Diplomacy and force

The United States is just beginning to realize some age-old truths on the exercise of diplomacy and the use of force.

While diplomacy without the sanction of force is impotent, force used without a valid cause is destructive. It is the task of statesmanship to blend the two and promote a result that will endure because it entails no loss of face for either side.

None other than the then chairman, joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen said on Jan 12, 2009: “The use of military means to achieve political ends is a thread of a rich discussion, one that reaches back through the ages. It was certainly so even in the winter of 1775, as Edmund Burke spoke on the floor of parliament at a time when England decided to send an army and a navy to put down the American rebellion. …

“Had Burke’s contemporaries listened to him, perhaps things might be a bit different on this side of the ocean. But what about today?”

He would not have spoken thus unless he felt strongly about that basic flaw in US policy.

Edmund Burke’s speech in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775 is strikingly relevant today: “The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered. My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force; and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without resource; for, conciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left. …

“A further objection to force is that you impair the object by your very endeavours to preserve it. …” This is not an unfair description of the results of the US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Another hard-headed realist, the director general of MI5 Stella Remington, said in 2008 after retirement, that the response to 9/11 was “a huge overreaction”. It was, she explained, “another terrorist incident”.

Zbigniew Brzezinski also said it was not an act of war by Afghanistan. Britain’s former ambassador in Kabul Sherard Cowper-Coles recalls “the surprise and horror with which the Taliban and many Afghans greeted the news of the attacks on New York and Washington.

An Afghan patriot told him of the shuras (assemblies of elders) in Kandahar which debated American demands.

He was convinced that the tide in those discussions was moving in favour of expelling Osama bin Laden, on grounds both of expediency (survival of the Taliban government) and of justice (in that Bin Laden had abused the precepts of hospitality).

But turning that tide into a majority would have taken more time than Western governments thirsting for violent revenge were prepared to give. Hence a ruinous war.

This is borne out by the documents published by the National Security Archive in The Taliban File. Mullah Omar always sought negotiations,

even after 9/11. He was rebuffed. In 2013 the US has desperately sought his cooperation for a decent exit from Afghanistan.

It was the same story in Iraq with its non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Nor was Libya a success. The distinguished scholar, Vali Nasr, who recently left the State Department, told Michael Crowley of Time. “We forget that Libya didn’t turn out well”.

The tragedy is being repeated in Syria at a colossal loss to human lives and the destruction of property, including heritage structures in a great and historic land. Only last month the US ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, publicly warned that “there needs to be a negotiated political settlement, because our sense is that regime supporters, fearing death, would fight to the death”.

He was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 11. On the same day the director of intelligence gave his assessment. James R. Clapper, Jr, warned that even if President Bashar al-Assad fell, sectarian fighting would most likely engulf the country for a year or more. Radical forces too would join in the fray. Syria would be wrecked totally.

Common to all the four countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria — was preference for force over conciliation. The reason is simple. In all the cases it is regime change which the US sought. “Qadhafi must go”, President Barack Obama arrogantly proclaimed.

Iran is a regional player whose cooperation is essential for a settlement in Afghanistan or Syria. Had its comprehensive proposals for a “grand bargain”, made in 2005, not been ignored, the dispute over its nuclear programme would have been solved. The Swiss ambassador who transmitted the proposals was insulted by secretary of state Condoleezza Rice for his pains.

The pattern is repeated in the Far East. Like Iran, North Korea justifiably demands lifting of US sanctions, sponsored by the US, as a pre-condition for starting a dialogue.

In this process the United Nations has suffered badly because it has been used cynically to promote American policies. International law has been flouted systematically as a leading international lawyer, Philippe Sands, Q.C. and professor of law at University College, London has documented in his work Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Rules.

Recourse to or support of force as the prime instrument of policy entails sheer destruction; in the last decade and more, of four nation-states. The famous Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s remarks 30 years ago sum up the devastation we have witnessed now.

“When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream. … A dictatorship … leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding.”

The writer is an author and a lawyer.