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.

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 ...

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.

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,

• 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

Very few people outside the ISI shed any tears when the United States attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9/11 to remove Al Qaeda’s major ally.  The regime was notorious for oppression, mindless assaults on its own cultural heritage, and defiance of the international community and was beset by a powerful insurgency which was motivated largely by traditional rivalries and resentment of Pashtun dominance.  The U.S. and NATO forces tipped the balance and presided over the installation of a new Afghan regime which had to struggle from the beginning for both legitimacy and effective control. 

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.

U.S. - North Korea Cut New Deal

The news that North Korea is suspending some of the most critical elements of its nuclear weapons program and the United States is shipping food to the regime in return is a very positive development in the roughly twenty year campaign to prevent North Korea from joining the nuclear weapons club.

At the same time it raises some serious and tantalizing questions for both policy makers in Washington, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo, and for folks like you and me, all of us trying to make sense out of events.

By the way, the difference between the world as someone in the President’s or Secretary of State’s position sees it and interested observers like us is not as great as one might imagine.  There’s the popular, quasi fantasy scenario: the decision maker reviewing true facts uncovered by daring spies, high tech surveillance and skilled analysts and making the hard choices, often in situations that ordinary folks don’t even know exist.  Not only is this version of reality depicted in countless books, movies, TV shows, web series and video games, but by policy makers themselves.  After all, if I can get you to believe that “I have examined all the classified information, reflected on the American National Interest and made the only possible choice” then I’m home free.  An historical example ... when Lyndon Johnson was presiding over the Vietnam war he would invite favored journalists into the Oval Office to talk about how the war was going.  He’d often start the conversation with papers marked TOP SECRET spread out on his desk.  The papers would be optimistic assessments of progress in Vietnam.  Suddenly, the President would realize that these highly classified documents were there and sweep them into a drawer, knowing that any half competent journalist would have read the documents, even upside down, and was now privy to inside secrets that showed the administration’s policy was right.

The reality is less glamorous.  The information available to a decision maker is refined and filtered through multiple layers of the national security bureaucracy.  The trite notion of “connecting the dots” is misleading as a metaphor for intelligence analysis.  Before you can ask how the dots are connected, you have to decide that this factoid is a dot and not a smudge, that this dot is related to some of those other dots but not others, and that you have enough dots to connect.  The intelligence briefings Presidents receive every day, as well as the longer term national security assessments are consensual documents, negotiated across departments and agencies.  Depending on the President they contain more or fewer references to points on which the various analysts and agencies disagree. 

Not only does the President get filtered and selected information about the world, but at every step of the way the raw data is interpreted in light of someone’s theory about how the world works and how the system works in other countries.  The President’s own theories and beliefs are deeply involved in the process, from start to finish, as are the beliefs and preferences of other top officials. 

You and I, on the other hand, rely on journalists using primarily open sources of information, along with the occasional strategic leak, for our raw data about what is going on.  One of the side effects of the Wikileaks episode was being able to see the close correspondence between the information and analysis being reported in secret diplomatic cables to the information and analysis being reported by journalists.  And then you and I, like all human beings, interpret and assess information in light of how we think about the world and what we already believe.

I don’t mean to suggest that we are all like the blind men in the fable who are trying to figure out the elephant (including the seventh and eighth blind men who can’t even find the elephant).  But it does mean that access to secret information and the inside dope is far less important than the quality of our concepts and theories and the opportunities we have had to reflect upon the times in the past when we have been right and when we have been wrong. 

This admittedly overly simplified version of both how the intelligence system works and how decisions are made is meant to suggest that what I think are the questions that the North Korean agreement raises are perhaps not so different from the puzzles keeping analysts in a number of governments busy.

■    What did Pyongyang and Washington really agree to? 

■    What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea?

■    Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later?

■    What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?

The agreement.  Mark Manyin from the Congressional Research Service has an excellent synopsis of the terms agreed to by both sides at http://www.cfr.org/north-korea/wary-steps-forward-north-korea/p27526?cid=rss-analysisbriefbackgroundersexp-wary_steps_forward_with_north_-030112 

In a nutshell, North Korea agreed to suspend operations at its major production facility for nuclear materials, to open its nuclear program facilities to inspectors from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and to forgo further testing of long range missiles.  The United States agreed to resume shipping food aid to North Korea.

It seems to me the biggest question is whether North Korea really agreed to do what it seems to have promised in terms of inspections and changes in its program or whether, some six months or a year from now, it will be clear that North Korea’s agreement did not include the full range of  details, from logistics to access to facilities, that would make inspections fully effective.

