Holbrooke's Legacy: The Power of Limited War
WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Romesh Ratnesar, Time) January 3, 2011 ― The untimely death of Richard Holbrooke last month has occasioned numerous paeans to his signal professional achievement: the Dayton peace accords of 1995, which ended four years of war in Bosnia.
To some of Holbrooke's admirers, that diplomatic masterstroke as well as Holbrooke's quip, as he lay dying, that his doctors find a way to "stop the war in Afghanistan" are rebukes to those who extol the virtues of American military power.
It took negotiations to silence the guns in Bosnia; something similar, the thinking goes, will be required to quell the insurgency in Afghanistan.
"Holbrooke the
Dove," proclaimed
Foreign Policy, the
magazine Holbrooke
once edited.
Holbrooke's wife
Kati Marton told one
gathering of
mourners the best
way to honor him "is
to press on with
peace."
There's every reason
to believe that
Holbrooke would
endorse that
sentiment, and
there's no denying
that Dayton is the
most significant
success in American
diplomacy in the
postCold War era.
But Holbrooke's
diplomatic skills
would not have
stopped Slobodan
Milosevic's
campaigns of ethnic
cleansing without
the persuasive power
of NATO
bombardments.
In the Balkans, the Clinton Administration showed limited applications of military power in the service of modest and clearly defined goals stop the killing of Bosnian Muslims and get the warring parties to the negotiating table could serve the U.S.'s strategic and moral interests.
That model of war-fighting was largely abandoned by the Bush Administration, with calamitous results. But now would be a good time for Barack Obama to revisit it.
In fact, the most
relevant lessons
from Holbrooke's
work in the Balkans
may have less to do
with making peace
than with waging
war.
The U.S.'s decision
to launch air
strikes in Bosnia
came after years of
Western dithering.
Holbrooke was an early advocate of allowing the Bosnian Muslims to arm themselves while bombing Serb positions from the air the policy known as "lift and strike" but was met with skepticism from both the military establishment and Vietnam-scarred liberals inside the Clinton Administration.
Holbrooke, who as a young foreign-service officer had opposed the bombardment of North Vietnam in the 1960s, believed the Bosnian Serbs were "poorly trained bullies and criminals who would not stand up to NATO air strikes the way the seasoned and indoctrinated Viet Cong and North Vietnamese did."
As Serbian
atrocities mounted
in the summer of
1995, the
lift-and-strike camp
finally convinced
Clinton to step in.
NATO airplanes began
striking
Bosnian-Serb
positions in
September. Within
six months the war
was over. Four years
later, the U.S. used
the same approach of
"limited war" to
force Milosevic to
withdraw from
Kosovo.
Yet despite those
successes, limited
war never really
caught on. Hawks
complained air
strikes might punish
aggressors like
Milosevic, but
wouldn't vanquish
them. Doves warned
the relative ease of
the Balkan wars
would tempt future
Presidents to launch
armed interventions
all over the globe.
After 9/11, the Bush
Administration
abandoned limited
war in favor of a
more expansive
strategy of regime
change and
nation-building in
Afghanistan and
Iraq. Our inability
to pacify both
places subsequently
gave rise to another
model of
war-fighting:
counterinsurgency,
which requires the
commitment of
massive numbers of
U.S. ground troops
to battle
guerrillas, protect
civilians and train
local security
forces.
The
counterinsurgency
approach has helped
avert an American
defeat in Iraq, and
may yet do so in
Afghanistan. But it
has also become
politically and
financially
unsustainable
which is why limited
war may be on the
verge of a comeback.
In recent months, drone strikes and commando raids in Pakistan have done more to achieve the U.S.'s core strategic aim there degrading al-Qaeda than 100,000 ground forces in Afghanistan ever will.
Limited war could also be the least worst option for dealing with Iran's nuclear program: the diplomatic fallout from another armed conflict in the Middle East means that any attack on Tehran will more closely resemble the war against Milosevic than the one against Saddam Hussein.
And preventing
genocide in places
like southern Sudan
may require Obama to
threaten some form
of U.S. military
intervention, just
as Clinton did in
the Balkans though
the use of ground
troops for such a
mission is off the
table.
That's a good thing.
By definition, limited wars can only achieve limited aims: drone strikes in Pakistan may damage al-Qaeda, but they won't help liberate Afghan women; an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities will delay Tehran's march toward the Bomb but not stop it.
And yet acknowledging the limits of military force, without forswearing the right to use it, would be a first step toward restoring the world's faith in American power.
"There will be other
Bosnias in our
lives," Holbrooke
wrote in 1998,
anticipating future
challenges of
American will. Then
as now, limited war
is a useful tool to
help meet them.
Ratnesar, is a
Bernard L. Schwartz
Fellow at the New
America Foundation
and the author of
Tear Down This Wall:
A City, a President,
and the Speech That
Ended the Cold War
