Tag: Yemen
Nation-building isn’t a four letter word
Donald Trump yesterday followed in a long tradition of American presidential candidates and presidents who have forsworn nation-building.
George H. W. Bush said he was sending the marines to Somalia in 1992 to restore order and enable feeding the population. When Washington discovered that we couldn’t get out without leaving chaos behind, we turned the nation-building over to a UN mission (run by a US Navy Admiral) that failed. We are still fighting insurgent terrorists in Somalia.
Bill Clinton said in 1995 we would send US troops to a NATO mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina for only a year, to oversee implementation of only the military aspects of the Dayton peace agreements. He discovered the obstacles to peace implementation didn’t divide neatly into civilian and military components. US troops stayed for almost 10 years and some still remain. They likewise have stayed in Kosovo much longer than initially projected. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, their presence has had positive effects.
George W. Bush declared during the 2000 election campaign that US troops don’t do nation-building. But once he had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq he discovered that we couldn’t get the troops out without it. He then launched the two biggest and most expensive nation-building efforts since the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Barack Obama has been more disciplined than his predecessors: he pulled US troops out of Iraq almost completely (in accordance with an agreement and timetable negotiated and signed by his predecessor) and has tried to get them out of Afghanistan. The negative consequences of failure to build an inclusive state in Iraq, including Prime Minister Maliki’s turn to sectarianism and the rise of a Sunni insurgency, are documented in the Washington Post this morning. The consequences in Afghanistan are all too obvious: the Taliban are back in force and the Islamic State is trying to gain traction. Obama has said that one of his worst mistakes was failing to provide adequate assistance to Libya after the fall of Qaddafi.
When Trump yesterday declared an end to nation-building, he was repeating what his predecessors have said, and mostly regretted. The American people are reluctant to govern others, even if they are quick to tell others how to govern. Trump followed that tradition too, by announcing that he would somehow make sure that lesbians, gays, transgender and queer people are treated with respect abroad and honor killings stopped.
It is of course unfair to blame all the consequences of reluctance to do nation-building on American presidents.
First, because they are reflecting the real preferences of their constituents. Americans want their resources expended at home, not abroad. Many believe that 25% of the Federal budget is spent on foreign aid, even though the actual figure is less than 1%. If I thought one-quarter of my tax money was going overseas, I would want foreign aid cut too.
Second, because the task they are trying to avoid really is difficult and expensive. It is properly called state-building rather than nation-building, a term presidents prefer because it sounds pejorative. But what we needed in Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya is a legitimate organization that could govern on a particular territory. The people on that territory might or might not constitute a “nation.”
Given what we know about terrorist groups and their affinity for weak or fragile states that cannot fully control their territory, state-building is not optional. Without it, post-war Syria or Yemen will, like post-war Iraq and Afghanistan, provide haven to people who wish harm not only to their own state but also to us.
That doesn’t mean the US has to be responsible for the state-building. You break it, you buy it is the prevailing rule. The Russians and Iranians in Syria along with the Saudis and other Gulf states in Yemen should be thinking about that as they bomb with abandon. The UN is already stuck with the job in Libya, where it appears to be making slow headway in gaining traction for a national unity government.
But what kind of state-building will Russia and Iran, or the Gulf states, do? Not the kind of state-building that even Donald Trump says he wants. What presidents call nation-building may not be what they want to do, but it is not a four letter word either. If you want to keep America safe, you are going to have to figure out how to get it done.
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The race isn’t over
Donald Trump delivered his much-ballyhooed Islamic State speech today. He began with a lengthy account of extremist attacks aimed at doing exactly what the Islamic State intends: scaring people. Beyond that, the speech was mostly a rehash of well-worn ideas:
- If you won’t call your enemy Islamic extremism, you can’t fight it.
- Guantanamo has to remain open.
- Immigration has to be restricted, and from some unspecified countries stopped.
- We should ship people home who don’t share “our” values.
- We should continue using drones and amp up intelligence but also capture a few more bad guys.
- We shouldn’t do nation-building, but
- We should somehow protect LGBTQ people and prevent honor killings abroad.
- We should have kept the US military in Iraq to hold on to its oil.
