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U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding CooperationRoles and Recommendations toward a Whole-of-Alliance Approach

Co-Edited byHoshino Toshiya

andWeston S. Konishi

A joint compendium report by The Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA)

and the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP)

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Contents Introduction and Acknowledgments 1Hoshino Toshiya and Weston S. KonishiThe Alliance and Peacebuilding or 6 The Alliance as Peacebuilding?Philip Shetler-Jones

Toward a Dynamic Japan-U.S. Alliance 13Katahara Eiichi and Satoh Haruko

Japan-U.S. Cooperation in Peacebuilding: 18 Between Potential and PitfallLam Peng Er and Ishikawa Sachiko

Peacebuilding as a Field of Joint Endeavor 29 in the Japan-U.S. AlliancePhilip Shetler-Jones

The U.S. Approach to Peacebuilding 44Weston S. Konishi and Charles T. McClean

The United States and Japan Should Aim for a 58 Strategic Complementary Partnership in AfghanistanUesugi Yuji

U.S. Peacebuilding in Afghanistan 68Jason E. Fritz

U.S. Policy and Assistance on Peacebuilding 81 in Sudan: 2001 – 2011Konrad J. Huber

Japan’s Assistance in Peacebuilding 100 in Sudan and Its ChallengesMurakami Yasuhito

Recommendations for 113 U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation

About the Contributors 116

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

1

Introduction and

AcknowledgmentsHoshino Toshiya

and Weston S. Konishi

Since the end of the Cold War, failed states have multiplied at an alarming rate, requiring increased attention and action from the international community as their polities become vulnerable to

criminal networks, paramilitary groups, and terrorist organizations that threaten the livelihood of civilians as well as efforts to promote stability and sustainable development. While the United States and Japan have tried to respond to this broad challenge, they have generally done so in a piecemeal fashion, often without a proper understanding of local realities or lessons learned from previous operations. In fact, the two allies have rarely used alliance mechanisms to harmonize their policies on reconstruction and stabilization operations in many parts of the world, or with international organizations, resulting in missed opportunities and sub-optimal performance. Furthermore, both the United States and Japan have struggled domestically to implement a “whole-of-government” approach that can fully integrate existing military and civilian resources across multiple agencies to

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achieve greater effectiveness in peacebuilding operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and from East Timor to South Sudan.

Working together with partners from Osaka University’s School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) and others, IFPA undertook a two-year research and dialogue project aimed at helping to narrow strategy gaps between Japan and the United States in the increasingly important area of peacebuild-ing in post-conflict or highly vulnerable countries and placing this mission squarely on a renewed alliance agenda. To accomplish this goal, IFPA assembled a group of core research members repre-senting U.S., Japanese, and UN perspectives to evaluate the allies’ peacebuilding cooperation in two of the most intractable cases of collapsed states: Afghanistan and Sudan (and later, South Sudan). Over the course of the project, the team examined ways to broaden bilateral peacebuilding cooper-ation beyond the UN agenda so that officials in both countries can be made aware of opportunities to work together in a “whole-of-alliance” approach to maximize peacebuilding efforts in the field.

In line with this objective, IFPA and OSIPP held a one-day workshop on April 29, 2011, in Washington, D.C., entitled “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission: Developing a Complementary ‘Whole-of- Alliance’ Approach.” The purpose of this event was to convene a group of experts and practitioners to discuss ways to enhance cooperation between the United States and Japan in inter-national peacebuilding operations. The workshop discussions were led by seven core research members, with additional participants from the government and NGO sectors contributing to an open exchange of ideas about how Japan and the United States can best cooperate and work syn-ergistically in a whole-of-alliance approach to peacebuilding operations in vulnerable or failing states. Research members also provided workshop papers addressing various angles of the project. A second workshop was held in Osaka, Japan, in the spring of 2012, producing a new set of project papers. This report is a compendium of select papers from both workshops as well as a list of policy recommendations that were developed by team members in Osaka.

Although the second round of workshop meetings was ostensibly aimed at digging deeper into the issues covered in the first workshop, other substantive differences between the two sets of workshop discussions emerged as well. In particular, the first round of meetings took the merits of bilateral peacebuilding at face value. In other words, discussions did not start by questioning the inherent value of U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation to the international community or to the bilateral alliance per se. Rather, the team’s approach was first to accept that bilateral peacebuilding coopera-tion is an important (if nascent) element of U.S.-Japan policy making and that a whole-of-alliance approach toward peacebuilding would present a positive new dimension of bilateral cooperation. In that context, the core theme of the first workshop primarily focused on the obstacles and opportu-nities of implementing a whole-of-alliance approach to peacebuilding, particularly in real-life field operations in Afghanistan and Sudan. This elicited a broad range of questions about the feasibility of a whole-of-alliance approach to peacebuilding.

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

To start, neither Tokyo nor Washington has been particularly adept at implementing its own whole-of-government approach to peacebuilding — that is, an approach that taps all the resources and assets available to each government in a fully integrated interagency effort. Stove-piping among Japanese government agencies has long held the fascination of political scientists, but similar prob-lems are endemic in the U.S. system as well. Lack of coordination between civilian and military agencies, diplomats and aid workers, and government and NGO sectors is among the many obsta-cles to integrated peacebuilding efforts by both the Japanese and U.S. governments.

An example of this problem that was highlighted during the course of the 2011 Washington workshop is the regionalist/functionalist divide that impedes whole-of-government policy making. Indeed, the workshop was attended by several civilian peacebuilding practitioners with extensive field experience and expertise in humanitarian aid operations in post-conflict states in Africa and other unstable regions around the world. As illustrated in the excellent case studies included in this report, func-tionalists in the aid community have a keen awareness of the on-the ground needs of peacebuilding cooperation but are less familiar with the assets and resources that could be available to peacebuild-ing operations through the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Conversely, alliance managers see the opportunities for enhancing bilateral cooperation in the peace-building arena, but generally do not have as detailed an understanding of what is really needed on a day-to-day basis in war-torn corners of Central Asia and East Africa. This knowledge gap between alliance managers and aid professionals ensures that the supply (alliance resources) and demand (humanitarian needs) components of bilateral peacebuilding cooperation remain coordinated largely on an ad hoc, rather than strategic, basis.

Serious attempts to improve interagency coordination along whole-of-government lines have been difficult to implement. In the wake of the Afghanistan and Iraq operations, for instance, the George W. Bush administration took decisive steps to establish an office that would oversee and direct peacebuilding operations across multiple relevant agencies. In 2004, the administration launched the U.S. Department of State Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), which was mandated to serve such a purpose. But the S/CRS, sometimes called the “forgotten office,” never developed the institutional clout or leverage needed to direct other powerful agencies. Subsequently, under the Obama administration, the functions of the S/CRS have been folded into the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations but this bureaucratic upgrade has so far not appeared to have significantly improved interagency coordination.

While structural hurdles impede whole-of-alliance peacebuilding at the unilateral level, they are exponentially more complex at the bilateral level. At the end of the day, the U.S. and Japanese gov-ernments reflect two quite different political systems and cultures, and meshing them into a seamless bilateral peacebuilding mechanism seems somewhat unrealistic. Enormous differences exist between the two countries on everything from doctrinal approaches to peacebuilding to institutional structures

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U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation

and the allocation of resources and personnel in the field. One large discrepancy, of course, is the role of the military in each ally’s peacebuilding operations, as well as the assets and resources allo-cated for military-led operations. Japan, with its strict constitutional limitations on military rules of engagement, emphasizes economic development and human security needs over stabilization and other military-centric operations. The United States, on the other hand, devotes vastly more assets and resources to military-led peacebuilding missions. As the adage goes, there are more personnel in U.S. military bands than in the entire U.S. civilian aid community.

These differences, however, do not preclude the need or the potential for significant improvements to U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation. Indeed, as Uesugi Yuji contends in his paper, Japan should not attempt to match U.S. peacebuilding approaches (including its heavy emphasis on counter-in-surgency operations) but should instead develop a complementary approach that maximizes its own strengths in human security and economic development in post-conflict states. Not only does a complementary approach to bilateral cooperation avoid unrealistic expectations of burden sharing, but it also would help to decrease the duplication of peacebuilding efforts in the field.

But should the alliance be involved in international peacebuilding at all? The second workshop, held on the campus of Osaka University on April 30 and May 1, 2012, took a harder look at whether or not peacebuilding is, in fact, an appropriate mission for the alliance, or, conversely, whether the alliance is an appropriate mechanism for peacebuilding. As one Japanese participant put it, peacebuilding is not and should not be prioritized over more traditional roles for the alliance, such as defending Japan or ensuring regional stability. Another participant took the somewhat unorthodox view that the alliance has always been about peacebuilding —i f, as has often been stated, it is responsible for keeping the peace in East Asia for the past half-century. If seen in this light, then peacebuilding could be recognized as a core alliance mission, rather than as a somewhat unnatural foray into the arena of non-traditional security. Or, as vividly demonstrated in Operation Tomodachi (friend) in the wake of March 11, 2001, Great East Japan Earthquake,non-traditional missions from disaster relief and humanitarian assistance to peacebuilding are highly promising areas where the United States and Japan can make a difference if they broaden the scope of core alliance cooperation. This debate is far from settled, but the group came to a general agreement that peacebuilding —i n what-ever capacity —i s an important contribution that Japan and the United States must make to the global common good as responsible leaders in the international community. In that vein, the participants at the Osaka workshop developed a list of policy recommendations for U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation, starting with basic principles for bilateral cooperation, institutional recommendations for facilitating a whole-of-alliance approach and, lastly, recommendations for on-the-ground joint peacebuilding cooperation in the field. These recommendations can serve as a valuable resource for policy makers on both sides of the Pacific as they consider ways to enhance U.S.-Japan peace-building cooperation in the future.

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that peacebuilding is an inherently unpredictable and constantly evolving enterprise. As the project’s expert case studies on Afghanistan and Sudan make abundantly clear, on-the-ground realities vary from country to country and reflect a vast and complex range of socio-economic, cultural, and political factors. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach to peacebuilding is both ill-advised and ultimately counterproductive once applied to real-life conditions. The project’s recommendations, therefore, are meant not as a dogmatic peacebuilding doctrine but as a point of reference for further analysis of peacebuilding cooperation, particularly as it applies to the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Indeed, this project, while ambitious in scope, merely scratches the surface of what is a broad and complex subject. The following report is intended to provide practitioners and students of peace-building and alliance relations with a useful starting-off point for further examination and study of this important issue.

Finally, this project would not have been possible without the contributions of many people who provided invaluable knowledge and expertise. An outstanding group of experts and practitioners made up the core workshop participants, several of whom provided papers selected for this report. They include Dr. Uesugi Yuji, program officer at the Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center (HPC) and asso-ciate professor at the Graduate School for International Cooperation and Development, Hiroshima University; Mr. Jason E. Fritz, independent consultant; Mr. Konrad Huber, independent consultant and senior director at International Sustainable Systems; Dr. Philip Shetler-Jones, specialist, com-mon security and defense policy operations, European External Action Service; Ms. Alix Boucher, research fellow, Center for Complex Operations, National Defense University (NDU); Ms. Ishikawa Sachiko, senior adviser, peacebuilding/South-South cooperation, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA); Dr. Katahara Eiichi, director of the Regional Studies Department at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS); Profesor Kawakami Takashi of Takushoku University; Dr. Lam Peng Er, senior research fellow, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore; Ms. Sato Mio, program advisor, Secretariat of the International Peace Cooperation Headquarters, Cabinet Office of Japan; Mr. Andrew Winternitz, deputy director for Japan policy, Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense; and Major Tad Woolfe, U.S. Air Force; and Ms. Satoh Haruko at OSIPP who was instrumental in organizing the second workshop meeting in Osaka and provid-ing her own substantive insights in completing our final activities. Beyond this core group, many other participants were included in the first workshop meetings, augmenting an already stimulating exchange of viewpoints and opinions. The project team is especially grateful to Dr. Richard Ponzio of the U.S. State Department, Dr. Ashizawa Kuniko of Oxford Brooks University, Mr. Jason Matus of AECOM International Development, and Mr. Robin “Sak” Sakoda of Armitage International for their insights and contributions during the Washington, D.C., workshop.

A final note of thanks, on behalf of IFPA and OSIPP, goes to the Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership (CGP) for its generous support of this timely and important project.

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2The Alliance and Peacebuilding

or The Alliance as Peacebuilding?

Philip Shetler-Jones

Reflections on the March/April 2012 IFPA “U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation” workshop, Osaka

What can the U.S.-Japan alliance do for peacebuilding? Not much, at least in its present form. Peacebuilding is poorly understood and has little institutional purchase in both countries,

and the alliance is over-militarized. If the alliance changed then there is a lot it could do for peace-building as it is understood in the context of post-Cold War interventions. Turning the question around, if we define peacebuilding in terms of a longer historical experience then there is a lot it could offer the alliance. This paper argues that re-conceptualizing the alliance as a more ambitious form of peacebuilding would enrich its value for East Asian regional security and reinvigorate it as an “international public asset” for a new global generation.

There are two ways to think about how peacebuilding fits with the U.S.-Japan alliance. We can eval-uate how the United States’ and Japan’s contributions to peacebuilding might be enhanced if they

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are mediated by the alliance relationship and related mechanisms; alternatively, we can examine how the alliance itself could benefit from peacebuilding as a fresh component of cooperative activ-ity between the two allies. This short paper, based on discussions held at the workshop in Osaka early in 2012, considers both of these perspectives, but it also proposes that a more historically open concept of peacebuilding yields fresh insights into the Asia-Pacific security situation, and shows a way to regenerate the alliance’s strategic significance.

What the Alliance Can Do for Peacebuilding The value of peacebuilding for the alliance is held down by several factors. First, a lack of conceptual clarity obstructs U.S.-Japan cooperation on peacebuilding. At the workshop, not all of the partic-ipants had a very focused idea of what “peacebuilding” is, in the sense of something distinct from other kinds of peace operations such as peacemaking, stabilization, and peacekeeping. Some who understood the difference emphasized its utility in the political discourse and had less interest in its specific (social/political) scientific application.

Some discussants recommended efforts to reach a shared understanding of terms for use in the alliance, but this ignores two points: 1) there is a common language, which is actually quite precise, but it is used in a rather narrow policy and academic discourse; 2) the ambiguity and imprecision with which the term is used outside this political/social scientific academic discourse is no accident. Political use of terms like peacebuilding thrives on ambiguity and sloppiness because it allows speak-ers to claim one thing and do another. If vagueness at this level is deliberate and inevitable, attempts to get governments to adopt a common language as a way of promoting or supporting cooperation is likely to frustrate and disappoint those with a more scientific motive.

Workshop participants’ differing views on what peacebuilding means and how it is done may also reflect how peacebuilding suffers from low levels of institutionalization and conceptual clarity in both governments. Japan does slightly better, as there is a stronger constituency for it and a con-ceptual basis in ideas like human security. Also, peace operations are enshrined in an office at the apex of government — the Cabinet Office. In the United States, however, the term “peacebuilding” is eschewed in favor of “stabilization,” and efforts lack a focused institutional home at the higher levels of government.

On the question as to why peacebuilding is important, the narrative has become established over the last decade or two: it makes a contribution to national security by heading off terrorism, orga-nized crime, pandemics, and so on. However, there is scarcely any empirical evidence to support this as a cost-effective solution to such problems. Others voiced the view that peacebuilding is more about displaying leadership in the international community and containing situations that threaten to disrupt or raise the cost to global economic flows. In Japan it is acceptable (even mundane) to argue that peace is something that we should be trying to achieve for its own sake, but anecdotally

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speaking, advocating risky and expensive action for an abstract ideal like peace is not treated with the same respect in the U.S. or European discourse, where there is an expectation that foreign policy action is justified on the basis of more concrete gains to national wellbeing or security.

Some participants noted that the alliance is now discussed almost exclusively in terms of its military aspects, and suggested that this might inhibit its contribution to peacebuilding. Others seemed to assume a role for the military in peacebuilding, without actually specifying what it might be. This could be attributed to the fuzzy-definition problem described above, or it could be taken as a warning of the degree to which the U.S.-Japan alliance has been militarized in the sense that alliance activity is assumed to be all or only about what the U.S. military can do with the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF). The fact that the U.S. Department of State was not represented alongside its Department of Defense colleagues perhaps allowed the discussion to be overly skewed in this direction, or its absence could itself be interpreted as confirmation of over-militarization. The problem here is that peacebuilding is essentially a political activity, using a multi-dimensional approach including, inter alia, economic, human rights, and development components, and unlike peace enforcement or peacekeeping per se, peacebuilding as a whole has little need for the military. So in its present form — as a military-focused institution, the alliance is not much use to peacebuilding. The recom-mendations at the end of this paper suggest some ideas to change this.

Inability to Support Peacebuilding Reveals Alliance Weakness?This civil/military imbalance can be interpreted as a symptom of something more important in the history of the alliance: the extent to which the alliance has abandoned the strategic or grand strate-gic ambitions of its past for more modest operational or tactical concerns. This matters because if it is true, a narrower alliance might be less robust than it was in the Cold War, and more fragile in the context of emerging challenges in the East Asian security environment.

When it was established, the alliance bound Japan and the United States together in a political, eco-nomic, and military struggle to resist communist hegemony in East Asia (through the Korean War). In the 1960s, when it was renewed, the alliance merited such a ferocious political battle in Japan that it felled the Kishi government, and fears of street violence forced U.S. President Eisenhower to can-cel his visit. Later in the Cold War, Japan flexed its economic muscle in support of “front line” states such as Pakistan against pressure from the Soviet Union,1 and the alliance provided a platform for Japan to take a more prominent role on the world stage.2 The depth and scope of the alliance’s influ-ence over that period makes today’s focus on what are essentially instrumental military issues (such as base relocation and fighter jet procurement) look myopic and small minded. Such a mismatch

1 Steve Chan, “Humanitarianism, Mercantilism, or Comprehensive Security? Disbursement Patterns of Japanese Foreign Aid,” Asian Affairs 19, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 8, 14.

2 Glenn Hook highlights Nakasone’s participation at the 1986 G7 summit as a signal event in this era. See Glenn D. Hook et al., Japan’s International Relations: Politics, Economics, and Security (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 97.

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between such a low level of ambition and the global significance of East Asian and Asia-Pacific security raises questions about how the alliance is valued. How many people would recognize the alliance as an “international public asset,” as it was described in the 1994 Higuchi Report?3 Perhaps we need to take a fresh look at the alliance, and think hard about what it has to offer not just to Japan and the United States, but to the rest of the world too.

At the Osaka workshop, Dr. Katahara (National Institute for Defense Studies, or NIDS) asserted that “peacebuilding has not been, is not, and will not be the main business in the alliance,” but if we look beyond recent experience to a more conceptually and historically open understanding of what peacebuilding is, then the contrary argument can also be made. A first step is to recognize how much of our understanding of peacebuilding has been gained through the post-Cold War experience of UN-mandated interventions in post-conflict situations following civil wars, and how much this has narrowed our understanding of peacebuilding to a range of technocratic tasks, such as restoring a range of state functions in governance, justice, rule of law, livelihoods, rights, and political participation. This concept of peacebuilding makes sense as a current practitioners’ guide, but methods of achieving peacebuilding in a specific historical and political context should not be allowed to restrict our understanding or limit the strategic appreciation of peacebuilding. If we step back and gain a broader historical view, we can approach peacebuilding simply as “what we do to prevent the recurrence of conflict.”

The central contention of this paper is that a broader historical perspective for defining peacebuild-ing helps us understand and perhaps operationalize the enduring purpose of the alliance. If we can consider the fundamental purpose of the U.S.-Japan security arrangements after World War II as preventing the re-emergence of conflict in East Asia, then this would make peacebuilding the very essence of the alliance’s function. Of course, containment was part of the picture even before 1951, but containment, like deterrence (or nation building), is merely a means, and not a strategic end. Furthermore, a concept of peacebuilding as a positive action aimed at “building peace” is hard to translate into action. It is far easier to focus operationally if it is seen as a way of preventing the re-emergence of conflict; in other words, a reactive or post hoc variety of conflict prevention. This prompted the workshop to explore the question from the other direction, as discussed below.

What Peacebuilding Can Do for the AlliancePerhaps the most important service the concept of peacebuilding can perform for the alliance is to take it back to its roots and restore some of its vitality for the next generation. This logic would more explicitly recognize the alliance as a form of peacebuilding.

3 Report of the advisory panel on defense issues (named after its chairman, Higuchi Hirotarō) submitted to Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi in August 1994. The quote is a reference to Watanabe Akio’s article, “Postwar Japan in History and Opting for the Japan-US Security Treaty Regime: Back to the Future,” in In Search of a New Consensus: The Japan-US Alliance toward 2020 (IIPS, 2010), http://www.iips.org/jussec/J-US-SEC2010e.pdf.

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How is the alliance a form of peacebuilding? For a start, it has long been observed that preventing the re-emergence of conflict between Japan and its neighbors was always an important part of the alliance. Evidence of this abounds: the “cork in the bottle” analogy for the U.S .bases, the one-sided collective security commitment that underwrote Japan’s non-nuclear policy, and the interpretation of Article 9 that limited defense spending, arms trading, and overseas military deployments.4

If we approach the alliance as a form of peacebuilding, this implies the presence of a dormant con-flict or conflicts that it serves to suppress. This raises deeper questions about how Japan and the United States view their relationships in Asia and more broadly. Which conflict or conflicts do they fear, and so seek to prevent? If the “cork in the bottle” refers to the potential conflict between Japan and others, the next move might be peacebuilding between the United States and China, or per-haps between China and other Asian nations. The same formulation could be used with respect to North Korea or a host of other cases. So then the key question becomes, what, beyond containment and deterrence, can the alliance as a means of peacebuilding do to prevent (the re-emergence of) conflict with China?

For a start, the alliance should reach beyond its myopic concern with tactical and micro-level mil-itary redeployments. Instead it could shift its attention to diplomatic and economic efforts to build confidence with China, explore economic incentives for peace on the Korean Peninsula, and struc-ture a security regime with Russia as a basis for agreement over the Far North and energy security in Asia. None of these is easy, but at least each has a strategic scope and ambition commensurate with the alliance’s proud peacebuilding history.

As this was the second and final workshop in this project, we concluded by hammering out a few concrete recommendations on what the alliance could do for peacebuilding. These recommendations are based on the received definition of peacebuilding in the context of multinational interventions to assist post-conflict societies to prevent the re-ignition of civil war.

Recommendations 1. Institutionalize a whole-of-government approach to peacebuilding. For both Japan and the

United States, there may be no single definition of peacebuilding, and for the United States there is also not a clear sense of where to assign institutional ownership. In Japan, there is a rather privileged place given to “international peace cooperation activities” (in the Cabinet Office), which is potentially very useful when it comes to coordinating a whole-of-government, or com-prehensive, response, but unfortunately and surprisingly Japan’s definition of IPCA does not

4 After 1907 the Anglo-Japan alliance performed a similar function from the British point of view, by reducing the prospect of Japan’s establishing regional dominance that could bring it into conflict with British interests. See Keith Neilson, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance and British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1902 – 1 914,” in The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902 – 1 922, ed. Phillips Payson O’Brien (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 58 – 5 9.

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include “peacebuilding.”5 This owes much to the International Peace Cooperation legislation going back to the early 1990s, before the peacebuilding concept emerged, so changing this would require revised legislation making peacebuilding a fourth pillar of IPCA. This sets the bar high, but with all the talk of revising the peacekeeping operations (PKO) law and the five principles, there might be an opening to bring peacebuilding into the statutory and bureaucratic categories of International Peace Cooperation and give it the weight of the Cabinet Office. Rather than looking backward and developing a revised set of five principles for peacekeeping, it might be better to take account of what has changed in the last twenty years and develop five principles for peace operations (including peacebuilding), and let the SDF and Special Measures laws do the rest in terms of saying what the SDF can and cannot do.

2. Institutionalize peacebuilding as an alliance priority, either by making it a permanent item on the agenda of high-level talks, the Security Consultative Committee, and so on, or by estab-lishing a standing body with dedicated staff to coordinate and direct alliance cooperation on peacebuilding activities, and work on concepts, doctrine, and lessons learned. The latter option could take advantage of peacebuilding as a way to upgrade the whole-of-government approach and raise the alliance back to a more strategic level. To achieve this, we could establish a 3+3 Peacebuilding Coordination Committee (alongside or in place of the existing 2+2), bringing the national security advisor into alliance consultation mechanisms (the U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee, etc.) as a first among equals next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs/State Department and the Ministry of Defense/Defense Department.

3. Use peacebuilding to “mainstream” the alliance. Take peacebuilding as a way to “mainstream” the alliance throughout U.S. and Japanese diplomacy. For example, extend cooperative mech-anisms down to country level by initiating inter-embassy cooperation on peacebuilding where appropriate and/or directed by central (capital to capital) alliance institutions. This peacebuilding mainstreaming initiative can be led at the country level but take coordination and direction on strategic principles from the 3+3 level. The same goes for alliance cooperation on peacebuilding in multilateral forums such as the UN and ASEAN.

4. Expand the scope of target countries. This can begin with existing cases such as Afghanistan, Timor Leste, and Sudan and could be extended to new country cases such as Myanmar (con-flicts between central government and other communities, such as the Karen insurgency) and Thailand (the insurgency in the south). A common interest in peace in these cases is shared by the United States and Japan for various reasons, including global counter-terrorism strategy, geostrategic advantage, and exhibition of leadership in the Asian region. The proposed 3+3 could also establish and regularly review a peacebuilding watch list of countries with potential to benefit from U.S.-Japan cooperation on peacebuilding.

5 IPCA has three pillars, only one of which is essentially about peace. These pillars are participation in peacekeeping, contribution to humanitarian relief, and contribution to international electoral observation.

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5. Use peacebuilding to enhance human intelligence, as a way to direct the alliance intelligence gaze at the human level, leveraging the overlap between “human security” and “human terrain mapping” for counter-insurgency. Although human security looks at humans as the end and governance as a means, and counter-insurgency (COIN) looks at humans as the means to the end of defeating an insurgency, something might be gained from the fact that both place value on understanding and meeting the needs of the human being.

6. Open up the U.S.-Japan alliance. Go beyond the top-down approach of the SCC and such high-level meetings that isolate the alliance from other levels of government and other areas of interest. Reaching down to the country level is one way of changing that (see recommendation 3). Another way is to explore partnerships in the same manner with which NATO has developed strategic partnerships. Peacebuilding activity is such a multinational and multi-sector endeavor that there is hardly a possibility of doing it without opening up to partners in other international or regional organizations such as the UN or ASEAN. The same goes for opening the alliance up (perhaps through cooperation in peacebuilding) to other spheres of government, such as trade, finance, and development aid. Bring the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and USAID into the alliance through peacebuilding cooperation ventures. Peacebuilding calls for a comprehensive approach, and it is time the alliance got back to being about more than just the most mechanical, narrowly focused aspects of security, such as deterrence and defense.

ConclusionThe workshop generated two conclusions that were more optimistic and had broader implications than most participants had expected. First, that in its present form the alliance does not have much to offer to peacebuilding, but that this is more a failure of imagination and ambition than anything fundamental to the nature of the alliance itself. Second, that viewing the alliance as essentially an instrument of peacebuilding has some potential to reinvigorate discourse around the purpose of the alliance, as well as broadening and promoting the cause of peacebuilding more generally. More thought should be given to what changes are needed to make the alliance more of an “international public asset,” both in the region and more widely. Thinking of the alliance in terms of peacebuild-ing (in the conventional as well as the broader sense) precipitated unexpectedly fruitful ideas, but putting these into practice will require that they be followed up by bold and creative action.

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Toward a Dynamic Japan-U.S. Alliance

3Toward a Dynamic Japan-U.S. Alliance

Katahara Eiichi and

Satoh Haruko

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop,“U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation,” March/April 2012

When Japan and the United States tried to cope with the grave accident that erupted at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant after it was severely damaged by the tsunami on March 11,

2011, both parties initially did not fully understand each other’s capabilities. Nor were they seeing eye-to-eye with regard to each other’s objectives in responding to the accident. Unlike Operation Tomodachi where the Japanese military, the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), and U.S. forces carried out a joint operation successfully, the quality of communication (especially information sharing) between Japan’s and America’s nuclear authorities and parties concerned in the initial phase of the accident was less than optimal in the face of a critical situation.

Fukushima was indicative of the kind of communication gap that Japan and the United States still need to close to strengthen the bilateral relationship as allies. Fukushima was, after all, a

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complex “non-traditional” security challenge, a growing area where Japan and the United States can work together.

How could they cooperate more effectively on a broader range of issues that are as yet covered by the traditional alliance mechanism, particularly in the expanding realm of non-traditional security issues? How could they enrich the quality of their cooperation so that the alliance is better prepared to meet these security challenges, traditional and non-traditional? How could the Japan-U.S. secu-rity alliance be useful to, and thus maintain relevance in, international security in the twenty-first century? These are some of the questions that this section bears in mind as it examines the prospects for Japan-U.S. cooperation in peacebuilding.

Domestic and International ContextsThe alliance faces challenges in both domestic and international contexts, and they have a bearing on how the alliance will work and be shaped in the future.

In the domestic sphere, there are political, economic, and demographic challenges that need to be considered. First, both Japan and the United States are under severe fiscal constraints, and eco-nomic revitalization is a common priority. Cuts in defense spending are also a serious issue for the effectiveness of U.S. global strategy; likewise, the trend in Japanese defense spending is not about to change either.

Second, the social and economic impact of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident cannot be ignored, as Japan is likely to become more inward-looking and focused on attending to domestic “human security” issues. This may weaken Japan’s international cooperation efforts not only in terms of resources but also in terms of public support for international peacebuilding, United Nations peacekeeping, and official development assistance. The war-fatigued American public is also likely to turn against costly and dangerous U.S. overseas commitments in the near future.

Third, in the long run, Japan will face a serious demographic challenge, as the population is rapidly aging and shrinking. This will likely lead to further economic stagnation and subsequent decline in Japan’s presence and influence in the international community, unless Japan finds a way to overcome this disadvantage to remain competitive. What is quite worrying is the prospect of an enfeebled Japan becoming marginalized to the point of irrelevance in world politics. In order for the alliance to remain meaningful, Japan needs to regain vitality and a sense of direction as a world-class power.

However, while the domestic challenges are of the most serious kind for the alliance, the interna-tional challenges are no less serious. The last two decades have been testing for the alliance in the face of new security challenges arising from the dual emergence of the challenge of new and aspirant powers, such as China and India, and non-traditional security threats, from terrorism and intra-state conflicts to climate change and pandemics.

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Above all, the alliance has been faced with a traditional security concern in a region where it has long served as the pillar of security and stability. Unlike in Europe, the end of the Cold War has not necessarily brought stability to Northeast Asia. Rather, Northeast Asia has become competitive and tense with the rise of China amidst a high concentration of states that do not trust each other. China’s military modernization and North Korea’s nuclear and missile development programs are two major traditional security concerns for the alliance. The confrontational nature of Northeast Asian international relations has affected Southeast Asia, which is also experiencing the ripples of a powerful and assertive China. How the alliance — both as a team and as separate states — man-ages this post-Cold War challenge will be a major test of its ability to function as a pillar of regional security and a significant contributor to international peace.

Another face of the alliance is as an alliance between two global powers with the attendant responsi-bility and interest to secure and maintain a peaceful international environment. Further, addressing non-traditional security challenges is increasingly part of such responsibility and thus a growing area where Japan and the United States need to enhance the level of cooperation. Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR), peacekeeping operations, peacebuilding in conflict states, responding to the needs of failed, failing, or vulnerable states, countering terrorism, and securing the sea lanes for safe navigation (maritime security) are some of the areas that the alliance has the resources and capability to meet.

The Japan-U.S. Alliance in the 21st Century: What Is It For?The Japan-U.S. alliance still has room to improve. Potential resources and capabilities cannot be realized without a proper synergy between Japan and the United States to work together in a variety of situations to put them to meaningful use.

