Military needs response plan to genocide

Chris Taylor and Anthony Zinni write for CNN:

In the past 75 years, the world has been witness to genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur and the Holocaust.

In a few weeks, the next mass atrocity could happen in East Africa.

As retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former U.S. director of National Intelligence, testified in 2010: "A number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in southern Sudan."

In one week, the mostly Christian people of South Sudan will cast a historic vote to secede or not from the Muslim North. While the United States rightly pursues diplomatic solutions to what most believe will be a vote to secede, prudence demands military preparations for violence -- to include mass killings that could be carried out simultaneously by varied groups.

Should South Sudan vote to secede, North-on-South violence is probable. A secession vote could also create a scramble for power and retribution by marginalized tribes in the South, while posturing by outside provocateurs and regional states could also lead to unintended violence.

Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army could exploit violence in Sudan to cover its own killing of civilians, as could al-Shabaab in Somalia. All could result in mass killings, and all could require military responses.

But so could a withdrawal from Iraq, unrest in Central Asia, or cartel violence in Mexico -- and the United States is unprepared to respond to genocide or mass atrocities in any of these cases. Failing to respond to barbaric events of human slaughter is more than just a matter of political will or legal authority -- it is a result of the manifest lack of critical thinking about how military forces could respond when prevention fails.

The Obama administration has said many of the right things. The 2010 National Security Strategy proclaims the United States will "in certain instances ... use military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities." The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review says the military will "prepare to defeat adversaries and succeed in a wide range of contingencies," to include "preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities." Even so, the United States has done little in the way of concrete planning should mass violence against civilians break out.

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