Tag: United Nations
War without politics won’t work
Yesterday’s Brookings Institution event addressed the ongoing challenges faced by the US in Syria and Iraq. Will it Work? Examining the Coalition’s Iraq and Syria Strategy brought together Kenneth Pollack, Senior Fellow at Brookings, and Salman Shaikh, Director of the Brookings Doha Center, with Michael O’Hanlon, Co-Director at the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence.
Pollack drew attention to positive developments in Iraq in recent months. The increasingly sectarian Nouri al-Maliki has left office, replaced by a less toxic Prime Minister. A new political process is developing in Baghdad as rival groups compromise in the face of the threat of ISIS and pressure from the Obama administration. It’s not perfect, but it is certainly progress.
The situation in Sunni parts of Iraq remains fraught. Though the ISIS offensives have been slowed across the north, expelling the group from its newly captured territory will require Iraqi military offensives. Herein lies a problem. Military action cannot be disentangled from politics. Many Sunnis believe that Maliki has left the Iraqi Army as little more than a Shi’a militia. They are unlikely to view an Iraqi Army liberating force as legitimate. But raising regional Sunni forces (a so called National Guard) could have far-reaching implications for the future of Iraq – not only in terms of its future military, but also in terms of its political structure.
This raises the question of what the future Iraqi government will look like. Many Shi’ites want to return to a Maliki era without Maliki: a Shi’ite dominated government absent the former PM’s autocratic tendencies. Many Sunnis, whose tribal leaders will be especially important in expelling ISIS, will not accept this: their preference is a decentralized autonomous zone, similar to Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds themselves want still more autonomy – if not outright independence.
Complex political manoeuvres to further these objectives will accompany any military steps against ISIS. Discussion about the makeup of Iraq’s future government cannot be put off until after a military resolution has been achieved. Military resolution against ISIS must come from political resolution in Baghdad. Western policy towards driving out ISIS must therefore pay careful attention to the importance of Iraqi political and sectarian issues.
In Syria, the situation is more complex. While Salman Shaikh sees the achievement of the US in building a coalition of Arab states to take on ISIS as important, he notes that local communities on the ground in Syria have the best chance of effectively marginalizing ISIS and the ideology it espouses. There have already been local successes against the group. Six or seven thousand Syrians have been killed fighting against ISIS. Local opposition formations have managed to expel the jihadists from cities and towns across Syria.
The US coalition has overlooked the importance of such local groups. Opposition fighters complain of a lack of coordination between combatants on the ground and the coalition air campaign. As a result, ground forces have been unable to take advantage of opportunities opened by the air strikes.
More concerning is the anger felt by anti-regime groups at the failure to target Assad’s forces. Many see the airstrikes as directly aiding the regime. Drawing attention to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimations, which put the war’s death-toll at over 200,000 (the majority killed by regime actions), Shaikh suggests that the moral argument used by the US and its allies as part of the justification for attacking ISIS will fail if the focus falls only on this one group, while ignoring Assad’s crimes. This approach will not only lose the battle for hearts and minds on the ground in Syria, but will also threaten the coherence of the coalition itself. Many of the countries now dropping bombs on behalf of the US joined the alliance not just to take on ISIS, but to remove Assad and his regime.
There is, however, a greater threat to long-term success in Syria. Both Shaikh and Pollack drew attention to the importance of working to build a political process in Syria in order to eventually rebuild the country. As in Iraq, this process cannot be an afterthought, to be made up once a military solution has been achieved. Pollack believes that Obama’s plan to degrade and destroy ISIS has missed the point. ISIS is symptomatic of the underlying problems that have been engendered by three years of civil war: deal only with ISIS and a new group will take its place. Any solution must address Assad and include a conversation about the reconstruction of the country after his departure.
Done right, Pollack envisions Syrian reconstruction, led by the UN, undertaken by preexisting Syrian civil society groups, with the US providing security and the Gulf states providing money. Lessons may be learned from successes in Bosnia, and failings in Afghanistan and in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. State building through engaging with Syrian groups in a bottom-up approach will lay the framework for a political transition. Shaikh by contrast holds that national dialogue among the many actors in Syria is the necessary precursor to reconstruction. Through such a dialogue, Syrians should decide – and agree on – their goals for the country’s future. Encouraging and enabling this conversation will also be vital to find a way towards a lasting resolution.