In view of what happened (or did not happen) in meeting the nuclear crisis in Fukushima Dai-ichi, the two countries need to focus their attention in order to improve their performance as allies in an emergency. To start, they clearly need to know each other better and to better understand each other’s capabilities, strategic cultures, national interests, and priorities. For example, perhaps Japan should have been aware of the kinds of technology the United States, as a nuclear (weapons) power, possessed to respond to nuclear accidents and radiation that Japan, as a civilian operator of nuclear power plants, did not possess, notwithstanding the fact that Japan’s safety precautions and measures were clearly inadequate at the time of the Fukushima accident.

Another area for improvement in peacebuilding cooperation is in planning. Japanese and American policy makers should get into the habit of planning together more to meet a variety of security issues, traditional and non-traditional. This would also require, at an earlier stage, setting the alli-ance’s priorities by communicating better each other’s strategic views and national interests with a view to acting together.

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Progress has been made in such joint planning. The “Common Strategic Objectives” identified twenty-four areas at the 2+2 meeting in June 2011. The stated top priority is “[t]o ensure the secu-rity of Japan and strengthen peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region,” meaning the defense of Japan and the United States, and also humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) issues that affect Japan and the United States (such as on March 11).

Secondary priorities coming under the umbrella of “Alliance Cooperation in a Regional and Global Setting” and include joint exercises and logistics support in HA/DR, peacekeeping, reconstruction, and anti-terrorism; maritime security and counter-piracy to protect freedom of navigation and sea lines of communication (SLOC); and environment issues. It must be noted that peacebuilding has never been, is not, and will not be the main business of the alliance.

In view of the present alliance mechanism and its priorities, here are some suggestions on what might be done in the field of peacebuilding cooperation. These are not just intended to improve Japan-U.S. cooperation but also to use peacebuilding cooperation to promote greater regional and global exchanges, dialogue, and cooperation on non-traditional security issues such as confidence-build-ing measures for the mutually suspicious Asia-Pacific powers, particularly China, Japan, and the United States.

•  Clarify the terminology at the conceptual and operational levels between various institutions, such as between Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and the UN, the United States, and NATO on the following terms: “peace-building,” “peacekeeping,” “nation building,” “state building,” “stabilization,” “post-conflict reconstruction,” “failed states,” “failing states,” “vulnerable states,” “civil-military cooperation (CIMIC),” “security sector reform (SSR),” “development,” “human security,” and “responsibility to protect.” Lexicon matters.

•  Prioritize strategic objectives and roles, missions, and capabilities in the field of peacebuilding.

•  Strengthen intelligence sharing and situational awareness with regard to local conditions (for example, failing or vulnerable states and emergency situations that require assistance).

•  Explore an “indirect whole-of-government approach” in which the international actors lead from behind and the local leadership plays a central role. In this respect, capacity building is essential.

•  Develop an integrated system of strategic communication for winning the hearts and minds of the local leadership and population (establish confidence with local communities via social media, medical care, education and training, development assistance, female military officers, and so on).

•  Strengthen capacity building, training, and exercise both in a regional and a global context (this can be applied to HA/DR).

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•  Strengthen CIMIC in peacebuilding (can be applied to HA/DR).

•  Get the UN and China involved in peacebuilding in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa and try to promote a culture of cooperation among Japan, China, and the United States; getting to know each other in an “out of area” context is important for confidence building. This can go side by side with the promotion of a trilateral Japan-United States-China security dialogue and cooperation.

•  Promote a trilateral Japan-United States-Australia security dialogue on the South Pacific islands.

•  Lead discussions about peacebuilding at ASEAN-centered institutions like the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the ASEAN Defense Minister’s Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus), and the East Asia Summit (EAS).

• Create a network of peacekeeping operations (PKO) training centers around the world (Japan, China, Australia, Malaysia, some states in Africa, for example) to facilitate peacebuild-ing operations.

• Create a network of research institutions (for example, IFPA, OSIPP, NIDS) and practitioners (such as USAID, JICA, Peace Winds, Care International) to disseminate information and encour-age situational awareness at the national, regional, and global levels.

• Study legal issues regarding the use of force and seek new legislation so that Japan can play a larger role in peacebuilding.

• Strategically promote area studies and foreign language studies at colleges, universities, and graduate schools in Japan.

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4Japan-U.S. Cooperation in Peacebuilding:

Between Potential and PitfallLam Peng Er

and Ishikawa Sachiko

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop,“U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation,” March/April 2012

The triple disaster— e arthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster— t hat struck Japan on March 11, 2011, brought Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the U.S. military to work together in a joint

operation for the very first time in the alliance’s fifty-year history. Operation Tomodachi impressed upon the Japanese people in tangible form the value of the Japan-U.S. security treaty. Although a peacetime operation, Operation Tomodachi also demonstrated the two countries’ potential capacity to work together in response to cases of human security emergency. Indeed, humanitarian assis-tance and disaster relief (HA/DR) in the Asia-Pacific is an area where Japan-U.S. cooperation can be an effective pillar of regional joint action. But can and should Japan and the United States work together in peacebuilding also? This section considers the prospects for Japan-U.S. peacebuilding cooperation primarily from the Japanese perspective.

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Japan-U.S. Cooperation in Peacebuilding: Between Potential and Pitfall

Japan-U.S. Peacebuilding Cooperation in ContextAs is known, “peacebuilding” is an elastic term that means different things to different people, and it also covers a vast area of actions and activities, from preventive diplomacy to post-conflict con-solidation of peace and reconstruction, depending on the scope of the definition that the concerned parties wish to adopt. Conceptually, peacebuilding also implies long-term, incremental endeavors to establish lasting peace between warring states, where peace becomes structurally embedded in international relations. For example, the objective of the alliance is peacebuilding in Asia, as it has been striving to maintain peace and order and to bring prosperity in post-World War II Asia. Without the alliance as a stabilizing element, it is difficult to say that Asia could have achieved the level of economic development and prosperity that it enjoys today. Maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific region is still the alliance’s greatest contribution to international peacebuilding, and it is an ongoing endeavor.

At issue here, however, is whether Japan and the United States can do something useful together in the realm of peacebuilding as expressed in UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali’s 1992 “An Agenda for Peace.” The Japan-U.S. security alliance is one of the most resourceful alliances, com-parable to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and there is no doubt great potential in Japan-U.S. cooperation in various aspects of peacebuilding. Yet, unlike NATO the Japan-U.S. security alliance is a bilateral alliance, and an asymmetrical one at that in many respects. This has bearing on how the alliance should approach the idea of working together in international peace-building, which, after all, is a relatively narrow area of cooperation in the full scope of the bilateral relationship. Moreover, cooperation in any area has to serve the national interest of both countries as well as enhance the alliance’s international credibility, image, or identity. In this regard, given the comprehensive nature of the bilateral relationship between two quite different powers as men-tioned above (the United States is a global power both militarily and economically, and it can be a unilateral actor; Japan is a pacifist economic power that prefers to work in a multilateral setting), cooperation between Japan and the United States in international peacebuilding has its limitations but it can also be quite distinct.

That said, for Japan and the United States to do something distinct in peacebuilding, let alone useful, is easier said than done. The two countries do not as yet share a common understanding of what they mean by peacebuilding, what sort of activities it entails, and practice on ground. They need not be on the same footing, but it is also dangerous to assume that Japan and the United States can complement each other in terms of resources, know-how, or experience. That is, for example, it is simply not the case where Japan’s aid workers (who are often at the forefront of Japan’s peacebuild-ing diplomacy) can work side by side with the U.S. military or USAID staff. Every institution has its own culture, philosophy, and style of doing things based on experience, and overcoming these differences can be a difficult task in itself.

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Aside from the issue of synergy (or lack thereof) and compatibility between Japan and the United States as partners in peacebuilding, the political implications of Japan-U.S. cooperation in this area also raise some concern. First and foremost, it is important to understand that peacebuilding diplo-macy is more important to Japan’s foreign policy than it is for America’s. Peacebuilding is where Japan has been trying to carve its own niche, a space in international relations autonomous from obligations toward the alliance with the United States. Japan’s peacebuilding diplomacy has essen-tially evolved from its overseas development aid (ODA) initiatives, a major Japanese foreign policy tool since the 1970s. The Japanese approach to peacebuilding, including post-conflict reconstruction, is also grounded in its own experience of recovering from devastation in World War II. Moreover, human security has become an important pillar of Japanese diplomacy, and attending to human security needs is an important element of Japanese peacebuilding as well. The United States, on the other hand, is a global power with global interests, presence, responsibilities, and also risks. The post-9/11 United States in particular has been party to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it tends to adopt more muscular means to address conflicts. In fact, not a decade has passed since World War II where the United States has not been involved in some sort of armed conflict around the world. If not for the fifty-year-old security alliance as a backbone to the bilateral relationship, it would be difficult to imagine Japan and the United States as being “natural” partners in peacebuilding activities.

So, what does the prospect of Japan-U.S. cooperation in peacebuilding look like from the Japanese side?

Peacebuilding: Japanese Style ReviewedThe Japanese practice of peacebuilding is now inseparable from the concept of human security. The declaration by then-Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo in Hanoi amidst the Asian financial crisis in 1998 that Japan would adopt a human security perspective in its international relations was a significant turning point in Japan’s embrace of the notion of human security.1 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) Charter, and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) have also incorporated the concept as an institutional norm. Significantly, JICA President Ogata Sadako declared in Manila after visiting the camp of the insurgent Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Mindanao in 2006 that Japan’s peacebuilding is guided by the concept of human securi-ty.2 The Japanese national media, most politicians of the major parties, intellectuals, and NGOs

1 Obuchi said, “The second area where our efforts are needed is ‘placing emphasis on human security.’ ‘Human security’ is a concept that takes a comprehensive view of all threats to human survival, life and dignity and stresses the need to respond to such threats. The economic crisis confronting the Asian countries today has been a direct blow to their socially vulnerable  —   the poor, women and children, and the elderly  —   threatening their survival and dignity. We need urgently to implement measures for the socially vulnerable who are affected by the Asian economic crisis.” Obuchi Keizo, “Toward the Creation of a Bright Future for Asia,” lecture program hosted by the Institute for International Relations, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 16, 1998, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/asean/pmv9812/policyspeech.html.

2 JICA notes: “The highlight of her visit is a keynote speech Wednesday to a day-long seminar called ‘Peace, Development, and Human Security in Mindanao’ sponsored by the Japanese Embassy and JICA to highlight the anniversary of the

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are also comfortable with the human security concept. In short, a consensus has emerged in Japan that “human security” is a desirable and practicable approach for Japan’s international relations in the post-Cold War era. Thus, Tokyo’s broader definition of security is not merely the protection of state sovereignty but also security for individuals and communities. Japan has also been seeking to externalize human security and peacebuilding as norms and institutions in the UN for global gov-ernance. Tokyo helped to establish and finance the Commission for Human Security (2004) and also the Peacebuilding Commission (2005) in the UN. These new UN institutions have taken an interest in addressing intra-state conflict in Africa and Asia.

In the decade-and-a-half since the bitter lesson of the 1991 Gulf War, when the country was criti-cized internationally for not contributing manpower to the war effort despite a $13 billion financial contribution, Tokyo has been searching for an appropriate international role that does not rely on its checkbook alone. Such a desire to play a larger security role commensurate with its economic status has history, dating back to the 1970s when Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo came up with his doctrine for Japan to play a positive role for peace and stability in Southeast Asia three years after the 1974 violent riots in Bangkok and Jakarta against then-Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei’s visits. Southeast Asia then viewed that Japan was an exploitive economic animal. Japanese involvement guided by the Fukuda Doctrine also served to fill the political vacuum in Southeast Asia after the withdrawal of the United States from the region in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It should also be noted that Japan was actively seeking to play a political role to deal with the civil war in Cambodia even before the post-Gulf War shock led to the establishment of the peacekeeping law in 1992.

The post-Cold War international ideational trends and norms also favored Japan’s search for a mean-ingful international role in the course of easing into the world of UN peacekeeping. During the 1990s, the world and the UN were confronted by numerous outbreaks of intra-state conflict. Ideas defining human security as either “freedom from fear” or “freedom from want” became more popu-lar and were incorporated in various UN documents to address conflicts that are within rather than between states.3 When Japan dispatched its troops for UN peacekeeping to Cambodia, it was the first time that its military, the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), had gone abroad for a mission since the end of World War II. Despite vociferous resistance from the Japan Socialist Party (the number-one opposition party at the time), liberal newspapers, and a pacifist public, the idea of Japanese partici-pation in UN peacekeeping gradually won public acceptance, in part because no SDF members were

half-century of normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries following World War II. The concept of ‘human security’ is being incorporated into mainstream JICA projects, particularly in such regions as Mindanao which are slowly emerging from years or decades of turmoil or war and are now trying to plan for post-conflict sustainable development.” JICA, “President Ogata’s Trip to the Philippines: Traveling to Mindanao Province,” September 19, 2006, http://www.jica.go.jp/english/news/press/jica_archive/2006/060919_1.html.

3 On the concept of human security and its development, see Wolfgang Benedek, Matthias C. Kettemann, and Markus Mostl, eds., Mainstreaming Human Security in Peace Operations and Crisis Management: Policies, Problems, Potential (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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killed in Cambodia. By the time the SDF was dispatched to East Timor, the public had accepted the idea of SDF’s participation in UN peacekeeping as their country’s contribution to regional peace and stability. In the case of peacebuilding, the concept was articulated in the aforementioned “An Agenda for Peace,” which proposed a four-step, seamless approach by the UN to effectively address issues related to peace and security, namely, preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding. Japan eventually embraced the new international norm of peace-building as desirable.

Initially, Japan defined peacebuilding as post-conflict consolidation of peace. However, its practi-tioners soon found that on-the-ground reality is much messier. In the case of Sri Lanka, the ceasefire between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers was often punctuated by conflict. Japan tried to provide economic incentives for peace even before the conclusion of peace accords in the internal conflict in Sri Lanka, Aceh, and Mindanao. Subsequently, Japan broadened its definition of peacebuilding to include the following: peacemaking; peacekeeping; ODA as economic incentives for peace; and post-conflict reconstruction, including demilitarization, demobilization, and job cre-ation for former combatants to reintegrate them into society.4 Guided by this definition, Japan was able to offer human security such as humanitarian relief and practical facilities like health clinics and schools in conflict areas to sweeten the ground for a peace accord. Although the concepts of human security and peacebuilding can appear fuzzy, ambiguous, and lacking in intellectual rigor, Japanese practitioners have found it useful to adopt the broader concept of peacebuilding. Moreover, the SDF`s peacekeeping operations have also come under broader rubrics like peacebuilding and international peace cooperation.

Yet, there are at least two hallmarks of Japanese human security and peacebuilding. First is Japan’s aver-sion to taking risks in peacekeeping and peace-monitoring operations in conflict areas. Constitutional restrictions, domestic political inertia, and post-war pacifist political culture, as reflected in the so-called Five Principles5 of peacekeeping, handcuff the SDF from behaving according to interna-tional norms of peacekeeping. If the SDF is to be dispatched, its troops are usually kept out of harm’s way by being sent to the safest areas, as in the case of its stints in Cambodia, East Timor, and Iraq. This may well be very good for Japan but unfair to other countries that have to expose their peace-keepers and peace monitors to higher risks. For example, the SDF in UNPKO can only use their light

4 See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan’s Efforts at Peacebuilding: Towards Consolidation of Peace and Nation Building (Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007).

5 “Thus the law as it now stands is quite restrictive in scope, and it stipulates five conditions that must be satisfied before a Japanese contingent may be dispatched. The five conditions are: 1) a cease-fire must be in place; 2) the parties to the conflict must have given their consent to the operation; 3) the activities must be conducted in a strictly impartial manner; 4) participation may be suspended or terminated if any of the above conditions ceases to be satisfied; and 5) use of weapons shall be limited to the minimum necessary to protect life or person of the personnel.” See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Current Issues Surrounding UN Peacekeeping Operations and Japanese Perspective,” January 1997 http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/un/pko/issues.html.

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weapons for minimal self-defense but are not allowed to assist nearby UN peacekeepers from other countries if these peacekeepers are attacked by hostile forces while engaged in a separate mission.

Second, Japanese peacebuilding emphasizes the non-use of force, human security, and ODA incen-tives. In January 2002 in Singapore, then-Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro declared that Japan would help to prevent conflict in Aceh, Mindanao, and East Timor.6 In May the same year, Koizumi proposed that peacebuilding would become a new pillar in Japanese foreign policy.7 Subsequently, Japan hosted international conferences in Tokyo to mobilize global support and resources as eco-nomic peace incentives to resolve conflicts in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Aceh. Japan seemed ever ready to organize international conferences in Tokyo for peacebuilding because such an approach is non-controversial, safe, and publicity-generating. But what is most lacking in Japanese peace-building is ideas for conflict resolution, leadership in peacemaking, and the offering of manpower beyond token numbers in peacekeeping and peace monitoring.8

Though undertaken with good intentions, the outcome of Japan’s peacebuilding and human security endeavor thus far is modest if not paltry. “Human security” and “peacebuilding” are allied concepts to address the issues of (civil) war and peace, which affect not only state sovereignty but also the survival and wellbeing of societies, communities, and individuals. Indeed, the twin pillars of human security and peacebuilding are consonant with post-war Japan’s pacifist culture. But if Japan con-tinues to avoid genuine risks to peace by not dispatching adequate manpower — including the SDF for UN peacekeeping in regional hotspots such as Sudan, or as peace monitors in Mindanao, Aceh, and Sri Lanka — like other “normal” states, it can hardly claim to be a significant player in inter-national peacebuilding, even though the Japanese people may think that their country is actively contributing to international peace through ODA and UN peacekeeping.9 JICA staff, MOFA diplo-mats, and citizen volunteers may go to conflict areas abroad, but the SDF is unable to do so because

6 Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet, “Speech by Prime Minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi Japan and ASEAN in East Asia: A Sincere and Open Partnership,” January 14, 2002, http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/koizumispeech/2003/10/07speech_e.html.

7 Koizumi declared at a speech in Sydney, Australia: “Since the end of the Cold War, regional conflicts arising from reli-gious and ethnic causes have been rampant the world over. The international society has been engaged in peacekeeping operations designed to consolidate peace and build basic foundations in countries suffering from such conflicts. The Government of Japan will consider how to increase our international role by providing an added pillar for the consoli-dation of peace and nation building.” See Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, “Japan and Australia: Towards a Creative Partnership,” May 1, 2002, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/pmv0204/speech.html.

8 While Japan has participated actively in UNPKO, it has not participated in peace-monitoring activities even in Sri Lanka, Mindanao, or Aceh, where it sought to play a peacebuilding role for at least two reasons. First, the peace-monitoring activities conducted by third parties in these regions were not conducted under UN auspices and Japan does not have the legislative framework to dispatch its troops abroad for non-UN peace monitoring. Second, Tokyo is extremely reluctant to commit its troops to conflict regions even under the UN framework if there is the danger that the SDF could be imperiled and domestic political controversy could arise.

9 Japan’s ODA will further decline because of its fiscal austerity, with negative implications for the country’s foreign pol-icy to cultivate goodwill in the international system.

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of potential political landmines at home. Indeed, Japan is probably one of the most risk-averse and timid countries to participate in UN peacekeeping for human security. There is a huge gap between theory and practice in Japanese foreign policy toward human security and peacebuilding.

Prospects for International CooperationHaving outlined the contours of Japan’s peacebuilding diplomacy it is apparent that cooperating with the United States, let alone with other countries, at the same level of commitment and responsibility is as yet difficult for Japan. Japan has associated peacebuilding as an expression of its post-war iden-tity as a peace-loving nation. Yet, for Japan to walk the walk, the country still has some domestic hurdles to overcome, particularly in the political sphere. To date, one has to wonder whether ODA in the guise of “human security” is a crutch or proxy for Japanese peacebuilding while not dealing with the critical issues of peacemaking and peace monitoring.

First, the issue of collective defense. The proposal to send the SDF for peace monitoring alongside other peace-fostering countries even if outside the UN framework is likely to be controversial in Japan given the Cabinet Legislation Bureau’s (CLB) narrow interpretation of Article 9, the famous no-war clause of the constitution. Japan’s ruling parties (the LDP (1955 – 2009) and subsequently the DPJ) have accepted the CLB’s narrow definition of Article 9 as permitting the country to be engaged only in “defensive” defense and does not recognize the right to collective defense. This, as mentioned earlier, makes the overseas dispatch of the SDF (even for humanitarian assistance) to conflict “grey” zones (where ceasefire might be inchoate) a liability as the SDF needs other friendly forces to protect its troops, as in the case of Iraq when the Dutch and the Australian forces protected the SDF. SDF troops cannot fire in defense of others; they are only permitted to use force to protect themselves. Even if Japan cannot be involved in peace enforcement in conflict areas because of its strategic culture and constitutional constraints, it should participate in peace monitoring in places where the prospects for a peace settlement and the post-conflict consolidation of peace are fair.

Second, the situation where there is no UN mandate. Many conflict resolutions in the world are outside the framework of the UN. Arguably, the UN is suffering from overstretch and cannot pos-sibly be involved in every regional conflict. The UN, in fact, is struggling to cope with the situation in Africa; in Southeast Asia what is important is that the region demonstrate that it takes care of its own conflicts, as reflected in the ASEAN’s establishment of the Institute of Peace and Reconciliation. Often, regional groupings, as in the case of ASEAN, or an individual country may take the lead in an attempt to address an intra-state conflict. For example, in the cases of Sri Lanka, Mindanao, and Aceh (places where Japan was involved in peacebuilding), their internal conflicts were not addressed by the UN but the leading countries of Norway, Malaysia, and Finland respectively.

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Third, stagnant politics that give rise to the two above problems. Many of Japan’s political leaders have little time, interest, or ideas for international affairs let alone knowledge about ethnic con-flict in places like Mindanao, Southern Thailand, or Sudan. A few politicians, such as former DPJ Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, may have romantic visions (including a vision of an East Asian Community) but no prominent politician has expressed a personal interest or commitment to peacebuilding. Nor are there fresh ideas from the wider political community about going beyond the limitations of a human security approach in Japan’s international relations, which so far provides palliative assistance to people suffering from internal conflict but does not address the political root causes of such conflict. No Japanese statesman personifies peacebuilding as do former President Jimmy Carter, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, and former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. Moreover, the foreign ministry has failed to publicize its efforts at peacebuilding abroad to win greater support and understanding from the media and general public. The intel-lectual class comprising academics, opinion makers, and talking heads in the media also lack solid knowledge and imagination about peacebuilding in concrete areas. They tend to be supportive of peacebuilding and international peace cooperation in general but usually have no concrete strate-gies to offer in specific areas suffering from internal conflict.

But the SDF has some of the best-equipped and best-trained personnel in the world. Since 2006, “maintaining international peace” has become one of the primary missions for the SDF, giving the SDF a sense of purpose apart from being the auxiliary force to the U.S. military under the secu-rity alliance (in case of invasion of Japan or an outbreak of regional crisis, such as in Taiwan or the Korean Peninsula). The SDF has been steadily enhancing operational readiness for UN peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and peace monitoring. For example, the SDF dispatched a thousand troops to Aceh for humanitarian assistance shortly after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The SDF mounted large-scale operations at home to cope with the aftermath of the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and severe accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Lacking are political vision, conviction, and courage on the part of the top political leadership to deploy the SDF like other “normal” countries for peacekeeping and peace-monitoring. These activities are fundamentally different from warfighting and resolving inter-state conflict by force.

On the other hand, Japanese civilian efforts led by JICA are also gaining valuable experience and accumulating expertise in addressing human security needs on the ground as well as in peace medi-ation. It is worth noting that Japan’s political role in conflict resolution, such as mediation, has great potential because Japanese involvement is not necessarily associated with great-power politics. By keeping a low political profile during the Cold War years Japan inadvertently gained the advantage of being regarded as a politically benign or neutral power in post-Cold War international politics, almost in spite of its other overwhelming identity as America’s most important ally in Asia. That

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is why, for example, Japan was invited to be part of the highly contentious peace negotiations in Mindanao, as a member of the International Monitoring Team. Although efforts in Sri Lanka, Aceh, and East Timor are regarded as a job only half done, that is because the concerned parties expected (and even desired) Japan to play a greater role. By contrast, a country engaged in a war on terror (i.e., the United States) cannot be expected to be a peace broker.

There are, however, green shoots sprouting in Japan that may support the peacebuilding endeavor in the long run. By 2011, many peacebuilding programs had been established in a number of leading Japanese universities and institutions, attracting academics, professionals, and students into this new field where virtually none existed a decade ago. Increasingly, some of these students are guided by altruism to become volunteers in peacebuilding abroad. Graduate students and young scholars of peacebuilding in Japan may also help generate “new thinking” in human security and peacebuilding, as the establishment of the Japan Association for Human Security Studies (JAHSS) demonstrates. Japan has also supported the establishment of peacebuilding centers not only in Hiroshima but also in Africa to train peacebuilders.10 JICA also has a well-established training center in Okinawa that is focused on human resource training and capacity building. These efforts are reinforced by Japanese practitioners in UN peacekeeping, the UN Commission of Human Security, and the UN Peacebuilding Commission, who can share their wealth of knowledge with others.

Although Japan’s peacebuilding with a human security approach has its shortcomings and hurdles to overcome, this is not to say that Japan’s contribution to international peacebuilding efforts has not made any difference to conflict-torn societies. Nor should Japanese human security diplomacy as an expanded form of its ODA be dismissed, just because Japan does not venture into danger zones. The question is, however, whether cooperating with the United States necessarily improves Japan’s peacebuilding diplomacy.

ConclusionAs stated in the beginning, peacebuilding comprises an array of approaches, tasks, and operations depending on the nature of the conflict; there is no “one size fits all” formula in peacebuilding. The timeline for peacebuilding also tends to be long, and those party to any peacebuilding process must be committed over a number of years for a job with no guarantee of success. It also involves various actors and various levels, from the highest level of international politics, such as the UN or other international/regional organizations, to the grassroots level of those actually in conflict. Therefore, there are various forms of international cooperation as well.

10 See Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center, The Program for Human Resource Development in Asia for Peacebuilding [Commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in Fiscal Year 2010] (Hiroshima: HPC, 2011).

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Japan-U.S. Cooperation in Peacebuilding: Between Potential and Pitfall

In considering the issue of Japan-U.S. cooperation, we should not lose sight of the differences: peacebuilding occupies a different position in the two countries’ foreign policy priorities, and their operational philosophies behind peacebuilding are also different. Even though the Japan-U.S. security alliance is resourceful, that does not necessarily translate to effective partnership in peacebuilding, especially the operational aspects of peacebuilding. That said, just as Operation Tomodachi has demonstrated, Japan and the United States can work effectively together on the ground where need be, especially in addressing human security needs. Bilateral cooperation in HA/DR is to be encour-aged and should be accorded an appropriate place in the alliance’s agenda. Where peacebuilding is concerned, however, Japan-U.S. policy cooperation and coordination presently can be effective at the pre-intervention, planning stages of peacebuilding. Working together in UN peacekeeping oper-ations would also be a welcome development that would help international peacebuilding efforts and enhance operational-level cooperation between Japan and the United States.

Selected BiliographyAkiyama Nobumasa. “Human Security at the Crossroad: Human Security in the Japanese Foreign Policy Context.” Conflict and Human Security: A Search for New Approaches of Peace-building. IPSHU English Research Report Series no.19. Hiroshima: Hiroshima University, 2004.

Atanassova-Cornelis, Elana. “Japan and the ‘Human Security’ Debate: History, Norms and Pro-active Foreign Policy.” Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3, no.2, 2005.

Benedek, Wolfgang, Matthias C. Kettemann, and Markus Mostl, eds.Mainstreaming Human Security in Peace Operations and Crisis Management: Policies, Problems, Potential. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Edstrom, Bert. Japan and Human Security: the Derailing of a Foreign Policy Vision. Institute for Security and Development Policy, March 2011.

———. Japan and the Challenge of Human Security: The Founding of a New Policy 1995 – 2003. Institute for Security and Development Policy, 2008.

Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center. The Program for Human Resource Development in Asia for Peacebuilding. Hiroshima: HPC, 2011.

JICA. “President Ogata’s Trip to the Philippines: Traveling to Mindanao Province.” September 19, 2006.

Koizumi, Junichiro, “Japan and ASEAN in East Asia: A Sincere and Open Partnership.” January 4, 2002.

———, “Japan and Australia: Towards a Creative Partnership.” May 1, 2002.

Lam Peng Er. Japan’s Peace-building Diplomacy in Asia: Seeking a More Active Political Role. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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———. “Japan’s Peace-building in Mindanao: Partnering the Philippines, Malaysia and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.” Japanese Studies 28, no.1, May 2008.

———. “Japan’s Human Security Role in Southeast Asia.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 28, no.1, April 2006.

———. “Has Japan Adopted a ‘New Thinking’ in Its Diplomacy?” In Rethinking Diplomacy: New Approaches and Domestic Challenges in East Asia and the European Union, edited by Lam Peng Er and Colin Duerkop. Seoul: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2011.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Japan’s Efforts at Peacebuilding: Towards Consolidation of Peace and Nation-building. Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2007.

———, “Statement by the Minister for Foreign Affairs on the Meeting between President Aquino of the Philippines and MILF Chairman Murad on the Mindanao Peace Process in the Philippines.” August 5, 2011.

Obuchi Keizo, “Toward the Creation of a Bright Future for Asia.” Lecture program hosted by the Institute for International Relations, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 16, 1998.

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Peacebuilding as a Joint Endeavor in the U.S.-Japan Alliance

5Peacebuilding as a Field of Joint

Endeavor in the Japan-U.S. AllianceThe View from an International Organizations’ Perspective

Philip Shetler-Jones

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

Interest in peacebuilding as a subset of peace operations has increased over the past two decades against the background of rising consciousness of the global interdependency of threats (for exam-

ple, malign emanations of failed states) and the imperative for alliances with their roots in the Cold War to become — and be seen to become — relevant to current security demands. With respect to state failure, the fragility of post-conflict stabilization (revealed in studies on the rate of relapse1 and recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan) prompts the reflection that the peacebuilding element of these efforts may merit greater investment. Regarding alliance concerns, in contrast to conven-tional military activities, the broader range of tasks involved in peacebuilding offers advantages for

1 The World Bank estimates that 40 percent of post-conflict countries relapse into conflict within ten years. World Bank,“Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries,” http://go.worldbank.org/BNFOS8V3S0.

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accommodating or taking advantage of the different capacities and comparative advantages offered by the United States and Japan. In short, peacebuilding may offer a way to tune the alliance to the zeitgeist of contemporary security concerns, but also to turn the asymmetries that have sometimes restricted U.S.-Japan cooperation to the alliance’s advantage.

The potential for closer cooperation in peacebuilding endeavors to add value and visibility to the U.S.-Japan alliance may be easier to capture if we pause to reflect on the concepts involved — most obviously peacebuilding itself — as well as the context for peacebuilding that prevails in those coun-tries chosen as case studies in this exercise. The first part of this paper scopes the term “peacebuilding,” identifying some of the prominent features that have influenced the development of the concept, and placing it in the context of related conceptual and operational themes. The second part of the paper looks at features of recent experience in Afghanistan and Sudan that frame the peacebuilding efforts in those countries, and which may also condition the insights they offer as case studies. The two features seen in both cases are the absence of a coordinating authority and the continuation of conflict alongside peacebuilding efforts. The effects of these are considered in relation to three questions that guide the studies that accompany this paper: the “whole of government” approach, national priorities, assets and expertise, and complementarity.

Scoping “Peacebuilding”Peacebuilding has recently made gains in stature relative to other concepts that evolved around

“peace operations” in the post-Cold War period. It has no fixed definition, but the working defi-nition that it covers “a range of activities aimed at making peace self-sustaining and reducing the risk of relapse into conflict” is generally accepted in practice.2 It is worth noting a few points about the context in which it evolved and how this may have influenced our current understanding and employment of the term.

