Day: May 4, 2012
True courage
Just a Friday reminder from central Damascus that true courage is not lacking in Syria:
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Glass half full
Amr Hamzawy, now a secularist member of the Egyptian parliament, returned to the Carnegie Endowment where he once worked on democratization issues today with a more optimistic version of what is going on in Egypt than the one I reported earlier this week.
Democratic transition is always messy, but Amr suggested four facts important to judging whether things are improving or not:
1. Egypt is way behind its original timetable for transition, which called for turnover of the government from the military to civilians within six months. It will take 17 or 18 months, provided the first round of the presidential election occurs later this month, as now planned. Preparation of the constitution, which should have preceded the presidential election, will now occur afterwards, giving the new president the abundant powers the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces now exercises and influence over the constitutional outcome. In addition, the constitution-drafting body has now been blocked in court, because of its legitimacy deficit. It did not include sufficient non-Islamist or women’s representation.
2. Human rights violations continue “nonstop.” Civilians are still tried in military courts, even more than was done under Mubarak. Military crackdowns on demonstrations are deadly and brutal.
3. Egyptian politics are nevertheless dynamic and diverse, with citizens fully engaged. There is currently a spirited debate on whether the presidential election should proceed. There is also ample debate within the various political forces, with the Islamists far from unified. There is no general moderating trend. The Muslim Brotherhood (Freedom and Justice Party) is becoming more pragmatic on the constitution and rights, but more conservative on social issues. The Salafists (El Nour) are very conservative on personal freedom but good on freedom of association and also on NGOs.
4. Non-Islamist political forces are strengthening and cooperating more with Islamists, who increasingly recognize the importance of consensus to the legitimacy of what they do, including in constitution-writing. There are plans for various non-Islamist parties to merge under the umbrella of Mohammed el Baradei’s constitutional party, something they could not do before the elections because they needed to test their relative electoral strength. The Islamists will not benefit much from their current time in power, because they are not delivering on their inflated promises. Their popularity has peaked. The Americans are wrong to focus their attention so strongly on the Muslim Brotherhood. The non-Islamist forces in parliament will soon deliver a liberal draft law on nongovernmental organizations as well as legislation against torture and sexual harassment. Al Azhar, the most important religious authority in Egypt, has done papers on democracy and personal freedoms that are very good and will influence the political forces, which have generally endorsed Al Azhar’s views.
Of course there are many other shortcomings: security sector reform hasn’t begun, rule of law is weak. Christians are not well-represented in the current parliament and some are leaving Egypt, but others are engaging more in the political sphere to regain lost ground.
Having ended natural gas exports to Israel, Egypt will maintain the Camp David peace treaty but no more so long as settlement activity continues.
There are difficult years ahead, but the Egyptian transition has not yet failed.
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Is Al Qaeda Inc. bankrupt?
It is hard for me to imagine adding anything original to the flood of commentary on the Letters from Abbottabad, as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center calls them. As the New York Times put it,
The frustrations expressed by Bin Laden as he issued instructions sometimes in vain might be familiar to any chief executive trying to keep tabs on a multinational corporation that had grown beyond its modest origins.
Osama even worried about which currencies to keep ransom proceeds in. Mario Draghi will be pleased to learn that Al Qaeda’s reserves were kept in euros as well as dollars. I guess its only a matter of time before they add Chinese renminbi.
In what I’ve read so far, which is not much, Bin Laden’s advice on leadership stands out:
As you well know, the best people are the ones most agreed on by the people, and the key attributes that bring people together and preserve their staying behind their leader are his kindness, forgiveness, sense of fairness, patience, and good rapport with him, as well as showing care for them and not tax them beyond their ability.
What must always be in the forefront of our minds is: managing people at such times calls for even greater wisdom, kindness, forgiveness, patience and deliberation, and is a complex task by most any measure.
This is quoted from the last of the letters, labelled no. 19 in the translations.
Getting people to do what Al Qaeda does obviously requires much more kindness than portrayed in American movies. This is an important lesson. The evil groups of people do is almost always done for some purpose the members of the group regard as good, not evil. Leadership is what convinces them that they are acting for a good purpose, so it needs to behave well towards those it wants to rally. At other points in the letters, it is clear that Bin Laden was unhappy with Al Qaeda and affiliated attacks on Muslims. He wanted his cadres to focus on Americans, because they are the real enemy.
Americans hope to defeat Al Qaeda. Certainly it has suffered a good deal of damage, self-inflicted as well as drone and special forces-inflicted in the last few years. But it is unlikely to disappear entirely, any more than homegrown right-wing terrorism, much reduced from its heyday, has disappeared entirely from the United States. The real question the Bin Laden papers pose is how much more effort we should put into what the Bush administration called the Global War on Terror, which we are still fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and other places.
Only a closer examination of the entire trove of letters and other documents could enlighten us as to the answer. I doubt the American public will ever get that privilege. The published letters have presumably been carefully chosen. They can give us only an incomplete picture of Al Qaeda. We’ll have to rely on the assessments of our (not always) intelligence community and the wisdom of our elected leaders to make the decision on whether Al Qaeda Inc. is bankrupt.
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