Tag: United Nations
Producing more enemies than you can kill
No doubt one of the few international issues President Obama will highlight in tonight’s State of the Union speech is the threat of international terrorists associated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. He will cite the American military response in Iraq and Syria as vital to our national interests and claim we are making progress, at least in Iraq.
He is unlikely to acknowledge that the problem is spreading and getting worse. In Libya, there are two parliaments and two governments, one of which has ample extremist backing. In Yemen, rebels have laid siege to the government the Washington relies on for cooperation against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram is wrecking havoc. In Syria, moderates have lost territory and extremists have gained. Taliban violence is up in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Fourteen years ago when the World Trade Center was attacked in New York City Al Qaeda amounted to a few hundred militants hiding out mainly in Afghanistan, with small clandestine cells in Europe and the US. Now estimates of the number of extremists change so rapidly it is hard to know which to cite, but there are surely more than 100 times as many actively engaged in extremist Islamist campaigns or recruitment efforts in close to a dozen countries, including (in addition to the ones cited above) Somalia, Egypt, Niger, Mali, Algeria, Palestine and Tunisia. Counting the numbers of sympathizers in Europe, Russia and the United States is just impossible.
The long war against Islamist extremism is not going well. It can’t, because we are fighting what amounts to an insurgency against the existing state system principally with military means. Drones and air strikes are killing lots of militants, and I am even prepared to believe that the collateral damage to innocents is minimized, whatever that means. But extremist recruitment is more than keeping up with extremist losses. We are making more enemies than we are killing. Insurgencies thrive on that.
The Obama administration is apparently prepared to make things worse, as it now leans towards supporting UN and Russian peace initiatives in Syria that are premised on allowing Bashar al Asad to stay in power. The Islamic State will welcome that, as it will push relative moderates in their direction and weaken the prospects for a democratic transition. Bashar has shown no inclination to fight ISIS and will continue to focus his regime’s efforts against democracy advocates.
President Obama knows what it takes to shrink extremist appeal: states that protect their populations with rule of law and govern inclusively and transparently. This is the opposite of what Bashar al Asad, and his father, have done. But President Obama has no confidence the US or anyone in the international community can build such states in a matter of months or even years. So he does what comes naturally to those whose strongest available means is military power: he uses it to achieve short-term objectives, knowing that its use is counter-productive in the longer term.
But producing more enemies than you can kill is not a strategy that works forever. The Union is recovering from a devastating economic crisis and can now afford to take a fresh look at its foreign policy priorities. I’ll be with the President when he calls tonight for completion of the big new trade and investment agreement with Europe (TTIP) and its counterpart in the Pacific (TTP). These are good things that can find support on both sides of the aisle, among Democrats and Republicans.
I’ll groan when he calls for a new Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) but says little or nothing about building the kind of states in the Greater Middle East that are needed to immunize the region against extremism. Support for restoration of autocracy in Egypt and for Gulf monarchies is not a policy that will counter extremism. We are guaranteeing that things are going to get worse before they get better.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Scraping the bottom of the barrel
With the likes of Josh Landis predicting more of the same (fragmentation, radicalization, impoverishment, displacement) in Syria, it would be more daring than I am to predict improvement. But it is still interesting to ask what could possibly make a difference and turn things in a more positive direction?
There are two propositions on the table at the moment.
One is the UN-proposed “freeze” for Aleppo. This is intended to be more than a ceasefire. It would freeze the warring forces in place, thus preventing them from simply being redeployed to fight elsewhere, as well as initiate local governance on a cooperative basis between the opposition and the regime. Monitoring would initially have to be local, with international observers deployed in due course. In the absence of effective monitoring, the regime would be likely to use any such freeze to redeploy its forces (including intelligence cadres and paramilitaries) to the south, where the opposition is making headway. It is much harder for the opposition to follow suit, because its fighters generally focus on their home areas and its supply and logistical support is far less developed.
The second proposition is a Russian proposal for intra-Syrian dialogue. This will supposedly convene January 26-28 on the basis of the June 2012 Geneva communique, which calls for an interim governing body with full executive powers. Moscow, Tehran and the Syrian regime view this formula as allowing Bashar al Assad to remain in place and preside over a “national unity” government. The opposition and Washington say it means Bashar has to exit, or at least give up all executive power (which if implemented would mean that he would consequently exit sooner rather than later). There is no sign that this difference of interpretation has been bridged.
