Oliver to Conor:
Non-intervention is a costly policy. Those costs have become clearer with a right-wing Republican administration in Washington that has proved notably diffident at projecting force.
This week President Bush threatened Sudan with tighter economic sanctions if it continued to obstruct the UN in sending attack helicopters and a peacekeeping force to Darfur. He also intimated possible constraints on the Sudanese government from flying military aircraft in the region.
It is a belated response to escalating violence. The African Union's peacekeeping force has shown conspicuous courage, but is inadequate to the task. The US has unfortunately displayed a pattern of firm declaratory policy followed by a failure to implement it. The hope of securing Khartoum's cooperation is, on present evidence, vain. UN security council resolution 1706, authorising a Chapter VII peacekeeping mission, has in effect been diluted by the very body that passed it.
The weaker hybrid force of the AU and UN looks like an expedient to get round Khartoum's objections to significant UN deployment. I fear it won't work; capitulation to malign governments rarely does. Intervention has risks. Without it, there is the certainty of continuing genocide and the undermining of neighbouring states.
Conor to Oliver:
Over the last few years British and American political leaders seem to have been conducting two battles, one against "rogue regimes" and the other against the United Nations, and its charter. We need to learn the lessons from the failures of previous unilateral interventions and some of the arguments that have been mounted by well-intentioned but ill-informed commentators to justify them.
In his speech on April 18, at the US Holocaust Museum, President Bush said he would give the UN more time but that Sudan had one "last chance" to stop the violence in Darfur. Otherwise, what he describes as "the international community" will take action against it. his chimes with earlier proposals floated by Washington and Downing Street to enforce a "no-fly zone" over Darfur by bombing the Sudanese air force.
I cannot see how this will do anything to protect the lives of civilians in Darfur, who are mainly threatened by militia on horseback and starvation and disease. It seems to simply be a rhetorical attempt by Bush and Blair to look tougher than the UN. No-fly zones were a disastrous failure in the Balkans and the policy contributed to the scale of the slaughter in Srebrenica.
The problem with these empty threats is they disrupt the relief effort and put back attempts to resolve the crisis in Darfur by political means. They may also lead to an escalation of the crisis. In Kosovo the rebels deliberately set out to provoke an international intervention, which cost far more lives than it saved.
I am in favour of political intervention in Darfur. We need to get both sides to the table and keep them talking until an agreement has been reached, as it nearly was last year. We also need to ensure that both sides guarantee access for relief supplies and respect international humanitarian law. A package of economic sanctions could help this, but what sort of intervention did you have in mind?
Oliver to Conor:
I take issue with your depiction of the British government's supposed hostility to the UN and its charter. Tony Blair in my opinion is unusual among international statesmen in respecting both the importance and the obligations of international institutions. But I agree on one point.
No-fly zones have proved an inadequate palliative in earlier crises. To the extent that they are seen as a way of resolving rather than temporarily containing a nascent or actual humanitarian disaster, they may merely compound it. But Nato's campaign in Kosovo, which relied on airpower, was more effective than you give credit for. Tragically, a slow start to Nato's campaign - numerous strikes were cancelled owing to bad weather - allowed Serb forces to intensify their atrocities. But the eventual outcome, so far from costing more lives than it saved, prevented a brutal regime from committing further mayhem.
This is not an exact precedent for intervention in Darfur, and I don't cite it as such. Serbia had a substantial concentration of armoured forces and a vulnerable economic infrastructure. Against genocidaires in Rwanda, air strikes would have been less effective. But I reject your suggestion that Kosovo (which was not, by the way, a unilateral intervention) augurs badly for intervention in Darfur.
I agree that economic pressure is necessary, but to a large extent that will depend on the attitude of governments other than the UK and US (notably China). Imposing a ban on travel by Sudanese officials would have symbolic impact. But the Sudanese government is likely to respond most readily to the credible threat of force. There should now be a successor to security council resolution 1706, authorising strikes against Sudanese military installations and a naval blockade, as urged by former Clinton administration officials Susan Rice and Anthony Lake. These measures won't work on their own, but I fear they are a prerequisite to the political resolution that you envisage.
Conor to Oliver:
Your strategy for Darfur seems to be bomb first and ask questions later.
Maybe this will provoke some positive political changes inside Sudan. My fear is that it will have the opposite effect, increase the suffering of civilians and also weaken the chances of maintaining a multi-lateral approach.
You think that this worked in Kosovo, but, on a simple crude body count you are wrong. The death toll in Kosovo was in the hundreds before the start of the bombing campaign. It was around 5,000 by the end. Not quite the "genocide" that some people claimed, incidentally, but not a good precedent either.
I was working at Amnesty International during the Kosovo crisis. I first visited refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia during the conflict and then spent a year in Pristina seconded into the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Tony Blair says that we "reversed ethnic cleansing" there, but I would not count the expulsion of over 100,000 Serbs and Roma from a province guarded by 40,000 Nato troops as a success.
