Retaliation and decaptitation of a terrorist organization's leadership is a form of coercive diplomacy; after all, both are designed to get the terrorist organization to stop its terrorist attacks.  Judging the efficacy of coercive diplomacy against terrorists is exceedingly difficult, as Martha Crenshaw explains, but she concludes that overall this technique has not worked well.

In its relations with Peru, the United States has historically placed greatest emphasis on fighting the war on drugs. As Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, led an insurgency against the Peruvian government in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States provided ample support against the terrorists located in the jungle, especially those participating in the drug trade. But Peru's victory over terrorism then was due more to improved police intelligence and increased public investment, rather than success in the war on drugs. Now, in the midst of economic troubles and a difficult transition back to democracy in Peru, the Shining Path has made a resurgence. The United States again faces a choice about how to proceed - to continue focusing on the war on drugs or to provide sustained levels of investment in Peru's economy and political institutions, thereby turning this war on terror into a war on poverty.

This book compares sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, and the disintegration of economic institutions and public institutions for human services. The contributors not only study state breakdown but also compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

This chapter looks at the processes of state formation in postcolonial Africa and the former Soviet Union and asks whether those processes make African and Eurasian states especially vulnerable to civil war. In particular, we ask whether the experience of Africa's postcolonial states suggests a similar historical trajectory for the new states that emerged in Eurasia at the beginning of the 1990s. We argue that, despite important differences between the two historical experiences, conditions surrounding state formation in Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia have inhibited the formation of stable and legitimate states and have made war more likely.

The chapter beings by outlining three broad explanatory factors that scholars have used in trying to explain civil wars since 1945: ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization. We argue that these explanations neglect what Klaus Gantzel referred to as "the historicity of war," by which he means "the structural dynamics which condition the emergence and behaviour of actors" in any given period (Gantzel 1997, 139). We then suggest that a focus on state formation is helpful in providing the historical context for understanding civil wars. After surveying the experience of state-building in postcolonial Africa and in Eurasia, we conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the regions.

President George W. Bush has demonstrated impressive flexibility in reshaping his approach to foreign policy to deal with the new international challenges brought to the fore by the terrorist attacks.

Before Sept. 11, President Bush embraced a humble mission for the United States in the world. This country, he believed, had to "preserve the peace" by seeking to maintain the basic balance of power between nations. Now, Bush has abandoned the preservation of the old system. Instead, he seeks to change it by promoting liberty, freedom and eventual democracy in countries ruled by autocrats.

In doing so, Bush lines up next to "idealists" or "liberals" such as Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson and Immanuel Kant, and implicitly distances himself from realists focused solely on the balance of power such as Richard Nixon, Thucydides and his own father, the 41st president.

In a second remarkable change, Bush has become a supporter, at least rhetorically, of nation building. Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration derided nation building as a Clinton-era distraction from the more important issues in international politics. Now, Bush has clearly identified the connection between rebuilding the failed state of Afghanistan and American national security interests. If Congress approves his proposals, Bush will be the author of the greatest increase in the American foreign aid budget since John F. Kennedy's presidency.

Third, the Bush administration before Sept. 11 expressed disdain for multilateral institutions. But in his speech this month before the United Nations, Bush outlined an ambitious proposal for revitalizing the United Nations and American cooperation with this most important multilateral institution.

To be credible, President Bush needs to do more to demonstrate his commitment to the promotion of democracy, nation building and multilateralism. Bush must show that he wants to see political reform in Saudi Arabia as well as in Iraq. Words about promoting liberty ring hollow if they apply only to some people.

To show seriousness on nation building, Bush should press for increases in the peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan. Those working to rebuild Afghanistan unanimously complain that the lack of security throughout the country is the No. 1 impediment to their work.

To make credible his pledge to reinvigorate the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the president should complement his pledge to enforce U.N. resolutions on Iraq with a rededication of American participation in other international regimes. Bush could start with the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, an agreement that American officials helped craft.

Because many are suspicious of the president's recent embrace of democracy promotion, nation building and multilateralism, he must demonstrate a sustained commitment to his new foreign policy strategy.

If Bush has shown a willingness to consider new ideas about foreign policy, his critics -- both at home and abroad -- have demonstrated amazing conservatism. In a reversal of positions, those most opposed to Bush's new approach to foreign policy now seek to "preserve the peace" by defending the status quo. The core flaw in this is the assumption that the old international system was working. It was not.

Before Sept. 11, the United Nations had failed to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq. If the "international community" cannot act to execute its will when dealing with such grave issues as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, then it has no credibility on anything.

The international community is ineffective in dealing with despotism, poverty and human rights violations because it seeks to preserve state sovereignty above all else. Fifty years ago, this was a progressive idea, which brought about the end of colonialism. Today, it is a regressive idea, which preserves the sovereignty of dictators who defy international law, denying the sovereignty of their people.

It is odd to hear the international community invoked so often as the defender of high ideals and then see representatives from Iraq in the U.N. General Assembly. Should the United States really be a member of the same organization that includes Saddam Hussein? Eventually, autocracy should go the way of slavery and colonialism as simply unacceptable.

