Tag: Egypt
What’s wrong with this picture?
After extending voting for a third day, the Egyptian authorities are claiming turnout of 46% of the 54 million eligible voters in the presidential election, with over 90% voting for Field Marshall Sisi. This would give him close to twice as many votes as Mohammed Morsi in 2012.
There are a lot of things wrong with this picture. No one seems to believe the the turnout figure was even close to what the High Election Commission is claiming. The third day of voting was testimony to popular disinterest in half the population. The other half is genuinely enthusiastic, so 90% or more of whatever percentage voted is believable. The trouble is it betrays the intimidatory atmosphere in which this shame election took place. Media and government institutions lined up to salute the new autocrat, who has shown no inclination whatsoever to reach out to his antagonists or to include anyone but yes men and women in the new government he will appoint. There is no parliament to approve or disapprove. Sisi will presumably proceed with parliamentary elections, which won’t likely be any freer, fairer or more participatory than the presidential poll.
Nathan Brown concluded earlier this month:
if the country is transitioning to anything, it is not to a democracy in anything other than the most technical sense of the term.
What should the US do, or not do, about all this? Frank Wisner, the extraordinarily capable former ambassador in Cairo, argues that we have no choice: our security interests dictate that we unfreeze assistance and support Sisi, lest Egypt turn away from the strategic relationship with the US. Frank suggests the autocracy won’t be as bad as last time around and the Egyptians will find a way to some decent modus vivendi.
I don’t agree. Sisi has already made a mockery of democratic process. This is restoration of military autocracy by electoral means. No one should have any doubts about that. Things are unlikely to move in the right direction of their own accord, but I’m not sure there is much we can do to turn things around. Senator Leahy is insisting that some assistance remain suspended. But Egypt is getting so much assistance from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which loathe the Muslim Brotherhood and have no problem with autocracy, that our contribution is a drop in the bucket. They have also pledged to replace any cuts we make.
So what should we do? First, we should not delude ourselves. The July coup was a coup, and this election was a sham. If US security interests require continued assistance, the Administration should convince the Congress and obtain relief from existing legislation. Meanwhile, our diplomats (there is still no ambassador in Cairo, as Senate Republicans are holding up nominations) should be explaining clearly and in detail why we can’t welcome an election that met neither international standards nor the aspirations of something like half the Egyptian population, if not more.
Egypt has its own reasons to fight terrorists and maintain the peace treaty with Israel. Cairo doesn’t need American pressure for our top immediate priorities to be fulfilled. Washington should keep its eye on the longer-term objective of seeing Egypt escape the autocracy trap it has fallen into. If Sisi is half as smart as his supporters like to think, he’ll recognize quickly that the country’s economic, water and political problems require a more open and transparent approach to governance than what it had under Mubarak and Morsi. If he fails to recognize that, he’ll follow them to the trash heap of Egyptian autocrats.
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Triage again
President Obama gave an intellectually vigorous response to his foreign policy critics today, in a commencement speech at West Point:
He made clear that the US would use military force, if necessary unilaterally, to defend its core interests. But at the same time he made it clear that crises that do not directly threaten the US do not merit the same response. Then, he suggests, nonmilitary efforts and multilateral military action are more appropriate and more effective.
Terrorism he identifies as the current top priority threat. But he wants to deploy the US military less and partner more with the countries where terrorists find haven. The now diffuse threat requires a more networked response, with other countries’ security forces taking the lead, as is soon to happen in Afghanistan. He wants $5 billion for training and equipping others. In Syria, he pledged to step up support to the neighbors and to the Syrian opposition, with the objective of reaching a political solution. In undertaking direct strikes against terrorists, the President cites the need for a continuing imminent threat and near certainty of no civilian casualties, so as not to create more enemies than we eliminate. He pledges to explain what we do publicly, asking the military to take the lead.
The second priority the President cites is protection of the international order, including multilateral international institutions. World opinion and international institutions blocked a Russian invasion of Ukraine and gave the country a chance to elect a new president, with America “firing a shot.” Sanctions on Iran, and the ongoing nuclear negotiations, are another example. We hope to achieve something better than what could have been achieved using force. These are signs of American strength and leadership, not weakness or hesistancy. So too is strengthening the forces of countries that contribute to international peacekeeping.
