Month: February 2013
US policy toward Iran in 2013
Unrealistic though it may sound in the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s trenchant rejection of Vice President Biden’s offer of bilateral talks, negotiations represent the best tool to deal with the nuclear challenge Iran poses for the US. The key to successful negotiations is a credible US threat to use force, Ambassadors Jim Jeffreys and Tom Pickering agreed at the release this week of the Washington Institute’s new paper on US policy towards Iran.
It will not be easy to mount a credible threat. The memory of the Iraq war and the drawdown of the US presence in Afghanistan leave little political appetite for the use of force against Iran. Israel may eagerly throw around the idea of a pre-emptive strike, but American political and economic realities cast the military option in an unfavorable light. A military strike against Iran could at best set the program back by four to five years. The boots on the ground needed to eradicate the threat of a nuclear Iran are politically and economically inconceivable.
Regime change is another woefully inadequate tool to cracking Iran. As Pickering put it,
Regime change is not something we do successfully.
US influence on the prospects for regime change inside Iran is at best limited and at worst undesirable. Iranian-led regime change is desirable, but would suffer from US endorsement. Any attempt to openly encourage regime change during a burst of popular regime opposition in Iran would be counter-productive.
The ambassadors disagreed on “containment” of Iran’s nuclear capability. Jeffreys prefers “confront and resist” to “containment.” He recommends this approach, among others. According to Pickering, adopting a strategy of containment now would represent a “premature capitulation to failure.” Containment in the classical sense amounts to treating Iranian nuclear break-out as inevitable and deterrence as the only available course of action. Such a fatalistic approach would weaken the nuclear non-proliferation regime, unnerving regional actors Turkey and Saudi Arabia and setting in motion a regional arms race with cataclysmic implications.
Both ambassadors praised the American-led mobilization of the international community to isolate Iran, mainly through the use of sanctions. But at the end of the day, both Ambassadors called for the pursuit of negotiations, even in the face of resistance and distrust.
Negotiations must proceed on the premise that a solution to the Iranian nuclear issue exists. To stop Iran from dismissing American engagement as a ploy to trigger a regime change, Jeffreys insisted that the Obama administration set clear red lines establishing which Iranian actions the US would not tolerate (nuclear break-out), and which actions the US could live with (human rights violations). Presenting military action as the consequence of nuclear break-out would prove to the Iranians that negotiation means negotiation, not mind games.
Pickering agreed with making lines clear, just not so red. He cautioned against trying to trade “horses for rabbits.” The degree of distrust between the two countries is too great for early negotiations to tackle the big ticket items head-on. The US cannot expect Iran to halt it’s nuclear program in exchange for reversal of a few sanctions. Engagement can result in small steps. The US would ask that the Iranians cap their enrichment at 3.5 to 5.0 percent. In exchange, the US would promise no new sanctions and repeal the more easily reversible (European) sanctions. The Iranians would also reserve the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.
Challenges between the US and Iran will continue even after resolution of the nuclear issue. In Jeffreys‘ words, Iran’s regional “hegemonic schemes” at the core of the nation’s foreign policy since “time immemorial” are not going away anytime soon.
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There is virtue in clarity
That’s the best I can say for today’s meeting of the Presidents of Serbia and Kosovo. President Nikolic made it clear that he does not and will never accept the independence of Kosovo. President Jahjaga made it clear she does not accept anything less.
The issue, as regular readers will know, is not really independence, which is relative and political. The real issue is sovereignty, which for these purposes is absolute and juridical. I think of it as based in a monopoly over the legitimate means of violence, recognized by other sovereign states.
If the two presidents remain apart on this issue, I imagine there won’t be many more meetings. Each meeting, including this one, confirms what everyone in the world–including in Belgrade–knows: Serbia will not be able to exercise sovereignty (a monopoly over the legitimate means of violence) over Kosovo. Anyone who thinks it will hasn’t been there in a long time. It is no surprise that Nikolic didn’t seem keen on continuing to meet.
The internationals will of course insist that the meetings continue at the more productive political level of prime ministers and below. This is a good idea. Pristina and Belgrade have made some progress on real issues and need to get to the difficult work of implementing what they have agreed. It is particularly important that they begin to resolve the vexing problem of northern Kosovo, where Serbia continues to defy the UN Security Council resolution that it incorrectly claims preserves some vague semblance of Serbian sovereignty.
I do not mean to imply that Nikolic’s reassertion of Serbian authority is irrelevant. To the contrary, a claim of sovereignty over Kosovo’s territory has to be taken very seriously, not only by the Kosovo authorities but also by the international community. Today it is the NATO-led KFOR presence in Kosovo that prevents this claim from assertion by force. KFOR wants out. It is unlikely to remain at all in five years. If Kosovo is to remain sovereign, it had better figure out some combination of diplomatic, political, military or other means to protect its claim. It is not that I doubt Serbia’s pledges not to use force. They are sincere. But they are also insufficient.
