Kenya captured headlines in December 2007 when the former beacon of stability and growth in East Africa descended into political and social chaos after elections heightened ethnic and tribal divisions. Yet despite over 1,300 deaths, 300,000 displaced, and fears of a second Rwanda, Kenya has pulled back from the brink with the creation of a fragile power-sharing government between the two major rival parties, facilitated by the collaborative efforts of multiple stakeholders locally, nationally, and internationally.

Today, Kenyans return to the polls for the first time since the post-election violence to usher in a new constitution and drastic political and judicial reforms. As Kenya takes a step in a positive direction, its trajectory from violence and complete institutional breakdown to slow but constructive change should be an opportunity for the international community and United States to evaluate the potential and limitations of preventive diplomacy as a concrete foreign policy tool.

International involvement in Kenya did not involve boots on the ground, but focused on rigorous negotiations and external economic and political pressure from international institutions and countries. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, the African Union, and others were all key in the process, threatening punitive measures and pushing both sides towards compromise. (more…)

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet state in Central Asia, has made many headlines after its corrupt President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was toppled in April. On June 10th, riots erupted between the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek minority in Bakiyev’s stronghold Osh, leaving hundreds dead and sending a flood of refuges to neighboring Uzbekistan. The June 27th constitutional referendum ratifying a new constitution was deemed successful, but true peace is elusive in southern Kyrgyzstan. The violence continues as the Kyrgyz police abuse ethnic Uzbeks, and the unrest threatens to spread to neighboring countries. Riots may flare up anew when the local clans start vying for power in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Kyrgyzstan’s weak central authorities are unable to rein in the violence.

During this time, only the lazy refrained from opining about the Kyrgyz misfortune, but nevertheless world governments have not followed words with actions. Russia and the United States have limited their response to Kyrgyz pleas for help to providing humanitarian relief. Their continued inaction may have dire consequences. Even in the unlikely scenario that the conflict resolves itself, the indecisiveness of the two world powers will leave a bitter aftertaste in the former Soviet republics. (more…)

Well, no one said it would be easy. After months of shuttle diplomacy from Middle East Special Envoy Sen. Mitchell, President Obama reengaged on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and committed to securing a final status agreement between the two parties.

For those of us who have been frustrated by the delays in this process the President’s remarks today were very welcome. In particular I was encouraged by this portion of his statement:

Simply put it is past time to talk about starting negotiations — it is time to move forward. It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that’s necessary to achieve our goals. Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon. And more importantly, we must give those negotiations the opportunity to succeed. And so my message to these two leaders is clear. Despite all the obstacles, despite all the history, despite all the mistrust, we have to find a way forward. We have to summon the will to break the deadlock that has trapped generations of Israelis and Palestinians in an endless cycle of conflict and suffering. We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back. Success depends on all sides acting with a sense of urgency. And that is why I have asked Secretary Clinton and Senator Mitchell to carry forward the work that we do here today. Senator Mitchell will meet with the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators next week. I’ve asked the Prime Minister and the President to continue these intensive discussions by sending their teams back to Washington next week. And I’ve asked the Secretary of State to report to me on the status of these negotiations in mid-October.

There is little doubt that the path to a final status agreement will be a tough one but I agree with the President that it is a national security imperative. The question to be answered is whether supporters of a two state solution can provide the political support needed to allow the negotiations to be completed. With that in mind I was encouraged by this letter from prominent faith leaders (see below).

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I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in the SENSE simulation (Strategic Economic Needs and Security Exercise) at the U.S. Institute of Peace over the last three days. SENSE is a simulation exercise meant to train leaders in reconstruction in a post-conflict country, in this case the made-up country of Akrona. Originally created to help implement the Dayton Peace Accords, it has been updated since then and used to train Iraqi leaders, among other places. The values of experiential learning are immeasurable, and in the Congressional Fellowship Program here at PSA, we have the Fellows participate in a two-hour NSC Deputies Committee simulation exercise.

The SENSE simulation is unique in the breadth of stakeholders included in the scenario. I played a parliamentarian (one of six), but there was also a president with a cabinet of ministers covering all the major governance areas, a central bank, international donors, international and local NGO’s, private domestic firms and a multi-national corporation.