Cybersecurity, the South China Sea and climate change require a multinational approach. The President said we need to lead by example, subjecting ourselves to the same rules that apply to everyone else, including the still unratified Law of the Sea Convention. America is made exceptional by affirming international law and its own values, not by flouting it. This means closing Guantanamo and putting rules in place to regulate intelligence collection.
American leadership also requires acting in favor of human dignity. This means support for democracy, open economies and human rights, even where security interests come first, as in Egypt. Everyone’s best example these days is Burma (despite the many equivocal aspects of its still ongoing transition). But the President also squeezed in helping with electricity in Africa and education in Nigeria. “Human dignity” is a category that encompasses a lot of things.
It wasn’t a particularly stirring speech, but it was a logical one. I still wish he would do more about Syria, which threatens to collapse the neighboring states and provide haven to international terrorists. But he is into triage, not retreat, trying to limit American commitments and conserve America’s strength for whatever serious threats lie ahead. That’s what any smart president would want to do.
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Glad tidings
I’m counting the glad tidings today:
1. Egypt: Egyptians are staying away from the polls in an election conducted under conditions that are far from free and fair. General Sisi will be elected, but without the acclamation he had once expected. Maybe he’ll feel he has to work for popular approval, which would be a big change in Egyptian political culture.
2. Ukraine: Ukraine pulled off its presidential election and appears to be gaining an upper hand over separatists who made the mistake of seizing the Donetsk airport, where newly elected Petro Poroshenko was intending to land. While Russian President Putin is still capable of rejecting Poroshenko’s legitimacy, I doubt he’ll do it. He needs Poroshenko to garner the Western support that will enable Ukraine to pay its debts to Russia.
3. Afghanistan: President Obama has decided to leave 9800 American troops in Afghanistan at the end of this year’s withdrawal, but they too are scheduled to come out within two years (end of 2016). That’s a whole lot faster than some people feel comfortable with, but it is presumably intended to give the new Afghan government incentive either to defeat the Taliban or negotiate a political settlement with them.
4. Middle East: I don’t really expect the Pope inviting Presidents Peres and Abbas to the Vatican to bring peace, but in my book he did the right thing to pray at the separation barrier as well as at the Wailing Wall. I have no objection to the Israelis protecting themselves from suicide bombings, but the wall should be on an agreed border, not built unilaterally and all too frequently on territory the Palestinians (and most Israelis) believe belongs within their state.
5. Europe: Yes, the European parliament election returned lots of xenophobes and extreme nationalists, but not so many that the European project is at serious risk of anything more than demands to be more responsive to popular opinion and more aware of resistance to bureaucratic arrogance. Whoever tweeted that those who want change won everywhere but in Germany, which is the only country that can really change things, got it close to right. The government parties did relatively well in Italy too.
6. India/Pakistan: Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif attended Indian Prime Minister Modi’s swearing in and both came away from their meeting sounding notes of hope and conciliation. They will need a lot of both to overcome the problems that divide the two countries, but it was at least a start.
None of this good news comes even close to making the world what it should be, and much of it might be reversed tomorrow. Syria in particular haunts me. I can’t bring myself to praise the UN Secretary General for proposing humanitarian assistance be authorized by the Security Council directly into liberated areas from Turkey, knowing full well that Russia will veto any such move. But when we have a good day or two somewhere in the world, we should acknowledge it.
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Restoration, not transition
I’ve got lots of friends looking for the silver lining in Egypt’s presidential election Monday and Tuesday. All agree General Sisi will win big. The Center for American Progress advises him:
Egypt needs to deal effectively with security threats without creating new ones, set out a clear and practical plan to right the Egyptian economy, respect basic human rights, and open up political space for all Egyptians.
Paul Salem suggests looking beyond the results to the integrity of the electoral process, turnout, the margin of victory and Hamdeen Sabahi’s campaign for hints of what lies in the future.
