Tag: Syria
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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Yemen at stake
President Saleh has refused to sign the agreement to step down in 30 days in return for immunity from prosecution. This is not really a surprise. He is notoriously slippery and has wiggled out of several previous promises to give up power.
Now the question is what the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will do. Its oil-endowed members (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman) were to be the guarantors of the agreement the GCC had negotiated with Saleh and the opposition political parties. Individually and collectively they presumably have a good deal of leverage over Saleh. Will the GCC show its teeth, as it did by deploying troops in Bahrain? Or will it roll over and play dead, leaving Saleh to see if he can defeat the protests, now that he has rejected the deal with the political parties?
It is easy to imagine that Saleh is watching Bashar al Assad’s repression of protests in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi’s war against Libya’s population and wondering, “why can’t I survive if they can?” Of course the right answer to that question is that none of them should remain in power: each has delegitimized his own regime and by all rights should step aside.
But life is not often fair. I am reasonably confident that Gaddafi is finished, sooner or later, but the jury is still out on Bashar, who seems willing to imitate if not rival his father in killing and arresting Syrians. Saleh has so far been less heavy-handed in Yemen, but I wouldn’t put it past him to double down and try to intimidate the protesters. They have proven adept and savvy so far; let’s hope they can maintain their good humor, massive presence and commitment to nonviolence. They merit success.
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I don’t get it
Why is the Obama Administration so hesitant about supporting the demonstrations in Syria?
Yesterday’s UN Human Rights Council resolution on Syria was good: it clearly and unequivocally condemned the mistreatment and killing of protesters. The Administration understands the difference between right and wrong in this matter. Russia and China opposed the resolution, which signals why the UN Security Council is having such a hard time making a statement. I can’t really fault the Administration for that, and I imagine Susan Rice is working hard to get around their opposition.
But why does the Administration impose sanctions targeted on just three Syrian officials? Why does the President not speak out more forcefully? What more would Bashar al Assad have to do to get on the wrong side of history? Are 400 deaths not enough?
Talking to a U.S. government official yesterday, I got some hints: the Administration is worried about sectarian chaos that might spread to Iraq, it wants to maintain stability in Syria’s mutually hostile but nonviolent relationship with Israel, it has its hands full with Libya (not to mention Yemen and Bahrain) so doesn’t want another problem. It is trying hard not to raise expectations among the Syrian protesters that will likely be disappointed. It is especially important that the demonstrators understand that no military intervention is going to happen, so they had better keep their protests nonviolent.
All of that is fine, but it is creating a moral hazard on the other side: Bashar al Assad feels he can do as he pleases because no one will really try to stop him. He is likely also hinting that if only left in place he’ll be more forthcoming with Israel once things calm down.
It is hard for me to credit this hint, as there have been so many disappointments in the past. Nothing about Bashar’s past behavior suggests that he is a true reformer, or a leader capable of an historical advance in relations with Israel. Those who believe he is–Senator John Kerry most explicitly among them–have a burden of proof that has not been met.
The crackdown in Syria has been so pervasive and effective that there are few good first-hand accounts and interviews with protesters. This piece from the New York Review of Books is the best I’ve seen. I’ve also confirmed independently the report therein that at Deraa, an epicenter for the protests, the fourth division of the Syrian Army fired on the fifth, because of its refusal to fire on the demonstrators. The fourth is an elite group led by Bashar’s brother while the fifth is mainly conscripts, like most of the army. But it will take more than an incident or two to bring the security forces around to the realization that Bashar is leading the country in the wrong direction.
The NYRB piece cites these as the protesters’ immediate demands:
the lifting of emergency law; the release of political prisoners; the right to form new political parties and to protest peacefully; the right of freedom of speech and of the media; an end to corruption; permission to exiled dissidents to return to Syria; and the bringing to justice of those responsible for killing, arresting or torturing protesters and political opponents.
Longer-term goals are also being prepared. They may not be calling consistently for the end of the regime, but the regime is certainly making it clear that the objectives sought are incompatible with the continuation of Ba’athist rule.
Which side is history on?
PS: I hope on this guy’s side:
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Get Syrious: something besides the wedding
Yes, something else is happening today: the Syrian protesters are going to discover whether they can bring around their brethren in the army and thereby shake the foundations of the regime. Protests are just beginning today as I write this–no clear results so far.
I asked my bit of the twittersphere yesterday whether they thought the army would continue to fire on protesters. The smart money (or at least most of the money) said “yes.” One tweep even suggested it was “in the nature of Ba’athist regimes” to survive this kind of thing. I’m not sure what that means, but Bashar al Assad is definitely putting up a strong fight, if that is the right term for when you shoot an unarmed demonstrator.
The protest leadership is appealing to the army and defense minister to play a role in the transition, following the Egyptian precedent. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Syrian armed forces are 646,500 strong when fully mobilized, but more than half are reservists and the bulk are conscripts who serve only 18 months. Hard to believe they are well trained or equipped, and most will not want to fire on fellow Syrians. But so far there is little sign of resistance to the regime from within the armed forces. We are hearing about local resignations from the Ba’ath party, but few soldiers have joined the demonstrators and none so far as I know have refused to fire on them.
The issue is not one only for the security forces. The protesters will have to maintain nonviolent discipline and reach out to the uniformed military, making it clear that they are not the enemy and will not be attacked. This is best done with such large numbers of people in the street that the military and police will not want to precipitate chaos. The demonstrations in Syria have been widespread but not large.
The international community, such as it is, has done little to warn off the Assad regime or protect the demonstrators. The UN Security Council seems unable to agree to a statement, never mind a resolution. U.S. and EU sanctions are still under preparation.
With the internet and phone service largely cut off and foreign journalists barred, today is going to be a difficult day for the protesters. But no one ever suggested that getting rid of the autocratic regime in Serbia was going to be easy.
This video purports to be today in Damascus, where demonstrations are said to have broken out even in the center of the city:
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