Tag: Syria
Bashar won’t stop
I’d have liked to entitle this post “stop!”, but I know that Bashar al Assad won’t. He is fully committed to the crackdown. If it doesn’t succeed, he knows he will have to step down, or be drawn and quartered. I understand why President Obama Thursday offered him the option of leading the way on reform, but it has been clear for some time that will not happen.
Instead, Bashar intends to frighten his population into submission. He is scary. It would be foolish to express any certainty about whether repression will work or not. It depends on unknowable factors like the courage of Syrian young people, the unity of the army and the loyalty of regime cronies. Even someone inside Syria would have a hard time making definitive judgments on these factors, which will clarify only the day after the rebellion succeeds or is defeated.
In the meanwhile, what should we be doing? First and foremost what President Obama tried to accomplish in his speech: make sure everyone concerned understands that the United States stands with those who protest peacefully for freedom and human dignity. We should not expect instantaneous results from this, and our stance may not weigh heavily in the mix. But for our own sake, we need to be clear that the regime’s behavior is wrong. Naming Bashar and other heavies to the sanctions list, which Washington did earlier this week, is a necessary corollary.
What else can we do? Listen, and amplify the voices of those who are courageous enough to speak out. Dorothy Parvaz, an Iranian American journalist arrested in Syria and deported to Iran, is one of the few professional journalists who has seen Syrian treatment of prisoners up close (I would discount her description of treatment in Iran, since she has relatives there and intends to visit them again soon):
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A right-minded but (mostly) forgettable speech
It is hard for me to knock a speech whose most frequently occurring words are “region” “must,” “change,” “people,” and “rights.” There has to be something to appreciate there. The President was particularly good on Tunisia and Egypt, supporting completion of their transitions to democracy and offering economic help, mainly through debt forgiveness, trade and investment. He was better on Bahrain than I might have expected, underlining that the destruction of Shia mosques there is unacceptable (thank you Roy Gutman for your reporting on that!).
On Syria, he was so-so, appealing once again for Bashar al Assad to lead reform (fat chance) or step aside (fat chance of that too). But that is farther than Obama has gone in the past. He gave President Saleh of Yemen a push toward the exit, but it did not seem to have any real force behind it.
The President was overoptimistic on both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming we have broken the momentum of the insurgency in the former and established multiethnic and nonsectarian government in the latter. Both may happen, but they aren’t consolidated achievements yet.
On Israel/Palestine, the President took something like Shimon Peres’ approach: focus for now on defining Palestine’s territory and ensuring Israel’s security, solve Jerusalem and refugee return later. Rhetorical support for Israel was strong, as was opposition to the Palestinian effort to get the UN General Assembly to approve statehood. But there was really nothing new. That might be the best he can do for the moment, which is not propitious.
No mention of Saudi Arabia. A bit of talk about Iranian hypocrisy in providing assistance to Syria in repressing demonstrators, but no clarion call for rebellion there. Strong on women’s rights, inter-religious dialogue and rejection of political violence. Big throughout on self-determination (Palestinians take note), values as a focus for American policy in addition to interests, universal rights and strengthening the economic underpinnings of political transition.
A right-minded but I am afraid forgettable speech.
PS: I did not anticipate when I wrote this piece quickly this afternoon the furor that has erupted over the President’s endorsement of the ’67 borders of Israel as the basis for negotiations and eventual land swaps. It is still a bit hard for me to see what other basis there would be in a “land for peace” deal, but I take the point that this is the first time an American president has endorsed an idea that many of us take for granted. Those who object need to explain what other basis there might be for the territorial solution, other than “making the land whole.”
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The Palestine question needs answers
I am perfectly willing to believe that today’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, in which Israeli security forces killed at least eight people, were in part efforts to use the annual Nakba (“catastrophe”) commemoration of Israel’s founding as a way of refocusing attention away from poor governance in Arab countries and towards the plight of the Palestinians. This seems especially likely in the case of Syria, which has a real need to show Israel and the United States that there is good reason to preserve autocratic rule, which has ensured peace on the Syrian-Israeli border for decades. Israeli claims that Iran is stirring the pot seem far-fetched, but who knows, maybe even that is true.