Almost as important is the difference Manyin points out in the public statements by the two governments that were released simultaneously in Washington and P’yongyang.  The Korean statement explicitly mentions resumption of the Six Party Talks; the Washington statement does not.  This could be a comparatively minor difference perhaps based on nuances of language (hypothetical example: one side says “this could (meaning “it’s not beyond the realm of the possible”) lead to resumption...” the other side hears that as “this could (meaning “it makes it possible”) lead to resumption ...”) or it could represent a substantive divergence in understanding that could lead to some serious friction later on.

A much smaller question and one where in fact government insiders do know the answer is how this deal was reached.  There are no formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang so the normal channels are not there.  It would be interesting to know to what extent diplomats from other countries, such as China, were used as intermediaries and to what extent -- if any  -- this was the result of quasi-secret, informal talks between U.S. and North Korean official, perhaps at the UN.

What does this tell us about the regime in North Korea?  I think it tells us very little, if anything.

There is ample evidence that there have been massive and pervasive food shortages in North Korea for at least the last three years.  This is NOT likely to directly threaten the regime with demonstrations or a defiant opposition movement; starving people do not rebel.  But the nightmare that haunts North Korea’s neighbors is that the routine functions of government, which in North Korea include production and distribution of everything people need to survive, will grind to a halt because the state cannot pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and workers who operate the system and they will have to spend their time scrounging for survival.  If that happens, China will be flooded with millions of grindingly poor and starving people, the world will see scores, maybe hundreds or even thousands of desperate people dying in the mine fields that separate South Korea from the north and the international community will have to mount and sustain a humanitarian relief operation like nothing we’ve seen since the end of World War II.

There are three hypothesis I can think of to describe the current state of politics in Pyongyang.

I.      The transition from Kim Jong Il to his young son has gone far more rapidly and smoothly than most people expected.  Kim Jong Un is now picking up where his father left off (note that the deal announced in February was largely agreed before Kim Jong Il’s death.)

II.    Kim Jong Un is a figurehead, a shadow puppet whose strings are being pulled by a coalition of his older relatives, senior military officers and heads of the state apparatus all of whom are ready agree to a momentarily halt in the nuclear program in exchange for vital food aid.

III.    There is no transition as such but a pitched battle between various factions: the Kim family, state bureaucrats, party functionaries and the military.  At the moment a faction willing to suspend the nuclear program for the time being or even contemplate ending it is riding high; next month or year all will change.

What we’ve seen so far fits any of those hypotheses.  The deal tells us nothing.

Why was the deal struck now and not earlier or later?  There is some pretty good evidence that there was a tentative deal reached with Korea before Kim Jong Il’s death and some attempts by the Koreans to get the U.S. to sweeten the deal.  It may well be that it is only now, and not a few weeks ago, that it become clear that this deal was as good as it was going to get.  I can think of two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, hypotheses that cold explain why not later.

I.    Korean politics.  The timing is explained by whatever is going on at the highest levels of the North Korean regime.

II.    American politics.  As we’re all well aware, the first chapter of the 2012 Presidential campaign is in full swing.  The North Koreans might be motivated by the calculation that if they wait much longer an agreement could become an issue in the campaign and Obama might wish to bolster himself from an attack by Republicans by either not making an agreement at all or trying to wring more concessions out of them.  They might also be concerned about the possibility that a Republican will sit in the White House next January.  The fact that Mitt Romney’s chief foreign policy advisor is John Bolton – fiery super hawk from the Bush “Axis of Evil” years – and the other candidates have even more militant advisors may have convinced Pyongyang that it was now or never.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Actually, quite a bit.

The Six Party talks are very important to Chinese foreign policy for both symbolic and practical reasons.  From the broad symbolic perspective, the Six Party Talks show China as a leading player in regional politics, underlining the centrality of Beijing to peace and stability in Asia.  It is China, not the United Sates who sets the agenda and the timing of negotiations, and China, not the United States, to whom everyone looks for leadership.

From a practical perspective, China cares deeply about both the specter of a horrific human disaster in north Korean and the apocalyptic vision of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.  A much smaller practical consequence would be the opportunity Six Party Talks represents for U.S. and Chinese leaders to cooperate on a major issue to counterbalance the prickly relations of the last few months (and the China bashing that will mark the Presidential campaign.)

Bottom line: you and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and I, observers and analysts from the lowest echelons of the CIA to the highest echelons of the Chinese government, all have to stay tuned for further developments. 