Without a plan to address Assad and reconstruction, Shaikh envisions a conflict that will intensify, becoming an unpalatable contest between the regime and ISIS. The US is now involved in the Syria and Iraq conflicts. Doing nothing is no longer an option. The only question will be whether US policies will lead to a lasting solution.
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The next big thing in Syria
It’s been a few days since I’ve written about the importance of state-building in Syria, so maybe I can return to the theme. I’ve just come from a Brookings event at which Ken Pollack made an eloquent and well-argued plea in favor of what he termed nation-building, while Salman Shaikh underlined the importance of promoting a national dialogue in Syria, which is increasingly seen as important preparation for writing a new constitution, which of course is one of the vital tasks in state-building.
This took me a bit by surprise, as I thought the event was to focus on Ken’s most recent report Building a Better Syrian Opposition Army: How and Why. That proposes building over the next year or so a new, apolitical but opposition (to Bashar al Assad) army outside Syria. I’m on board that far. The report doesn’t say much about the state-building process. Some of what it says I can’t agree with:
Once the forces of a new Syrian army had secured a chunk of Syrian territory, they could declare themselves to be a new, provisional Syrian government.
Regular readers will understand that hell will freeze over before I advocate that an army declare itself a government. That is not a formula for good, or democratic, governance. Nor will it bring stability.
What Salman had to say made more sense to me. Syrians of all stripes need to talk with each other in an open and transparent national dialogue. Up to a point, that process worked well in Yemen, where the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) insisted on it and the UN made it happen. It was failure to implement its conclusions adequately that led to the current Houthi rebellion, not failure of the national dialogue itself.
Talking is not enough. What Syrians need to do is to define their goals. Salman, who is in active communication with many stripes of Syrians, gave some hints where they are coming out: they want security, rule of law, economic prosperity and better governance. None of that is surprising. Those are in fact four of the five end states in Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, the book of civilian doctrine for state-building whose preparation I supervised at USIP. The Syrians will discover the fifth end state–social well-being–soon enough. Or they will include it in one of the other categories.
There is nothing at all wrong with reinventing this wheel. People have to discover what they want for themselves, and it won’t always come out so neatly congruent with Guiding Principles. But it is vital that goals be defined. Otherwise, the state-building process has no direction and no way of measuring progress.
The question is whether this state-building process needs to wait until Bashar al Assad is gone. I think not. It needs to begin from the grass roots in liberated areas as soon as possible. The United States has been providing support to local councils and surrogate police forces in some liberated areas. That is all to the good.
But there are two problems. The Assad regime often bombs these areas to disrupt the process of creating alternatives to its own oppressive governing structures. That has to be stopped. It could be done by establishing a no-fly zone over the whole country or safe areas along the Turkish border and perhaps in other opposition-controlled areas. But let there be no doubt: such safe areas will come under attack, likely from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant as well as from the regime. We will have to be prepared to defend them, at least from air attacks (but likely also from artillery bombardment).
The second problem is preventing liberated areas from leading to de facto and eventually de jure partition. That will require they operate under the umbrella of something like Etilaf, the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC). So far, that has not generally been the case. Somehow or other, the breach has to be corrected. Ken proposes that the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General “hold sovereignty until a properly constituted new Syrian government is ready.” More or les that was done in Kosovo, but I can’t picture the Syrians putting up with it. Nor is it possible before Assad is deprived of Syria’s seat at the UN.
The international community I fear is as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution. Humanitarian assistance is usually subjected to serious coordination efforts. I trust that is the case in Syria. But reconstruction assistance rarely is. Donors like doing their own thing, often without regard to governing structures and international community coordination efforts that they in principle support. That has to be somehow avoided in Syria, which will be subjected to strong centrifugal forces of other sorts. The last thing we need in Syria is partition.
Despite President Obama’s reluctance, state-building in Syria is the next big thing. Stay tuned.
