The Iron Dome system was developed by an Israeli defense contractor building, in part, on engineering and software advances from the U.S. Star Wars system.
[While the technology for linking radar to detect and track intercontinental missiles and the interceptor rockets that are meant to blast off and destroy the incoming warhead in outer space has yet to work as hoped (every test so far has loosely defined “success” using the horseshoe and dancing principle: close counts) knocking down slow moving short range rockets is easier. ]
The Iron Dome equipment is a major advance over the Patriot missile system that the U.S. developed in the late 1980s and first deployed against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1990 Gulf War. By some accounts Iron Dome can destroy between 80 and 90% of its targets.
This has created an interesting “good news/bad news” situation. The good news is that most of the rockets aimed southern Israeli towns and the handful of longer range rockets fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv can be shot down. The bad news is 1) that is scant comfort to the citizens of those towns when the 10-20% that make it through blow up down the street; and 2) it weakens the perception of balance and proportionality between the harm done by Gaza launched rockets and the scope and severity of the Israeli response.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Notes On the West Bank and Gaza
(Angels fear to tread in this area, but we’ll rush in anyway. The language used to discuss the situation is highly politicized. There are some Israelis who continue to refer to this area as Judea and Samaria and others who prefer “administered territories.” This is not idle word play. How you describe the situation forces you to take sides on some central issues.)
The status quo in the West Bank includes Palestinian governance of some areas and occupation and control of other areas by the Israel Defense Forces. The occupation is expensive and breeds resentment among West Bank Palestinians. There is a small but growing movement in Israel to call attention to the psychological toll of occupation duty on soldiers.
The West Bank is also home to over 300,000 Israeli citizens. Some of the settlements are suburbs of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem drawing inhabitants with subsidized housing and typical suburban amenities. Others are fortified camps surrounded by Palestinian farms and villages, created by young men and women, often recent immigrants to Israel from Russia or the United States, who are ideologically and religiously motivated to expand the Jewish presence. Some of the settlements are legal under Israeli law; some are not. Most experts consider them illegal under international law. The push for settlements in the West Bank began shortly after Israel occupied the area during the Six Day War of 1967. A network of Jewish settlements in the territories was promoted as a way of creating “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to ever withdraw completely to the old borders of Israel.
The more ideologically and religiously motivated settlers are an important force supporting conservative parties that have (until very recently) been critical components of the Netanyahu government’s right of center majority coalition. Some of them have been at the center of controversial “price tag” assaults on Palestinian mosques, olive groves and villages. On a few occasions the government of Israel has moved to forcibly liquidate an illegal settlement. The images of Israeli soldiers and police officers dragging Jews from their homes broadcast on the TV news have disturbed many Israelis.
The growing settler based economy in the West Bank has become the target of an international campaign, especially in Western Europe. Israeli owned companies located in the West Bank settlements and Israeli companies that get components or materials from firms in the settlements stamp their goods “Made in Israel.” Some of the protestors want products relabelled to reflect their settlement origins; others want them banned from altogether.
Despite the problems posed by the occupation and the vagaries of politics, West Bank Palestinians have seen significant economic improvement in the past decade. The opposite is true in Gaza.
Particularly after the economic pressures exerted by Israel and foreign governments after the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and de facto civil war with Fath in 2007, the Gaza economy has regressed and become almost totally dependent on UN humanitarian support for the refugee camps and smuggling.
Hamas leaders have not proven particularly adept at governance and some are now being accused of the same kind of corruption and high handedness that led to the rejection of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.
The status quo in the West Bank includes Palestinian governance of some areas and occupation and control of other areas by the Israel Defense Forces. The occupation is expensive and breeds resentment among West Bank Palestinians. There is a small but growing movement in Israel to call attention to the psychological toll of occupation duty on soldiers.
The West Bank is also home to over 300,000 Israeli citizens. Some of the settlements are suburbs of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem drawing inhabitants with subsidized housing and typical suburban amenities. Others are fortified camps surrounded by Palestinian farms and villages, created by young men and women, often recent immigrants to Israel from Russia or the United States, who are ideologically and religiously motivated to expand the Jewish presence. Some of the settlements are legal under Israeli law; some are not. Most experts consider them illegal under international law. The push for settlements in the West Bank began shortly after Israel occupied the area during the Six Day War of 1967. A network of Jewish settlements in the territories was promoted as a way of creating “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to ever withdraw completely to the old borders of Israel.
The more ideologically and religiously motivated settlers are an important force supporting conservative parties that have (until very recently) been critical components of the Netanyahu government’s right of center majority coalition. Some of them have been at the center of controversial “price tag” assaults on Palestinian mosques, olive groves and villages. On a few occasions the government of Israel has moved to forcibly liquidate an illegal settlement. The images of Israeli soldiers and police officers dragging Jews from their homes broadcast on the TV news have disturbed many Israelis.
The growing settler based economy in the West Bank has become the target of an international campaign, especially in Western Europe. Israeli owned companies located in the West Bank settlements and Israeli companies that get components or materials from firms in the settlements stamp their goods “Made in Israel.” Some of the protestors want products relabelled to reflect their settlement origins; others want them banned from altogether.
Despite the problems posed by the occupation and the vagaries of politics, West Bank Palestinians have seen significant economic improvement in the past decade. The opposite is true in Gaza.
Particularly after the economic pressures exerted by Israel and foreign governments after the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and de facto civil war with Fath in 2007, the Gaza economy has regressed and become almost totally dependent on UN humanitarian support for the refugee camps and smuggling.
Hamas leaders have not proven particularly adept at governance and some are now being accused of the same kind of corruption and high handedness that led to the rejection of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Power To The People?
Foreign policy will be the focus when Romney and Obama square off in their third debate on October 22. We will undoubtedly hear a good deal about American power, whether we have enough, use it wisely, or are losing it to China. And it is highly likely we’ll hear about hard power and soft power. As you read commentaries on foreign policy and world politics, and listen to everyday conversations, you’ll begin to sense that there seems to be two quite different meanings of the seemingly simple idea of power. Getting power right is not just important for the sake of clarity and precision in analysis but it has immense practical implications. You are much more likely to wield power effectively if you understand how it works. That is as true in everyday life as it is on the world stage.
Sometimes we talk as if power were like money in the bank. And sometimes we recognize that the most useful meaning of power is the ability to get somebody to do something they would not have done otherwise. (In Political Science jargon the someone who is trying to change behavior is often labeled the initiator and the party who is on the receiving end is the target.)
“Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” (Mao Tse Tung)
But I guess Gandhi didn’t get Mao’s memo. And ousting Imperial England from India was a much bigger accomplishment than ousting the corrupt and incompetent Chung Kai Shek regime.
“The United States is the most powerful country in the world.”
But if “most powerful” means the U.S. will always dominate, I can think of a whole raft of folks who didn’t get this memo, from Fidel Castro, to the government of Iraq, to the Canadians.
If you watch people or countries interacting, an important question is who is going to get what they want. (Who is going to get someone to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.) Just looking at the resources each side has isn’t very helpful for three reasons.
1) Not all of your resources are available to be used in a given situation.
Close your eyes and imagine something that – or so it seems -- would make you really happy. Might be the coolest car made, might be a super. big screen HD TV, might be a significant contribution to your favorite charity ... But by the time you pay the mortgage, buy some food, pay utilities and all those other bills, that big pile of money has dwindled to a tiny stack. The U.S. Air Force has about 5600 planes of various types. But they are stationed at close to a hundred different bases in the U.S. and abroad and committed to a multitude of missions. The President can’t just decide to send 100 or planes to bomb someone.
2) Not all of your resources are relevant to a given situation, even if they are available.
I could go up to the checkout counter at the store with a six pack of beer and say, “What ho, my good man. I am Seth Thompson, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University, author of a blog on world politics, and I have a whole semester worth of PowerPoint slides on “power” and I’m not afraid to use them!” And the clerk will yawn and wait for me to hand over the $10 for the beer.
The U.S. has some fairly serious trade dissipates with Canada that we have been unable to resolve. The United States has 450 ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads; Canada has none. But Secretary of State Clinton has not summoned the Canadian ambassador to her office on the seventh floor of the State Department and said, “Listen Jack (his name is really Gary), either you guys stop exporting cheap hogs and logs and stop stealing our fish, or we’ll reduce Ottawa to a smoking pile of ash.”
3) Not all your threats or promises are credible.
As the late Flip Wilson used to say, “A lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it.” Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The credibility of a threat or promise hinges on the extent to which your target believes [1] you have the resources to carry it out; [2] what you’re threatening or promising seems proportional to what you want the target to do (we could nuke Canada but threatening to do it over shipping lumber from British Columbia into the U.S. is incredibly over the top); [3] you have a reputation for making good on your threats or promises.
Couple of side notes: credibility does not demand that you carry out every single threat or promise ... just most of them. And credibility explains why it is rational to carry out a punishment even if the threat has failed to deter someone.
Power is not resources, but resources are relevant to the exercise of power. Anything that might potentially be used to threaten or promise in an attempt to change someone’s behavior is a resource. What matters in a real situation are the resources that are available, relevant and credible: your capabilities. Exercising power, getting someone to do something they would not otherwise have done, depends the initiator’s capabilities compared to the target’s, each side’s goals and each side’s strategy. Back in 1968 some researchers gathered hard data on the military and economic resources of the United States and North Vietnam and fed them into a computer. After whirling and clanking for a while the computer printed out the news that the United States had won the Vietnam war six months earlier.
