Tag: United Arab Emirates
Obama Needs Both a Peace and a War Plan
The Middle East Institute ran this piece on its website today:
Last week, President Obama said that he has no strategy yet to confront the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. He was attempting to counter speculation about American bombing of IS targets there. It had been rumored that the President wanted to decide on a war plan by the end of the week.
Before the Commander-in-Chief reviews war plans, he must give strategic guidance that specifies his intent. What is he trying to accomplish? It does not suffice to wax metaphorical about the IS being a cancer. He needs to decide whether the objective is to destroy it and prevent it from spreading, to contain and perhaps shrink it, or more modestly to limit the damage. In less metaphorical terms, the President might want to ensure that the IS is less capable of committing atrocities against civilians and harming Americans (his declared objectives in Iraq). Without guidance on goals, it will be impossible to design a strategy or to judge whether progress is being made.
Circumstances in Syria make setting the goals particularly challenging. The IS and other extremists, including the Al-Qa‘ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, are not the only problem. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has conducted a war against its own citizens that has killed more than 200,000 Syrians, displaced more than a third of the population, and forced 3 million to become refugees, mostly in neighboring countries. Intervention focused against the IS and other extremists could inadvertently free Assad to suppress the more moderate rebels and help him to reestablish his authoritarian rule. The United States must ensure that their friends, not Assad or Islamist extremists, benefit from U.S. military intervention.
Moderates in Aleppo, for example, are being attacked from the north by the IS and from the south by regime forces. Targeting IS could cause Aleppo to be captured by the regime. Likewise, the IS has taken over Raqqa in eastern Syria from the regime in the last few weeks. Attacking them there could enable regime forces to return.
A White House spokesman has suggested that the President’s objective will be containment and some rollback. Containment should be feasible, if it means preventing the IS from crossing rural and desert expanses to attack population centers, either in Syria or Iraq. But it would require destruction of Syria’s air defenses, which itself is a major military enterprise.
Rollback is even more difficult. It would require not only destruction of Syrian air defenses but also vigorous and sustained U.S. air attacks. Pushing the IS back from an isolated, fixed installation in the desert, as was done in Iraq at the Mosul Dam, is relatively easy. Getting IS out of Syrian cities and towns will be far more difficult, as the confrontation lines change often and who controls what is not clear. Targeting is therefore harder and collateral damage likely. Even if defeated in Aleppo or Raqqa, IS cadres can melt into an urban population, lying low until a new opportunity presents itself.
Rollback also raises the question of who would secure and govern any areas that are taken back from the IS. Washington recognizes the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) as the political representative of the Syrian people, and it will need enormous strengthening if it is to provide policing and governance in areas from which IS has been rolled back. The SOC will also need continued military protection. Assad has often bombarded liberated areas, including hospitals and schools, in an effort to make them ungovernable. The strategy will therefore have to include a commitment to continued application of military force as well as a plan for governance, justice and delivery of services. If liberated areas are left unprotected, the IS or the Assad regime will return, sooner rather than later.
Defeating the IS in Syria and preventing it from spreading would be even more demanding. Defeat is already proving difficult in Iraq, even with Kurdish and Iraqi security forces fighting IS on the ground. They are far stronger relative to the IS than the SOC-loyal forces in Syria. Defeat of the IS in Syria will also require a difficult political straddle: while supporting a Shi‘i-led government in Iraq, the United States will need to provide the mostly Sunni rebels in Syria with the means to defeat the IS as well as the Shi‘i-allied Assad regime.
If the IS is defeated and the territory it controls falls to the opposition, the SOC would then be in a far better position to negotiate with the Assad regime than it was in January, when the Geneva II talks failed to produce the political transition that the United States and the SOC wanted. Syrians are understandably reluctant to oppose Assad if they think the alternative is the IS, which not only abuses the civilian population but is also largely manned by non-Syrians. Without the IS boogey-man, Assad’s days will be shortened.
