‘”Defence Diplomacy” in North/South Relations’

Tarak Barkawi “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations In their introduction to this issue of International Journal, Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann draw a distinction between diplomacy as a category of practice and as a category of analysis. Inquiry cannot remain at the level of the self-understanding of diplomats and officials if it is to achieve clarity. This is especially the case in matters of “defence” and “security.” Even though these terms are regularly used both in the world of practice and in the policy-oriented academy, they are essentially political and bureaucratic euphemisms. Ministries of war (and of the army and the navy) were renamed defence ministries just before and after World War II. The name change had to do with the politics of legitimating the use of force in the western world. Similarly, the political utility of the term “security” is that it can be articulated with any value—anything can be Tarak Barkawi is senior lecturer at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 597 | | Tarak Barkawi | made into a security issue to give it greater salience.1 Together, defence and security became the bywords for policies concerned with the threat, use, and organization of armed force in world politics. So while there are defence attachés in embassies involved in security relations, these terms of practice are not sufficient for an analytic understanding of what they do. How might we begin to understand military-to-military contacts in north-south relations in such a way that we account for the activities and self-understandings of defence attachés, but also place them and the institutions they represent in a broader theoretical and historical context? Momentarily setting aside efforts to widen the security agenda, defence and security are most strongly associated with the world of sovereign states and their “anarchic” relations with one another. Each state maintains a military establishment to serve national interests, counter threats, and project armed force internationally. So close is the association between the sovereign state and armed force that the monopoly on legitimate violence within a given territory is taken to be definitive of the state. Traditionally, diplomacy was about managing relations between sovereign entities in such a way as to balance power and avoid war. Military officers were useful adjuncts in this task. Not only was their expertise necessary for the military dimensions of any negotiations under way, but they could also communicate information and intentions in respect of maneuvers and of troop and fleet movements. The personal relations military delegations established with their counterparts could be called upon in a crisis to avoid unintended clashes. Military attachés also served as sources of intelligence on the armed forces of host nations and could help facilitate arms sales. These are the classic categories of practice for defence diplomacy. The wider security agenda, the rise of the UN system, and developments often referred to under the rubric of “globalization” have added new categories of practice, many of which are more pertinent to north-south relations. These revolve in large measure around peacekeeping, peacesupport operations, and other forms of humanitarian intervention. Military officers have had to deal with a range of new actors, including militias, local leaders, and political groupings in wartorn countries as well as those who work for nongovernment organizations in the field and in metropolitan headquarters. “Since the 1990s, armed forces and defence ministries have 1 Arnold Wolfers, “‘National security’ as an ambiguous symbol,” Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1952): 481-83. | 598 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | taken on a growing range of peacetime cooperative tasks.”2 These include ceasefire and peace negotiations, security sector reform, training, and advice, as well as strengthening regional peacekeeping capacity. To simply name these new activities, as Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann also remind us, is not to explain them. Indeed, they heap new diplomatic euphemisms— “peace,” the “security sector,” and “developing countries”—upon older ones like “cooperation.” The traditional and more recent categories of practice do, however, allow some preliminary bearings to be taken. The first of these is that in respect of north-south relations, defence diplomacy happens against a backdrop of international hierarchy, not anarchy.3 At issue is less the conduct of relations between equivalent sovereigns than how it is that strong powers influence the character of subordinate states and societies. Second, and related, is that defence diplomacy in a north-south context falls on the governing side of the representation/governing distinction and involves various forms of transborder regulation and political-military organization. Efforts to end civil wars in foreign countries and shape the peace, as well as to redefine civil-military relations, can go beyond governing and become foundational political acts for others. But whereas transborder governing is normally seen as more a feature of the contemporary world, especially in accounts that forget empire, western militaries have long and enduring histories of involvement in politics and the organization of force in the formally colonized world. These histories set the present-day stage. These two points—hierarchy and governance—illuminate an important underlying reason why the categories of diplomatic practice are misleading and insufficient analytically. The contemporary world is almost entirely divided up into sovereign territorial states. Formally speaking, defence diplomacy occurs between independent sovereign states, each with their own national armed forces. Even intervention into civil wars under UN auspices is intended to reestablish the formal, sovereign independence of the target country so that it may resume its normal role as a member of the international system of states. This world of juridical equality overlays and obscures the world of hierarchy, of power differentials, and of transborder 2 Andrew Cottey and Anthony Forster, Reshaping Defence Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5, 8. 