Daniel Byman

Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements

Abstract : State support or sponsorship of an insurgency as an instrument of foreign policy was common during the Cold War. The United States, the Soviet Union, and a host of regional powers backed their favored proxies, often transforming local quarrels into international contests. The end of the Cold War did not end the use of insurgents, but the dimensions and nature of outside aid and the identity of the providers have changed significantly. Hundreds of millions of dollars no longer regularly flow from Washingtons and Moscows coffers. Leading state sponsors today such as Iran, Rwanda, Angola, and Pakistan, for example, devote far smaller amounts of money and resources to their proxies. Indeed, state support is no longer the only, or necessarily the most important, game in town. Diasporas have played a particularly important role in sustaining several strong insurgencies. More rarely, refugees, guerrilla groups, or other types of non-state supporters play a significant role in creating or sustaining an insurgency, offering fighters, training, or other important forms of support. This report analyzes these changes in the nature of outside support for insurgencies starting with the end of the Cold War. It describes the nature and motivations of state backers and examines the role of diasporas, refugees, and other non-state supporters of insurgencies. The report concludes by assessing which forms of outside support are most important and also offers implications for the analysis of insurgency today.

Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In

In January 1762, Prussia hovered on the brink of disaster. Despite the masterful generalship of Frederick the Great, the combined forces of France, Austria, and Russia had gradually worn down the Prussian army in six years of constant warfare. Austrian armies had marched deep into Saxony and Silesia, and the Russians had even sacked Berlin. Frederick’s defeat appeared imminent, and the enemy coalition intended to partition Prussia to reduce it to the status of a middle German state no more powerful than Bavaria or Saxony. And then a miracle occurred. The Prusso-phobic Czarina Elizabeth unexpectedly died, only to be succeeded by her son Peter, who idolized the soldier-king. Immediately Peter made peace with Frederick and ordered home the Russian armies. This reversal paralyzed the French and Austrians and allowed Frederick to rally his forces. Although Peter was soon ousted by his wife, Catherine, the allied armies never regained their advantage. In the end, Frederick held them off and kept Prussia intact.1 Frederick’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War was essential to Prussia’s eventual uniacation of Germany and all that followed from it. Conceiving of European history today without this victory is impossible. It is equally impossible to conceive of Prussian victory in 1763 without the death of Elizabeth and Peter’s adoration of Frederick. In the words of Christopher Duffy, “It is curious to reoect that if one lady had lived for a very few weeks longer, historians would by now have analyzed in most convincing detail the reasons for a collapse as ‘inevitable’ as that which overtook the Sweden of Charles XII.”2 In short, had it not been for the idiosyncrasies of one man and one woman, European history would look very, very different. Let Us Now Praise Great Men Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack

Do Targeted Killings Work

SALAH SHEHADA lived a violent life. During his last two years, the senior Hamas leader directed up to 52 terrorist operations against Israel, killing 220 civilians and i6 soldiers. And on July 22, 2002, Shehada died a violent death: an Israeli F-16 dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on his apartment building, obliterating it with him inside. Before deciding to kill Shehada, Israeli officials had first gone to the Palestinian Authority and repeatedly demanded his arrest. When the PA refused, the Israeli government then sought to apprehend him directly. But they gave up after realizing that Shehada lived in the middle of Gaza City and that any attempt to grab him would probably spark a general melee. It was then that the Israelis decided to kill Shehada. But things still remained complicated; according to Moshe Yaalon, then the chiefof staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Israel had to call off its first eight attempts because Shehada was always accompanied by his daughter. Only when Shin Bet, Israels domestic intelligence service, learned that he would be in an apartment building with no innocents nearby did the operation proceed. But the intelligence turned out to be incomplete: Shehada had his daughter with him after all, and the buildings surrounding his own were occupied. When the massive bomb demolished the target, it also damaged several of these other buildings. Shehada was killed-but so were at least 14 civiiians, including his daughter and eight other children.

Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate

The capitulation of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on June 9, 1999, after seventy-eight days of bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is being portrayed by many as a watershed in the history of air power. For the arst time, the use of air strikes alone brought a foe to its knees—and at the cost of no NATO lives. The prophecies of Giulio Douhet and other air power visionaries appear realized.1 Lieut. Gen. Michael Short, who ran the bombing campaign, has argued that “NATO got every one of the terms it had stipulated in Rambouillet and beyond Rambouillet, and I credit this as a victory for air power.”2 This view is not conaned to the air force. Historian John Keegan conceded, “I didn’t want to change my beliefs, but there was too much evidence accumulating to stick to the article of faith. It now does look as if air power has prevailed in the Balkans, and that the time has come to redeane how victory in war may be won.”3 Dissenters, of course, raise their voices. Noting the failure of air power to fulall its promise in the past, they are skeptical of its efacacy in Kosovo. Instead, they point to factors such as the threat of a ground invasion, the lack of Russian support for Serbia, or the resurgence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as key to Milosevic’s capitulation. Without these factors, dissenters argue, air strikes alone would not have

The logic of ethnic terrorism

Ethnic terrorism differs considerably from violence carried out for ideological, religious, or financial motives. Ethnic terrorists often seek to influence their own constituencies more than the country as a whole. Ethnic terrorists frequently seek to foster communal identity, in contrast to an identity proposed by the state. Ethnic terrorists often target potential intermediaries, who might otherwise compromise on identity issues. A secondary goal of the attacks is to create a climate of fear among a rival groups population. Ethnic terrorism creates a difficult problem for the state: conventional countermeasures may engender broader support for an insurgency or a separatist movement even when they hamstring or defeat a specific terrorist group. Because state strategies often backfire, an ideal strategy is to compel “in group” policing—encouraging ethnic moderates through carrots as well as sticks to punish radical activity.

