Tag: United Nations
Has Obama done right on Afghanistan?
Michael Cohen and I had a go-round on Bloggingheads about Afghanistan:
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Marvel the Syrians!
From Hama, yesterday:
You’ve got to admire the fortitude and organizational capability of the Syrians. Josh Landis has the most complete coverage I’ve seen of both the “Friday of the Children of Freedom” and the opposition conclave Wednesday and Thursday in Antalya, Turkey.
The demonstrators inside Syria managed to turn out in good numbers to protest the torture and murder by security forces of a 13-year-old boy as well as other atrocities against children, despite shut-down of a large part of the internet and cell phone systems. Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s two biggest cities, are still not turning out big numbers, but yesterday’s demonstrations were widespread and energetic according to the reports that have leaked out. Several dozen people appear to have been killed.
The opposition meeting in Antalya that ended Thursday not only reached agreement on a statement (not yet available in its entirety) but also elected an executive board. So far as I can tell, the program focuses on getting rid of Bashar al Assad in favor of his vice president and holding free and fair elections within a year. There is talk as well of maintaining separation of state and religion as well as Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity (Kurdish representation in Antalya was strong, so this is significant). The Washington Post reported:
The statement also called for the creation of a democratic, secular Syrian state, in which freedom of worship would be guaranteed, but religion would play no role, and the rights of the country’s minorities would be respected.
All of this is fine, but of course the big problem is the regime’s determination to hold on to power. My understanding is that the protesters are not promising amnesty to Bashar al Assad, who therefore has a choice of using maximum repression to stay in power or expatriating himself to some safe haven. All indicators are that he is determined to hold on.
The protesters now have the challenge of maintaining nonviolent discipline and unity while under enormous pressure from the security forces. They also need eventually to spread their mass mobilization efforts into the centers of Damascus and Aleppo. Only when some of the security forces begin to hesitate–when they refuse to fire on protesters or even join them–will the revolution in Syria begin to see the fruits of its labors. Connecting with the army, some units of which are believed to be less committed to Bashar al Assad than others, needs to be a priority objective. This is likely to happen earlier in the provinces than in the major cities, where Assad will station the most loyal troops.
The international community is still proving ineffective on Syria. No UN Security Council resolution has emerged, despite expectations earlier in the week. Washington is sounding a bit more stentorian, but nevertheless holding on to the slim hope that Assad will institute reforms. The Wall Street Journal had a good article Friday detailing Obama Administration efforts to win Assad over to a settlement with Israel and a break with Hizbollah, Hamas and Iran. The odds of that now seem vanishingly small, but I suppose someone in the White House (and in Senator Kerry’s office) may still harbor hopes.
The die is cast. Either Assad will succeed, as his father did, in repressing the protests with state violence or he will have to yield to what is beginning to look like a more or less united, determined and focused revolution.
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Embracing Solomon’s baby
As the Americans prepare to leave Iraq, most of the journalistic focus–insofar as it exists at all–is on the security situation there, which is far from completely calm. But that is not what most people who know Iraq well are most concerned about. They worry mainly about Kurdish-Arab disputes, which take many forms: quarrels about distribution of oil revenue, the authority of Baghdad’s government and courts, the degree of Kurdish control over oil development and the extent of the territory under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government, a sub-national entity with a wide degree of autonomy. It is all inter-connected. Whichever one you start with, you’ll end up discussing the others in due course.
Sean Kane at the United States Institute of Peace has chosen to take up Iraq’s “disputed territories,” arguably the toughest of the Arab-Kurdish issues, first. In a long and detailed disquisition, he demonstrates assiduously that quite a few of the territorial disputes are resolvable on the basis of voting patterns since 2005 as well as historical/cultural antecedents. The report will be presented and discussed at a webcast event this morning featuring also Emma Sky and Joost Hiltermann. One unusual feature of the report is the posting online of several Iraqi reactions to it. They make interesting reading.
Having disposed of some of the “easier” problems, Sean comes to the difficult core issue: Solomon’s baby in this context is Kirkuk, which is the object of Arab, Kurdish and Turkomen ambitions that appear irreconcilable. Here he proposes that either the entire province be given a “special” status (allowed under the Iraqi constitution) and shared between Erbil and Baghdad, or that much of the province be divided between the two and only Kirkuk City become a “common” city. These solutions bear a distinct resemblance to the so far successful effort to share the town and county (opstina) of Brcko in Bosnia between the two constituent entities of the Bosnian state. In practice, this has meant a special status now recognized in the Bosnian constitution. Something like this for either all of Kirkuk province or the town of Kirkuk would allow both sides to claim victory and neither to enjoy all of the spoils. In due course, the solution might be ratified, along with mutually agreed divisions of territory, in a referendum provided for in the Iraqi constitution.
All of this is eminently reasonable and notably helpful. Where things get more problematic is in drawing conclusions for American policy. There is the great temptation to condition American security assistance to the Kurds and Arabs on their respective good behavior with regard to their dispute. On some level, this will surely be the case: the United States will not want its materiel deployed in an intra-Iraqi dispute and will likely tie some strings to the relevant agreements to try to prevent that from happening. But it would be hard for the U.S. to yank its training of the Iraqi army, navy or air force in response to developments between Erbil and Baghdad. Washington sees that training–and the ample armament that goes with it–as vital to Iraq’s regional role, especially vis-a-vis Tehran. Washington is not going to cut off its nose to spite its face, or throw Baghdad into Tehran’s arms.
More promising is the positive incentive approach Emma Sky says has been used in the past to encourage peshmerga integration. She has proposed in the same paper (also published by USIP) conflict resolution, management and prevention mechanisms that merit more attention than they have so far gotten. As Emma knows better than most civilians, wishful thinking is not a plan.
But that does not mean the internationals necessarily need to keep their hands on this problem either–it could be that leaving the Kurds and Arabs to manage it themselves is not only feasible but preferable. What I haven’t seen is a careful, independent assessment of the different options. The U.S., UN and Iraqis need to get their heads together sooner rather than later on how to handle Arab-Kurdish disputes, especially as resistance to a continuing U.S. troop presence after the end of this year seems to be strengthening.
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Where are the civilians when we need them?
Our friends at the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (thank you David Harland!) have taken a hard look at a long list of limits to international civilian capacity in an e-discussion conducted by the International Stabilization and Peacebuilding Initiative over the past month (Summary of Responses – e-Discussion – UN Review of Intl Civ Cap):
- difficulties recruiting civilians,
- competition with the private sector,
- slow recruitment times, links among training,
- rostering and recruitment,
- vague work descriptions,
- generalized competencies,
- diversity of organizational cultures, values and visions,
- lagging national (host country) capacity development,
- differences between international and national strategies,
- getting the right people for the right jobs,
- expertise gaps, relevance of training
- and gender balance.
They’ve also looked, less successfully, at planning processes for development of civilian capacities and at bottlenecks that impede deployment: bureaucratic obstacles, insecurity in conflict zones, lengthy recruitment times and civilian logistics limitations.
Perhaps the most innovative part is on interoperability from the UN perspective, where it is clear that despite the obstacles there is sometimes real benefit to the UN drawing on others’ capacities. The natural outcome of this discussion is a series of recommendations for more coordination and coordination bodies, a subject that I confess leaves me cold. I think what all of us need are agreed strategic endstates and frameworks rather than undirected coordination meetings.
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