Use of the term in the United Nations can be traced back almost two decades to UN Secretary General Boutros Ghali’s 1992 “An Agenda for Peace,” which defined post-conflict “peace-building” as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.”3 Another salient report that followed almost a decade of rather mixed UN experience in post-conflict interventions (the 2000 Brahimi report) described it thus:

Peace-building … defines activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassem-ble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war. Thus, peace-building includes but

2 DPKO/DFS, “Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding: Clarifying the Nexus,” September 2010, http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/PKO%20Peacebuilding%20Peacekeeping%20Nexus.pdf (accessed March 30, 2011).

3 United Nations, “An Agenda for Peace,” paragraph 21 and chapter 6, June 1, 1992, http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.htm.

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is not limited to reintegrating former combatants into civilian society, strengthening the rule of law (for example, through training and restructuring of local police, and judicial and penal reform); improving respect for human rights through the monitoring, edu-cation and investigation of past and existing abuses; providing technical assistance for democratic development (including electoral assistance and support for free media); and promoting conflict resolution and reconciliation techniques.4

Initially, there was a sense that peacebuilding follows peacekeeping in a linear sequence, but more recent studies and doctrines describe certain peacebuilding tasks as starting earlier in the sequence of post-conflict recovery.5 Any attempt to present these activities on a continuum therefore produces a degree of overlap between peacemaking, stabilization, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding.

The aftermath of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq drew attention to the theme of “stabilization” operations, which may also take place in the period of the conflict itself and as it (hopefully) starts to decline. The rising popularity of the term “stabilization” extends to UN peacekeeping, where it has even found its way into the titles of recently renamed operations (“stabilization” puts the “S” in the MINUSTAH mission — the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti — and in the MONUSCO mission — the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Definitions vary, but for the UK, “stabilization” is about establishing a legitimate government, and therefore “has explicitly political aims.”6 As we shall explore below, due to its “state-building” or

“nation-building” aspects, one could make the same observation about peacebuilding.

The following diagram is the author’s own attempt to present these various concepts to do with peace operations in a way that allows us to appreciate their overlap and their sequence in relation to conflict. They in no way reflect any UN or other official doctrine. The double-headed arrow to the right hand side indicates the scope of activities, which is also reflected in the different height of the shaded areas — thin for military and/or political objectives, broader for others such as prevention, peacemaking, and peacebuilding that take in a range of issues commensurate with the character of the conflict in question (including development and state-building efforts across a wider range of professional disciplines). Peacekeeping is somewhere between the narrow, security-centered scope of stabilization and the wider scope of the conflict itself and of peacebuilding.

The typology could be described as follows:

•  Conflict prevention can begin any time and, since it aims to prevent violent conflict, it shares some features with peacebuilding. As for its termination point, obviously it ends in failure when war begins.

4 United Nations, “Report on the Panel on United Nations Operations” [Brahimi report], paragraph 13, October 2000, http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations/.

5 DPKO/DFS 2010.6 UK Stabilisation Unit, “The UK Approach to Stabilisation, Stabilisation Unit Guidance Notes,” November 2008, http://

www.stabilisationunit.gov.uk/attachments/article/520/Stabilisation_guide[1].pdf (accessed March 30, 2011).

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•  Peacemaking could be seen as a relatively “broad church” if one considers the full spectrum between diplomatic activities such as mediation and coercive action such as sanctions or inter-ventions by force designed to bring the conflict to an end. All such activity may be conducted at any time during the conflict, but should be considered complete when the parties not only agree to “cease fire,” but commit via a peace agreement or other accord that comprises a process of resolving their conflict through peaceful means.

•  Stabilization operations may (as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan) continue within the timespan of the conflict itself, and may continue for some time afterwards, depending on how rapidly secu-rity is restored, but they tend to be rather narrowly focused on security and political objectives.

•  Peacekeeping may be initiated very early in this sequence to assist in sustaining a cease-fire and “hold the ring” through the conclusion of negotiations on a peace agreement, the imple-mentation of its terms, and even beyond. The functions of peacekeeping substantially overlap those of stabilization, but tend to embrace a wider scope of activities, depending on the agree-ment reached. Ideally, stabilization is a short-term endeavor and may take place in the absence of a peace agreement. In contrast to that ideal, we can observe a recent trend of peacekeeping operations that continue running even beyond the point at which the implementation of the agreement that they were created to support has largely been completed. Such operations may stay on to fulfill some of the state’s functions or continue the task of building state capacity (for example, UNMIL in Liberia, MONUC and MONUSCO in DRC, and the missions in what has become Timor Leste). Some missions led by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) came into existence without being based on any peace agreement at all (for example,

Prevention Peace-making Stabilization Peacekeeping Peacebuilding

War

Cease-�re ------- Peace Agreement

Scope

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MINUSTAH in Haiti). This is one of the factors that have increased the difficulty of making a clean or exclusive distinction between peacekeeping and peacebuilding. This view is also reflected in the recent trend to describe peacekeepers as “early peacebuilders.”7

This brings us to peacebuilding, which has tended over recent years to move toward the left of the above diagram, that is, its activities now begin in the “immediate aftermath” of the conflict.8 One could argue however that it is not possible to talk seriously about peacebuilding until there is a peace to build, which is why in the diagram peacebuilding activity is represented as beginning not after a cease-fire, but after the conclusion of an agreement, which (ideally) comprises the “road map” toward consolidated peace as committed to (ideally) by the parties to the conflict.

A recent DPKO/DFS study characterized the relationship between these concepts as a “nexus”:9

7 DPKO/DFS, “Strategy for Early Peacebuilding,” forthcoming 2011.8 UN Secretary General, “Report of the Secretary General on Peacebuilding in the Immediate Aftermath of Conflict,”

June 11, 2009 (A/63/881 – S /2009/304), http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/topic,45a5199f2,465575a62,4a4c6c3b2,0.html (accessed March 30 2011).

9 DPKO/DFS 2010 (see textbox).

Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping: Clarifying the Nexus of What Peacebuilding Is•  Peacebuilding is primarily a national challenge and responsibility, and national factors will largely shape its

pace and sequencing. An early and sustained focus on national capacity development is a central theme of the UN system’s engagement in peacebuilding.

•  Peacebuilding is a fundamentally political process requiring ongoing political mediation, the strengthening of national capacities at several levels for conflict management, and sensitivity to the political, historical, eco-nomic and cultural context and dynamics.

•  Peacebuilding entails a range of activities aimed at making peace self-sustaining and reducing the risk of relapse into conflict. Peacebuilding may begin prior to the arrival of a peacekeeping mission and always continues beyond its departure. It is supported by a variety of national and international actors, happens at different levels (political, operational, technical, national, sub-national, etc.) and across many closely linked sectors.

•  Peacebuilding priorities vary in response to the demands of each context, but typically include support to (i) basic safety and security including protection of civilians and rule of law, (ii) inclusive political processes, (iii) delivery of basic services, (iv) restoring core government functions, and (v) economic revitalization. The resto-ration or extension of legitimate state authority, including a basic degree of political consensus and financing, is typically one of the fundamental conditions for sustainable peace.

•  While the above reflects the concept as articulated in numerous Secretary-General’s reports (starting with ‘Agenda for Peace’ in 1992 through to the 2009 report on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict), the roles and responsibilities of different actors and inter-governmental organs within the UN system and the relative importance of different types of support remain the subject of discussion among Member States. For this reason, different constituencies continue to use the term ‘peacebuilding’ in ways that may diverge from each other and from the concept as articulated in reports of the Secretary-General.

•  In addition, the fragmented international system to support peacebuilding creates a number of systemic obstacles to coherence, continuity and predictability. This includes the need to draw from disparate financing streams of varying reliability and with different funding cycles across different parts of the UN system and beyond.

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This brief review would be incomplete without mention of recent efforts toward the institutionaliza-tion of peacebuilding into the UN architecture but, without wishing to denigrate efforts in this regard, it seems fair to say that progress in this has lagged behind the advance of academic and conceptual thinking. The main feature of institutional development has been the establishment in 2005 of the intergovernmental Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), along with the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) and the Peacebuilding Fund (PBF). The secretary general listed its functions as follows:

The Commission’s establishment in 2005 reflects Member States’ recognition of the need for a dedicated United Nations mechanism to sustain attention, mobilize resources and improve coherence while addressing critical gaps, needs and priorities in countries emerging from conflict.10

The PBC has taken on to its agenda countries that were beyond the “immediate aftermath” stage (first two years), such as Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, and Liberia.11 The PBF has dispersed money to a wider range of countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, Haiti, Kenya, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan (DDR) (Immediate Response Facility), as well as Nepal and Comoros (Peacebuilding Recovery Facility).12 However, when one considers the tens of millions of dollars the PBF disperses globally each year ($50 million in 2009, less than $80 million in 2010) across more than ten countries, this should be seen in comparison to the budgets for stabilization or peacekeeping, where the larger individual missions have annual budgets in the range of $1 billion (Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo) or multi-billions (Afghanistan). This is not simply a matter of the institution’s material significance; the PBC and PBSO have not filled the role of overall strategic coordination of peacebuilding efforts, which remains a void in the international institu-tional architecture. Rather than dwelling further on these institutional shortcomings, we now turn to examine a few salient features of peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Case Study: Afghanistan

UN in Afghanistan

The UN’s peacebuilding involvement in Afghanistan has been long and slow to show success. The factors constraining the UN’s effort are generally significant in that they are related to difficulties that, while particularly obvious in this case, are by no means unique to Afghanistan: 1) the relative peace following the successful toppling of the Taliban in 2001 has proved transient, with effects that complicate peacebuilding activity; and 2) there is a lack of unity of purpose and authority to govern or coordinate peacebuilding resources, planning, and activity. Let’s look at these in turn.

10 UN Secretary General, paragraph 25.11 Peacebuilding Commission, “Peacebuilding Commission Agenda,” http://www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding/pbcagenda.

shtml (accessed March 31 2011).12 Peacebuilding Fund, http://www.unpbf.org/irf.shtml (accessed May 5, 2011).

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The fact that the conflict has re-ignited over the decade since the Bonn Agreement complicates the process of peacebuilding in several ways. Ongoing conflict and insecurity restrict access, drive up the costs of the civilian presence (due to the need for expensive protection facilities), and put obstacles in the way of attracting people with the right skills to come and work in Afghanistan. They also make it harder for the Karzai government to survive any reform of the security sector or reconfiguration of its members that might diminish its short-term ability to counter the insurgency.

As for the second point, the international effort is split between the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the UN Security Council-led Special Political Mission (SPM) UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). The coordination of peacebuilding is further diffused among other actors such as the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) and a particularly large number of national and international NGOs. Suggestions to appoint a “tsar” to lead the international coordination have come to nothing. Is the UN capable of fulfilling a coordi-nation role for peacebuilding? One of the reasons it is not is perceived partiality: its identification with the internationally recognized authority since Bonn (which excluded the Taliban from power) puts it firmly on one “side,” counter to one of the traditional principles of peacekeeping — neutrality.

The two challenges (ongoing conflict and lack of overall coordination) are mutually reinforcing. For instance, although the UN would be a natural place to look for coordination, as noted above, the conflict makes it difficult for the UN to take a neutral position because of where it sits in terms of relations to the main parties. Unlike traditional peacekeeping, where the UN sits between two parties to a conflict, here, the UN sits between the GoIRA and the international community. Neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda is party to any form of agreement or cease-fire with any other actor. However, since it is itself little more than a representative of the members of that international community, the UN is hardly capable of claiming neutrality in this relationship either.

This points to another difficulty with peacebuilding in situations of ongoing conflict. Peacekeeping is, in its classical form, a rather technical process in that it provides a conflict resolution service to both sides regardless of their political position. This has historically been the reason why neu-trality became one of its operating principles. By contrast, peacebuilding is an explicitly politicized process, in that it supports the internationally recognized national institutions of government in extending their authority, including by force, across their territory. When engaged in peacebuild-ing in situations of ongoing conflict, the international community sides with the state against the rest, or the insurgents.

As a consequence of this partiality, the international approach to state building in such settings finds it more difficult to respect another of the tenets of peacebuilding: “national ownership.” It is important in this context to remember the difference between the nation and the state. Privileging national ownership by using the government as a focus for international support is reasonable only insofar as it is safe to assume that the government is representative of the nation. In Afghanistan

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this was brought into focus by the problems that ensued regarding the UN’s role when questions arose around the legitimacy of the Karzai government following the last national elections. The elec-tions issue led to the noisy departure of the deputy special representative to the secretary general (SRSG), Mr. Peter Galbraith, shortly followed by the resignation of the SRSG himself, Mr. Kai Eide. This illustrates one of the potential implications of the differences between national ownership and government ownership.

The current situation of the international involvement in Afghanistan is dominated by the planned withdrawal of NATO combat forces and the transition of leadership and ownership of security responsibility to the Afghan government — the so-called Kabul Process. This leads us on to some of the other relevant issues of the peacebuilding context, which flow from the presence and role of the other major international organization active in Afghanistan — NATO.

NATO and Afghanistan

Before discussing NATO’s activities in Afghanistan, it is worth noting some of its recent contribu-tions in the area of peacebuilding and the Alliance’s development of the “comprehensive approach” doctrine in recent years. Although NATO is principally a military alliance, without much histori-cal experience of mobilizing its civilian peacebuilding capabilities (with the possible exception of aspects of security sector reform), it has recently developed a strong doctrinal interest in stabiliza-tion and reconstruction (S&R) activities, which overlap to some extent with peacebuilding. Why should this be so?

Like the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, NATO developed an interest in peace consol-idation as it became involved in countries struggling to end or emerge from some form of internal conflict. Unlike the situation in countries emerging from inter-state conflicts, international support to countries recovering from internal or “civil” wars has to be directed at the root causes — rather than the symptoms — of the conflict, or else they risk the political and economic cost of having to return. As these causes tend to lie in political, economic, social, or cultural areas of life, action designed to address them has to be designed and implemented according to the principles of social and political, rather than diplomatic or military, science. Very often, the security situation needs to be stabilized for a period to create conditions that allow this peacebuilding activity to take effect. NATO has recently decided to commit to developing the means to carry out stabilization and recon-struction missions in such situations (see the latest Strategic Concept adopted at its Lisbon Summit in November 2010). However, an international security presence capable of doing this is not only expensive, it may increasingly be hard to sustain politically when the peacebuilding actions are not seen to be delivering on their promises. As domestic political pressure to curtail seemingly open-ended military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan started to build, the need for the military to hand over to other national or international civilian authorities has been brought into sharper focus. So while NATO, like the UN Security Council, may not have the means to carry out actions to make

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peace gains “irreversible,” they have an institutional interest in seeing these processes succeed. The imperative of developing an exit strategy for military interventions has thus driven more attention to supporting the success of peacebuilding. Hence NATO’s recent interest in promoting its contri-bution to the “comprehensive approach.”

In the period since embarking on its intervention in Afghanistan, NATO has clearly recognized the need for military operations to be embedded in an overarching strategy with military efforts contributing to a wider comprehensive approach that includes humanitarian, diplomatic, devel-opment, and governance initiatives. This was articulated in the 2008 Bucharest Summit and made part of NATO’s latest Strategic Concept, adopted in November 2010. However, it will take some time for NATO allies to put in place the practical means to implement these policy decisions. In Afghanistan, despite the encouragement of some high-level officials, talk of a “civilian surge” has so far been just that — talk.13

The second issue besetting NATO’s efforts to contribute to a comprehensive approach in Afghanistan is the lack of unity of purpose among the international community. This is the pre-requisite for an internationally agreed comprehensive approach to which NATO could contribute. In Afghanistan there is no obvious focal point for the articulation of this unity of purpose and effort. The default options are the UN or the host government. However, on these issues the UN is dominated by the Security Council, which may not be a suitable authority from which NATO can accept coordination. Two of the UN Security Council permanent members, Russia and China, are not always guaranteed to share NATO interests. Leaving aside Security Council politics, one may wonder if it is realistic to expect that NATO would subordinate its military command to a political appointee who takes direction from the Security Council. Could we imagine General Petreaus taking orders from Kai Eide? The second option is the host government, but it hardly seems realistic for the host govern-ment to provide this focus in cases where it is exactly that government’s weakness that is the target of continued international state-building efforts.

Case Study: Sudan

UN in Sudan

The UN presence in post-conflict Sudan is largely matched to the role allocated to it in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended the war between the Khartoum govern-ment and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), based mainly in the south. The UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) began with the completion of that agreement and supported the par-ties (governments of north and southern Sudan) in implementing its terms. In 2006 a UN-African Union hybrid Assistance Mission in Sudan’s western province of Darfur (UNAMID) was deployed

13 Josh Boak, “In Afghanistan, U.S. ‘Civilian Surge’ Falls Short in Building Local Government,” Washington Post, March 8, 2011.

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to protect civilians and support the implementation of a fledgling peace process in Darfur. UNMIS and UNAMID are separate missions but both report to the UN Security Council. The UN has begun preparations for a reconfiguration of the UN presence in Sudan to account for the end of the period covered by the CPA. There is a broad expectation that the international peacebuilding effort in Sudan will to continue in the soon-to-be newly independent country of South Sudan, and perhaps also in Sudan to the north.

Peacebuilding in Sudan

Although the CPA provided for a host of peacebuilding-related activities in Sudan, these were retarded because of the low level of trust between the parties and fear of renewed conflict. Because of slow progress on many of the confidence building measures designed into the CPA, as well as more fun-damental issues (such as border demarcation, the status of the Abyei region, revenue sharing), both sides have neglected other areas of activity related to peacebuilding — notably security sector reform.

Other contingencies have contributed to the slow rate of progress on peacebuilding. In the north, the conflict in Darfur has continued its slow burn since 2004. Khartoum has also had to contend with another armed separatist movement in the east. Some of these regional issues in the north are tied directly to the ambitions of would-be rivals to the ruling party, such as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), who are accused of using the Darfur crisis as a way of unseating President Bashir’s government in Khartoum. In South Sudan there are other reasons why there has been little peace to build. First, the “other armed groups” (some formerly in receipt of support from Khartoum) have only gradually and incompletely been brought within the formal military and state structures governing South Sudan from the new capital in Juba. Some still reject the authority of the Juba government, senior members of which accuse them of receiving support from the north, which Khartoum denies. Then there is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which remains active in areas bordering Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As with Afghanistan, efforts to build peace progress slowly if at all against a headwind of continuing conflict that constantly threat-ens to drive them backwards.

A second point Sudan has in common with Afghanistan is that many of the factors limiting the UN role in peacebuilding are related to doubts about its impartiality. Because of the situation in Darfur since 2003, the UN Security Council has taken a series of actions against the government of Sudan (sanctions, referral to the International Criminal Court, or ICC, and so on) that alienated the UN from the host government, and compromised the traditional peacekeeping principles of neutrality and impartiality. It is difficult to say whether the UN would have had more success in getting the parties to implement the CPA and in advancing peacebuilding efforts had it not been for Darfur, but its effect on relations between Khartoum and the UN has certainly not made this task any easier.

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Guiding Questions

The “Whole of Government” Approach

There is general consensus that because peacebuilding ranges across a wide scope of diplomatic, security, political, governance, rights, development, and economic issues, and consequently draws on an equally wide range of authorities for planning, implementing, resourcing, and funding, it requires a degree of coordination. A key UN report on peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict notes that:

Within the international community, the United Nations has a critical and significant role to play in peacebuilding. At the same time, the United Nations system is only one of several actors working to support post-conflict countries, and the coherence of this broader interna-tional effort is key to helping countries to succeed in their efforts to construct a viable peace.14

Even after almost twenty years of considering peacebuilding, we continue to face the challenge that we lack any authority accepted as responsible for and capable of coordinating efforts in these areas. However, even if one body such as the United Nations were chosen, there remains a second issue, which is its reliance on governments to provide the legal basis, the resources, and the funding to carry out peacebuilding activities. Some funding (for example, the peacekeeping budget) is auto-matic: like the overall UN budget, funds are paid according to an assessment of the member states’ wealth. This form of “assessed contributions” is a fixed cost of UN membership. However, much of the funding for peacekeeping activity comes not from this assessed contribution, but from “voluntary contributions,” which are bilateral transfers at member states’ discretion. These voluntary contri-butions are subject to appeals processes and the variable contingencies of member states’ interests and budget priorities, so are less predictable than the fixed sums from assessed contributions. This lack of predictability presents an obvious challenge for sustaining the kind of multi-year programs required to address deep-rooted problems of peace consolidation.

In addition to this, funding that is forthcoming comes not centrally from a member state, but from one or other of its ministries. This means the lack of a joined-up approach to government presents the UN with a situation where different parts of its member states’ governments relate independently to different parts of the UN. What happens when the independent parts of the UN meet the inde-pendent parts of its member states’ governments is not conducive to a coordinated international response. For example, very often political direction and legal direction come from the ministry of foreign affairs, military resources from the ministry of defense, development funding from overseas aid agencies, and these elements are delivered according to the individual imperatives of each minis-try, rather than according to a national strategy. The existence of a national security council or other joint mechanism such as the “stabilization” units set up in the United States (Department of State

14 UN Secretary General, paragraph 5.

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Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, or S/CRS), the UK (Stabilization Unit), Canada (Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force, or START), the Netherlands (Peacebuilding and Stabilization Unit), Denmark (Stabilization Unit), and others would raise the expectation that coordination of this support could be achieved, but even where they exist, such institutions are rarely given the authority or capability to do so. Even if they had such powers, decisions on the allocation of resources would still need to be anchored in an authoritative assessment of national priorities, assets, and expertise.

Identification of National Priorities, Assets, and Expertise

The first difficulty in this task is in conducting a process for determining national priorities and directing the use or development of assets and expertise, that is above the institutional interests of existing government organs, which tend to skew the conclusions to favor entrenched interests. This may be assisted by the creation of a national security council or similar mechanism that is above other ministries, but this alone is not sufficient; however well structured, such a mechanism still requires the highest standards of national leadership with the vision to inspire and carry public support.

A second issue that is of relatively stronger importance with peacebuilding compared to peacekeep-ing or peacemaking is the need to appreciate and accept the longer duration of the overall effort, and the implications of this for total costs. This is exacerbated in the cases of Afghanistan and Sudan by the way ongoing conflict produces conditions in which progress is hard to realize, and even harder to demonstrate over a relatively short time. This has implications for the task of securing long-term material and moral support from the domestic constituencies whose calls that “nation building begins at home” get louder as time goes by.

A third issue arises from the way “nation building” aspects of peacebuilding may resemble domes-tic priorities in a way that makes comparisons with international action both easier and perhaps invidious to the sustainability of support to the latter. For both Japan and the United States, natural disasters and economic pressures that have afflicted both countries in recent years may sharpen the argument that nation-building efforts should “begin at home.” Pressure on public spending has intensified in both countries, either due to long-term trends in Japan or due to the extension of gov-ernment borrowing to meet the costs of bailouts in America. Domestic causes that compete for the assets and resources required to meet short-term disaster needs and (re)construct infrastructure include the 2005 hurricane Katrina in America and for Japan the effects of the recent earthquake and Fukushima nuclear incident.

Complementarity — Strengths and Weaknesses

Any institution subject to less than rigorous external evaluation will be vulnerable to a tendency toward measuring its performance in terms of its inputs, rather than the outcomes or effects of its activities. This phenomenon is sometimes put more lyrically in the expression: “When all you have

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is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” When it comes to complementary or comparative advantage in support to peacebuilding, unless focus is maintained on outcomes and effects, the risk is of giving this tendency free play to the detriment of the overall objectives in the target country. It is also worth noting that there is no institution that has been designed specifically for peacebuilding. Rather, nations with an intention to contribute to peacebuilding rely on the tools they have, which were designed for other purposes and may be slow to adapt. Absent a view that peacebuilding will continue to be a sustained area of national effort into the future, and if the tasks for which these tools were designed are not deemed obsolete, this will only reduce the pressure on them to adapt at all.

Keeping this “institutional inertia” factor in mind, given existing capabilities, the obvious division of labor is for the United States to carry the burden of the dangerous and “kinetic” tasks, while Japan takes care of the finance. But there are reasons to query this model.

For one thing, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) have a wealth of experience in working among the population in response to civil emergencies, such as extreme weather (heavy snowfall) and natu-ral disasters (earthquake, tsunami). This practice has accustomed the Japanese military to working among the civilian population, as well as refining skills in civil engineering and coordination with civil authorities. A military with such skills has obvious value in deploying “among the people,” in situations where civil society harbors doubts about foreign forces or has bitter memories of hostile military occupation.

Japan has undoubtedly been generous, but money on its own can be a blunt instrument, and a raw injection of finance may carry its own risks. For instance, Afghanistan rates among the lowest coun-tries on the international ranking of corruption.15 A huge injection of cash to central authorities with weak accountability mechanisms and limited absorptive capacity in their institutions is practically guaranteed to contribute to problems of corruption. Corruption in turn weakens government per-formance and alienates it from the population. In the peacebuilding phase, where one of the main efforts is to restore public trust in government, this carries the risk of counter-productive effects.

These points are just to hint at the need to look again at stereotyped expectations of the Japanese or U.S. contributions.

One clue to complementarity can be seen in the different attitudes Japan and the United States take to the tasks of state building or nation building, which are inherent to peacebuilding. According to the website of the permanent mission of Japan to the UN, Japan defines peacebuilding as “consoli-dation of peace and nation-building, and takes a multifaceted approach to strengthening the political, economic and social frameworks of the relevant country, while promoting the peace process, security

15 Afghanistan is one of the handful of only 9 countries ranked at the maximum level of “highly corrupt” at number 176 out of 178 countries in the 2010 report of the organization Transparency International. Transparency International,

“Corruption Perceptions Index 2010,” 2010, http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results.

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and stability [italics added].”16 It has been noted that “the very words ‘nation building’ were akin to an expletive when George W. Bush ran for the White House four years ago.”17. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is said to have noted with reference to nation building that in the Bush administration the 82nd Airborne would not be walking children to school. Japan appears to harbor no such aversion, possibly because it has the experience of being the object of such efforts itself. This is an area of complementarity that probably deserves more attention.

The respective strengths of the United States and Japan are somewhat offset by a common weak-ness — both countries lack institutions with a highly developed capability of comprehending foreign societies in a way that would enable them to wield raw military and financial power in ways that meet peacebuilding objectives. In the military sphere, it is training more than fighting that will enable the government to stand on its feet. In the financial sphere, it is not spending power, but capability in the responsible management of resources that will gain the government credibility and enable it to deliver services in a sustainable fashion. Both these activities pose challenges in that they entail a much closer understanding of and partnership with national authorities. This means speaking their language, living and working alongside them. Neither American nor Japanese officials are claiming these qualities as a particular strength of their system, but most would recognize their importance.

ConclusionsThe first generally relevant factor reflected in these two cases is the absence of an overall coordi-nating authority for determining peacebuilding strategies, which would be expected to conduct an assessment of needs, as well as determine ways of meeting them in line with the comparative advan-tages of the various actors involved. The implication of this absence is that peacebuilding tends to be driven by supply-sided logic. This can ultimately undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of overall efforts, which in turn undermines support among the publics of contributing countries. It certainly does not help to address the problems of lack of “joined-up” government. Nor does it help solve the issue of comparative advantage among donors.

Another thing Afghanistan and Sudan have in common is that peacebuilding efforts are being pushed forward in the context of ongoing conflict, so in a sense one could say that “there is no peace to build.” In Sudan, since the signing of the CPA, the governments in both Khartoum and Juba (north and south) have continued combat operations in their struggles against rebel and insurgent move-ments, not to mention maintaining a level of military preparedness as a hedge against the need to resume fighting against each other, by proxy or otherwise. Likewise in Afghanistan, since the Bonn Agreement, while efforts have been made at peacebuilding, fighting with the Taliban and Al Qaeda has steadily escalated to the point where it presents a major obstacle to peacebuilding efforts.

16 Permanent Mission of Japan to the UN, “Peacebuilding,” http://www.un.emb-japan.go.jp/topics.en/peacebuilding.html (accessed March 30 2011).

17 Wayne Washington, “Once against Nation-building, Bush Now Involved,” Boston Globe, March 2, 2004.

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The continuation of combat operations has various implications not only for the costs and sub-stantive challenges facing peacebuilding efforts, but also for the scope of participation by civilian institutions. Security or even existential imperatives limit parties’ willingness to adjust to post-con-flict conditions of governance (democracy, accountability, switching out wartime partners for those capable of meeting norms of inclusiveness and expertise). A government that is simultaneously trying to manage a conflict and a post-conflict reconstruction may not wish to make the kind of adjustments expected of it, particularly in the area of security sector reform. It may need to keep certain partners whose awkwardness in the new political context must be overlooked because they possess the military means to help the ruling authority prevail or survive in the short-term security environment. As well as trading off long-term political changes for short-term needs, ongoing or anticipated conflict also weakens the incentive for host governments to switch resources from the security sector to other areas of governance and service delivery. Finally, the fact that a government is either at war or feels forced to remain on a war footing may make it harder for external partners like Japan and the United States to assist, either because offering support to a belligerent clashes with other norms or criteria of foreign policy, or because it involves the external partner in a wider international confrontation.

To the extent that these phenomena (lack of coordinating authority, peacebuilding on a war footing) are not limited to these case studies, they may need to be incorporated into our exploration of the potential for peacebuilding as an arena for alliance cooperation. The danger is that these phenom-ena are deeply antithetical to peacebuilding itself, that is, the lack of a coordinating authority forces contributing nations to work through the government, while at the same time the government’s need to remain on a war footing acts as a fundamental obstacle to progress in peacebuilding. This suggests more radical approaches are not only possible, but may be necessary. The United States and Japan could cooperate on building institutional capacity at the UN to serve as the focus for coordinating peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict. Going even further upstream in the peace process, the allies could cooperate to design effective peacemaking processes that deliver more reliable agreements, reducing the chances that combat continues, thus improving the chances of peace building approaches later on.

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6The U.S. Approach to Peacebuilding

From a Whole-of-Government to a Whole-of-Alliance Approach with Japan

Weston S. Konishi and Charles T. McClean

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

Perhaps nothing speaks more about the challenges of post-conflict stabilization and rehabilitation than the fact that the United States remains deeply engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq roughly a

decade after the Bush administration’s decision to invade those two nations as part of its global war on terror. The experience of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq underscores the complex-ities of modern-day military interventions and the subsequent challenges involved in stabilizing and rebuilding war-torn states. Similar challenges apply to the host of fragile or failed states that threaten to cause instability in neighboring countries and to have negative implications for global peace and security.

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Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, failed states have multiplied at an alarming rate, requiring increased attention and action from the international community in general and from the United States (still the world’s “global policeman”) in particular. Today, struggling or failed states, many of which suffer from post-conflict devastation, range from Afghanistan to Somalia and from Haiti to Sudan. Their unstable polities leave them vulnerable to terrorist and extremist groups, insurgents, local militia forces, organized criminals, and other illicit networks. Disease, poverty, land disputes, religious conflict, and oppression of women and ethnic minorities often go hand in hand with their dire socio-economic circumstances.

Over the past decade, the United States has tried to respond to these myriad challenges, but it has generally done so in an ad hoc manner, lacking consistent policies or strategies and a full appreciation of on-the-ground realities. This is despite the fact that successive U.S. administra-tions have highlighted weak or failed states as a top national security concern since Al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a safe haven to launch terrorist attacks on 9/11. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy proclaimed that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”1 More recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has argued that “Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main secu-rity challenge of our time.”2

Along with the recognition that failing states pose a direct threat to U.S. security interests, the United States has typically relied on a military-led approach to stabilizing and rebuilding fragile, post-con-flict states. This is partly due to the fact that the entry point for reconstruction and rehabilitation operations in war-torn and fractured states has often involved combat-related missions to quell armed insurgents or to keep the peace between warring factions.