When people talk about “hard power” they typically mean military resources. “Soft power” usually refers to less tangible things like culture, prestige, and business opportunities. This use of the word “power” is misleading because it equates power and resources. And since military capabilities almost always involve inflicting pain and damage on the target and the other dimensions of resources seem much more useful in making promises or providing rewards, this language runs the risk of reinforcing another misleading notion of power. Some folks talk as if “power” meant coercion, crushing your victim’s will, dragging her or him kicking and screaming to do your bidding, while “persuasion” is the softer, wimpier tactic of asking nicely or incentivising behavior.
By the way, I find it interesting that we offer incentives or encouragement to persuade people we like to do the right thing but resent offering bribes or rewarding bad behavior to persuade people we don’t like. And we find it very easy to punish our enemies but it feels wrong to threaten or punish our friends. It may feel good to be nice to the nice and nasty to the nasty, but it is not good strategy.
So it seems to me that the distinction between “hard” and “soft” power is not only not useful; it is non-sensical. For almost all foreign policy issues, the most effective strategy is going to be a mix of threats and promises. The critical question is what can you use to make threats (if you don’t do what I want, you’ll be sorry) and promises (if you do what I want you’ll be better off) that are large enough and credible enough to convince your target to go along. Question is not rock hard or squishy soft; but, does it work?
All this is more, I think, than a semantic quibble. Thinking clearly and usefully about means in foreign policy is as important as thinking clearly about ends. I find it a little disconcerting that the person we will choose to sit in the Oval Office might not be clear about the tools he’s got to pursue American interests and how to use them.
Sometimes we talk as if power were like money in the bank. And sometimes we recognize that the most useful meaning of power is the ability to get somebody to do something they would not have done otherwise. (In Political Science jargon the someone who is trying to change behavior is often labeled the initiator and the party who is on the receiving end is the target.)
“Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” (Mao Tse Tung)
But I guess Gandhi didn’t get Mao’s memo. And ousting Imperial England from India was a much bigger accomplishment than ousting the corrupt and incompetent Chung Kai Shek regime.
“The United States is the most powerful country in the world.”
But if “most powerful” means the U.S. will always dominate, I can think of a whole raft of folks who didn’t get this memo, from Fidel Castro, to the government of Iraq, to the Canadians.
If you watch people or countries interacting, an important question is who is going to get what they want. (Who is going to get someone to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise.) Just looking at the resources each side has isn’t very helpful for three reasons.
1) Not all of your resources are available to be used in a given situation.
Close your eyes and imagine something that – or so it seems -- would make you really happy. Might be the coolest car made, might be a super. big screen HD TV, might be a significant contribution to your favorite charity ... But by the time you pay the mortgage, buy some food, pay utilities and all those other bills, that big pile of money has dwindled to a tiny stack. The U.S. Air Force has about 5600 planes of various types. But they are stationed at close to a hundred different bases in the U.S. and abroad and committed to a multitude of missions. The President can’t just decide to send 100 or planes to bomb someone.
2) Not all of your resources are relevant to a given situation, even if they are available.
I could go up to the checkout counter at the store with a six pack of beer and say, “What ho, my good man. I am Seth Thompson, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University, author of a blog on world politics, and I have a whole semester worth of PowerPoint slides on “power” and I’m not afraid to use them!” And the clerk will yawn and wait for me to hand over the $10 for the beer.
The U.S. has some fairly serious trade dissipates with Canada that we have been unable to resolve. The United States has 450 ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads; Canada has none. But Secretary of State Clinton has not summoned the Canadian ambassador to her office on the seventh floor of the State Department and said, “Listen Jack (his name is really Gary), either you guys stop exporting cheap hogs and logs and stop stealing our fish, or we’ll reduce Ottawa to a smoking pile of ash.”
3) Not all your threats or promises are credible.
As the late Flip Wilson used to say, “A lie is as good as the truth if you can get someone to believe it.” Credibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The credibility of a threat or promise hinges on the extent to which your target believes [1] you have the resources to carry it out; [2] what you’re threatening or promising seems proportional to what you want the target to do (we could nuke Canada but threatening to do it over shipping lumber from British Columbia into the U.S. is incredibly over the top); [3] you have a reputation for making good on your threats or promises.
Couple of side notes: credibility does not demand that you carry out every single threat or promise ... just most of them. And credibility explains why it is rational to carry out a punishment even if the threat has failed to deter someone.
Power is not resources, but resources are relevant to the exercise of power. Anything that might potentially be used to threaten or promise in an attempt to change someone’s behavior is a resource. What matters in a real situation are the resources that are available, relevant and credible: your capabilities. Exercising power, getting someone to do something they would not otherwise have done, depends the initiator’s capabilities compared to the target’s, each side’s goals and each side’s strategy. Back in 1968 some researchers gathered hard data on the military and economic resources of the United States and North Vietnam and fed them into a computer. After whirling and clanking for a while the computer printed out the news that the United States had won the Vietnam war six months earlier.
When people talk about “hard power” they typically mean military resources. “Soft power” usually refers to less tangible things like culture, prestige, and business opportunities. This use of the word “power” is misleading because it equates power and resources. And since military capabilities almost always involve inflicting pain and damage on the target and the other dimensions of resources seem much more useful in making promises or providing rewards, this language runs the risk of reinforcing another misleading notion of power. Some folks talk as if “power” meant coercion, crushing your victim’s will, dragging her or him kicking and screaming to do your bidding, while “persuasion” is the softer, wimpier tactic of asking nicely or incentivising behavior.
By the way, I find it interesting that we offer incentives or encouragement to persuade people we like to do the right thing but resent offering bribes or rewarding bad behavior to persuade people we don’t like. And we find it very easy to punish our enemies but it feels wrong to threaten or punish our friends. It may feel good to be nice to the nice and nasty to the nasty, but it is not good strategy.
So it seems to me that the distinction between “hard” and “soft” power is not only not useful; it is non-sensical. For almost all foreign policy issues, the most effective strategy is going to be a mix of threats and promises. The critical question is what can you use to make threats (if you don’t do what I want, you’ll be sorry) and promises (if you do what I want you’ll be better off) that are large enough and credible enough to convince your target to go along. Question is not rock hard or squishy soft; but, does it work?
All this is more, I think, than a semantic quibble. Thinking clearly and usefully about means in foreign policy is as important as thinking clearly about ends. I find it a little disconcerting that the person we will choose to sit in the Oval Office might not be clear about the tools he’s got to pursue American interests and how to use them.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Why Are They Mad At Us?
Four Americans killed in a brutal assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
U.S. embassy in Cairo attacked and invaded ... angry anti-American demonstrations in Taher square
Enraged mobs in Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, even India ...
The wave of vehement, often violent, anti-American protests is deeply disturbing and very hard to understand for a lot of people.
Many of us feel betrayed as well as profoundly puzzled. Why are they so mad at us when we didn’t do anything? It wasn’t you and I who made some cheap, tacky movie. We condemn hatred and prejudice and don’t blame an entire group of people for the outrageous actions of a few nut cases. We don’t join murderous mobs or support violent protests. We try to live by our principles and values and try to be tolerant and understanding of other people. We support the right of free speech even for slimeballs and idiots who say disgusting things. So why are they so mad at us?
It’s even harder to take the anger and insults when we shared the joy and exhilaration of the Arab Spring. We were emotionally with the protestors in Tahir Square who brought down the Mubarak dictatorship. We agonize over the innocent casualties of the Syrian civil war and hope that somehow Assad can be ousted. We felt solidarity with the people of Iran in 2009 when their “green revolution” was ruthlessly crushed. We’re on the side of the people ... how can they treat us like enemies?
I do not intend to argue with anyone’s feelings of anger and betrayal. To suggest ways we might understand these events is not, even implicitly, to justify or explain them away. It is not cultural imperialism or insensitive ethnocentrism to say these reactions are way over the top and wrong.
I think there is a real danger that for many of us the positive image of people in the Middle East and elsewhere as being pretty much like us with some understandable difference will be replaced by the dark image of “The Other”: irrational, reactionary, seething with hatred and barely repressed violence. Perhaps some analysis of the politics and psychology involved in this and similar mass reactions will be useful.
Among many possible questions these seem to me to be particularly important:
What are the protests really about?
Who are the protestors (and who isn’t protesting?)
Doesn’t this mean that those who warned us about an Islamist capture of the Arab Spring were right and we are in for a very dark time?
What are the protests about?
To phrase the question that way is lead us on a wild goose chase through the underbrush searching in vain for the “real” reason. The simple answer that goes something like, “people saw or heard about this movie that grossly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and rationally (or irrationally) got very angry” is no help because it can’t explain why almost all the roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world did NOT rush into the streets to chant “Death to America” at the nearest U.S. embassy.
Data from the several waves of the World Values Survey and from the 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims around the world suggest that widely held attitudes toward the West in general and the United States in particular include two sets of ambivalent perceptions. One common dichotomy is the juxtaposition of good American people and bad American government. A second dimension of ambivalence is the evaluation of the material and moral quality of life in the U.S. On the one hand, our technology, material standard of living, political and personal freedoms are admired and applauded and envied; on the other hand our technology and wealth are a reminder (or product) of their comparative backwardness and poverty and our liberty looks more like indulgent license and immorality. The more strongly a person holds the negative half of those dimensions, the more likely rumors of insults to Islam can become symbols that evoke these broader and deeper negative feelings about the U.S. or the West.
“Culture” is a sloppy and slippery term that resists clear or precise definition. Nonetheless, there are three very common elements in the political culture of the Middle East and North Africa that make negative images and attitudes toward the U.S. easier to evoke. Neither is unique to this setting but both seem to be more common here than other parts of the world.
The first element, held with varying degrees of strength, is a sense of being besieged by the outside world. A recurrent theme in both formal education and popular cultured is 1200 years of Christian attempts to contain and thwart Islam and 300 years of oppression by Western imperialism.