All that is well and good, but I fear none of it will count for much. What we are seeing in Egypt is not the continuation of a democratic transition. It is the restoration of military autocracy. The “deep state,” which reaches beyond the military into the judiciary and business, is back in charge. Sisi has declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, jailed its leadership, and expropriated its property. The April 6 Movement, whose leadership denounced these and other violations of human rights, has likewise been jailed and disbanded. The press is under the thumb of the new authorities. Al Jazeera’s journalists are in prison. Thousands of Brotherhood demonstrators have been killed and hundreds condemned to death in one-day sham trials.
All the indicators point in a direction opposite the one CAP advocates. Political space has narrowed, human rights are not respected, nothing practical or clear has been done (or even proposed) about the economy, and the brutality of the crackdown is generating insurgency in the Sinai. The electoral process will be okay, because most of Sisi’s opponents will stay home. Still, turnout will likely not be any lower than is normal in Egyptian elections. Fifty per cent will be a triumph. The margin of victory will be large, but Sabahi will get enough votes to lend credibility to the exercise.
It is what Sisi does with the power Egyptians bestow on him that really counts. Nothing about his behavior since the July 2013 coup suggests he will govern openly and inclusively. He’ll likely keep his current “technocratic” government, or something much like it. It is loaded with holdovers from the Mubarak era. Power in Cairo may be a bit more dispersed, but it is unlikely that the parliamentary elections due in a few months will produce a serious opposition. The Brotherhood may be back some day, as Shadi Hamid suggests, but for now it will revert to its semi-clandestine status while serious advocates for human rights either rot in jail or find refuge abroad.
Western minds find this scenario a difficult one to picture. We have a sense that there is a direction, a right and a wrong side, to history. Progress is in a democratic, liberal direction. It is natural, even inevitable. Anything other than that will run up against newly empowered citizens who won’t give up their hard-won freedoms.
It isn’t necessarily so. Egypt is an astoundingly poor country. Most of its citizens, who live on less than $2 per day, have to think first about their daily bread. Literacy is low and the middle class tiny. The “party of the couch,” who stayed at home during the street demonstrations, is far more representative of citizen sentiment than the April 6 Movement. Even the Brotherhood, which has deep roots, is not finding it easy to mobilize against the army’s determined effort to marginalize it. Liberal notions of freedom of speech, religion and association as well as equality before the law have little constituency in an Egypt that has basically known 7000 years of autocratic rule, in one form or another.
I don’t mean to suggest that Egyptians are incapable of liberal democracy. To the contrary, I think they are not only capable of it but would benefit enormously from it. But the social basis for it is narrow and the resistance to it among the elite strong. Sisi shows every sign of unwillingness to entrust his country’s fate to the will of its people. He is conducting a restoration, not a transition.
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Undaunted
America’s admirably frank ambassador to Libya Deb Jones answered a lot of questions at the Stimson Center this afternoon about Libya, where an American citizen militia leader, Khalifa Hiftar, has been whacking extreme Islamist militias he holds responsible for political violence in Benghazi and Tripoli. This comes on top of more than a year of struggle in the country’s parliament between Islamists and secularists, a semi-abortive election of a constitution-drafting committee, expiration of the parliament’s mandate, resignation of one prime minister and failure to confirm a new one…. The US military calls this a goat rope.
Deb though was undaunted. She refused to criticize Hiftar for his attack on extremists, among whom the United States counts many of its enemies in Libya. The Syrian war and chaos in Egypt are sources of trouble-makers in Libya (as presumably it is for them). She noted (but did not endorse) that Hiftar wants the parliament to step aside and the constitution drafting committee to take over. She hopes he will contain his political ambitions and satisfy himself with taking out the bad apples.
Beyond that she was reluctant to say what precisely Washington would like to see happen. Training of the General Purpose Force by the US, Italy and Turkey is continuing, but its relationship to Libyan governing institutions, which are still rudimentary, is not clear. The Libyans will have to decide what they want.
They have their share of issues to resolve, which Deb characterized along these lines:
- what to do about a “political isolation” law that prohibits former Libyan officials from the Gaddafi era from playing a political role, thus excluding a lot of competent people;
- how to deprive the militias of their political power (“neutralize” them, not in the physical sense);
- how to sort out the confusion of executive and legislative authority in the current constitutional declaration;
- what to do about decentralization of governing authority;
- how Libya’s ample oil and gas resources and revenue will be shared.
