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My schedule recently did not permit much in the way of my normal, extensive, blogsurfing  that is the genesis of my regularly scheduled Recommended Reading posts. I would however, like to highlight Matt Armstrong’s recent, in depth, post on AFRICOM. Much like 7-Up, if the vision pans out, AFRICOM is to be “The Un-Combatant” Command. Sys Admin from the inception, interagency “jointness” in conception. But will that actually happen in the real world?

AFRICOM: DOA or in need of Better Marketing? No and Yes.

By Matt Armstrong

Like Mark Twain’s “death” in 1897 (he died in 1910), reports of AFRICOM’s demise may be exaggerated.  Concerns that AFRICOM hasn’t been thought out or is unnecessary aren’t supported by the actions and statements of those charged with building this entity.  However, based on the poor marketing of AFRICOM, these concerns are not surprising.

I attended USC’s AFRICOM conference earlier this month and between panel discussions and offline conversations, I came away with a new appreciation (and hope) for the newest, and very different, command. 

This is not like the other Combatant Commands (one DOD representative said they dropped “Combatant” from the title, but depending on where you look, all commands have that word or none of the commands include that adjective).  Also unlike other commands, this is “focused on prevention and not containment or fighting wars.”  This is, as one speaker continued, is a “risk-laden experiment” that is like an Ironman with multidisciplinary requirements and always different demands (note: thank you for not saying it’s a marathon… once you’ve done one marathon, they’re easy, you can “fake” a marathon… Ironman triathlons are always unpredictable, I know, I’ve done five.).  The goal, he continued, was to “keep combat troops off the continent for 50 years” because the consensus was, once troops landed on Africa, it would be extremely difficult to take them off. 

General William “Kip” Ward realizes that only once in several generations is there the opportunity to stand up a new command.  General Ward has worked hard to create something new and unique that addresses modern security dilemmas.  Modern communications and the vastness of Africa make a singular location for AFRICOM impractical.  For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone is nearly 1/4 the size of the U.S. and has 130 million people alone.  Across the continent political boundaries on the map mask tremendous language and cultural variations. 

The goal, as it was laid out in the conference, is to divide AFRICOM into four tiers because it is “easy to overwhelm our African partners in [both] enthusiasm [and] size.”

Read the rest here.

The Department of State recently released Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XVIII, China, 1973-1976. This volume covers the critical period of the Nixon Adinisrtion’s watershed “China Opening”. I could have used this about ten years ago but better late than never.

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans” – Otto von Bismarck

“I think what we did in Kosovo was profoundly important.” – Bill Clinton

A new nation declared itself today after close to a decade as a UN protectorate; a fragment of a fragment of an extinguished artificial state once built upon the polyglot ruins of European empires and Muslim sultanates. This particular geographic node, Kosovo, has a quality that all of it’s larger forerunners lacked – the cultural unity of identity that will make the nation the primary loyalty of the overwhelming majority of it’s citizens. A fact on the ground that trumps diplomatic protests over the finer points of international law or the mythic appeal of seven hundred year old Lost Causes.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence is ultimately rooted in an overwhelming demographic reality that could have only been altered by Kosovar Serbians having had larger families three and four decades ago than their poorer Albanian neighbors; and the Yugoslavian and Serbian governments having given rural Serbs some kind of economic incentive not to migrate to Belgrade or the larger towns of Serbia proper. As such, Kosovo’s declaration is worrisome to all multiethnic states plagued by separatism where the majority population is in decline – from the windows of the Kremlin, Serbia today must look hauntingly like Russia writ small.

However demographics alone was probably not enough here to explain Kosovo – Kurds, Shan, Tamils, Basques, Tibetans, Palestinians, Uighurs, Baluchis, Pushtuns and in previous centuries, the Irish – all thoroughly dominate their respective homelands but are not yet being welcomed into independence by great powers. What hapened is that the adversaries of the Kosovar Albanian, the Serbians nationalists, also morally de-legitimized themselves under Slobodan Milosevic, with years of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic and his murderous policies had considerable popular support until the very end; they still retain support from a not inconsiderable, defiant, hardcore as evidenced by the inability or unwillingness of Serbia to bring Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to justice. As the Germans bade farewell forever to East Prussia and Silesia in 1945, Serbians today can reflect on Sarajevo’s impact upon their legal claim to sovereignty over Kosovo.

