War
The death of Zarqawi could have mixed results for al-Qaeda, the WP reports.
His ruthless targeting of civilians was opposed by the global al-Qaeda leadership, as it alienated both Arab public opinion and the larger Iraqi insurgency; Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq was becoming increasingly isolated.
Analysts argue that Zarqawi’s death could undercut his group’s recruitment of foreign fighters, and other foreign jihadis might turn away from al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They also argue that the Zarqawi group is less militarily important than several other foreign insurgent units, including some led by Egyptians, Saudis, and Algerians.
Al-Qaeda has a chance to assert greater control over its Iraqi franchise, but faces problems if that franchise loses too much “market share” of the insurgency. According to a German counterterrorism expert, “By losing Zarqawi, they run the danger of losing Iraq as a battlefield to the nationalist insurgents and others who aren’t interested in bin Laden or the global jihad.”
This presents broader problems for al-Qaeda:
If al-Qaeda fails to maintain a high-profile stake in the conflict with U.S. forces in the region, the analysts said, its relevance in the jihadist movement will quickly diminish. …. Others said Zarqawi’s death is likely to widen the factional splits that have been developing for years within the global movement. More and more, Islamic radical groups are becoming splintered and are only loosely affiliated. While they may be united in a broader struggle against the United States and the West, they often have different aims and tactics.
Terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq yesterday by a US airstrike.
Forecasters were cautious about the significance of the event.
On NPR, former DIA Middle East chief Jeffrey White said Zarqawi’s death could help dampen the extreme wing of the Iraqi insurgency. However, reduced extremism could actually help unify the insurgency, he said, as Zarqawi’s tactics were controversial within the resistance forces.
Zarqawi’s group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, deliberately targeted civilians, which most Iraqis disapproved of.
Juan Cole suggests that Zarqawi was not as important as some might think:
There is no evidence of operational links between his Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. … But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.
The NYT acknowledged that his program of igniting sectarian conflict was already well underway:
“Zarqawi may be gone, but the conflagration that he set alight continues to burn,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist expert at the Rand Corporation in Washington. “That is the reality. He has already set in motion powerful forces that won’t necessarily stop just because he is dead.”
Al Qaeda in Iraq is loosely organized, the NYT states, and only a small part of the overall insurgency.
It should also be kept in mind that Zarqawi only rose to prominence as a result of the US invasion of Iraq; while his death is very positive in itself, it only partially undoes the progress jihadists have made in the country in the environment the US effectively created.
After a number of months trending downwards, American casualities have jumped again, likely indicating that the Oct. ‘05 to March ‘06 pattern was not significant, and there has not been any clear change on the ground.
PBS has been airing “Fire and Ice,” a history of the 1939-1940 Winter War, which began when Stalin’s Soviet Union attacked its tiny neighbor Finland. Heroic Finnish resistance held off massive Soviet offensives for months, until the weight of men and materiel became too great for the Finns.
Stalin was practicing preventive war: the Finnish border was quite near Russia’s second-most important city, Leningrad, and Stalin seems to have felt that that this could constitute a future threat. And he proved correct, when Finland allied with the Germans in the Second World War. (That Stalin probably brought about the threat he imagined is not really germane; states of all kinds do that frequently.)
Stalin’s actions appear to be permissible under the Bush administration’s preventive war doctrine, which ultimately uses a nation’s sense of being threatened as the criteria for whether it can engage in war.
Most advocates of preventive war doctrine would reject that idea, so it is worth considering whether there are rules for preventive war that would define the idea more palatably. Candidate rules:
- Nations may do what they can; moral rules do not apply — This hyperrealist argument has its backers, but few Americans are truly among them, even in the ranks of preventive war advocates. It would allow everything, and most people in the world believe that many state actions should be forbidden.
- The US may practice prevention, but no one else may — The international system simply does not work this way, and not even Americans claim this level of privilege. Whatever one nation may do, so too may all others.
- Democracies may engage in preventive war — There are three problems with this rule: it is not how the international system allocates rights, democracies can be aggressive and often make mistakes, and there are many potential democracies that will feel strongly threatened in the future. For instance, Iran and Iraq might still feel threatened by Israel even if they were fully democratic, and Pakistan’s wariness of India will not abate if democracy returns.
- The threat must be real — The basic problem here is that there is no consensus about reality. Stalin was “proven correct” by events, after all, and most observers thought that Iraq did not present a truly plausible threat to the United States before the invasion. On the other hand, this concept would justify preventive war by Iran against the US or Israel. Americans still see the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the deepest perfidy, but it clearly was a response to a real, gathering threat to Japan, as war was widely anticipated. Until they decide that Pearl Harbor was permissible, Americans do not really believe in this rule.