The second element in the Middle Eastern political culture is a tendency to see powerful, often malignant forces behind events. “Sh*t Happens” bumper stickers are very rare. It is closer to “common sense”, easier to believe, that there are powerful forces acting behind the scenes to at least permit, if not instigate negative events. Freud was not alone when he said there were no accidents.
The third element is a general and diffuse sense of frustration and disappointment with life. The idea of relative deprivation , the gap between what you feel you’re entitled to and what you have, is pretty well understood in political and social psychology. It is not that people are grindingly poor ... people who are living on the edge of physical survival are not at all easy to mobilize for politics. But people who feel that live has not been fair, that they have less than they deserve, tend to have an (unconscious) reservoir of resentment that can be manipulated and channeled.
So, for those who responded, when the video was described in highly provocative terms it became what could be called a condensation symbol -- an act of event that could tap into one or more underlying, deeper sources of anger and frustration. The protests are about the video and they are about far more.
Who are the protesters?
The analysis above and what we know about this kind of political participation in general would lead us to expect that the majority of participants would be young men who were psychologically available to be mobilized because of their attitudes. An additional factor is social: people who are members of a group, especially a small, face to face group, that shares and reinforces beliefs and attitudes are far more likely to engage in political action.
This emphasis on the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been people who were predisposed to respond to an opportunity to express frustration and discontent becomes even more important for understanding the meaning of their actions when we realize that most of the participants have NOT seen the video but only heard about it from someone else. Only about a quarter of the people in Egypt have access to the internet and, not surprisingly, they’re the wealthier, better educated Egyptian business owners and professionals, along with university students. Except for the students, these are the people least likely to recruited for a large, potentially violent demonstration.
The most critical players in mobilizing demonstrations are the imams. Imams play the same roles that rabbis or ministers do in the U.S., leading religious services and preaching sermons, presiding over marriages and funerals, visiting the sick, offering advice and comfort to the confused and afflicted. Particularly in working class or poor neighborhoods, the mosque is not just where you go on Friday to pray but the center of social and cultural activity. Imams are trained and credentialed by recognized institutions. Some countries, for example Egypt and Iran, have well developed and historically renowned centers for clerical education. As you might expect, the curriculum is narrowly focused on theology and law and heavily imbued with very conservative social values. Other, smaller countries, do not have many locally trained imams and rely on importing imams from abroad. A critical source of foreign trained imams for most of the Middle East and North Africa and, indeed, most of the broader Muslim world, is Saudi Arabia. This is an important factor in understanding why and how mosques can become focal points for mobilizing protests and demonstrations against the U.S. and the West.
As some of the readers already know, Islam in Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tenor. The Wahabbi religious movement that began in the 18th Century was a highly puritanical, deeply fundamentalist reform movement on the Arabian Peninsula. The Wahabbis combined calls for sinners to repent and be saved with the image of Muhammad and his followers as the model of a perfect Islamic society. If life in 19th Century Arabia seemed decadent and sinful to the early Wahabbis; 21st Century Saudi Arabia is even more sinful and immoral. And beyond Saudi Arabia, the world gets worse and worse until one comes to the unimaginable cess pit of the West. Saudi religious authorities feel a positive duty to send Wahabbi trained imams as missionaries to Muslims throughout the world.
I don’t mean to imply that all imams are ignorant of physical and social science, history and geography, or that all imams have a very limited education. But many, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, do have a shallow and simplistic view of the world and little knowledge about anything outside their immediate experience.
Islam is not a hierarchical religion with a structure of authority. There is no equivalent of the Pope or the Southern Baptist Convention that provides authoritative guidance to members of a particular group. There are distinctions among imams, based on perceived knowledge of law and theology, and the imam of the local mosque will look to a well known and respected man whose views he finds compatible for direction and leadership. Relationships among those perceived leading imams can often be highly competitive and feature a certain amount of jockeying for position and efforts to maintain and expand one’s circle of followers.
Here is a central dynamic in protests. Imams who are leaders of other imams can seize upon an event or person, frame it as a cause for great concern or celebration, and use it to rally and energize their followers. (Huge caveat: the fact that this is what it looks like to you and me as an observer does NOT mean that people are necessarily cynical manipulators rather than honest and sincere interpreters of reality as they see it.)
Thus an event like the notorious 12 minute YouTube video or the news reports earlier of American soldiers (accidently) defiling Korans, or the wacky Florida pastor’s promise of a Koranic bonfire, can be presented as a mobilizing symbol through the social dynamics of the mosque.
More insight into the political and social psychological dynamics of the protests comes from looking at who did not participate. I’m thinking of enormous number of quite traditionally devout Muslims whose lives are reasonably stable and secure. It is not that they are indifferent to insults to their religion and culture, but their reaction is not loaded with a lot of intensity and anger from other underlying issues.
As far as we can tell at the moment, the killing of four Americans in Benghazi is a completely different phenomenon from the widespread demonstrations throughout the Middle East. All the evidence suggests that an armed group more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, planned a murderous assault on the American consulate and simply took advantage of a demonstration (that they may have had a hand in organizing.)
Does this mean the Arab Spring has taken a terrible wrong turn?
Some people fear that the forces behind these demonstrations are part of a broader movement to replace the bad old dictators like Mubarak with bad new, Islamist dictators, much as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did. Some people believe that all politicians who look to Islam for values and guidance in running a country are part of an ominous “Islamist” movement that is inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western and hell bent on imposing theocracy in the Middle East and North Africa. These are people who see no real differences between so-called moderates like the current President of Egypt and “salafis” more hard core, reactionary forces. The passions and slogans of these demonstrations show that their political leaders are not interested in democracy, reject Western values, and are happily using elections to seize power and abolish elections. Fortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
There are real and enduring differences between the wide range of people and parties marching under the banner of “Political Islam” and outpourings of what looks on the surface like religious emotionalism are not the prelude to the abject failure of these early stirrings of democracy, as I discussed earlier http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-polticial-islam-really-so-scary.html
The great threat to political progress in the region remains what it has already been: failure to deal with economic stagnation and threats to peoples’ ability to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living. Economic development does not necessarily cause democracy but a democratic regime that does not improve peoples’ lives is extremely vulnerable to the siren call of some rigid and simplistic ideology. The real threat to a democratic future in Egypt is the immense economic challenges facing the government.
Some people worry that these outbursts will make it impossible for local governments, primarily Egypt, to continue cooperating with the United States. Certainly a government that has to pay attention to the anti-American and anti-Western feelings of some of its population is going to be more constrained to avoid the appearance of cooperating with the U.S. But the most important area of cooperation is countering terrorism and it is in the self interest of all the governments in the Middle East except Iran to act against Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look alikes.
And some people are worried that these demonstrations reveal a deeply rooted, pervasive anti-American sentiment. Even those of us who know that “they all hate us” is a grotesque over simplification, are likely to be disturbed by the idea that millions of people -- many more than actually protested – do not like us. Here there is, I think, bad news and good news.
The bad news is that attitudes are not likely to change very quickly and, if the analysis here is close to the mark, we will see more incidents of apparent rage and searing expressions of dislike. It is not that Middle Easterners or Muslims are more sensitive to insults than you and I nor is it that the United States pursues policies that are consistently opposed to the interests of the people of the Middle East (or the less developed world in general) or make their lives worse. (I realize that goes well beyond the original goal of explaining events without a political slant but I think I can defend the assertion that, on the whole, U.S. foreign policy is more often than not on the right track.) But if a central dynamic is the existence of a significant number of people who can be mobilized to load their underlying discontent and sorrow onto “bad America” as a symbol, that dynamic is not likely to change very soon.
The good news is that heated and dramatic cultural or religious conflict between you and me and our counterparts in the Middle East is not inevitable. Forty years ago (yes, I know for some readers I might as well have written “Once upon a time, along time ago ...” but others will remember) Latin America was often rocked by anti-American demonstrations and we heard the same fears that if there were more democracy there would be more opposition to the United States and more open rejection of us and our values.
What happened? I think the quick answer is economic development. Standards of living have improved in Latin American countries. There are still a large number of poor people but they are a smaller and smaller proportion of the population in the various countries and even the poor have some reason to expect that their lives, or at least the lives of their children, will improve over time.
If things go well for the Middle East, meaning a combination of good policies on the part of governments and favorable dynamics in the global economy, one can see a Middle East more integrated into the global economy and experiencing sustained growth over a number of years. That will lead to less frustration and less friction and more weight given to the positive aspects of images of the U.S. and the West. It will also expand the possibilities for serifs dialog and clarification of the areas where Muslim and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the good person, the good life and peoples’ relation to God coincide and areas where there are deep and fundamental differences.
U.S. embassy in Cairo attacked and invaded ... angry anti-American demonstrations in Taher square
Enraged mobs in Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, even India ...
The wave of vehement, often violent, anti-American protests is deeply disturbing and very hard to understand for a lot of people.
Many of us feel betrayed as well as profoundly puzzled. Why are they so mad at us when we didn’t do anything? It wasn’t you and I who made some cheap, tacky movie. We condemn hatred and prejudice and don’t blame an entire group of people for the outrageous actions of a few nut cases. We don’t join murderous mobs or support violent protests. We try to live by our principles and values and try to be tolerant and understanding of other people. We support the right of free speech even for slimeballs and idiots who say disgusting things. So why are they so mad at us?
It’s even harder to take the anger and insults when we shared the joy and exhilaration of the Arab Spring. We were emotionally with the protestors in Tahir Square who brought down the Mubarak dictatorship. We agonize over the innocent casualties of the Syrian civil war and hope that somehow Assad can be ousted. We felt solidarity with the people of Iran in 2009 when their “green revolution” was ruthlessly crushed. We’re on the side of the people ... how can they treat us like enemies?