The Arab Spring, Part 2

The first part of this look at the Arab Spring focused on two cases that have gone relatively well.  Neither Tunisia nor Egypt experienced a revolution, in the sense of a fundamental change in the structure of society, but both saw a change in regime and a significant opportunity for the development of more democratic politics.  Other countries in the Middle East have not fared as well. 

Using the same set of variables: structure and cohesion of the old regime, nature of the opposition groups, and role of outsiders, we can take a look at three countries that have had less optimistic outcomes.  In Libya the weakness and disarray of the opposition groups stands out; in Syria the structure and dynamics of the old regime seem most important and in Bahrain outsiders played the decisive role.

The Libyan story is widely known: NATO air strikes played a central role in Qadhafi’s demise.  The distinction between intervening to prevent mass bloodshed and intervening to support rebel military operations was clear enough in Washington and New York; it was meaningless on the ground. 

The base of Qadhafi’s rule of a country created out of three historically distinctive regions was traditional tribal alliances, lubricated by oil wealth and effective control of military force.  When the uprising began in the east anti-regime forces were able to create a large number of small local militias.  As the battles raged on, these militias became more effective even as the air strikes degraded the capability of units loyal to Qadhafi.  (One suspects that the British Special Air Service members who were embarrassingly captured and then released were not the only foreign advisors and trainers in Libya.)

Even when Tripoli fell to rebel forces, the identities and backgrounds of the rebel leaders were obscure.  At best the new leadership is a loose coalition of returned exiles, local notables and Islamists.  Plans for the future are largely irrelevant right now because the new regime has not solidified its hold on the capital.  The streets of Tripoli remain overrun by militiamen whose first loyalty is to their immediate leadership, not some broader Libyan policy.  There has been a certain amount of looting and of settling scores with supporters of the Qadhafi regime. Fire fights between groups are fairly common.  Many of the militia groups are reluctant to disband lest their home towns and villages be assaulted by other militias.  Despite the resumption of oil sales and continued political support from Europe, the future of Libya is very much up in the air.

Why has Syria gone so dreadfully wrong?  First of all, the Syrian military political and economic elite is deeply entangled with the Assad family.  Since 1969 Syria has been dominated by men from the Alawite sect, a small group among Syria’s minority Shi’a community.  The sense of being a minority among a minority that has been historically at the bottom of Syrian society contributes to a great feeling of solidarity among the leadership and resistance to change and reform.  It may well be that much of the Syrian elite fears that if the al-Assads go, so too will everyone else.

The Syrian state has developed a very effective repressive apparatus over the past 40 years and bolstered it with propaganda images of regime opponents as either tools of Western Imperialists hell bent on undermining the leading proponent of Arab nationalism or stalking horses for reactionary Muslim Brothers who would destroy secularism and tolerance. 

The Damascus regime acts as if they are under serge and fighting for their lives.  That may help explain the widespread use of brute military force against civilians, especially in cities like Homs that have long been centers of opposition to Alawite rule.

The Syrian opposition has been hampered by the fact that is it centered in peripheral areas like Homs and Latakia and not at the center of the system, Damascus.  It has developed a military wing from units who have defected from the Syrian military but cannot effectively protect civilians in the areas where it dominates.  The opposition is split between London-based exiles and groups within Syria itself and it is not clear if the agreement signed last month in Cairo will result in more effective cooperation and coordination.

Outsiders have played a public but ineffective role in Syria.  The Arab League continued the pattern it first showed in Libya by criticizing one of its members and then taking the remarkable step of expelling Syria for human rights abuses.  The first stage of the Arab League observer mission in Syria could do nothing but verify that the violent assaults continued.  While the misson has been extended, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and the small countries bordering the Persian Gulf) have withdrawn their personnel and called for more active involvement by the UN Security Council. 

Calls for more robust external intervention seem to me to be cynically manipulative.  Both the United States and the European Union have implemented sanctions against the Assad regime.  But the UN Security Council will not take any action on Syria.  Russia and China have been extremely reluctant to sanction Iran for its nuclear program because of both a general reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of any country and some more tangible economic and political ties to Teheran.  They are highly unlikely to support a Security Council resolution that would matter in Syria and the members of the GCC know this full well.  Many of the rulers and policy makers in Saudi Arabia and Gulf States are convinced that Iran is the central problem in the region.  Syria is seen as Iran’s most important ally in the Arab world.  I think it is fair to suggest that calls from Gulf States and others for more robust UN involvement in Syria are far more aimed at dealing a blow to Iran than supporting the concept of a Responsibility to Protect that figured so prominently in the justification for Libya.

