Day: October 11, 2012
A dangerous place
Yesterday’s circus in a House hearing on the killing of U.S. officials last month in Benghazi was barely over when news reached Washington that Al Qaeda had assassinated the Yemeni security chief at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa. No doubt these incidents will continue to provide grist for the American political mill, where candidate Romney is trying to pin blame on the Administration and portray America as besieged.
We are not besieged on most days, but we are at risk. The thousands of our fellow civilians who serve abroad cannot do what they are there to do without running risks. You can build fortress embassies, as we have in Baghdad, and provide personal security details. But nothing reduces the risks to zero.
Some of the security measures we take inhibit achievement of the mission. Andrew Exum tweeted to me this morning:
It’s what the military refers to as the false balance between the men and the mission. In the end, the mission must come 1st.
Diplomats and aid workers need to be out on the street talking with people, monitoring projects, taking the pulse of local communities, giving speeches, engaging with the press and civil society generally. Law enforcement officials need to be consulting closely with their police and interior ministry counterparts. There is no use in an embassy or consulate that incarcerates and warehouses our civilian presence abroad, which is what the euphemistically named “diplomatic security” part of the State Department likes to do.
We need to get smarter about how to protect our people, while recognizing that there are no risk-free formulas. Anonmity and changing daily patterns is a lot better protection for many diplomats than a personal security detail. Spreading our people out, and moving them around frequently, is a lot safer than concentrating them in one hardened place. Relying on properly trained and equipped local security forces is often better than using highly visible Americans, who become easy targets.
Our four colleagues in Benghazi were killed in a fortress-like facility guarded principally by Americans. They–or someone else–might suffer the same fate using the approach I am suggesting. We need to ensure that we don’t have more people abroad than we really need. We also need to make sure they are undertaking efforts that are worth the risk to life and limb that they necessarily entail.
Congress is likely to move in quite a different direction. It will provide more funding for higher and thicker walls, and more American protection, as it does from time to time. Then it cuts that funding after a few years of quiet, leaving the State Department with an enormous capital infrastructure but without the means to maintain it.
The pointy end of the diplomatic spear is a dangerous place. Let’s get smarter and more agile about wielding it.
PS: I stumbled on this after drafting the above. So I’m not alone in my devotion to the mission.
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Why riot?
You don’t have to be a foreign affairs expert to see that there are political reasons for the Innocence of Muslims-inspired protests around the Muslim world in what has been termed “the video incident.” America’s recent wars in predominantly Muslim countries have heightened tensions. U.S. support for Israel also contributes.
But this can’t be just about politics. The video offended Muslim sentiments. If these protests were really about politics, why were they not more widespread and why did they not take on a more explicitly political guise?
Americans find it difficult to understand the religious justification for these protests. Either they are reduced to cultural relativism (“things are different in the Muslim world”) 0r they wonder if Muslims are so weak in their faith that any offense to their prophet pushes them to mass violence. Neither produces interesting answers.
What Westerners fail to appreciate is the cultural milieu in which Islam originated and propagated. Islam emerged from a pre-existing oral tradition of poetry. The influence is apparent in the Holy Qur’an, which often reads like poetry:
Say, “I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind,
The Sovereign of mankind,
The God of mankind,
From the evil of the retreating whisperer –
Who whispers [evil] into the breasts of mankind –
From among the jinn [spirits] and mankind.” (Surat an-Nas 114)
Recitation of the Qur’an is art, and those with the Qur’an memorized are respected. In early Islam, that was the only way to experience the Qur’an. It is believed Muhammad was illiterate, so when he received the Qur’an from the Angel Gabriel he memorized it and taught it to his followers. The sunnah, or the large body that encompasses the words and actions of the Prophet and some of his close followers, was also initially memorized and passed along orally.
Memorization and oral transmission were the privileged modes of gaining and disseminating knowledge. How was it to be determined whose oral transmission was legitimate? What would be done if two people remembered something differently? In the case of the sunnah an incredibly complex system developed for evaluating the legitimacy of different ahadith (pieces of the sunnah, particular stories about things the Prophet said or did). Was it possible that a certain transmitter could have had contact with another in order to pass along a hadith? Did both transmitters live in the same era and were they known to have traveled in the same region?
