Tag: Yemen
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- Arab youth are embracing modern values. 46% of Arab youth believe that traditional values are outdated and belong in the past.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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Responses to Al Qaeda 3.0
The American Security Project Tuesday discussed “Al Qaeda 3.0: Three Responses to the Changing Nature of Al Qaeda” on the current terrorist threats in the Middle East and North Africa and how several countries have responded to these concerns. Speakers Said Temsamani, Zack Gold and Timothy Fairbank detailed the principal terrorist threats in Morocco, Egypt, and Yemen, and whether each country’s approach has been successful in combatting these threats in recent years.
The previous Senior Political Advisor of the US Embassy in Rabat, Said Temsamani, said the primary terrorist threat in Morocco is the rising number of Moroccans participating in the Syrian civil war. Approximately 3,000 have voluntarily left to fight in Syria over the past several years, largely due to the ideological appeal of participating in the war. It has become logistically easy and inexpensive for these young Moroccan men to get to Syria—a visa is not required and they receive immediate combat training upon arrival.
While many combatants have been drawn to organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS), it is now an increasing concern to the government that young Moroccans have established their own group, known as Harakat Sham, to engage in this ideological–and some would even say jihadist–war.
The foremost issue lies in the reentry of these fighters who are now choosing to return to Morocco after participating in the Syrian civil war. In response to this influx of combatants, Morocco has focused on an approach centered on “spiritual diplomacy,” specifically providing training to both men and women to become scholars and imams. This counter Salafist-jihadist strategy centers on a revival of Moroccan Islam and has largely been successful—so much so that other countries throughout the region, such as Libya and Tunisia, have begun to request this teaching for their own religious leaders and scholars.
Zack Gold, researcher and writer on US-Middle East policy, analyzed the major terrorist threats in Egypt after the revolution in January 2011. Terrorist activity over the past several years has risen both in the Sinai and along the Libyan border due to the disappearance of security forces from these areas. As a result of past crackdowns and repression in the Sinai, the tribal Bedouin population responded to this void in authority by destroying police stations and producing weapons intended for Gaza. The Egyptian government has responded to these threats with brute force and repression. While somewhat effective in deterring the Sinai threats, it is merely a short-term measure.
Timothy Fairbank examined the current terrorist activity in Yemen and the challenges the government faces. He highlighted the weaknesses of the Yemeni cabinet in combatting the significant threats of Al Qaeda of the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), specifically due to the lack of elected officials with a true mandate. AQAP has become the number one terrorist challenge in the country over the past several years. It has continued to gain supporters both from Yemen as well as Saudi Arabia.
While AQAP is always in a state of flux, Fairbank emphasized that the increase in counterterrorism and drone strikes has in fact coincided with an increase in the size and presence of AQAP in Yemen. A state is weakened when the people do not support local government leaders and suffer from violence and poverty. In the case of Yemen, he concluded, “the weaker the state, the greater the chance for AQAP to infiltrate.”
Morocco is doing better than Egypt and Yemen, where revolution and war have sapped the strength of the state.
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Still righting the balance
These are my speaking notes for the talk I gave last night at the DC World Affairs Council on my book,
Righting the Balance (Potomac, 2013). I’ve added a bit about Ukraine, which is in part an instance of state weakness. It also illustrates the limited usefulness of conventional military instruments in meeting asymmetrical challenges, a key theme in the book. Click there on the right to order your own copy!
1. It is truly an honor to present here at the World Affairs Council. The 98 World Affairs Councils throughout this country play a key role in generating and sustaining the kind of citizen engagement in foreign policy that I think is so important in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
2. As I am going to say some harsh things about the State Department and USAID, and even suggest they be abolished in favor of a single Foreign Office, I would like to emphasize from the first that I have enormous respect for the Foreign Service and the devotion of its officers to pursuing America’s interests abroad. I feel the same way about the US military.
3. But I don’t think the Foreign Service is well served by the institutions that hire, pay and deploy our diplomats and aid workers. And I don’t think our military should be called upon to make up for civilian deficiencies.