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Yemen and Afghanistan
What do Yemen and Afghanistan have in common? They have both reached power sharing agreements in the last couple of days. In Afghanistan, President-elect Ghani has agreed to share power with runner-up Abdullah, who is to be named “chief executive” operating under the President’s authority but sharing the President’s appointment and some other powers. In Yemen, the northern Houthi insurgents are slated to get a bigger slice of power in Sanaa, which they have invested, capturing key installations.
Power sharing is never easy, but sometimes necessary.
In Afghanistan, it will deprive the electorate of what it apparently voted for, which is Ashraf Ghani as president. At the same time, it will avoid a clash that might have become violent, or paralyzing. Abdullah and his supporters are convinced that only fraud could have caused his first-round lead to evaporate. They prevailed on the election commission not to release the final tally, which apparently had the margin as 55/45. Ghani, while insisting on the chief executive reporting to the president will be delegating implementation of government policy to someone he has been criticizing for many months.
In Yemen, the gap is even wider. The Houthi, who are Shia, are expected to share power with the Sunni Islah party. The rivalries among President Hadi, former President Saleh and various military warlords are intricate. Saleh notoriously described governing Yemen as dancing on the heads of snakes. Now Hadi will be dancing with partners on the heads of snakes. But there was no alternative: the surprising military success of the Houthi, who descended on Sanaa from their northern enclave, made it imperative to negotiate a power sharing arrangement, which UN envoy Jamal Benomar obligingly did.
In Ghani’s case, we know in surprising detail what he will try to accomplish. He literally wrote the book on Fixing Failed States. There he put rule of law, a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence and administrative control at the top of the list. Next comes sound management of public finances (he is a former finance minister) and investments in human capital (he is also a former chancellor of Kabul University). Social policy, market formation, management of public assets and effective public borrowing complete his “framework for rebuilding a fractured world.” While I imagine as president Ghani will concentrate his own efforts on the justice and security priorities, he will be an exigent taskmaster in the other areas as well.
No Houthis are writing textbooks in English to my knowledge. The best guidance we have on what is supposed to happen in Yemen is the detailed power sharing agreement itself, which sets out specific deadlines and a detailed process for naming a new, more inclusive, government. It also dictates a series of priority economic, social and electoral reforms as well as security arrangements in Sanaa and other areas of Houthi military activity. The agreement is even more specific than Ghani’s book, which as a generally applicable text needed to maintain a higher level of abstraction. But already the Houthis are said to have refused to sign the annex providing for their own disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.
So what are the odds that these agreements will be implemented as written and hold past the next six months or so? Not good. Experience suggests that they will be renegotiated, perhaps repeatedly. But that is the good news. Their purpose is to avoid or end violence. So long as the protagonists are engaged in trying to ensure implementation of an agreement by peaceful means, we should be satisfied that the agreements are serving their main purpose. And in Africa it has been shown that peaceful outcomes after elections correlate not with successful power sharing but rather with repeated renegotiation of power sharing agreements!
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The fate of the displaced
After more than three years of fighting, the Syrian civil war shows little sign of abating. Meanwhile there has been an intensification of the humanitarian crisis. The rise of the phenomenally violent Islamic State, which has spread from its de facto capital in Raqqa, displacing Syrians previously inclined to remain in spite of the war, has in part contributed to the problems. An increase in the willingness of the government to use tactics which indiscriminately target the Syrian population such as barrel bombing, and the continued use of certain types of chemical weapons, has further added to the number of Syrians seeking refuge. This ongoing displacement has enormous implications not only for the future of Syria, but also for neighboring countries currently playing host to refugees.
Seeking to address some of the issues the region is facing, Carol Batchelor, the Turkey representative in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Brian Hansford, the UNHCR spokesperson in Washington DC, and Andrew Tabler, senior fellow in the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute, Tuesday joined Elizabeth Ferris, the co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement in a discussion on Syrian Displacement: Views from the Region.
