Abstract
This chapter looks at the score sheet for U.S. government proxy wars, indicating that 8 out of 25 of them can be counted as successes in the sense of proxies achieving military victory. In half of these successes, a more direct U.S. military intervention was necessary to secure the desired outcome. The chapter discusses causes of success and failure and argues that even the successes were highly problematic with respect to bringing into power incompetent and corrupted governments. Covert intervention resulted in the emergence of brutal dictatorships, criminal states, and regions of permanent political instability. PMOs are usually half-hearted measures that are often incapable of changing the outcomes of conflicts and that are often setting up countries for future malaise even when they are successful.
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Notes
- 1.
Shapiro makes this point with respect to the problem of terrorist organizations to recruit members: the pool of suitable members tends to be very small and terrorist leaders do not know who will make a good terrorist in the long term at the stage of recruitment. See Shapiro 2013, 112.
- 2.
Daniel Lake has argued that it was neither the air campaign nor NATO’s threat of using ground forces or the KLA that resulted in Milosevic giving in, but rather Serbian vulnerability to economic warfare and political pressure that had destabilized the regime. See Lake 2009.
- 3.
According to Riedel, ‘The Pakistanis came to refer to that period as the golden age in US-Pakistani cooperation, when “Reagan rules” were used, meaning that the CIA gave the ISI money and arms and asked no questions about what the ISI did with them. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.’ See Riedel 2014, 147.
- 4.
Bruce Riedel defended the use of Pakistan by questioning ‘whether the United States had any viable policy alternatives to Pakistan or whether US influence could have altered Pakistan’s strategy,’ suggesting that there was no alternative to Pakistan and that Washington could exercise very little influence on Pakistan, nor were any efforts made in this respect by the Reagan administration. See Riedel 2014, 146–147.
- 5.
It is often pointed out that the Taliban were just hoarding the opium to drive up the prices so that they could cash out at a later point.
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Krishnan, A. (2018). Endgames and Outcomes. In: Why Paramilitary Operations Fail. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71631-2_8
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