Conflict Prevention

Political disagreements between the United States and Russia over Ukraine should not hamper their cooperation in search of strategic solutions to the issue of Afghan drugs production and trafficking. This was a key conclusion drawn by the EastWest Institute’s project team following a three-day meeting of its U.S.-Russia experts steering group on Afghan narcotrafficking, held in Moscow at the end of June. Co-chaired by EastWest’s vice president, David Firestein, and the institute’s Russia office director, Vladimir Ivanov, the meeting in Moscow was convened specifically to assess the implications of the current systemic crisis in Russia’s relations with the West on the security situation and counternarcotics efforts in and around Afghanistan. 

The meeting involved leading experts from the EastWest Institute’s bilateral Joint U.S.-Russia Working Group on Afghan Narcotrafficking: Ilnur Batyrshin, head of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service’s research center; Ivan Safranchuk, associate professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations; Konstantin Sorokin, advisor at the International Training and Methodology Centre for Financial Monitoring; Ekaterina Stepanova, head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Unit at the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations; George Gavrilis, visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University; and Austin Long, assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The steering group meeting also included Patricia Nicholas, project manager in the International Program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, whose generous contribution makes possible the work of this EastWest Institute experts group on Afghan narcotrafficking.

Participants discussed the effect of the drawdown in Afghanistan of NATO International Security Assistance Force troops after 2014, with many noting that poppy cultivation and exports of illicit drugs from the country are likely to increase and that a basic precondition to solving this problem in the longer term would be political reconciliation and increased stability and functionality of the Afghan government at both the central and local levels. Discussion also focused on possible measures for managing the situation in the interim, such as continued international assistance to help raise the capacity of Afghan military and security forces as well as enhanced efforts to secure the borders around Afghanistan to counter both illicit drugs exports and the possible spillover of violent extremism to the neighboring countries. In this context, it was pointed out by some participants that even if U.S.-Russian counternarcotics cooperation continues at the operational level in this post-Crimea-sanctions environment, this is not enough to effectively address the complexity of Afghan drugs and security issues. 

The steering group devoted one full meeting day entirely to consultations with key regional players that contribute to shaping security and counternarcotics strategies around Afghanistan. The consultations involved senior diplomats from the embassies in Moscow of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Kazakhstan as well as the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Secretariat of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Ambassador Zamir Kabulov, Special Envoy of the Russian Federation President for Afghanistan, also addressed the group. 

The outcome of the steering group meeting in Moscow made it clear that the EastWest Institute’s leadership of this dialogue is particularly important against the backdrop of the recent challenges in the U.S.-Russia relationship at the governmental level. The steering group concluded that increasing efforts to engage regional players in this project could be an effective step towards helping restore regular communication between the Russian and U.S. counternarcotics communities. 

Larry Mantle and Gady discussed justifications for the Justice Department's charges alleging that Chinese hackers targeted U.S. corporations. "Both China and the U.S. have an interest in de-escalating tensions in cyberspace," said Gady.  

Listen to the full interview here on 89.3 KPCC. 

Photo credit: Chuck Hagel via Flickr. 

The EastWest Institute hosted a lively roundtable discussion where it launched its Stronger Together: Women Parliamentarians in Joint Action for Peace and Security report on April 29, 2014, at its New York center. The report focuses on the partnership activities that the institute’s Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention has been undertaking with Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND) in consolidating international support for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. 

State Senator Nan Orrock from Georgia, currently the president of Women Legislators' Lobby (WiLL), is a veteran of the civil rights movement, and in reflecting on the exchanges, said she felt that she was once again “in the presence of raw courage” when she heard about the stories of politicians in Afghanistan or Pakistan receiving death threats. 

Two international exchanges with parliamentarians from Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Pakistan, joined by U.S. state legislators resulted in a coalition of women political leaders ready to take on the challenges of promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda both domestically as well as on international platforms.

Throughout the well-attended roundtable discussion by members from civil society organizations, representatives of governments and of UN, the issue of the National Action Plan (NAP) came up several times. Participants pointed out that only 46 countries in the world have one and that the NAP content, when it does exist, lacks the budgeting for implementation. The countries that claim that they do not need NAP, because they are societies that do not suffer from conflict, most often seen in the traditional sense of the word, are not recognizing a systemic problem with insidious consequences.