4. My book, Righting the Balance, is aimed at correcting those imbalances. But it does not start there.
5. It starts with the sweep of American history, which has given our military a leading role in America’s foreign affairs since at least the French and Indian war.
6. Americans think of their country as a peaceful one, but in fact we have had troops deployed in conflict zones for more than a quarter of our history—not even counting wars against native Americans and pirates—and every year since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
7. With each of those wars, we improved our technology and expanded our reach, becoming by the end of the 20th century the world’s only remaining superpower.
8. We have a strong, well-exercised military arm for projecting power. It is so strong that it is reaching a point of diminishing returns: every additional dollar buys miniscule improvement.
9. But our civilian capacities are more limited. This was glaringly apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan, where State and AID struggled, and all too often failed, to meet the requirements.
10. It has also been glaringly apparent during the Arab uprisings, which not only caught our diplomats by surprise but left them puzzled about what to do.
11. These failures are more important than ever before. The enemies who cause us problems today are not often states: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fell quickly, as did the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
12. We won the wars. We lost the peace.
13. The main threats to America today come not from other strong states but from non-state actors who find haven and support in fragile, weak and collapsing states.
14. Even in Ukraine, the Russians are not using the full weight of their armed forces but rather relying on disruption in challenging the legitimacy of Kiev’s government and its control over territory in the east and south.
15. National security, always more than a military mission, now requires conflict prevention and state-building capacities that are sorely lacking in both State and AID. They have scrambled hard to meet the needs in Bosnia, Kosovo, South Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not much better configured than when I arrived in Sarajevo for the first time in November 1994.
16. Some of you will be thinking, that’s OK, because we never want to do this state-building stuff again.
17. It’s not only my colleague Michael Mandelbaum who thinks that way. Each and every president since 1989 has resisted getting involved in other countries’ internal politics, and each one has discovered that it is far easier to go to war and kill enemies than it is to withdraw, leaving behind a collapsed state that will regenerate those enemies.
18. Unless you are willing to fight on forever—even longer than the “long war”—you need to build capable states that protect their citizens reasonably well.
19. We are discovering this today in Yemen, where the drone war appears to have created more terrorists than it has killed. This is one of the main reasons President Obama has avoided military intervention in Syria, but the post-war effort there will still be a major one, even if is not primarily a U.S. responsibility. The same is true in eastern DRC and in Colombia, where peace is threatening to break out after decades of war.
20. America won’t be able to avoid being engaged when North Korea or Cuba collapses. Nor will we stay aloof if nuclear-armed Pakistan starts coming apart. Let’s not even think about Iran. If Ukraine is to be kept whole and independent, it will need a far better state than the one that has performed so badly since the Orange Revolution of 2005.
21. So my view is that we need to prepare for the day, not continue to delude ourselves that we will never do it again.
22. But I would be the first to admit that post-war state-building, a subject I teach at SAIS, is hard and expensive. Anticipation is cheaper and better. We need civilian foreign policy instruments that will take early action to prevent states from collapsing and help initiate reforms.
23. We’ve been reasonably successful at allowing this to happen in much of Latin America and East Asia, where recent decades have seen many countries turn in the direction of democratic transition. Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Indonesia are sterling examples of transitions that the United States allowed, nurtured and encouraged.
24. That’s what we failed to do effectively in the Arab world, with consequences that are now on the front pages every day. We failed to anticipate the revolution in Tunisia. In Libya we failed to help the new regime establish a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. That failure cost us an ambassador and three of his colleagues and has left Libya adrift.
25. In Egypt, we’ve been inconstant, supporting whoever gains power. The result, as I observed during the constitutional referendum in January, is a restoration of the military autocracy, with voters intimidated into staying home rather than voting against the new constitution and human rights advocates imprisoned along with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
26. In Syria, we failed to support moderates, only to see them displaced and replaced by extremists. The result is a daily catastrophe of truly genocidal dimensions.
