Month: January 2011
Adult supervision needed
The New York Times reports that President Karzai has agreed to convene Parliament Wednesday, after making a genuine mess of things by trying to get changes made in the results of last September’s elections. Somehow I have a feeling we have not heard the last of this story, but even thus far it tells us something about Afghanistan.
The President had good reason to be unhappy with the outcome of the September parliamentary elections: due to insecurity in the parts of the country where they live, Pashtuns are underrepresented, especially in Ghazni province, and some of his favorites did not get in. The last parliament had become increasingly aggressive in questioning ministers, claiming it had ultimate responsibility for constitutional interpretation, and in general exercising some oversight of the executive branch. This is not fun for any president, especially one who lacks a strong power base of his own and is fighting a counter-insurgency war with allies he regards as fickle while he tries to negotiate a political settlement with the enemy. A little support in parliament would be nice.
What Karzai tried to do was use a panel of judges he appointed expressly for the purpose to outflank the internationally supported electoral commissions that were supposed to have final say on the election results. Normally I might cheer a president who is feisty enough to tell the internationals where to go, but that would not have been the appropriate reaction in this instance. It is hard always to credit the rule of law arguments (“integrity of the electoral process” and all that) my colleagues make, but every once in a while something is so blatantly abusive that we should, if only because the Afghans who did vote are entitled to the parliament they voted for.
So what does this story tell us about Afghanistan? It tells us that the international intervention there needs to maintain its vigilance and act when necessary to counterbalance abuses.
But it also tells us that the Afghans have their own balancing mechanisms–President Karzai apparently backed down after a very long lunch with the people elected to the new parliament, who had been threatening to open their session without him. Maybe, just maybe, the adult supervision that is needed can come in the future a bit more from Afghans than from the foreigners.
We’ve got our own politicians to keep on the straight and narrow. As well as an ex-spy and his friends to rein in.
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Darkest hour before dawn, or just a flop?
Laura Rozen reports in detail on the failure to make progress on nuclear issues in the P5+1 talks with Iran in Istanbul. The press will no doubt say this is a flop.
I certainly wouldn’t argue it is success, but note the absence of more threatened sanctions, the “open door” to further, unscheduled discussions, and the updated fuel swap proposal left on the table for the Iranians to take back to Tehran. This smells to me like the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of one, at least on the P5 end.
The sticking point seems to be recognition of Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium. This is a complicated legal issue that I won’t pretend to elucidate. Suffice it to say that I don’t know of any country that has given up enrichment technology once it has acquired it, even if it may have stopped enrichment or limited its extent. We may not worry anymore about Brazil or Japan acquiring nuclear weapons, but it is not because they have given up their enrichment technology.
Iran won’t either–that is quite clear. The P5+1 are trying to finesse this issue with the avowedly pragmatic swap agreement, which would remove stocks of enriched uranium from Iran and limit the extent of enrichment. But the Iranians are wanting an acknowledgment of their “right” to enrich even as they give up the enriched material. This doesn’t strike me as an insoluble problem–and it has appeared in the recent past that Hillary Clinton was flexible on the issue.
That said, the P5+1 will want to be certain that Iran has seriously abandoned its nuclear weapons program before agreeing, either explicitly or implicitly, to Iran’s continuing to enrich. That would require more intrusive inspections and a more serious statement by Tehran of its commitment. Other countries have moved in this direction–Argentina, Brazil, Libya and South Africa are not such bad analogues.
It is impossible to be hopeful that Tehran will go in their direction. Two factors weigh heavily in the direction of keeping the Iranian nuclear weapons option open: a fragmented but nationalist political leadership that makes it difficult for any one component to compromise without being sharply criticized by others; real regional incentives to gain the power and prestige that some think would accrue to Iran as a nuclear weapons state, or even as a potential nuclear weapon state.
Tehran also had reason to be belligerent and recalcitrant during this particular meeting. The murders of its nuclear scientists, the apparently successful Stuxnet attack on its centrifuges, and Israel’s apparent assessment that Iran would not be able to get nuclear weapons until 2015 have combined to lessen the likelihood of a military attack.
That said I doubt this is the end of the negotiations. Too much is at stake for Iran, Israel and the P5. Before reaching any solid conclusion, let’s wait for Acting Foreign Minister Salehi’s reaction to what the Iranian delegation brings back from Istanbul.