But another factor in the military-centric nature of these operations has been the preponderance of resources (human, financial, and material) available to the armed forces compared to civilian dip-lomatic and aid agencies. It is often said, for instance, that the U.S. government has fewer personnel in its diplomatic corps and foreign aid agencies than in its military marching bands. Additionally, the military generally has stronger organizational and planning capabilities compared to civilian agencies in the federal government. 3

1 The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/, 1.

2 Robert M. Gates, “Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of U.S. Security Assistance,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010.

3 See Nina M. Serafino, “Peacekeeping/Stabilization and Conflict Transitions: Background and Congressional Action on the Civilian Response/Reserve Corps and Other Civilian Stabilization and Reconstruction Capabilities,” Congressional Research Service, CRS Report to Congress, February 5, 2009.

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Given the heavy reliance on the military, it is perhaps not surprising that the U.S. approach to peace-building4 in post-conflict states has tended to emphasize what the military does best: stabilization measures aimed at providing a basic level of security in fragile states where insurgents, warring factions, and other hostile elements threaten the peace. While stabilization is a critical element of post-conflict reconstruction, it is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Stabilization operations must go hand in hand with a full range of development measures in order to create sustainable con-ditions for post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation.

The U.S. military has taken on development tasks — often effectively — but long-term success in the field will depend on leveraging the full resources and capabilities of the U.S. government.5 The U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has highlighted the fact that swift military victories over hostile regimes do not necessarily lead to long-term success in stabilizing post-conflict states. While mil-itary-led stabilization operations can provide a requisite level of security for reconstruction efforts, long-term stability depends on a broader range of initiatives, such as institution building and civil society development, that are better suited for civilian agencies — provided they have the resources to carry them out.

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing consensus among U.S. policy makers for a “whole of gov-ernment” approach to post-conflict peacebuilding operations. Yet this has proven to be an elusive goal. A major problem has been the lack of a lead agency for planning, coordinating, and implement-ing an integrated peacebuilding policy, despite the establishment in 2004 of the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) mandated to fulfill such a role. Another is the ongoing imbalances in funding, manpower, and material resources that are allocated to the military as opposed to civilian agencies involved in peacebuilding operations.

The U.S. effort to bring about a comprehensive approach to peacebuilding therefore is a work in prog-ress, with significant discrepancies remaining between the range of military and civilian resources deployed in the field. One way to make up for this discrepancy is for the United States to turn to its allies and partners for additional support. Partner nations can, in some cases, help compen-sate for areas where the U.S. peacebuilding effort is either under-resourced or comparatively weak. For instance, partner nations, not to mention partner international organizations such as the UN

4 Peacebuilding is closely associated with the United Nations, since the term was introduced in the UN’s 1992 report “An Agenda for Peace” as a core post-Cold War UN mission (following peacemaking and peacekeeping). The report described peacebuilding broadly as “action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solid-ify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.” It was later defined by the UN and others to emphasize integrated and coordinated actions (by various groups) aimed at addressing the root causes of violence in a country and to help restore order and resuscitate governing institutions, the rule of law, and the provision of public goods and services. The overarching task of all this coordinated humanitarian assistance, developmental and financial aid, technical assistance, security support and training, political dialogue, and other measures is to build up three key pillars of the nation-state, namely security, capacity, and legitimacy.

5 Secretary Gates has frequently warned of the “creeping militarization” of U.S. aid and development initiatives and has advocated a rebalancing of resources toward civilian agencies.

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Department for Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) or the UN Development Program (UNDP), can be stronger in the development side of peacebuilding operations and can fill critical roles in state building that the United States is either unwilling or unable to undertake on its own given other mission priorities.

Japan, for instance, is one of America’s closest allies and, as a major economy and international aid donor, is a nation that can bring unique assets to peacebuilding operations. A self-proclaimed

“civilian power,” Japan has promoted comprehensive peacebuilding measures and is one of the more proficient of America’s allies in this field, making important contributions in both the theory and the practice of peacebuilding in countries such as Cambodia, Timor Leste, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, among others.

In many ways, Japan’s approach to peacebuilding represents the flipside of the U.S. approach, stress-ing the development side of operations over security and stabilization. This is a reflection of Japan’s constitutional restrictions on the exercise of collective self-defense and its relatively limited mili-tary resources other than those strictly used for defending the homeland. Japan’s avoidance of “hard power” solutions to international disputes has led it to pursue and support alternative areas of inter-national security. For that reason, it has been at the forefront of promoting “human security” as a new security paradigm,6 spearheading numerous high-level conferences on the subject and devoting considerable diplomatic and economic resources to human-security initiatives.

Thus, given their respective strengths and weaknesses, along with their foundational ties as stra-tegic allies, there is enormous potential for enhanced cooperation between the United States and Japan in the peacebuilding field. At a time when the United States is struggling to fully implement a whole-of-government approach to peacebuilding — one that integrates military and civilian resources across multiple agencies — there could be opportunities to work more closely with Japan to develop a comprehensive whole-of-alliance approach to peacebuilding operations.

Both allies have made modest progress on this front. They have talked about increasing peacebuild-ing cooperation in the past, most notably in their February 2005 U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee (2+2) joint statement.7 In October 2009, the two allies launched the U.S.-Japan Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) Senior Mission Leaders (SML) course, a training course for

6 Hideaki Asahi writes that human security “… initially drawn from the 1994 Human Development Report by the UNDP, is composed of two functional elements: ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want.’ It subsequently developed in two directions: while the ‘primary emphasis is on security in the face of political violence,’ another approach emphasizes, among other matters, ‘the interrelatedness of different types of security and the importance of development.’ In prac-tice, the latter, steadfastly supported by Japan, is a valid approach to deal with the underlying problems of post-conflict peace-building through protection and empowerment.” See Hideaki Asahi, “Peace-Building in Practice: Lessons from the Ground: Forging Japan’s New Strategy for Peace Building,” a paper adapted from a chapter in Human Security (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2008).

7 See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Joint Statement: U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee,” paragraph 11, February 19, 2005, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/scc/pdfs/joint0502.pdf.

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leaders of UN peacekeeping operations (PKO).8 Finally, the bilateral Peace Operations Working Group (POWG) has been established to plan and conceptualize bilateral collaboration in a range of humanitarian and reconstruction activities such as peacekeeping cooperation, maritime security, and disaster relief operations.

However, bilateral peacebuilding cooperation as a whole is a new field of endeavor and remains rela-tively underdeveloped. A more institutionalized and effective bilateral mechanism for peacebuilding cooperation in fragile states, such as Afghanistan and Sudan, could help demonstrate mutual alli-ance value while simultaneously contributing to global stability and national security. At the same time, a whole-of-alliance approach could fill existing gaps where the whole-of-government approach in U.S. policy making has as yet failed to materialize. Subsequent sections of this paper elaborate further on the U.S. peacebuilding approach to date, with an eye toward exploring how a U.S.-Japan whole-of-alliance initiative could complement U.S. attempts to forge a more comprehensive and integrated peacebuilding strategy for post-conflict states.

The Evolving U.S. Approach to PeacebuildingThe U.S. approach to peacebuilding has evolved over the past few decades as Washington has responded to the increasing incidence and rising security risk of failing and failed states and as it has gained experience in the field from its attempts to stabilize and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. During the 1990s, most U.S. policy makers viewed fragile states as humanitarian concerns, not neces-sarily potential security risks to the United States or to international peace and security.9 Washington was often reluctant to support armed intervention for humanitarian purposes, doing so only in to evacuate American civilians or to quickly stabilize the situation — avoiding deeper involvement in long-term challenges such as mediating civil wars and state building. For the U.S. policy community, vulnerable or failed states were of low geopolitical importance and, at best, “remote and third-tier security concerns.”10

However, Al Qaeda’s ability to launch devastating terrorist attacks on the United States from the safe haven of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan demonstrated the need to recognize weak or failed states as potentially significant threats to U.S. and global security interests. This, in turn, led to a dramatic shift in strategic thinking in Washington, as policy makers began to see failed states not simply as potential humanitarian crises but also as more complex security concerns.

8 According to the U.S. Department of State website, “The Global Peace Operations Initiative was established after the 2004 G8 Sea Island Summit to address growing gaps in international peace operations… The program aims to build and maintain capability, capacity, and effectiveness of peace operations,” http://www.state.gov/t/pm/ppa/gpoi/. See also G8 2004 Sea Island Summit Documents, “Action Plan on Expanding Global Capability for Peace Support,” June 10, 2004, http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/2004seaisland/peace.html.

9 Pauline H. Baker, “Forging a U.S. Policy toward Fragile States,” Prism 1, no. 2 (March 2010). 10 Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown, “Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Assessing ‘Whole of Government’ Approaches

to Fragile States,” International Peace Academy, 2007, 33.

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The elevation of failed states to a higher national security priority allowed for greater attention and resources to be applied to state-building and reconstruction operations. Yet the relatively modest range of civilian personnel and resources at the U.S. government’s disposal meant that the military was increasingly relied upon to conduct not just security operations but also a broad range of civil and humanitarian reconstruction projects in affected areas.11 In Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and other trouble spots, military forces were deployed to undertake a variety of state-building missions, from police assistance to promoting the rule of law and governance.12

The military-centric approach to state building has of course been most prominent in Afghanistan and Iraq, partly because of the combat-oriented nature of the initial interventions in those nations and then the preponderance of military resources on hand to engage in stabilization and reconstruc-tion efforts once a civilian on-the-ground U.S. presence was established. As the civil/humanitarian dimension of this mission expanded, it became clear that military expertise and resources were being stretched to the limit and that many of these tasks would be better suited for civilian aid and development agencies.13

This realization roughly corresponded with the Bush administration’s heightened emphasis, fol-lowing the inauguration of its second term, on promoting democratic institution building and the creation of strong centralized governments in post-conflict states.14 This strategy further stretched the limits of military expertise and engagement, and called for a far more robust involvement of civilian personnel (often referred to as a “civilian surge”) with greater experience than the military in governance and institution building.

In an effort to build a more integrated civil-military approach to stabilization and reconstruction operations, the Department of State Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization was created by congressional authorization in July 2004. In December 2005, President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 44, which formally tasked S/CRS with the duty to “coordinate and lead integrated United States Government efforts, involving all U.S. departments and agencies with relevant capabilities, to prepare, plan for, and conduct stabilization and reconstruction activities.”15

While the Bush administration created S/CRS as the lead coordinating office for a whole-of-gov-ernment approach, the office was, from its inception, not given the resources or bureaucratic clout to coordinate and oversee policies and procedures across multiple agencies, as its original mandate had envisioned. The office was chronically underfunded and understaffed and struggled to assert

11 Baker, 71.12 Serafino, 1.13 Ibid., 23.14 Patrick and Brown, 50 – 5 1. 15 The White House, National Security Presidential Directive/NPSD- 44, December 7, 2005. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/

nspd/nspd-44.html.

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its authority both within the State Department and with other competing bureaus, departments, and agencies.16 For instance, many regional desks were reluctant to cede decision-making author-ity to S/CRS given their traditional role in taking the lead in responding to overseas crises in their respective areas.17

That is not to say that S/CRS has been completely marginalized or made irrelevant. Instead, S/CRS has spearheaded important initiatives, such as the creation of a rapidly deployable civilian force known as the Civilian Response Corps (CRC), which now has nearly twelve hundred members operating across the globe and has been a catalyst for training multi-agency personnel in whole-of-govern-ment approaches to stabilization and reconstruction initiatives.18 The CRC is a promising example of efforts to establish a civilian-surge component to peacebuilding that can respond quickly to conflicts, even in situations where combat has not necessarily ended, and it has been able to make concrete contributions to operations in challenging failed states such as Chad, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).19

Nonetheless, the inability to turn S/CRS into an effective coordinating body for an interagency response to post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation persists, despite the Obama admin-istration’s stated commitment to a whole-of-government approach. Indeed, the much-heralded Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), released by the State Department in late 2010, proposes subsuming S/CRS under a new Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), which would not only “build upon but go beyond the mandate and capabilities of S/CRS [and] serve as the institutional locus for policy and operational solutions for crisis, conflict, and instability.”20 To date, though, the QDDR’s proposals for empowering S/CRS as a viable coordinat-ing body have yet to be implemented.

In light of the problems that S/CRS has faced in establishing bureaucratic authority over other agen-cies, some experts have advocated that a dedicated director for peacebuilding be established in the National Security Council (NSC). Ostensibly, such an office would have the automatic prestige of the White House, giving it the requisite institutional clout to effectively coordinate and implement interagency policies, plans, and strategies.21 However, this too, has proven to be difficult to achieve and such an office within the NSC has not yet materialized.

16 Heather Price, “The Future of S/CRS – What’s in a Name?” Journal of International Peace Operations 6, no. 5 (March/April 2011): 18.

17 Dane F. Smith, Jr., U.S. Peacefare: Organizing American Peace-Building Operations (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies and Praeger Security International, 2010), 216.

18 Price, 18. 19 For more information on the Civilian Response Corps, see “Civilian Response Corps: Who We Are,” http://www.

civilianresponsecorps.gov/who/index.htm.20 U.S. Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development, Leading through Civilian Power: The First

Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, December 2010, http://www.state.gov/s/dmr/qddr/, 135.21 Baker, 80.

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The lack of a strong coordinating body to oversee peacebuilding efforts underscores the ongoing structural and institutional challenges facing the Obama administration as it tries to implement a whole-of-government approach to reconstruction and stabilization efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Among the changes advocated by the Obama administration is a renewed focus on domestic capacity building and sustainable economic development in post-conflict and failing states.22 The focus is intended to shift to using existing human resources, boosting local procure-ment, and building capacity, while mitigating corruption and promoting governance at the local and provincial levels.23

The military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan has also changed in a way that mirrors the Obama administration’s ongoing attempts at a whole-of-government approach to state building. The shift of military doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan from counter-terrorist operations to counter-insurgency (COIN) operations requires more measured use of kinetic force and more outreach, dialogue, and restraint in winning the trust of local civilian populations and tribal leaders. As Pauline Baker writes,

“The emphasis in COIN doctrine on protecting civilians has narrowed the gap between military and civilian needs on the ground, but it remains a gap nonetheless”24

A crucial part of the increased focus on local populations will also be the development of host nation security forces’ capacity. While security sector reform (SSR) was acknowledged even in the begin-ning of the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan, the Obama administration nevertheless stresses the importance of training local security forces so that they can take responsibility for the security of their people and the United States can begin to draw down its troop presence in the host coun-try. With regard to Afghanistan, Obama stated that “We will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces, so they can eventually take the lead in securing their country.”25

Clearly, the U.S. approach to peacebuilding has evolved over the past ten years of involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Yet, in many ways, the U.S. approach continues to face ongoing challenges and difficulties. These include:

•  A tendency to react to failed states after the fact, rather than preventing state collapse through poverty alleviation and efforts to promote sustainable economic development and institution building. As the cases of Somalia and Afghanistan demonstrate, the United States has too often

22 William M. Frej and David Hatch, “A New Approach to the Delivery of U.S. Assistance to Afghanistan,” Prism 1, no. 1 (December 2009): 91.

23 Ibid.24 Baker, 71.25 The White House, “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” March 27, 2009, http://

www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-a-New-Strategy-for-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan/.

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waited for fragile states to erupt into major crises before taking action, at which point they become either too big or too complicated to resolve without military intervention.26

•  The absence of a consistent peacebuilding strategy or framework that integrates a comprehen-sive use of resources and that clarifies goals and objectives with key international partners and allies. U.S. policy makers continue to approach peacebuilding in a piecemeal fashion, often without a full understanding of lessons learned from previous crises and lacking consistent and coherent policies. Moreover, U.S. policy makers have rarely harmonized their stabilization operations with key allies and international organizations, resulting in missed opportunities and sub-optimal performance.

•  A general lack of understanding among lawmakers and top policy makers that peacebuilding is a long-term process, requiring a firm U.S. commitment over an extended time period. All too often, U.S. missions have been tied to domestic political timetables or unrealistic expecta-tions that operations can be completed quickly and successfully if enough resources are applied.

•  Emphasis on large infrastructure projects and strong, centralized governments, even in countries such as Afghanistan where such centralization of power has never previously existed. Trying to rebuild failed states in the image of the United States, by promoting democratic reforms in centralized governments, further runs the risk of alienating rural populations, weakening the state, and creating havens for insurgent groups that can turn to violence in response to their marginalization in the political process. 27

•  A fragmented approach to the difficult task of implementing comprehensive SSR in failed states. Although the United States has stressed building the capacity of the police forces and armies of host nations, it has been hesitant to transfer too much responsibility to local forces before they are deemed ready and has instead turned to organizations outside the state apparatus such as private security firms and informal armed groups to guarantee the preservation of security.28 Emphasizing both SSR and stabilization requires a careful balancing act, as the United States must build domestic institutions and respect local sovereignty while simultaneously mitigating corruption and ensuring sufficient stability to foster an environment conducive to economic development and other peacebuilding measures.

•  An overemphasis on the security implications of failed states. Although the U.S. shift in view-ing failed states primarily through a security lens rather than a humanitarian one post-9/11 has allowed for the dedication of greater resources to peacebuilding, some experts argue that the magnitude of this shift in view is inappropriate and overstates the danger that failed states

26 Baker, 74.27 James Stephenson, Richard McCall, and Alexandra Simonians, “Not in Our Image: The Challenges of Effective

Peacebuilding,” Prism 1, no. 2.28 For information on Afghanistan, see Mathieu Lefèvre, “Local Defense in Afghanistan: A Review of Government Backed

Initiatives,” Afghan Analysts Network, Thematic Report, March 2010, http://aan-afghanistan.com/index.asp?id=763.

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pose to the United States and other developed nations.29 Too heavy an emphasis on security implications and a military-centric approach to peacebuilding risks overshadowing the press-ing humanitarian needs of local populations in post-conflict states.

Toward Whole-of-Alliance Peacebuilding Cooperation with Japan

While the United States has attempted in recent years to tackle many of its traditional shortcom-ings in the field of peacebuilding by working to implement a whole-of-government approach that fully coordinates existing resources across agencies, significant gaps remain. Japan, a strong ally of the United States and a country with expertise in promoting sustainable economic development and directing assistance to target local communities, could make an ideal international partner to fill in some of these gaps.

Indeed, a whole-of-alliance approach could integrate all aspects of the bilateral relationship including political, diplomatic, development, military, and non-governmental components (in cooperation with other countries and international organizations). The potential exists for the United States and Japan to come together and forge a more comprehensive and integrated peacebuilding strategy, but to date the two allies have lacked the political will to make peacebuilding a bilateral priority.

One conspicuous exception is the area of disaster relief missions. The allies have invested in these capabilities and collaborated closely, and disaster relief has benefited from improvements in bilateral and multilateral civil-military coordination. As two major players in the Asia-Pacific region, the United States and Japan should extend their regional and global collaboration beyond disaster relief. The two governments can do more to promote peacebuilding as a core alliance mission, both in the political process of strategy development and in field-oriented planning and operational activities. However, some signs are emerging that this situation might be changing.

An early example of this potential is the new U.S.-Japan Global Peace Operations Initiative Senior Mission Leaders (or GPOI SML) course launched in October 2009. Participants for the two-week course at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) comprised twenty-six military, police, and civilian officials from thirteen Asia-Pacific countries who are potential senior mission leaders for future UN peacekeeping operations. The course included training in integrated planning; media-tion; public affairs; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR); peacebuilding; rule of

29 See, for example, Stewart Patrick, “Why Failed States Shouldn’t Be Our Biggest National Security Fear,” Washington Post, April 15, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-failed-states-shouldnt-be-our-biggest-national-security-fear/2011/04/11/AFqWmjkD_story.html.

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law; protection of civilians; gender-based violence; security management; humanitarian affairs; and human rights in the context of peace operations.30

The GPOI SML course presented an opportunity for the two allies to contribute to peacebuilding development and to add another dimension to the U.S.-Japan alliance, but the course has yet to receive additional funding and a new round of courses is not planned. The two allies should revi-talize the GPOI SML course and make it an annual program. The United States and Japan should also work together with the UN to create stronger evaluation mechanisms to determine whether practitioners found the training to be useful in the field.

The bilateral Peace Operations Working Group has also been established to explore potential syn-ergies between the United States and Japan in humanitarian and reconstruction activities. The working group is a promising initiative spearheaded by U.S. and Japanese alliance managers that originated from subcabinet bilateral talks in 2009 and aims to create a new mechanism to identify and develop ideas for cooperation under the U.S.-Japan alliance. Members of the POWG include participants from the Ministry of Defense (MOD), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), and their U.S. counterparts, and they began discussions in December 2010. The purpose of the group is to identify shortfalls in the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) as well as to discuss further cooperation in areas such as PKO, maritime security, and humanitarian development.

While the POWG is still in its early stages, the group should be expanded so that policy makers and practitioners from across the interagency spectrum can be made aware of opportunities to cooperate with Japan in joint operations. As the U.S. government attempts to implement a whole-of-govern-ment approach, it needs to take into account the valuable contributions that Japan can make to peacebuilding. The U.S.-Japan POWG can be a catalyst for enhanced whole-of-alliance activities, but further efforts should be made to institutionalize bilateral peacebuilding cooperation.

Yet as Japan faces its largest crisis since the Second World War — the March 2011 earthquake, tsu-nami, and subsequent nuclear radiation crisis — it remains to be seen how this will affect Japan’s commitment to international peace operations. On the one hand, the government has been severely tested by the magnitude of these challenges and has already decided to cut the fiscal year 2011 budget for official development assistance (ODA) by ¥50.1 billion (or 9 percent) to fund recovery efforts.

Conversely, the joint operational experience gained as a result of high levels of coordination between U.S. troops and their Japanese counterparts in the aftermath of the disaster could prove to be a useful building block for future peacebuilding operations. For instance, the POWG had fortuitously met to discuss humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) operations just a week before the

30 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “U.S.-Japan Global Peace Operations Initiative Senior Mission Leaders Course,” October 15, 2009, http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/event/2009/10/1196611_1168.html.

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disaster and discovered through joint cooperation that even small changes in the decision-making process by both allies could bring about huge improvements in coordination at relatively low cost. Thus, even as Japan faces the budget crunch of massive internal reconstruction, the potential exists for a more comprehensive whole-of-alliance approach to facilitate Japan’s participation in a range of humanitarian and reconstruction activities.

Greater interoperability between the United States and Japan should first be applied to existing areas of complementarity between the two allies in the field. Given its constitutional restrictions on the use of force as a means of settling international disputes, Japan has developed expertise in human security, which focuses on improving the livelihood of individual people in host countries.

Japan can play an important role, therefore, in complementing the military-centric approach of the United States, which stresses national security concerns and stabilization. Livelihood assistance and political stabilization are really two sides of the same coin; without stability, it is impossible to ensure that assistance will not be diverted to insurgent groups, while without economic development, job creation, and a host of other measures aimed at addressing conflict drivers, stabilization efforts can hardly hope to create an enduring peace.

In other words, the United States and Japan should not seek to replicate each other’s activities in peacebuilding operations, nor should they force bilateral cooperation in every dimension of peace-building, as in cases where multilateral collaboration with other allies such as Australia might be more appropriate. A whole-of-alliance approach also cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution for every failed state. Instead, the United States and Japan need to recognize the specific tools that each ally has at its disposal and, when it makes sense given the on-the-ground political conditions, apply an integrated and complementary approach to achieve maximum effectiveness through joint peace-building activities.

For instance, although Japan may face limitations on its participation in global security, both Japan and the United States can work together to improve coordination of security sector reform measures in post-conflict states. In the case of Afghanistan, the United States and NATO have both placed a high priority on training and increasing the size of local forces (Afghan National Police) so that they can eventually take responsibility for their own security. Japan, for its part, has made significant contributions to SSR in areas such as DDR, as well as disbandment of illegal armed groups (DIAG).

While Japan-led DDR and DIAG programs have successfully demobilized large numbers of ex-com-batants in the past, the missions have often suffered from the challenge of integrating program participants into either the military forces or back into civilian life. A whole-of-alliance approach could mitigate some of these shortcomings and ensure that participants do not rearm after being demobilized and returning home. Bilateral cooperation can also be further expanded to include other areas of SSR such as good-governance training, police training, and rule-of-law development. A fundamental aspect of this effort is that both allies should establish standard measures of success

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and work to jointly achieve the creation of a “professional security sector that is legitimate, impar-tial, and accountable to the population.”31

Here, the term “legitimacy” refers not only to the degree to which the local population accepts the newly formed host-nation government, but also the extent to which the local population agrees with the mandate of the peacebuilding mission itself. While the United States is beginning to emphasize the need for decentralization and local ownership, an association with a strong ideological agenda and democracy promotion still largely taints its reputation in areas such as the Middle East. There may be some instances, therefore, where it will be easier for Japan to assure local communities of the legitimacy of the mission and the impartiality of America’s intentions. As a non-Western, non-NATO, non-Christian country, Japan enjoys a better reputation amongst many failed states, presenting an opportunity for it to play the role of honest broker in bilateral peacebuilding activities.32

Another area where Japan and the United States could foster a whole-of-alliance approach is by cul-tivating opportunities for joint human resource development in response to a growing trend in both countries to increase the civilian presence in peacebuilding operations. The United States hopes to counter its overemphasis on the military by increasing the participation of civilians and the role of USAID and the Department of State, while Japan’s $5 billion pledge in assistance for Afghanistan (the future of which may be under question in light of the March 11 earthquake/tsunami disaster) will necessitate greater numbers of civilians travelling abroad to non-permissive environments.

The problem with a so-called civilian surge is that these civilians often have little peacebuilding experience or knowledge of the local language and culture, yet can join provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan’s “most conflicted and deadly southern provinces.”33 Building from the GPOI SML course, the United States and Japan could do more to train not only leaders for UN peacekeeping operations but also a broader range of civilian personnel dispatched to dangerous and complex field missions. The United States will need to increase the quality and not just the quantity of its civilian response if it hopes to truly balance out its military-centric methods, and it can work with an ally like Japan to augment the civilian component of its peacebuilding operations.

Apart from training exercises, Japan and the United States could also encourage greater opportuni-ties for civil society engagement in the peacebuilding process. By drawing in NGOs from both sides of the Pacific, the two allies could facilitate increased civil society cooperation against the backdrop of government-level support. A good example is Peace Winds America, which formed as a sister organization to Peace Winds Japan in 2008 to focus on “disaster preparedness and response in the

31 United States Institute of Peace and United States Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, 2009, http://www.usip.org/files/resources/guiding_principles_full.pdf, 3-21.

32 “International Meeting Stresses Japan’s Key Role in Afghan Peace Process,” Kyodo News Agency, November 25, 2009. 33 Stephenson, McCall, and Simonians, 130.

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Asia-Pacific.”34 By working together, the two organizations have managed to encourage other NGOs, militaries, government officials, and the private sector to plan and respond to humanitarian crises, including the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

As the United States and Japan pursue the implementation of a more coordinated bilateral approach, the two allies can also benefit from jointly expending greater intellectual capital to come up with creative solutions to peacebuilding problems. Peacebuilding remains an amorphous and evolving concept, as both the United States and Japan have discovered that creating durable peace is a much more formidable challenge than simply orchestrating an end to open conflict. The two allies should begin by holding regular meetings to ensure that both sides are aware of each other’s resources, to create mutual accountability, and to stimulate greater peacebuilding cooperation.

Institutional mechanisms can also be remolded to better reflect and facilitate a whole-of-alliance approach. Right now, bilateral cooperation is spearheaded at the desk level and in subcabinet-level dialogues. But as the United States moves toward a greater whole-of-government approach, it will need to diversify the range of interlocutors and agents who can interact with international partners like Japan. In other words, those who are charged with developing a whole-of-government approach should be aware of opportunities to work with Japan and other allies in order to maximize peace-building efforts in the field. One idea could be to create within S/CRS a dedicated liaison officer with a Japanese counterpart. Whatever the method, there needs to be a linkage between interagency harmonization and international coordination.

In many ways the ad hoc nature of U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation reflects the haphazard nature of peacebuilding policies in general. Nevertheless, it is imperative that both allies clearly define their objectives before deploying on missions and plan joint operations with strategic goals in mind. By working together, the United States and Japan can avoid redundancy, coordinate their interventions in failed states, and introduce an appropriate division of labor to maximize the ben-efits of a whole-of-alliance approach.

34 Peace Winds America, “Who We Are,” http://peacewindsamerica.org/who-we-are/(accessed April 24, 2011).

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7The United States and Japan Should Aim for a Strategic Complementary

Partnership in AfghanistanSearch for a Proactive Division of Labor

Uesugi Yuji

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

From a viewpoint of advocating effective U.S.-Japan cooperation in the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan, the two countries should aim for a strategic complementary partnership. This does

not mean that both countries are going to work together by doing exactly the same thing. Rather, Japan should complement American efforts by becoming actively involved in the areas where Japan has a comparative advantage and the United States has had little involvement. Indeed, a search for a complementary combination of efforts by the two countries would be the most effective and real-istic option.

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Division of Labor under a Common Strategic GoalThe problem of Afghanistan is complex and has multiple intertwining factors. Each challenge needs different activities at different times. Some challenges require prompt action and quick results, whereas others might need longer-term perspectives and commitments. Some will call for military responses whereas others need humanitarian assistance and development aid. Indeed, it can be argued that military units, aid workers, humanitarian agencies, NGOs, diplomats, and other actors in Afghanistan have already been working in a complementary manner in one way or another. This paper does not deny that such cooperative relationships have already occasionally developed sponta-neously in the field. At the same time, however, it seeks to make the case for a more coordinated or shaped complementarity, as a complex situation on the ground requires more systematic approaches.

In order to find a complementary combination of approaches that can indeed bring better outcomes, it is imperative that the United States and Japan have a common strategic goal. Under a common strategic understanding, the two countries can examine their positions and comparative strengths, and search for a harmonious and complementary division of labor. Of course, different combinations should be sought based on the different nature of the particular challenges they face in Afghanistan.

Hence, instead of seeking a way to work in the same area where the United States has already been active, Japan should concentrate its efforts on the areas and issues where the United States does not have a comparative advantage, has not paid sufficient attention, or should avoid being involved. In this way, Japan can demonstrate its full potential as an alliance partner of the United States.

Of course, a division of labor has already been sought, in substance, between the United States and Japan. However, it was sought as a result of passive and negative understanding of the role of Japan in the security dimension. Japan has a number of domestic challenges, legal constraints, and its Self-Defense Forces (SDF) have not been designed to be active in overseas operations. Hence, there is a limit to the extent to which Japan can actually choose to be active in global security management. This is why the United States and Japan have to look to a division of labor whereby Japan will assist the United States in non-military activities such as financial contribution and development aid.

Rather than promoting such a conventional division of labor, however, this paper argues for a more proactive division of labor between the United States and Japan. In this approach, Japan will not seek to serve as a United States-lite, but rather it should be recognized as an irreplaceable partner of the United States in the context of peacebuilding in Afghanistan.

While Japan’s efforts should be placed within the same strategic framework, its activities should be separated from the counter-insurgency efforts led by the United States and NATO, which aim to urge anti-government elements in Afghanistan to support the government side. Japan’s efforts should be directed to areas where they have a better chance of being successful models of post-conflict recon-struction, and the people on the ground can appreciate the peace dividends. At first glance, such

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an approach can be seen as irrelevant to ongoing efforts by the United States and its NATO allies. Nonetheless, if Japan’s efforts are to be coordinated strategically with those of the United States and NATO, it can serve as a good complementary approach to existing efforts.

Thus, maintaining a policy that can be seen as having “strategic distance” from that of the United States can be a way for Japan to contribute to the ongoing efforts of the United States in Afghanistan. Japan does not have to be involved in every single American operation. It does not necessarily always have to work side by side with the United States as long as its approach is firmly based on broader U.S.-Japan cooperation. Each country should play a certain and different role based on its relationship with the country concerned. For instance, if Japan wants to act as an effective mediator between anti-government elements, such as the Taliban, and the incumbent government, it might be better off not being closely involved in the U.S. counter-insurgency operations on the ground.

