WikiLeaks: Azerbaijan cannot capture Karabakh

WikiLeaks: Azerbaijan cannot capture Karabakh
17:43 • 23.02.11
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, a former US Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Anne Derse has said, according to a recently leaked US State Department confidential cable.The cable (dated July 2, 2009 ), that is part of Wikileaks cache, was first published by the Russian news website Russkiy Reporter and later appeared in Armenian Reporter.It contains US diplomats' comments on the Azerbaijani president's rhetoric and their analysis on the country's potentials to settle the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh .Below is an extract from the cable.The Washington viewDerse'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.
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