Caucasus Politics 2022

[Jubal]

Azerbaijan has been attacking Armenia again - this time shelling into Armenia proper, possibly taking advantage of the fact that Russia is in no position to provide peacekeeping. The Pashinyan administration in Armenia has been much more willing to try and reach terms with Azerbaijan than its predecessors (much of the opposition to Pashinyan is from the more tub-thumpingly military-resistance and defend-Artsakh-at-all-costs political wing) but at the end of the day it looks like the Azerbaijan dictatorship's revanchist tendencies have won out.

It's all rather grim really

[dubsartur]

Well, at least its a small war: a few million Armenians and about 10 million Azerbaijanis.  Pity for the remaining population of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

[dubsartur]

Phillips P. O'Brien shared a claim that Kyrgystan is now shelling Tajikistan after Russian peacekeepers left.  Supposedly there was fighting in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Kyrgyzstan%E2%80%93Tajikistan_clashes

[Jubal]

Well, at least its a small war: a few million Armenians and about 10 million Azerbaijanis.  Pity for the remaining population of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

This does come across as a slightly hollow "at least" (and could possibly come across as callous, which I'm sure you didn't mean but the implied ironic tone doesn't always carry well online). I guess I have enough colleagues in, or with family in, Armenia that it does hit quite close for me.

[dubsartur]

I do not have a lot of energy right now, and I think that its essential to use our heads and look at numbers.  Otherwise a hit-and-run and a genocide are the same thing, and otherwise we use our limited resources in ways which ameliorate less suffering than we could.  That is one of my firmest beliefs, and one where I respectfully disagree with some smart people with fancy jobs.

The big wars in the world right now are probably RU-UA, Yemen, and the Syrian and Ethiopian Civil Wars (there is also the massive flooding in Pakistan which is supposed to have inflicted devastation similar to a war).  AZ-AR and KYR-TAJ seem currently roughly on the level of the Burmese insurgency, big deals for the people there but not on the top three.

Edit: there are also the private wars between cartels in Mexico, have not looked up the stats on them and their current state

[Jubal]

The problem with looking at numbers, when it comes to the scale and casualty figures of a war, is that a) by the time they start shooting up very fast that's a lot of dead people that you can't ever bring back and b) the tenor and tone of a war are important in telling you what the war might do. The rhetoric from Azerbaijan, combined with its consistent attempts at heritage destruction and cultural erasure, are very obviously genocidal; some of the reports of mutilation of Armenian captives by the Azerbaijan regular forces are stomach-churning. If this war turns into a sizeable Azeri invasion of Syunik, and there is every reason to think that it might, then there will be every potential for full-scale civilian massacres. Also, the more one can make it clear that "small" inter-state wars will not be tolerated by the international community, the less other people are likely to start bigger ones. Setting expectations is important in diplomacy.

Another point, and one I don't think you've factored in, is that cost-effectiveness of action on a utilitarian level isn't just about the scale of a war. You can do a lot more to prevent deaths than you can to wade into a "hot" war where massacres are already taking place, the lines are a mess and you don't have a mechanism to pull anyone back. Conversely, you could probably stop Azerbaijan invading Armenia proper simply by signing a security agreement with Pashinyan that sat a token number of western troops along the Syunik borderline. Aliyev is a tub thumping nationalist bastard, but he's not a sufficiently isolated maniac to start a war that he thinks he might lose, so sending the physical message could well be enough to save a lot of lives if western countries actually want that outcome. I'm not convinced there's any military action we could take in Yemen or Tigray that would have similar cost-benefit analyses, and both of those wars are civil wars which makes the international legal situation considerably more complex: they're horrifying things, I think we should be spending vastly more on aid in those cases and putting much more pressure on governments and regional powers in both cases to try and stop the fighting... but when the context rather than just the numbers are taken into account, I don't think it makes any sense to relegate the current inter-state conflicts of central Asia and the Caucasus to some kind of "Tier 2" on the grounds that not enough people have been killed in them yet.

[dubsartur]

I do not have time or emotional energy to read that in September (maybe October) but I am just thinking of the situation of the whole region around Armenia.

• Massive protests in Iran after the morality police arrested and killed a woman for failing to wear a headscarf
• Iraq is post-Baathist Iraq (a thousand curses to the lesser Bush administration and their useful idiots in London and New York!)
• Syria is in the middle of an endless civil war with foreign interventions
• Turkey has Erdogan the strongman
• Georgia has disputes with the breakaway regions of South Ossetsia and Abkhazia

Moving one step out Afghanistan is run by the Taliban, Pakistan is a military dictatorship looking out over a flooded wasteland, Lebanon is running out of food and money, Israel is Israel, Egypt is a military dictatorship, and Russia is a dictatorship losing a war against a smaller country.  What a mess!

I'm not saying that we should bring back the Achaemenid empire, just saying that Ahuramazda does not like disorder or injustice