I had visits today and yesterday from two Serbs. One said Serbia would never recognize Kosovo’s independence. The other looked forward optimistically to reintegrating the north with the rest of Kosovo, where he is a politician participating in the Pristina institutions. I suggested they get together for a chat.
It is unlikely to be any more productive than today’s meeting between the two presidents. But there is virtue in clarity.
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Lawful but awful
I don’t usually get worked up over the drone wars and killing terrorists. I’d rather see many of them dead before a single innocent victim is killed or maimed. But the Justice Department “white paper” on “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or an Associated Force” has chilled my blood.
I hasten to note that I am not a lawyer. If you want the opinion of one, try Lawfare. But I spent decades as a bureaucrat. I could drive a massacre through the policy loopholes outlined in this memo.
The obvious first: the memo focuses on “imminent” threats, but then it includes in “imminent” an operation that hasn’t even yet been planned. That’s a neat trick. By that standard, Ron Paul’s election as president was imminent before he announced he was running. That’s not what the word means. If you call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?
Capture has to be “infeasible” for the killing to be lawful. But infeasible is in the eye of the beholder. I suspect it is infeasible more often than not because we no longer have anyplace to put such captives. Or is it only infeasible because a military operation with capture as its purpose cannot be mounted without unreasonable risks? And what would unreasonable risks be?
But the problems don’t end there. The decision-maker in the memo is not the president of the United States. It is a well-informed senior official. Presumably he or she gets a delegation of authority from the president. Do we really think killing a U.S. citizen in Yemen by a drone operator in Utah does not require the decision of an elected leader? It should be done by a GS-15? Admittedly we delegate the authority to decide whom to kill on a battlefield to 18-year-old soldiers. But that is the difference between targeted killing at a great distance and conventional warfare requiring split-second decisions to protect our forces.
What is a “senior operational leader?” Here the white paper is more explicit: it is someone known to be “actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans.” I’ve got no problem with targeting someone who is targeting Americans. But how do we know that a particular person is a senior operational leader? The obvious problem is someone like Anwar al Aulaqi, who certainly encouraged killing Americans but publicly available evidence that he was an operational commander at the time of his killing in 2011 was thin. Did the Administration have more? Or is the definition of “senior operational commander as loose as the definition of imminence? Did some well-informed senior official get worked up over Aulaqi’s explicit incitement of violence against Americans?
Then there’s that “associated force” loophole. Is the Taliban a force associated with Al Qaeda? Their goals are certainly distinct, but they have been associated. Is the Movement for the National Liberation of Azawad (the Tuareg rebel organization in northern Mali) associated with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM)? It certainly was for a while last spring, but right now it seems to be helping the French do in AQIM. Is the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence directorate “associated” with the Haqqani network? Some days yes, who knows right now?
Let’s not forget the problem of collateral damage: innocent people (including children) who happen to be nearby when a Predator strikes, or targeting errors. That too is a problem on the conventional battlefield, but I might hope that it could be considered more fully when our own soldiers are not at risk. We need to ask the obvious question: are drone strikes creating more enemies than they are killing? Are we raising the risks to ourselves rather than lowering them?
What difference does it make that the person killed is a U.S. citizen? A lot of the problems I see would be just as troubling if the person were not. Nor do I see much in this paper that makes me think it could not also be applied inside the United States. Now that gets a bit paranoid, but would we feel comfortable with drone strikes against terrorists–U.S. citizen or no–holed up in a bunker in Alabama?*
This white paper raises more questions than it answers. It is hard to imagine that no mistakes are made. Judicial review is the method we use to avoid mistakes in the criminal justice system. A soldier’s behavior on the battlefield is subject to military judicial review. But there is no judicial review of drone strikes, before or–if the Administration continues to have its way–after the fact. Nor is it clear that the bureaucratic process envisaged is adequate to minimize error.
I’m convinced: killing terrorists is not unlawful. But for more than legal reasons we need to be careful about who, how, when, where and why we do it. The white paper suggests the system in place is still far from adequate, even after several hundred drone strikes that have killed thousands. That really is awful.
*PS, March 6, 2013: For those who think I was hallucinating about drone strikes inside the US, read what Attorney General Eric Holder has now said on the subject.