Opening the dialogue, Brian Hansford noted the sheer number of Syrian refugees now registered by the UNHCR. As of August 29, that figure stood in excess of three million, though Hansford stressed that this does not account for those internally displaced within Syria, or for those who have crossed borders but failed to register. Indeed, those Syrians who are now registered often report having been displaced within the country multiple times before attempting to cross the border. He also drew attention to the number of children – making up more than half of the refugees – now in camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.
Carol Batchelor picked up on the significance of the number children in refugee camps, noting that this is exerting a toll on the education of a generation of Syrian children. The situation is complicated further in Turkey where the lack of a common language between host and hosted has led to educational difficulties. In some cases children have now missed up to four years of schooling. This is important when considering the long term strategies for rebuilding Syria. If its people are to succeed in reconstruction then they must be furnished with skills and opportunities so as to be empowered to rise to the challenges of rebuilding a state.
Batchelor also warned of the dangers that have arisen as the humanitarian crisis has become more protracted. While she praised the generosity of the Turkish state in its efforts to accommodate refugees, she expressed concern that little has been done to transition from short term, reactive strategies focussing on the emergency encampments set up at the onset of the crisis, to a longer term strategy. As the situation stands, the psychological well-being of the refugees is suffering after three years of living in tents. If this is not addressed there may well be implications both for short-term stability and for longer term rebuilding efforts.
For Andrew Tabler the primary concern lies not with the refugees inside of the camps, who are relatively well cared for despite their growing numbers. Instead he drew attention to those refugees who are unregistered and unaccounted for, whom he believes represent a two-fold security concern. On the one hand there is concern for these displaced persons’ personal security and well-being, which without support from the UN and NGOs may become vulnerable. On the other hand there is the more general security concern that these unaccounted refugees could become radicalized or facilitate attacks and unrest in host nations.
The panelists were all in agreement that there is no end in sight, either for the war or for the displaced Syrians. Tabler estimated the crisis could easily continue for five years, with full settlement taking a decade or more.
But there was disagreement as to how Syria might one day be reconstructed. Though Tabler claimed that it was beyond Syrians themselves to put the pieces back together, both Batchelor and Hansford stressed that the refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan do not see themselves staying in their host countries indefinitely: generally they want to return, and to play a role in shaping the country’s future once it is safe enough to do so. It is now important for the UN and the international community to ensure that these refugees are empowered so when the time comes they are able to realize this future.
Listen to the event here.
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Peace after Gaza?
In the aftermath of the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, the question on everyone’s mind is what comes next. Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs of the United Nations, joined Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, in a discussion on Peace After Gaza: A New Framwork for a Changing Landscape.
The seven week conflict devastated the Gaza Strip, while consolidating Hamas popularity and causing support for the Palestinian Authority to wane. The question now is whether the change in the Palestinian political sphere will pave a way for peace or hinder the peace process.
Fayyad emphasized there is a growing number of voices calling for immediate peace talks. He is hesistant because there have not been adequate preperations on either side for a constructive dialogue. There must be a way to address the factions and political pluralism within the Palestinian political environment. In order for there to be peace, there must be reconciliation between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
Fayyad does not believe in rushing back into negotiations. Critical adjustments must be made on the Palestinian side first. On the one hand, there is the issue of the representativeness of organisations claiming to speak for Palestinians. The de jure power of representatation lies with the Palestine Libertion Organization – but this has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians, especially in the wake of the recent land-grab by the Israeli government in Bethlehem. This occurred in spite of the PLO’s cooperation and collaboration in intelligence gathering.
On the other hand, factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad hold de facto legitimacy with large swathes of the population (opinion polls suggest a surge of support for Hamas in Gaza in the wake of last month’s conflict). These groups do not recognize the commitments of the Oslo accords, whereas the PLO does. If any sense is to be made of these disparate positions in the name of negotiating both with the Israelis and the world at large, an intra-Palestinian dialogue must first occur.
According to Fayyad, such a dialogue must include a serious discussion on building a unified leadership framework in which a forum of factions might convene in order to come to a common view of how to proceed as a whole. Without such a forum the Palestinian Authority will struggle to regain legitimacy in the eyes of the people of Palestine – removing peace negotiations further and further from the will of the people it claims to represent.