3 David Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). See, for instance, Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 599 | | Tarak Barkawi | regulation and governance. A raison d’être of traditional diplomacy is to find various turns of phrase, forms of comportment, and manners of address that mask untoward power relations and keep up the pretence of respect for sovereignty.4 So if one source of obfuscation arises from euphemisms like security, defence, and peace, another comes from the idea of a system of formally equal sovereign states. How, then, do we make theoretic sense of military-to-military relations in a north-south context? An initial step is to think about a “how possible” question. Broadly speaking, militaries around the world share similar institutional forms as bureaucracies composed of paid officials with their means of violence provided by the state. They are under regular discipline based on an officer or other rank distinction and are organized primarily around the three mediums of warfare—land, sea, and air. This similarity facilitates their interactions with one another, making it possible for an officer trained in one country to work effectively in another. Where did this military globalization come from historically and what forms of international military relations does it entail? The next step is to take seriously the primary significance of armed force for politics and society, but to let go of the idea, at least in north-south relations, that state, military, and society come in sovereign territorial—or trinitarian—packages. There are international dimensions to the organization of armed force in world politics veiled by sovereignty. Most prominently, and in ways that vary historically, great powers try to organize, shape, and direct armed forces in foreign countries. In north-south context, international military relations are about the struggle to constitute armed force for local, regional, and global projects of order-making. Defence diplomacy is the contemporary euphemism for the management of this struggle. The final move is to return to the categories of practice and locate them within this analysis. A principal activity in military-to-military relations is training, the organization and conduct of which is the most common way in which officers and soldiers encounter their foreign counterparts. The output of international military training and education is to generate or render more effective personnel in foreign military organizations—personnel who serve purposes deemed to be in the interests of the sponsoring states. 4 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Diplomacy as impression management,” manuscript, 2011. | 600 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | MILITARY GLOBALIZATION Globalization is often thought to rely on contemporary communications technologies, or is conceived as a process that works against state power. But the worldwide circulation of people, goods, and ideas has a much longer history than is generally realized.5 It can occur through the mediums of sailing vessels and written dispatches as well as by jet aircraft and fibre optic cables, and it can be directed by states as well as work against them. Armed forces have long been part of this circulation. European soldiers and their forms of military organization were carried abroad with European expansion from the 16th century onward. The factories, mines, trading entrepôts, plantations, and colonies established by European sovereigns and their chartered companies abroad all required security, as did their lines of communications with one another, with their homelands and markets, and with their sources of free and slave labour. White troops were expensive and died from disease at alarming rates. From early on, two ways to augment western military power with locally recruited forces were developed. One was to ally with local powers and their armed forces—native allies—such as Hernán Cortés used in his conquest of the Aztec empire or the British and the French in North America. A second was to directly recruit, train, and officer local troops in the European style. Especially when European powers were relatively weak and their outposts amounted to tiny footholds on the edges of vast continents, allegiances with local powers were the most obvious route to security. Modern arms and other forms of military assistance could be provided to increase the armed power of the indigenous rulers who allied with the Europeans. The deft management of such alliances over time could strengthen the European position considerably and set the stage for decisive wars of conquest. Augmenting the military power of an ally is a basic category of international military relations, and the handling of such advice and assistance is one way soldiers became involved in diplomacy. The purpose of such efforts in an imperial context was to create the basis for a political and economic order conducive to European interests. Indigenous allies and their armed forces were useful both for the conduct of wars against hostile native powers and for internal security against local revolts, bandits, pirates, and other threats to commerce. As the Europeans gained strength, and especially as they became settled rulers of much of the world outside Europe, they turned to the 5 A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002). | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 601 | | Tarak Barkawi | direct organization of indigenous military forces along western lines. What began as locally hired armed guards turned into regiments of native infantry, such as those of the East India Company. These were used to fight other European powers and to defeat indigenous rulers. As the Europeans established various forms of long-term colonial rule, they created