Separately, neither of these propositions seems likely to succeed. The Americans and Europeans are allowing both to move along, faute de mieux. The question is whether together they might be more likely to produce some sort of positive outcome.
I’m not seeing it yet. The missing ingredient is enforcement. Only if and when the international community gets together behind a UN Security Council resolution that makes it clear Bashar will suffer irreparable damage to his hold on power will he be willing to countenance a serious ceasefire in Aleppo that blocks him from redeploying his forces. This would require the Americans to be prepared to execute air strikes if there is a violation. As for creation of an interim governing body with full executive powers, enforcement would rely heavily on Russian willingness to cut Bashar’s military and financial supply lines if he transgresses. Putin has given no indication he is prepared to do that. Even if he were, Iranian support might keep Bashar afloat.
This brings us back to the inevitable: there is no diplomatic solution in Syria in the current military situation unless Washington and Moscow come to terms and agree on one, including a mutual commitment to enforcement. They certainly have a common strategic interest in a negotiated settlement. Both capitals want the Islamic State and Jabhat Nusra, the main jihadi extremist organizations, defeated. They differ mainly on whether Bashar al Assad is a bulwark against the jihadis or an important cause of their presence.
Richard Gowan suggests there might be room for the US and Russia to reach a “dodgy” grand bargain based on a trade-off between Ukraine and Syria: Moscow would temper its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine (and get some sanctions relief) in exchange for Washington backing off its demand for Bashar to step down. The trouble with this idea is that Washington has already backed off, because it gives priority to fighting the Islamic State. It might be more likely the other way around: Moscow could back off support for Asad and temper support for separatism in Ukraine in return for Washington allowing some sanctions relief.
Like Russia, Iran props up Asad because it sees him as an ally against Sunni extremism, but Tehran has also needed Asad as a reliable link in the “resistance” chain that it has forged with Hizbollah and Hamas. There is no sign Iran is prepared to abandon Damascus. Even under sanctions and with lower oil prices, Tehran is providing ample men, weapons and financing. A nuclear deal this year would make that easier to sustain, as multilateral sanctions are at least partially lifted.
Freeze, intra-Syrian dialogue, grand bargain: we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. There may be something there that will work, but the odds are not good.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Even good things won’t make 2015 a good year
Mark Leon Goldberg wrote just before Christmas that 2015 might be one of those rare years that shakes up the international system, he thought for the better. His hopes are based on
- adoption next September of the Sustainable Development Goals and
- conclusion of a treaty on climate change before the end of the year.
I’m not optimistic, even if both these hopes are realized.
Mark is correct that the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, have been a significant success. But unfortunately that is unlikely to be repeated with the follow-on Sustainable Development Goals. Success has encouraged overreach. The MDGs were restrained and reachable. There were only eight of them:
The current draft of the SDGs is ridiculously over-ambitious and unrealistic. They start with “end poverty in all its forms everywhere.” They repeat that sweeping over-ambition for hunger, health, education, gender equality, water, energy, economic growth, employment, infrastructure, inequality (within and between countries), cities, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, justice and sustainable development. Seventeen goals in all. This is a catalog of the developed world’s current concerns, not a set of achievable goals for countries and organizations with limited capacity and even more limited resources.
Unless a real effort is made to prune and prioritize, the SDGs risk irrelevance or worse. There is certainly no risk they will be achieved if they remain in their current formulation. A real effort should be made in the next few months to pare them back, both in number and ambition. A tighter and shorter set of goals would bode much better for implementation.
I too am optimistic about a climate change treaty concluded in 2015. But unfortunately there is no hope it will be strong enough to avoid truly serious impacts of global warming. We are well on our way to breaching the 2 degrees centigrade rise over pre-industrial levels that is generally regarded as a benchmark, albeit an arbitrary one, signalling serious problems due to irreversible melting of major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The way I read this World Bank report, we are likely to double that figure before the end of the century. You have to believe that countries will all meet their current pledges and tight new ones will be made in order to avoid it.
I’m not a climate disaster monger. But I do have a long memory. What I remember is that the “greenhouse effect” (which is what causes the fossil fuel contribution to global warming) was already an issue at the 1972 (first) UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. I was a young staffer on the secretariat and amazed that human activity could affect the entire planet. Our collective failure to do anything serious about it in the more than forty years since suggests that we will need some real disasters before acting. New York City is building up its coastal defenses, in response to the massive flooding that occurred due to Hurricane Sandy, and other big cities have invested heavily (London has floodgates, Venice is getting them). The Netherlands has its dikes. But much of Asia is at serious risk, as are lots of islands. Bangladesh, Mauritius and Vietnam can’t afford the defenses that New York and the Dutch build.
