Tilting at windmills: The flawed U.S. policy toward the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war

ABSTRACT

This article examines decision-making mistakes made by U.S. President Nixon and national security advisor Kissinger during the 1971 India-Pakistan crisis and war. It shows that Nixon and Kissinger routinely demonstrated psychological biases that led them to overestimate the likelihood of West Pakistani victory against Bengali rebels as well as the importance of the crisis to broader U.S. policy. The evidence fails to support Nixon and Kissinger’s own framing of the 1971 crisis as a contest between cool-headed realpolitik and idealistic humanitarianism, and instead shows that Kissinger and Nixon’s policy decisions harmed their stated goals because of repeated decision-making errors.     

Nuclear opportunism: A theory of how states use nuclear weapons in international politics

How do states use nuclear weapons to achieve their goals in international politics? Nuclear weapons can influence state decisions about a range of strategic choices relating to military aggression, the scope of foreign policy objectives, and relations with allies. The article offers a theory to explain why emerging nuclear powers use nuclear weapons to facilitate different foreign policies: becoming more or less aggressive; providing additional support to allies or proxies, seeking independence from allies; or expanding the state’s goals in international politics. I argue that a state’s choices depend on the presence of severe territorial threats or an ongoing war, the presence of allies that provide for the state’s security, and whether the state is increasing in relative power. The conclusion discusses implications of the argument for our understanding of nuclear weapons and the history of proliferation, and nonproliferation policy today.     

Buying Peace? Civil War Peace Duration and Private Military & Security Companies

Do Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) impact peace duration after civil war? I argue that the role these organisations play in a conflict can impact post-conflict stability. Specifically, I suggest that variance in services provided by PMSCs can influence rebels’ calculations about relative capabilities. These calculations then contribute to the probability for civil war recurrence. Building on the bargaining framework, with a focus on information and commitment problems, this article demonstrates that PMSCs participating in armed combat operations can jeopardise the stability of peace following civil war. Three case narratives (Angola, Sierra Leone and Croatia) are used to probe the theoretical argument and results are illustrative – PMSCs serving as force multipliers contribute to an increase in the probability for conflict recurrence.     

Moving Beyond Population-Centric vs. Enemy-Centric Counterinsurgency

Historically, insurgency is one of the most prevalent forms of armed conflict and it is likely to remain common in the foreseeable future. Recent experiences with counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offer many lessons for future counterinsurgents, but the discourse on the subject continues to be mired in a traditional dichotomy pitting population-centric approaches to counterinsurgency against enemy-centric approaches. Historical analysis suggests that this traditional dichotomy is not a sufficiently nuanced way to understand or plan for such operations. Instead, discussions of counterinsurgency should focus on two dimensions: actions (use of physical force vs. political or moral actions) and targets (active insurgents vs. insurgent support). This perspective divides the space of possible counterinsurgency efforts into four quadrants, suggesting that effective counterinsurgency campaigns find a balance of effort across the four quadrants that is well matched to the specific context.     

The misguided and mismanaged intervention in Libya: Consequences for peace

In this paper, I critically analyse the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), as it relates to the responsibility of intervening forces towards the people they claim to protect and the challenges that the situation in Libya now poses in the region and for the African Union (AU). I focus most of my attention on the coercive elements of the RtoP framework (Pillar III). This is the most contested element in the framework. Three questions guide this article: were there legitimate grounds to justify an external intervention in Libya? In the words of Hugh Roberts in Who Said Gaddafi Had to Go, ‘[w]hat if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it’ since 2011? What are the practical implications and consequences of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention, led by the United States (US), for regional peace? I discuss the problems surrounding the US–NATO intervention, followed by an analysis of the various positions and narratives leading up to the intervention, the framing and justifications provided for the intervention, and an analysis of the AU's proposal for the resolution of the Libyan crisis. I analyse the various debates that took place in the US (Pentagon/White House), at the United Nations, among scholars in the West and in Africa, and among various actors who tried to broker a ceasefire in Libya before and during the intervention. I conclude with a discussion of the implications for regional peace.     

Capacity improvement,penalties, and the fixed charge transportation problem

Capacity improvement and conditional penalties are two computational aides for fathoming subproblems in a branch‐and‐bound procedure. In this paper, we apply these techniques to the fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) and show how relaxations of the FCTP subproblems can be posed as concave minimization problems (rather than LP relaxations). Using the concave relaxations, we propose a new conditional penalty and three new types of capacity improvement techniques for the FCTP. Based on computational experiments using a standard set of FCTP test problems, the new capacity improvement and penalty techniques are responsible for a three‐fold reduction in the CPU time for the branch‐and‐bound algorithm and nearly a tenfold reduction in the number of subproblems that need to be evaluated in the branch‐and‐bound enumeration tree. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 341–355, 1999