Ambassador Chowdhury, former Under Secretary General and High Representative of the United Nations stood at the bedrock of Resolution 1325 as the president of the UN Security Council back in 2000. He has a clear message for countries hiding behind such excuses. “No country can claim not to be in conflict if women do not have equal rights,” Ambassador Chowdhury said. 

As the 15th anniversary of resolution 1325 in 2015 approaches, participants want to see a seismic shift  from commitments to accomplishments. This means more NAPs, more budgets to implement existing NAPs, and more innovative drafting of NAPs, rather than a listing of current activities on gender mainstreaming. It is essential that the global community works to guarantee the fundamental rights of half the world’s population. 

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Click here to view pictures from the event on Flickr. 

Click here to read a write up of the event on The Celock Report. 

Perhaps the current situation of Ukraine was inevitable in some way, given the emerging realities through the last several years. Inevitable or not, it was certainly foreseen.

In 2009, a group of eminent persons convened by the EastWest Institute warned of a possible crisis in and around Ukraine. The report documented a collapse of trust between NATO and the West, especially after the short military conflict in Georgia in 2008, and the failure of Europe’s institutions to address the basic challenges that surfaced in that unhappy event. “NATO and Russia have declared that they are no longer enemies”, the report noted. “They need to agree just what that means in terms of a number of important military/political issues.” It went on to say that the “heated debates over NATO expansion … provide the proof that the two sides have not yet made that fundamental settlement.”

It was absence of a fundamental settlement that prevented collaboration between Russia, Europe and the United States to help Ukraine through its crisis in the last five years and, more recently, since November last year.

The 2009 report warned that “If not corrected, those trends will produce negative strategic consequences for the future stability of Europe as a whole. This may be playing out in Ukraine, which is experiencing high levels of internal political tension at a time of a profound economic crisis.” And so it came to pass.

The report, titled EuroAtlantic Security: One Vision, Three Paths made several recommendations. Some are still relevant today, albeit with some adjustment. One set of recommendations (one of the three paths) that argued for a fundamental transformation of security relations, had warned that “there will be no reversal of the deteriorating trends in security relationships unless political leaders find a way to move decisively toward the joint decision-making and joint problem-solving in this sphere that are foreshadowed in the NATO-Russia Founding Act.” To address this, some members of the group recommended a mechanism to escape the unstable and narrowly conceived structure represented by the NATO Russia Council (NRC). One proposal was to create a new structure at EuroAtlantic level that would bring the heads of state of Russia, the EU and the United States together to create the necessary political channel which was missing in the NRC. This idea also had the advantage of modernising the Europe/Russia security relationship through a structure not dependent on NATO, Moscow’s historic adversary. Russians often complained that the NRC was really a “28 against 1” structure in which its voice was not taken seriously.

Given events in Ukraine so far in 2014, it is hard to imagine that the relationship between NATO and Russia will stabilise any time soon. Also, it may seem to many observers that the time is simply not right to think about the bigger picture while the very future of Ukraine is in peril. Yet we do need to look ahead to begin to imagine what a new, predictable and trusting security relationship between Russia and the rest of Europe will look like.

If we want to get that future plan right, we do need to have some understanding of what went wrong. Why was this crisis not avoided? One answer to this is that powerful NATO leaders wanted Ukraine to have the right to join it, while Russia was opposed to that right—the two views were irreconcilable and thus a security crisis in and over Ukraine was inevitable. Another answer, more serious in its implications, is that the diplomats on both sides failed to heed the clear warning signs, visible at least five years out, and failed to take appropriate preventive measures.

Photo credit: Sasha Maksymenko 

EWI Senior Fellow Franz-Stefan Gady weighs in on Ukraine's complicated past with Russia that dates back centuries. "Ukraine in one way or the other was always a pawn between great powers throughout its history; and that, I think, is not something that's going to go away," says Gady.

View the full clip here at PBS NewsHour. 

Gady appears at 3:51 and 10:01.

Photo Credit: spylaw01