The post-war state-building tasks in both Syria and Iraq will be colossal. With its oil infrastructure in the south undamaged, Iraq can in principle pay for its own rebuilding; it is a wealthy country with about $100 billion in oil revenue at current prices. But Syria cannot. Its oil production was declining even before the war, its fields are now damaged, its infrastructure is devastated, and its bills are unpaid. If the IS is defeated, someone is going to have to foot a big bill. Washington need pay only a fraction. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have supported the revolution and should be expected to pay the lion’s share if it succeeds. But U.S. diplomacy may be required to remind them of that responsibility. Hopefully that is on the agenda of Secretary Kerry, who is scheduled to head to the Middle East to build an international coalition to support the fight against the IS.
President Obama is late to the realization that the IS represents a serious threat. But haste should not obscure the need for clarity about goals and plans for peace as well as war.
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The anti-ISIS fire brigade
I’m an Obamista–I campaigned for him and continue to support him. I even sympathize with his much-criticized reluctance to engage abroad. The United States needs a respite. We are a weary world policeman. Our most recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated our limitations more than our capacities.
But even while taking a break from our law and order role, we need to be prepared to lead the fire brigade. Uncontained fires that break out abroad can cause us serious damage here at home. The war in Syria, which the President initially viewed as one not directly affecting American national security, always had the potential to do so, by creating a safe haven for terrorists and by spilling over to neighboring countries.
Now both threats have become real. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has carved out a substantial area of control in both countries. While the challenges of governing may prevent ISIS from threatening the United States in the near future, the supposed caliphate it has established clearly intends to do so. Its threat to fly its black flag over the White House is bombast, but if it gains and consolidates a safe haven in Iraq and Syria ISIS will want to strike the United States. It would be delusional to think otherwise.
The President has chosen to act against ISIS, but in strictly limited ways. He is using American air power to provide humanitarian assistance and protection to threatened civilians as well as to prevent an advance on Iraqi Kurdistan, whose vaunted peshmerga have found it difficult to defend their long confrontation line with ISIS. The US is also providing advice and intelligence to both Kurdistan and Iraqi security forces, which performed miserably when ISIS advanced against Mosul and moved towards Baghdad.
The United States needs to do more. It needs to lead a fire brigade committed to containing and eventually defeating ISIS.
This should not be a US-only effort. ISIS threatens Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia more immediately than it threatens the US. But these are not countries that are used to cooperating with each other. Only Turkey has a habit of projecting military force into neighboring countries. But Turkey and Saudi Arabia are at odds over the role of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East, Lebanon is preoccupied with its internal difficulties, and Jordan is overwhelmed with Syrian refugees.
The main ground forces available to meet the ISIS threat are Iraqis and Syrians.
The Iraqi Kurds need help: air power, logistics and intelligence. For the moment, the Americans are providing all three. But there is no reason why Turkey can’t provide at least some of the air power and logistics to help Kurdistan. Turkey’s long border with Kurdish-controlled territory and the immediacy of the ISIS threat would enable it to intervene from the air and supply the Kurds with whatever materiel they may need. Perhaps Qatar might help from the air as well. It participated in the NATO-led operation against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and it shares Turkey’s affection for the Muslim Brotherhood, making it a natural ally.
The Iraqi security forces also need help. They are getting intelligence and some supplies. But President Obama wants Baghdad to form an inclusive government before he commits fully. Nouri al Maliki is still refusing to step down, despite strong hints from Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Iranians that he should do so. He is an extraordinarily stubborn man, and he has the largest block in parliament as well as a lot of personal preference votes in the April election to back his claim to the prime ministry. There are rumors that he is negotiating for a large security detail and immunity. It would be foolish not to give him both under current circumstances, if doing so will accelerate the process of forming a more inclusive government.
Simply changing the prime minister may not solve the problem. Iraq needs a new political compact that will give
- the Kurds money they are owed as well as some capacity to export their own oil and receive the proceeds from its sale;
- the Sunnis more power in Baghdad as well as control over their own destiny in the Sunni-dominated provinces and the money to realize their ambitions.
In exchange, the Kurds should be expected to commit to staying in Iraq and fighting ISIS while the Sunnis and their foreign supporters Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) should be expected to turn against ISIS and help defeat it.
Nailing together a pact of this sort in peacetime would be difficult. It may be easier in wartime, as the consequences of failure are all too clear.
