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A Farewell to Victory - Wars once ended with winners and losers. Then it got complicated.
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jan 13, 2010 07:06pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Author | Katie Paul |
| Media | Magazine - Newsweek |
| News Date | Wednesday, January 13, 2010 01:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Before 1945, there was something like a formula for how wars were fought and ended. When groups disagreed, usually over a piece of land, and failed to reconcile their differences amicably, they duked it out until one surrendered and the other carried off the prize. When they ended, wars had clear winners and losers.
With U.S. troops leaving Iraq and deploying in Afghanistan, it's worth asking: how are wars won now? Increasingly, they're not. Instead, says Page Fortna, a political scientist at Columbia University who researches war outcomes, nearly half of all wars since World War II have ended indecisively. That trend between states started with the Cold War, and for civil wars it began when the Cold War ended. (By contrast, only half a percent of all wars fought between 1816 and 1946 ended without a victor, according to the Correlates of War, an academic project that codes war outcomes.)
Partly, that's because the meaning of victory itself is changing. Even military routs have become divorced from political resolution, prompting a rise in "frozen conflicts" that seem to drag on through endless cycles of ceasefires, stalemates, and resurgences without ever properly concluding, says Fortna. "Because of changing norms about what is acceptable to gain through warfare, issues that were once resolved militarily are now often left unresolved," she says. "There are still cases when one side is clearly stronger militarily, but that often doesn't translate into political victory. For example, what would victory in Iraq look like? Or Afghanistan? It's pretty open to interpretation." In a world where many guerrilla groups consider not losing to be the same as winning, it has become much harder to translate military success into the political stability necessary for peace. |
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