- Clinton and Obama are responsible for the rise of the Islamic State.
- We should convene an international conference to form a coalition to fight it, including NATO [sic] and Russia.
I suppose the relatively restrained tone of this hodge-podge and absence of any unfortunate adlibs will generate a new barrage of people saying he is now on track. But we are not likely more than 24 hours from one more outrageous remark intended to attract the media attention this speech is unlikely to get.
What Trump did not offer were any serious new ideas about how to deal with the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists. Nothing in this pale recitation comes even close to something anyone would call a new strategy.
I don’t really think there is one to be had. As Benjamin H. Friedman suggests, there is more danger in overreacting to international terrorism than from the phenomenon itself. It might even be said that is the purpose of many terrorists. Despite his even tone today, Trump is clearly willing to take that risk, at least so far as domestic policy is concerned. But he did not suggest he would do anything different about the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen than what Obama is already doing. Even his suggestion that we work with the Russians is nothing new. John Kerry has been pursuing that idea for months without much visible progress so far.
The sad fact is that this guy is not ready to be a Congressman from Wyoming, much less president of the United States. The polling, as interpreted by 538, has him with an 11.1% chance of winning. There is even informed talk of a Clinton landslide.
Trump didn’t do himself a lot of good today, even if he avoided any big mistakes. But these are early weeks in a long campaign. Frightening as it is to me, I suspect at least 40% of voters will vote for him. Clinton is winning because Trump is losing. She has not overcome the trust and likability deficits that have plagued her candidacy. No one should imagine the race is over.
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Yemen talks need rethinking
The most recent round of peace talks between the Houthis, supporters of former president Ali Abdullah Salih, Yemen’s government in exile lead by Abd Rabbuuh Mansur Hadi, and the regional powers involved in the GCC campaign in Yemen has gone nowhere. Hadi’s government in exile has departed from Kuwait. They signed a recently proposed UN deal and left it up to the Houthis to ratify the agreement and keep the talks moving.
The Houthis have not, and will not. This should come as no surprise. The Kuwait talks in their present form cannot lead to a political solution for three reasons:
1. The assumptions and structure that underpin the talks preclude an equitable settlement. On April 17, 2015 the Security Council adopted Resolution 2216, which has served as the basis for all Yemen peace talks since then. Then UNSC president Jordan (a party to the GCC coalition that has supplied planes and arms to pro-Hadi forces) proposed the resolution. It calls for the Houthis to withdraw from all territory they have seized since 2014 and to surrender their weapons.
That’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Particularly troublesome is that unconditional Houthi surrender has become a precondition for further political negotiations, not an end goal. Once the Houthis surrender their weapons and retreat from seized territory, they lose their bargaining chips in the negotiations. The Houthis initiated the current conflict because they felt they were not being heard in the political process. They aren’t going to trust Hadi to include them in Yemen’s future without the threat of force. The UNSC resolution also reiterates the legitimacy of the Hadi government and extols the GCC Initiative that removed Salih from power, led to the National Dialogue Conference, and created a draft constitution.
Widely credited with helping to avoid civil war in Yemen after the 2011 uprising, the National Dialogue Conference failed to represent the demands of the groups that had fought for Salih’s removal. Women, young people, the Houthis, and representatives of the movement for southern independence were all marginalized. Despite an initial unanimous agreement to a federal structure for Yemen, the process fell apart when it came to deciding the precise terms. A small, unrepresentative committee Hadi hand-picked redrew Yemen’s 21 governorates into a 6 regions. Criticism was widespread: the Houthis, southerners, the salafi Rashad Union, and others questioned the new map.
This led to the Houthi take over of Sana’a in September 2014. Going back to the GCC Initiative without addressing the grievances of young activists, Southerners, and especially the Houthis will accomplish nothing. A new starting point for a more representative political process is needed.
By far the most damning aspect of UNSC 2216 is its exoneration of the Saudi-led campaign. The Resolution makes no mention of a multilateral ceasefire, even while noting the deteriorating humanitarian situation. In fact, the GCC air campaign is not mentioned at all, even though the UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, Ivan Simonovic, reported the day prior that the majority of casualties were civilians. Demanding that only the Houthis put down their weapons without asking the same of “pro-Hadi forces” will never work.