ISIS will be easier to defeat in Iraq if it is also attacked in Syria. Bashar al Asad cannot be expected to do that in any but a perfunctory way. It serves his purposes well to have an extremist threat that he can blame for the uprising against his rule. It also conveniently fights against more moderate opposition forces. The Syrian opposition needs more and better weapons and training in order to attack ISIS. It also needs help from the Syrian Kurds, who can attack from ISIS’ rear and have proven effective against ISIS at times in the past.
So the anti-ISIS fire brigade looks something like this:
- Kurds in the north and east supported by Turkey and Qatar in addition to the US,
- Iraqi army in the south and Syrian opposition (including Kurds) in the west supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Putting that 360° coalition together is today’s challenge for American diplomacy.
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Mission leap
I’ve been wondering, as many of my readers have, how long the war in Gaza will continue. This depends on what Hamas and Israel are trying to achieve. What is the mission? What is an acceptable end state?
Hamas has been pretty clear: it wants an end to the siege of Gaza, which means opening it to trade and commerce with both Egypt and Israel. Hamas also wants release of the West Bank operatives Israel arrested in the prelude to this latest Gaza war. It will resist demilitarization and try to maintain its hold on governing Gaza.
Israel is more of a mystery to me, so I listen carefully when an Israelis speak. They initially seemed to focus on ending Hamas’ rocket threat. But Iron Dome has effectively neutralized the rockets, one-quarter to one-third of which have either been used or destroyed. Destroying many more would require a full-scale reoccupation of Gaza, which the Israelis are loathe to do.
The tunnels into Israel now loom larger as a security threat, albeit one limited to the immediate surroundings of Gaza. So far, the Israelis have destroyed about half the tunnel network. But in order to be effective, the tunnels have to come up inside Israel. Sooner or later–likely sooner–the Israelis will acquire the technical means to detect the digging. The tunnels could then be destroyed inside Israel, making the kind of operation now going on in Gaza unnecessary. It may provide some satisfaction to destroy a couple of years of digging, but it puts Israeli soldiers at risk. If alternative ways are developed to reduce the threat they would obviously be preferable.
Israel’s objectives do not seem to be limited to restoring calm (aka ending the rocket attacks) and destroying the tunnels. It appears to want to break Hamas’ will to fight. The Israelis think they share this objective with Egypt, which regards Hamas as a Muslim Brotherhood organization and therefore an implacable enemy of the restored military regime in Cairo.
Both Egypt and Israel would like to see a post-war political evolution that puts the Palestinian Authority (PA) back in charge of Gaza. Israel has had bad experience trying to engineer regime change in the Arab world (witness the 1956 effort to overthrow Nasser and its later Lebanon machinations). But the Israelis still imagine they can, with cooperation from the international community, help the PA by steering reconstruction funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and border openings in the right directions. Hamas was already in trouble before this latest war, perhaps even on the verge of collapse as a viable governing entity. More radical groups like the Islamic State have little traction in Gaza, the Israelis think.
Unless one side or the other is victorious, the end of this war will likely involve a trade: improved security for Israel, reconstruction and economic benefits for Gaza. But there is no guarantee of the political outcome the Israelis and Egyptians are hoping for. Displacing Hamas entirely is not just mission creep but mission leap. In the meanwhile, Gaza’s civilians are paying an exorbitant price.
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Due for a rethink
As US policy towards the Middle East is floundering, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a timely report Monday entitled “US Middle East Policy at a Time of Regional Fragmentation and Competition,” based on field research in four countries. At CAP to discuss the results of the report were Peter Mandaville of George Mason University, Haroon Ullah of the State Department, and Brian Katulis, CAP Senior Fellow and coauthor of the report.
Islamists are at the center of the regional struggle, but fissures within and between different groups are multilayered and run deep. The Sunni-Shia rivalry is only one element of the conflicts embroiling the Middle East. The intra-Sunni rivalry is another, if less prominent, aspect. The division between rich and poor countries is an additional ingredient, as wealthier states tend to fight out proxy battles in weaker and more divided nations.