I do not intend to argue with anyone’s feelings of anger and betrayal. To suggest ways we might understand these events is not, even implicitly, to justify or explain them away. It is not cultural imperialism or insensitive ethnocentrism to say these reactions are way over the top and wrong.
I think there is a real danger that for many of us the positive image of people in the Middle East and elsewhere as being pretty much like us with some understandable difference will be replaced by the dark image of “The Other”: irrational, reactionary, seething with hatred and barely repressed violence. Perhaps some analysis of the politics and psychology involved in this and similar mass reactions will be useful.
Among many possible questions these seem to me to be particularly important:
What are the protests really about?
Who are the protestors (and who isn’t protesting?)
Doesn’t this mean that those who warned us about an Islamist capture of the Arab Spring were right and we are in for a very dark time?
What are the protests about?
To phrase the question that way is lead us on a wild goose chase through the underbrush searching in vain for the “real” reason. The simple answer that goes something like, “people saw or heard about this movie that grossly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and rationally (or irrationally) got very angry” is no help because it can’t explain why almost all the roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world did NOT rush into the streets to chant “Death to America” at the nearest U.S. embassy.
Data from the several waves of the World Values Survey and from the 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims around the world suggest that widely held attitudes toward the West in general and the United States in particular include two sets of ambivalent perceptions. One common dichotomy is the juxtaposition of good American people and bad American government. A second dimension of ambivalence is the evaluation of the material and moral quality of life in the U.S. On the one hand, our technology, material standard of living, political and personal freedoms are admired and applauded and envied; on the other hand our technology and wealth are a reminder (or product) of their comparative backwardness and poverty and our liberty looks more like indulgent license and immorality. The more strongly a person holds the negative half of those dimensions, the more likely rumors of insults to Islam can become symbols that evoke these broader and deeper negative feelings about the U.S. or the West.
“Culture” is a sloppy and slippery term that resists clear or precise definition. Nonetheless, there are three very common elements in the political culture of the Middle East and North Africa that make negative images and attitudes toward the U.S. easier to evoke. Neither is unique to this setting but both seem to be more common here than other parts of the world.
The first element, held with varying degrees of strength, is a sense of being besieged by the outside world. A recurrent theme in both formal education and popular cultured is 1200 years of Christian attempts to contain and thwart Islam and 300 years of oppression by Western imperialism.
The second element in the Middle Eastern political culture is a tendency to see powerful, often malignant forces behind events. “Sh*t Happens” bumper stickers are very rare. It is closer to “common sense”, easier to believe, that there are powerful forces acting behind the scenes to at least permit, if not instigate negative events. Freud was not alone when he said there were no accidents.
The third element is a general and diffuse sense of frustration and disappointment with life. The idea of relative deprivation , the gap between what you feel you’re entitled to and what you have, is pretty well understood in political and social psychology. It is not that people are grindingly poor ... people who are living on the edge of physical survival are not at all easy to mobilize for politics. But people who feel that live has not been fair, that they have less than they deserve, tend to have an (unconscious) reservoir of resentment that can be manipulated and channeled.
So, for those who responded, when the video was described in highly provocative terms it became what could be called a condensation symbol -- an act of event that could tap into one or more underlying, deeper sources of anger and frustration. The protests are about the video and they are about far more.
Who are the protesters?
The analysis above and what we know about this kind of political participation in general would lead us to expect that the majority of participants would be young men who were psychologically available to be mobilized because of their attitudes. An additional factor is social: people who are members of a group, especially a small, face to face group, that shares and reinforces beliefs and attitudes are far more likely to engage in political action.
This emphasis on the fact that the vast majority of protestors have been people who were predisposed to respond to an opportunity to express frustration and discontent becomes even more important for understanding the meaning of their actions when we realize that most of the participants have NOT seen the video but only heard about it from someone else. Only about a quarter of the people in Egypt have access to the internet and, not surprisingly, they’re the wealthier, better educated Egyptian business owners and professionals, along with university students. Except for the students, these are the people least likely to recruited for a large, potentially violent demonstration.
The most critical players in mobilizing demonstrations are the imams. Imams play the same roles that rabbis or ministers do in the U.S., leading religious services and preaching sermons, presiding over marriages and funerals, visiting the sick, offering advice and comfort to the confused and afflicted. Particularly in working class or poor neighborhoods, the mosque is not just where you go on Friday to pray but the center of social and cultural activity. Imams are trained and credentialed by recognized institutions. Some countries, for example Egypt and Iran, have well developed and historically renowned centers for clerical education. As you might expect, the curriculum is narrowly focused on theology and law and heavily imbued with very conservative social values. Other, smaller countries, do not have many locally trained imams and rely on importing imams from abroad. A critical source of foreign trained imams for most of the Middle East and North Africa and, indeed, most of the broader Muslim world, is Saudi Arabia. This is an important factor in understanding why and how mosques can become focal points for mobilizing protests and demonstrations against the U.S. and the West.
As some of the readers already know, Islam in Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tenor. The Wahabbi religious movement that began in the 18th Century was a highly puritanical, deeply fundamentalist reform movement on the Arabian Peninsula. The Wahabbis combined calls for sinners to repent and be saved with the image of Muhammad and his followers as the model of a perfect Islamic society. If life in 19th Century Arabia seemed decadent and sinful to the early Wahabbis; 21st Century Saudi Arabia is even more sinful and immoral. And beyond Saudi Arabia, the world gets worse and worse until one comes to the unimaginable cess pit of the West. Saudi religious authorities feel a positive duty to send Wahabbi trained imams as missionaries to Muslims throughout the world.
I don’t mean to imply that all imams are ignorant of physical and social science, history and geography, or that all imams have a very limited education. But many, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, do have a shallow and simplistic view of the world and little knowledge about anything outside their immediate experience.
Islam is not a hierarchical religion with a structure of authority. There is no equivalent of the Pope or the Southern Baptist Convention that provides authoritative guidance to members of a particular group. There are distinctions among imams, based on perceived knowledge of law and theology, and the imam of the local mosque will look to a well known and respected man whose views he finds compatible for direction and leadership. Relationships among those perceived leading imams can often be highly competitive and feature a certain amount of jockeying for position and efforts to maintain and expand one’s circle of followers.
Here is a central dynamic in protests. Imams who are leaders of other imams can seize upon an event or person, frame it as a cause for great concern or celebration, and use it to rally and energize their followers. (Huge caveat: the fact that this is what it looks like to you and me as an observer does NOT mean that people are necessarily cynical manipulators rather than honest and sincere interpreters of reality as they see it.)
Thus an event like the notorious 12 minute YouTube video or the news reports earlier of American soldiers (accidently) defiling Korans, or the wacky Florida pastor’s promise of a Koranic bonfire, can be presented as a mobilizing symbol through the social dynamics of the mosque.
More insight into the political and social psychological dynamics of the protests comes from looking at who did not participate. I’m thinking of enormous number of quite traditionally devout Muslims whose lives are reasonably stable and secure. It is not that they are indifferent to insults to their religion and culture, but their reaction is not loaded with a lot of intensity and anger from other underlying issues.
As far as we can tell at the moment, the killing of four Americans in Benghazi is a completely different phenomenon from the widespread demonstrations throughout the Middle East. All the evidence suggests that an armed group more or less loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, planned a murderous assault on the American consulate and simply took advantage of a demonstration (that they may have had a hand in organizing.)
Does this mean the Arab Spring has taken a terrible wrong turn?
Some people fear that the forces behind these demonstrations are part of a broader movement to replace the bad old dictators like Mubarak with bad new, Islamist dictators, much as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did. Some people believe that all politicians who look to Islam for values and guidance in running a country are part of an ominous “Islamist” movement that is inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western and hell bent on imposing theocracy in the Middle East and North Africa. These are people who see no real differences between so-called moderates like the current President of Egypt and “salafis” more hard core, reactionary forces. The passions and slogans of these demonstrations show that their political leaders are not interested in democracy, reject Western values, and are happily using elections to seize power and abolish elections. Fortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
There are real and enduring differences between the wide range of people and parties marching under the banner of “Political Islam” and outpourings of what looks on the surface like religious emotionalism are not the prelude to the abject failure of these early stirrings of democracy, as I discussed earlier http://ir-comments.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-polticial-islam-really-so-scary.html
The great threat to political progress in the region remains what it has already been: failure to deal with economic stagnation and threats to peoples’ ability to achieve a minimally acceptable standard of living. Economic development does not necessarily cause democracy but a democratic regime that does not improve peoples’ lives is extremely vulnerable to the siren call of some rigid and simplistic ideology. The real threat to a democratic future in Egypt is the immense economic challenges facing the government.
Some people worry that these outbursts will make it impossible for local governments, primarily Egypt, to continue cooperating with the United States. Certainly a government that has to pay attention to the anti-American and anti-Western feelings of some of its population is going to be more constrained to avoid the appearance of cooperating with the U.S. But the most important area of cooperation is countering terrorism and it is in the self interest of all the governments in the Middle East except Iran to act against Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look alikes.
And some people are worried that these demonstrations reveal a deeply rooted, pervasive anti-American sentiment. Even those of us who know that “they all hate us” is a grotesque over simplification, are likely to be disturbed by the idea that millions of people -- many more than actually protested – do not like us. Here there is, I think, bad news and good news.
