Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | Track II Diplomacy, page 4

Carter agrees that, "It takes real discipline to make sure you're not confusing people or undercutting government." Further, notes Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center, "Track II can't succeed when governments don't want it to succeed," but he argues that even in closed, totalitarian governments there are divisions among officials regarding the wisdom and utility of Track II exercises. Says Krepon, "It seems to me that Track II programs have real opportunities to make a positive difference when governments are divided. They help in the internal battles that governments invariably have in moving the ball in a positive direction."

For example, he notes, early in the 1980s when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a ban on nuclear testing, the Reagan administration rejected the idea arguing, in part, that it was unenforceable, based on Pentagon opposition to the idea. However, a number of NGOs approached the State Department, which favored the test ban, and obtained State Department licensing to install monitoring equipment at Soviet test sights, enabling them to demonstrate that a test ban could be verified. "That had a significant prodding effect, and an embarrassing effect," says Krepon. "Joint monitoring talks for test ban limitations began and the Congressional support for an end to nuclear testing grew."

Krepon offers a set of six "standards and conditions for success" in Track II, which he notes can be most effective when dealing with "divided governments":

First, the target country must be open to course correction or, at least, having doubts about its current course; countries that appear monolithic from the outside can still have internal debates.

Second, Track II initiatives can make a difference by "opening lines of communication when channels are closed or very constricted." This proved true in Cold War discussions on the missile-based Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as well as in Middle East diplomacy.

Third, "Seeding specific ideas ... offering new inputs, impressions, ideas for consideration" to governments facing internal disagreements and other instabilities before they are ready to adopt them frequently germinates successfully.

Fourth, "by proposing and implementing symbolic gestures to help break impasses or soften official resistance within divided governments."

Fifth, "by gaining initial access to facilities that are closed to foreign governments."

Sixth, "when topics are too sensitive for official government interaction," NGOs frequently can open dialogue.

Success Stories

"The father of Track II diplomacy," according to Joseph Montville, was President Dwight Eisenhower, who initiated a defining exercise in Track II diplomacy. Amid one of the most frigid episodes of the Cold War, the 1960 Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane, as relations between the super powers steadily eroded, Eisenhower is reported to have remarked to Norman Cousins, the veteran editor of the Saturday Review, "I can't talk to the Soviets, but somebody better."

At Eisenhower's urging, Cousins, operating with a Ford Foundation grant, was able to convene leading U.S. and Soviet citizens, opening a nongovernmental channel with the Soviet Union in 1960, which led to a series of meetings known as the Dartmouth Conference, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union was it revealed that then-Premier Nikita Khrushchev approved his delegation's role in the talks.

The Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force continued to meet under the direction of Harold H. Saunders (see sidebar), a former top National Security Council official for Asian affairs and Gennady Chufrin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The task force, created in 1981 by Saunders and co-directed until 1988 by Yevgeny Primakov, who became the Russian Prime Minister in 1991, chose as its primary post-Soviet goal to focus on newly independent Tajikistan, where a civil war threatened to disrupt stability throughout the region.

In what became known as the Inter-Tajik Dialogue, the Task Force succeeded in engaging representatives loyal to the Tajik government as well as opposition forces and maintain a peaceful co-existence through Track II discussions, a process that is widely credited with bringing a UN-mediated peace settlement, and continuing dialogue.

In another part of the world, Track II activities are credited with assisting in carrying reinforcing messages to PLO leaders during the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Peace Accords process in 1993 and, at least in one set of talks (convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), provided a back channel for discussions of the so-called "Gaza first" and "Gaza plus" talks that identified the process of Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory, which has now begun.

There is less emphasis being placed on Israeli-Palestinian Track II efforts because, since Oslo, "The parameters of an agreement are there; now it's up to the political powers that be and the Israeli and Palestinian communities to overcome the objections of their extremist minorities and put a deal in place," says Jeffrey Boutwell, who was instrumental in those Track II sessions.

Today, Boutwell is the Executive Director of the Pugwash Conferences, which has been making important Track II strides toward resolving the Indian-Pakistani impasse over Kashmir. In 2004 and 2005, Pugwash convened Track II conferences involving Pakistani, Indian and Kashmiri participants, which by itself represents an important development in the quest for continuing dialogue. The first step was a series of discussions, in which Pugwash Secretary General Paolo Cotta-Ramusino obtained approval from Pakistan and India to let Kashmiris from both sides of the line of control, together with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, engage in purely non-governmental Track II discussions aimed at finding ways to reduce violence in Kashmir.

"This is a process that will be hard to reverse now that it is underway," says Boutwell. "Having given their approval for Kashmiris to meet for the first time in decades, the Indians or the Pakistanis would be sending a strong signal if they prevent such meetings in the future, because what they will be saying is, 'We're no longer interested in improving the situation in Kashmir or of advancing Indian-Pakistani relations.'"

Unlike post-Cold War Western relations, which are framed by an elaborate architecture of institutions evolved from more than half a century of nuclear tensions and negotiations, Asia doesn't have much experience in the power politics of mutually assured destruction. Increasingly, however, Shirk and others report that China's interest in Track II exercises, for example, is bearing fruit. "When we first set up the NEACD, in 1993," recalls Shirk, "I had more enthusiasm from the North Koreans than from the Chinese, who worried that any kind of multilateral process in Asia would end up pointing the finger at them because they were the big guys on the block and that everybody would gang up on them." Instead, over the past decade, while engaging with NEACD and other Track II programs, younger foreign ministry officials realized that they could use these opportunities to signal their non-hostile intentions and make multilateral institutions serve their interests.

"As a result, they have developed a new security doctrine, which is promoting this kind of multilateral cooperation," says Shirk, including creating a network of largely independent think tanks to support multilateral regional diplomacy. She adds, "Over the past decade, this has got to be the biggest success story in Track II."

Ambassador Charles Kartman, a Special U.S. Envoy to the Korean Peace Talks, agrees with Shirk's assessment: "Now that we're at the evaluation stage I'm asking myself, well, okay, what did that all add up to? And it's a plus...multilateral institution building is one of the clear pluses. I don't think that can be argued with."

Next page: Carnegie financed a 1910 European peace junket in which one of his heroes, recently retired President Theodore Roosevelt, would meet with his other hero, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, for a conference advancing Carnegie's concept for a "League of Nations."

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