27. The specific areas I describe as lacking in today’s State and AID are these:
• Mobilizing early, preventive action
• Reforming security services
• Promoting democracy
• Countering violent extremism
• Encouraging citizen and cultural diplomacy
28. These are all efforts at the periphery of traditional diplomacy, and I readily admit that the last three are better done mainly outside government while the first two are more inherently governmental.
29. But I don’t think we can get them done with our current institutions, which were designed for different purposes in other eras. Inertia and legacy are too strong.
30. The State Department, originally the Department of the State, is now a conventional foreign ministry with a 19th century architecture: most Foreign Service personnel serve abroad in static embassies and other missions servicing agencies of the US government other than the State Department. Legacy and inertia, not current needs, dictate where it has people stationed and a good deal of what they are doing.
31. USAID was founded with a poverty alleviation and economic development mission to help fight the Cold War. Few of us still think that US government programs can fix poverty at home, much less overseas.
32. There have been a lot of proposals for reform. Let’s recall Condoleezza Rice’s transformational diplomacy and Hillary Clinton’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, now being reprised. None of these efforts have gained more than temporary traction.
33. What we need to do is conduct what scientists call a thought experiment: knowing what we do about the challenges we now face, what kind foreign policy instruments do we need?
34. The answer is nothing like what we’ve got.
35. My book doesn’t offer a detailed design, but it does suggest that we need a single Foreign Office with a national security focus as well as a much-enhanced nongovernmental effort, operated at arms’ length from officialdom but with much greater Congressional funding than it has today.
36. I am not however prepared to propose, as so many have before me, that this new Foreign Office be funded by passing up an F22 or two. I think State and AID have the resources needed, but unfortunately tied up in those elephantine embassies supporting other US government agencies.
37. Shrinking these dramatically would provide the funds for a much sleeker and more effective Foreign Office, including a corps of several thousand people able and willing to deploy, with or without US troops, to difficult environments to take on the hard work of conflict prevention and state-building where required.
38. What we need is a far more agile, anticipatory and mobile Foreign Service, one built for a world in which virtually everyone will soon be connected to worldwide communications at reasonable cost and ordinary citizens, including you, count for much more than ever before in world history.
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Freedom of the press in 2014
Today is World Press Freedom Day. So here is an appropriate post:
Thursday morning Freedom House released Freedom of the Press 2014, its annual report assessing media freedom around the world. The event featured a panel discussion with Karin Karlekar (Freedom of the Press project director), Scott Shane (New York Times national security reporter), and Sue Turton (Al Jazeera correspondent). Jim Sciutto, CNN chief national security correspondent, moderated.
Jim Sciutto asked panelists why they thought global press freedom has fallen in the past year. Karin Karlekar said that technology can be a source for good that enables a large audience to publish and access information. However in many countries, particularly ones with authoritarian governments, governments are increasingly cracking down. In some cases governments have used new tactics. In others, their methods are just an extension of the traditional media censorship methods they have used in the past. Governments are using tools that are supposed to empower people to track and follow them instead.
In China, some of the search engines and social media outlets employ more people to censor them than they do to produce them. They have a large, widespread mechanism for controlling online content. But even governments that don’t have that technological capability have found ways to clamp down online. They pursue people after the material has been produced. That has been the case in some countries like Ethiopia, where they just imprisoned 6 bloggers.
Sciutto asked Scott Shane to put into context leaks and prosecutions. How much of that is a threat to freedom of exchange in the US and how the White House is covered?
Scott commended Freedom House for being objective on the issue of press freedom. It saddened him to see the US downgraded from 21 points last year to 18 points in this year’s report. This has to do with the fact that in all of American history until 2009, there were three government officials prosecuted for leaking classified information to the press. We are now up to eight with Obama. This affects the willingness of government officials to talk even on unclassified but sensitive issues. It affects the reporting that national security journalists do. The US is now ranked lower in press freedom than Estonia and the Czech Republic.
Sciutto: Has it reached a point where our leaders are not under the same level of oversight we expect them to be or that they were ten or twenty years ago?