The bad news is that attitudes are not likely to change very quickly and, if the analysis here is close to the mark, we will see more incidents of apparent rage and searing expressions of dislike. It is not that Middle Easterners or Muslims are more sensitive to insults than you and I nor is it that the United States pursues policies that are consistently opposed to the interests of the people of the Middle East (or the less developed world in general) or make their lives worse. (I realize that goes well beyond the original goal of explaining events without a political slant but I think I can defend the assertion that, on the whole, U.S. foreign policy is more often than not on the right track.) But if a central dynamic is the existence of a significant number of people who can be mobilized to load their underlying discontent and sorrow onto “bad America” as a symbol, that dynamic is not likely to change very soon.
The good news is that heated and dramatic cultural or religious conflict between you and me and our counterparts in the Middle East is not inevitable. Forty years ago (yes, I know for some readers I might as well have written “Once upon a time, along time ago ...” but others will remember) Latin America was often rocked by anti-American demonstrations and we heard the same fears that if there were more democracy there would be more opposition to the United States and more open rejection of us and our values.
What happened? I think the quick answer is economic development. Standards of living have improved in Latin American countries. There are still a large number of poor people but they are a smaller and smaller proportion of the population in the various countries and even the poor have some reason to expect that their lives, or at least the lives of their children, will improve over time.
If things go well for the Middle East, meaning a combination of good policies on the part of governments and favorable dynamics in the global economy, one can see a Middle East more integrated into the global economy and experiencing sustained growth over a number of years. That will lead to less frustration and less friction and more weight given to the positive aspects of images of the U.S. and the West. It will also expand the possibilities for serifs dialog and clarification of the areas where Muslim and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the good person, the good life and peoples’ relation to God coincide and areas where there are deep and fundamental differences.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The Revoluton Starts Now?
Egypt is in a crisis at least as momentous as January 2011. But the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Tahir Square are gone, so there are no gripping videos. The simple story line – brave young (media savvy) Egyptians versus stodgy old dictator -- has been replaced by a confusing cast of characters who are complicated mixes of interests and motives. The result, to paraphrase the 70's protest song, is that the revolution is not being televised.
The dramatic events of the Arab Spring, culminating in the departure of Hosni Mubarak were prologue; this is the revolutionary moment in Egypt, when the broad outlines of the future will be determined.
Perhaps a brief reminder of the major events of the recent past will help set the stage. When Mubarak was ousted by his former close allies in the military the 20 member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control. SCAF oversaw drafting a series of new laws, most notably provisions for parliamentary elections last November. It should not have surprised anyone that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the single biggest winner in the elections and when allied with more fundamentalist and conservative Islamist parties, commanded a two thirds majority. The SCAF also established a procedure for Presidential elections. Part of the process involved review of potential candidates by SCAF and the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (all of whose members were appointed by the Mubarak government) which led to the disqualification or withdrawal of a fairly large number of candidates. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood broke its public pledge not to sponsor a Presidential candidate and when their first choice was disqualified, nominated Mohamed Morsi. Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, emerged as the other major contender after the first round of voting in early June.
Ten days before the presidential election the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled on legal challenges to the parliamentary elections and decided that as many as one third of the members elected in November had run illegally. Almost immediately the SCAF issued a series of decrees that dissolved parliament, claimed all legislative authority, prevented the not yet elected president from interfering with the military (including cutting its budget.) So Egyptians went to the polls on June 19 to vote for a president whose authority was unclear and whose specific powers were to be determined by SCAF or some other body at some unknown date.
For many Egyptians the Presidential choice was difficult. During the campaign Mohamed Morsi found himself walking a tightrope between the expectations of his social and religiously conservative base and the need to reassure more secular and liberal voters that he was fully committed to democracy and tolerance. Ahmed Shafik could run a campaign based on who he was not -- an Islamist -- without too many awkward questions about his ties to the military or his role in the old regime. He presented himself as the safe candidate, disinclined to change the social order and more likely to get the economy going again both because he knew how to run a modern bureaucracy and because he would not frighten tourists away.
Ten days after parliament was dissolved Morsi won the presidency. A week later he challenged the military by convening the dissolved parliament. Some of the liberal and secular members boycotted the session which they saw as a flexing of Islamist political muscle, but the large majority of members were there for a very brief session that charged a committee with pursuing legal avenues to counter the Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision and adjourned. (Somewhat disingenuously the speaker of the parliament insisted that the session and its decision were not defying the Court’s authority but were trying to find ways to implement the Court’s decision.)
So if it is not a simple fairy tale of good guys and bad guys, what is going on? For most politically active Egyptians there are two examples in the Middle East of how the future might look. One is relatively democratic Turkey, where an Islamist party moderated its positions over a couple of decades and has not used its electoral victory to radically upset the society or economy and the military has increasingly moved away from its old dominance. The other is autocratic Saudi Arabia where the government and semi-official committees for the promotion of virtue and suppression of vice vigorously enforce a very narrow and restrictive version of Islam. Each example inspires hope in some Egyptians and dread in others.
There are three major players whose decisions will interact with each other and define Egypt’s future: the Muslim Brotherhood, the senior military officers, and the secular or liberal politicians. Each of them has reasons to oppose and support the others and each of them is in turn internally divided.
In simple (dangerously close to overly simplistic) terms, the interests and challenges of each include:
For the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary interest is in achieving power in Egypt to reform the country. There is a wide variety of views within the Brotherhood itself and among its supporters about the nature of that reform. For some the goal is to use persuasion and the democratic process to improve social morals and reduce the influence of secular, Western ideas and practices. Turkey is the example. For others, it is to use the state apparatus to force people to conform to conservative religious ideals and behaviors and Saudi Arabia is a positive example. The Brotherhood was an opponent of the Egyptian regime at its founding in the days of the monarch and was the most forceful and visible opponent of the regime initiated by Gamal Nasser in the 1950s that ended with Mubarak’s ouster.
The Brotherhood is viewed favorably by many Egyptians for its consistent opposition to repression. But it is feared for its roots in Islamic fundamentalism and episodes of violence in its history. The decision to run a candidate for president paid off in a short term victory; it is hard to tell how much damage it did to the Brotherhood’s long term credibility and legitimacy. Secular liberal Egyptians and the military hope the constraints of governance and the more democratic elements within the Brotherhood will move it toward the Turkish model but fear that even apparently moderate members secretly long for Saudi Arabia and repressive righteousness.
For the senior military officers there are two primary interests: maintaining order and stability in Egypt and maintaining the uniquely privileged position of the officer corps in the Egyptian economy and society. The military has worked very hard to counter the Muslim Brotherhood over the decades, outlawing it, jailing its leaders from time to time, portraying it as a threat to ordinary Egyptians to justify continued military rule, and making strenuous efforts to inoculate the officer corps against Islamist tendencies. The 20 members of SCAF have vivid personal memories of the Islamists who gunned down Anwar Sadat in 1981. The leadership of the Brotherhood is not tied into the modern economy in the ways that the leaders of many secular liberal parties are nor are they likely to be tolerant of the military's largely autonomous network of businesses. At the same time, assuming direct rule as way of preventing the Brotherhood from coming to power is a very unpalatable alternative. Far better to have people applaud you for guarding the country against all enemies foreign and domestic than have people blame you for high unemployment and inflation.
For secular liberals, the primary interest is preserving and extending the modern sectors of Egypt. It is close enough to the truth to say that there is an observable class division in Egypt. On one side are urban, western educated, upper and middle class business people and professionals and recent college graduates, living or hoping to live much the same sort of life you do. On the other side are rural or urban slum dwellers, not well educated or having only a religious education, small farmers or traditional artisans, making the best of meager resources and often feeling vaguely threatened by an alien world. The fondest hope of the secular liberal parties is that they can play a broker’s role between the Brotherhood and the military and avoid the Scylla of a return to dictatorship and the Charybdis of reactionary religiosity. The greatest fear is that the Brotherhood will be able to mobilize its base in rural Egypt and the slums and use democratic forms to destroy both democracy and secularism.
Adding to the volatile mix is a high level of distrust and suspicion in Egyptian political life. Conspiracy theories are hardly unique to Egypt and the Middle East, but they seem more common than in the U.S. There is a pervasive suspicion that powerful forces are manipulating events behind the scenes. For example, President’s Morsi’s attempt to reconvene parliament is seen by some as a bold confrontation of the military; others are sure that Morsi and the military had collaborated on the script for the drama. Political opponents are suspected of colluding to thwart your interests and your allies may be tempted to make a deal behind your back. The culture of distrust makes it hard for politicians and groups to forge long term cooperative relationships and to take statements of positions or pledges of support at face value.
The current drama will probably not have a sudden, obvious outcome. Unless the Brotherhood leadership grossly miscalculates or Cairo erupts in riots, the military is not likely to send tanks into the streets and declare the democratic experiment dead. President Morsi and the parliamentary majority are unlikely to try to establish an overtly Islamic state and unleash a reign of terror on loose women and MINOs (Muslim in Name Only.)
The more likely outcome is a two steps forward, one back, messy and halting movement toward a hybrid system that can maintain order while addressing Egypt’s glaring economic problems. If everyday Egyptians do not feel personally secure and the economy gets even worse over the next year, then the military might well decide (as have militaries in many other countries) that the civilians have failed and it is time for direct rule by men who know how to get things done ...
The dramatic events of the Arab Spring, culminating in the departure of Hosni Mubarak were prologue; this is the revolutionary moment in Egypt, when the broad outlines of the future will be determined.
Perhaps a brief reminder of the major events of the recent past will help set the stage. When Mubarak was ousted by his former close allies in the military the 20 member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control. SCAF oversaw drafting a series of new laws, most notably provisions for parliamentary elections last November. It should not have surprised anyone that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the single biggest winner in the elections and when allied with more fundamentalist and conservative Islamist parties, commanded a two thirds majority. The SCAF also established a procedure for Presidential elections. Part of the process involved review of potential candidates by SCAF and the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (all of whose members were appointed by the Mubarak government) which led to the disqualification or withdrawal of a fairly large number of candidates. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood broke its public pledge not to sponsor a Presidential candidate and when their first choice was disqualified, nominated Mohamed Morsi. Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, emerged as the other major contender after the first round of voting in early June.
