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When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? the Logic of Multilateral This article was downloaded by: [Cornell University] On: 13 February 2013, At: 23:30 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Security Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20 When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? The Logic of Multilateral Intervention and the Case of Afghanistan Sarah Kreps Version of record first published: 15 Sep 2008. To cite this article: Sarah Kreps (2008): When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? The Logic of Multilateral Intervention and the Case of Afghanistan, Security Studies, 17:3, 531-567 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636410802319610 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Security Studies, 17: 531–567, 2008 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 online DOI: 10.1080/09636410802319610 When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? The Logic of Multilateral Intervention and the Case of Afghanistan SARAH KREPS Using the debate between the logic of appropriateness and con- sequences as a theoretical backdrop, I argue that neither is able to explain the United States’ choices between unilateralism and multilateralism in post-Cold War military interventions. The logic of appropriateness is theoretically flawed because states are ulti- mately unwilling to compromise operational effectiveness on behalf of “oughtness,” and the logic of consequences has until now been insufficiently specified for the purposes of explaining military coop- eration behavior. In this article, I suggest that “consequences” are best specified according to time horizon, which creates intertempo- ral tradeoffs between the long-term benefits of multilateralism and immediate payoffs of unilateralism, and the nature of the inter- vention, which affects the operational payoffs of multilateralism. I test this argument and the existing explanations against the case of Afghanistan. Its within-case variation—largely unilateral in com- bat operations and robustly multilateral in post-conflict phases— lends strong support to the logic of consequences as specified ac- cording to time horizon and operational payoff. Downloaded by [Cornell University] at 23:30 13 February 2013 Sarah Kreps is a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and an Assistant Professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government. I would like to thank Col. John Agoglia, Stephen Biddle, Dan Byman, Conrad Crane, David Edelstein, Theo Farrell, Col. Michael Fleck, Gustavo Flores, Rian Harris, Jeffrey Legro, Kalev Sepp, Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors at Security Studies for their helpful comments on this research. I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University’s American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for generously supporting this research. 531 532 S. Kreps Q: “Is the coalition unraveling?” A: “Well, let me make it clear. No single coalition has raveled. Therefore it’s unlikely to unravel.1 In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States saw an outpouring of international support on its behalf. From the now-famous “nous sommes tous americains” headline in Le Monde,tothe unprecedented Article V invocation by NATO,tothe unanimous condemnation of the attacks within the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the United States enjoyed a rare respite in anti-Americanism and resistance to U.S. policies abroad. In principle, that support extended to U.S. retaliation through the use of force, and indeed, the international community agreed the United States had “the right of individual or collective self-defense.”2 Despite the overwhelming offers of assistance, the United States essentially conducted the combat phases of the intervention individually and deferred offers of support to the lower intensity post-conflict phases. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defended the approach, saying that mission would “determine the coalition. The coalition is not going to determine the mission because it will dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator.”3 The largely unilateral combat operations in Afghanistan broke with a post-Cold War trend of multilateralism that had prompted prominent constructivists such as Martha Finnemore to declare multilateral interven- tionism as an international norm and assert that the normative basis for multilateralism—a “logic of appropriateness”—was the guiding principle be- hind such behavior.4 In a seemingly competing claim, however, realist schol- ars also took credit for explaining post-Cold War intervention behavior. Ben- jamin Miller tested the empirical record of U.S.-led interventions and suggested that rationalist calculations best explained motivations behind how the United States intervened in this period. Both analytical predictions fell short in the case of Afghanistan. The unilateralism of combat operations undermined the multilateral norm argument, in which states should intervene multilaterally because it was considered appropriate and even if doing so was strategically less effective. But the rationalist argument—specified according to how re- Downloaded by [Cornell University] at 23:30 13 February 2013 gional powers incur political costs and according to the level of state interest surrounding the intervention—would have predicted a large intervention and an incentive to incorporate allies.5 1 See Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s press conference of 18 October 2001, available at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/18/se.23.html. 2 UNSC Resolution 1368. 3 See Rumsfeld interview with Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, 16 November 2001; http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11212001 t1116sun.html. 4 Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 5 Benjamin Miller, “The Logic of U.S. Military Interventions in the post-Cold War Era,” Contemporary Security Policy 19, no.3 (December 1998): 72–109. When Does the Mission Determine the Coalition? 533 As the experience in Afghanistan shows, neither set of expectations held. The United States did not assemble a coalition of strategically “disinterested” states that were operationally inconvenient though politically attractive as a way of legitimating the intervention, as the constructivist argument would have predicted.6 Rather, the United States only accepted support from in- strumentally useful states such as Britain, whose forces were considered to be roughly equivalent with U.S. forces, or from the Northern Alliance, which lacked significant capabilities but provided a source of indigenous resistance on the ground. Only once the United States had established greater levels of stability was it willing to incorporate special operations forces (SOF)from coalition partners, and only then from western European states, Australia, and Canada, whose SOF units were proficient in mountain operations and could easily be matrixed in with U.S. units. The patterns of cooperation in Afghanistan, which will be examined closely in this paper, provide evidence for an intervention based on a “logic of consequences.” As opposed to other logics of consequences that have been outlined in the literature, which I argue are not properly specified and therefore un- helpful in explaining cooperation behavior, I argue that consequences are a function of the constraints and incentives surrounding the intervention. The first consideration is the state’s time horizon. Diplomacy—the manifestation of multilateral bargaining—takes time. President George W. Bush has ac- knowledged these intertemporal tradeoffs between acting unilaterally versus multilaterally: “If you’re acting alone, you can move quickly. When you’re rallying world opinion and trying to come up with the right language at the United Nations to send a clear signal, it takes a while.”7 More benignly but still problematically, cases such as Afghanistan show that campaign planning is difficult under any circumstance; campaign planning with a coalition that brings multiple inputs becomes more arduous and time intensive. A state with short-term challenges to its security and an outside, unilateral option may therefore have incentives to circumvent the multilateral diplomacy and planning and instead intervene unilaterally. The second consideration addresses how the nature of the intervention Downloaded by [Cornell University] at 23:30 13 February 2013 itself affects the potential payoffs of
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