In Egypt, for instance, Qatar and Turkey threw their support behind the Muslim Brotherhood, while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are backing the new military regime. Saudi Arabia sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a potential competitor, rather than just another disjointed Salafist group. A key dynamic is between countries with more resources and less division at home, who fear the success of an alternate model of governance. This complicates US policy, as it is difficult to execute a cohesive strategy in the region while Qatar and Saudi Arabia are locked in a struggle over Egypt’s future.
Mandaville said that the US must look beyond the Sunni-Shia frame to recognize that we are witnessing a potential unraveling of the entire post-Ottoman order. The aftermath of 9/11, coupled with Arab uprisings of 2011, has seen a withering away of post-WWI arrangements. The upheaval is comparable to what we saw in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when groups whose identities had been in check during the Cold War emerged and began questioning, and ultimately restructuring, the existing order.
One of the major weaknesses of US policy in the region is our tendency to oversimplify the debate. Whether or not American troops should have stayed in Iraq misses the larger picture. American diplomatic engagement needs to be better informed about the regional dynamics of movements in the Arab world. Even after many years, the Arab nationalist-Islamist divide is still not well understood. Americans are good at understanding groups who want to attack us, but we need to peer further into what drives these conflicts in the first place.
Katulis suggested that Obama has bungled his attempts to reengage with the Muslim world. By addressing them as a separate community, he signaled that they are a single constituency, one that should be handled with kid gloves, an approach comparable to George W. Bush’s. The implication is that all Muslims subscribe to a single, transnational identity, a message that is echoed by groups like al Qaeda.
Political Islam has always existed in the background. Partial openings in the political and media environment after the Arab uprisings have allowed some Islamist groups to come to the fore. Islamism, as a point on the political spectrum, has broadened significantly. Despite Egypt’s best efforts to silence Islamists, they are here to stay. Ullah noted that, while President Sisi wants to dismantle the Muslim Brotherhood’s comparative advantage in Egypt and revert to the weaker Sadat-era Brotherhood, this is not possible in modern media environment.
He also noted one positive development in America’s attitude towards political Islam, pointing to Assistant Secretary of State Patterson’s comments last week:
Some people in this region conflate Islamists with terrorists and desire to eliminate the Islamists entirely from the political scene. Our difficult fight against violent extremists is made more complicated by this viewpoint. The need for compromise is underscored by political experience in the Arab world as well as our own.
One of the myths the report attempts to debunk is the so-called moderation thesis. This is the false belief that Islamists will moderate their positions if they join the political fray. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood failed to accommodate more moderate positions. Islamist groups have fared better in other countries in the region, including Tunisia’s Ennahda party, partly because they had to contend with a large secular/liberal bloc. Nonetheless, many mainstream Islamists have internalized only the procedural spirit of democracy, without embracing pluralism.
Another myth is that socioeconomic conditions are the primary drivers of extremism. Research has found no causal link between poverty and extremism. The key constituency for Egypt’s Salafist al Nour Party, for instance, is that country’s urban-based middle class.
One persistent challenge to foreign policy is US counterterrorist doctrine, which relegates violence committed by Muslims to the “terrorist” category. This neglects the fact that in places like the Sahel, conflicts are based on ethnic, rather than religious, differences. In Obama’s speech at West Point, he called for additional funding of counterterrorism programs, but the real problem in many of these countries stems from long-running ethnic conflicts.
Mandaville noted that the US government still thinks about the world in terms of the blocs that arose during the Cold War. We would do well to shed these outdated notions of the Middle East, although it will be difficult in light of our current investments in the Gulf and rising sectarianism in the region. As Iraq and Syria descend into sectarian-fueled chaos, it is time for the US to reexamine its strategy in region.
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Survey says
Tuesday Jay Leveton presented the results of the 2014 ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller survey at the American Security Project. It focuses on Arab youth perspectives, concerns and aspirations throughout the region. The survey consisted of 3,500 face-to-face interviews conducted over the past year across sixteen countries in the Middle East. The sample was split equally between males and females ranging from 18 to 24 years old. Leveton highlighted the top ten findings:
- Arab youth are embracing modern values. 46% of Arab youth believe that traditional values are outdated and belong in the past. This number has risen from only 17% in 2011, demonstrating a shift away from traditional values. This change is also reflected in the decreasing influence of parents, family, and religion on Arab youth.