Ten days before the presidential election the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled on legal challenges to the parliamentary elections and decided that as many as one third of the members elected in November had run illegally. Almost immediately the SCAF issued a series of decrees that dissolved parliament, claimed all legislative authority, prevented the not yet elected president from interfering with the military (including cutting its budget.) So Egyptians went to the polls on June 19 to vote for a president whose authority was unclear and whose specific powers were to be determined by SCAF or some other body at some unknown date.
For many Egyptians the Presidential choice was difficult. During the campaign Mohamed Morsi found himself walking a tightrope between the expectations of his social and religiously conservative base and the need to reassure more secular and liberal voters that he was fully committed to democracy and tolerance. Ahmed Shafik could run a campaign based on who he was not -- an Islamist -- without too many awkward questions about his ties to the military or his role in the old regime. He presented himself as the safe candidate, disinclined to change the social order and more likely to get the economy going again both because he knew how to run a modern bureaucracy and because he would not frighten tourists away.
Ten days after parliament was dissolved Morsi won the presidency. A week later he challenged the military by convening the dissolved parliament. Some of the liberal and secular members boycotted the session which they saw as a flexing of Islamist political muscle, but the large majority of members were there for a very brief session that charged a committee with pursuing legal avenues to counter the Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision and adjourned. (Somewhat disingenuously the speaker of the parliament insisted that the session and its decision were not defying the Court’s authority but were trying to find ways to implement the Court’s decision.)
So if it is not a simple fairy tale of good guys and bad guys, what is going on? For most politically active Egyptians there are two examples in the Middle East of how the future might look. One is relatively democratic Turkey, where an Islamist party moderated its positions over a couple of decades and has not used its electoral victory to radically upset the society or economy and the military has increasingly moved away from its old dominance. The other is autocratic Saudi Arabia where the government and semi-official committees for the promotion of virtue and suppression of vice vigorously enforce a very narrow and restrictive version of Islam. Each example inspires hope in some Egyptians and dread in others.
There are three major players whose decisions will interact with each other and define Egypt’s future: the Muslim Brotherhood, the senior military officers, and the secular or liberal politicians. Each of them has reasons to oppose and support the others and each of them is in turn internally divided.
In simple (dangerously close to overly simplistic) terms, the interests and challenges of each include:
For the Muslim Brotherhood, the primary interest is in achieving power in Egypt to reform the country. There is a wide variety of views within the Brotherhood itself and among its supporters about the nature of that reform. For some the goal is to use persuasion and the democratic process to improve social morals and reduce the influence of secular, Western ideas and practices. Turkey is the example. For others, it is to use the state apparatus to force people to conform to conservative religious ideals and behaviors and Saudi Arabia is a positive example. The Brotherhood was an opponent of the Egyptian regime at its founding in the days of the monarch and was the most forceful and visible opponent of the regime initiated by Gamal Nasser in the 1950s that ended with Mubarak’s ouster.
The Brotherhood is viewed favorably by many Egyptians for its consistent opposition to repression. But it is feared for its roots in Islamic fundamentalism and episodes of violence in its history. The decision to run a candidate for president paid off in a short term victory; it is hard to tell how much damage it did to the Brotherhood’s long term credibility and legitimacy. Secular liberal Egyptians and the military hope the constraints of governance and the more democratic elements within the Brotherhood will move it toward the Turkish model but fear that even apparently moderate members secretly long for Saudi Arabia and repressive righteousness.
For the senior military officers there are two primary interests: maintaining order and stability in Egypt and maintaining the uniquely privileged position of the officer corps in the Egyptian economy and society. The military has worked very hard to counter the Muslim Brotherhood over the decades, outlawing it, jailing its leaders from time to time, portraying it as a threat to ordinary Egyptians to justify continued military rule, and making strenuous efforts to inoculate the officer corps against Islamist tendencies. The 20 members of SCAF have vivid personal memories of the Islamists who gunned down Anwar Sadat in 1981. The leadership of the Brotherhood is not tied into the modern economy in the ways that the leaders of many secular liberal parties are nor are they likely to be tolerant of the military's largely autonomous network of businesses. At the same time, assuming direct rule as way of preventing the Brotherhood from coming to power is a very unpalatable alternative. Far better to have people applaud you for guarding the country against all enemies foreign and domestic than have people blame you for high unemployment and inflation.
For secular liberals, the primary interest is preserving and extending the modern sectors of Egypt. It is close enough to the truth to say that there is an observable class division in Egypt. On one side are urban, western educated, upper and middle class business people and professionals and recent college graduates, living or hoping to live much the same sort of life you do. On the other side are rural or urban slum dwellers, not well educated or having only a religious education, small farmers or traditional artisans, making the best of meager resources and often feeling vaguely threatened by an alien world. The fondest hope of the secular liberal parties is that they can play a broker’s role between the Brotherhood and the military and avoid the Scylla of a return to dictatorship and the Charybdis of reactionary religiosity. The greatest fear is that the Brotherhood will be able to mobilize its base in rural Egypt and the slums and use democratic forms to destroy both democracy and secularism.
Adding to the volatile mix is a high level of distrust and suspicion in Egyptian political life. Conspiracy theories are hardly unique to Egypt and the Middle East, but they seem more common than in the U.S. There is a pervasive suspicion that powerful forces are manipulating events behind the scenes. For example, President’s Morsi’s attempt to reconvene parliament is seen by some as a bold confrontation of the military; others are sure that Morsi and the military had collaborated on the script for the drama. Political opponents are suspected of colluding to thwart your interests and your allies may be tempted to make a deal behind your back. The culture of distrust makes it hard for politicians and groups to forge long term cooperative relationships and to take statements of positions or pledges of support at face value.
The current drama will probably not have a sudden, obvious outcome. Unless the Brotherhood leadership grossly miscalculates or Cairo erupts in riots, the military is not likely to send tanks into the streets and declare the democratic experiment dead. President Morsi and the parliamentary majority are unlikely to try to establish an overtly Islamic state and unleash a reign of terror on loose women and MINOs (Muslim in Name Only.)
The more likely outcome is a two steps forward, one back, messy and halting movement toward a hybrid system that can maintain order while addressing Egypt’s glaring economic problems. If everyday Egyptians do not feel personally secure and the economy gets even worse over the next year, then the military might well decide (as have militaries in many other countries) that the civilians have failed and it is time for direct rule by men who know how to get things done ...
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
I Will Drone You
... reportedly used as a threat by young men in the tribal areas of Pakistan who frequently hear the buzz of U.S. hunter killer drones overhead.
About a decade ago there was a great deal of talk about a revolution in military affairs, the emergence of the electronic battlefield, the transformation of G.I. Joe into Buck Rogers, and a wide range of gee-whiz innovations, constrained only by the writer’s imagination. While we’re still waiting for much of what was promised (along with the flying cars, robot housekeepers and free electricity that the fearless forecasters of the 60s assured us would be here long before now), some aspects of modern warfare has been transformed by technology.
A particularly notable example is the mushrooming use of drones. The consensus estimate is the U.S. has about 7,500 drones -- unmanned aircraft -- deployed today. They range from the relatively small like the 18 inch Wasp III with a 3 mile radius, to the forty-four and half foot Global Hawk that can fly as high as 65,000 feet and say in the air as long as 36 hours. The large majority carry cameras and radars of varying types for data gathering and mapping. Some, like the Predator and Reaper, are used for killing.
Drones are not cheap; you can fly the little WASP III off the lot for $49,000 but a Predator will set you back over $13 million and the Global Hawk goes for around $15 million. (All drones include GPS systems and electronics far more advanced than your car; but your car does have a better sound system and more cupholders.)
Most drones are purchased and controlled by the military; some are loaned to other branches of government, from the CIA to the Border Patrol to NASA. The CIA’s use of drones to attack and kill suspected Taliban in Pakistan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has raised some of the most serious questions surrounding their use.
Under the Obama administration the use of drones for all purposes has mushroomed including the use of Reaper or Predator drones for attacks. Hard data is elusive but it has been estimated that there have been around 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade, with at least 118 confirmed strikes in Pakistan in 2010 alone.
Responsibility for using drones is divided between the Department of Defense and the CIA. The military operates the drones in Afghanistan and until the first of this year, in Iraq. (At least there have no public reports of U.S. drone attacks in Iraq since the ostensible withdrawal of U.S. forces.) Operations in Pakistan are under the CIA and operations in Yemen are divided, with the military making some drone attacks and the CIA others.
This division of responsibility matters because it affects who gets targeted for drone attacks and who oversees the operations. There are, according to some sources, three separate “kill lists” -- the National Security Council compiles one, the CIA another, and the miliary’s Joint Special Operations Command a third. Who decides, using what criteria, to put someone’s name on a list is not clear. Nor do we know who decides that there is enough intelligence to launch a specific mission targeting an individual. In addition, the CIA uses “signature” strikes. Instead of confirming that a particular individual whose name is on a kill list is in fact in the sights of the drone operator, there is a set of behavioral indicators that support the conclusion that the people being observed are engaged in harmful or threatening activities and should be targets of a missile.
Civilian, specifically Congressional, oversight of both the military and the CIA is central to our conception of American government. The military use of drones in Afghanistan is overseen by the House and Senate Armed Services committees, while the House and Senate Intelligence committees oversee the CIA operations. It is not surprising then that the rules of engagement are apparently different for military as opposed to CIA drone attacks.