- The UN must sign off — This rule, derided by Americans as “the permission slip,” is in theory how the international system operates: only the Security Council can authorize force in the kinds of situations related to preventive war. Abiding by this rule constrains everyone’s behavior, as it is meant to, but gives the US effective veto power over the legitimacy of other states’ preventive wars.
Ultimately, it appears difficult to write plausible rules for preventive war that Americans could actually live with, given that others may invoke the same rules. That in itself signals the potential perils of the concept.
A Washington Post article yesterday offered many provocative forecasts for Iraq, based on the idea of dividing the country up into sectarian pieces.
Those who see the partitioning of Iraq as increasingly attractive argue that separating the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds may be the only solution to the violence that many experts believe verges on civil war. Others contend that it would simply lead to new and dangerous challenges for the United States, not least the possibility that al-Qaeda would find it easier to build a new base of operations in a partitioned Iraq.
Partition was always a not-unlikely outcome, but that it is now being considered by some as a preferable path shows how badly the American plan has gone astray. And it would be a further retreat from several of the American goals for Iraq.
According to an American counterinsurgency expert,
“The Iraqis are positioning for civil war,” and …. the United States should be contemplating a “soft partition” of the country by design, rather than through violence. An all-out civil war would not only endanger U.S. troops more but also would be more likely to spill over into neighboring states and so wreak havoc on the international oil market.
And it would hardly be an easy solution:
Even carrying out a planned division of Iraq may prove more difficult than it appears, warned an officer now serving in Iraq with the 101st Airborne …. “It’s a simple, blunt approach to preventing sectarian violence,” he said. “However, it won’t stop all infiltrations and violence, and it may simply result in armed camps that eventually resort to all-out, partitioned state-on-state war.”
Preventing major ethnic and sectarian massacres such as occurred in the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan would require huge investments of time and money, hard to come by four years into the war, warned Hammes, the counterinsurgency expert. “We will have to develop and fund some kind of displacement agency to move the families and set them up — very manpower and civilian expertise intensive!” Because of those hurdles, Hammes said, he expects that the U.S. government will be incapable of managing a breakup of Iraq. He considers a “hard” division of Iraq, achieved through civil war, more likely. “This will spread disorder to Saudi and other Gulf states,” he predicted.
A division achieved through that level of violence could easily raise killings beyond the worst levels of the Baathist regime.
Millions of people would be on the wrong sides of any lines drawn, and there would be resources to fight over, above all oil:
“There is no way a partition would work,” said Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice, who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, expressing his personal opinion. Baghdad is a deeply mixed city, he noted: “The largest Kurdish city in Iraq? Baghdad. The largest Sunni city? Baghdad. The largest Shiite city? Yep, Baghdad.” Also, he said, it would be difficult to parcel out Iraq’s greatest treasure, its oil reserves, in a way that all three major groups would find acceptable.
According to the Washington Post:
Some analysts [in Nepal] say they believe that the tumult of recent weeks could open the way for an end to the insurgency, by creating a new political framework in which the Maoists can work peacefully.
Meanwhile, the Maoist leader interviewed in the article reinforces this forecast of insurgent extremism. The leader
denounced the mainstream parties as “status quo-ist and feudal” and said some Nepalis could be forced to undergo “reculturization” in labor camps following the inevitable triumph of the revolution.
If the countries did come to blows over the island dispute, Asia / Korea Tide argues out that South Korea is poorly equipped to face the Japanese navy and would face defeat.
(Via Coming Anarchy)
Possible combatants: Japan, South Korea
Causes: Disputes over minor islands and their accompanying sea zones, historical animosity due to Japanese colonization of Korea
Probability in next decade: low; though South Korea has already threatened force, the common interests of the two most advanced Asian democracies should keep them in check
The Maoist insurgency in India may still be a low-intensity conflict, but “looks increasingly like a civil war,” according to the NYT (IHT version here).
It is surprisingly widespread, “with toeholds in 13 of 28 Indian states,” from the far south to the Nepalese border, and some influence in a fourth of the country’s 600 districts, by one estimate.
Says an Indian security analyst, “Unless something radical is done in terms of a structural revolution in rural areas, you will see a continuous expansion of Maoist insurrection.”
That may be a bit bold, given that the conflict has been sputtering for 38 years, but the war is another reason that India’s future success is dependent on achieving a more equitable, inclusive society.