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Finitiatives
Ammar Abulhamid writes:
Not too long ago, Assad issued a “Finitiative,” that is, an initiative to end all initiatives, calling, allegedly, for dialogue with the opposition. Now, opposition leader Moaz Alkhatib has repaid Assad in kind by issuing his own “Finitiative” calling, purportedly, for dialogue with the regime. Both finitiatives were clearly designed for purposes other than those declared and were meant primarily as acts of continued defiance, even if some failed to detect the defiance involved in Alkhatib’s finitiative
….Assad’s finitiative was meant to rally troops and consolidate support and control rather than enter into any real dialogue with the opposition, Alkhatib’s came as a revolutionary act meant to break a political stalemate in the ranks of the international community and to push for a real policy to help resolve the situation in Syria in a way commensurate with the expectation of the majority of average Syrians from all communal and political backgrounds. Assad’s finitiative was, then, a defensive act, a last stand of sorts. But Alkhatib’s finitiative marked the opposition’s first real offensive on the political front.
This makes a lot of good sense to me as an interpretation of what is happening, but Khatib’s challenge is greater than Asad’s: to hold the opposition together as he undertakes his “finitiative.” The regime, so far at least, has had relatively little difficulty maintaining cohesion, at least at its core. The cracks are many. But I’ve seen some ancient vases with a lot of cracks and no real breaks.
The opposition seems less intact, because it never was united. Khatib’s initiative took at least some people by surprise, which is not a good way of maintaining support from people who might already be less inclined than desirable to follow your lead. It is still not clear whether Khatib’s move will weaken or strengthen his position, but the uncertainty is itself debilitating.
As for the international community, it still looks unlikely that a breakthrough is imminent. Despite much chest beating, Washington seems as committed as ever to not taking military action. The Russians and Iranians seem wedded to Bashar, even if they claim it isn’t true. Brahimi is active, but so far to no good effect.
The war drags on, with something like 200 civilians killed each day. Atrocities are documented but not prevented. The regime is still able to use its air force to disrupt areas outside its control. The revolutionaries are likewise able to strike in Damascus and other areas of regime dominance. Fatigue–absolutely vital to the “mutually hurting stalemate” that opens up the possibility of successful negotiation–is setting in for many. But neither the regime nor the most avid of the revolutionaries appears to have concluded that they can gain more by talking than by fighting.
A lot of people in the middle concluded that long ago. The Khatib and Asad initiatives are designed to appeal to them. But it is the guys with guns who get to determine what happens. They still seem content to battle on.
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Reform or else
Laurentina Cizza reports on last week’s discussion at the Middle East Institute:
Jordan’s King Abdullah had three main objectives for the January 23 election: to increase the integrity of the election process in response to heavy criticisms of the previous one, increase voter turnout in the face an Islamist boycott, and to usher in reform, or at least give Jordanians that impression. A Middle East Institute discussion last week on the challenges ahead suggested that the King made some progress on the first two counts but fell short of meaningful reform. The upheavals in Egypt, Syria and Libya have bought King Abdullah some time, but he needs to deliver more substantive reform before his luck runs out.
Recently returned National Democratic Institute election observer, Leslie Campbell argued the January 23 election was better run than last time. An Independent Election Commission (rather than the Ministry of the Interior) used a pre-printed standardized ballot. This was a significant improvement over the previous blank pieces of paper, which opened the door to fraudulent practices. The standardized, numbered ballots made cheating more difficult. For the first time authorities assigned voters to polling stations, making tracking of individuals easier. The improved technical organization of the elections increased the credibility of the results.
However, the King’s failure to deliver on more profound reforms reduced these technical adjustments to little more than cosmetic changes. The combination of unequally sized districts and the single non-transferable vote in multiple-member constituencies served to prevent ideological cohesion and to amplify family, clan and tribal cleavages. Candidates in Jordan run as individuals, not on party lists. This renders political parties irrelevant. Strong family and ethnic ties compel individuals to vote for the candidate with shared family ties, not shared ideology.
In addition, The West Bank origin portion of the Jordanian population is disadvantaged relative to the King’s traditional East Bank powerbase. Campbell offered an extreme example: while a candidate running in the 1st district of Amman (majority Palestinian-origin population) needed 19,000 votes, a candidate running in the rural, tribal area of Ma’an needed a mere 1,600 votes to be elected.
A truly national legislative body cannot develop under these conditions. The unequal distribution of districts and the single-vote system over-represent the rural areas, amplify ethnic divisions, and hinder the development of ideologically cohesive political actors. A parliamentary system with no ideological blocks does not lead to effective coalition building, but rather to a system that sees the King fully in charge as the parliamentarians squabble for something to unite over.
Campbell remained optimistic nevertheless. Improvements in the process could move Jordan in the right direction. This round of elections 34 candidates of Palestinian origin made it to Parliament versus 19 last time. Only 33 incumbents made it back into parliament this time around.