The Libyans are going to need help getting these things done, but their absorptive capacity is limited. As Deb put it, there were more people in the room at Stimson (fewer than 100) than there are Libyan officials able and willing to interact to good effect with foreigners. It would be easy to overwhelm them, to no good effect.
The US diplomatic effort she suggested is like a dentist’s drill: a big, complicated piece of (interagency) machinery culminating in a pointy end that has to be wielded with skill to have a good effect. Mixing metaphors: it would be easy to give Libya too much love. There are also pretty severe limitations on what the embassy can do. Its personnel do not visit Benghazi or Derna. Security is tight. Deb gets out, but the embassy is “lean.”
National political dialogue is what Libya needs. Several countries, including the US, have appointed special envoys to help with that process. The dialogue process launched under former Prime Minister Ali Zeidan is continuing. Some people believe it is too closely associated with him to have much good effect. But some process of that sort is necessary to resolve the two big issues that drove the Arab uprisings, not only in Libya: legitimacy and dignity. Restoring both and overcoming the legacy of humiliation by illegitimate regimes will be no quick or easy task.
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Still righting the balance
These are my speaking notes for the talk I gave last night at the DC World Affairs Council on my book,
Righting the Balance (Potomac, 2013). I’ve added a bit about Ukraine, which is in part an instance of state weakness. It also illustrates the limited usefulness of conventional military instruments in meeting asymmetrical challenges, a key theme in the book. Click there on the right to order your own copy!
1. It is truly an honor to present here at the World Affairs Council. The 98 World Affairs Councils throughout this country play a key role in generating and sustaining the kind of citizen engagement in foreign policy that I think is so important in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
2. As I am going to say some harsh things about the State Department and USAID, and even suggest they be abolished in favor of a single Foreign Office, I would like to emphasize from the first that I have enormous respect for the Foreign Service and the devotion of its officers to pursuing America’s interests abroad. I feel the same way about the US military.
3. But I don’t think the Foreign Service is well served by the institutions that hire, pay and deploy our diplomats and aid workers. And I don’t think our military should be called upon to make up for civilian deficiencies.
4. My book, Righting the Balance, is aimed at correcting those imbalances. But it does not start there.
5. It starts with the sweep of American history, which has given our military a leading role in America’s foreign affairs since at least the French and Indian war.
6. Americans think of their country as a peaceful one, but in fact we have had troops deployed in conflict zones for more than a quarter of our history—not even counting wars against native Americans and pirates—and every year since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
7. With each of those wars, we improved our technology and expanded our reach, becoming by the end of the 20th century the world’s only remaining superpower.
8. We have a strong, well-exercised military arm for projecting power. It is so strong that it is reaching a point of diminishing returns: every additional dollar buys miniscule improvement.
9. But our civilian capacities are more limited. This was glaringly apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan, where State and AID struggled, and all too often failed, to meet the requirements.
10. It has also been glaringly apparent during the Arab uprisings, which not only caught our diplomats by surprise but left them puzzled about what to do.
11. These failures are more important than ever before. The enemies who cause us problems today are not often states: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fell quickly, as did the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
12. We won the wars. We lost the peace.
13. The main threats to America today come not from other strong states but from non-state actors who find haven and support in fragile, weak and collapsing states.
14. Even in Ukraine, the Russians are not using the full weight of their armed forces but rather relying on disruption in challenging the legitimacy of Kiev’s government and its control over territory in the east and south.
15. National security, always more than a military mission, now requires conflict prevention and state-building capacities that are sorely lacking in both State and AID. They have scrambled hard to meet the needs in Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not much better configured than when I arrived in Sarajevo for the first time in November 1994.
16. Some of you will be thinking, that’s OK, because we never want to do this state-building stuff again.
17. It’s not only my colleague Michael Mandelbaum who thinks that way. Each and every president since 1989 has resisted getting involved in other countries’ internal politics, and each one has discovered that it is far easier to go to war and kill enemies than it is to withdraw, leaving behind a collapsed state that will regenerate those enemies.
