Day: January 29, 2013
Costly and insufficient
President Obama today sharply increased humanitarian aid to Syria, by $155 million:
Welcome though it may be, increased humanitarian aid will do nothing to solve the real problem in Syria, which is at its heart political. The regime has decided to stay in power by using whatever force is necessary.
Fred Hof argues that what Syria really needs now is an alternative government. The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces is trying to form one. But the Coalition is hesitating because it worries about failure. If the international community does not provide sufficient resources, a revolutionary government could demonstrate weakness rather than strength, ringing a death knell to the two-year struggle against Asad.
President Obama is rightly worried about getting involved militarily in Syria, a move that could endanger Russian cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran. But what Fred is arguing does not require American boots on the ground, Patriot missiles in the air or even boatloads of arms supplies. It would only require that Washington recognize a revolutionary government and supply it with financial resources, perhaps $50-100 million for its own first-year start up costs as well as channeling a good part of the humaniarian aid through whatever mechanisms it is able to gin up.
This to me is a no-brainer. If we’ve already accepted the National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, the government it forms must the legitimate government of Syria. I’m sure there are a thousand legal issues that would need to be resolved, but it makes no sense to allow those to stand in the way of making the political moves required to bring the regime in Syria to the earliest possible end. And political moves require some financial backing, albeit much less than feeding, sheltering and clothing millions of people.
President Obama obviously knows what is going on in Syria–he refers to some of the worst behavior of the regime in the White House video. And he must know how hollow his own presentation sounds to those who are suffering inside Syria. If not, he should count the thumbs down on his video. Now what he needs to do is put some money and political support behind an alternative Syrian government, before it is too late.
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Round 1 to the French
As the residents of Timbuktu and Gao celebrate their French liberation from Islamist extremists, it is tempting to think that things are now okay and we can go back to ignoring Mali. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Mali was a problem last week, it is still a problem this week too. What the French have done is to chase the extremists northwards, into even more forbidding terrain. They were not resoundingly defeated. If given the chance, there they will regroup.
Here’s your primer on the main jihadi players. Get ready for the pop quiz. None of them sound like people who will be giving up the cause anytime soon.
One key to what happens now are the Tuareg. Their National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA) precipitated the current difficulties with a rebellion last spring that chased the Malian army from the north, with cooperation from al Qaeda-linked Islamist extremists. But the Tuareg fell out with the Islamists. They will now presumably try to take advantage of the Islamist defeat at the hands of the French to reassert control over “Azawad” and continue their push for independence.
Will the French contest the Tuareg? They are more likely to try to get them on side. They will be relieved if the Tuareg oust the Islamists and hope thereafter to broker a deal between the Tuareg and the central government in Bamako. Will the Tuareg do in the Islamists? Hard to tell. It is not clear they can, even if they try. The jihadi betrayed them first time around, and proved a more formidable fighting force, but if independence is their objective the Tuareg cannot really expect to get it from the French, who support the government in Bamako. Nor from the trans-national jihadi.
Meanwhile, the African Union is pledging to solve Africa’s problems. With the French army retaking northern Mali and conflicts raging in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and elsewhere, that seems unlikely. But it is still worth considering the proposition of getting African forces more engaged than they have been so far in Mali. There is already UN Security Council authorization. The question is whether the Africans can get their act together to field a serious force, as they appear to have done in Somalia.
The French army seems to have won this round. Good for them, and for Malians who like music. But the war is unlikely to be over.
PS: Here’s a piece I participated in for Voice of America that tries to make similar points:
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