I have also worked in Afghanistan and about a dozen other conflict and post-conflict zones. I have seen the consequences of the mistakes up close and lost friends and colleagues, in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have paid the penalty for them.
Although Iraq was not a humanitarian intervention, the continuing attempts to justify it on human rights grounds have, ironically, made it much more difficult to persuade people to support military action in situations when it could be used to prevent mass murder.
I do not believe that the west will go to war for Darfur and neither does anyone else. Sabre-rattling in these circumstances is worse than pointless.
Oliver to Conor:
The argument of those who supported the Kosovo intervention was not that genocide was committed, but that it was prevented. There were thousands of civilian deaths (more than you estimate). The death toll amounted to around a tenth of that in the Bosnian war, and less than one per cent of those driven out of their homes by Milosevic.
What you call a crude body count might have been lower without Nato intervention - but probably would not have been. Milosevic had incited or otherwise procured the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats, and had expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians. Failure to repel his aggression would have made us complicit in a gross injustice. There were many mistakes in the intervention, but its outcome was indeed the protection of a threatened population and the reversal of aggression. It was an alloyed success, in contrast to the unalloyed failure of British policy in Bosnia.
Darfur has received a less timely response, with bloody consequences. Bomb first? This has been going on since 2003, when the rebels initiated their campaign. The response from western governments has been dilatory and even quiescent. (This may have been partly for reasons of securing Khartoum's cooperation in countering terrorism.) The Bush administration has been diplomatically active, and its efforts were evident in the signing of the Darfur peace agreement last May, to which you allude.
But diplomacy has not worked. Khartoum has been obstructive with regard both to political concessions and to allowing a peacekeeping force to operate. So it will continue to be unless pressure is exerted. Your assertion that we need to get both sides to respect international humanitarian law is, in the circumstances, a notably unspecific direction. The reason for the humanitarian catastrophe going on is that international humanitarian law is not so respected, and there is no sovereign supranational body capable of implementing it.
I agree that the failures in Iraq have made it more difficult to press the case for humanitarian intervention, and I do not doubt your personal courage. My experience of brave people who have spent much time in war zones and humanitarian emergencies is that their political judgement is not always and in the highest degree reliable, and it is on that point that I wish to press you.
Conor to Oliver:
I followed the Kosovo crisis very closely, and from very close up, and spent a long time trying to find accurate figures.
Two years after the war had ended Human Rights Watch documented 3,453 killings by Serbian or Yugoslav government forces while the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had exhumed approximately 4,300 bodies. Kosovo is a small place and was very thoroughly investigated. I have spoken to dozens of human rights and war crimes investigators and most use 5,000 as a working figure. Are you sure that we are all wrong?
However, your claim that "hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians" were expelled from their homes before the start of NATO air strikes is most definitely incorrect. This happened after the start of the bombing campaign, which is more than a minor detail, given the rest of your argument. Sorry to repeat myself, but the death toll was in the hundreds before Nato intervened.
Neither of us would be human if we were not appalled by the bloody consequences of the conflict in Darfur, but it does have to be placed in context. I spent the last few months of last year in Northern Uganda where 90% of the population have been displaced from their homes and are dying at the rate of 1,000 a week in displacement camps. A conflict that caused up to four million deaths has just come to an end in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both of these countries border Sudan and, like Chad, what happens in them can have consequences in neighbouring countries, and vice versa. What we need is a series of peace agreements that can bring stability to the whole region.
The Darfur peace agreement was rejected by the rebel forces, not the government. Perhaps if the negotiations had been given a bit more time agreement could have been reached. These negotiations took place under African Union (AU), and not US auspices, and it could have been the sudden arrival of western diplomats that forced the final pace too fast. I agree with Alex de Waal, who attended as part of the AU delegation, that some in the west seem to be suffering from a "salvation delusion" when it comes to Darfur.
Oliver to Conor:
On the question of deaths in the Kosovo crisis: no, we're looking at the same figures. Ivo Daalder, who coordinated US policy for Bosnia in the first Clinton administration, says with his co-author Michael O'Hanlon in their Brookings study of the Kosovo crisis that death toll estimates for Kosovar Albanians range from 5,000 to 11,000, suggesting that the widespread initial estimates - by Nato and the UN - of 10,000 deaths were probably not far wrong, if possibly slightly high. I don't think your interlocutors are wrong; I think they're scrupulously using a figure that can be directly verified by the physical evidence.
In fact 300,000 Kosovar Albanians fled in 1998 after Yugoslav forces attacked civilians and began expelling people from their homes. I agree that Milosevic intensified his xenophobic and murderous campaign after Nato intervened, and the major mistake made by Nato governments was to underestimate his capacity for violence. But all the evidence suggests that Milosevic's campaign was a continuation of what he intended to do, and was actually doing, rather than a provocation that forced him into uncharacteristic behaviour.