While Fayyad focused on disunity within the the Palestinian parties he also noted the lack of balance between the occupied (Palestine) and occupier (Israel) in terms of leverage in the peace process.
Feltman acknowleged that the United Nations is still stuck on the “old paradigm” as it still supports Palestinian unity in accordance with PLO commitments to the Oslo Accords of 1993. The two main stipulations included recognition by the PLO of Israel’s right to exist as well as the renunciation of violence. While the UN’s immediate focus is on the reconstrution of Gaza and addressing humanitarian needs, Feltman noted it will take serious and real commitment from both sides this time around to return a sense of normalcy. Fayyad added that Oslo was not meant to be an open ended process and future negotiations should come with clear time-frames for completion that must be adhered to.
There is a growing push from Israelis and Palestinians to deviate from recurring patterns. Fayyad reiterated the need to set an end date for the occupation and work backwards from there, but PLO weakness militates against this course of action. While the question was raised of going to the Security Council, Fayyad noted the inevitability of a veto.
Upcoming months will determine whether either side is serious about a long-term solution. Fayyad and Feltman both called for a strong and unified Palestine that can build lasting solutions in partnership with Israel and the United Nations.
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Wrong lessons learned
ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. It has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.
Thus President Obama misdiagnosed the problem in last night’s rallying cry for a military effort to degrade and destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
ISIL is certainly an organization that uses terrorist means, but it is also more than that. It now controls and even governs a swath of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq populated by millions of people. While it slaughters its enemies with ferocity, it is wrong to say it has no other vision. Its vision is the destruction of the states of the Iraqi and Levantine states (at the least Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Israel and Palestine), as well as the recreation of a caliphate governed under its peculiarly harsh notion of sharia.
This misdiagnosis is leading President Obama to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush, in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to avoid them. The United States won the wars in it fought in those two countries in 2002 and 2003 respectively. What it lost was the post-war transitions, for which it did little to prepare.
In Afghanistan, the intention was to “kill Al Qaeda and get out,” as Republican advisor Phil Merrill told me at the time. He found ludicrous the notion that we would worry about how justice is administered after we had succeeded. Twelve years later, it is clear that the Taliban took advantage of this failure to re-establish itself, especially in the eastern and southern provinces, while Al Qaeda took refuge in Pakistan.
In Iraq, General Tommy Franks, the American military commander of the invasion, refused to plan for “rear area security,” which is the military euphemism for law and order in the areas liberated from the enemy. The planning for civilian administration, one of three pillars of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was weak to non-existent. ORHA floundered, then got displaced by Gerry Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, which managed to create the conditions for the Sunni insurgency by disbanding the Iraqi army and barring many Ba’athists from senior positions.
ISIL is a direct descendant of that insurgency. It began its notorious existence as Al Qaeda in Iraq and played a major role in the Iraq civil war of 2006/7. The American counter-insurgency campaign against it was at least partially successful with the support of Sunni tribesmen, but ISIL rose from the ashes in the last few years partly due to the war in Syria and partly due to Nouri al Maliki’s exclusion of Sunnis from real power (not from positions–there were as many Sunnis or more in his governments than in the current one Secretary Kerry has labeled “inclusive”). There is no reason to believe ISIL won’t revive again, unless there are states in Syria and Iraq that have legitimacy with their Sunni populations.
The failure of the President to take into account the requirements and costs of post-war transition once ISIL is defeated in Iraq and Syria means that he is underestimating the risks of his decision to go to war. The costs need not all be American, and they don’t necessarily require American troops. But there has to be a plan for the UN, Arab League, EU and others to support state-building once the anti-ISIL war is won.
The notion that we can kill ISIL and get out, without any attention to what follows, is the same mistake George H.W. Bush made in Somalia (with the result that we are still fighting there more than 25 years later), Bill Clinton would have liked to make in Bosnia (but fortunately was convinced that he could not withdraw US troops within a year), and George W. Bush made in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won’t happen. We’ll get stuck with bills and tasks that we might have preferred to avoid, and for which we fail to prepare.
PS: I discussed some of these issues on WSJ Live this morning:
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