None of that excuses the ham-fisted reaction of the Israeli security forces, which seemed unprepared and undermanned for the occasion. Of course the country has a right to defend its borders, and stone-throwers in my view do not qualify as unequivocally peaceful demonstrators. But how stupid is it for democratic Israel to adopt the methods of the Arab autocrats in responding to provocation? Where has shooting protesters had a stabilizing impact? And just how serious is the presence on your sovereign territory of even a few hundred demonstrators? How long do you think they will be able to stay once the security forces move deliberately and without violence to cut them off from support across the border?
This overreaction comes at a delicate moment, with Prime Minister Netanyahu getting ready to visit Washington and President Obama preparing to unveil who knows what now that his Middle East special envoy, George Mitchell, has quit in obvious frustration. If Iran and its Arab allies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza are successful in an effort to refocus the Arab Spring on Palestinian issues, Israel and the United States are both in deep difficulty. The best thing they can do to avoid that unfortunate trap is to stop killing protesters and offer some clear answers on when and how the state of Palestine can emerge from the chaotic soup in which the Middle East finds itself.
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Obama laps to the wrong side of history
While he is wisely not spiking the football, President Obama is still taking a few victory laps. The problem is that there are other races still going on in the stadium. He is supposed to be competing in those as well: the autocrats in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria should not be left to win their competitions. How do we think they will behave if they are successful in their current efforts to repress the demonstrations?
The picture is different in each of these countries. Obama has made it clear enough that Gaddafi must leave Libya, but the NATO military effort seems to be falling short and the diplomatic maneuvering hasn’t yet produced the desired result. In Yemen, the slippery president has refused to sign an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council to step down and has returned to beating up on demonstrators. King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa in Bahrain is busy bulldozing Shia mosques, as if that will make the 70% Shia population go away. In Syria the supposed reformer Bashar al Assad has killed hundreds, rounded up thousands and subdued towns one by one using grossly excessive military force against civilians.
We are not hearing much from either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton about these developments. I would argue that the outcome of the still ongoing rebellions in the Arab world are more important to U.S. vital interests than the killing of Osama bin Laden, who wasn’t living much better in Abbottabad than he would have in Guantanamo (though he was clearly in better communication with his network). Yemen is already a weak state where terrorists hide and Syria provides support to Hizbollah and Hamas. Libya has undertaken state-sponsored terrorism in the past and may well revert in the future. Bahrain? How does the Sunni king expect his Shia majority population to react once he is finished depriving it of its political rights as well as many houses of worship?
I won’t propose a full package of solutions. What it seems to me is needed is simpler than that: a Presidential decision to make the cause of democracy in the region his own, and a tasking to the State Department to come up with the (non-military) propositions that will make it real. Failing that, Obama risks lapsing to the wrong side of history.
PS: Jackson Diehl treats the Syrian case well in this morning’s Washington Post, as does Brian Whitaker in The Guardian.
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While we weren’t watching
I admit it is hard to shift attention away from the consequences of Osama bin Laden’s death. America and Pakistan have embarked on a great debate. Sticking with the claim that they knew nothing about either OBL’s whereabouts or about the American operation to kill him, Pakistan’s government now has to explain its apparent incompetence. The Obama Administration has to explain why we should provide billions in assistance to a country that incompetent, or worse, one that harbored OBL.
These debates will go on for some time but is unlikely to change much. Congress will fulminate, but President Obama will not want to reduce aid, for fear of making the situation worse, and he will stick to his drawdown schedule in Afghanistan, starting small. Maybe in Pakistan the debate will have a broader impact: its military and intelligence services deserve a thorough airing out, though they are likely to survive with their prerequisites intact.
More interesting for the long term are the things that were, and were not, happening in the Arab world while we weren’t watching.
In Syria, the crackdown is proceeding, with hundreds more arrested in apparently indiscriminate security sweeps of major provincial centers of unrest. Bashar al Assad shows every sign of continuing. Aleppo and Damascus, Syria’s two biggest cities, remain relatively quiet. Friday will tell us whether the repression is succeeding.
In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has managed to slip out of an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia plus other oil-rich gulfies) to step down in 30 days. It is unclear whether the GCC, the political opposition or the protesters can do much at this point to resurrect the agreement, so it is likely both demonstrations and repression will continue.
In Libya, a kind of tottering stalemate has developed, with Gaddafi continuing to pound the western town of Misrata and to hold off the rebels in the east. Turkey has turned against the Colonel, but it is unclear whether that will make much difference. For all the much-vaunted rise of Turkey as a regional player, Ankara seems to have trouble making its weight felt with either Bashar al Assad or Muammar Gaddafi.
