transitory character of political sovereignty.  In the Crimean War, among the allies against Russia were two “states” that have since passed into history -- the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Duchy of Nassau.

The Crimean region has been a focal point of invasion and changing political sovereignty over the last millennium. Today, while very clearly a part of Ukraine, the city of Sevastopol and its naval base, like the Crimean peninsula as a whole, have been the subject of some political contest with Russia.

The region and this city have a distinct place in Russian history and psychology. Through 1855 and 1856, Tolstoy achieved his early fame with publication of Sevastopol Sketches, written in large part from the front lines of military service as the city was under siege from France, Britain and Turkey. The Soviet era added even more complex layers of memory and politics. The second siege of Sevastopol, during the Great Patriotic War, lasted some nine months and resulted in Soviet military casualties of around 11,000 killed in action.

Sevastopol is today a “Russian” city. According to the Ukrainian National Census of 2001, the ethnic composition of Sevastopol is predominantly Russian, around 72 per cent, with Ukrainians around 22 per cent.

For now, the political disputes around Sevastopol and Crimea have become quieter. In April 2010, Ukraine and Russia agreed terms to extend the lease on the naval base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042. Ukraine is now led by a political party that more clearly represents the interests of Ukraine’s Russian communities than the rival parties. The government has officially taken its country’s possible membership of NATO off the table.

But Sevastopol remains a beacon warning us of possible dark days in Europe’s future. Under the new agreement, Russia has taken on the responsibility for supporting infrastructure development in Sevastopol and the rest of Crimea. President Medvedev has already ordered planning work to begin. This is definitely good news for local residents and has to be applauded on that basis.

In the longer term, the political significance of this extra-territorial economic planning reach of Russia into the sensitive political region will be determined by what else happens in relations between Russia, Ukraine and rest of Europe. 

Here the Russian proposal for a new European security treaty takes on added significance. The case of Sevastopol, which most Europeans and American simply don’t understand, is an important part of the psychology behind Russia’s advocacy of a new security architecture. If we want a guarantee of stability in Europe’s east, then we need to understand that psychology better.

But we also need to respond to it. Europe was not prepared to come to terms with the incipient crisis represented by the political tensions between Georgia and Russia before August 2008. Europe needs to learn from that failure. It needs now to take advantage of the pause offered by Presidents Yanukovich and Medvedev in respect of Sevastopol to negotiate a new security architecture that addresses directly and adequately the “eastern question” of its security -- represented so well by the case of Sevastopol and the Black Sea region.