SENSE is also unique in that it uses computers to process the decisions of these many actors to constantly update the status of Akrona. Depending on your role, you are able to update certain elements of the simulation based on the decisions you make, and you can track the decisions made by other players. For instance, while I was sitting at a parliament computer yesterday, I was quite pleased to see the Minister of Finance cut spending in the civil budget and start paying down the national debt. (more…)

For the last decade, deep in the heart of the African continent the Democratic Republic of the Congo has laid claim to one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history. Since the beginning of the Second Congo War (also known as Africa’s World War) in 1998, an estimated 5.4 million people have died, making the war and its ongoing six-year aftermath the deadliest conflict since World War II. Equally appalling is the fact that only 10% of deaths are attributed to violence, with most resulting from starvation and easily preventable disease. An estimated 45,000 people are still dying each month – more than triple the mortality rate at the peak of the Darfur crisis in 2003 – and, according to both the World Bank and the IMF, the Congolese people are, quite simply, the poorest in the world.

The extraordinary level of Congo’s suffering is perhaps only rivaled by the conflict’s own complexity. Congo’s eastern provinces contain massive mineral deposits that are the source of the metals used in the cell phones, laptops, mp3 players, and digital cameras we use every day. But the minerals are mined in horrendous conditions under the watchful eye of many ambiguously interrelated militant factions, earning the lucrative natural resources the name “conflict minerals”.

Recently, strides have been taken toward achieving transparency of the origins of the minerals with the introduction of the Congo Conflict Minerals Act, co-sponsored by Senators Brownback, Durbin, and Feingold. The legislation would require all U.S.-registered electronics companies selling products containing columbite-tantalite, cassiterite, or wolframite to annually disclose the country of origin – and, if derived from Congo or an adjacent country, the mine of origin – to the SEC. Through oversight by the State Department, the intended outcome of the bill will be to sever the funding of the armed groups at the source. By modeling the effort on the Kimberley Process – the regulatory policy that has brought relative stability to the diamond trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone – the plan hopes to achieve the same results. (more…)

Given that one of my distant relatives (no, not Johnny Depp) was one of the first Americans assigned the task of defeating pirates, I take a particular interest in the subject of piracy. Throw in my few years in the U.S. Navy, and I can’t help myself. Even though I was technically on vacation last week, I followed the story of the Maersk-Alabama and Captain Richard Phillips with great interest. And I exulted when three of the four pirates met their end. The safe return of the Maersk-Alabama and her entire crew was a clear win for the cause of justice, and could serve as a model. Future efforts to protect ships from pirates are likely to include some combination of greater vigilance on the part of the shipping companies and crews, in collaboration with the navies of the many different nations who have an interest in keeping the sea lanes open and free. (This is one of the themes that I develop in my new book, and that I will discuss next Monday at Cato.)

We do not need to reorient our grand strategy to deal with pirates. We don’t need to reshape the U.S. Navy to fight a motley band of young men in leaky boats. As my colleague Ben Friedman has written, piracy is a problem, but decidely minor relative to many other global security challenges.

But some are criticizing the approach taken to resolve last week’s standoff. They say that the only way to truly eliminate the piracy problem is to attack and ultimately clean out the pirates’s sanctuaries in lawless Somalia. This “solution” fits well with the broader push within the Washington foreign policy community that would deal with our security problems by fixing failed states.

I have gone on at length, usually with my colleagues Justin Logan and Ben Friedman, on the many reasons why a strategy for fixing failed states is unwise and unnecessary. I won’t expand on that thesis here, other than to point out that of all failed states in the world, Somalia is arguably the most failed of the lot. “Fixing” it would require a massive investment of personnel, money, and time — resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

Mackubin Owens offers one of the more intriguing defenses of this approach in a just published e-note for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Owens likens a strategy of fixing Somalia to Gen. Andrew Jackson’s military operations in Florida, a story that features prominently in John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security and the American Experience. As Owens notes, when some members of President James Monroe’s cabinet wanted to punish Jackson for exceeding his mandate — in the course of his military campaign he captured and executed two British citizens accused of cavorting with the marauders who had attacked American citizens – Secretary of State John Quincy Adams jumped to Jackson’s defense, and proposed a different tack. He demanded that Spain either take responsibility for cleaning up Florida, or else give it up. And we all know what happened. Under the terms of Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Florida became a territory of the United States. 26 years later, it became our 27th state.