2. The Kuwait talks do not represent the forces fighting on the ground. The war in Yemen is widely portrayed as a war with two sides:
- the Houthis and forces loyal to Ali Abdullah Salih;
- Allegedly “Pro-Hadi forces,” who include southern secessionists, tribes in central Yemen who are fighting more to remove the Houthis than to reinstate Hadi, and people in the Houthi stronghold of Sa‘ada who oppose the Houthis on religious and political grounds.
A large portion of the forces fighting the Houthis share many of their grievances and also felt side-lined by the elite-dominated GCC Initiative, but oppose the Houthis’ turn to violence and effort to dominate opposition to Hadi. Many do not want to see Hadi re-installed as president, but none of them have been represented at talks in Kuwait or Geneva. While “pro-Hadi forces” are united for now by a common enemy, if the Houthis retreat Hadi will lose what little influence he commands on the ground.
3. The war has stalemated on the battlefield, but both sides still believe they can use force to extract more concessions at the negotiating table. When the Yemeni government in exile walked away from the talks the first time, the Houthis escalated their shelling of the Saudi border. There is no genuine commitment on either side to reaching a political solution for the sake of the Yemeni people.
Throughout all negotiations, Hadi has not budged an inch. He demands a full return of his government and has offered no concessions to his opponents. He sees the negotiations as a zero-sum game. Any power-sharing deal with the Houthis and other groups in Yemen would come at a cost to his monopoly. With the GCC and much of the international community behind him, Hadi has no reason to accommodate Houthi interests.
The Houthis, on the other hand, lost international legitimacy when they violently chased the Yemeni government from Sana’a. Their most recent proposal, to form a joint body to oversee a political transition to a national unity government, went nowhere. Their subsequent move to form a governing council with supporters of Ali Abdullah Salih lost them any sympathy they might have enjoyed from the international community.
Peace talks in Yemen need rethinking. The international community needs to stop seeing the GCC as an impartial arbiter when it is in fact a party to Yemen’s war. The negotiations need to include all the stakeholders, including southerners and civil society actors. Then it might be possible to begin talking about trust-building measures that could lead to partial Houthi and Salih withdrawal and disarmament as well as aid delivery to besieged Ta’iz. Without these changes, Yemen’s war will continue and its abysmal humanitarian situation will continue to deteriorate.
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War, not oil prices, challenge the Gulf
Last Tuesday the Middle East Policy Council held their 85th Capitol Hill Conference on “Economic Reform and Political Risk in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).” Speakers were Aasim M. Husain, IMF deputy director of the Middle East and Central Asia; Ford M. Fraker, president of the Middle East Policy Center and former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Edward Burton, CEO and president of the US-Saudi Arabian Business Council; and Karen E. Young, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute. Richard Schmierer moderated.
Husain presented data on how different countries of the GCC are adapting to cheaper oil. Prior to the dramatic decline in oil prices in mid-2014, Gulf governments had been raising their spending by expanding energy subsidies, increasing government payrolls, and raising wages. Non-oil sectors were growing at an average of 7 percent throughout the GCC. When oil prices suddenly dropped from $110/barrel to $40/barrel in mid-2014, a GCC average 10% budgetary surplus turned into a 9% deficit overnight. Spending, which had been increasing by an average of 8-10% since 2011, is expected to contract by over 10% in coming years.
Most Gulf states are cutting back their capital spending by starting fewer new projects and slowing and canceling current ones. Many are raising subsidized energy prices—ending the longstanding policy in some countries of providing essentially free energy to their citizens. Some GCC members are also considering a value added tax. Even with these reforms, in the next five years we can continue to expect deficits of 7-10% of GDP. It’s a grim picture, even before you consider how cuts in spending will impact economic growth.
Over the next five years, 2 million youth will enter the workforce across the GCC. Husain predicts that 2/3 of those will find jobs. That optimistic figure relies on the necessity of non-oil sector growth in next five years generating more jobs than in the past.
Fraker emphasized just how dramatic recent changes in Saudi policy have been. He identified the main goals of Vision 2030—diversifying the Saudi economy and eliminating government inefficiency—and added that the biggest change brought about in the months since Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s assumption of the throne has not been any particular economic policy, but rather an “unprecedented” opening of Saudi government.