Shane: In 1971 the New York Times Washington bureau chief Max Frankel wrote a memorandum about the Pentagon Papers arguing that covering secret, classified information is critical to informing the public. Some people take the attitude that it is secret; therefore, it should not be talked about. But that would make the White House and diplomacy impossible to write about.
As an example Shane mentioned how in 2011 the US deliberately hunted down and killed an American citizen in Yemen, the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki. There was a long legal opinion justifying the unilateral killing of an American citizen. That was classified opinion, so Shane made a Freedom of Information Act request for that document in 2010. Four years later, after filing a lawsuit, an appeals court ordered the government to release it. If he is lucky, Shane says he might receive a redacted form of this legal opinion 5 years later. When the president has the right to order the killing of an American citizen is a fairly fundamental question. Americans, Shane argues, have the right to know the legal basis.
Torton explained that she is being tried in absentia for aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood. She left Cairo on November 6, which was a month and a half before the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of terrorism. Her Al Jazeera colleagues were arrested three days after the Muslim Brotherhood was proscribed a terrorist organization. They have been in jail for 126 days. Originally, she believed that the three judges were independent of the state and that they would see the situation for what it is. It is a politically motivated trial and she hoped they would throw the case out. As the sessions go on, however, and the judges refuse bail, she is frightened of the outcome.
Sciutto: Did the Arab Spring fail on the issue of freedom of information?
Turton: Each country has its own situation and different outcomes. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring did not deliver what Western governments were probably hoping it was going to, which was perfectly packaged democracy. Access to information and the media is freer in some countries. Tunisia has had a sophisticated reaction to the Arab Spring. Libya is still a mess. At the beginning, optimism was enormous and the situation improved, but since then Libya has backtracked. But Egypt has failed. Talking to people on the ground, you get a sense that conditions are worse than under Mubarak.
Sciutto: How much of its moral high ground in terms of pushing for internet freedom has the US lost with the existence of the NSA and other interference on the internet?
Karlekar: I think it is affecting our moral high ground. Many governments use surveillance and other repressive tactics. The US used to be able to say that they should not be doing that. Now it is becoming much more difficult to say that. It is particularly ironic because the US government is trying to sell itself as an open, transparent government, but it is not.
Sciutto asked, are your Al Jazeera colleagues more scared now when they work?
Turton: We have had to change how we operate. This is not just Al Jazeera; it is the media in general. In Egypt it is not just journalists being thrown in jail, but anyone with opposing views.
Sciutto: When you get into issues like coverage of leaks and you worry about your sources and your own legal situation, does that affect the overall quality of reporting?
Shane: I think it has chilled reporting on national security. What is interesting is the crackdown under Obama. There seems to be a random quality to it. All of the cases have involved electronic trails; emails or Internet chat logs. In the past the FBI would say that they would like to investigate this leak, but there are 1,000 people with security clearance. They had no good way of finding out who was responsible. Now, they can go into the government email system and find out exactly who has been talking to the reporter whose byline is on that story.
In fairness, technology is driving leakers as well. Two of the cases, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, are unique in American history. The volume of classified information out there is unprecedented. If our government is tracking leaks to the press in the US, it is obviously happening on an exponentially greater scale in countries like China or Russia.
Karlekar: The fear is that these issues will lead to self-censorship. What stories are not getting covered out of fear?
The entire Freedom House report can be viewed here.
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Battlefield to conference room
Today’s US/EU/Russia/Ukraine Joint Diplomatic Statement aims to de-escalate a conflict that has been spiraling for weeks. The steps it proposes are straightforward:
All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism.
All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.
Amnesty will be granted to protesters and to those who have left buildings and other public places and surrendered weapons, with the exception of those found guilty of capital crimes.
The Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) is to provide monitors, as had been hoped in Crimea (but Russia did not permit it, preferring to annex the peninsula).
Like many diplomatic statements, this one is well-intentioned but riddled with ways to wriggle out. There will always be violence, intimidation or provocation on which one side can base its own violence intimidation or provocation against the other. Disarmament of armed groups generally requires a superior force to undertake the task. Which building and other seizures are illegal is in the eye of the beholder. Where are those who allegedly committed capital crimes to be tried and by whom?