military, police, and intelligence bureaucracies, and trained indigenous personnel to staff them. In this manner, considerable military power was generated in the non-European world for western purposes, especially by the British in India and the white commonwealth countries and by the French in west and north Africa. These forces could be used for wars of imperial conquest and in great-power war. Wherever there were European colonies, there were local native soldiers and police.6 In providing security for the empire, they also were part and parcel of the globalization of western forms of military organization. The world wars and, in different ways, the growing struggle against anti-colonial movements were major moments in the modernization of nonwestern armed forces and security bureaucracies. Nascent modern naval and air forces were created, as in the formation of the Royal Indian Air Force and the Royal Indian Navy in the early 1930s. The French sought to counter their demographic imbalance with Germany by expanding their north and west African forces, while the British Indian army reached a strength of two and a half million during the Second World War. As opposition to colonialism became a form of mass politics in the early decades of the 20th century, colonial security bureaucracies increased in size and in the scope of their operations in response to both armed and unarmed resistance. The focus in the west is often on the adventures and misadventures of western troops in “small war” and in the great post-1945 insurgencies, especially Algeria and Vietnam. However, nearly everywhere throughout the period of European empire, locally raised military and police forces bore the primary security burden. With independence, unless achieved violently, these colonial forces became the sovereign military and security services of the new states. In broad sweeps, that is how states around the world came to have similar institutional forms for the organization of violence. Defence diplomacy is conducted within this institutional world, in a landscape initially formed by the military histories of empire and resistance to it. These histories lie behind the continuing relations between metropolitan militaries and those in the 6 For an overview, see David Killingray and David Omissi, eds., Guardians of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). | 602 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | formally colonized world in which, for example, African, Middle Eastern, and south Asian officers still attend Sandhurst and British staff colleges.7 Regardless of direct imperial parentage, however, the institutional similarity of militaries around the world facilitates their dense patterns of international interchange, as do various long-standing patron-client relationships such as those between the US and many Latin American and Caribbean countries.8 In regular colonial military forces, Europeans served as commissioned officers, generally with the assistance of a class of indigenous sub-officers. Nationalist movements demanded the nationalization of the officer corps, while expansion and casualties in the world wars added further pressures to commission indigenous officers, who appeared in increasing numbers as the colonial era wound to a close. The officers who rose to command the Indian and Pakistani armies in the decades after independence began their careers in the British Indian army. The sovereign independence of the new states meant that Europeans generally could no longer serve as commissioned officers. With some exceptions, western officers now transitioned into an advisory role in many of their contacts with foreign armed forces in northsouth context. Dwarfing embassy staff in numbers, missions of advice and support became a significant way in which western soldiers participated in international military relations after 1945. Such missions echoed the early period of European expansion and that of military assistance to native allies, in which the Europeans could not exercise direct control but had to rely more on persuasion and bargaining with local elites, while respecting their sovereign independence.9 THE OFFICER-ADVISOR TRANSITION It is useful to consider some transitional, hybrid cases between the world of empires and that of sovereign states, between a world in which Europeans officered indigenous soldiers and one in which they advised sovereign but subordinate militaries. Places like Oman and Vietnam enable us to see the changes and the continuities with earlier eras of western military activity in the non-European world. The British had a patron-client relationship with 7 See for instance V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies 1815-1960 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998); and Robin Luckham, The Nigerian Military (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 8 See for instance Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 9 Donald Stoker, ed., Military Advising and Assistance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 603 | | Tarak Barkawi | the sultanate of Oman that stretched back to the mid-18th century. Oman was faced with a rebellion in the Dhofar in the 1960s that began as a tribal affair but was later articulated through communism. To openly assist the sultan with western forces would have weakened his position politically, making him appear a tool of western imperialism. Instead, a British officer was seconded to command the sultan’s armed forces along with British officers and non-commissioned officers who volunteered to serve. Other British officers were hired privately directly into the sultan’s armed forces and known as “contract officers,” many having been recently discharged from the Indian army (which continued to employ British officers for some years after 1947). Due to long standing feudal rights, the sultan could recruit soldiers from Baluchistan. Baluchis made up around 67 percent of the army in 1961 as the Dhofar rebellion got underway. Indians were hired as dentists, doctors, and other specialists, and as navy