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Do your duty
Here’s something worth watching:
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In just a few words, Aung San Suu Kyi answers a lot of questions about her plans: she advocates negotiations with the Burmese regime and reconsideration of sanctions, based on their political and social impact. Can she pull off this kind of “engagement” strategy? What sort of deal can she hope for from a regime that has everything to lose from democratization? Or is she deluding herself into thinking it has a softer side? Only time will tell, but she is clearly committed to trying the negotiation route, without ruling out nonviolent confrontation.
She also in this clip betrays an acute awareness of the information revolution, and is reportedly getting an internet connection. I’m not a “twitter revolution” kind of guy (though I do tweet @DanielSerwer), and obviously the regime will read everything she types. But they will also hear everything she says. The virtues of electronic connectedness for mass action, even if the regime follows every byte, should not be underestimated. The day they shut her down, they’ll have a big crowd in the street.
In the end, she wants to be remembered as someone who did her duty. Would that all leaders had her concise elegance.
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Karzai is right, but O’Hanlon is wrong
Michael O’Hanlon in The National Interest suggests that the Parliamentary election results from September need to be corrected because security conditions prevented Pashtuns from voting. Citing President Karzai’s concerns, which have caused him to postpone convening parliament, Michael proposes two possible fixes:
One would be to seat all 249 of the members who just won seats according to official tallies (including about 100 Pashtuns, less than their share of the population and less than their 115 seats previously held), but add in some seats on an ad hoc basis for those Pashtun parts of the country like Ghazni that lost representation in the recent voting. A respected group would need to be charged with this task, and no more than ten to fifteen additonal seats should be created as a result, but the fix might otherwise work. A second approach would be to convene a shura in Ghazni to create a balanced provincial delegation—effectively discarding the results of the election for that province only (and, again, perhaps one or two others if truly needed).
Now I can agree with President Karzai and Michael that the lack of representation from Pashtun areas is a problem, but I don’t really think either of his suggested fixes is going to work: either they will alter the political balance in Parliament, in which case the non-Pashtuns will object, or they will not, in which case Karzai will not be satisfied.
In addition to the power balance, there is an issue of democratic legitimacy. Something similar to what Michael proposes was tried in Iraq in 2005, in order to compensate for the lack of Sunni votes (due both to boycott and security conditions) and resulting representation. Sunni members were added to the committee preparing the new constitution, which quickly decided to ignore their input, meet without them present, and proceed with a constitution inimical to Sunni interests. I imagine the U.S. Congress would also react badly if someone proposed adding members to represent the 50 per cent or so of Americans who don’t vote.
The time for Pashtuns to fix this problem was election day, by making the efforts required to ensure security and to go to the polls. The fact that they failed to do so is certainly a problem for Karzai, who already tried to fix it by stuffing the ballot boxes. The kind of post-facto fixes that Michael is proposing will only undermine the integrity of the electoral process and encourage many others to ask for corrections–surely there were security problems in non-Pashtun majority areas as well. It will also validate the already strong Afghan tendency to believe that your own ethnic group cannot be represented by someone of another ethnic group.
Why wouldn’t it be better to ask Karzai to govern with a parliament not altogether to his liking? That is what you get in a lot of democratic systems (especially presidential ones), including our own. And Ghazni’s largely Hazara parliament members won’t have much of a chance of getting reelected unless they begin to take the concerns of their Pashtun constituents seriously, because next time they’ll make the effort to vote.
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Hu is the better alternative
Michael J. Green in the National Interest has an excellent piece on communique diplomacy with China, but it leaves open the difficult question of the longer-term relationship between Washington and Beijing. While this question is being asked at Brookings and elsewhere, answers seem to be lacking. Clean energy technologies are far too weak a reed to support a long-term U.S./China relationship. While some argue that what is needed is to implement what has already been agreed, that too seems a formula less robust than what is needed.
The basic problem lies in diverging values. This is not just a matter of human rights, but it is also a matter of human rights. First ducking the question and then sounding forthcoming yesterday, President Hu Jintao said China “recognizes and also respects the universality of human rights” and acknowledged that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.” This answer that will cause Hu more trouble in Beijing than in Washington. But expert analysts are having a hard time interpreting what it means, and even whether it is boiler plate or something new. And for the Chinese, human rights include economic and social rights, not just political ones. Where we hear “freedom of expression” they may mean “right to health.”