Review of Japan’s Contribution to Peacebuilding in Afghanistan: DDR and DIAGSo far, Japan has contributed to the security aspect of the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan in two major programs: disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of the ex-combatants, and disbandment of illegal armed groups (DIAG). DDR was attempted as a part of a larger effort toward security sector reform, which was led by the G8, while DIAG was launched as a successor program to DDR. In the DDR program, the Japanese government worked with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). In the DIAG program, it worked with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Afghanistan.

Unless they are carried out within the wider strategic framework for peacebuilding in Afghanistan, these two programs can undermine the overall peacebuilding objective. One can argue that since Japan has not dispatched any military contingent to Afghanistan, and has thus won a certain trust from the government as well as from the Afghan people, Japan had a strategic advantage in pursu-ing the implementation of difficult tasks such as DDR and DIAG. Nevertheless, these endeavors are closely linked to security management and cannot be indifferent to other security operations such as security sector reform and counter-insurgency undertaken in Afghanistan.

Because Japan has not contributed its military contingent to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), it has limited access to the strategic and operational decision-making process of ISAF. At the same time, as Japan did not dispatch its armed forces to Afghanistan, and because of its unique commitment to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, Japan was able to fulfill a special role that no one else could have played in the implementation of DDR. That being said, however, with-out the presence of U.S. and/or NATO forces on the ground, it might have not been possible for Japan to persuade recalcitrant warlords to disarm their troops. Moreover, without the emergence of

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favorable conditions, which resulted from other political and security endeavors, the DDR program could not have been completed no matter how strenuously Japan had devoted its efforts to that end.

It is fair to say that the DDR program carried out by Japan together with UNAMA was “completed” and achieved some of the desired objectives with help from the United States, Canada, and other troop-contributing countries. At least, the completion of the DDR program provided a ceremonial moment in the reconstruction process of Afghanistan, which served to symbolize a new beginning.

In this context, Japan was able to collaborate with relevant security actors on the ground when it engaged in DDR. Nevertheless, such collaboration was limited to the tactical level, and Japan did not collaborate at any strategic level. For example, the coordination between the DDR program and other critical aspects of security sector reform such as the reform of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP) remained insufficient. Furthermore, it seems that the DDR program has never seriously been coordinated with the U.S.-led counter-terrorism operation called Operation Enduring Freedom.

As a result, the completion of the DDR program, at a time when other relevant programs were seri-ously delayed, created a security vacuum and allowed the warlords to retain their influence over the central government. In short, DDR was not successful although the DDR program was completed. It left a negative legacy to the overall peacebuilding process in Afghanistan.

Japan has worked with the UNDP in the DIAG program, which was considered to be a follow-on program of DDR. DIAG was launched in unfavorable conditions. Of course, it is difficult to say that the DIAG program was a total failure as it was able to facilitate the disbandment of 743 groups out of about 2,000 illegal armed groups operating in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2010. Nonetheless, unless it is effectively placed in the overall strategy and conducted in conjunction with other recon-ciliation/reintegration initiatives and counter-insurgency activities, the DIAG program is doomed to failure. In other words, tactical gain in DIAG will not lead to strategic achievements if it is con-ducted without close coordination with other relevant endeavors.

A Key Area for U.S.-Japan Cooperation: The Afghan National Police In preparation for the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan, the United States and NATO now seek to facilitate the transition of security responsibility to the Afghan authority. The United States and NATO seem to consider such a transition to be their first priority in the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan. Thus, in order to establish a complementary and cooperative relationship with the United States, Japan will have to design and adjust its approach to be supportive of the transition process, whether it likes it or not.

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As the United States undertakes a major effort in the reform of the Afghan National Police, assis-tance to ANP can serve as a good area for meaningful U.S.-Japan cooperation. In fact, this is one of the most concrete and direct nexuses between the efforts of the two countries. The Japanese govern-ment has provided about half of the salary of the entire ANP through the UNDP’s Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan (LOTFA), amounting to about $240 million, which makes Japan the second-largest donor after the United States. Furthermore, Japan has assisted in the establishment of the training center for ANP and provided various training opportunities for a number of Afghan police officers. Although so far Japan has avoided playing a significant role in counter-insurgency operations conducted by the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, its assistance to ANP, which is expected to play a pivotal role in counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, will indirectly contribute to counter-insurgency operations. Hence, the capacity development of ANP can serve as a milestone for finding U.S.-Japan cooperation in the security dimension of the Afghan peacebuilding process.

It is anticipated that close coordination will be necessary between the United States and Japan in order to carry out effective assistance to the ANP. As efficacy of this nexus will surely contribute to the outcome of counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan, the United States will have a stake in the success of the capacity development of ANP. Hence, both the United States and Japan will have to seriously discuss how they are going to collaborate in this endeavor in particular and in a wider security-sector reform effort in general. This is because the goals of the capacity development of ANP may be different for the two countries, depending on the perceived needs of the situation. As the United States expects ANP, particularly the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), to take over at least some of the counter-insurgency operations conducted currently by U.S. and NATO forces, its focus is rather short-sighted and on the creation of effective security forces. On the other hand, Japan is strongly interested in the development of the governance capacity of ANP, as it believes that police officers will serve as a focal point of the government for the people on the frontline.

If the two governments do not appreciate the potential pitfalls of separately pursuing complemen-tary roles in the capacity development of ANP, frictions could emerge between the two over their competing priorities and emphases. Therefore, it is imperative that the two reaffirm that they share a common strategic goal and agree upon a complementary division of labor.

Division of Labor: The Importance of Local Administrative BodiesAnother complementary relationship between the United States and Japan in peacebuilding assis-tance can be envisioned in the geographical division of labor. The presence of the United States is undeniably significant in the capital as well as other strategically important footholds. This is noth-ing new or special, as a large amount of aid has been poured into the capital city in most cases of international peacebuilding assistance. Likewise, international assistance to Afghanistan so far has been concentrated on the capital and other major cities. Hence, Japan can concentrate its efforts in

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peripheral areas that are either too far away from the center or strategically insignificant and thus not included in U.S. efforts.

In Afghanistan, the majority of ordinary people live in the periphery. It is the local administrative bodies such as provincial governments, municipalities, and village offices that have direct contact with these civilians. As stated above, the capacity development of ANP is regarded as one of the top priorities of the United States. On the other hand, the capacity development of the local admin-istrative bodies has not attracted equal attention although these local administrative bodies are expected to deliver basic services including public safety to the people in the periphery, according to the blueprint of the modern Afghan state. Hence, the capacity development of the local admin-istrative bodies deserves more than passing notice.

Initially, Japan put forward a policy where, in addition to Kabul, its assistance was allocated to four major provincial cities — Barmian, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kandahar. Furthermore, Japan tried to deliver peace dividends to the periphery through grassroots grant projects. These Japanese efforts on the provincial level have certainly served as a complementary measure to other efforts concentrated in the center.

Such a policy, however, has become increasingly difficult to implement as the security situation on the ground deteriorates. Although Japan recognizes the significance of helping the capacity devel-opment of the local administrative bodies and is also aware of the potentially complementary role it can play in this field, there is not much Japan can do unilaterally to overcome the ongoing secu-rity challenges. Traditionally, Japan expected that other countries with this capacity, namely the United States, would act as the vanguard and eliminate security-related obstacles. However, both the United States and NATO are facing enormous challenges from anti-government forces such as the Taliban, and they do not seem to be able to drastically improve the security situation in periph-eral areas. Japan has thus begun to explore possible cooperation with other partners in Afghanistan, including participation in a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to contribute to stabilization efforts in the periphery.

Use of PRT in the Wake of Deteriorating Security ConditionsFaced with worsening security, Japan has decided to cooperate with NATO/ISAF. In fact, this devel-opment can provide a new impetus for further peacebuilding cooperation between the United States and Japan.

Japan can collaborate with the United States or NATO in delivering peace dividends to the periphery. In particular, PRTs can provide Japan a useful platform for helping local administrative bodies in a non-permissive environment. Indeed, since 2009 Japan has worked with Lithuania in Chaghcharan PRT in Ghor Province by sending civilian development advisors. Japan also dispatched its liaison

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officers to the NATO/ISAF headquarters in Kabul to coordinate with and provide assistance to NATO/ISAF partners in an effort to design and implement development projects in rural areas.

In most of the rural areas, a PRT is perhaps the only international presence on the ground. Hence, it is natural that Japan seeks to collaborate with PRTs in delivering peace dividends to these areas. However, reconstruction efforts facilitated through PRTs so far have primarily been concentrated on providing humanitarian aid and quick-impact projects, and the use of PRTs in the capacity development of the local administrative bodies has been minimal at best. The need for nurturing the governing capability of the local administrative bodies, which are expected to take over secu-rity responsibility from ISAF and to serve as security oversight mechanisms in the provinces, has been either overlooked or deferred. Unless the governing capability and quick-response capability of the local administrative bodies are developed, the United States will face a major problem in the handover of security responsibility, as it is the local administrative bodies that will be in charge of providing law and order on the ground as well as civilian oversight of the newly created Afghan Security Forces in the periphery.

The United States and its NATO allies have been preoccupied with developing credible Afghan secu-rity forces that can replace ISAF in their counter-insurgency efforts. They give priority to creating effective security forces that can overwhelm the anti-government forces. Japan can complement American efforts and support the transition of security responsibility by focusing its efforts on assist-ing the recipients of the handover process — local administrative bodies. Japan can advocate the use of PRTs in the enhancement of the governing capability of the local security apparatus.

Moreover, Japan can also complement the efforts of the United States by preparing and consolidat-ing the foundations for the transition of security responsibility in areas of lower security concern. Deteriorating security in the south has forced the United States to become deeply involved in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, while neglecting the relatively stable areas that have the potential to assume security responsibility from ISAF much earlier than Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Because of the emphasis on security, the majority of U.S. assistance is generally allocated to those areas where anti-government forces are active and the security situation is fragile. Since PRTs have been recognized by the United States and its NATO allies as a counter-insurgency tool used for winning the support of local populations, the primary target of major U.S. PRTs has been set in the southern and eastern part of the country, where security concerns are most pressing. To comple-ment the U.S. efforts in the most fragile regions, Japan can assist PRTs in relatively stable regions and play an instrumental role in encouraging PRTs to assist in the development of the governing capability of the local administrative bodies. This is another possible area for a proactive division of labor between the United States and Japan that requires closer strategic coordination between the two governments.

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The effectiveness of PRTs, however, depends largely on the surrounding security and political envi-ronment. Up until this point, Japan has remained passive in its policy towards shaping the security and political architecture for Afghanistan. Because of the worsening of the security situation in the center and the periphery, Japan has had to downsize and limit its development assistance in many parts of Afghanistan. Japan has to find a way to create the necessary conditions for effective deliv-ery of peace dividends in a non-permissive environment. The newly launched Afghanistan Peace Reintegration Program (APRP) can offer a key avenue for Japan to tackle such a challenge.

Afghanistan Peace Reintegration Program In order to guarantee political stability in Afghanistan, political reconciliation and reintegration among various stakeholders including the Taliban are unavoidable. In this sense, the APRP, which was established in June 2010, can provide a useful framework for such an effort. Japan has already allocated $50 million to APRP, contributing about one-third of the total of $141 million in inter-national assistance to APRP. It is still too early to evaluate the effectiveness of APRP, but it is fair to say that, from a Japanese perspective, APRP must be closely coordinated with the DIAG pro-gram and counter-insurgency operations carried out by the United States and its NATO allies. The activities of APRP must be carried out firmly in accordance with a common strategic goal and be coordinated closely with the handover of security responsibility, which is the greatest concern of the United States and its NATO allies.

Counter-insurgency operations can undermine both DIAG and APRP, and vice versa. Thus, it is imperative that the United States and Japan, together with NATO and other stakeholders in Afghanistan, hold a strategic dialogue over how to go about political reconciliation and reintegra-tion, as the lack of common understanding of a shared strategic goal will lead to contradiction and competition among different initiatives.

It is universally understood that political reconciliation between the incumbent government and the Taliban is essential if political stability in Afghanistan is to be achieved. At the same time, many, including the Taliban and ordinary Afghans, are well aware of the fact that the presence of inter-national forces will eventually decline. The challenge is that the United States has to create a set of conditions under which the Taliban feels it is in its interest to strike a deal with the incumbent gov-ernment and the United States, in a situation where the U.S. commitment is declining.

This paper does not purport to present a set of recommendations for Japan on the issue of how to shape the scope and core objectives of APRP in relation to a common strategic goal, except to reiterate the importance of searching for complementary combinations and a proactive division of labor between the United States and Japan. Japan will have to engage in serious dialogue with the United States on this issue.

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Such a strategic dialogue with the United States over hard-core security issues in Afghanistan might force Japan to seriously explore its roles in politico-military affairs and to commit itself, as an alli-ance partner of the United States, to various hardships that the United States is now enduring in Afghanistan and elsewhere. However, this does not necessarily mean that Japan will have to commit itself militarily to Afghanistan. The point is, Japan should pursue a complementary partnership with the United States on the strategic level.

Conclusion: From a Follower to a Complementary PartnerBecause the United States has the capacity to solve problems through military means, it falls into a trap of depending too much and relying too hastily on military solutions. One the other hand, because Japan has constitutional limitations on its ability to solve overseas problems militarily, its policy has a tendency to lean towards non-military solutions and avoid hard decisions. Unless the United States and Japan can fill in such a gap in policy preferences, it is difficult for the two coun-tries to agree upon a common strategic goal. There is room for Japan to question and correct errors and miscalculations made by the United States, while the United States can assist Japan to develop its independent capacity to be more effective in peacebuilding and peaceful conflict management.

In the past, both the United States and Japan have appreciated Japan’s function as a major financial contributor to international security operations. This approach has increasingly become impracti-cal and unrealistic as Japan’s economic power declines. Japan can no longer be used as a “magical mallet” that can finance costly military operations. It is important that both countries redefine their relationship with each other. Japan should no longer act as an impotent and nervous follower of the United States in hard-core politico-security endeavors. Japan should be recognized as a partner who can complement the capacity of the United States and supplement in areas where the United States has limitations. Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio once advocated for an ‘equal rela-tionship’ between the United States and Japan. The important point for Japan, in the context of peacebuilding in Afghanistan, is not demanding an equal relationship with the United States but engaging in a strategic dialogue with the United States to figure out the best complementary part-nership for both countries.

To do so, the two countries must share a certain strategic vision. In this sense, this project can offer an ideal platform for identifying possible gaps and searching for a common ground in our efforts toward stabilizing Afghanistan. The United States and Japan should examine their unique positions, comparative advantages, and potential both individually and jointly so that they can work together to define and build a harmonious and complementary partnership.

In particular, peacebuilding experts in Japan will have to wrack their brains to find ways to coor-dinate various Japanese efforts in APRP, DIAG, PRT, and other programs to demonstrate the full

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potential of Japan’s contributions. Furthermore, all Japanese efforts must be in line with a common strategic goal to be able to form an integral role in a wider peacebuilding strategy for Afghanistan.

There is not a moment to lose as the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly. The United States and Japan will have to reach a conclusion as to how the two powers can best work to comple-ment each other to contribute to the peacebuilding process in Afghanistan.

ReferencesUesugi Yuji, “Japan’s Peacebuilding Policy toward Afghanistan: The Need for a Civilian Surge to Improve Security,” AJISS-Commentary, no. 81, January 28, 2010, http://www2.jiia.or.jp/en_commentary/201001/28-1.html.

———, ed., Toward Bringing Stability in Afghanistan: A Review of the Peacebuilding Strategy, IPSHU English Research Report, no. 24, 2009, http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/heiwa/Pub/E24/yujiuesugied.pdf.

——— “Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan: Filling the Gaps in Peacebuilding,” in Peace and Human Security, ed. Masatsugu Matsuo, Vladimir Rouvinski, Rafael Silva Vega, IPSHU English Research Report, no. 23, 2009, http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/metadb/up/kiyo/ipshu_en/ipshu_en_23_173.pdf.

———, “Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan: A New Model for Civil-Military Coordination in Peace Operations,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th annual convention, Chicago, IL, February 28, 2007, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p178892_index.html.

———, “The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and Their Contribution to the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) Process in Afghanistan,” HiPeC Research Paper Series, no. 3, 2005, http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/hipec/ja/products/RP3.pdf.

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8U.S. Peacebuilding in Afghanistan

Jason E. Fritz

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

Peacebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, including those of the United States, began after the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001 and upon the signing of the Agreement on Provisional

Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending Re-establishment of Permanent Institutions, more commonly known as the Bonn Agreement. This agreement, signed by members of the international community as well as Afghan leaders, led to the passing of United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1386 on December 20, 2001, which provides the framework for international activities within a sovereign Afghanistan. These documents, quickly drafted and passed, placed the onus of security and rebuilding of the country on the Afghan Interim Authority (and later the elected gov-ernment of Afghanistan) with international assistance supporting their activities, which were almost exclusively located in Kabul before 2005.

This tack proved problematic for a number of reasons: the Afghan leadership was inexperienced in national governance, donor nations allowed the inexperienced Interim Authority to drive the agenda, and the Kabul-focused nature of the agreements set the conditions for a resurgent Taliban

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to challenge governmental control in the outlying areas of the country. As the Taliban regained its ability to fight over the next few years, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan turned its focus from peacebuilding intended to strengthen Afghan communities and governance structures to winning the war against the Taliban.

This paper examines three key aspects of U.S. peacebuilding in Afghanistan since December 2001:

•  The development of the Afghan National Police (ANP) in order to protect the Afghan population

•  The development of the Afghan National Army (ANA) to defeat threats to the Afghan government

•  The disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of armed non-state groups inside Afghanistan to provide the Afghan government with a monopoly on the organized use of violence

These areas have received the preponderance of U.S. efforts and resources and are essential to build-ing a lasting peace within Afghanistan. The United States was not necessarily in the lead for these lines of effort, but it was a major donor of personnel and other resources to each of them, with the United States often driving results through U.S. action in spite of other international programs or best practices as the United States looks to extract itself from combat. As a result, the United States has focused myopically on defeating insurgent groups in order to stabilize the country sufficiently for it to withdraw its military forces. In this process, it lost sight of the essential peacebuilding activ-ities required to bring a lasting peace to Afghanistan.

U.S. Efforts at Police Development in AfghanistanBoth the Bonn Agreement and UNSCR 1386 call upon the ISAF to provide assistance to the Interim Authority “in the establishment and training of new Afghan security and armed forces.”1 Neither compact, however, delineates what security and armed forces are required or which nation would lead the assistance effort. This was determined in a G8 ministerial conference in 2002 and subsequent conferences, which divided the Afghan security sector into five pillars with a lead nation for each to oversee and support reforms (a similar process was used by the United Nations in the Balkans).2 Under this construct, Germany was assigned leadership for Afghan police development and reform, at the request of the Interim Authority, based on Germany’s previous police development assistance to Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. The pillar framework was designed to ensure that all major areas of development were covered and that all donor nations would contribute proportionally to their means, but it did not hold donor states to follow the lead of the responsible donor state.

1 UN Security Council, “Security Council Authorizes International Security Force for Afghanistan; Welcomes United Kingdom’s Offer to Be Initial Lead Nation: Resolution 1386 (2001) Adopted Unanimously,” December 20, 2001, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/sc7248.doc.htm.

2 David Bayley and Robert Perito, The Police in War: Fighting Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2010), 18.

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The G8 plan for police development was to raise a professional national police force of 62,000 offi-cers by December 2005, consisting of 44,300 uniformed police, 12,000 border police, 3,400 highway police, and 2,300 counter-narcotics police.3 It was based on a European training model of police development, which included “university level education for officers and a shorter academic pro-gram for [non-commissioned officers, or NCOs].”4 In a country with a male literacy rate under 50 percent and no standing police force from which to draw, this police development program with a target force of such a large size would have likely taken decades to complete. That sort of time horizon was unacceptable to the United States, prompting it to create a parallel, but not necessar-ily complementary, police development program. The United States gave the Department of State’s (DoS) Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) the lead on establish-ing seven regional police training centers throughout Afghanistan.

As INL is staffed by Foreign Service officers and not law enforcement officials, it must draw upon outside expertise when undertaking police development missions.5 For larger operations, such as its initial development efforts in Afghanistan, INL must rely upon contractors to execute the bulk of its operations, usually the contracting firm DynCorp, because of both the lack of a national U.S. police force to draw upon and also INL’s lack of in-house police expertise. INL is also a primary funder of the U.S. Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), an organization whose primary mission is to conduct police development operations as part of U.S. foreign policy. While ICITAP would have been the likely U.S. government agency to provide the U.S. contingent for Afghan police development, it was not selected to do so. The result of INL’s efforts was essentially a police train- and-equip program, not a police development program, and it was executed almost entirely by contractors with minimal government oversight.

INL’s training program consisted of an eight-week basic policing course for literate NCOs and patrolmen, a five-week course for illiterate patrolmen, a fifteen-day refresher course for experienced police officers, and a two-to-four-week course for police instructors.6 This created a semi-trained Afghan National Police (ANP) force of over seventy thousand by 2007. The training program was quite austere, with trainees in day-long classes on hard benches in classrooms with no temperature control. Instruction was given by contractors with little experience in police development and who did not speak the native languages and so depended upon interpreters with little grasp of policing terminology.7 More than 70 percent of the recruits were illiterate, which challenged further their ability to absorb and comprehend the curriculum. Beyond being ineffective at instilling basic indi-

3 Inspectors General, U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Defense, “Interagency Assessment of Afghanistan Police Training and Readiness,” November 2006, http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/76103.pdf, 5.

4 Bayley and Perito, 20.5 William J. Durch and Madeline L. England, “International Police: Improving Professionalism and Responsiveness,”

Stimson Center, Stimson Future of Peace Operations, September 2009, http://www.stimson.org/images/uploads/research-pdfs/Police_Issue_Brief.pdf, 6.

6 Bayley and Perito, 21.7 Ibid.

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vidual skills, the short duration of the training prohibited exposure to the principles of democratic policing — possibly the most important aspect of any police development program. This led to issues in the operational ANP force which will be discussed later.

The United States transferred responsibility for police assistance from the Department of State to the Department of Defense (DoD) in 2005, as it had done in Iraq, in order to provide greater fund-ing and manpower for the endeavor. The DoD lead for this program was given to the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A), a military command also responsible for Afghan National Army development. CSTC-A retained INL as the contract manager for all elements of police development, including ministry reform. INL in turn retained DynCorp as the primary provider of police trainers and advisors. There were numerous issues with the transfer so that even a year after the police assistance program came under CSTC-A control, that command had still not received the primary contract between INL and DynCorp or the modifications to this contract. Indeed, INL’s contracting representative to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul (on a temporary assignment) could not provide the required documentation for the contract to auditors in 2006.8 The interagency coordination between INL and CSTC-A was not executed well because of poor internal practices in each organization and murky delineation of responsibilities between the two.

The transfer of responsibility of police assistance in Afghanistan to CSTC-A coincided with a return of the Taliban and an increase in fighting between ISAF and the Taliban, causing the former to take more of a counter-insurgency approach to the conflict.9 With command of police development and employment, CSTC-A incorporated the ANP as an integral part of its counter-insurgency strategy to defeat the Taliban, shifting the ANP’s focus away from community policing and the protection of the population and toward a military auxiliary against armed groups.10 In December 2009, when President Barack Obama announced a surge of U.S. military and civilian personnel into Afghanistan in support of a counter-insurgency approach, the ANP became integral to that approach. When CSTC-A was asked to produce more trained police personnel (and faster), the basic course for ANP was reduced to six weeks, further decreasing the trainees’ proficiency upon graduation.

The U.S. approach to police development in Afghanistan has been marred by a number of problems: disunity with international partners, disunity within the U.S. mission, an emphasis on quantity over quality from the training program, an inability to inculcate democratic community polic-ing principles, poor oversight of the training program, and, until recently, limited mentorship of ANP units in the field, to name a few. The result of these missteps has been an ANP force that not only is generally incapable of conducting policing in its assigned jurisdictions, but is corrupt and

8 Inspectors General, 35.9 Throughout this paper, the term “Taliban” refers to the myriad groups that could be classified as insurgents in Afghanistan,

understanding that there is more than one Taliban group as well as other insurgent groups not associated with a par-ticular Taliban group and that these many organizations do not necessarily coordinate or associate with each other as part of a monolithic hierarchy.

10 Inspectors General, 95.

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incompetent to the extent that officers are often drivers of conflict within their own communities. This is all predominately due to the United States’ insistence on training and developing the ANP to be a counter-insurgent force instead of a police force, especially after the transition of responsibility from INL to CSTC-A. The ANP is now an organization incapable of community policing and yet is neither trained nor equipped for the essentially counter-insurgent infantry role its members now fill.

The development of democratic community police is an essential element of peacebuilding, par-ticularly in an environment such as Afghanistan where the central government has difficulty in exercising control in large swathes of the country. The police, the ANP in this case, should provide a vital and everyday link between the citizens and the government and should be there to protect the people from violence. The U.S. approach to police development has not supported this and instead of forming an Afghan entity capable of pacifying communities, it has turned it into another element of the war effort. An indicator of this mindset is the fact that between 2002 and 2009, the United States had given more than $21 billion in aid to the Afghan National Army and Police, while only providing $2.5 billion in aid for rule of law, democracy, and governance initiatives combined.11 The fact that the United States has not invested a proportional share of resources in the reform of the Afghan judicial system (particularly the corrections and courts elements) suggests its focus, when it comes to ANP development, remains on warfighting. The peacebuilding objective is little more than an afterthought, to the detriment of both progress in war and long-term prospects for civilian order through effective community policing.

U.S. Efforts at ANA Development in AfghanistanThe United States was given the responsibility of leading the army pillar of Afghan development and, with the assistance of international partners, began recruiting for the ANA in 2002. End-strength goals for 2005 were set at 70,000 members of the ANA, to be drawn from the pre-war militia groups and the populace at large. Subsequent goals as the security situation deteriorated were expanded to 100,000 troops by the end of 2009 and then again to 171,600 by October 2011.12 The ANA is based on a standard military hierarchy from platoons up to corps commands and it members classified in rank as enlisted, NCOs, or officers.

Officer training in the ANA can take one of three forms for entry-level officer candidates, all of whom must demonstrate basic reading and writing skills. Former Afghan Army officers receive an eight-week officer training course, which includes professional ethics training. New officers attend either a six-month officer candidate school or the four-year National Military Academy of Afghanistan

11 Marc J. Cohen and Tara R. Gingerich, “Protect and Serve or Train and Equip? US Security Assistance and Protection of Civilians,” Oxfam America Briefing Paper, November 12, 2009, 3.

12 International Security Assistance Force, “International Security Assistance Force and Afghan National Army Strength and Laydown,” February 1, 2010, http://www.nato.int/isaf/docu/epub/pdf/placemat.pdf.

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(which is modeled in part on the United States Military Academy at West Point).13 ANA officer training has been the longest and most thorough in Afghan security sector training.

Basic training for enlisted recruits consists of a seven-week basic training course followed by another six weeks of advanced individual training, much like in the U.S. Army. Those identified as having leadership potential are then sent to the NCO course in lieu of the advanced individual training course and are assigned to lead a new unit at the end of their and their units’ respective courses. These organizations are then tested in collective training to assess their ability to react to common tactical situations they will likely face after training.14 Some training programs are occasionally shortened in order to train more individuals and units faster.

The ANA has been a relative success story for the United States in Afghanistan. It is an institution that is designed to fight extremists within Afghanistan and does an adequate job at that. The mem-bers of the ANA have lower casualty and desertion rates than the ANP and are widely regarded by the Afghan people as relatively honest (particularly when compared to the ANP). This is mainly thanks to their receiving better equipment and training and to the fact that an ethos of service has generally been adopted by the army.

While ANA development has seen some positive outcomes, the ANA is still under-equipped (a sit-uation not likely to improve with such drastic increases to ANA personnel strength), the Ministry of Defense (MoD) has not embraced all of the institutional reforms required to truly professionalize and sustain the army, and the ANA cannot maintain itself well in the field (mainly with regard to pay and logistics). Further problem areas include nepotism within the MoD and ANA, the involvement of ANA units in narcotics trafficking, the disproportionately Tajik makeup of the officer corps, and the dependence on donors to cover the costs of maintaining the ANA — a situation that is unsus-tainable in the long term.15

Developing a sustainable and professional ANA is an essential element to U.S. peacebuilding, as doing so provides the government of Afghanistan with the means to maintain peace on its own. As with other peacebuilding efforts, however, the United States has been focused on the short-term objective of quick defeat of the Taliban through quick train-and-equip programs. Increased num-bers of trainees and shorter training periods lead to improperly trained soldiers and units who are incapable of succeeding on the battlefield and are also less likely to be the professional organization that could be a stabilizing factor in a peaceful Afghanistan once the United States has withdrawn.

13 U.S. Department of Defense, “United States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces: Report to Congress in Accordance with the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act,” June 2008, http://www.defense.gov/pubs/united_states_plan_for_sustaining_the_afghanistan_national_security_forces_1231.pdf, 18.

14 Naval Postgraduate School, “Summary of Afghan National Army,” http://www.nps.edu/programs/ccs/Docs/Pubs/ANA_Summary_Web.pdf, 4.

15 Ibid., 7-8.

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U.S. DDR Activities in AfghanistanThe DDR program in Afghanistan, begun in 2002 under the direction of Japan and the UN Development Program (UNDP), aimed specifically at militias that had been part of or associated with the Northern Alliance during the Afghan civil war. Under the umbrella of the Afghan New Beginnings Program (ANBP), the DDR program was run in conjunction with the Afghan MoD and at first federalized the militias into the initial elements of the ANA to form the Afghan Military Force (AMF) (this plan was eventually abandoned in favor of the U.S. plan to raise the ANA from scratch) and to demobilize fifty thousand AMF members.16 The program was scheduled to remain in place for five years, with the intent to remove weapons from Afghanistan and either transition AMF members into the ANA or ANP or retrain them for civilian occupations. ANBP faced many chal-lenges from the start. One main issue was the fact that DDR was not discussed as part of the Bonn Agreement or UNSCR 1386 and was instead agreed upon by the AMF commanders and international partners at the donors’ conference in Geneva in 2002. This immediately excluded armed groups in the west and south of Afghanistan, as the Afghan voices at the conference were only those from the AMF and did not include those from the problematic Pashtun regions on the Pakistani border.

DDR’ed personnel by province

45%

33%

11%

11%

Kabul

Kunduz

Mazari-i-Sharif

Therest

Figure 1: Distribution of ANBP DDR’ed Personnel by Province17

As the AMF commanders were part of the planning and decision making to initiate the DDR pro-cess, they used their influence to ensure that they benefited from the program politically, monetarily, or militarily. Initially, the AMF commanders had inflated the number of combatants under their command to the international community in order to increase their share of DDR aid. When DDR implementers realized this they had to decrease the number of combatants to support through the

16 Simonetta Rossi and Antonio Giustozzi, “Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants in Afghanistan: Constraints and Limited Capabilities,” London School of Economics, Crisis States Research Center, June 2006, 4.

17 Ibid.

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program,18 a situation that disillusioned many combatants with regard to the program.19 Regional biases persisted within the AMF so that the most powerful militias received a disproportionate amount of DDR assistance, as depicted in figure 1, above, which shows the disparity in assistance by province. This chart provides a visual example of how the ANBP focused on a small area of the country. Additionally, funneling DDR aid through the militia commanders also precluded a com-munity-based approach to DDR (a fairer system of DDR) and allowed those who commanded the guns to decide which guns to give up and where.