I hope I am wrong, but I do not see anything good happening in Syria in the near future.  The situation increasingly resembles a civil war.  It could drag on for months, even years.  The regime may survive, ruling a sullen and resentful population ground down by both physical repression and increasingly difficult economic times. 

Outside intervention has been decisive in Bahrain.

Bahrain was briefly part of the Arab Spring, when protests erupted against the reluctance of the monarchy to make modest democratic reforms.  The regime in Bahrain is a traditional, patriarchal monarchy, in which citizens are expected to forgo political involvement in return for lavish subsidies of everything from gasoline to education.  One important reality of Bahrain is that the ruling family and allied members of the elite are Sunni Muslim and the majority of the Bahraini citizens are Shi’a.  This has been a source of discontent and agitation for greater democracy for the past two decades and in the 1990s there were some attempts to increase public involvement in consultations without undermining royal supremacy. 

When protesters shut down traffic and commerce in Manama, Bahrain’s capital and home to over 10% of the population, both Bahrain’s rulers and their neighbors in Saudi Arabia framed it as a Shi’a assault on Sunni power, fomented by Iran.  Saudi Arabia responded to a request form the king of Bahrain for help by sending military units across the 15 mile long causeway that connects the island of Bahrain to mainland Saudi Arabia.  After “restoring order” the Saudi units have remained in Manama and effectively suppressed further demonstrations. 

If we broaden our perspective from the dramatic events of the past year in the Middle East and take into account developments in the rest of the world in the last three decades we may gain some insight.  Beginning in the 1980s what scholars dubbed “The Third Wave of Democracy” spread over Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  Long standing authoritarian regimes gave way to multi-party liberal democratic and stagnant command economies were replaced by market systems. 

Some of those dramatic regime changes have stuck and former dictatorships have become functioning relatively democratic systems.  Others have stagnated or even (e.g. Russia) drifted back toward authoritarian rule.

An important variable in explaining success and failure of nascent democracies has been economic development.  Regimes that succeed in meeting basic needs and expanding opportunities for everyday people have tended to maintain their democratic gains.  Those that have either not been able to meet basic physical needs or have seen rapidly widening gulfs between a wealthy few and a less affluent many have been more likely to back slide. 

The second thing a broader perspective reveals is the reminder that politics is a process, a series of events and underlying dynamics, not an overnight stand.  We’re back to Yogi, and it ain’t over until its over.

The "Arab Spring" a year later

It is roughly the one year anniversary of the protests in Tunisia that led to the demise of the Zine Ben-Ali government, the opening act of the Arab Spring.   Yogi Berra was right, “it ain’t over until its over.”  The dynamics unleashed over the past year have not yet played themselves out anywhere and it is far too soon to reach any definitive conclusions.  But it is not totally foolish to take stock in the middle of historical movements and get some sense of direction.

Two observation are safe to make.  First,  neither the most naive hopes nor most paranoid fears have been realized.  Old authoritarian regimes have not been replaced with perfect democracies, with economic justice and unicorns dancing in the streets.  But neither have Islamist bogeymen or sinister Iranian agents seized power, forcing burka-clad women back into the kitchen, banning music and laughter, and making great strides toward a restored Caliphate that stretches from the Middle East to China. 

Second, the “gee whiz, hip technology has changed everything” notion has been discredited.  Flying fingers Twittering, posting to Facebook, and texting were not the cause of success in Egypt nor somehow to blame for the nightmare in Syria.  Technology makes it easier to do some things but in the end it is old school politics that matters: real people, face to face in real time protesting, organizing and refusing to play by the old rules. 

The cliche that all politics is local has a couple of grains of truth and the events of the past year have varied greatly from country to country, but three basic dimensions can be seen.  The structure and cohesion of the old regime, the nature of opposition groups, and the role of outsiders.

 I will split this topic into two.  The first section, which you reading now, will focus on two countries, Tunisia and Egypt,  who have significant success in moving toward democracy.  The second installment will discuss three countries with far less promising outcomes: Syria, Libya and Bahrain.

Tunisia, where it all arguably started, has probably made more progress than anywhere else.  Elections for a Constituent Assembly last Fall showed significant support for moderate Islamist parties and secular leftists.  The parties have so far shown an ability to cooperate in an interim government and draft a new constitution. 