I’ve vacationed in Florida many times. Walt Disney World is wonderful for the kids; I’ve been there six times. I spent three memorable days watching March Madness in Miami a few years back. Spring training baseball is great fun.  Adams couldn’t have imagined any of these things when he acquired a vast swampland; he cared only that Florida under Spanish control, or lack thereof, posed a threat.

Here is where the parallels to the present day get complicated. I’ll admit that I’ve never been to Somalia. Perhaps they have their own version of South Beach, or could have some day. But I’m frankly baffled by the mere intimation that our national security is so threatened by chaos there that we need to take ownership of the country’s — or the entire Horn of Africa region’s — problems.

And yet, that is what many people believe. And this is not a new phenomenon. In many respects, we have chosen to treat all of the world’s ungoverned spaces as the modern-day equivalent of Spanish Florida.

It is a dark irony that the printing press – the nifty device that made religion available to the masses – is often in the crosshairs of the world’s most militant believers.  Perhaps this isn’t alarming at all, since the right to think what one will and speak as one pleases is at odds with the core dogmas of religion. And what, pray tell, are these core dogmas?  First, religious truths can be neither criticized nor defamed.  Second, the attempt to criticize or defame those truths is a sin of unparalleled proportion, an abomination, as it were.

If you have any doubt that these core dogmas are alive and kicking, consider this:  A diverse yet similarly cantankerous and commonly-minded group of Muslims, grouped under the umbrella of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, are now demanding that Islam be shielded from criticism.  In July of 2008 the Conference formally asked the United Nations to recognize that “Islamophobia” is a real threat affecting the lives of well-meaning, peaceful Muslims.  According to the Conference, not only are Muslims often subject to stereotyping and discriminatory treatment, they must also endure the most insulting, offensive and contemptuous treatment from others, since the world is quite eager to “defile” and “denigrate” the sacred symbols of Islam.  Islam is itself under attack, a vicious and baseless siege that will only end if the United Nations steps in to level the playing field.

If Islam is “under attack,” is that a bad thing?  The United Nations seems to think so, and appears keen to intervene, as it recently renewed a non-binding resolution (62/154) entitled Combating defamation of religions.  This resolution has a number of lovely instances of non-sense on stilts, but focus your attention, dear friends, on the following gems:

(The U.N.) Expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.  (5)

(The U.N.) Stresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions and incitement to religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular.  (9)

Paragraph 5 is quite entertaining, if you put just a bit of pressure on it.  Is the problem that Islam is sometimes or even often correctly associated with human rights violations and terrorism, but in absolute terms “frequently” incorrectly associated with human rights violations and terrorism without sufficient grounds?  Or is the problem that in relative terms, people tend to incorrectly associate Islam with human rights violations and terrorism?  My sense is that the latter cannot be correct.  But the real issue isn’t the relative proportion of correct to incorrect associations between Islam, on the one hand, and human rights violations and terrorism, on the other.  The real bugbear is whether the U.N. should spend its valuable time trying to malign a practice – i.e., the criticism of Islam – that in a non-trivial number of instances gets the association between Islam and the underlying problems exactly right. (more…)

The UN has prepared a draft report on the recent escalation in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the results are damning.  The report, which is due to be presented to the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council this week, accuses the governments of both the DRC and Rwanda of fuelling the long-standing conflict through the covert supply of arms, personnel (including child soldiers) and financial aid.

The report alleges that the Rwandan government, headed by a former Tutsi rebel, has been supplying troops and heavy artillery to General Laurent Nkunda, the leader of the Tutsi community in the DRC.  Meanwhile, the DRC government (or more precisely, the DRC army) stands accused of collaborating with the FLDR, a Hutu militia encompassing many of the leaders of the 1994 genocide.  The result is a proxy war of sorts, between two governments eager to formally distance themselves from the conflict and keen to portray the civil war as a battle between renegade forces.