- They remain confident in their national government’s abilities. Arab youth show approximately 60% confidence in the government’s ability to address living standards, economic stability, war, unemployment and terrorism. There is great surprise in this confidence, specifically in countries that have suffered from economic hardship or political instability following the Arab Spring. Approval of the impact of the Arab Spring has declined from 72% in 2012 to 54% in 2014, most likely due to the continuous civil unrest and political instability in countries such as Egypt and Syria.
- They are increasingly concerned about the rising cost of living and unemployment. 63% of Arab youth are concerned about growing living expenses, while 42% expressed significant worry over unemployment. Approximately half are apprehensive about their own national economy. However, 55% of youth in countries outside of the GCC are concerned about unemployment, while only 39% within the GCC. This is due to the GCC’s proven ability to assist in job creation, while countries in North Africa and the Levant struggle with their youth unemployment rates.
- Arab youth believe that the biggest obstacle in the Middle East is civil unrest. 55% believe that the recent uprisings and instability are the greatest impediments to the advancement of the region. 38% believe that the lack of democracy is the greatest issue, while some believe it is the threat of terrorism.
- They are increasingly looking towards entrepreneurship as a source of opportunity. 67% feel that the younger generation is more likely to start a business than in previous generations. This entrepreneurial spirit hints at the perceived opportunities in starting one’s own business, specifically in response to some governments’ inability to provide jobs for their youth.
- The country that the younger Arab generation would most like to live in is the United Arab Emirates. 39% said that the UAE is the ideal country they would move to, while 21% said the United States, and 14% said Saudi Arabia. The UAE is the model country for Arab youth in terms of the right balance of governmental responsibility, national economy, foreign relations, etc. The United States has remained high in favor in Arab youth perspectives.
- Arab youth see their country’s biggest allies to be Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 36% believe that Saudi Arabia is their country’s biggest ally and 33% said the UAE. This was followed by Qatar, Kuwait, and lastly the United States, which marks a shift away from Western countries as the largest allies.
- They have a new concern for obesity and rising health issues. Over the past year, there has been a sharp increase in the percentage of youth concerned about obesity from 12% in 2013 to 26% in 2014. An increasing number of the younger generation is worried about diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Among all countries, 52% of youth feel as though the healthcare in their country has remained the same over the past year, while 34% believe that it has improved.
- They believe that the government should subsidize energy costs and aren’t too concerned about climate change. 74% believe that energy, electricity, and transport fuel should be subsidized by the government. This comes from the rising concern about the cost of living in each respective country. While this is the greatest worry among youth, concern for climate change and the environment is a very low priority at only 6%.
- There has been a great increase in daily news consumption, specifically through online media and social networking sites. Television has been the most popular source of news for the sixth year in a row with 75% of Arab youth using it as their most frequent news source. However, a declining number of youth see the television as the most trusted source of news– 39% now view social media as the most reliable source, rising from 22% in 2013.
While the 2014 survey ranges across sixteen countries that vary in political, economic, and social characteristics, there is nonetheless a great sense of continuity in the hopes, concerns, and priorities of Arab youth in the region.
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Something Americans will like
Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns gave a fine speech yesterday at CSIS on “A Renewed Agenda for U.S.-Gulf Partnership” heavy on security, resolving regional conflicts and supporting “positive” transitions (you wouldn’t want to use the D word in the Gulf). Too bad the agenda bore so little semblance to the changing reality.
The Gulf will of course remain important to the US and to the rest of the world. Its oil resources are the life’s blood of much of the global economy. An interruption in supply, as Bill rightly pointed out, would cause an increase in oil prices worldwide, with possibly catastrophic impacts on growth and investment.
But the political economy of Gulf oil is changing. The United States is importing less of it, down now to about 20% coming from the Persian Gulf. And that represents a shrinking percentage of total US oil requirements, as our own oil production is increasing rapidly. Asia is importing more Gulf oil. China takes the lion’s share of Hormuz-transported oil, India another big chunk. The International Energy Agency forecasts that 90% of Persian Gulf oil will go to Asia within a generation. Why would such a dramatic shift in oil trade not affect geopolitics? Read more
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