Decision-making had always happened behind closed doors without transparency or outside input. The rise to prominence of the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman changed that. He has opened government, for example by putting all government ministers on stage for unprecedented public questioning. Fraker wants the US to welcome these changes. Washington has a strategic interest in a stable Saudi Arabia and should therefore support its allies politically and economically.
Burton elaborated on business opportunities for American investors. Saudi Arabia is the third biggest spender on military equipment in the world. Mohammed bin Salman’s goal to divert 50% of Saudi military spending to domestic contractors would create major opportunities for job-rich growth. Burton also foresees healthcare as a potential growth sector. Saudi Arabia suffers from high rates of obesity, diabetes, and other health challenges. The Kingdom is the Middle East’s largest information and communications technologies market, particularly with its growing youth population.
Young analyzed GCC strategies and policies to make ends meet. Across the region, there has been a dramatic rise in bond issues. In the short term, there is no problem. Gulf countries are not heavily indebted and currently have access to the capital they need. Continued reliance on credit for the next five years could get dicey. This oil crisis is different from the 1970s crises. Over the course of the 2003-2014 oil boom, the Gulf invested in building lasting institutions, which enabled Kuwait and the UAE to adapt to the drop in oil price. The GCC is also much more integrated into the MENA region than it was previously. Egypt and Lebanon are dependent on Gulf foreign direct investment. Jordan and Morocco rely on foreign aid from the GCC to balance their budgets.
All the panelists managed to neglect the economic and political ramifications of GCC involvement in two regional conflicts. Husain talked about massive cuts in capital and social spending to ease the sting of deficits, but ignored the continued climb in Saudi defense spending since 2011, starting with Saudi involvement in funding and training opposition fighters in Syria.
Saudi Arabia will be running up against its biggest planned budget deficit in 2016, despite the slight uptick in oil prices and domestic fiscal reforms. GCC members are heavily involved in proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, so military spending is continuing to rise at an alarming rate. In 2016, Saudi Arabia surpassed Russia as the third biggest military spender, spending $87.2 billion. Qatar and the UAE have also increased their military spending while drastically cutting other spending.
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Liberal democracy at risk
The handwriting is on many walls. Liberal democracy and the world order it has built since World War II are at risk. Equal rights, political pluralism and rule of law are being challenged from several directions.
We see it in Brexit, which aims explicitly to restore borders, reject immigrants and implicitly to end the liberal democratic establishment’s monopoly on governing power. We see it in Trump, who aims at similar goals. We see it in Putin, Erdogan and Sisi, who are selling the idea that concentrated power and restrictions on freedom will deliver better and more goods and services. We see it in China, which likewise aims to maintain the Communist Party’s monopoly on national political power while allowing markets to drive growth. No need to mention Hungary’s Orbán, Macedonia’s Gruevski, Poland’s Szydło and other democratically elected leaders who turn their backs on liberal democratic values once in power, in favor of religion, nationalism or ethnic identity.
Among the first victims are likely to be two bold efforts at freeing up trade and investment and promoting growth by removing barriers and encouraging globalization: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the US as well as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was intended to do something similar in the Pacific Basin. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have said they are opposed to TPP. It is hard to picture TTIP proceeding while the EU is negotiating its divorce from the United Kingdom.
We have seen assaults on liberal democracy and its associated world order in the past. Arguably that is what World War II was about, at least in part. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Mussolini’s Italy offered Fascist, autocratic responses to relatively liberal democracy in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, which fought with the Allies against Fascism, offered a Communist alternative that survived the war and engaged in the Cold War standoff with liberal democracies for almost 45 years thereafter, one that involved proxy wars, Communist and anti-Communist puppets, and the enormous risk of nuclear holocaust. The history of fights between liberal democracy and its antagonists is fraught with war, oppression, and prolonged authoritarianism.
It wasn’t that long ago, when the Berlin wall fell, that liberal democracy seemed overwhelmingly likely to win worldwide. The end of history didn’t last long. The two big challenges liberal democracy now faces are Islamist extremism and capitalist authoritarianism. These are both ideological and physical challenges. Putinism is an authoritarian style of governance that sends warplanes, naval ships and troops to harass and occupy its neighbors and adversaries. The same can be said of Xi Jinping’s China, which is making the South China Sea into its backyard and harassing its neighbors.