officers. The air force had all “white” faces. The formal appearance of independent, sovereign, armed forces was maintained while the actual staff was composed largely of foreigners.10 Naturally, the relative lack of Omani nationals in the sultan’s armed forces was politicized by the Dhofar rebels. The response of the sultan and his British advisors to this charge was similar to that of colonial authorities facing a nationalist movement: they offered a nationalization plan to move from the appearance to the reality of an authentically national force. Efforts were made to recruit more Omanis into the forces, while public statements were made to emphasise their Omani character. The sultan proclaimed in a speech in 1972 that “everyone knows the air force is an Omani air force, and that the navy is an Omani navy, and that our Omani army is the only force which protects the land of our nation.”11 The very fact that the sultan had to make such statements is an indication of the fraught politics involved in the international organization of force. When a western client in the nonEuropean world after 1945 appeared to be overly reliant on western forces, harming legitimacy in both the target country and among western publics, such nationalization plans were a typical response, as in “Vietnamization” and “Iraqization.” Organizing effective indigenous security forces can be 10 Author’s interview with Major-General John Graham (ret.), former commander of the sultan’s armed forces, 26 September 2004; “Report on tenure of command of SAF by Col. Smiley from April 1958 to March 1961,” Oman archive, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College Oxford; Ian Gardiner, In the Service of the Sultan (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006). 11 “Addresses given by HM Sultan Qaboos,” 3/3 Graham papers, Oman archive. | 604 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | the only route to a successful exit if western forces are directly involved. Once the rebellion in the Dhofar was defeated, the British presence could be wound down, although close links continue to this day. The Omani case shows how internationally organized armed forces can exist behind the veil of sovereign appearances. Another kind of transitional moment is evident in the final stages of the French presence in Indochina. As throughout the era of empire, the bulk of the forces used to maintain French rule in Indochina were non-European, even as late as 1953. In addition to French army and Foreign Legion units amounting to 74,000 troops, the French deployed nearly 100,000 imperial troops that year, consisting of Indochinese and west and north African units. But it is a third category of troops that is of most interest. The French created “national” states and armed forces in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the last stages of their rule. While the Laotian and Cambodian forces numbered only 13,000 each in 1953, the Vietnamese forces had 150,000.12 These became the armies of the newly independent states with the Geneva accords of 1954, with some French military remaining behind, now in an advisory capacity. As the French presence wound down, the US took over the role of patron to the Vietnamese national army, which became the army of the republic of (South) Vietnam on independence. As the Second Indochina War got underway in the early 1960s, the US supplied, trained, clothed, armed, and advised the South Vietnamese army down to the company level. On the one hand, over the course of the war, it served the same function as a colonial army: bearing the brunt of the cost in blood of an anti-imperial, nationalist rebellion. Some 250,000 of its soldiers were killed in action, while the US figure numbered just over 58,000.13 On the other hand, the US was continually frustrated both in its efforts to control the government of South Vietnam and to operationally direct its army. Even for a client totally dependent on US assistance, sovereign independence provided a strong negotiating position. Equally, the Vietnamese communists continually and effectively invoked in their propaganda the dependence of South Vietnam on its US patron, as in labelling the Diem regime the “US-Diem clique.”14 A basic problematic for military-to-military relations in the north-south context is the political potency of nationalism in tension with the reality of international assistance. Western officers engaged in advice-and-support 12 Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa (London: Brassey’s, 1988), 160. 13 Robert Brigham, ARVN (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), x. 14 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (New York: Penguin, 1984), 255. | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 605 | | Tarak Barkawi | missions at all levels had to negotiate the difficulties associated with this problematic. This included things like working in a respectful fashion with counterparts regarded as incompetent and venal as well as maintaining in everyday interactions the formal, ceremonial pretence that South Vietnam was an independent state that was merely assisted by the US. THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF FORCE In Africa and the Middle East in particular, Britain and France maintained their links with former colonies, educating their soldiers, maintaining basing rights, and engaging in joint maneuvers and training exercises. These links could be mobilized to exercise various kinds of influence, especially when third-world militaries became directly involved in politics.15 Elsewhere, the US managed the transition from colonial to sovereign army, as in Vietnam. In this way, the US supported the South Korean army as well as the country’s national police, who had served the Japanese during the period of colonial rule in Korea.16 Both the superpowers developed extensive programs for foreign military training and advising, as well as the supply, sale, and maintenance of weapons, equipment, and munitions.17 Between 1955 and 1981, nearly 400,000 third-world officers were trained in various programs in the US, a figure that excludes training that occurred outside the US.18 After a long history of Cold War assistance to Colombia, which led to growth in the army from about 6000 soldiers in the 1940s to 65,000 by the 1960s, the US increased its aid from 2000 under plan Colombia. About 80 percent of the $5.3 billion allocated went to military aid, amounting to around seven percent of Colombia’s entire military budget in any given year, with 800 US soldiers and 600 security contractors based in country in 2006.19 15 See for instance Luckham, Nigerian Military; Guy Martin, “Continuity and change in Franco-African relations, Journal of Modern African Studies 33, no. 1 (1995): 1-20. 