Wikileaks: Armenians can’t be defeated by Azerbaijan

by Emil Sanamyan

Published: Tuesday February 22, 2011

Armenian military practices operational art during November 2010 exercises. Official photo

Washington - "Azerbaijan, even with its focus on improving its military capability, is unlikely anytime soon to structure a force large or well-equipped enough to overcome the terrain advantages enjoyed by the NK Self-Defense Force and the Armenian army," former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Anne Derse argued at the end of her tenure in Baku.

According to the July 2, 2009 cable that is part of Wikileaks cache and was first published by Russkiy Reporter on February 22, Derse believed that Azerbaijan assumed "a much rosier scenario for NK than it has any plausible reason to expect."

Derse served as U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan from 2006 to 2009 and is currently the ambassador to Lithuania.

In a January 2009 cable, also published by Russkiy Reporter today, Derse notes that Azerbaijani "President's rhetoric has vastly outpaced the results" of Azerbaijan's military build-up.

The Washington view

Derse's analysis is in line with U.S. assessment of the balance of forces in Karabakh that former U.S. officials and experts have communicated publicly, their views unaffected by Azerbaijan's ballooning military spending expected to top $3 billion in 2011.

Ross Wilson, another former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan (2000-2003), and Stephen Blank of the U.S. Army War College offered similar analyses during a panel discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on February 18.

Blank stressed that Ilham Aliyev is "sadly mistaken" if he believes, as he often says publicly, that Azerbaijan could successfully undertake a military operation to capture Karabakh. Blank suggested that his conclusion was based on an in-depth and recent analysis by a group of Western experts.

"Any military campaign will seriously set back Azerbaijan's interests in the region including with respect to solving this [conflict] and I say that in part because I don't think a military effort will succeed," Wilson remarked at an earlier event at Georgetown University.

"This is extremely difficult terrain, the Armenians hold the high ground and it is very, very difficult to try to take that kind of territory without truly overwhelming force" which Azerbaijan does not possess, Wilson noted.

Wayne Merry, a former State Department and Pentagon official, argued in May 2009 that in addition to the terrain and other physical limitations, Azerbaijan would be facing the Armenian military that has "a clear record of superiority in operational art [that] they would exercise in the inherently advantageous role of defenders of a skillfully prepared position."

The realities on the ground "should persuade any rational Azeri not to resort to war. Even the most favorable battlefield outcome would leave Azerbaijan immeasurably worse off than before," Merry wrote.

He warned further that "it is not out of the question that the existence of an Azeri state could hang in the balance, as in a major renewed war it might be in the combined interests of Armenia, Russia and Iran to redraw the map of the eastern Caucasus. Unlikely, but history is replete with precedents."