The report will force the Security Council in general, and the Sanctions Committee in particular, to think long and hard about novel ways to approach the DRC conflict.  Clearly, the current approach of combining an arms embargo with a significant, in-country UN peacekeeping presence has been ineffective in addressing rising security and humanitarian concerns.  The arms embargo, the UN report has found, has been repeatedly breached by the Rwandan and DRC governments, among other organisations.   The UN peacekeeping force, whilst being the largest and most expensive of its kind in the world today and the beneficiary of a recent injection of a further 3,000 troops, still faces considerable problems in terms of both legitimacy and practical power.  The disparate nationalities of the troops and the size of the peacekeeping force, relative to the civilian population, have made it difficult for the peacekeepers to fulfil their mandate of disarming the rebel forces.  Suggestions that the peacekeeping force has not been appropriately prioritising the protection of civilians, including by respected aid agencies such as Oxfam, have only added fuel to the fire.  (more…)

One might think that the current crisis roiling the American economy might be an opportunity for Senators Obama and McCain to spell out their differences on one important issue; U.S. military spending.

Consider the fact that on September 24th, during the fight over the Wall Street bail out, the House of Representatives passed, bill passed by a vote of 392-39, a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without any public protest or meaningful press comment. This show there is unlikely to be any significant pressure to cut military or related national security spending.

Instead, Senators Obama and McCain seem to be reading off the same page. That is the kind of bipartisanship we do no need. The time is long past for someone to stand up and say the obvious; that both military and associated “national security” spending is out of control and continually getting more outrageous.

The latter category includes nuclear weapons spending at the Energy department, plus the State department, as well as Veterans Affairs, and the intelligence agencies. All together that totals exceeds a trillion dollars annually.

Let’s stipulate that there are multiple factors which impact U.S. military spending. And yes, while the financial crisis will increase pressure to reduce military spending, other countervailing political factors will ensure that there likely will be no significant reduction.

Why is this? The primary reason is that the United States is at war, even if is an undeclared one and one which the country is largely disengaged and removed from. And no politician dares cutting military spending for fear of being accused being ‘soft on defense” or not “supporting the troops.”

Unlike the situation at the end of the 1980s and early 19980s there is nothing comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which drove significant reduction in U.S. military spending.

Today the situation is reversed. The United States is fighting the “long war” (formerly known at the global war on terror) and politically both the incumbent administration and the opposition party are reluctant to cut military spending at such a time.

Sadly, there is nothing in the campaign platforms of either Sen. John McCain or Barrack Obama to suggest that they would significantly reduce military spending.

In fact McCain says the United States must enlarge the size of its armed forces. That alone will guarantee that operation and support costs, traditionally one of the highest categories of U.S. military spending will stay high.

Likewise Sen. Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops.

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Taking into account some of the arguments made by Devil’s Advocate in response to my previous post, I’d like to expand on some of my original points as well as clear up a few inconsistencies and misunderstandings that seem to have emerged in this exchange. I’ll return to the question of defense spending and America’s geostrategic position in a moment, but I’d like first to clear the debate of some straw arguments that Devil’s Advocate makes, likely due to my incomplete exposition of some of my original ideas.

In disputing my diagnosis of likely causes of twenty-first century instability, Devil’s Advocate makes the following argument:

Mr. Eckel attributes 21st century instability to “poor resource management, unresolved tensions between political institutions and political identity, [and] governments that are unresponsive to the needs of their people.” The exact opposite in fact is true: The instability in the world is directly caused by governments that attempt to manage their resources and economies (Pre-1995 India, Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc.) Planned economies create much more instability than ones that rely on the free market and capitalism.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating the reintroduction of central planning as the guiding principle of global economic management. I’m certainly not advocating for, nor defending, the kinds of klepto-socialism practiced by the leadership of Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Maoist China or the now-defunct U.S.S.R. When I talk about “managing” the global economy, I’m talking about using market-based institutions to guide global development. This isn’t a new idea, nor is it a particularly leftist one. The I.M.F. manages the global economy by ensuring that individual government insolvencies don’t lead to the systemic collapse of global finance. The W.T.O. manages global trade. The World Bank attempts to manage economic development. None of these institutions are particularly socialistic, and they certainly aren’t back doors to central planning. (more…)