I think the use of hunter killer drones like Predator and Reaper raise several issues that you and I as American citizens ought to be thinking about.
● who is monitoring the broad policy implications of drone attacks outside formal combat zones, particularly the attacks in Pakistan
● are targeted assassinations comparable to, or different from, shooting enemy solders during a fire fight
● who, using what criteria, puts someone’s name on a kill list
● can the government of the United States execute an American citizen without a trial?
The question of broader policy implications is raised directly by the CIA operations in Pakistan. CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have complicated an already difficult relationship. From an American perspective the key issues are internal stability, deep concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, and the potential for a violent confrontation with India.
The drone strikes seriously complicate U.S. efforts to slow down the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and to support political development because they:
Are wildly unpopular with Pakistan public opinion. It may well be true that they have gotten far more discriminating and the number of innocent bystanders killed has been drastically reduced, as proponents of the strikes contend. But they are widely perceived in Pakistan as an arrogant assault on Pakistan’s territory and sovereignty that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders. This makes it harder for the government to appear to cooperate with the U.S.
Divide the Pakistani military. The popular democratic movement that replaced the military dictatorship with a civilian government did not change the fundamentals of Pakistani politics: the military is the single most important factor. The military is deeply ambivalent about the Taliban operating in northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas. For some military leaders, especially the Intelligence agency (ISI), the Taliban is a tool they created in the 1980s to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and to prevent India from gaining a foothold in the area. [for a brief overview of the Taliban and its relation to the ISI, see Who are Those Guys?] In 2012 India is the major threat and replacing the weak and corrupt Karzai government with a reliably anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan regime would be a good thing. Drone strikes kill good guys and are very bad thing. For other military leaders, the Taliban has become a threat to internal stability and urban middle and upper middle classes. Drone strikes kill bad guys and are a good thing, even if the government must make periodic public protests for the sake of public opinion.
The weightiest issue, I think, is not the drone strikes themselves but who decides that the positive impact of the strikes on the war in Afghanistan outweighs the negative impacts on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy. It is not clear that anyone is seriously evaluating the larger strategic consequences of the tactical use of drones.
The use of drones to target particular individuals who have been identified as Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders raises a serious issue. U.S. law prohibits assassination attempts on foreign heads of state. International law and norms try to maintain a distinction between combat on a battlefield and other kinds of killing. Drones are used in Pakistan and Yemen (and perhaps elsewhere) to kill specific individual who are believed to be plotting against the United States. I don’t think this can be justified in the same way that one can justify killing someone in an enemy uniform or someone who is shooting at you. I can make an argument that it can be justified and I can make the counter argument. The point is, I think, is that no one has been challenged to make the argument, there has been no demand that the CIA or the Defense Department justify the use of drones as weapons in this fashion.
Closely related to the question of targeted killings by drones the existence of “kill lists.” Perhaps because it is so easy to see the targets of the drone attacks as “bad guys who need to be killed” very few people seem to be concerned about the criteria used and the decision process that puts a person’s name on the list. The arguments for and against capital punishment are well known and the debate has raged for decades and the conditions under which the State can take a person’s life are tightly circumscribed by law. But a person can be executed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone under secret guidelines with no trial. This seems to be a serious enough action that we ought to be thinking about it.
Signature attacks seem even more problematic. The criteria are secret -- some people find it troubling that you can be killed far from a battlefield for doing something that someone sitting in a darkened room at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas or another installation in the U.S. finds suspicious. There is no way for you or I to know how useful the behavioral criteria are at clearly distinguishing hostile behavior or how often they yield a false positive by misinterpreting behavior. There are unconfirmed allegations, for example, that people running to help victims of a drone attack have in their turn been attacked.
For many people, the fact that American citizens have been executed in targeted drone attacks is particularly troubling. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed last September in Yemen. His 16 year old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. When word leaked that President Obama had approved adding al-Awlaki to a kill list in the fall of 2010 there was a flurry of protests by civil liberties groups but legal challenges failed and the alleged crimes of al-Awlaki were so serious and he was so public in his hopes to do harm to Americans that most of us paid little attention. And we paid equally little attention a couple months ago when Attorney General Holder offered a long awaited justification of killing al-Awlaki by citing a secret Justice Department memo. But some people do remain troubled by the argument that the President has the authority to execute an American citizen without a trial or any judicial process but you and I cannot see the legal rationale.
In some ways the issues raised by drone strikes are some of the familiar issues raised by the “war on terror” which in many ways continues just as it began under the Bush administration, even if the term itself has been stricken from the official vocabulary. In other ways these issues flow from the use of a new technology whose implications are only now beginning to emerge but that promises to become more and more prominent in our every day lives as well as on battlefields far removed.
About a decade ago there was a great deal of talk about a revolution in military affairs, the emergence of the electronic battlefield, the transformation of G.I. Joe into Buck Rogers, and a wide range of gee-whiz innovations, constrained only by the writer’s imagination. While we’re still waiting for much of what was promised (along with the flying cars, robot housekeepers and free electricity that the fearless forecasters of the 60s assured us would be here long before now), some aspects of modern warfare has been transformed by technology.
A particularly notable example is the mushrooming use of drones. The consensus estimate is the U.S. has about 7,500 drones -- unmanned aircraft -- deployed today. They range from the relatively small like the 18 inch Wasp III with a 3 mile radius, to the forty-four and half foot Global Hawk that can fly as high as 65,000 feet and say in the air as long as 36 hours. The large majority carry cameras and radars of varying types for data gathering and mapping. Some, like the Predator and Reaper, are used for killing.
Drones are not cheap; you can fly the little WASP III off the lot for $49,000 but a Predator will set you back over $13 million and the Global Hawk goes for around $15 million. (All drones include GPS systems and electronics far more advanced than your car; but your car does have a better sound system and more cupholders.)
Most drones are purchased and controlled by the military; some are loaned to other branches of government, from the CIA to the Border Patrol to NASA. The CIA’s use of drones to attack and kill suspected Taliban in Pakistan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen has raised some of the most serious questions surrounding their use.
Under the Obama administration the use of drones for all purposes has mushroomed including the use of Reaper or Predator drones for attacks. Hard data is elusive but it has been estimated that there have been around 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia over the past decade, with at least 118 confirmed strikes in Pakistan in 2010 alone.
Responsibility for using drones is divided between the Department of Defense and the CIA. The military operates the drones in Afghanistan and until the first of this year, in Iraq. (At least there have no public reports of U.S. drone attacks in Iraq since the ostensible withdrawal of U.S. forces.) Operations in Pakistan are under the CIA and operations in Yemen are divided, with the military making some drone attacks and the CIA others.
This division of responsibility matters because it affects who gets targeted for drone attacks and who oversees the operations. There are, according to some sources, three separate “kill lists” -- the National Security Council compiles one, the CIA another, and the miliary’s Joint Special Operations Command a third. Who decides, using what criteria, to put someone’s name on a list is not clear. Nor do we know who decides that there is enough intelligence to launch a specific mission targeting an individual. In addition, the CIA uses “signature” strikes. Instead of confirming that a particular individual whose name is on a kill list is in fact in the sights of the drone operator, there is a set of behavioral indicators that support the conclusion that the people being observed are engaged in harmful or threatening activities and should be targets of a missile.
Civilian, specifically Congressional, oversight of both the military and the CIA is central to our conception of American government. The military use of drones in Afghanistan is overseen by the House and Senate Armed Services committees, while the House and Senate Intelligence committees oversee the CIA operations. It is not surprising then that the rules of engagement are apparently different for military as opposed to CIA drone attacks.
I think the use of hunter killer drones like Predator and Reaper raise several issues that you and I as American citizens ought to be thinking about.
● who is monitoring the broad policy implications of drone attacks outside formal combat zones, particularly the attacks in Pakistan
● are targeted assassinations comparable to, or different from, shooting enemy solders during a fire fight
● who, using what criteria, puts someone’s name on a kill list
● can the government of the United States execute an American citizen without a trial?
The question of broader policy implications is raised directly by the CIA operations in Pakistan. CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have complicated an already difficult relationship. From an American perspective the key issues are internal stability, deep concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban fighters from Afghanistan, and the potential for a violent confrontation with India.
The drone strikes seriously complicate U.S. efforts to slow down the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and to support political development because they:
Are wildly unpopular with Pakistan public opinion. It may well be true that they have gotten far more discriminating and the number of innocent bystanders killed has been drastically reduced, as proponents of the strikes contend. But they are widely perceived in Pakistan as an arrogant assault on Pakistan’s territory and sovereignty that have killed hundreds of innocent bystanders. This makes it harder for the government to appear to cooperate with the U.S.
Divide the Pakistani military. The popular democratic movement that replaced the military dictatorship with a civilian government did not change the fundamentals of Pakistani politics: the military is the single most important factor. The military is deeply ambivalent about the Taliban operating in northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas. For some military leaders, especially the Intelligence agency (ISI), the Taliban is a tool they created in the 1980s to help expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and to prevent India from gaining a foothold in the area. [for a brief overview of the Taliban and its relation to the ISI, see Who are Those Guys?] In 2012 India is the major threat and replacing the weak and corrupt Karzai government with a reliably anti-Indian, pro-Pakistan regime would be a good thing. Drone strikes kill good guys and are very bad thing. For other military leaders, the Taliban has become a threat to internal stability and urban middle and upper middle classes. Drone strikes kill bad guys and are a good thing, even if the government must make periodic public protests for the sake of public opinion.
The weightiest issue, I think, is not the drone strikes themselves but who decides that the positive impact of the strikes on the war in Afghanistan outweighs the negative impacts on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy. It is not clear that anyone is seriously evaluating the larger strategic consequences of the tactical use of drones.