16 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 169, 172-76. 17 See for instance Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (London: Verso, 2004), 131-40; Lora Lumpe, “US foreign military training,” Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, 2002; Stephanie Neuman, Military Assistance in Recent Wars (New York: Praeger, 1986). 18 Neuman, Military Assistance, 28-29. 19 Douglas Porch and Christopher Muller, “’Imperial grunts’ revisited: The US advisory mission in Colombia,” in Stoker, ed., Military Advising, 171-72. For an overview of US police assistance in Latin America, see Martha Huggins, Political Policing (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). | 606 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | In these examples and figures, the scale of international military relations in the post-1945 world begins to become clear, as does the fact that military staff in embassies are but the tip of the iceberg of the foreign activities of western soldiers. Indeed, one aspect of “total war” in the 20th century was that it required ever-closer military cooperation and integration, evident in multinational operations as well as defence industries.20 Britain and France waged the world wars as empires while Germany and Japan recruited extensively from conquered populations and subordinate allies. The western powers and the Soviet Union organized as blocs during the Cold War, with extensive military integration in the NATO and Warsaw pact countries. For metropolitan countries, much defence diplomacy occurred in an alliance context, as officers became used to working in combined headquarters and commands. Exercises and maneuvers were multinational in character, placing demands for tact, diplomacy, and foreign language and cultural skills at all levels, including that of soldiers interacting with foreign citizens in the countries in which they were based. The Warsaw pact was essentially an informal empire, in which the Soviet Union exercised political military autonomy, as evidenced in 1956 and 1968. But even the minor NATO members surrendered elements of autonomy as their forces were increasingly unable to operate outside NATO command, control, and communications arrangements. In a north-south context, with its greater power differentials and amid the political turmoil of many thirdworld states, the international dimensions of military organization took on greater significance. Military advice and support was an example of what Andrew Scott has referred to as “techniques of informal penetration” that blossomed after World War II and gave powerful governments “direct access to the people and processes of another society.”21 Colombia, like many other countries, would not have had the army it did were it not for the US. Both superpowers sought to conduct their competition in the third world through proxies and clients, making use of locally raised forces to as great an extent as possible. This was in part because any direct clash between the forces of the superpowers risked escalation into a general war. In order to do so they had to shape the politics, armed forces, and civil-military relations of subordinate states and societies. Successive US presidents conceived of the various programs for advice and support as a means of using foreign 20 William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 262-384. 21 Andrew Scott, The Revolution in Statecraft (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), xi. | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 607 | | Tarak Barkawi | manpower for Cold War purposes. As President Eisenhower put it, “The United States could not maintain old-fashioned forces all around the world,” so it sought “to develop within the various areas and regions of the free world indigenous forces for the maintenance of order, the safeguarding of frontiers, and the provision of the bulk of the ground capability.” After the trauma of the Korean War, “the kernel of the whole thing” for Eisenhower was to have indigenous forces bear the brunt of any future fighting.22 After Vietnam, the Nixon doctrine was similarly concerned with limiting the role of US national forces. The US would “look to the nation directly threatened to assume primary responsibility of providing manpower for its defense.”23 In these statements, the relationship between advice and support to foreign forces and projects of order-making comes into view. From the point of view of the great powers, controlling particular areas with locally raised forces were pieces of a larger picture, the local component of a regional or international order the sponsoring powers sought to build, maintain, or defend. Examples at varying scales and times include the “free world” of the Cold War, Françafrique, US hegemony in Latin America, apartheid South Africa’s “near-abroad” in the frontline states, and Soviet and Cuban support for insurgencies. Much is different about these examples, and about the conditions under which the great powers and their local clients operated. What unifies them is the effort to constitute and maintain armed forces from foreign populations. This is the enduring dimension of international military relations. The purposes for which these forces are raised vary, but soldiers have often found themselves in the roles of recruiting, training, and advising foreign counterparts. In modern history, this has very often happened in contexts of western rule and intervention in the non-European world, and amid the legacies such rule and intervention left in their wake. Colonial powers normally had the advantage of long and settled periods of rule within which to develop military and security bureaucracies and establish traditions of service around regular pay and pensions. In other contexts, military advice and support has often occurred on an ad hoc and short-term basis, amid the difficulties and uncertainties associated with formally independent clients. In these cases, the struggle faced by sponsoring powers is that of rapidly growing military and security services, 22 Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 153. 