Disarmament was conducted by mobile units that traveled to regional sites to collect weapons. ANBP collected 57,629 light and medium weapons and 12,248 heavy weapons (most of which were not serviceable) from 63,380 AMF members. The program also boasts the demobilization of 62,376 ex-combatants (and 260 AMF units), of whom 55,804 entered the reintegration program with a 97 percent completion rate. While these numbers seem impressive, the number of weapons collected represents a mere 56 percent of the weapons known to be in the hands of the AMF, and the poor state of the Afghan economy created many challenges for employing retrained former militiamen.20 Implementation of the reintegration process produced a number of other issues. While high-level AMF commanders received contested political positions within the Afghan Security Forces and ministries, mid- and low-level commanders were treated as equal to their soldiers within ANBP. This reduced status, both socially and financially, has caused a number of them to engage in illicit trades, furthering the conflict, in order to maintain the standard of living to which they had been accustomed.21

Upon completion of the initial ANBP in 2006, international partners realized that the program had failed to attain its desired effects. A second phase was initiated, still under the direction of Japan and UNDP, and was titled the Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG). DIAG was scheduled to run until March 2011 and had two lines of operation: Anti-Personnel Mine and Ammunition Stockpile Destruction (AMPASD) and DDR and heavy weapons cantonment. It was geared toward illegal armed groups (IAGs), defined as armed groups outside of the control of the government. Unlike its predecessor, DIAG is district-focused, not militia-focused, and is being implemented throughout Afghanistan. From 2005 until late 2010, the program disbanded 743 IAGs and collected 51,873 weapons.22 DIAG faces a number of challenges: poor security that makes implantation very

18 One estimate states that fully 80 percent of the persons registered for DDR were not actually combatants. See Shamsul Hadi Shams, “Assessing the Role of DDR in Afghanistan: Internal Security Provision and External Environment,” in Toward Bringing Stability in Afghanistan: A Review of the Peacebuilding Strategy, ed. Yuji Uesugi (Hiroshima: Institute for Peace Science Hiroshima University, 2010), 62.

19 Ibid.20 UN Development Program, “United Nations Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration Resource Centre:

Afghanistan,” undated, http://www.unddr.org/countryprogrammes.php?c=121 (accessed April 23, 2011).21 Caroline A. Hartzell, Missed Opportunities: The Impact of DDR on SSR in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: United States

Institute of Peace, 2011), http://www.usip.org/files/resources/SR270-Missed_Opportunities.pdf, 10.22 UN Development Program, “Afghanistan Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups: Third Quarter Project Progress Report

[2010],” http://www.undp.org.af/Projects/03%20QuarterRep.2010/2010-11-01-%20Third%20Quarter%20Progress%20

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dangerous, local and tribal leaders who are generally unwilling to disarm and demobilize, and some provincial and district leaders who do not support implementation.

Both the ANBP and DIAG were programs led by Japan, UNDP, and the government of Afghanistan and were supported by other donor nations, including the United States. The United States engages in little active leadership in the implementation of DDR in Afghanistan, but supports it through interagency efforts and funding — mainly from the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Yet the biggest effect the United States has on DDR in Afghanistan is not its involvement within it, but the actions it takes outside of it.

The initial U.S. plan for security sector reform — specifically how to raise the ANA and ANP — con-tradicted the international plan for DDR as well as DDR best practices. Ideally, the preponderance of the Afghan Security Forces could have been drawn from the AMF initially, reintegrating them into a governmental structure instead of releasing them into a bleak economic environment. In addition to providing former combatants with work (decreasing the likelihood that they would join insurgent groups), integrating former militiamen into the military would have provided the ANA with proven battlefield leaders. There would have been challenges to such a program: training would still be required on civil rights, professional military standards, and higher-level skills; per-sonal connections acquired in the militias would have to be broken to promote unity of command within the army; and ethnic proportions within the ANA’s leadership and rank-and-file would need to be adjusted. In spite of these challenges, reintegration of the AMF into the ANA would have given the ANBP a better chance of success (some 70 percent to 80 percent of ANBP reintegration alumni are dissatisfied with the services they received).23 The United States’ insistence on starting the ANA from scratch prevented such large-scale reintegration measures, with only 2 percent of new ANA and ANP recruits coming from the AMF through ANBP.

The second way in which the United States has inadvertently derailed the DDR process from the out-side is through rearmament programs. These programs have come in many forms over the course of the conflict, but have become a mainstay (even if controversial) of U.S. counter-insurgency practices. Inspired by the legitimization of Sunni militias as part of the Awakening Councils in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, U.S. military leaders have supported the rearming of tribal or local militias throughout Afghanistan in order to gain support in fighting the Taliban. ISAF leadership has done this on the assumption that local leaders feel that the central government of Afghanistan is failing to meet their basic needs, specifically in the area of security, and they also assume that permitting locals to defend themselves would contribute to solving a number of issues. These include, first, that local leaders can meet local needs, and the distrusted central government security forces (specifically the ANP) will not exacerbate the security situation. Second, such groups are required to pledge their loyalty to the government of Afghanistan in order to be recognized as legitimate armed groups. Third, such

Report%20of%20DIAG.pdf, 1.23 Hartzell, 10.

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programs provide additional troops to fight the Taliban beyond the limited number of Afghan and ISAF forces. Early indications are that ISAF’s planning assumptions are incorrect and that locally armed groups are unable to drive these effects.

Essentially, the United States is subverting the DDR process in pursuit of military interests. By doing so, it allows the reintroduction (or re-legitimization) of the militia structures that proved so difficult to break in the initial years of the war, and it deprives the government of its monopoly on legitimate violence. These programs have proven disastrous in the past as local leaders may be somewhat difficult to accurately identify (a designated militia leader may not lead what ISAF thinks he does), have flexible ideas on loyalty, or may have entered such a program with the specific intent of defecting later once they have collected all they can from coalition forces. Experience has shown that ISAF’s assumptions need to be reexamined. The rearmament of local militias is reversing the few gains seen by ANBP and DIAG.

ConclusionThis paper has focused on three elements of peacebuilding in Afghanistan and how the United States has contributed to them: building the Afghan National Police, building the Afghan National Army, and disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating armed groups. This focus was based on the large scale of these endeavors and their long-term effects on building a stable peace. There are of course many other peacebuilding activities ongoing in Afghanistan: economic development, agricultural support, drug eradication, governmental and constitutional reforms and development, education support, and medical support, to name but a few. These activities and programs are supported by the international community of donor nations as well as many agencies within the U.S. government, such as the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Education, and Health and Human Services. Based on U.S. gov-ernment policies, however, supporting agencies develop their own policies based on DoS and DoD guidance and receive most of their funding for these activities from DoS and DoD.

While peacebuilding in Afghanistan is an interagency endeavor, the non-DoS and non-DoD elements usually provide only expertise to DoS and DoD operations, ensuring that peacebuilding efforts are controlled by DoS and DoD. Even within this construct, the amount of resources that DoD brings to Afghanistan is so significantly larger than those available to DoS (which, again, funds most of the interagency’s programs) that DoD often drives peacebuilding efforts whether it intends to or not. From a personnel perspective, DoD has over ninety thousand uniformed personnel on the ground in Afghanistan fulfilling a number of combat and non-combat roles, whereas there are fewer than one thousand civilians on the ground to conduct all of State’s non-combat roles. Collecting this many civilian government officials was difficult for the U.S. government under such circumstances, as civilian agencies are not funded, authorized, or trained to conduct deployed operations without special congressional approval.

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From a fiscal perspective, since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the combined bud-get in Afghanistan of DoS and USAID has been on average 5 percent of the U.S. Afghanistan budget, with DoD receiving the balance.24 This is not to say that combat operations consume 95 percent of the U.S. Afghanistan budget, because DoD does spend some of its funds on non-combat operations (particularly with the Commander’s Emergency Response Program), but with such a significant share of the overall budget DoD has the ability to drive U.S. policy in Afghanistan, which in turn means that policy is geared toward DoD’s primary mission of winning the war. Although civilian U.S. government contingents in Afghanistan share this objective to some extent, DoD’s focus on short-term security gains is often detrimental to their programs. Such influence has ensured that most U.S. government activities support the current counter-insurgency strategy to defeat the Taliban, often at the expense of long-term peacebuilding initiatives. This is apparent in the marked increase in proportional spending on security assistance as a total of U.S. assistance to the government of Afghanistan, as depicted in figure 2.

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As shown in the above discussion on ANP development, DoD has a vested interest in producing as many policemen as possible, as fast as possible. The ANP is employed as a counter-insurgent force that has been focused on defeating the Taliban instead of protecting the citizens of its members’ juris-dictions. The short-duration training regimen is intended to be a solution for counter-insurgency, but instead creates ill-trained and ill-equipped counter-insurgents and police. This has made the ANP more a driver of conflict than a key element of peacebuilding. The ANA, too, may be destabi-lizing in the long term. While ANA development has been a relative success story in Afghanistan,

24 Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” CRS Report for Congress, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf, 14.

25 Rebecca Williams, “US Assistance to Afghanistan,” The Will and the Wallet, a Stimson Center blog, September 3, 2009, http://thewillandthewallet.org/2009/09/03/us-assistance-to-afghanistan/.

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the United States has supported such an ambitious growth of the end strength of the ANA that the government of Afghanistan will be unable to sustain it after the United States draws down its sup-port (which presents a future DDR requirement). Again, U.S. counter-insurgency needs are driving decisions with short-term benefits and long-term costs, costs that will likely preclude a lasting peace.

DDR has been a peacebuilding effort for which the United States has been a supporting donor, yet its actions with regard to the war against the Taliban have derailed, subverted, and in some cases reversed international efforts at DDR. With so many resources focused on military success, the United States has influenced peacebuilding initiatives without intending to. This phenomenon exists in other aspects of peacebuilding not discussed in depth here. For example, drug production is seen to fund insurgent groups, so the United States undertakes drug eradication measures to wipe out poppy fields. This is done with the purpose of destroying an insurgent funding stream without concern for actual second-order effects. Anecdotal evidence suggests that eradication has become a driver of conflict in many cases as the poppy farmers lose their livelihood and turn to the Taliban for sources of income.

The United States is spending a significant amount of resources in Afghanistan in order to defeat the Taliban and is unlikely to completely withdraw its troops until some modicum of security is estab-lished. The U.S. government has determined that a counter-insurgency strategy is its best method of achieving that and has geared its activities toward that end, often to the detriment of achieving a lasting peace. With waning public support for the war, the United States is looking to disengage as quickly as possible and is taking steps to hasten its withdrawal to meet domestic public sentiment and risks prolonging the conflict as a result. This is not to say that the United States has difficulty with peacebuilding in every setting, only that in war zones in which the United States is a primary combatant, it will treat peacebuilding as supporting the war effort and not as a necessary process of its own. The United States should strive to change how it approaches peacebuilding in conflict zones.

Implications for Cooperation with JapanWhen engaged in conflict, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the United States tends to disproportionately and myopically center its resource allocation on combat tasks. The United States is usually the largest overall donor to these types of operations and feels that because of this it should be able to drive all aspects of the combat and peacebuilding missions. When possible, both financially and politically, Japan should attempt to partner with the United States as an equal donor for the peacebuilding process — with both money and expertise — in order to gain equitable standing in decision making. With fewer vested interests in actual combat in these conflicts, Japan could prove to be a neutral broker in driving peacebuilding activities that could provide for a lasting peace as well as the ability to effectively end the conflict as quickly as is realistically possible. Given Japan’s reputation for com-petency in the peacebuilding arena and the fact that it is non-Western (removing a significant source of bias in many parts of the world), the United States would hardly be able to ignore that country’s

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expertise as long as Japan brings enough resources to be able to support the United States toward better peacebuilding in its wars. In this capacity, Japan could prove to be the ideal parity partner for peacebuilding in areas of the world in which the United States is militarily engaged.

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9U.S. Policy and Assistance on

Peacebuilding in Sudan: 2001 – 2011Konrad J. Huber

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

U.S. policy toward Sudan — particularly in the last ten years — has been deeply shaped by the country’s benighted history of violence and its complicated, often fitful search for peace. The

human costs of this violence, in Africa’s largest country, have been catastrophic: two million dead, and five million displaced in the southern conflict alone, plus an additional three hundred thousand dead in Darfur and another two million displaced. The United States has been an indispensable player in efforts to stop conflict and bring about peace in Sudan, but it is not the only player, nor the most important. At most, it has been an influential outsider and generous donor, together with other countries; the main protagonists have been Sudanese. In this regard, it should be emphasized that despite considerable progress in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), stability is still precarious, particularly in the borderlands between the north and the south of the country. And indeed, peace itself has been elusive in one major region of the country: Darfur.

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Nonetheless, U.S. efforts have incontrovertibly contributed to peace. It is, however, virtually impossi-ble to talk about a narrowly circumscribed set of “peacebuilding” activities within U.S. policy toward Sudan. Rather, peacebuilding goals have suffused the U.S. approach. This paper will therefore use a broad definition of the term to encompass a range of activities beyond those strictly construed to support dialogue and reconciliation between belligerents. These include humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict, efforts to protect civilians from violence, aid to build up nascent institutional and social capacities to govern justly and peacefully, and indeed diplomacy and other forms of statecraft (like sanctions) that promote peace processes or strengthen implementation of signed accords. In this sense, the United States has been instrumental in promoting peace in Sudan. From 2005 until 2010, the United States spent in excess of $8 billion for humanitarian, development, security, and peacekeeping purposes in Sudan and eastern Chad (where many Darfur refugees were forced to flee). Far beyond the numbers, however, the United States has invested considerable political capital in bringing about a peaceful transformation of Sudan — in the midst of costly and highly time-con-suming engagements elsewhere in the world.

This paper seeks to shed further light on this role by reviewing Sudan’s history of conflict, its halting progress toward peace, and U.S. policy and aid throughout this process. The final sections provide brief reflections on how the U.S. foreign policy and assistance apparatus is organized for Sudan and how effective its functioning has been. The final section concludes with some observations on how the U.S. and Japanese approaches to peacebuilding in Sudan relate to each other and can seek deeper coordination.

Sudan’s Long History of Conflict: 1950s – 2000Sudan’s recent experience with peacebuilding has to be seen within the context of a half-century of deep-seated, often brutal civil wars that have harmed large numbers of civilians in different parts of the country. In fact, Sudan’s vast, multi-ethnic republic has been beset by conflict since before inde-pendence in 1956.1 A mutiny of southern soldiers who refused transfer to the north prompted the start of the first civil war in 1955, and southern secessionism under the leadership of the Anya Nya movement gained steam by the early 1960s. Peace was reached fleetingly with the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, which soon broke down over southern grievances regarding the lack of implementation of autonomy provisions. A new rebellion, Anya Nya-II, then arose in the mid-1970s, around the time that oil was discovered in Bentiu, located within the boundaries of the Southern Region. The

1 This and the following section draw from various sources including Mark Simmons and Peter Dixon, eds., Peace by Piece: Addressing Sudan’s Conflicts, Conciliation Resources Accord, issue18 (2006), http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/sudan/contents.php (accessed April 6, 2011); and the reports of the Assessment and Evaluation Commission (AEC), mandated by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, http://www.aec-sudan.org/ (accessed April 8, 2011). For a useful one-page overview of this period, see “Timeline of North-South Conflict in Sudan, 2000 – 2010,” compiled for the Oslo Forum’s 2010 annual meeting of a network of high-level mediators, http://www.osloforum.org/system/files/retreats/Sudan%20timeline.pdf (accessed April 11, 2011).

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subsequent defection of the Sudanese Army’s Colonel John Garang, who had been sent to put down a southern mutiny, led in 1980 to the establishment of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), based in Ethiopia. Gradually — and at times vio-lently — the SPLM/A then supplanted Anya Nya-II as the standard-bearer of southern secessionism.

The 1980s saw further upheaval in Sudan as national political control alternated between civil-ian and military leaders. Fighting in the government-SPLM/A conflict intensified, and the war expanded from southern Sudan into the central areas of the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile. Khartoum began arming migratory Arabs against southern civilians. These militias — raised among the poor tribes in the hard-scrabble borderlands between northern and southern Sudan — came to be known as Popular Defense Forces (PDF). Meanwhile, internal divisions among southern rebels led to internecine bloodshed often along ethnic lines. The effect on civilians of this virulent com-bination of conflict factors was devastating. In 1988, more than 250,000 Sudanese died of famine, many of them in Bahr al-Ghazal, as a result of Khartoum’s “scorched-earth” tactics, the denial of access to relief, and the effects of drought and floods. This prompted the UN in early 1989 to sign an agreement with the government and the SPLM/A to provide relief assistance via Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) — which was to become one of the world’s largest, longest, and most logistically complex aid efforts, lasting over a decade. At the national level, a power struggle in 1989 between Islamists and traditional political forces produced yet another coup, and Brigadier Omer al-Bashir assumed power in an alliance with the National Islamic Front (NIF) and dissolved the parliament, political parties, and trade unions.

The 1990s were no less bloody or cataclysmic for the country as the NIF sought to consolidate its power and impose shari’a. Conflict worsened in the Nuba Mountains, and the region was beset by a war-induced famine, as was Bahr al-Ghazal (for the second time in a decade). Meanwhile, the SPLM/A and northern opposition parties — united as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) — sought to coordinate their efforts against the regime. With Ethiopian and SPLA help, the NDA launched an insurgency in eastern Sudan. The decade of the 1990s, however, also saw the launch of regional peace efforts, led by a consortium of Ethiopian, Eritrean, Ugandan, and Kenyan governments under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD, which later shortened its name to IGAD). Six rounds of talks in 1994 posted successes in gaining President Al-Bashir’s and SPLM/A leader John Garang’s acceptance of the mediation process, but IGAD’s initial efforts yielded no peace accord. In fact, the regime negotiated a separate deal with other southern factions, including that of Riek Machar, and signed the Khartoum Peace Agreement in 1997. IGAD-mediated talks between the government and the SPLM/A resumed in the last years of the decade, but without significant effect. Sudan also became an oil producer in 1999, underscoring a highly contentious issue in the north-south relationship (and one that has remained problematic despite the advances achieved under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005).

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Sudan’s Uncertain Struggle Toward Peace: 2001 – 09With the start of the new millennium, peace efforts entered into a qualitatively different phase. As discussed in greater detail below, this period coincided with an increase in the focus and level of U.S. commitment in pushing for an end to the government-SPLM/A war. Greater pressure from key domestic constituencies within the United States and from the Congress itself — which was seeking to pass a proposed Sudan Peace Act — led the Bush administration in early September 2001 to appoint the first U.S. special envoy on Sudan, former Senator (and Episcopalian pastor) John Danforth. Days later, al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. This dramatically changed the context in which Khartoum saw its relations with the United States and the war against southern secessionism. Meanwhile, IGAD had advanced in its efforts to facili-tate a peace process, and the international community was in a position to cooperate more directly with Khartoum, including lifting UN diplomatic sanctions that had been in place since 1996.

By late 2001, sizeable strides were made in reinvigorating a peace process. Special Envoy Danforth was particularly keen to establish a series of “litmus tests” to verify the parties’ willingness to negoti-ate in good faith. Mediated by the United States and Switzerland, a six-month, renewable cease-fire was signed in January 2002 by the government and SPLM/A to allow for humanitarian assistance to enter the Nuba Mountains, which would be monitored by unarmed foreign personnel through joint military monitors and a civilian protection monitoring team. With the inclusion of interna-tional monitors and provisions for unimpeded aid to the Nuba Mountains, the cease-fire was a signal achievement. In the meantime, through the Nairobi Declaration, also agreed to in January 2002, Riek Machar’s faction reconciled with the SPLM/A, overcoming a major hurdle to greater southern unity and cohesiveness and increasing chances of a successful peace process. The other monumental breakthrough reached in 2002 was the Machakos Protocol, signed in July by the government and SPLM. It acknowledged southern Sudan’s right to a referendum on secession after a six-and-a-half-year transition period while allowing the north to keep shari’a law.

The year 2003 saw the continuation of IGAD talks, bolstered by the inclusion of the United States, UK, Norway, and others as observers. Separate talks in Kenya facilitated by the IGAD mediator — retired Kenyan General Lazaro Sumbeiywo — focused on the status of the so-called Transition Zones (now called the Three Areas) along the presumptive north-south border at the time of Sudanese independence on January 1, 1956, also known as “1-1-56.”2 Eventually shifted to Naivasha, the IGAD process marked yet another success in bringing together SPLM/A leader John Garang and Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and brokering the Framework Agreement on Security Arrangements during the Interim Period in September. Unfortunately, however, 2003 was also the year when a new insurgency was launched in Sudan’s western region, under the name Front for

2 The Three Areas of Abyei, southern Blue Nile, and the Nuba Mountains became ensnared in the SPLM/A uprising for different historical reasons than those of the south, but their position along the ill-defined 1-1-56 border and their role in the rebellion made the resolution of their status all the more nettlesome.

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the Liberation of Darfur. In part because of the example and influence of the SPLM/A, the Darfur rebels then changed their name to the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A); their support came mainly from the Fur, Masalit, smaller allied tribes, and parts of the Zaghawa ethnic group. The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — which traces its origins to the Muslim Brotherhood and disaffected NIF members from Darfur but draws heavily on other elements of the Zaghawa for its membership — also entered the fray in Darfur and the east. Paralleling Khartoum’s earlier use of Arab PDF militias against southern civilians, the Sudanese government armed and supported Arab militias in Darfur known as janjaweed. These militias were tasked with burning villages and attacking civilians from mostly African tribes as part of the military’s counter-insurgency effort. Large-scale death, destruction, and displacement of civilians commenced in 2003, continuing into and reaching international notoriety in 2004. By the end of 2004, some 2 million Darfurians were estimated to have been displaced, including some 200,000 in refugee camps in eastern Chad and over 1.5 million within camps in Darfur.

In 2004 – 0 5, the Sudanese government simultaneously pursued peace negotiations with the SPLM/A while prosecuting an indiscriminate counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur against areas suspected of SLM/A or JEM sympathies (and half-heartedly negotiating with the Darfur rebels). As discussed below, this led to strong tensions in U.S. policy and peacebuilding efforts. On the one hand, the Naivasha process produced in early 2004 the Agreement on Wealth-Sharing during the Pre-interim and Interim Period, a pioneering deal regarding Sudan’s oil wealth (which is located in the south but has to transit the north via a pipeline to reach Port Sudan and export markets). Soon thereaf-ter, the government and SPLM/A agreed on a power-sharing deal as well as protocols for the Three Areas. These are highly significant, both in terms of substance and in terms of U.S. assistance. The power-sharing accord officially divided executive and legislative positions between the government party and opposition parties (including but not exclusively the SPLM), and its primary focus was the national political institutions, in other words those located in the north (and which would remain in the north if the south were to secede). The protocols for the Three Areas — which in essence were miniature peace agreements — involved a special U.S. role as mediator and have therefore implied a special U.S. commitment to the Three Areas.

Unfortunately, 2004 – 0 5 also saw an intensification of the conflict in Darfur, a listless peace process for the region, and increasing pressure from the United States (and others) on Khartoum to change its bellicose policies toward the west of the country. Talks commenced in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, between the government and the SLM/A and JEM, but only yielded a renewable forty-five-day cease-fire, the creation of the Joint Ceasefire Commission, and a commitment to further negotiations. The African Union (AU) then received the mandate both to lead the peace process and to establish the cease-fire commission and deploy observers. Deploying cease-fire monitors was an enormously taxing undertaking for the body, given its limited operational capacity. In mid-2004, the first contingent of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) peacekeeping force began

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arriving in Darfur, but it required significant Western (mainly U.S.) airlift and even on-the-ground logistical support (provided via a U.S. civilian contractor hired to operate AMIS bases and instal-lations). AU-mediated peace talks limped along in late 2004, making lackluster progress through 2005 and into 2006.

Meanwhile, pressure increased enormously in 2004 within UN, U.S., and other policy-making circles to declare the Darfur crisis a “genocide.” The U.S. Congress officially labeled it as such, and following large-scale, in-depth interviews of Darfur refugees in eastern Chad (an effort paid for and organized by USAID), then-Secretary of State Colin Powell testified to Congress in September of that year that

“genocide has been committed” through a “consistent and widespread” pattern of atrocities, including killings, rapes, and destruction of livelihoods and property.3 In part through U.S. advocacy, the UN Security Council mandated the Independent Commission of Inquiry into Darfur and threatened sanctions if civilians were not protected. An early-2005 UN Security Council resolution went even further and allowed for sanctions against Darfur cease-fire violators and for referrals of suspected perpetrators of genocide or crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

It was in this schizophrenic context that talks in Kenya resumed regarding a final settlement between the government and SPLM/A. In January 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was formally signed. Soon thereafter, the report of the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM) — prepared by the government, the SPLM/A, and donor institutions — was released, estimating the costs of initial reconstruction assistance for southern Sudan and the Three Areas at close to $8 billion. To strengthen implementation of the CPA’s security provisions, the UN Security Council authorized the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) with ten thousand troops and up to 715 civilian police to be deployed, primarily in the south and Three Areas but also in other contentious zones, like the east.

With the end of the six-month “pre-interim period,” the formal, six-year-long interim period envi-sioned by the CPA commenced on July 9, 2005, when John Garang was sworn in as president of the Government of South Sudan (GOSS) and Sudan’s first vice president. His untimely death in an accidental helicopter crash — occurring within mere weeks of his dual appointment — provoked widespread violence in Khartoum, Juba, and some other towns. However, setting up GOSS insti-tutions and the Government of National Unity (GNU) at the central level continued apace with the appointment of the new SPLM leader, Salva Kiir Mayardit, as first vice president and president of GOSS and with the inclusion of SPLM ministers in the GNU. By the end of 2005, Sudan had a new interim national constitution and a new interim constitution for southern Sudan. By early- to

3 On September 9, 2004, the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research jointly published a report, “Documenting Atrocities in Darfur,” summarizing these findings. This report was previously available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/36028.htm, but appears no longer to be archived on the State Department’s public website. For more on then-Secretary Powell’s testimony, see Steven R. Weisman,

“Powell Declares Genocide in Sudan in Bid to Raise Pressure,” New York Times, September 9, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/international/africa/09CND-SUDA.html (accessed April 6, 2011).

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mid-2006, myriad new institutions mandated by the CPA were established. Progress beyond these initial steps, however, was slow and uneven.

Adding to Sudan’s complex patchwork of power-sharing agreements, security arrangements, and autonomy provisions under the CPA, two further peace agreements were inked in 2006. In May, the government and Menawi’s SLM/A faction signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), but the JEM and Abdelwahid’s SLM faction refused to sign. The United States was heavily engaged in helping to bring about the DPA, pushing for its broader acceptance and assisting with implementation of key provisions. In fact, following assertive U.S. diplomacy in edging the parties toward an agreement and mustering expanded international support, then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick arrived in Abuja, the site of the talks, in early May, together with UK International Secretary Hilary Benn. The plan was to cajole the parties into signing the deal, but only the Sudanese government and Minni Menawi’s SLM/A faction acceded.4 (Though Menawi was sworn in as assistant to the president, the DPA ultimately failed, for myriad reasons.) In November, the Sudanese government agreed in principle to a hybrid AU-UN peacekeeping operation in Darfur, a key demand of the international community as part of overall stabilization efforts.

The second peace agreement in 2006 came in October, when the government and the Eastern Front rebels signed the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement (ESPA). Mediated by the Eritrean gov-ernment — which had previously supported the Eastern Front as an irritant against its erstwhile antagonists in Khartoum — the ESPA envisioned power- and revenue-sharing between the GNU and the three eastern states of Kassala, Red Sea, and Gedaref. With each successive accord, how-ever, cynicism mounted regarding the robustness and durability of Sudan’s “kaleidoscope” of peace deals. To make matters worse, confrontation between Sudan and Chad escalated in 2006, with each country supporting rebels fighting against its neighbor. (Libya also backed some of the Darfur reb-els, particularly JEM.)

The messiness continued throughout 2007 – 0 9 as tensions surfaced on multiple fronts. At the national level, the SPLM temporarily withdrew from the Government of National Unity in 2007 over disputes with President Bashir’s National Congress Party regarding the pace of implementa-tion of CPA provisions, including agreements on Abyei, wealth sharing, withdrawal of government security forces from the south, and demarcation of the 1-1-56 north-south border. In fact, Abyei became a major flashpoint in 2008 as government forces and Arab militias clashed with the SPLA and destroyed the town. The parties eventually agreed to submit resolution of Abyei’s status to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The year 2008 also saw the census, stipulated by the CPA, finally

4 For a trenchant critique of the “deadline diplomacy” that the United States and others practiced in Abuja, see insider Laurie Nathan’s account of the talks, “No Dialogue, No Commitment: The Perils of Deadline Diplomacy for Darfur,” Small Arms Survey, no. 4 (December 2006), http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/pdfs/HSBA-SIB-4-Darfur.pdf (accessed April 11, 2011).

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take place after successive delays (it was originally to be held in early 2007) and despite problems, including an SPLM boycott in South Kordofan and contested results.

CPA Milestones and a Renewed Darfur Peace Process in DohaThe census set the stage for the remaining events of the interim period, namely the 2010 general elections and the 2011 referendum. These milestones were not reached easily, however, as the par-ties (particularly on the NCP side) ratcheted up demands and dragged out decision making. In fact, talks mediated by the United States in 2009 led the NCP and SPLM eventually to agree on the terms of the referendum: it would be considered valid if at least a 60 percent turnout was achieved and a simple majority voted for independence. Though far from a smooth year, 2010 constituted a turn-ing point for Sudan in many respects. The parties agreed to redo the census in South Kordofan and to resolve disputes about the overall census results by augmenting the number of southern seats in the national assembly by forty. General elections were finally held in April, although the SPLM and other opposition parties boycotted the vote in the north out of protest over what they saw as unfair tactics and abuse of incumbency by the NCP. President Bashir, who had been charged in 2008 with genocide in Darfur by the ICC prosecutor, was elected president with 68 percent of the vote, and Salva Kiir won 93 percent of the vote for the presidency of the south. In addition, “popular consulta-tions” envisioned for Blue Nile and South Kordofan as part of the CPA were finally initiated in 2010.

In early 2011, Sudan reached the definitive milestone of the CPA’s interim period with the January referendum on whether southern Sudan should remain part of the country or become independent. The one major footnote to this event was that Abyei’s status still remains unresolved. A simultaneous referendum was to be held there on whether it would become part of South Sudan or stay with the north, but the vote was delayed because of differences between the NCP-dominated central govern-ment and the SPLM over boundary demarcation for Abyei and residency rights. Nevertheless, close to 99 percent of southerners voted for independence; despite irregularities in a number of counties, the vote’s results were announced officially in February and are considered valid, setting the stage for southern independence on July 9, 2011.

The period from 2007 to 2011 presented a very mixed picture for Darfur as well. Inter-tribal vio-lence following the collapse of the DPA persisted into 2007. Throughout that year, the United States was extremely active in pushing for renewed talks and particularly in encouraging rebel unification, although a renewed peace process launched in October 2007 in Sirte, Libya, ultimately proved still-born. In 2008 the security situation in Darfur deteriorated further, bringing the total deaths since 2003 to an estimated three hundred thousand. A JEM attack in May 2008 — which reached Khartoum’s twin city Omdurman and almost carried the rebels across the Nile River — broadened the war and unleashed a government crackdown. Eventually, however, a new Darfur peace process began in Qatar in 2009 and continues as of the time of this writing, in April 2011. Its prospects are uncertain.

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U.S. Policy on Sudan since 2001Against this tortured background of wars, atrocities, and peace processes, U.S. policy on Sudan has sought to function effectively across a number of issues. Although an extremely important priority, promoting durable peace and assisting with implementation of viable accords are but one element of U.S. policy. Dynamics in the bilateral relationship have been complicated because of numerous issues — including those important to a number of influential lobbies within the United States5 — and relations have often been fraught. Part of this stems from highly antagonistic relations dating back to the 1990s, when Bashir and the NIF first came to power. The regime’s support for international terrorists and its overt flirtation with Osama bin Laden, who resided in Sudan in 1991 – 96, put it on a collision course with U.S. policy along many dimensions, and international sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Khartoum duly followed. Indeed, in the wake of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar-as-Salam and Nairobi, the United States conducted a missile strike in the outskirts of Khartoum against the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, allegedly the site of a chemical weapons factory. Sanctions and restrictions imposed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 were affirmed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and subsequently thereafter.