That being said, events can be handled well or poorly. Kosovar independence would have gone down better in a world where Russia was a prosperous, democratic state, thoroughly integrated into the Core and a regional strategic partner of the United States instead of a bitter, increasingly paranoid, plebiscitary “soft” dictatorship that views America with grave suspicion and the EU with contempt.  That was not an outcome that Washington could have created alone but a relationship that three administrations might have attempted to build with Russia but elected not to do so. Benign neglect mixed with pressure toward Moscow was a deliberate choice on our part, one that might have made Berlin, London and Paris happy in the 1990’s but it wasn’t to our long term strategic benefit.

Independence is good for the Kosovars and in the last analysis, inevitable; but our statesmen should be arranging matters so that the United States profits from inevitable events rather than simply bearing the diplomatic costs.

Kosovo Links:

Coming Anarchy  ,  Duck of Minerva,   TDAXP,  Aqoul,  Outside the Beltway,   Centerfield,   John Robb,  Matthew Yglesias   Catholicgauze – New!,     Weekly Standard -New!

UPDATE:

The United States government has formally recognized the independence of Kosovo via the State Department but, significantly, with an accompanying statement by President Bush.

MountainRunner gets a special, solo, Recommended Reading today.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner – “Departure Assessment of Embassy Baghdad”

This is simply an utterly amazing “must read”. An excoriating, damning and devastating cri de coeur  by an insider, leveled at the institutional culture of the State Department bureaucracy and Foreign Service that has not had a top to botom, clear the decks, clean slate, reform since the 1920’s. Kudos to Matt for printing this document – it should be a far bigger story than it is. Had an equivalent arisen in the Defense Department over Iraq, it would be front-page news in The New York Times for a week. Easily. A few excerpts:

….After a year at the Embassy, it is my general assessment that the State Department and the Foreign Service is not competent to do the job that they have undertaken in Iraq. 

….Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up.  It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken

…. Likewise, the State Department’s culture of delay and indecision, natural to any bureaucracy, is out of sync with the urgency felt by the American people and the Congress in furthering America’s interests in Iraq. The delay in staffing the Commanding General’s Ministerial Performance initiative (from May to the present) would be considered grossly negligent if not willful in any environment.  I would venture to say that if the management of the Embassy and the State Department’s Iraq operation were judged by rules that govern business judgment and asset waste in the private sector, the delays, indecision, and reorganizations over the past year, would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal. In light of the nation’s sacrifice, what we have seen this past year in the Embassy is incomprehensible.

Read the rest here.

Count me as somebody who believes that the State Department is grossly underfunded for the tasks at hand and that the public is too seldom aware of the dirty and dangerous jobs that FSO regularly undetake, far from glamorous and comfortable European postings. However, systemic reform of State and the Foreign Service is several decades overdue and this post screams as to why. When your net effect ranges from useless to obstructive, it’s time to go.

The implementation of COIN in Iraq has garnered success even as American public diplomacy and IO efforts are justifiably trashed by…well…everyone, really. Why is that?

Perhaps the reason has to do with the credibility of the actors operating on different levels of conflict. Unit commanders in Iraq, if they are engaged with locals and dependably follow through on their commitments and threats, they gain a degree of authenticity with their audience, friend and foe alike. More or less this is happening at the tactical level.

Our national leaders, broadly speaking, carry no such weight on the strategic level, neither at home nor abroad. Regardless of their position on the war, most politicians appear to be disconnected economically and socially from the lives of ordinary Americans, much less foreign audiences – unless they are foreign elites who were educated in American Ivy League schools. “Spin” has become so habitual and baldfaced lying, denial of reality and lawyerly semantics so commonplace a tactic in American politics, that our words no longer carry any credibility, just our actions. When our actions then contradict our values as well, the game is over.

Our elite cannot wage 4GW or strategic IO until they first become connected enough to reality to systematically execute actions that build legitimacy in the eyes of a multiplicity of audiences. Our checking account is overdrawn and we need to start making deposits. This isn’t a call to appease anyone but to earn the respect of even our enemies by making the certitude of what America is fighting for a given.

After that, the rest is simply a discussion of means.