The World at War January-June 1, 2006
“Resistance is the right of every human being whose country is occupied by foreigners.”
~ Sheik Abdul Dhari, Fallujah mayor
“Wars Decrease.”
Set against non-stop cable news broadcasts recounting the ongoing daily carnage in Iraq and the resurgent violence in Afghanistan, the headline was a jolt.
No less of a jolt was the tacit admission by one of the original architects of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that the whole operation could have been avoided. Carefully hedging his statement, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the first George W. Bush administration, observed to Agence France-Presse: “If somebody could have given you a Lloyds of London guarantee that weapons of mass destruction would not possibly be used, one would have contemplated much more support for internal Iraqi opposition and not having the United States take the job on the way we did.”
“If you could have given us a guarantee….”
The instinctive reaction to such a lament by an adult supposedly grounded in realpolitik is to note the childishness of the statement. The second reaction is to note that Life provides no guarantees to anyone in any circumstance, be it rain or shine, peace or war, life or death.
The third reaction is to note that what Wolfowitz really said about the invasion confirms the view that planning for this war was so advanced that it had ceased to be merely a contingency plan long before the actual opening of hostilities in March 2003. He does not say that with an ironclad guarantee the war would not have occurred, but that the U.S. would have approached the task differently. The alternative mode arguably would have mirrored Afghanistan by providing “much more support for internal Iraqi opposition.”
The War Count
As 2006 began, FCNL registered 15 significant ongoing armed conflicts (1,000 or more deaths) and another 23 “hot spots” that could slide into or revert to war. The total number of significant armed conflicts is eight less than in 2005, marking one of the largest declines in any one year and the lowest overall number at the beginning of a calendar year since this survey began 17 years ago.
The graph illustrates the changing count.
What did not change is the distribution pattern of warfare across the continents. Africa accounted for fully one-third of the total with Asia right behind with four. The Middle East and the Americas each registered two “wars,” with Europe adding one. The U.S.-proclaimed and -led global war on terror, re-christened the “long war,” rounds out the count at fifteen.
Because so many conflicts were dropped, this year’s report looks first at these eight as a group. Six of the eight were shifted to the secondary “watch” list while the remaining two were entirely dropped. The other initial point to note is that all 15 significant armed conflicts are intra-state; there are no government vs. government armed hostilities.
Now in general, civil wars usually end because one or more of the following conditions develop:
- one side suddenly gains a decisive military advantage;
- both sides become exhausted by the length and intensity of the fighting;
- outside mediation, arbitration, or international pressure halts the conflict, or
- a disaster of such monumental proportions occurs that the belligerents are
overwhelmed by the event – Nature’s version of “shock and awe.”
All four conditions came into play in 2005-and the first half of 2006. And of the eight wars deleted from the main list, two were substantially influenced by natural disasters.
Indonesia. The December 26,, 2004 tsunami sent both the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government reeling and, in turn, focused international assistance and then international pressure to negotiate an end to the 30-year civil war that had claimed an estimated 120,000 lives. (By comparison, the tsunami killed approximately 166,000.) Mediated by Finland’s Crisis Management Initiative, the two sides met in late January 2005 to work out a formal cease fire. The two sides agreed on peace terms – for GAM, amnesty, significant autonomy, recognition of GAM as a regional political party, and more equitable sharing of the revenue generated by Aceh’s natural resources; for Jakarta, a four-stage demobilization of 3,000 GAM fighters and their weapons, and no independence for Aceh – on July 18 and signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on August 15, 2005.
The MoU calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for an 80-member Aceh Monitoring Mission led by the European Union. The MoU also set March 31st, 2006 as the projected date for Jakarta to promulgate a new law for governing Aceh madated local elections in April.