To be effective, the international community and the United States need each other. U.N. Security Council resolutions can only be enforced if the United States helps to enforce them. The United Nations can only assist in the building of new states or prevent the destruction of vulnerable regimes if the United States participates, and vice-versa. The international community has no army and no economy, but even the mighty and rich United States can't afford to remake the world alone. For an effective partnership, change has to come from both sides.

Michael McFaul is an associate professor of political science and Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

Published in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), Georgia Institute of Technology.

From the Introduction:
"The election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1997 signaled renewed interest in IT and the Internet. The BJP advocated economic liberalization and listed IT as one of the government's top five priorities, along with more traditional issues such as the provision of potable drinking water and education [10]. "Indian IT has had many small voices, but the BJP is attempting to give IT a national voice" [10]. In May 1998, Prime Minister Vajpayee organized a national IT task force to make recommendations for a comprehensive policy overhaul. The task force's recommendations were instrumental in initiating wide-ranging and fundamental changes in Indian IT policy.

The speed with which the Indian National Task Force on Information Technology and Software Development moved was indicative of the changing government attitude. Within 90 days of its establishment, the Task Force produced an extensive background report on the state of technology in India and an IT Action Plan with 108 recommendations [10,11]. The Task Force could act quickly because it built upon the experience and frustrations of state governments, central government agencies, universities, and the software industry. Much of what it proposed was also consistent with the thinking and recommendations of international bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and World Bank. In addition, the Task Force incorporated the experiences of Singapore and other nations, which implemented similar programs. It was less a task of invention than of sparking action on a consensus that had already evolved within the networking community and government.

Prime Minister Vajpayee captured the changing attitude toward technology in India in his claim that "IT is India's Tomorrow" [13]. This assessment offers a vision of a 21st century India substantially different from that of the 20th century. With its high levels of poverty, bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, protectionist policies, and large size, 20th century India was like the Asian elephant, plodding and turning slowly. At the dawn of a new millennium, Vajpayee and a growing number of politicians, bureaucrats, industry leaders, foreign investors, and bright-eyed entrepreneurs are trying to teach this Asian elephant to dance [14]."

The book chapter is a revised and updated version of "Asymmetrical Federalism and State Breakdown in Russia," which originally was published in 1999 in Post-Soviet Affairs.

The only Reader on post-Soviet Russian politics, this important book brings together the best published work from a wide variety of sources. Unusually for a Reader, it also includes many up-to-date, specially commissioned contributions. Some forty of the world's leading specialists on Russian politics, a third of them Russians, cover institutional design, elections, parties, federalism, regional politics, presidency and legislature, economic reform and economic interests, foreign policy, public opinion, the mass media, and prospects for democracy.

Substantial editorial introductions to every section provide the student with essential background information, detailing the historical development, contemporary relevance, and current debates for each topic area and each individual chapter. The chapters themselves have been carefully selected and edited to be as useful and relevant as possible to all students of contemporary Russian politics,

With analysis of major recent developments, including the Duma election of 1999, the Presidential election of 2000, and the institutional changes launched by President Putin, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to political institutions and processes in Putin's Russia.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies recognized that it was in their vital security interests to promote stable transitions in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. For the most part, such transitions would depend on the efforts of the states in transition themselves, including many that had been newly formed. However, one way in which the Western nations could help was by economic assistance -- both financial and technical.

The most abundant and efficacious form of financing will eventually be direct investment by Western private industry combined with indigenous investment in the countries; however, many of the transitioning countries, particularly those of the NIS did not have many attractive investment targets, with the possible exception of the natural resources sector. Recognizing this, the Western countries established a variety of unilateral and multilateral mechanisms to provide interim financing. These mechanisms utilized existing multilateral institutions such as the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund as well as existing unilateral institutions such as the United States' Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The charters and agendas of several existing institutions were expanded to address the specific issues in CEE/NIS. In addition, they established new multilateral institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and unilateral institutions such as several enterprise funds set up by the United States and TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) set up by the European Union.

In conjunction with these sources of finance the Western countries also initiated an extensive series of programs designed to address specific economic development and security issues in the region. These programs provided their own funding for projects, provided extensive technical assistance, and in some cases were designed to attract and work with Western private industry. One such program is the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), which is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. NCI's primary objective is to help prevent the flow of critical weapons technology and personnel from Russia to countries aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons. NCI's approach is to assist Russia in downsizing its nuclear weapons complex by creating sustainable, non-military employment for nuclear weapon specialists in Russia's closed nuclear cities. NCI is designed to build infrastructure necessary to attract private investment and to facilitate the efforts of private investors, thereby leveraging NCI's own budget.

Many of the sources of finance cited herein require a Western company as a strategic partner and co-investor. Thus the missions of NCI and these financial sources are highly complementary. Recognizing this, Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, under contract to NCI and under subcontract to the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, undertook a project to assemble information on many sources of finance that were applicable to NCI's mission, particularly those that are at least partially capitalized by the United States Government (USG). The intent was to make this information available to NCI partners to facilitate the establishment of ventures co-financed by NCI, the Russian Federation, private Western industry, and the sources described herein. While this research was performed for the purposes of NCI, much of the data are generally applicable to other projects seeking financing in Russia.

Book abstract:

This book addresses the organization and management of the national security establishment, and especially the Department of Defense, to implement the policies the nation's leaders choose for it, to manage the programs they direct, and to adapt to a changing world.