The U.S. posture has gradually shifted as Khartoum’s support for al-Qaeda waned, as the Sudanese government explicitly sought to assist the United States following the September 2001 attacks, and as Sudan implements the provisions of the CPA. Regarding purportedly greater intelligence coop-eration since 2001, Sudan was characterized by the State Department in yearly Country Reports on Terrorism — based on information provided by U.S. intelligence agencies — as a “strong partner in the War on Terror” despite the evident backing of militias in Darfur against civilians and support for non-state terrorist groups elsewhere.6 Open sources report that Sudan was allegedly providing spies for U.S. purposes in Iraq, tracking al-Qaeda in Somalia, and offering other intelligence assis-tance.7 The 2005 visit of Sudan’s then-intelligence chief, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, to the United States for meetings at CIA headquarters is often cited as evidence of this closer relationship.

U.S. policy also seeks to remain cognizant of Sudan’s importance as an oil producer and a large, influ-ential country in a volatile region. Sudan’s oil exports, some 65 percent of which go to China but

5 These have included, since the 1990s and into the new millennium, the following: Christian conservatives concerned about religious persecution under the NIF regime, such as the imposition of shari’a; the Congressional Black Caucus and other African-American advocates, who were first concerned about modern-day slavery in Sudan but then became engaged more broadly on the north-south war; human rights groups focused on war crimes, genocide, and large-scale violations in the north-south war and then later on Darfur; and the wellspring of campus, youth, religious, and other groups (assembled via Save Darfur and other networks) agitating for a robust U.S. policy regarding Darfur.

6 See, for example, Josh Meyer, “Sudan Called a Key U.S. Ally,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2007, http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/05/world/fg-ussudan5 (accessed April 11, 2011).

7 See Greg Miller and Josh Meyer, “U.S. Relies on Sudan despite Condemning It,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2007, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2007/jun/11/world/fg-ussudan1 (accessed April 11, 2011).

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provide close to all of southern Sudan’s revenues, require the United States to take a nuanced approach.8 Sudanese cooperation — for example, in withdrawing Khartoum’s earlier support for the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda — has also been instrumental in progress on regional issues.

Nevertheless, the major issue for U.S. policy regarding Sudan has been the country’s internal con-flicts and the regime’s often-wanton disregard for civilian life in the course of countering the regional rebellions. This engagement first developed in the 1980s and particularly the 1990s with the intensi-fication of the north-south war, but the past decade’s carnage and displacement in Darfur has again brought humanitarian concerns strongly to the fore. The United States has become Sudan’s largest aid donor almost exclusively because of the magnitude of its humanitarian needs and peacekeeping operations. Over time, this concern has garnered greater awareness and support among U.S. voters than for any other foreign policy issue in Africa, particularly among grassroots humanitarian and religious organizations mobilized by the Darfur genocide. This higher level of popular awareness about Sudan — and now particularly Darfur — is reflected in vigorous engagement by Congress, members of which have been some of the longest-standing U.S. observers of the country. A highly noteworthy dimension of this popular groundswell for an energetic U.S. policy on Sudan is the role of celebrities — particularly big names in the movie industry like Mia Farrow, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Steven Spielberg — to push publicly for more muscular international responses against the Sudanese government for its depredations against civilians.

Given this domestic concern, pushing for and helping to achieve the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement was, therefore, an important Bush administration foreign policy success. This focus has continued under President Barack Obama. Following his inauguration in 2009, his administration initiated a Sudan policy review, which was formally released in October of that year. Entitled “Sudan: A Critical Moment, a Comprehensive Approach,”9 it lays out a vision clearly grounded in human-itarian concerns for the fate of the CPA and civilians in Darfur, but it also focuses on integrating disparate elements of U.S. Sudan policy into a more cohesive whole. It advocates for “a more effec-tive multilateral approach,” in which U.S. leadership is crucial and seeks to construct an “expanded coalition … to promote security, justice, and development” in Sudan. Balancing simultaneous focus on Darfur and CPA implementation as well as conflict prevention elsewhere, the policy aims to

“be agile enough to address discrete emerging crises, while maintaining a sustained focus on long-term stability.” Similarly, it seeks to ensure that Sudanese support for counter-terrorism objectives not “be used as a bargaining chip to evade responsibilities in Darfur or in implementing the CPA.”

8 Sudan produces close to a half-million barrels a day, some of which is consumed domestically, and the rest exported mostly to China and in lesser quantities to Indonesia, Japan, India, Malaysia, and others. For more, see http://www.eurasiareview.com/sudan-energy-profile-oil-over-90-percent-of-total-export-revenues-26022011/(accessed April 17, 2011).

9 U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, “Sudan: A Critical Moment, a Comprehensive Approach,” October 19, 2009, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/oct/130672.htm (accessed April 11, 2011).

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The policy review then articulates three principal U.S. strategic priorities, including the following (reproduced verbatim):

1. A definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses, and genocide in Darfur.

2. Implementation of the North-South CPA that results in a peaceful post-2011 Sudan, or an orderly path toward two separate and viable states at peace with each other.

3. Ensure that Sudan does not provide a safe haven for international terrorists.10

This set of priorities hinges on a relatively narrow array of policy options, however, especially given the geopolitical realities of the region. (The last decade has seen U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a seemingly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and now the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria, as well as a NATO-imposed no-fly zone in Libya.) The major carrot in U.S. policy toward Khartoum is the prospect of removing Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and normalizing rela-tions with Washington, which are being held out as inducements for full implementation of the CPA and substantive progress on resolving the Darfur conflict.

U.S. Peacebuilding Priorities in Sudan: An Evolution over TimeU.S. peacebuilding efforts have remained a consistently high bilateral and multilateral priority. Largely flexible and responsive to the circumstances in Sudan, the exact mix of elements and their relative emphasis within peacebuilding efforts have evolved over time. Seven major elements can be dis-cerned, though, each one fluctuating in relation to the exigencies of the moment. These are as follows:

1. Using diplomatic pressure to secure — and implement — durable and just peace agreements between the belligerents

2. Encouraging rebel/opposition groups to resolve internal differences and present a more cohe-sive front externally

3. Helping parties to avoid the escalation of local disputes into more destabilizing conflicts

4. Building up southern capabilities, particularly during the interim period, so that southern Sudan can become a viable counterpart to Khartoum and survive as a state if it opted for independence

5. Seeking to expand the access of average Sudanese to information about issues and events that affect the country, like peace agreements, constitutional and institutional changes — and seeking to increase popular participation in key events such as the census, elections, popular consulta-tions, and referenda

10 Ibid.

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6. Calling attention to large-scale abuses, for example in Darfur, and providing concrete assistance that aims to protect civilians

7. Providing large-scale assistance to alleviate the suffering of civilians and begin the process of post-war reconstruction and recovery

Pressing for Peace — and for Peace Implementation

Arguably the most important and at times the most influential role played by the United States in Sudan has been to press for peace: before and during negotiations and throughout the vitally criti-cal implementation period after a deal has been signed. The stand-out achievement for the United States in this regard was to work closely with IGAD, regional governments, the UK, Norway, and other international parties to bring together the Sudanese regime and the SPLM in the Naivasha process. This ultimately yielded the CPA.11 A specific example of leadership was to assure the SPLM that concerted U.S. assistance and vigilance regarding the Three Areas would be provided in exchange for decisive concessions that Abyei could have a referendum on its status and association with the south while the SPLM-held zones of the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile would remain in the north (albeit with substantial autonomy envisioned during the interim period). The United States has sought to play a similarly active role with regard to the Darfur conflict, serving as a key broker of the 2004 N’Djamena cease-fire and the 2006 Abuja peace accord and continuing to push for peace in the Doha talks.

This role, however, has not been limited to the pre-negotiation and negotiation phases of formal talks, but extends to the implementation of often-vague, contentious issues conveniently left ill-de-fined or even undecided in an accord. The United States has been a vital participant in the CPA’s formal oversight process led by the Assessment and Evaluation Commission, and it breathed new life into the troika of CPA guarantors (United States, UK, and Norway). More significantly, it has been an instrumental broker of post-accord agreements for disputes that have arisen during CPA implementation. The United States was indispensable in bringing about the SPLM-NCP deal to refer the Abyei dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration and in overcoming obstacles created by the census results. The 2009 policy review recommitted the United States to working with inter-national partners to address unimplemented elements of the CPA, such as the 2010 elections, the 2011 referendum, border demarcation, and confidence-building measures along the 1-1-56 line.

11 At the time of its signing and immediately thereafter, the United States and other CPA proponents argued that if prop-erly implemented, the accord could “make unity attractive,” and that national authorities, particularly those associated with the National Congress Party and the security forces, should engage in efforts to do so. Underlying this hope, how-ever, were the assumptions that power- and wealth-sharing accords would be fully implemented and thereby would undercut secessionist grievances, and that the national elections envisioned under CPA would be free, fair, and com-petitive and bring about a different political dispensation that could make continued union between the north and south viable. These assumptions were not borne out by subsequent events.

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Contain and Defuse Tensions in Potential Flashpoints

The Darfur crisis — as tragic and brutal as it has been for civilians — also drew enormous foreign policy attention away from the north-south peace process precisely at a time when the interna-tional community was trying to push for signatures on the CPA. This experience and the presence of myriad hot-spots throughout Sudan, particularly in the Three Areas and the oil-rich borderlands, underscored for U.S. policy makers and aid managers the need to remain vigilant about potential flashpoints. The flare-ups in Abyei in 2008 and again now in early 2011 are a case in point. U.S. pol-icy and assistance therefore seek to help the Sudanese head off or otherwise manage tensions in about a half-dozen priority areas and to support others, like the UN and international NGOs, in implementing conflict prevention activities and/or disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs. A specific concern is that local conflicts can be escalated by unscrupulous elites and derail the CPA or other peace processes. Particularly through targeted, highly flexible programming mechanisms managed by USAID, the United States is seeking to mount high-impact, visible pro-grammatic responses to such flashpoints and crises. At a diplomatic level — whether via the special envoy (see below), Friends of the CPA, and/or like-minded embassies — the idea is to bring pres-sure to bear on spoilers or their recalcitrant backers in order to resolve conflicts early and peacefully.

Resolving Inter-group Differences

An issue related to these potential flashpoints is divisive inter-group relations. The underlying assumption in promoting reconciliation within groups or regions is that greater internal cohesion will enable parties to achieve more vigorous, more durable settlements with their counterparts. The danger is that unresolved conflicts could undermine or imperil a broader peace. This strategy was first employed in the south and the Nuba Mountains, where internal divisions during the 1990s left communities fragmented, mutually hostile, and often open to the machinations if not manipula-tions of outside elites. The central government in Khartoum was well versed in pitting Arabs against Nuba in South Kordofan, for example, or in exploiting Dinka-Nuer-Shilluk rifts in the south, often arming one group against the other.

Early milestones in overcoming some of these internal divisions came with the 1999 Wunlit meet-ing that helped lay the groundwork for Dinka-Nuer reconciliation and thereby for the SPLM’s rapprochement with other southern factions, including those under the command of Riek Machar. An almost identical strategy was pursued in Darfur, when the United States and other like-minded outsiders encouraged the deeply fractured western rebels to reconcile with each other in 2007, via meetings in Mombasa, Kenya, and in Arusha, Tanzania, in the run-up to the resumption of peace talks in Sirte, Libya. (Both the pre-meetings and the Sirte talks ultimately proved unsuccessful.)

In a similar vein, USAID funded the All-Nuba Conference in December 2002, which helped to undergird the cease-fire in the Nuba Mountains and the re-launching of humanitarian operations

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in that area. During the Kenya-based negotiations in Machakos and Naivasha in 2003 – 0 4 and in the immediate post-CPA period of 2005 – 0 6, USAID energetically supported grassroots, “peo-ple-to-people” peacebuilding in southern Sudan as part of an effort to help southerners show their ability to overcome their differences and prepare for regional autonomy and self-governance. This approach has also been extended to dealing with local disputes in other places, including where USAID funded implementing partners to promote community-based peace mechanisms. For example, in an insecure area of Upper Nile where three contending tribes vie for access to water and control over cattle, a USAID partner established six “early warning” monitoring posts through which com-munities could contact local authorities and police in the event of an impending conflict.

Building Up Southern Capabilities

It is difficult to overstate the role of the United States in providing assistance to the emerging insti-tutions of the Government of South Sudan. Assistance to the south covers a vast realm ranging from managing public resources, including oil revenues, to helping the SPLA transform itself into a more professional (and less costly) army while promoting community disarmament and security programs. In terms of building GOSS institutions and ensuring some modicum of transparency and effectiveness in political processes like elections, the U.S. role is unequaled. Help was provided for writing a southern constitution, standing up key institutions, and training or advising GOSS officials and technical staff. This assistance has included direct USAID support to the GOSS Office of the President and Ministry of Presidential Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Bank of Southern Sudan, and myriad other ministries and government organizations in an effort to build up a professional civil service and establish systems and skills for transparent government functioning at both the regional (that is, Juba) and southern state levels.

At the state level, USAID has gone so far in the south and the Three Areas as to 1) support local civil authorities with developing plans, policies, governing bodies, procedures, and infrastructure; 2) provide basic office furniture and equipment (sometimes called “Government in a Box” for short), capacity-building training, and technical assistance to emerging governance structures; and 3) pro-mote the ability of local governments to deliver services to citizens and increase the opportunities for — and the quality of — dialogue between local officials and their constituents.

Assistance to southern institutions involved in preparing for and carrying out key processes like the census, elections, and the referendum has been monumental. Transparency in fiscal expendi-tures and governance more generally is seen as essential for the GOSS to function effectively and to be able to attract outside investment. Shortcomings in this area prompted donors, the United States included, to insist with the GOSS on the 2009 Juba Compact to promote greater transparency. Shortcomings in governance were also highlighted by severe irregularities in the 2010 elections, including, among other deficiencies, abuse of incumbency and diversion of public resources for

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electoral purposes in the south (not to mention the harassment of opposition candidates and other more blatant abuses in the north).

“Democratizing” Peace Agreements and Related Political Processes

Elite-brokered peace agreements are fundamentally undemocratic and involve a small group of leaders who have generally earned a spot at the negotiating table via the muzzle of a gun rather than the ballot box or the will of the people. A key challenge following signature of any peace deal is therefore to “democratize” it, making it more intelligible and accessible to the average citizen, par-ticularly those who are still armed or might otherwise want to express specific grievances. Sudan’s vast size, low literacy, and authoritarian history have posed additional challenges in popularizing the CPA, arguably the most complex peace accord to ever settle a civil war. Particularly through USAID programming, the United States has been the most energetic donor in disseminating information about the CPA (and the other regional peace accords, as they were concluded), increasing popular access to reliable information on public affairs, and seeking to improve the quality and profession-alism of the media generally. This has been all the more important — and indeed difficult — in the closed political atmosphere of northern Sudan.

Noteworthy initiatives include funding Sudan’s first shortwave radio broadcasts in native languages other than Arabic; establishing community FM radio stations throughout the south and the Three Areas; distributing solar-powered and wind-up radios and promoting village listening groups; and supporting independent print media, especially in the north, and training journalists. Given the new regulatory environment for independent media in the south, USAID also worked with the GOSS Ministry of Information to develop and vet policies and regulations. A specific effort was focused on disseminating information on the CPA (and later the DPA and ESPA) through accessible forms for illiterate citizens, including using local languages, street theater, music, and other popular media. (Authorities blocked similar efforts in and around Khartoum.)

Exposing Atrocities and Protecting Civilians

The Darfur crisis of 2003 – 0 4 highlighted with tragic clarity the Sudanese government’s capacity for prosecuting a brutal counter-insurgency that disproportionately affected civilians while simulta-neously seeking to engage in high-profile peace talks. U.S. government attention to such atrocities in Darfur garnered both policy action and programmatic support. For example, the United States was an early champion of the N’Djamena cease-fire process while pushing for the deployment of AU monitors (under an operation known as AMIS, which the United States aided with airlift and other logistical support). Similarly, USAID sought to fund a number of initiatives in both Darfur and eastern Chad that focused explicitly on protection of civilians, including interviews with Darfur refugees in eastern Chad that provided the basis for then-Secretary of State Powell’s above-men-tioned testimony in September 2004, declaring the official U.S. government view that genocide had

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occurred. In mid-2005, his successor, Secretary Condoleezza Rice, was similarly moved on a trip to Sudan to call for a multi-million-dollar program specifically to counter violence against women that she heard about first hand during meetings in Darfur. This led to a multi-year effort funded largely by USAID and implemented through UN and community development partners to moni-tor abuses, minimize women’s exposure to violence, increase awareness of the damaging effects of violence against women, and improve victims’ access to legal and medical services.

Providing Humanitarian Assistance

While not strictly considered “peacebuilding,” the U.S. humanitarian assistance for Sudan’s con-flict-affected populations has been the single largest source of bilateral aid to the country. This assistance includes one of the largest food aid programs in the world and support in virtually every other humanitarian sector, including health, water, sanitation, shelter, livelihoods, and economic recovery. It has spanned the country from the conflict-affected parts of the east to the west of Darfur (and the refugee camps of eastern Chad) and from the large IDP settlements near Khartoum to the Three Areas and the south.

Assets and Expertise of U.S. Peacebuilding Efforts in SudanThis review covers only civilian U.S. agencies engaged in peacebuilding efforts in Sudan and not defense or intelligence agencies (though their role will be touched on in the subsequent section). Broadly speaking, the executive branch has provided the main leadership for developing and imple-menting peacebuilding policies and programs, but Congress has historically also played an important role dating back to the advocacy and legislative action of the 1990s. In terms of the executive branch, the State Department and USAID have been the key agencies engaged on Sudan. Though access has fluctuated depending on security factors and the state of U.S.-Sudanese relations, the United States has had a diplomatic presence in Khartoum and, since 2005, in the southern capital of Juba. During certain periods of more intensive diplomatic engagement around peace processes, the State Department has augmented or reassigned staff to follow and support talks more closely, in countries ranging from Kenya (during the CPA negotiations) to Chad, Nigeria, Libya, and now Qatar (for Darfur-related negotiations). In addition, diplomats were deployed on an extended basis in El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and focus of DPA-related activity, from 2006 onward. While USAID’s presence has varied over time — including using Nairobi as its base for assistance to southern Sudan until 2005 —t he development agency has had a sizeable field presence in Khartoum, throughout the south, in the Three Areas, and in parts of Darfur for most of the last five to six years.12

12 Some of USAID’s most senior officials over the last ten years — including former administrator Andrew Natsios, former assistant administrator Roger Winter, former assistant administrator Kate Almquist, former mission director Allen Reed, and senior advisors Brian Da Silva and John Marks — are Sudan specialists in their own right and brought years if not decades of high-level contacts to bear on their work in the country, particularly in the south.

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Unlike policy on most other countries, Sudan policy has the added benefit of a presidentially appointed special envoy, who not only provides top-level policy direction but also a direct link to the White House. The role of the special envoy has helped to distinguish U.S. policy and engagement on Sudan over the last decade. Created in 2001 when former Senator John Danforth was first appointed to the job, the special envoy post has been occupied by a series of appointees over the years. Particularly in the wake of relatively broad-based popular awareness and grassroots activism on Darfur in the United States, the special envoy has been increasingly forced into the policy spotlight, particularly as statements are disseminated instantaneously via the internet and social media favored by activ-ist groups.

In theory, the special envoy role allows for top-down coordination of policy across various agencies to minimize stove-piping or disconnects in the U.S. approach to a country like Sudan. It also enables a more direct, high-level dialogue to take place between the White House and key Sudanese interloc-utors, beyond the profile that in-country U.S. diplomats can bring to such problems. The 2009 policy review13 pointedly stated that the special envoy’s role “includes frank dialogue with the Government of Sudan about what needs to be accomplished, how the bilateral relationship can improve if condi-tions transform, and how the government will become even more isolated if conditions remain the same or worsen.” The special envoy can also serve as the counterpart for similarly senior officials from the UN (such as the secretary-general’s special representative) or other countries.14 This is par-ticularly relevant given that the 2009 policy review explicitly noted that the United States “will seek to broaden and deepen the multilateral coalition actively working to achieve peace in Darfur and full implementation of the CPA such that backsliding by any party is met with credible, meaning-ful disincentives, leveraged by the United States and the international community.” High turnover in the special envoy position over the last five years, however, has bedeviled efforts to achieve and maintain a consistent sense of momentum and direction, although the recent appointment of the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Princeton Lyman, to this role has been seen positively.15

Assessing a Whole-of-Government Approach to Peacebuilding in SudanOver the last ten years, the U.S. government has been reasonably successful at establishing a more or less coherent policy framework on Sudan — despite the multifaceted and often vexing challenges that the country presents. The U.S. government has also created more or less effective mechanisms

13 For more information, see U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 2009. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/oct/130672.htm (accessed April 11, 2011).

14 Norway and China, for example, have both nominated high-ranking diplomats — in addition to in-country ambassa-dors — to work exclusively on peace and security issues regarding Sudan.

15 For more on the newest special envoy appointment, see Rebecca Hamilton, “Our New Man in Sudan: Can Washington’s Fourth Envoy in Five Years Finally Get Things Right?” Foreign Policy, April 4, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/04/our_new_man_in_sudan?page=0,0 (accessed April 11, 2011).

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for interagency coordination (these are not unique to Sudan policy but have been used to good effect on it). Since the time of the Naivasha talks, which saw both State and USAID personnel par-ticipating in U.S. delegations and advising on the peace process, there has been a high degree of coordination across the main civilian agencies engaged on Sudan. Relatively robust interagency coordination mechanisms have included Department of Defense and intelligence agencies at key moments. A noteworthy example was the June 2004 release of commercial satellite imagery by the State Department’s Humanitarian Information Unit depicting the widespread, systematic destruc-tion of villages in Darfur.

While internal policy-making deliberations on Sudan have not been disclosed, public expressions such as congressional testimony, special envoy speeches, or the above-mentioned Sudan policy review released in 2009 provide snapshots of U.S. policy at different points. By and large, these have been consistent over time. This relative coherence within the U.S. government also reflects and is translated into active interagency consultations. By 2004 – 0 5 — at the height of the Naivasha end-game and the depths of the Darfur crisis — National Security Council staff and State Department personnel were managing an intensive process of interagency meetings and consultations at multiple levels and across multiple time zones. These processes have persisted in similar forms since then.16 Another set of highly influential stakeholders is the Congress, which has played a strong advocacy and legislative role on Sudan since the 1990s.17 Similarly, while sometimes critical of U.S. decision making, civil-society actors, including high-profile celebrity spokespeople, have largely sought to constructively shape policy debates and influence key players in the administration and Congress.

Complementarity: How Do U.S. and Japanese Peacebuilding Efforts Work Together in Sudan?

Do the United States and Japan Share Common Interests and Objectives in Sudan?

Both Japan and the United States share an interest in ending Sudan’s conflict, protecting civilians, addressing humanitarian needs, and preventing terrorism. The U.S. objectives to stop the conflict and human rights abuses in Darfur, to support successful implementation of the CPA, and to end state support for terrorism reflect Japan’s focus as well (Japan has also funded projects in eastern Sudan). Both countries are investing their efforts in a stable and viable South Sudan, a positive relationship between the north and the south, and the continued viability of the north. The United States and Japan, however, face questions and a lack of policy clarity on what sort of relationship

16 The State Department’s public report on the 2009 policy review indicates that “[e]ach quarter, the interagency at senior levels will assess a variety of indicators of progress or of deepening crisis, and that assessment will include calibrated steps to bolster support for positive change and to discourage backsliding.” For more information, see U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, 2009.

17 For a good 2002 overview of the state of congressional action on Sudan, see Ted Dagne, “Sudan: Humanitarian Crisis, Peace Talks, Terrorism, and U.S. Policy,” CRS Issue Brief for Congress, no. IB98043, http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/872.pdf (accessed April 18, 2011).

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with and future for northern Sudan they envision, beyond its continued viability as a country. Is the objective to preserve the status quo, or to encourage reform of the ruling party (the NCP) and the authoritarian system it controls and push for “north-north” political dialogue, leading to a more inclusive multi-party, decentralized democracy?

Do the United States and Japan Share Common Approaches and Analysis?

Both Japanese and U.S. peacebuilding efforts cover a similar range of activities. The United States, however, has dedicated the highest level of executive, legislative, and foreign assistance focus to resolving the conflicts in Sudan. This focus has been backed by strong and committed domestic political constituencies, which have generally transcended clear ideological lines. The same depth of political support for peacebuilding in Sudan does not exist within Japan, despite its commitment to pursue similar objectives. Nonetheless, the two countries are bound by common programs that have supported implementation of the CPA, including elections, the referendum, and DDR. The United States and Japan are the largest funders of the UN and share mechanisms that could be enhanced for improved collaboration. Situation analysis is also an area where the United States and Japan share similar viewpoints, and there are other examples of joint coordination, especially on approaches to Sudan’s Three Areas — Abyei, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile.

Over the last half-century, Sudan has been caught in the throes of deep-seated, often brutal con-flicts. These will not be durably resolved without a “whole-of-Sudan” approach that decentralizes and democratizes power in such a vast and diverse country. To be effective, outside support for peacebuilding efforts has to take a comprehensive, integrated approach. The effectiveness of the whole-of-government approach pursued by the United States stems from many factors: special envoys reporting directly to the president, close coordination between the State Department and USAID, individual U.S. government officials with years of experience and relationships in Sudan, high-level and sustained engagement of Congress, committed and diverse civil-society constitu-encies (including celebrities) pushing for a robust policy, and the Sudanese government’s interest in negotiating with the United States on diplomatic normalization. Japan’s engagement on Sudan started later — really only with the signing of the CPA — but it has quickly relied mostly on devel-opment assistance to support key aspects of the peace processes and help provide “peace dividends.” There is clearly a commonality of interests, objectives, and approaches between the United States and Japan on Sudan policy, and this creates an opportunity to increase collaboration on peacebuilding. As top funders to the UN, both countries also have a shared mechanism to move such collabora-tion forward. The citizens of one of Africa’s most troubled nations — soon to become citizens of two separate Sudans — certainly deserve as much.

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10Japan’s Assistance in Peacebuilding

in Sudan and Its ChallengesMurakami Yasuhito

Paper presented at the IFPA workshop, “Peacebuilding as a U.S.-Japan Alliance Mission,” April 2011

Civil war between the north and south of Sudan continued for over twenty years, until the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in January 2005. Since the signing, the inter-

national community has assisted with the implementation of the CPA and sought to provide peace dividends to the people of Sudan. Based on the spirit of making unity attractive through power sharing and wealth sharing among the parties as well as respecting the self-determination of the southern population, which is articulated in the CPA, the parties progressed with the implementation of agreed agendas under one country with two systems, consisting of the Government of National Unity (GNU) and the Government of South Sudan (GOSS), in cooperation with the international community. In the final phase of implementation of the CPA, the southern Sudan referendum was conducted in January 2011, and secession of the south has been confirmed as the final result of the southerners’ will. Following official endorsement of the final result of the referendum by the GNU in Khartoum, it is expected that the GOSS will declare its independence at the end of the interim period of the CPA in July. The GOSS has been substantially preparing for independence. In this process, there are two challenges to be tackled. First, there are still pending issues of the CPA and

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post-CPA issues to be resolved through negotiation with the North. To some extent, it is essential to explore how the south can create a relationship with the north as well as how the international community can create an environment for dialogue between the parties. Second, creating state institutions and promoting development pose a big challenge for the GOSS.

Japanese assistance for peacebuilding in Sudan has continued since the signing of the CPA. Practices of Japan’s assistance to Sudan represent a transition in Japan’s approach to assisting peacebuilding in Africa. While the process of peacebuilding consists of political settlement of conflict, peacekeep-ing, consolidation of peace, and reconstruction and development, the main feature is that Japanese assistance focuses on components of peace consolidation as well as reconstruction and development. This article describes the features of the Japanese approach to supporting peacebuilding in the case of Sudan in order to understand the difference from the American approach, and it aims to provide hints for creating complementarity between Japan and the United States in assisting peacebuilding.

The Japan-Sudan Relationship and Support of Peacebuilding in SudanJapan has maintained relatively good bilateral relations with Sudan since 1956, although the two countries have engaged in little active trade or exchange of nationals. Japan has actively assisted Sudan in development cooperation, especially in the field of basic human needs (BHNs) such as food security, primary health care, water, and sanitation from the 1980s to the early 1990s. However, the security, political rights, and human rights situation in Sudan has thrown a shadow over its relationship with the international community and has had negative effects on the bilateral relation-ship with Japan. In 1983, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which is the main opposition component in southern Sudan, started a second civil war against the government of Sudan. The war greatly raised concerns about the security situation, especially in the boundary areas between north and south. The government applied a national emergency law and inflicted human rights abuses in the country. The international community, deeply concerned with the situation in the country, urged the Sudanese government to fully respect human rights.1 Moreover, the international commu-nity suspected that the government might be harboring terrorists within the country. Under these situations, major donors suspended their bilateral assistance to Sudan. Japan also stopped official development assistance (ODA) in 1993, except for humanitarian relief. Suspension of Japanese ODA made bilateral involvement in Sudan issues limited, and, as a result, infrastructure for keeping close communication with governmental counterparts in various levels has been lost.

In the early 2000s, the Intergovernmental Agency for Development (IGAD) and its partners includ-ing the United States, the UK, Norway, and others conducted mediation efforts. However, Japan did not have active engagement in the IGAD partnership forum or involvement in the mediation activ-ities for north-south negotiation that took place in Sudan and neighboring countries. As mediation efforts led by IGAD progressed, Japan carefully monitored the negotiation progress without direct

1 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan,” Commission on Human Rights Resolution, 1993, 60.

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engagement in the mediation.2 After the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed the CPA in 2005, Japan undertook to become more involved in Sudan issues, especially implementation of the CPA. During the period from 1993 to 2005 when the polit-ical situation in Sudan progressed, Japan’s policies for the assistance of peacebuilding evolved, and it developed modalities to conduct assistance and accumulated on-the-ground practical experience.

Japan’s Tools for Assisting Peacebuilding

Policies and Modalities

As discourses and practices on peacebuilding evolved in the international community, Japan also developed regulations and policies for assisting peacebuilding. First, the International Peace Cooperation Law, the so-called PKO act,3 came into effect in 1992 and opened opportunities for 1) participation of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) in UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs); 2) humanitarian relief operations by the JSDF and other governmental units; and 3) conducting obser-vations of international elections. Second, Japan shifted its ODA approach to include assistance in peacebuilding in the revised ODA policies and expressed commitment on various occasions to inter-national initiatives. Japan developed an ODA charter in 2003,4 and conducted an ODA mid-term review in 2005. These documents defined and confirmed the direction of ODA reform toward mak-ing assistance in peacebuilding one of the most important components of Japanese ODA policy. The charter stated that “Japan will extend bilateral and multilateral assistance flexibly and continuously for peacebuilding in accordance with the changing situation, ranging from assistance to expedite the ending of conflicts to assistance for the consolidation of peace and nation-building in post-conflict situations.” According to the charter, ODA will be used for the following: “assistance to facilitate the peace processes; humanitarian and rehabilitation assistance, such as assistance with displaced persons and in the restoration of basic infrastructure; assistance in assuring domestic stability and security, including DDR of ex-combatants, and the collection and disposal of weapons, including demining; and assistance in reconstruction, including social and economic development and the enhancement of the administrative capacities of governments.” These efforts for policy develop-ment created an opportunity to apply resources to Sudan issues, but other incentives or leverage at the decision-making level have been needed to ensure those modalities are utilized on the ground.