Whether the statement is a turning point will depend on political will. It is difficult for me to imagine that President Putin is ready to de-escalate. He has been on a winning wicket both in Ukraine and in Syria. Why would he want to stop now? The statement presumably forestalls further EU and US sanctions, but he knows as well as everyone in the DC and Brussels press corps that agreement on those was going to be difficult. Ukrainian military and police action to counter Russian-sponsored takeovers in the east has so far failed. I suppose Putin knows even better than this morning’s New York Times that Russia’s economy was on the rocks even before the Ukraine crisis. It will get worse, but since when did Putin or Putinism worry about the economy? Oil prices around $100/barrel are all he has needed to get Russia up off its knees. Crisis helps keep the oil price up.
So I’ll be surprised if this agreement holds, or even begins to change the perilous direction Ukraine is heading in. But the statement includes an important bit that should not be ignored:
The announced constitutional process will be inclusive, transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments and proposed amendments.
The Ukraine crisis, like the Syrian one, is fundamentally a political crisis: it is more about perceptions of legitimacy and distribution of power than about who military balance or who speaks which language. We’ve seen in Libya, Egypt and Syria the results of failure to conduct an inclusive and transparent discussion of the kind of state their people want and how its leadership will be held accountable. It is very difficult to move from violence to the negotiating table unless one side is defeated or both sides recognize they will not gain from further violence. Tunisia and Yemen have done it, but they are the exceptions, not the rule.
The odds of successfully moving from the battlefield to the conference room in Ukraine are low. But that is the challenge our diplomats now face, along with the OSCE monitors. I can only wish them success, no matter how unlikely that may be.
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Passover wandering
Like 70% of American Jews, I spent last night at a Seder, celebrating the story of liberation from pharaoh. Here are some of the thoughts that were on my mind.
Three years ago I wrote with enthusiasm about the Passover of Arab liberation. Two years ago Syria seemed already in the midst of ten plagues and ruled by a pharaoh who wouldn’t let his people go. Last year I thought things in the Middle East better than expected.
This year I’ve got to confess things are a mess, not only in the Middle East but also in Ukraine.
The war in Syria rages on. Israel/Palestine peace negotiations are stalled. Both sides are pursuing unilateral options. Egypt is restoring military autocracy. Libya is chaotic. Parts of Iraq are worse. The only whisper of good news is from Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia, where something like more or less democratic transitions are progressing, and Iran, where the Islamic Republic is pressing anxiously for a nuclear deal, albeit one that still seems far off.
In Ukraine, Russia is using surrogates and forces that don’t bother wearing insignia to take over eastern and southern cities where Russian speakers predominate. It looks as if military invasion won’t be necessary. Kiev has been reduced to asking for UN peacekeeping troops. NATO can do nothing. Strategic patience, and refusal to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and any other parts of Ukraine it might absorb, seems the best of a rotten bunch of options.
This is discouraging, but no one ever promised continuous progress. Even the Israelites wandered in the desert. Everyone forgets the part about getting stuck in one lousy oasis for 38 of those years. Freedom is not a one-time thing. It requires constant effort. There are setbacks. And there are breakthroughs.
Americans face their own liberation challenges. While the past year has seen giant strides in acceptance of gay marriage, there have been setbacks to the right to vote. Money is now speech and corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. I’ll believe that when a corporation gets sent to prison and banks start accepting what I say as a deposit. The right to bear arms continues to expand, but not my right to be safe from those who do, except by arming myself. In Kansas City Sunday a white supremacist and anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed three people at Jewish facilities, all Christians.
The plain fact is that liberation, as Moses discovered, is hard. It requires persistence. There are no guarantees of success. The only directions history takes are the ones that people compel it to take. Some of those people are genuinely good. Others are evil. Sometimes they are both, as son Adam’s piece on LBJ this week suggests. There may be a right side and a wrong side of history, but it seems difficult for many people to tell the difference.
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