Libya Discussions Lack Serious Prevention Talk
By Mary Stata and Matt Southworth on 04/05/2011 @ 03:00 PM
Over the last several weeks, conversations about the US led and NATO backed military operation in Libya have largely focused on two things: the perceived need for intervention to stop mass killings of civilians in Libya; and the rate at which the U.S. can disengage from its military assault on Libya. Aside from being narrowly short sighted, these conversations ignore something very important: the U.S., after decades of undermining the structures of prevention, cannot destroy Libya from the air and expect to have a long term positive impact on the humanitarian crisis.
The U.S. led war in Libya has been hailed by some as the embodiment of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. In 2005, the US joined the majority of the world’s government’s by agreeing to a new global norm for the protection of civilians. When a state is unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens, the international community has agreed to act. The intervention in Libya is seen by many as the inauguration of R2P.
A critical part of the R2P doctrine, however, is being overlooked. The original concept included three parts: prevention, reaction, and rebuilding. The U.S. actions in Libya fall under the category of reaction. The responsibility to prevent mass killings of civilians –through diplomatic measures—is absent in the current debates surrounding Libya. Moreover, there is almost nothing being said about rebuilding Libya. Most important is the glaring truth that the U.S. lacks critical resources and capacities to prevent situations like Libya, Cote d’Ivoire, or Bahrain from spiraling out of control.
This is not a new phenomenon. On the eve of NATO’s military campaign in Kosovo, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Shalikashvili observed, “What we are doing to our diplomatic capabilities is criminal... By slashing them, we are less able to avoid disasters such as Somalia or Kosovo and therefore we will be obliged to use military force still more often.”
The U.S. constantly engages in reactionary foreign policy measures while undermining the structures for prevention. The intervening twelve years between NATO’s air strikes in Kosovo and today were witness to unprecedented increases in US military spending while under-resourcing civilian agencies, such as the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. When faced with security challenges overseas, we are seldom given a choice between “do nothing” and “use the military”—even when the problem is political, not military. In conflict and genocide prevention, precedent should be given to seasoned and well trained diplomats, not tomahawk missiles.
Despite the bipartisan recognition in Congress that civilian agencies are woefully under resourced, the disparity in personnel and capacity remains staggering: the State Department and USAID employ roughly 6,600 and 1,000 foreign service officers, respectively, while the U.S. military has hundreds of thousands of troops deployed worldwide.
The bottom line here is one cannot treat a problem by ignoring underlying causes and only addressing symptoms. The U.S. foreign policy establishment cannot wait until Gaddafi is at the gates of Benghazi to prevent conflict or mass atrocities; a well resourced institution based on prevention through diplomacy is needed to adequately prevent civilian casualties. By focusing on long term gaps in civilian capacity, the United States is less likely to become embroiled in future scenarios that resemble Libya. Investing in preventive diplomatic and development will help stop the killing before it starts.
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