Election observer Danya Greenfield of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East focused on what new insights the elections could provide. Islamic Action Front (IAF) appeals to boycott the elections fell flat. Only 2,000 people showed up to protest, and only 2-5% of Jordanian voters refrained from voting with the express purpose of boycotting the elections. Turnout was better than in the last elections, though the statistics indicate that Jordanians still feel apathetic about politics. Turnout of registered voters was 56%, but only 40% of the eligible voter population. This is low in comparison to the rates of electoral participation in neighboring Egypt and Libya.
The IAF remains popular. Since family ties motivated people to go to the polls, voters may have been reluctant to boycott. Studies indicate that in an equitable distribution system the IAF would win 20 to 25% of the parliamentary seats. The increased turnout is not a good barometer of the King’s popularity. To the contrary, the low turnout compared to neighboring countries suggests disappointment with the reforms the King is offering.
The conflict in Syria has frightened Jordanians, but they are unlikely to remain quiescent. Upcoming IMF-mandated food and fuel price spikes, and the continued influx of refugees from a hemorrhaging Syria, are increasing political pressure in the Kingdom.
Both Campbell and Greenfield came to the same conclusion: the King must demonstrate his commitment to reform to boost Jordanian confidence in the future. Perhaps the King’s abstention from tampering with the Parliament’s upcoming selection of the Prime Minister will represent the perfect opportunity.
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What difference does it make?
Presidents Nikolic of Serbia and Jahjaga of Kosovo will meet in Brussels Wednesday. This is a first since Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence. But the prime ministers have met several times in Brussels since last fall. Official talks have been ongoing since 2011. What difference does a meeting of the presidents make?
Likely not much on the substantive side, though we’ll see soon if enough progress has been made on resolving issues in Serb-controlled northern Kosovo to warrant sealing a deal. As my friends over at Transconflict have been anxious to note, the main issues there are between the local Serbs and Belgrade. Once those are resolved in a way that meets German concerns about parallel institutions, a deal with Pristina should not be difficult, provided Serbia forgets about the ludicrous platform it put forward recently still claiming sovereignty over all of Kosovo. An announcement on exchanging liaison officers, to work out of EU missions in the respective capitals, is another possibility.
But even without specific outcomes, the presidents’ meeting is significant symbolically. Serbia has been careful in its dealings with Kosovo to try to preserve its own symbols of sovereignty and deny any to the Pristina authorities. That’s what silly quarrels about Kosovo license plates (whether they can have an “R” on them for “Republic”) and Kosovo* (that’s how Serbia wants Kosovo identified at regional meetings) are really about.
I am not privy to the preparations for Wednesday’s meeting, but I imagine that the Kosovo authorities will be exigent in insisting on reciprocity and symmetry in every aspect of the meeting. I don’t really think symbolism is all that important, but the Serbs do. Atifete Jahjaga is the living symbol of Kosovo statehood, independence and sovereignty. She should insist on nothing less than full respect for those hard-won attributes from Tomislav Nikolic, who is himself the living symbol of Serbia’s statehood, independence and sovereignty. Yes, also independence: ridding itself of Kosovo is vital to Serbia’s future as a European state.
Tim Judah, surely one of the most experienced analysts of Serbia, Kosovo and the Balkans in general, sees the current avowedly nationalist Serbian leadership as continuing to normalize relations with Kosovo, like its allegedly liberal predecessor. Surely there has been progress in the EU-sponsored talks under Nikolic, but let’s be clear about why: it is the German insistence on settling the issues in northern Kosovo that is driving Belgrade in the direction of rapprochement with Pristina. Serbia wants a date for EU accession negotiations to begin, in part because the date will bring money intended to fund the adjustments required as Belgrade makes its way through the 35 chapters of the acquis communitaire, to which it must conform its laws and practice before becoming an EU member.
Serbia, whose economy is in doldrums linked to the European financial crisis, needs that money. Kosovo, while less developed economically than Serbia, is in better financial shape: it has borrowed little and invested heavily in infrastructure, while keeping overall government expenditure relatively tight. Its population is much younger than Serbia’s, which makes its pension burden far lighter.
There is another big difference: Kosovo’s population is 90% committed to NATO and EU membership. Serbia’s is negative on NATO and not much better than that on the EU (plurality, not majority, support). The irony of course is that NATO and the EU are much more interested in Serbia than in Kosovo. That’s another reason the meeting of the two presidents is important. Jahjaga, a former deputy chief of the much-respected Kosovo police, is the picture of propriety and rule of law. She polishes Kosovo’s image in Europe, the United States and beyond. Symbolism does sometimes count.
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