18. Unless you are willing to fight on forever—even longer than the “long war”—you need to build capable states that protect their citizens reasonably well.
19. We are discovering this today in Yemen, where the drone war appears to have created more terrorists than it has killed. This is one of the main reasons President Obama has avoided military intervention in Syria, but the post-war effort there will still be a major one, even if is not primarily a U.S. responsibility. The same is true in eastern DRC and in Colombia, where peace is threatening to break out after decades of war.
20. America won’t be able to avoid being engaged when North Korea or Cuba collapses. Nor will we stay aloof if nuclear-armed Pakistan starts coming apart. Let’s not even think about Iran. If Ukraine is to be kept whole and independent, it will need a far better state than the one that has performed so badly since the Orange Revolution of 2005.
21. So my view is that we need to prepare for the day, not continue to delude ourselves that we will never do it again.
22. But I would be the first to admit that post-war state-building, a subject I teach at SAIS, is hard and expensive. Anticipation is cheaper and better. We need civilian foreign policy instruments that will take early action to prevent states from collapsing and help initiate reforms.
23. We’ve been reasonably successful at allowing this to happen in much of Latin America and East Asia, where recent decades have seen many countries turn in the direction of democratic transition. Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Indonesia are sterling examples of transitions that the United States allowed, nurtured and encouraged.
24. That’s what we failed to do effectively in the Arab world, with consequences that are now on the front pages every day. We failed to anticipate the revolution in Tunisia. In Libya we failed to help the new regime establish a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. That failure cost us an ambassador and three of his colleagues and has left Libya adrift.
25. In Egypt, we’ve been inconstant, supporting whoever gains power. The result, as I observed during the constitutional referendum in January, is a restoration of the military autocracy, with voters intimidated into staying home rather than voting against the new constitution and human rights advocates imprisoned along with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
26. In Syria, we failed to support moderates, only to see them displaced and replaced by extremists. The result is a daily catastrophe of truly genocidal dimensions.
27. The specific areas I describe as lacking in today’s State and AID are these:
• Mobilizing early, preventive action
• Reforming security services
• Promoting democracy
• Countering violent extremism
• Encouraging citizen and cultural diplomacy
28. These are all efforts at the periphery of traditional diplomacy, and I readily admit that the last three are better done mainly outside government while the first two are more inherently governmental.
29. But I don’t think we can get them done with our current institutions, which were designed for different purposes in other eras. Inertia and legacy are too strong.
30. The State Department, originally the Department of the State, is now a conventional foreign ministry with a 19th century architecture: most Foreign Service personnel serve abroad in static embassies and other missions servicing agencies of the US government other than the State Department. Legacy and inertia, not current needs, dictate where it has people stationed and a good deal of what they are doing.
31. USAID was founded with a poverty alleviation and economic development mission to help fight the Cold War. Few of us still think that US government programs can fix poverty at home, much less overseas.
32. There have been a lot of proposals for reform. Let’s recall Condoleezza Rice’s transformational diplomacy and Hillary Clinton’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, now being reprised. None of these efforts have gained more than temporary traction.
33. What we need to do is conduct what scientists call a thought experiment: knowing what we do about the challenges we now face, what kind foreign policy instruments do we need?
34. The answer is nothing like what we’ve got.
35. My book doesn’t offer a detailed design, but it does suggest that we need a single Foreign Office with a national security focus as well as a much-enhanced nongovernmental effort, operated at arms’ length from officialdom but with much greater Congressional funding than it has today.
36. I am not however prepared to propose, as so many have before me, that this new Foreign Office be funded by passing up an F22 or two. I think State and AID have the resources needed, but unfortunately tied up in those elephantine embassies supporting other US government agencies.
37. Shrinking these dramatically would provide the funds for a much sleeker and more effective Foreign Office, including a corps of several thousand people able and willing to deploy, with or without US troops, to difficult environments to take on the hard work of conflict prevention and state-building where required.
38. What we need is a far more agile, anticipatory and mobile Foreign Service, one built for a world in which virtually everyone will soon be connected to worldwide communications at reasonable cost and ordinary citizens, including you, count for much more than ever before in world history.
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