Pakistan-India. On October 8, 2005, a massive earthquake rocked the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. An estimated 73,000 were killed and another 3.7 million displaced. This disaster sparked a massive international response – the U.S. even shifted helicopter resources from Afghanistan because many villages in the high mountain areas affected were inaccessible by road. The sheer extent of the disaster and the challenge to relief efforts seemed to dissolve any lingering reservations the leaders of India and Pakistan might have harbored about including Kashmir within the framework of the “irreversible” peace negotiations begun in April 2005. At that April meeting, President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid the groundwork for shifting from “conflict management” to “conflict resolution.” Both leaders insisted that the Line of Control along which the province is currently divided will not be normalized as an international border. Any effort to hold the popular referendum called for at the time of partition more than likely would rekindle violence among the extremists on both sides of the LoC. So if there is to be a resolution to the Kashmiri question, it would seem to lie in some form of cooperative engagement by those residing therein and some form of shared responsibility at the national level for security in the province. Obviously, the process to final peace will be a lengthy one.
Looking at another aspect of the Kashmiri question, in 2005 the main indigenous Kashmiri umbrella resistance organization, the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, which represents 25 guerrilla organizations, fractured further. Two of the larger insurgent groups, The National Front and the People’s Conference, began a dialogue with New Delhi, although they declined to attend a “roundtable” on peace. Nonetheless, in early May 2006, the insurgent leaders met with Prime Minister Manmohut Singh and agreed to a formal structure for negotiations. Sensing that these direct talks may prove more decisive, Singh has seemingly sidelined other discussions (i.e., the next roundtable scheduled for May 25, 2006) in a bid to reach a resolution of the Kashmir question by the end of 2008.
One of India’s longest running rebellions in Assam appears to have ended. The National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) signed a ceasefire with New Delhi in May 2005, after sustained operations by Bhutan against rebel bases in that country severely damaged the NDFB’s infrastructure base. The ceasefire is for a one-year term during which negotiations for a permanent peace are to be held. The NDFB’s negotiators are seeking a wide-ranging autonomy deal in place of their original demand for independence – the tact taken in 2004 by another insurgent group, the Bodoland Liberation Tigers. Only one other major insurgent group, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), remains outside Assam’s peace process.
One of Colombia’s three insurgencies seems to have ended. The rightist Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries continued to disarm and re-integrate into Colombian society. In early April 2006, the last 1,700 AUC fighters turned in their weapons, bringing the total number demobilized to 26,000. Most will receive amnesty, and the maximum sentence for those responsible for atrocities is eight years in jail. Some AUC splinter groups remain outside the peace process, as do the two leftist insurgent groups. By law, the number of U.S. military trainers and U.S. contractors working with Colombian troops and police are limited to 800 and 600, respectively.
In the Middle East and North Africa, two armed resistance movements have simply faded.
Abu Abbas, Yassir Arafat’s successor as President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), is committed to negotiating rather than fighting to create a two-state settlement with Israel.
Three events in early 2006 changed the landscape. Ariel Sharon, who had bolted the rightest Likud political party to form his own – called Kadima – suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma. Kadima, under Sharon’s deputy, Ehud Olmert, won a plurality in the March balloting for the new parliament, forcing it into an alliance. How this will affect Sharon’s master plan for finally settling Israel’s borders – preferably with the PA’s concurrence but unilaterally if the PA demurs – remains to be seen. The third event was Hamas’ victory in the 2006 Palestinian local elections, a result attributed to its wide-ranging social aid infrastructure. (See below for further comments.)
Algeria’s bloody 14 year civil war seems to have ended through sheer exhaustion on both sides. The military remains powerful, although less visible than in the past. A few pockets of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) still exist, but these are in remote areas. An estimated 150,000 Algerians died in the fighting, but the population, which approved a peace plan in a September 2005 referendum, seems intent on forgetting the past.
In sub-Saharan Africa, Laurent Gbagbo unilaterally extended his term as Ivory Coast’s president in October 2005, a maneuver reluctantly accepted by the UN Security Council with the stipulation that elections had to take place by October 2006. In December an interim government was installed with a mandate to prepare for the election and to disarm the rebels in the north of the country and militias loyal to Gbagbo. Both projects seemed in jeopardy in mid-May 2006 as peace talks scheduled for April failed to take place and ethnic and political unrest mounted. This country may return to the major wars category if violence continues to escalate.
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This analysis was prepared by Col. Dan Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.). Dan, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, is FCNL's Senior Fellow on Military Affairs.
Reviewed:
06/02/2006
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