We’ve likely already seen some of the disasters and their consequences. Climate variation caused heightened conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in Darfur and drought in Syria, where an influx of farmers into urban areas was contributed to the rebellion against Bashar al Assad. We are going to see a lot more such climate-induced violent conflicts as competition for resources–especially water–grows and productive land area shrinks. The United Arab Emirates can afford to desalinate sea water. Egypt much less so, but its needs will soon exceed what the Nile will provide.
So no, I am not sanguine. Even good things won’t make 2015 a good year.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Falling off the wagon
I am grateful to Davide Denti and Franklin DeVrieze for this tweet on Saturday:
Davide Denti retweeted
#Russia no longer supports European perspective for#BiH. See footnote in report Peace Implementation Council. Sad. http://www.ohr.int/pic/default.asp?content_id=48910 …
FranklinDeVrieze It is sad, but also good, to have it in writing. Davide adds this:
@FranklinDVrieze@MsElleSandberg@BogdanovskiA and they had the same objection few weeks ago @ UN on the renewal of EUFOR Althea (abstained)
This is no footnote. It is an important development that has long been in the making. Russia has sometimes in the past vacillated between outright support for specific NATO and EU goals in the Balkans (during Yeltsin’s time Russian troops served under US command in Bosnia) and competition (Russian troops seizing Pristina airport). Most of the time it has stood aside and watched while Washington and Brussels pushed Euro-Atlantic integration. It has now gone over to outright hostility.
This has serious implications, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina but possibly also in Serbia. Moscow, which has annexed Crimea and is seeking to carve out a Republika Srpska-like, semi-sovereign entity in eastern Ukraine, has long coddled and financed Milorad Dodik, supporting his maximalist positions.
Now we can expect the Russians to go further in challenging EU efforts to promote reform, which Brussels is trying to intensify. We should also anticipate that Russia may veto the next renewal of the EUFOR Althea peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, or try to extract a price for not doing so. Moscow is anxious to show it is an indispensable superpower, just like the US. Putin figures the best way to prove that is to block what others want to do.
Dodik will be a willing ally to Moscow. He has no interest in EU-promoted reforms, which would likely lead to transparency and accountability contrary to his interests. I am told that at the working level Republika Srpska officials often do cooperate with the Bosnian government in Sarajevo when it comes to technical issues associated with preparing the country for its European obligations. I have my doubts that will continue.
Serbia’s attitude is more uncertain. Moscow is actively courting Belgrade,which remained loyal to the Russian-sponsored South Stream natural gas pipeline up until the day President Putin killed it, despite EU pressure to conform to Brussels’ antagonism to the project. Russians own a large part of the Serbian energy sector. Military cooperation and religious ties are strong. Belgrade loves to portray itself as “non-aligned,” a notion most Americans will have trouble fathoming in the post-Cold War world. In the Serbian lexicon, it no longer means equidistance between two superpower blocks but rather hostility to NATO and the EU. But the political leadership in Belgrade is at least nominally far more committed to EU accession, which it is now negotiating, than Dodik is.
Few in the US will get worked up about this. The Balkans have returned to oblivion in Washington, where everyone would like to be thinking about the Asia Pacific but many find themselves preoccupied with the Middle East. If Serbia wants to volunteer to serve as a Russian satellite, the issue won’t rise above the Deputy Assistant Secretary level in the State Department, where they are likely to c0nclude that little more than continuing to chant about a Euro-Atlantic future for the Balkans can be done about it. Nor is Brussels likely to get too agitated either. Heightening the prospects for EU enlargement is just not something any major players there want these days.
I don’t have any doubt about whether a European perspective for all the Balkans is a good idea. It is the opportunity of a generation. The other countries of the Balkans see it that way and are preparing accordingly. But Bosnia and Serbia could fall off the wagon, with a push from Moscow. It’s their loss if they do.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Lessons learned and forgotten
Roy Gutman, currently serving with distinction in Istanbul as McClatchy bureau chief for the Middle East, has kindly given me permission to publish this longer than usual post. Read and weep.
Until recently, few Americans had even heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). But a new poll just out shows that 70 per cent of the population view ISIS as the number one threat to the United States. From nothing to 70 per cent in six months. What’s behind the phenomenon of the Islamic State? Who’s to blame? What do you do about it?