23 From a clarification of the Nixon doctrine provided by the White House and quoted in Gaddis, Strategies, 298. | 608 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | sometimes under the intense stresses of war, which pose challenges even for established armed forces. Shared across the colonial and contemporary era in a north-south context are hierarchy and governance. That is, what is defining of northsouth is strong-weak. It is not El Salvador that trained US forces to defeat a rebellion in the US in the 1980s, but the other way around. Missions of advice and support, and other forms of international military relations, occur in many different contexts, including between great powers. But these missions are such an enduring component of relations between big and small powers, between imperial centres and their peripheries, that north-south is a significant if geographically incorrect analytic category. Interestingly of course, dyadic relationships can move out of this category over time. UK armed forces and those of the Republic of India still maintain close ties, but India has now surpassed the UK in military power and there is no question of its sovereignty being infringed. By contrast, many states in the Persian Gulf and in Africa are still in relations of defence dependency with the UK. In plain language, the term “defence diplomacy” probably most often evokes military attachés at embassies and the international community’s peacekeeping efforts. The analysis in this article has tried, on the one hand, to focus on international military relations between the strong and the weak and, on the other, to situate what are often taken to be recent and unique developments within enduring if changing histories. UN peacekeeping partakes both of histories of military integration and cooperation and of those of sponsoring locally raised forces. Expanded forms of peacekeeping seek in various ways to reorder armed forces in conflict torn countries. Programs to demobilize militias or to retrain them as professional, law-abiding soldiers are examples, as are peace processes that involve the integration of formerly warring parties. The idea is for foreign sponsorship to establish local forces for the maintenance of order, as Eisenhower put it. That is the definition of “peace” in the political-military domain. Perhaps unintentionally, western defence ministries echo earlier histories of colonialism and “white man’s burden” in presenting defence diplomacy as a kind of multicultural encounter session, if also a paternalistic mission of training and assistance to the “legitimate authorities” of “developing” but needy states.24 24 See for instance “Quadrennial defence review report,” US Department of Defence, 2010, 26-31; and “The directorate of military training and cooperation,” Department of National Defence and the Canadian forces, Ottawa, 2011, www.forces.gc.ca. | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 609 | | Tarak Barkawi | Continuity and change is evident also in the major military advice and support missions underway at the time of writing, as is seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.25 As in Vietnam, the exit for foreigners embroiled in insurgency lies in the creation of credible and effective “national” forces. The very presence of the foreigners is part of what the insurgency is about, and the dependence of the local state on international support is always potentially fatal to its legitimacy. The problem is that establishing effective military and security bureaucracies amid a war and on the time scales realistic for western publics is extraordinarily difficult. The constant temptation for quick fixes, hastily raised ad hoc forces, and local alliances works to undermine longer-term state-building efforts, as in the “Anbar awakening” or the earlier and now defunct Iraqi civil defence corps. Other difficulties arise from the multinational character of the coalition forces. Different arrangements for training and sponsoring local forces appertain in different commands and areas of national responsibility, as with the UK in Basra or the tensions between the international security assistance force and the American operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Other problems come from the increasing reliance on private contractors to provide training as western states contract out their responsibilities, often without sufficient oversight or quality control. The result is expensive and haphazard efforts to produce forces with varying degrees of success. An additional challenge arises from having to put in place the full range of personnel and logistical services required by even relatively basic modern armed forces. Raising a local infantry battalion is something cadres of professional officers and noncommissioned officers have been doing since the rise of organized warfare in the ancient world; it is relatively straightforward and can be accomplished in six months to a year. Establishing the systems by which that battalion is supplied with food, munitions, and transport, its officers trained, its soldiers paid and pensioned, and so on, is another matter. Here again is a window on the sheer scale of military advisory efforts. Iraq and Afghanistan, as with Vietnam in its day, are also symbols of the central strategic significance for western powers of military advice and