The use of drones to target particular individuals who have been identified as Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders raises a serious issue. U.S. law prohibits assassination attempts on foreign heads of state. International law and norms try to maintain a distinction between combat on a battlefield and other kinds of killing. Drones are used in Pakistan and Yemen (and perhaps elsewhere) to kill specific individual who are believed to be plotting against the United States. I don’t think this can be justified in the same way that one can justify killing someone in an enemy uniform or someone who is shooting at you. I can make an argument that it can be justified and I can make the counter argument. The point is, I think, is that no one has been challenged to make the argument, there has been no demand that the CIA or the Defense Department justify the use of drones as weapons in this fashion.
Closely related to the question of targeted killings by drones the existence of “kill lists.” Perhaps because it is so easy to see the targets of the drone attacks as “bad guys who need to be killed” very few people seem to be concerned about the criteria used and the decision process that puts a person’s name on the list. The arguments for and against capital punishment are well known and the debate has raged for decades and the conditions under which the State can take a person’s life are tightly circumscribed by law. But a person can be executed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper drone under secret guidelines with no trial. This seems to be a serious enough action that we ought to be thinking about it.
Signature attacks seem even more problematic. The criteria are secret -- some people find it troubling that you can be killed far from a battlefield for doing something that someone sitting in a darkened room at Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas or another installation in the U.S. finds suspicious. There is no way for you or I to know how useful the behavioral criteria are at clearly distinguishing hostile behavior or how often they yield a false positive by misinterpreting behavior. There are unconfirmed allegations, for example, that people running to help victims of a drone attack have in their turn been attacked.
For many people, the fact that American citizens have been executed in targeted drone attacks is particularly troubling. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed last September in Yemen. His 16 year old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. When word leaked that President Obama had approved adding al-Awlaki to a kill list in the fall of 2010 there was a flurry of protests by civil liberties groups but legal challenges failed and the alleged crimes of al-Awlaki were so serious and he was so public in his hopes to do harm to Americans that most of us paid little attention. And we paid equally little attention a couple months ago when Attorney General Holder offered a long awaited justification of killing al-Awlaki by citing a secret Justice Department memo. But some people do remain troubled by the argument that the President has the authority to execute an American citizen without a trial or any judicial process but you and I cannot see the legal rationale.
In some ways the issues raised by drone strikes are some of the familiar issues raised by the “war on terror” which in many ways continues just as it began under the Bush administration, even if the term itself has been stricken from the official vocabulary. In other ways these issues flow from the use of a new technology whose implications are only now beginning to emerge but that promises to become more and more prominent in our every day lives as well as on battlefields far removed.
Who Are Those Guys: Quick Overview of the Taliban
Hunter killer drone strikes in Pakistan are directly linked to the war in Afghanistan but I suspect that most Americans have little understanding of who is fighting there and why. Many of us could identify “The Taliban” as the enemy (especially if it was a multiple choice question) but would find it very hard to explain who they are and why our government has felt it necessary to fight them for the past 10 years.
The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a excellent example of a colonial border that is little more than a line drawn on a map arbitrarily dividing members of an existing society. The border does exist, there are check points along the roads and soldiers who will question you if you want to go visit friends and family and who have to be avoided or bribed if your business is taking untaxed or illegal merchandise from one side to the other, but it is more of an inconvenient fiction than a true division. People think of themselves as members of their extended families, their village societies, and the broader clans and groups that make up the community of Pashtu speaking traditional people and not as citizens of Pakistan or Afghanistan. The idea that I am Pakistani and my mother’s brother’s son who lives in the next valley over is a citizen of Afghanistan and therefore a foreigner is nonsensical.
Much of the Pakistani army is stationed in this northeastern section of the country to maintain order. But the central government in Islamabad is far away and leaves everyday governance and economic life to traditional leaders in the villages. On the Afghan side the central government is even further away and even more irrelevant.
The outside world intruded heavily in Pashtun life in the 1980s when the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime. Resistance to foreign forces was fierce across Afghanistan and refugees flooded into northeast Pakistan.
The United States framed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Cold War and sought proxies to fight the Red Army. Anti-communist, anti-Russian Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, framed the invasion as atheists assaulting Islam. Pakistan framed the invasion as India’s ally, the USSR, threatening Pakistan’s security. The result was the emergence of the Taliban as the largest and most well supported opposition force.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency became the primary conduit for money and weapons from the U.S. and Persian Gulf states to anti-Soviet fighters. The ISI is a highly secretive, quite autonomous branch of the military that combines many of the functions of the CIA, special operations forces, and the FBI. The ISI recruited young men from refugee camps, from villages along the border with Afghanistan and incorporated a wave of volunteers from the Middle East to create a very effective guerrilla force that could launch operations in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia also supplied a number of religious leaders who set up schools in refugee camps and worked with potential fighters to promulgate a particularly austere and conservative version of Islam.
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,
It is a question for another day, a classic “woulda coulda shoulda” question, to decide how different Afghanistan would have been if the U.S. had not almost immediately launched the war in Iraq, if there had been a strong and consistent focus on the civilian side of national development and building effective governance institutions, if we could have avoided becoming perceived as yet another band of foreigners trying to impose a corrupt and intrusive regime. The fact is that is how the situation came to be defined.
It is convenient to lump all the groups fighting against us under the rubric “Taliban” and to perceive all of Afghanistan as a single combat zone. American strategy is more complicated than that and we do, at least at times, recognize that there are divisions and factions within the coalition that is opposing us. The most important groups are Pashtun, motivated as much by xenophobe as religious or social values and their ability to rest and regroup in Pakistan’s tribal areas is critical. And the most important groups have some kind of relationship with Pakistan’s ISI.
There are two optimistic scenarios for the end of American direct combat in Afghanistan. One is that the investment in training the Afghan army and national police pays off and the Karzai government can survive. The other is that the U.S. and the Karzai regime can split their opponents and negotiate a power sharing agreement with enough factions within the Taliban to block the most extreme leaders and the groups most under the sway of the ISI from returning to power. The drone attacks are seen by the Obama administration as supporting either of those happy outcomes.
The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a excellent example of a colonial border that is little more than a line drawn on a map arbitrarily dividing members of an existing society. The border does exist, there are check points along the roads and soldiers who will question you if you want to go visit friends and family and who have to be avoided or bribed if your business is taking untaxed or illegal merchandise from one side to the other, but it is more of an inconvenient fiction than a true division. People think of themselves as members of their extended families, their village societies, and the broader clans and groups that make up the community of Pashtu speaking traditional people and not as citizens of Pakistan or Afghanistan. The idea that I am Pakistani and my mother’s brother’s son who lives in the next valley over is a citizen of Afghanistan and therefore a foreigner is nonsensical.
Much of the Pakistani army is stationed in this northeastern section of the country to maintain order. But the central government in Islamabad is far away and leaves everyday governance and economic life to traditional leaders in the villages. On the Afghan side the central government is even further away and even more irrelevant.
The outside world intruded heavily in Pashtun life in the 1980s when the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime. Resistance to foreign forces was fierce across Afghanistan and refugees flooded into northeast Pakistan.
The United States framed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Cold War and sought proxies to fight the Red Army. Anti-communist, anti-Russian Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, framed the invasion as atheists assaulting Islam. Pakistan framed the invasion as India’s ally, the USSR, threatening Pakistan’s security. The result was the emergence of the Taliban as the largest and most well supported opposition force.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency became the primary conduit for money and weapons from the U.S. and Persian Gulf states to anti-Soviet fighters. The ISI is a highly secretive, quite autonomous branch of the military that combines many of the functions of the CIA, special operations forces, and the FBI. The ISI recruited young men from refugee camps, from villages along the border with Afghanistan and incorporated a wave of volunteers from the Middle East to create a very effective guerrilla force that could launch operations in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia also supplied a number of religious leaders who set up schools in refugee camps and worked with potential fighters to promulgate a particularly austere and conservative version of Islam.
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,
- the foreign fighters left, some to become Al Qaeda;
- the Taliban triumphed in the chaotic melee among different ethnic groups contending for power in Afghanistan and the dominant faction, influenced by the Saudi version of Islam, instituted a government mirroring life in the most rural and reactionary villages;
- the Taliban regime provided a refuge for its erstwhile allies in Al Qaeda who had been chased out of their camps in Sudan;
- the ISI retained its close ties to its proteges
It is a question for another day, a classic “woulda coulda shoulda” question, to decide how different Afghanistan would have been if the U.S. had not almost immediately launched the war in Iraq, if there had been a strong and consistent focus on the civilian side of national development and building effective governance institutions, if we could have avoided becoming perceived as yet another band of foreigners trying to impose a corrupt and intrusive regime. The fact is that is how the situation came to be defined.
It is convenient to lump all the groups fighting against us under the rubric “Taliban” and to perceive all of Afghanistan as a single combat zone. American strategy is more complicated than that and we do, at least at times, recognize that there are divisions and factions within the coalition that is opposing us. The most important groups are Pashtun, motivated as much by xenophobe as religious or social values and their ability to rest and regroup in Pakistan’s tribal areas is critical. And the most important groups have some kind of relationship with Pakistan’s ISI.
There are two optimistic scenarios for the end of American direct combat in Afghanistan. One is that the investment in training the Afghan army and national police pays off and the Karzai government can survive. The other is that the U.S. and the Karzai regime can split their opponents and negotiate a power sharing agreement with enough factions within the Taliban to block the most extreme leaders and the groups most under the sway of the ISI from returning to power. The drone attacks are seen by the Obama administration as supporting either of those happy outcomes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)