The issue of legitimacy also brought into question each transmitter’s character. Ignoring other variables, one might trust what one transmitter said the Prophet did over another if the first had a reputation for honesty while the second was known to lie. The legitimacy of the information a transmitter passed along was intimately connected to the transmitter’s reputation: how honest he was, how often he prayed, whether his teachings were consistent. Character is vital to legitimacy in the Islamic tradition.
The connection between the legitimacy of the content and the character of the content’s originator or transmitter implies that criticism of the latter calls the former into question. If a transmitter is not of high moral standing, there are implications for whether the ahadith he transmitted are considered legitimate. Insulting the Prophet, the original transmitter, calls into question his message, or all of Islam.
In the Shi’i tradition a religious leader’s character is very important, especially in a Muslim’s choice of Ayatollah. Because of the occultation of the last imam, Ayatollahs are selected to demonstrate how a Muslim should live her life until the last imam returns. The importance of an Ayatollah modeling good character is captured in the title given to a well-respected Ayatollah, marja-e-taqlid, which translates as “source of emulation.”
This is strange from the Judeo-Christian perspective, which privileges text. Jews are exigent about error-free copying of the Torah. Western culture worries about plagiarism. Improperly expropriating text undermines an author’s credibility and may call into question everything she has written. We have little need to worry about an author’s character to decide whether a text is valid or not.
It is therefore not surprising that the Judeo-Christian tradition includes insulting, teasing, or at least recognizing the faults of religious leaders without it negatively reflecting on their mission. In the Jewish tradition, many of the prophets are far from moral perfection, but their character flaws do not affect the sanctity of their purpose. Most Christians had a good laugh at the late-night TV jokes about Jesus’ possible wife. The ancient Greeks often mocked the gods.
There is of course no justification for the killings associated with the recent demonstrations. But the importance of transmitters in preserving the Islamic tradition provides some insight into the anger a number of Muslims are feeling around the world, an anger that so many in the West cannot begin to understand.
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I agree with Dačić
If anyone still doubted Belgrade’s continuing determination to partition Kosovo, Prime Minister Dačić’s horrified reaction to mention of Kosovo’s territorial integrity in a European Union report on enlargement should remove all doubt. The EU made an almost banal remark:
Addressing the problems in northern Kosovo, while respecting the territorial integrity of Kosovo and the particular needs of the local population, will be an essential element of this process.
Dačić responded:
I am fairly upset with this statement, since it could close the Belgrade-Priština dialogue, instead of helping (re)start it. Perhaps it would have been more honest to ask Serbia to recognize Kosovo than to recognize (its) state integrity.
He’s right: the EU is insisting on Serbian acknowledgement of Kosovo’s territorial integrity, which is a step towards recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign state. Dačić and President Nikolić have been trying to duck this issue for months. They have been hoping against hope that the EU will not state bluntly what Belgrade has been told repeatedly by Germany, Sweden, the UK and other EU members: the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia will not be moved to accommodate ethnic differences. Serbia will have to recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty and territorial integrity before it can hope to enter the EU. Belgrade has taken what comfort it could from the notion that the EU itself has never before said it.
Now the EU has. That should not be surprising: UN Security Council resolution 1244, which ended the NATO/Yugoslavia war, is absolutely clear in referring to Kosovo as a single, undivided entity from which all Yugoslav (now Serbian) security forces were to be removed. That never happened, hence the current struggle over north Kosovo, where Serbia still rules in clear violation of the UN Security Council resolution to which Belgrade constantly appeals in its claim to sovereignty over (you guessed it) all of undivided Kosovo.
For those who will object that borders have been changed in other parts of the Balkans, let me preempt: the status of the republic borders of former Yugoslavia (and of the federal unit known as Kosovo) has been changed from internal boundary to international border, but the lines have not been moved to accommodate ethnic differences.
For others who may think Cyprus represents a model the EU might want to follow (allowing Serbian accession with a territorial dispute unresolved), forget about it. No one in the EU wants to repeat that mistake.
I agree with Dačić. There is really no point in reopening the dialogue with Pristina, much less at a political level, unless Serbia is prepared to commit itself to cooperating on the reintegration of the north with the rest of Kosovo. This is the sine qua non of the talks. Without it, the EU should be prepared to wait to give Serbia a date for opening negotiations on accession. Anything softer than that risks destabilizing Macedonia, Bosnia and, by the way, Cyprus.
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