ON THE EFFECTIVE USE OF PROXY WARFARE by Andrew Lewis Peek A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May 2021 2021 Andrew Peek All rights reserved Abstract This dissertation asks a simple question: how are states most effectively conducting proxy warfare in the modern international system? It answers this question by conducting a comparative study of the sponsorship of proxy forces. It uses process tracing to examine five cases of proxy warfare and predicts that the differentiation in support for each proxy impacts their utility. In particular, it proposes that increasing the principal-agent distance between sponsors and proxies might correlate with strategic effectiveness. That is, the less directly a proxy is supported and controlled by a sponsor, the more effective the proxy becomes. Strategic effectiveness here is conceptualized as consisting of two key parts: a proxy’s operational capability and a sponsor’s plausible deniability. These should be in inverse relation to each other: the greater and more overt a sponsor’s support is to a proxy, the more capable – better armed, better trained – its proxies should be on the battlefield. However, this close support to such proxies should also make the sponsor’s influence less deniable, and thus incur strategic costs against both it and the proxy. These costs primarily consist of external balancing by rival states, the same way such states would balance against conventional aggression. Conversely, the more deniable such support is – the more indirect and less overt – the less balancing occurs. This should ii outweigh the cost in its proxies’ operational capabilities. This dissertation seeks to illustrate that deniability is more important than military effectiveness in achieving a sponsor’s strategic goals. Plausible deniability is the focus in this dissertation because it is the feature battlefield advantage that proxy warfare provides. The other benefits of proxies, such as their cheaper political and material cost than conventional units and the ideological benefit they provide, may have longer-term strategic benefit in a conflict, but only deniability has a direct effect on the forces in the field. That effect is primarily keeping balancing powers out of the conflict; allowing a state to project power into an area without meeting the counterreaction or balancing that it would if it projected power with its conventional forces. Primary Reader and Advisor: Eliot Cohen Secondary Reader: Daniel Markey iii Contents Abstract ii List of Figures v 1. Research Design and Literature Review vi 2. Russia and Georgia, 2003-2008 51 3. Russia and Ukraine, 2013-2016 113 4. Iran and Hezbollah, 2005-2016 180 5. Pakistan and the Haqqani Network, 2001-2016 254 6. Saudi Arabia and the Chechens, 1996-2003 331 7. Summary and Implications 403 iv List of Figures 2.1 Georgia and the separatist regions . 57 2.2 Georgian-controlled areas of South Ossetia, prewar . 94 2.3 Abkhazia . 97 3.1 Ukraine and its cities . 128 3.2 The separatist areas of eastern Ukraine . 135 3.3 Changes in the line of control before and after August 2014 . 147 3.4 Area under separatist control after Minsk I . 153 4.1 Sectarian distribution of Lebanon . 188 4.2 Israeli advance into Lebanon during the July War . 214 4.3 Qalamoun Mountains and initial Hezbollah deployment to Syria . 233 5.1 Afghanistan, provinces and cities . 265 5.2 North Waziristan and Loya Paktia . 268 5.3 Taliban control of Afghanistan by province, 2015 . 312 6.1 Chechnya and its cities . 341 6.2 Russian advance on Grozny, 1999-2000 . 381 v CHAPTER ONE: RESEARCH DESIGN AND LITERATURE REVIEW 1 This dissertation asks a simple question: how are states most effectively conducting proxy warfare in the modern international system? It answers this question by conducting a comparative study of the sponsorship of proxy forces. It uses process tracing to examine five cases of proxy warfare and predicts that the differentiation in support for each proxy impacts their utility. In particular, it proposes that increasing the principal-agent distance between sponsors and proxies might correlate with strategic effectiveness. That is, the less directly a proxy is supported and controlled by a sponsor, the more effective the proxy becomes. Strategic effectiveness here is conceptualized as consisting of two key parts: a proxy’s operational capability and a sponsor’s plausible deniability. These should be in inverse relation to each other: the greater and more overt a sponsor’s support is to a proxy, the more capable – better armed, better trained – its proxies should be on the battlefield. However, this close support to such proxies should also make the sponsor’s influence less deniable, and thus incur strategic costs against both it and the proxy. These costs primarily consist of external balancing by rival states, the same way such states would balance against conventional aggression. Conversely, the more deniable such support is – the more indirect and less overt – the less balancing occurs. This should outweigh the cost in its proxies’ operational capabilities. This dissertation seeks to illustrate that deniability is more important than military effectiveness in achieving a sponsor’s strategic goals. Plausible deniability is the focus in this dissertation because it is the feature battlefield advantage that proxy warfare provides. The other benefits of proxies, such as their cheaper political and material cost than conventional units and the ideological benefit they provide, may have longer-term strategic benefit in a conflict, but only 2 deniability has a direct effect on the forces in the field. That effect is primarily keeping balancing powers out of the conflict; allowing a state to project power into an area without meeting the counterreaction or balancing that it would if it projected power with its conventional forces. The measurements in this dissertation are mostly focused on that counterreaction: when it comes, how decisive it is, and what delays it. Deniability causes this delay and degradation of balancing in three ways. First, at its most basic, it clouds the tactical intelligence. All of the cases examined here and indeed most proxy relationships involve a significant amount of secrecy. The relationship between sponsor and client, even if it is acknowledged, usually requires the clandestine exchange of weapons, money, recruits, or some other type of support. This exchange must retain some level of that secrecy for the proxy relationship to work effectively. That is the entire game: that is how a state can convince other states that what looks like a military invasion is actually something else. By the secret nature of these links they are often difficult to parse out, even by sophisticated intelligence operations. The precise nature of Pakistan’s support to various Afghan insurgents, for example, was extremely challenging for the US to decipher even with all of its resources and even if strategically it had a fairly good strategic idea of what Pakistan was doing. This leads to the second way in which deniability helps delay and degrade consequences: it impedes the ability of the balancing state(s) to prove to the broader international community that interstate aggression is being committed. Turning often extremely sensitive intelligence into indisputable bilateral fact is challenging, even for allies. There are also different tiers of states that a balancer must convince, based on the alignment of these other states’ interests with the balancer. There are those treaty allies 3 that are not directly involved in the conflict but share the same basic goals. Like Germany with the US, these states are predisposed to support the balancer but need something more than its assurances. There are also those states that are not party to the conflict nor have much interest at all, but that are nonetheless unwilling to impose costs on a fellow-state without some evidence bilaterally or at the UN. Lastly, there are those states of the opposing coalition that will claim virtually any evidence is faked unless it is so convincing that they become pariahs by continuing to deny it. Finally, there is a third way in which plausible deniability reduces balancing, and it involves the proxy sponsor itself. Deniability gives both sponsor and balancer(s) the ability to manage escalation in a way that conventional aggression does not. This is as much a benefit for the balancer as it is for the aggressor: as long as the interstate aggression is not too overt, the balancer can decide how much of its resources it wants to commit to countering it, and even decide on none, if necessary, without significant penalty. Proxy warfare thus removes the automaticity of the need to respond to conventional aggression. Any decision to intervene in a conflict and balance proxy aggression becomes a complicated one, particularly if – as in Georgia and Ukraine – both sides include great powers with nuclear weapons. Deniability provides an off-ramp to both parties. The nominal distance between sponsor and proxy allows the balancing state to avoid a confrontation with the sponsor state, and vice versa. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the balancing powers often treated interstate aggression as an intrastate problem, and indeed focused the Minsk process after February 2015 on ethnic self- determination rather than escalate a confrontation with Russia. 4 The state sponsors in this dissertation’s case studies include Iran, supporting the world’s Shia malcontents; Russia, supporting ethnic Russians and other marginalized groups abroad; Saudi Arabia, supplying its brand of political Islam to mosques and madrassas around the world; and Pakistan, supporting militants in Afghanistan and India. Two Russian cases are included because they are particularly recent and salient examples of proxy warfare. Of these five cases, according to this proposal, Saudi Arabia should be using proxy forces the most successfully.