Keeping the peace : lasting solutions to ethnic conflicts

Contents: 1 Ethnic Conflict in Todays World 2 Causes of Ethnic Conflict 3 Control Policies 4 Co-optation 5 Manipulating Ethnic Identities 6 Participatory Systems 7 The Promise and Perils of Partition 8 Military Intervention in Ethnic Conflict 9 Dilemmas and Choices Notes Bibliography Index

Constructing a Democratic Iraq: Challenges and Opportunities

States and its allies have toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the knotty question of Iraq’s future government is rising to the fore. Although the Bush administration, nongovernmental organization ofacials, and exiled Iraqis disagree on interim measures for governing Iraq, there is a surprising consensus on the eventual nature of Iraq’s government: Almost all parties believe that Iraq must have a democratic, and highly federal, government.1 President George W. Bush declared that “all Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected.”2 Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the special presidential envoy and ambassador at large for Free Iraqis, called for “a broad-based representative and democratic government” in a post-Saddam Iraq.3 Indeed the Bush administration’s vision for democracy extends beyond Iraq. Richard Perle, an inouential strategist with close ties to the administration, Constructing a Democratic Iraq

Passive Sponsors of Terrorism

Defeating radical jihadists today requires all states to act aggressively against them – an exceptionally difficult challenge. Some states aid terrorist groups by being passive as terrorists operate on their soil. The experiences of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan vis-à-vis al-Qaeda, as well as the US tolerance of Provisional Irish Republican Army activities during the 1970s and 1980s, are instructive. These cases suggest that passive support usually occurs due to strong popular support for a terrorist groups cause, a perceived lack of a direct threat to the regime, and limited costs to the government for tolerating these activities. Halting passive support is difficult and requires new policies and a new way of thinking about the problem of state support for terrorism.

Israel's Pessimistic View of the Arab Spring

Americans took heart as they watched Egyptian demonstrators rally in Tahrir Square and topple the regime of Hosni Mubarak in a peaceful revolution. Next door in Israel, however, the mood was somber: ‘‘When some people in the West see what’s happening in Egypt, they see Europe 1989,’’ an Israeli official remarked. ‘‘We see it as Tehran 1979.’’ Political leaders vied to see who could be the most pessimistic, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly warning that it was even possible that ‘‘Egypt will go in the direction of Iran,’’ with the new Cairo government becoming even more dictatorial and lashing out abroad. As he pointed out in remarks to the Knesset, ‘‘They too had demonstrations; multitudes filled the town squares. But, of course it progressed in a different way.’’ As unrest spread from Egypt to Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen, the gloom seemed to deepen. These apocalyptic predictions and Israel’s doom-and-gloom mentality are easy, too easy, to dismiss. Israelis are always sensitive to their security. Indeed, their reaction to the spread of democracy so close to their borders seems churlish, as does their tendency to look on the dark side when so many of their Arab neighbors now have hopes for a better life. But dismissing Israeli concerns would be a mistake. Some of Israel’s fears are valid, and others that are less so will still drive Israeli policies. The new regimes and the chaotic regional situation pose security challenges to the Jewish state. These challenges, and the Israeli reactions to them, are likely to worsen the crisis in Gaza and make the prospects for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians even more remote. The

An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

This article examines whether the outbreak of an insurgency after the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an avoidable policy failure or whether the structural conditions surrounding the occupation made such an outbreak inevitable. Several U.S. policy mistakes, in particular the deployment of too few troops, a lack of comprehensive political and military planning for the occupation, disbanding the Iraqi military, the failure to establish a government in waiting, and overly aggressive de-Baathification, greatly exacerbated rather than ameliorated the various structural problems. More fundamentally, structure and policy choices interacted at all levels to explain the Iraq failure. The unavoidable conditions that coalition forces encountered in Iraq—a divided society devastated by years of war, sanctions, and misrule—and the political context in the United States made the challenge for successful policy execution difficult. This structure constrained and delimited the options open to U.S. policy makers but, even within those narrow limits, the United States made many bad choices that further diminished the chances of success. A particularly important series of policy mistakes occurred well in advance of the buildup to war itself. The orientation of the U.S. armed forces away from counterinsurgency, the failure to establish a political settlement before invasion, and other controllable policy choices in the prewar period all led to enormous difficulties during the occupation itself. Thus, by the time of the invasion, these policy choices had become almost like structural constraints and the failures had a snowballing effect, making policy corrections far more difficult.