In Bahrain, repression is also in full swing, with the Americans seeming to bend to Saudi pressure not to object too strenuously. The regime there, in the past one of the milder ones, has been arresting doctors and nurses who provided medical treatment to protesters.
So it looks as if counter-revolution is succeeding for the moment across the region. It would be ironic if OBL’s death were to coincide with failure of the protests that showed promise of harnessing the discontents that used to be channeled into terrorism. Mr. Obama, where was that right side of history last time we saw it?
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Slippery slope, moral hazard and tall order
The big questions for me in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death are how it will affect America’s relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as the Arab Spring. I leave it to others to consider the impact on Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and the terrorist enterprise in general, but I have to assume that the already weakened enterprise will suffer some further fragmentation and demoralization, even as it tries (and occasionally succeeds) to exact revenge.
Pakistan has got some explaining to do. It seems likely someone in the Pakistani government knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a garrison town not far from Islamabad. There is no sign they tipped off the Americans, their putative allies. How come? How many other Al Qaeda principles harbored in Pakistan? And if no one in the Pakistani government knew that OBL was there, that would suggest true incompetence, no? So too would failure of the Pakistani government to intervene to block the American operation, if the Americans are telling the truth about not having informed the Pakistanis.
My best guess is that some Pakistanis (army? intelligence service?) knew where bin Laden was hiding. They likely also knew about the American operation, or at least knew something was “going down.” So they both hid him and allowed him to be captured. That sounds like the kind of duplicity we’ve witnessed for years, practiced to our detriment. Glad it was at someone else’s expense this time. The unexcited and even congratulatory reaction of official Pakistan to the news suggests this was the case.
So what do we do now? Is it business as usual with the Pakistanis? Or is it time for a shift toward a more demanding stance? Should we make military assistance conditional on greater cooperation? Surely someone in the Congress will push that idea. The problem is we would then have to be prepared carry out the threat, which would surely reduce military and intelligence cooperation further. That’s a slippery slope. Are we really reduced, as Madeleine Albright suggested on the PBS Newshour this evening, to “working with” the Pakistanis?
Maybe. With OBL out of the way, Al Qaeda is a lot less interesting to the Pakistanis, whose purposes inside Afghanistan might just as well be served by the Taliban without all the international complications OBL necessarily engendered. Besides, they’ve now got lots of homegrown jihadis to throw against India when the need arises. OBL wasn’t so good in that direction anyway.
What about Afghanistan? President Karzai, in his usual uncharitable mood, took the occasion of OBL’s death to suggest that the Americans and their allies have been wasting a lot of time and Afghan lives looking for him inside Afghanistan. Meanwhile, American senators were suggesting that OBL’s death might make it possible to draw down American troops in Afghanistan faster than currently contemplated, leaving Karzai to his fate. Of course the two ideas are compatible: Karzai would like less U.S. military effort, and so would the Americans.
This “beggar thy ally” approach on both sides does not bode well for continuing anything like the current level of effort in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are proving resilient and resurgent. I confess to temptation: maybe we should try withdrawing faster than had been anticipated, making it clear to Karzai that we are in part responding to his pressure. He pushes us out because he has been pretty sure we wouldn’t take him up on it. If he thought we might, he would be getting his act together faster.
This is what is called “moral hazard.” Leon Panetta, about to become Defense Secretary, was big on the idea of giving the Iraqis a quick time line for U.S. withdrawal when he served on the Iraq Study Group (I’m not breaking confidence–he said so publicly on many occasions). I wonder if he might adopt the same posture on Afghanistan. Of course David Petraeus, whether in his current job or his future one, is likely to be on the other side of that argument.
As for the Arab Spring, it seems to me that OBL’s death should reduce the fear some have of Al Qaeda exploitation of the demonstrations and weaken the argument that we need autocrats to repress international terrorists. Those arguments have not gained much traction with me these past few months, but I hope those who believe them will reexamine the situation and come to the obvious conclusion: the faster we can help get something like democratic regimes up and running in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria the better off we will be. I wish I could say the same about Bahrain, but it seems to have fallen hostage to the regional sectarian standoff. We’ve already got what most would consider a tall order.
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