I share your wish for a negotiated peace that brings stability to the region, and admire the humanitarian efforts of those working in the field. I'd take the opportunity in particular of commending the work of Unicef in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it was not an excess of intervention by western powers that caused the persistence of that horrific civil war. A few thousand UN peacekeepers performed nobly, but with no prospect of having the mandate or the numbers to stabilise the country.
There is a dispiriting parallel in Darfur. The Darfur peace agreement was inherently flawed because it omitted two rebel groups and the one that signed did so in effect under threat. A lasting agreement is not going to come about, on this precedent, without some prospect of pressure on Khartoum. That is a crucial impediment that needs to be cleared away.
Conor to Oliver:
I know Brookings well and I respect their work, but their figures are inflated and do not accord with anyone who was on the ground. It is more revealing that some of the key policy-makers remain in denial.
The point that you have not disputed is that the death toll was in the hundreds before Nato's intervention and jumped to the thousands as a direct result of the bombing. As a humanitarian aid worker, that is the reality that I have to deal with. An ill-thought-out intervention can get a lot more people killed.
Fifteen years ago there were 20 wars raging in Africa. Today there are fewer than five. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that the UN has got a lot better at peace-keeping operations and has learned the lessons from some of its previous mistakes. I wish the same could be said for western commentators.
I think that we share the same wish for peace in Darfur and agree that this crisis should not be turned into a proxy for ideological battles elsewhere. I hope that the investigation by the International Criminal Court will continue and bring those responsible for war crimes to justice, but my priority for the region is peace - and you rarely get that by bombing.
Oliver to Conor:
I don't have the firsthand experience of the Kosovo crisis that you do, but those journalists I know who did cover it accord with the range I've cited from the Brookings authors concerning civilian deaths among Kosovar Albanians. The difference between 5,000 deaths and a range of 5,0000-11,000 deaths is of great humanitarian importance but doesn't greatly affect our debate over policy. Indeed, I'm surprised you think the policymakers I've cited are "in denial". You, after all, are arguing that Nato's intervention precipitated a sharp increase in civilian deaths. I'm agreeing with you that there was a sharp increase in killings, though I draw different conclusions.
I agree also that there were serious errors in that intervention. But the most serious error was not an excess of force applied too early. Milosevic was able to expel one-sixth of the Kosovar Albanian population from their homes in a steady escalation of attacks before Nato intervened. After the Racak massacre Nato even depleted its airpower in the region. It was a case of declaratory policy rendered incredible by action.
"Salvation delusion" is a weighty criticism. Barack Obama, in a baffling comment alluding to the Virginia Tech massacre, lamented a foreign policy conducted "as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there". That is demagoguery. But Obama's Democratic colleagues have made practical proposals for applying pressure on Khartoum and mitigating the risks to civilians. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice has urged air strikes combined with a rapid reaction force based in Chad. Unfortunately the lesson of earlier interventions in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone is that little will be achieved while bad people think they can get away with doing bad things.
Let me conclude my side of this exchange with admiration for the work that you and other aid workers have done on behalf of victims of war and persecution. But governments need to make strategic judgements about whether, and if so how, conflicts can be foreshortened by diplomatic and economic pressure, and sometimes military force. I will defend Tony Blair's foreign policy on most issues, and I hope he will not under-react on this one.
Conor to Oliver:
My point about policy-makers in denial was actually more aimed at Clare Short, and other politicians, whose retrospective accounts of the Kosovo conflict have reversed the order in which events occurred so that it looks like Nato's intervention was in response to the mass expulsion of Kosovar Albanians from their homes, rather than the other way around. If you read her book, an Honourable Deception, you will see what I mean.
I agree with you that it is not the specific numbers that matter, but the policy conclusions that we draw. I think that if people had been more honest about Kosovo we could have avoided some of the mistakes that were made in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The consequences of external military intervention are always going to be hard to predict. I think that they are justified where they will directly help save people's lives, either by stopping massacres or safeguarding the passage of relief supplies. Beyond that, in the absence of a peace agreement, troops inevitably end up supporting one side or another in a civil war.
The proposals being put forward for Darfur will not directly protect civilians. They are based on a calculation that certain military strikes will have certain political consequences. My fear is that they could have the opposite effect.
The main lesson that I draw from the Balkans is that half-hearted interventions do more harm than good. The "no-fly zone"/"safe haven" policy contributed to the disaster in Srebrenica, so why should we think that it will work in Darfur?
There are two possible solutions to conflict: a political one, where the two sides negotiate an agreement, or a military one, where the outcome is determined by force of arms. If the military strikes that you are proposing merely entrench Khartoum's intransigence, and encourage the rebels to continue their campaign, then the west needs to be prepared to escalate its response, including the deployment of ground troops. Is it your honest assessment, given the current military commitments which you support elsewhere, that this is a serious practical policy?