The Islamist extremist challenge comes above all from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which are competing with each other even as they destroy fragile states like Libya, Yemen and Syria. Iraq appears to be winning its fight, though it is likely to face a virulent insurgency even after it ends Islamic State control over parts of its territory. The outcome is unlikely to be liberal democratic. Many other states face that kind of insurgent Islamist threat: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Somalia, and Tunisia, to name but a few.
But the biggest threat to liberal democracy today comes from inside the liberal democracies themselves. Islamist terror has killed relatively few people, apart from 9/11. Popular overreaction to Islamist threats, immigration and globalization could bring to power people with little commitment to liberal democratic values in the United States, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. They will seek to reestablish borders, slow or end immigration, impose draconian laws to root out terrorists, and restore trade barriers in the hope of regaining lost industries.
Another challenge, peculiar to the US, seems to be emerging: black insurgents with guns who think they are retaliating against police for abuse of black citizens. This is bound to elicit a law and order response the could even bring a real threat to liberal democracy in Washington: Donald Trump in the presidency. If the protests in Cleveland this week are not disciplined and peaceful, it could put real wind in his sails.
The menace to liberal democracy is real. If we want pluralism, human rights and the rule of law, we are going to have to take some risks. I find it an easy choice, but many of my compatriots seem inclined to lean in the other direction.
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28 pages, the Turkey coup and Nice
Those are the issues dominating the headlines this morning. The common thread: they all reflect in one way or another the secularist reaction to Islamist politics.
Islamism has become the main political event of our time, because we have made it so. The Nice attacker, like the Orlando one, seems to have been only loosely, if at all, affiliated with the Islamic State or any other extremist movement. Both were more loser than Islamist. Until fairly recently, we might have attributed their acts to mental illness rather than politics. Today, it would be hard for a Muslim in the West to commit mass murder without its being attributed to Islam.
Turkey’s coup attempt likely originated within the anti-Muslim Brotherhood currents of Turkish politics, including the Gulen movement. Its failure will enormously strengthen the hand of President Erdogan, whose Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political party will continue to broaden the powers of the presidency as it reduces the opportunities for political dissent. There is nothing like an attempted coup to give an aspiring autocrat more opportunity to gain control over the levers of power.
The 28 newly published pages of preliminary investigative material on 9/11 shed little new light on possible connections between Saudi Arabia and the plotters of the attack. Despite the efforts of the Kingdom’s American public relations consultants, they will nevertheless stimulate the appetite of anti-Muslim forces in the US, who have already entertained us for several days with their approval of Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a Shariah litmus test for American Muslims. Like the attempted coup in Turkey, this Christian chauvinism is bound to strengthen those they attack.
We need to stop helping our adversaries. Islamic extremists are a real threat. But mistaking Erdogan, the Nice and Orlando attackers, and even the Saudis for the real thing is foolish and counter-productive. That lumps together apples and oranges and labels them extremists. It magnifies the problem and reduces our own capabilities to deal with it, by spreading them far too thin. We need to keep the focus where it belongs: on the weak states of the Middle East that are breeding social pathology, calling it Islam and killing mostly Muslims.
Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen are cases in point. These are the weak states whose collapse has made room for extremism to flourish. The Islamic State and Al Qaeda that exist there are not a bunch of crazed individuals, but rather well-organized insurgencies against the existing state system. They are doing far more damage in the Middle East than the occasional sympathizer or wannabe causes in France or Florida.
Erdogan should not be counted among the Islamist extremists. He an Islamist, but democratically elected. He proposes autocracy as the response to all threats, as does Egypt’s President Sisi. They are peas from different ideological pods, but peas nevertheless. As we have seen already in Egypt and will now see in Turkey, their answers to the Islamist threats will not be adequate. Autocracy may squelch secularism, but it is unlikely to stamp out Islamic extremism, as Sisi should by now have discovered. Islamic extremism has far deeper roots in the Middle East. It is there that it most needs to be fought, not only with military means.
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