2 In June 2002, by mediation from IGAD, the north and the south resumed consultation, and they signed the Machakos Protocol, which defines the self-determination of southerners, accompanied by witnesses such as the United States, the UK, Norway, and Italy, in July 2002. In September 2003, the north and the south revitalized their consultation through active efforts of mediation by the United States, and they signed a security arrangement protocol.

3 Secretariat of the International Peace Cooperation Headquarters, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, “Act on Cooperation for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and Other Operations,” June 19, 1992, http://www.pko.go.jp/PKO_J/data/law/pdf/law_e.pdf (accessed April 29, 2011).

4 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “Japan’s Official Development Assistance Charter,” August 2003, http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/oda/reform/charter.html (accessed May 2, 2011).

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Leverage for Engagement on Sudan Issues

With support from its revised policy framework, Japan has embarked on many initiatives for assist-ing peacebuilding activities in Africa, including Sudan. These new activities have been sustained by practices on the ground as well as commitment in international forums.

At the Third Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), Japan put forth the consolidation of peace in Africa as one of the important pillars to be addressed.5 Involvement in Sudan is one good example of Japan’s pursuing practices sustained by policies and internationally expressed commitments. When the CPA was signed between the government of Sudan and SPLM in January 2005 to end the longest civil war in Africa, the international community understood that sustaining and implementing the CPA would contribute to achieving a sustainable peace in the country as well as to maintaining stability in the region. In this context, Japan decided to support the consolidation of peace in Sudan and to explore possibilities to conduct emergency relief and to provide aid, technical assistance, and international peace cooperation, while still restricting ODA to cover only the conflict-affected region since the humanitarian situation in Darfur was still unresolved.

International donors have provided substantial support to make peace sustainable in Sudan, as donor conferences have strongly promoted efforts toward peacebuilding in the country. Japan has also actively participated in these international initiatives. In April 2005, at the Oslo donor conference on Sudan, Japan pledged $100 million for delivering the peace dividend for the south and north. In January 2006, Japan’s development agency, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), resumed bilateral assistance in southern Sudan for rehabilitating water supply facilities, assisting community development, and reconstructing the river port in Juba. However, earlier suspension of bilateral aid caused difficulties in reestablishing aid infrastructure and delayed the delivery of assistance. In March 2006, when the first Sudan consortium took place in Paris, Japan had already disbursed 80 percent of the aid it had pledged at the Oslo conference through UN agencies, funds, and programs. Japan’s prompt action aimed to create a safer environment by providing peace divi-dends for further dialogues between the CPA parties and to facilitate the implementation of the CPA. Moreover, JICA started a capacity-development program in vocational training in Juba and other training in third-party countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia. By the beginning of the second Sudan consortium at Khartoum and Juba in March 2007, Japan had already delivered assistance amount-ing to $140 million and met the commitment it had made at the Oslo conference. Furthermore, Japan pledged an additional $200 million at the third Sudan consortium held in Oslo, targeting its assistance to support conflict-affected people as well as to meet basic human needs in the country.

5 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “Highlights of the Summary by the Chair of TICAD III,” September–O ctober 2003, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/africa/ticad3/chair-2.html (accessed April 28, 2011).

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Japan’s Assistance in Peacebuilding in SudanWhen we look at the peacebuilding process as defined by Japan’s ODA charter, consisting of the facilitation of peace negotiation, stabilization by UN peacekeeping forces, consolidation of peace, and reconstruction and development, we can see that Japan’s involvement is heavily focused on peace consolidation as well as reconstruction and development through ODA. Japan has supported Sudan by delivering peace dividends to the country and Sudanese people as well as by supporting the agendas of the CPA. After setting targets in its own policy documents and commitments in international forums such as donor conferences to overcome the challenges in peacebuilding in the conflict-affected country, Japan has fully utilized modalities of ODA in accordance with the policy and indicated goals working with UN agencies and one of Japan’s development agencies.

Official Development Assistance

Japan has fulfilled its responsibility and successfully met the commitments it made in international initiatives on Sudan issues and Africa.6 Since the signing of the CPA in 2005, Japan has revitalized its assistance in peacebuilding in Sudan and sustained its assistance through revised ODA policies. The amount of Japanese assistance to Sudan has reached $550 million since 2005, and Sudan was the largest recipient of Japanese ODA among sub-Saharan African countries in 2008 and 2009. Approximately 60 percent of the assistance was directed to southern Sudan, while the remainder was distributed to Darfur and the eastern regions of the country. The first priority of Japan’s assistance to Sudan is to provide assistance for conflict-affected people in southern Sudan and three protocol areas (also known as the Three Areas) — the Southern Kordofan state, Blue Nile state, and Abyei, the border area between the north and south as well as with the Darfur region. A second priority is assistance for basic human needs such as primary health care, water, health, and sanitation, food security, primary education, and vocational training for sustainable livelihoods. Japan tries to pro-mote the consolidation of peace by filling gaps in needs in these targeted areas.7 In addition to this assistance, Japan actively supported national programs such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), elections, and the southern Sudan referendum, which are articulated in the CPA.

Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration

The DDR program in Sudan is one of the essential components of the security protocol of the CPA. The security arrangement protocol of the CPA discharged in total 180,000 soldiers from the armed forces of the north and south. However, there was a lack of common understanding and opera-tional procedures on DDR among the armed forces, as well as a lack of capacity in the executive body of the program. The DDR program is assisted by the UN peacekeeping mission (UNMIS)

6 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “Japan’s Support for Consolidation of Peace in Africa,” March 2007, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/africa/ticad/peace/support.html (accessed April 28, 2011).

7 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “ODA Rolling Plan for the Republic of Sudan, 2009,” April 2009, http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/oda/rolling_plans/pdfs/sudan.pdf (accessed April 28, 2011).

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for the demobilization component and by the UNDP for the reintegration component. Japan is a leading donor for the DDR program in Sudan and has assisted the interim DDR program since 2005 through the UNDP. In 2009, Japan again provided assistance to the DDR program through the UNDP, creating enough leverage to officially launch the program in February 2009. Moreover, JICA provided technical assistance to the vocational training sector in the Three Areas as well as Juba. Those beneficiaries, which are training institutes, are expected to provide vocational training for discharged soldiers. Japan contributed financial support to the DDR program and strengthened the service delivery architecture of the reintegration component of the program.

The DDR program created opportunities to provide peace dividends for ex-soldiers, and it encour-aged discharged soldiers to reintegrate into civilian life. However, both parties of the CPA persisted in conducting disarmament of their units without proper monitoring and assessment from interna-tional partners to ensure the integrity of the disarmament, insisting instead on their right to have regular forces. Therefore, the DDR program has not played a notable role in either transforming the security sector or right-sizing the military. In this sense, the program has had the effect of a social security program, but it is difficult to confirm whether the program has had an impact on reforming the security sector of both parties. It is expected that the number of discharged soldiers from the armed forces will not be achieved as spelled out in the agreement.

Elections (Legislative and Executive)

In 2010, the first multi-party (legislative and executive) elections were held since 1996. There are many technical and logistical difficulties to managing the referendum given the lack of access in remote areas to electoral materials and the weak electoral management capacity on the local level. Japan provided financial assistance amounting to $10 million to procure electoral materials such as ballot papers, ballot boxes, and other materials, and it supported women’s awareness projects through a UNDP basket fund. This assistance is the largest-scale contribution among Japan’s elec-toral assistance efforts ever provided in Africa, and this contribution is expected to promote the democratization process in the country through sustained electoral processes.8 Moreover, Japan dispatched an election observation mission to ensure the openness of the electoral process amidst the political environment in the country, and the mission monitored voting and counting processes in Khartom, Juba, and El Fashir.9

8 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “Emergency Grant Aid for the Electoral Process in the Republic of Sudan,” October 16, 2009, http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2009/10/1196628_1144.html (accessed April 28, 2011).

9 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Japan, “Activities of the Japanese Election Observation Team for the General Elections in Sudan,” April 28, 2010, http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/africa/sudan/observation/activities.html (accessed April 28, 2011); and “Dispatch of a Japanese Election Observation Team for the General Elections in Sudan,” April 1, 2010, http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2010/4/0401_01.html (accessed April 28, 2011).

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Southern Sudan Referendum

The referendum, which is an opportunity to confirm the right of the people of Sudan to choose national unity or secession, is one of the most important components of the CPA. A lack of capacity in the management of the referendum and bad road conditions are constraints for delivering the referendum-related materials to polling stations to ensure the credible management of the exercise of the referendum. Moreover, the illiteracy of many southerners prevents broader participation in the referendum process and understanding on the proper procedure of the referendum. Japan extended its financial assistance to $8 million through a UNDP basket fund to procure referen-dum-related materials, voter education activities, and capacity building for the media in order to assist the implementation of the referendum in a fair manner.

Peace Process

While international efforts by concerned countries such as the United States, the UK, and Norway (the so-called troika), as well as by IGAD countries and its partners, to achieve the final peace agreement between the Sudan government and SPLM made gradual progress from 2002 to 2005, Japan carefully followed the situation. Japan did not, however, participate as a witness to the CPA. This led Japan to miss out on participating in monitoring and the follow-up mechanism of the CPA, the Assessment and Evaluation Commission (AEC). Therefore, Japan did not have a direct track to facilitate the implementation of agendas indicated in the protocols, and it faced difficulties in estab-lishing channels through which to take any measures to assist the parties. However, as mentioned above, Japan assisted technically and financially with the benchmarks of the CPA in areas such as DDR, elections, and the southern referendum, and its assistance helped ensure an environment conducive to the implementation of the CPA.

International Peace Cooperation

Japan covers 12.5 percent of the UN PKO budget, including UNMIS. In 2005, Japan extended in-kind contributions such as vehicles and equipment for mine action to UNMIS. Moreover, two JSDF staff officers have been dispatched to UNMIS since 2008. High officials of the UN informally expressed requests to send Japanese units to UNMIS on several occasions.10

Moreover, Japan dispatched a governmental observation mission under the PKO act to Juba and Khartoum to monitor the administration of the referendum and to ensure a better political envi-ronment for free and fair polling exercises.11

10 Kyoto Shimbun, http://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/politics/article/2010084000070 (accessed April 28, 2011). 11 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Dispatch of a Japanese Referendum Observation Mission to Sudan,” December 10, 2010,

http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2010/12/1210_02.html (accessed April 28, 2011).

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Challenges for Sustaining Peace in South SudanThe final result of the southern Sudan referendum clearly indicated secession, and the presidency of the Government of National Unity endorsed the outcome. Many expect when the interim period of the CPA expires in July 2011, the GOSS will declare its independence. President Bashir has already expressed his will to recognize the new state if the south declares its independence after the CPA period. Moreover, some Western countries indicated their intention to recognize the independence of the south. In the event that South Sudan becomes the newest nation-state, many challenges await it.

North-South Relationship: Pending Issues of the CPA and Post-CPA Arrangement

The bilateral relationship with Khartoum is essential even after the CPA period. Many issues are still pending, such as 1) final status of Abyei, where oil has been produced and conflicts have occurred between local southerners, the Dinka Ngok tribe, and the Arab-pastoralist Misseriya; 2) demar-cation of the boundary between north and south. Both of the CPA parties are reluctant to extend the CPA period. Even if these pending issues are not resolved, the Government of South Sudan is expected to declare independence in July 2011. Many are concerned that pending issues will be internationalized, which may complicate issues after independence. Currently, the priority of the GOSS is its independence, and it is fully occupied with preparing to set up core state functions as a new nation. It is unclear whether consultation on pending issues can be resolved before the end of the CPA. Furthermore, many other issues, so-called post-CPA issues, such as people’s rights and the nationality of southerners in the north and northerners in the south, economic issues such as natural resources and foreign debt, and the security arrangement between the north and the south need to be further discussed and settled. Currently, the National Congress Party (NCP), represented in the dialogue by Salaha Gosh, adviser to the president, and SPLM, represented by Pagan Amum, minister of CPA affairs, are in the process of consultation, but progress is slow.

When the CPA expires, the Assessment and Evaluation Commission — an international body for monitoring progress of CPA matters and dialogue between the parties — and the UN PKO mission will also have finished their stated duties. Given the remaining mistrust between the parties, many believe that international mechanisms should be established to ensure dialogue between the parties on pending issues as well as post-CPA issues. In November 2010, the African Union High Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP), headed by Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, and accompanied by U.S. special envoy Scott Gration, hosted a meeting on post-CPA arrangement in Ethiopia.12 In this meeting, NCP and SPLM promised they would consult further and clear pending issues and other post-CPA issues. Although it is unclear whether they can solve all issues by July 2011, the meeting could make a good example of the involvement of third parties in the consulta-tion process regarding post-CPA issues.

12 African Union press release, November 15, 2010.

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Many argue that it is important to reorganize the international community’s participation in con-fidence-building measures and in the consultation process between the north and the south by establishing a new UN mission post-AEC.

State Building of South Sudan and Conflicts within the South

A state does not exist inherently. State institutions must work effectively in fulfilling their function. The authority of the state will depend on the consent of the people to be governed, and this support will depend on what the state has achieved. Currently, the GOSS is preparing to build and enhance governmental institutions ahead of independence anticipated for July 2011. Moreover, the GOSS is in the process of revising its interim constitution, since the current interim constitution includes some articles that regulate the Government of National Unity and is therefore unfit for the real-ity after the secession of the south. In addition, this modification shows that the GOSS is willing to establish permanent legal frameworks for the new government. However, there are still many problems and challenges, such as the inadequate capacity of institutional structures and security threats from within the region. This lays out expected agendas and difficulties for the south as a new nation-state after independence.

Unifying Political Forces for Managing the New State

The relationship with Khartoum has made southerners unified, but many point out that the political culture in the south is characterized by ethnic and tribal kinship as well as a winner-takes-all men-tality. SPLM’s influential power dominates political discourse within the south. The SPLM appears reluctant to agree to power-sharing arrangements with opposition parties. Such attitudes came out after the April 2010 elections, with the landside win of the party in legislative and executive elections in the south. After the final result of the southern Sudan referendum came out, President Salva Kirr indicated his willingness to make a broader-based transitional government in South Sudan after the CPA period before moving toward permanent governmental structures. Currently, the SPLM is in the process of revising the interim constitution as articulated by the CPA and calling for opposition leaders to participate in the process. Embedding and ensuring political pluralism in South Sudan is a key component to ensure democratic governance in the new state. However, it is unclear how the SPLM can deal with these difficult tasks and how the international community can assist these political processes to make a pluralist political culture.

Mitigating Intra-South Conflict

Other armed groups should be integrated into the regular armed forces and regional political groups, or else discharged into civilian life. However, un-unified forces of the SPLA are still potential security threats, especially in Jonglei, the Upper Nile, and the Unity states. For example, the Shilluk tribe in Jonglei state and the Nuer tribe groups of the former Southern Sudan Defense Force (SSDF), which

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is a pro-Khartoum militia component, are still making security threats. Some components are bar-gaining over a better rank within the SPLA and to try to get more benefits from the mainstream of the SPLA. Others are suspected of having links to or being manipulated from the north. These elements hinder the government’s monopolization of power, which is one of the conditions of any nation-state institution. Currently, the GOSS and SPLA are in the process of attaining political and military control over these areas where many tribal militias were previously under control of the SSDF and supported the SAF during the civil war. This operation has caused tension between the SPLA and militias in the southern region.

Establishing Core State Functions of the New Government

To make governmental institutions work as a nation-state, the GOSS established task forces to build the core functions of the state. One of the subcommittees of the task force, chaired by Riek Machar, vice president of the GOSS, has been mandated to prepare a plan for creating the core functions of the governmental institutions, and the subcommittee has identified six priority areas: 1) interna-tional relations, to be led by the Ministry of Regional Cooperation; 2) rule of law, to be led by the Ministry of Legal Affairs; 3) governance, to be led by the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs; 4) economy and natural resources, led by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning; 5) service deliv-ery, led by the Ministry of Labor and Social Services; and 6) security and intelligence, led by the Ministry of SPLA. The GOSS, in cooperation with UN agencies and donors, has worked to identify gaps in state functions and to develop the plan.13 In these works, the European Commission hosted a high-level international conference on core-function building for southern Sudan in September 2010. The meeting boosted initiatives to prepare core state functions with the help of international institutions and donors. Faced with time and resource constraints to complete all tasks, unresolved agendas within the established plan will be handed over to the mid-term development plan.

Making and Implementing a Development Plan

The GOSS is preparing a mid-term development plan, an effort chaired by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning in cooperation with other ministries as well as UN agencies and the World Bank, and has indicated its intention that the development plan will be finalized by June 2011.14 The development plan prioritizes five areas for ensuring the development process of South Sudan: 1) executive leadership; 2) security sector, ensuring rule of law; 3) fiduciary management; 4) gov-ernance; and 5) management of natural resources. At its annual meeting in April 2011, the World Bank organized a roundtable on Sudan to update the progress of drafting a development plan, to consult on debt relief and other issues, and to accelerate the effort to resolve difficulties in establishing

13 United Nations Security Council, “Report of the Secretary-General on Sudan,” S/2011/239, paragraph 75, April 12, 2011, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/291/83/PDF/N1129183.pdf?OpenElement (accessed May 30, 2011).

14 United Nations Security Council, S/2011/239, paragraph 74.

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development architecture in South Sudan.15 The development plan is expected to identify gaps in the needs of each prioritized area and to provide donors with the platform to harmonize their assis-tance to South Sudan. In this case, donor conferences will be held, and international partners will be expected to ensure that their assistance is in accordance with this plan. However, the plan itself has been developed within a short timeframe.

Establishing a New PKO Mission

UNMIS’s mandate will expire by the end of the CPA. However, as mentioned above, the north-south relationship is threatened by the inability to resolve the pending issues of the CPA. Khartoum is unwilling to allow the presence of UNMIS after the interim period. On the other hand, the south has expressed a request to the UN for its presence after the mission.16 Currently, the UN continues to study whether there is a need for a new mission in the south. Many experts indicate the need for the UN mission’s involvement in 1) assisting the GOSS, including mediation of disputes with political and ethnic groups; 2) assisting security sector reform, including the professionalization of regular forces in the south and the rule of law; 3) protecting civilians in the region. The scale of the new mission, such as deploying into rural areas as well as measures for ensuring mobility of the military and civilian components, is a critical issue in this mission’s design.

Therefore, close communication and information sharing with the UN PKO and other countries are essential to identify needs and gaps in the mission’s organization as well as to explore the pos-sibility for dispatching personnel to the mission. Based on information obtained through better communication, expected troop-contribution countries (TCC) can start to consider what the mis-sion’s needs are on the ground and assess the best match between the identified needs and what the TCC can offer to the mission.

Japan’s Challenges in Involvement in Peacebuilding in SudanBased on the understanding that the stability of Sudan can lead to a sustainable peace in the region, Japan will actively extend its support to Sudan since the country is one of the first-priority countries for providing investment for peace as well as towards improving human security in Africa. However, there are some difficulties for Japan in playing a greater role in peacebuilding in Sudan, including South Sudan. In this section, possible broader areas of Japan’s involvement in peacebuilding in the South and its difficulties are considered.

15 World Bank, “World Bank and African Development Bank Urge Sudan to Resolve Issues and Pledge Support for Broad Based Development,” April 17, 2011, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/SUDANEXTN/0,,contentMDK:22891816~menuPK:50003484~pagePK:2865066~piPK:2865079~theSitePK:375422,00.html (accessed May 30, 2011).

16 At the request of the GOSS, the UN has commenced planning of a possible post-UNMIS presence in South Sudan; United Nations Security Council, S/2011/239, paragraph 90.

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Involvement of International Mechanisms in North-South Dialogue in Post-CPA Period

Monitoring and facilitation mechanisms for further dialogue between the north and the south have still not been established, except the AUHIP, chaired by Thabo Mbeki. Many international partners have shared concerns about the need to set up an internationally recognized device such as post-AEC or post-UNMIS to monitor and follow up the parties’ consultations on many issues to reduce the risk of further conflict and to ensure stability in the region.

Japan has supported benchmarks of the CPA such as DDR, elections, and the southern Sudan refer-endum. The parties have recognized that Japan is keen to support implementation of the agreement, although Japan was not a witness to the CPA document. Involvement in the internationally rec-ognized mechanism for facilitating dialogue could lead to a larger role for Japan in supporting the peacebuilding process in the country. Therefore, Japan should participate in political processes such as monitoring and facilitating mechanisms in the area of peacebuilding in Sudan through encour-aging consultation between the parties.

Development Assistance and Its Architecture in the South

Although modalities of Japan’s assistance to Sudan have diversified in areas such as humanitarian assistance, involvement in peacekeeping missions, and reconstruction and development, Japan’s contributions have mainly been in the form of financial and technical assistance to development-ori-ented programs through ODA. In the Japanese fiscal year 2009, the amount of ODA to Sudan was the highest of all ODA to sub-Saharan Africa. However, the amount of Japanese ODA to Sudan is fifth among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. After the independence of the south, Japanese ODA will be divided between the north and the south. This means that it will become a big challenge to maintain the same volume of Japanese assistance through ODA given the various needs for peacebuilding in Sudan, especially in the south.

As described earlier, Japan used modalities of ODA in assisting peacebuilding in Sudan. However, Japan’s presence in the south is very weak compared with the enormous assistance in state building that the south needs. Major international players have already set up compounds, consulates, or liaison offices to establish closer communication with the GOSS and other international partners in the south. Although Japan’s ODA-implementing agency has a field office in Juba, the lack of human resources on the ground limits its capacity to identify needs on the ground, to ensure assistance projects, and to follow up policy discussions in donor forums with coordination in development assistance. This has led to less input from on-the-ground aid workers in the formation of policy documents on development of the country, creating significant challenges for effective development progress in state building in the south.

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Establishing a New PKO Mission and Assisting Its Mandate

Recently, many have argued for a new UN mission in South Sudan for the post-CPA period, but because these plans are still in the initial planning phase the structure of the mission remains unclear. This ambiguity will create difficulties for experts to scrutinize what the mission needs and what troop-contribution countries can offer to the mission.

Besides, once the details of the mandates of a new UN mission become clear, it will be better to consider what kind of ODA modalities can provide the financial and technical support to facilitate the mandates of the mission, such as security-sector reform or mitigating tribal tensions through community development. In these tasks, Japan and other international partners must have close communication to share information in areas where they can work together while maintaining complementarity with the UN mission.

Toward Strengthening Japan’s Assistance in Peacebuilding in SudanJapan’s assistance in Sudan has been a showcase of its practices based on an evolving concept of Japan’s assistance in peacebuilding. Japan focused heavily on the development assistance modality in its assistance to Sudan, but it needs to modify its modality or find alternatives to conduct more effective peacebuilding assistance in a whole-of-government approach, since there are many chal-lenges in peacebuilding in Sudan.

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Recommendations for U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation

11Recommendations for U.S.-Japan

Peacebuilding Cooperation

Members of the U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation workshop, held in Osaka on April 31 and May 1, 2012, produced three sets of recommendations for policy makers, focusing on

principles for bilateral peacebuilding cooperation, structures and institutions necessary to better support and implement bilateral cooperation, and on-the-ground actions and operations that both countries could take to make their efforts more effective. A general consensus on these recommen-dations was reached, although not all members agreed with every point listed below.

PrinciplesThe United States and Japan, as allies, have been a force for peace in the Asia Pacific region since the end of the Second World War. During the Cold War, the alliance was an indispensable part of the containment strategy toward communist regimes; in the first decade of the post-Cold War period the alliance has paid increasing attention to the problem of failed states. While the nature of the alliance has evolved over time, the alliance has consistently contributed to building peace in the region — a fact that needs to be better recognized in order to enhance U.S.-Japan cooperation in the peacebuilding arena.

The United States and Japan share responsibilities as global powers that warrant consultation, coor-dination, and cooperation in peacebuilding issues. Importantly, the United States and Japan are economic superpowers that share a common concern for maintaining regional and global peace and prosperity. Making sure that conflicts do not disrupt economic activities is not only an essential part of defending their economic interests, but it is also an objective of international organizations

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such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, of which both the United States and Japan are major players.

In recommending enhanced bilateral efforts toward peacebuilding, however, there are several import-ant caveats that must be considered as operational principles moving forward. They are:

1. The United States and Japan need not always work together “on the ground,” as in the case of Operation Tomodachi. Rather, there should be emphasis on strengthening information- and intel-ligence-sharing, joint planning, and conflict analysis at the upstream level of policy formulation.

2. The allies need to be aware of the differences in each other’s capabilities and decision-making and operational mechanisms, and to understand the limitations of bilateral cooperation.

3. The allies should seek complementary roles rather than a dynamic in which one dominates the other in peacebuilding operations.

Structures and Institutions

Improving Peacebuilding Structures and Institutions

1. U.S.-Japan peacebuilding cooperation should be a top agenda item along with other issues in bilateral Security Consultative Committee (SCC) meetings.

2. There should be dedicated human resources and offices for peacebuilding cooperation (that is, elevate the Peace Operations Working Group, or POWG, in support of the above point).

3. The U.S. National Security Council (NSC) and Japan’s Cabinet Office should, in an ideal world, coordinate policies between the two capitals.

There should be central-peripheral coordination between U.S .and Japanese embassies in conflict states.

Improving Alliance Structures and Institutions

•  The alliance should continue expanding partnerships with other members of the interna-tional community.

•  There should be greater dialogue between regionalists and functionalists among work-ing-level officials.

•  The top national security advisors (総理補佐官) on both sides should be included in the SCC to enhance high-level political coordination on peacebuilding policies.

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Recommendations for U.S.-Japan Peacebuilding Cooperation

Actions and OperationsEnhance intelligence sharing on human terrain and human security related issues.

Compile a watch list of peacebuilding-concern countries.

Capacity building:

•  Regularize the bilateral Global Peace Operations Initiative, or GPOI (make it the default mech-anism for training).

•  Reinforce (interdisciplinary, regional, and multilateral) peacebuilding training centers.

•  Develop a common doctrine with a shared lexicon on operations regarding peacebuilding. For example, Japan might change and expand the scope and efficacy of the present peacekeeping operations (PKO) law, and the United States might “embrace” or recognize the importance of the human security approach.

•  Conflict analysis (sharing findings and discussing methodology): share information and analysis on the context of a particular conflict; improve government-to-government and agency-to-agency understanding, such as between JICA and USAID; share a common understanding on peacebuilding doctrine from the perspective of human security.

•  Japan might assume a greater leadership role in the Pacific Partnership humanitarian relief effort as an alternative to U.S. leadership.

•  Develop a robust domestic platform or framework for peacebuilding. For example, Japan pres-ently does not have a legislative platform to comprehensively cover peacebuilding activities and operations. Japan should consider adopting a “basic law” that would streamline the legislative approval process for overseas peacebuilding operations.

•  Identify bilateral projects, such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), live-lihood recovery, and security sector reform (SSR).

•  Enhance funding for HA/DR operations in post-conflict states.

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12About the Contributors

Mr. Jason FritzJason Fritz is a consultant and analyst of U.S. stability operations. Most recently with the Noetic Corporation, Jason focused on the application of law enforcement on international U.S. government operations, where he was a coauthor on the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute’s publication Lessons Learned from U.S. Government Law Enforcement in International Operations. He also has provided various consulting services to the Departments of Defense and State. Until 2008, Jason served as an officer in the U.S. Army in numerous staff and leadership positions, including three tours of duty in Iraq where he planned, led, and coordinated combat and stability operations. 

Hoshino Toshiya (Project Co-investigator and Co-Editor)Dr. Hoshino is the dean of the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University. He is a member of the boards of Japan for UNHCR and the Okinawa Peace Assistance Center, and he is the vice president of Kansai, the EU institute in Japan. Dr. Hoshino’s research inter-ests include international politics and security, UN system studies, UN peace and security (conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding), human security and humanitarian issues, security in the Asia-Pacific region, U.S. foreign and defense policy, and intelligence stories. From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Hoshino also served as minister-counselor for the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations.

Konrad J. HuberKonrad Huber is a seasoned analyst and manager specializing in political/stakeholder analysis, consensus-building, and community engagement, particularly in conflict environments. He has extensive international peacebuilding experience, including long-term residence in and/or fre-quent travel to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Until 2008, Mr. Huber served as Africa team leader for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, where he directed approximately fifteen staff in multiple country programs and managed $40 million to $50 million annually in U.S. foreign aid. He has twenty years of experience and training, including previous positions with UN agencies, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the U.S. Department of State, and other organizations.

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Ishikawa SachikoIshikawa Sachiko is a senior advisor on peacebuilding assistance and ASEAN regional cooperation at Japan International Cooperation Agency. Her research interest is on development aid in peace pro-cesses. Ishikawa has been involved in “track 1.5 mediation” for the current Mindanao peace process.

Katahara EiichiProfessor Katahara is director of the Regional Studies Department at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) and a former professor of international relations at Kobe Gakuin University. Professor Katahara has also been a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Australian National University.

Weston S. Konishi (Project Co-investigator and Co-Editor)Weston S. Konishi is director of Asia-Pacific studies at IFPA, where he specializes in Japan and Asia policy issues. Before joining IFPA, he was an adjunct fellow at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation in Washington, DC. In 2009, Weston served as an analyst in Asian Affairs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), authoring Japan’s Historic 2009 Elections: Implications for U.S. Interests, the first report to Congress focusing on the Democratic Party of Japan. He was also principal author of the CRS report South Korea: Its Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Outlook. From 2007 to 2008, Weston was a Council on Foreign Relations/Hitachi International Affairs fel-low in Japan. During that time, he conducted research on Japanese foreign and defense policies at the Tokyo-based Institute for International Policy Studies (IIPS) and the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS).

Charles T. McCleanCharles T. McClean is currently a research associate in the Japan studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining CFR, he was a research intern in Asia-Pacific studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and for the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a B.A. in international rela-tions and Japanese, and received an M.A. from the Regional Studies-East Asia program at Harvard University. Before entering Harvard, Charles spent a year as a Fulbright fellow at Kobe University in Japan studying Japanese foreign aid to Africa and Southeast Asia.

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Murukami Yasuhito Dr. Murakami is currently desk officer on Sudan, Chad, and Central Africa, and Peace and Security in Africa in the Middle Eastern and African Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. He has over ten years of national and international experience in the field of post-conflict development and peacebuilding work, especially in post-conflict situations in areas of democrati-zation, electoral assistance, and DDR in management of programs and projects with UN agencies, regional organizations, donor agencies, and NGOs in seven developing countries (Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sri Lanka).

Satoh HarukoSatoh Haruko is an associate professor at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), Osaka University, where she is part of the “Peace and Human Security in Asia” project. She is also wrapping up a project on East Asian order with Asian and European researchers.

Philip Shetler-JonesPhilip Shetler-Jones is currently working as a consultant at NATO’s military headquarters (SHAPE), as senior strategic analyst in the Comprehensive Crisis and Operations Management Centre. Philip is a scholar/practitioner of peacebuilding who has combined an academic career focused on Japan and Japanese defense and security policy with professional experience in military, political, and NGO activity in peacebuilding operations and policy making worldwide. His field experience in Bosnia (as a UN observer in the mid-1990s), Afghanistan (humanitarian NGO) and Sudan (in both UN peacemaking and later peacekeeping missions) is complemented by work in UN HQ in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations’ best practices unit and more recently as the focal point for interagency planning. Philip maintains a blog at www.euroasiasecurityforum.com 

Uesugi Yuji Uesugi is currently program officer at the Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center (HPC) and an associate professor at the Graduate School for International Cooperation and Development (IDEC), Hiroshima University. His major research interests include conflict resolution and international peace oper-ations. Dr. Uesugi has participated in various post-conflict elections as an international election observer (Cambodia in 1998, 2001, 2003; East Timor in 2001, 2002, 2007). Prior to becoming an associate professor, Dr. Uesugi worked as a research fellow at the Research Institute of Peace and Security (Tokyo), the Nansei Shoto Industrial Advancement Center (Okinawa), the secretary-gen-eral at the Okinawa Peace Assistance Center (Okinawa), and at Hiroshima University’s Partnership for Peacebuilding and Social Capacity.

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