My own inclination, but I admit it is not a particularly well-informed one, is to think that yesterday’s visit did open some possibilities for improved longer-term relations with China, if only because the two leaders seemed on the same wavelength and free to express their agreements and disagreements clearly and comfortably. Above all, they seemed to agree that the kinds of misunderstandings that plagued the bilateral relationship in 2010 should not be repeated in 2011 and beyond. Tone matters in diplomacy, especially with the Chinese, and yesterday’s tones were harmonious (an important value in Beijing).
The tone of mutual respect hides however a fundamental asymetry. Hu Jintao is the leader of a one-party system. President Obama is not everyone’s favorite in the U.S.–I am getting a lot of Tea Party tweets these days about defeating him at the next elections–but precisely because he won office in a tough political competition he has a kind of democratic legitimacy that Hu Jintao lacks. In fact, democracy of the sort we would recognize as such is still a great threat in China, because it calls into question the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power.
What difference does this make? A great deal, it seems to me. The Chinese are feeling their cheerios: the past decade of rapid economic growth, financial success and infrastructure modernization has given even the man in the Shanghai street the sense that nothing can stop an inevitable rise, one in which competition and potentially conflict with the U.S. is regarded as likely. Chinese nationalism is a serious and rising threat to good relations with the U.S., since it sees the U.S. as hegemonic, or at least as trying to hem in China’s growing power.
There is the irony: Hu Jintao, weak though he is in the panoply of Chinese leaders and lacking though he may be in real democratic legitimacy, is a bulwark (or at least a facade) of sorts against vigorous expressions of Chinese nationalism, which seem to be all the rage these days, especially in the military. So the Americans are once again caught in a situation where the democratic alternative, more nationalistic than the Hu Jintao we witnessed yesterday, would be a lot more difficult to deal with than the less democratic reality.
But China’s one-party system will not persist forever. There will be enormous risk to U.S. interests once that system starts to transition to something more obliged to reflect Chinese nationalism. The kind of cautious, low-key and mutually sensitive approach on display between the two presidents yesterday will not satisfy human rights hawks in the U.S. or Chinese nationalists, but it certainly sets a reasonable tone for the difficult challenges ahead.
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Let’s be clear
“Europe may have reacted hastily” by recognizing Kosovo, a Member of the European Parliament is quoted as saying on Serbia’s B92 website. This sentiment has appeared regularly in recent weeks, based on unsubstantiated allegations by a Council of Europe rapporteur who opposed Kosovo’s February 2008 declaration of independence.
While the allegations require serious investigation, the efforts to call into question Kosovo’s independence are unjustified. Kosovo became independent because Serbia stopped treating its majority population as citizens. This was clearest in Milosevic’s attempt to remove Albanians from Kosovo in 1999, but it was no less damaging to Serbia’s claims of sovereignty when the post-Milosevic Serbian state did not count the Kosovo Albanians on the voter rolls for the 2006 referendum on its new constitution, thus denying them their right under the then existing constitution to block the adoption of a new one by not voting (the then existing constitution required that 50 per cent of registered voters participate in the referendum, a percentage that would not have been reached had the Albanians been counted).
Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army that fought for independence in the late 1990s now stand accused at the Council of Europe of heinous crimes. These allegations have been circulated for a long time: they are stock in trade in Belgrade, where officials have investigated them and spread rumors about them for 10 years. This does not mean they aren’t true–they clearly need to be investigated more objectively and professionally. It does mean we should suspend judgment and treat those individuals allegedly involved, including Prime Minister Thaci, as innocent until proven guilty in a properly constituted court with jurisdiction over the case. If the allegations are eventually found to be true, a possibility that cannot be excluded, that would still not bear on Kosovo’s independence any more than accusations of corruption against Croatia’s former prime minister bear on Zagreb’s bid for EU membership.
Much more immediately damaging to Kosovo than the unsubstantiated allegations are the claims, reported not only by B92 from EU sources but also by Albanian sources, that threats and fraud plagued not only the December elections in Kosovo but also the January 9 rerun in several municipalities. These elections were an ideal opportunity for Kosovo to demonstrate unequivocally its democratic credentials. Whoever has tampered with the voters and the votes has done his country serious harm.
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