My premise is that the Islamic State did not spring from nowhere. It is the product of five wars over 35 years, three of which took place in Afghanistan; there was one long war in Iraq and we’re now three years into war in Syria. A major contributor to its rise is us, the United States, and how we’ve dealt with those wars.
We need to go back 25 years to 1989. That astonishing year began with the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in February, and ended with the opening of the Berlin Wall and the Czech revolution. The Soviet Empire collapsed, and a new era began with one superpower and no defined order about how to handle crisis. What we’ve seen since then is a good deal of disorder and, with some notable exceptions, flawed responses to it. Possibly it’s because many of the crises occurred in countries that had been in the Russian orbit or non-aligned.
Afghanistan ushered in the post-cold war era, and the US response there set a pattern. The crisis is now in its 35th year. It has produced not just tragedy and threat, indeed radical modern Islam got its start there — but lessons as well. In my book, now out in a second edition (How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan), I documented well over 50 policy decisions that led to the continuing crisis. I’ll choose just 10 lessons that should have been learned. They weren’t, as we are seeing in Syria today.
Ten lessons Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
The Yazidi plight
On Tuesday, the Wilson Center hosted a discussion with Vian Dakhil, the only Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament. Halah Esfandiari, Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, moderated.
Dakhil received international attention in August, when she delivered a speech highlighting the plight of the Yazidis at the hands of Da’ish in the Sinjar area of Nineveh Province. The high profile siege of thousands of refugees sheltering on Mount Sinjar was ultimately broken by Kurdish forces from Syria (YPG) and Turkey (PKK). However, less well reported has been the fate of the Yazidis in the months since.
Dakhil was quick to note that there are still Yazidi refugees on the mountain. She estimates that there are as many as 1,200 families (6,000-7,000 individuals) encamped there. Though Da’ish was driven back, its forces make the surrounding lands too dangerous for land-based evacuation. Throughout the fall, the Iraqi armed forces have worked to airlift families off the mountain. Though Dakhil was quick to praise these efforts as well intended, she notes they are still woefully inadequate: only four helicopters have been spared for the operation. On any given evacuation mission, only around 25 individuals can be flown out.
Though Dakhil made no mention of it during the discussion, she has had first-hand experience of the shortcomings of the airlift mission. In August, she was on board a rescue helicopter when it crashed after being overloaded with refugees.
Meanwhile, for those thousands of Yazidis still on the mountain, the situation is desperate. As winter closes in, temperatures will plummet and several inches of freezing rain will fall. While grateful to the international community for what aid and supplies it has provided, Dakhil does not believe enough has been done to relieve the refugees. She is particularly critical of the quality of tents provided by UNHCR. Last month, three children died when a tent caught fire. Tragedies such as this are not isolated incidents. More supplies, of better quality, are needed.
The plight of Yazidi women is also of the utmost importance. Dakhil estimates that upwards of 5,000 kidnapped women and girls are still held by Da’ish. Yazidi women are especially targeted for kidnap and sale, as the jihadists see Yazidis as kuffar (infidels) on account of their reverence for the angel Melek Taus (whose perceived similarities to the Islamic and Christian devil has contributed to centuries of persecution). Dakhil‘s trips around the world have in part been to raise awareness for these women.
Off the mountain and away from Da’ish, half a million Yazidis (a majority of the Yazidi population) are in refugee camps in and around Iraqi Kurdistan. More help is needed, desperately. In the camps, there is one bathroom for 18 families; one shower for 50 families. And Yazidi families are large. With winter closing in, and hundreds of thousands living in unsanitary conditions, the humanitarian crisis will worsen. Dakhil wishes to do all she can to avert such a crisis, and hopes that the international coalition will direct as much energy into helping the victims of Da’ish as they do when bombing it.
For the US, Dakhil‘s request for help is specific. Earlier this year she formally requested US assistance at the American Embassy in Baghdad, but she also wants the US to use its global influence – especially in the UN and the UN Security Council – to try to bring about more international commitment to providing humanitarian aid. She has seen first hand that the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, though sympathetic, are lacking resources and are at risk of being overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis.
Earlier this year, Da’ish attempted genocide of the Yazidis. Though they failed, the plight of this tiny people remains dire. Dakhil‘s work to protect and save her constituents, despite personal setbacks and injuries, shows her devotion as an MP at a time politicians around the world have been widely criticized.
RSS - Posts