support in a north-south context. These are not sideshows. In considering the international organization of force, it is important not to equate the struggle to create local forces with straightforward control 25 See Anthony Cordeman and Adam Mausner, Iraqi Force Development (Washington: CSIS Press, 2007); Anthony Cordesman, Adam Mausner, and David Kasten, Winning in Afghanistan: Creating Effective Afghan Security Forces (Washington: CSIS Press, 2009). | 610 | Summer 2011 | International Journal | | “Defence diplomacy” in north-south relations | by the sponsoring power. When westerners served as officers in colonial armies, they exercised command and control. With the transition to advisor, they had to learn to bargain, cajole, persuade, bribe, induce, flatter, and beg their counterparts to get their way. Moreover, insurgencies and civil wars involve a multifaceted struggle over the control and organization of force. Forces trained by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan could be used by their commanders for purposes other than the US intended, from criminality to the pursuit of alternate political projects. The same applies to weapons, ammunition, and other military assistance supplied to local militias. Clients exercise surprising powers over their patrons. This element of struggle over the organization and direction of armed force is particularly evident in Pakistan. A key issue in US-Pakistan relations is to what purpose Pakistani military and security resources will be put. Pakistan is a powerful, nuclear-armed, sovereign state. On the other hand, it is in a state of defence dependency vis-à-vis the US, which has supplied it with $14.1 billion in military aid since 11 September, 2001.26 Pakistani politicians and senior officers use the forces at their disposal for their own projects of order-making, which include military assistance to insurgent networks hostile to the US and India, while trying to accommodate US demands. At the same time, US officials and officers use every lever at their disposal to orient the Pakistanis towards their objectives in Afghanistan, the frontier areas, and the war on terror more generally. Amid all of this, Pakistani officers at all levels continue to attend military schools in the US and the UK, while senior officers in all of these armies draw on their personal relations in the course of their diplomatic struggles. In many respects, Pakistan encapsulates all the elements of defence diplomacy discussed in this article, especially when the origins of the Pakistani army in the British Indian army are recalled. CONCLUSION The basic claim of this article is that serious thinking about defence diplomacy begins with analysis of the historical and contemporary international military relations briefly surveyed above. Military officers working out of embassies are but one node in a dense network of international interchange. Sometimes, they are simply diplomats in uniform, providing specialist advice to officials based on their professional expertise, much as the lawyers and 26 K. Alan Kronstadt, “Direct overt US aid and military reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2012,” prepared for the Congressional Research Service, 2011, www.fas.org. | International Journal | Summer 2011 | 611 | | Tarak Barkawi | economists discussed elsewhere in this issue.27 But to focus only on defence attachés and what they do in embassies and foreign ministries would be to miss the much more enduring and significant role of foreign military relations in international politics, and in north-south relations in particular. Western military officers are agents of the globalization of particular forms of organizing violence—the bureaucratic, regularly disciplined military. Across historical eras, they have made use of these military forms to constitute armed forces from foreign populations for political projects of local, regional, and global order-making. While the officer-advisor transition fundamentally affects the conditions under which they operate, the struggle to raise and direct foreign forces remains the core enduring feature of international military relations in a north-south context. Military officers posted to embassies, serving in the UN department of peacekeeping operations or in capacities such as foreign area officers in the US military, amount to a kind of permanent staff for the international military relations described here. They facilitate the foreign activities of their colleagues in their home countries and of the military in their host nations. Militaries are always educating and training their personnel and formations in recurring cycles. This is true both of national militaries and of foreign advisory efforts. Military attachés spend much of their time facilitating and managing various kinds of military education and training. They help select officers from their host countries for training abroad; they organize the visits of training teams to their host countries; and they make arrangements for the use of host-nation training facilities and areas for units from their home countries. If military attachés are the permanent staff for international military relations, managing training is their primary activity. Training is where we see the world of diplomatic practice—military staff in embassies—and the terms of analysis developed in this article come together. Training transforms recruits into soldiers and soldiers into better soldiers, while officer education increases the intellectual capacities of those who direct and manage armed forces. In an international context, it makes foreign armed forces better at whatever the sponsoring power wants them to be better at. They become more effective agents of international projects of order-making that require armed force. The constant international rotation of individual and unit training provides the military basis for such projects, and military attachés are their essential managers and facilitators. 27 See the contributions by Ian Hurd and Leonard Seabrooke in this issue. | 612 | Summer 2011 | International Journal |