The problems with the old regime in Tunisia were symbolized by Zine Ben-Ali, his immediate family and their cronies.  Lack of jobs and opportunity, an unresponsive and repressive state apparatus and economic inequality were, and remain, major problems but there is much less resentment of a larger corrupt and illegitimate elite than elsewhere in the Middle East.  Thus the challenge of  building new institutions is not complicated by the need to simultaneously purge a large proportion of senior officials and business people.  An important  fact of life in Tunisia is the relatively small size of the miliary and the relatively small role it has played in politics throughout the country’s history.  The military is a far less important interest group than in many other countries and less inclined (and able) to impose its preferences on civilian leadership.

The nature and dynamics of the opposition has been profoundly affected by the facts that Tunisia is small country (under 11 million), relatively urban, with comparatively low unemployment and very little abject poverty.  That has made cooperation across ideological and social boundaries easier and fostered a climate of trust.  Regime opponents and the parties that have emerged to contest elections show the familiar bipolar pattern: political Islam attracts a plurality of the voters but secular democratic liberals also have strong support.  And the most prominent Islamist party has repeatedly stressed its commitment to democracy.

Outsiders played no significant role in Tunisia.  Tunisia’s neighbors did not fear that anti-regime sentiment would spill over the border (Algeria was right; Libya wrong), neither the U.S. nor Europe felt they had a much interest in the outcome and the regime did not resort to large scale violence or brutal repression that provoked a humanitarian crisis.


Egypt presents a more complicated picture. The ruling elite was far more than Mubarak and his immediate cronies.  The liberalization of the Egyptian economy in the 1980s created a relatively large group of newly wealthy people who owed their success to political connections and favoritism.  The Egyptian military has been a significant political actor ever since 1952 and the upper ranks of the officer corps were (and are) closely tied to the upper stratum of Egyptian society and politics. Power passed from Mubarak to the senior army officers without disturbing the structures of power and privilege in Egyptian society.  The continued demonstrations in Tahir Square and protracted struggle over rules for parliamentary and presidential elections reflect a deep unease among Egyptians that the new boss will, unfortunately, turn out to be same as the old boss. The struggle to change policies and priorities to address economic stagnation, unemployment, and lack of social mobility is just beginning.

Far more than in Tunisia, the old regime succeeded in portraying Islamists in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular as enemies of freedom and a threat to Egyptian life.  This has made relations between the parties and groups with a liberal democratic secular orientation and the more traditionally Islamic parties difficult.  There is a major cultural difference between the relatively well off, relatively well educated, relatively liberal on social issues prototypical twenty something Tahir Square protestor and the Nile villager or urban slum dweller who does not post English language Tweets or trust foreign media like Al Jazeera.  These differences are reflected in the backgrounds and orientations of the leadership of secular and Islamist movements. This has made collaboration among Islamist parries and secular liberals more fraught.

The several self-identified Islamist parties have done very well in the convoluted three stage process of parliamentary elections. The Freedom and Justice Party, linked to the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood leadership, has been the most successful vote getter, achieving a plurality of seats.  Optimists both within and outside Egypt take the party’s stated commitment to democratic values and tolerance seriously; skeptics worry that an alliance between Freedom and Justice and more extreme Islamists would control over two thirds of the parliamentary seats. 

Outsiders played a small role in the downfall of Mubarak.  The United States tried to publicly tiptoe between support for the democracy movement and preservation of the institutional and personal ties between U.S. and Egyptian intelligence and military players.  It is pretty clear that behind the scenes the U.S. encouraged the Egyptian military to throw Mubarak under the bus to preserve the larger status quo.  Relations with outsiders are a much larger issue in Egyptian than Tunisia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tops the agenda.  Polling data is pretty clear that the majority of Egyptians have not ever been in favor of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel and strongly support greater Egyptian support for Hamas and the Gaza Strip.  But the Egyptian military and political leadership (including Freedom and Justice party leaders) have repeatedly stressed their intention to abide by the treaty.  The more serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations, I think, is the Gaza Strip.  The primary locus of economic activity in Gaza is the series of smuggling routes that have been set up to evade the Israeli blockade.  Under Mubarak the issue was defined as weakening Hamas and other Islamists and Cairo was happy to oblige with border closings and tacit approval of the destruction of smuggling tunnels.  But since Mubarak’s departure the emphasis has been shifted from thwarting Islamists to aiding suffering citizens and Egyptian collaboration has dropped dramatically.  Another Israeli military adventure in Gaza along the lines of the ill-fated Operation Cast Lead of December ‘08 and January ‘09 could trigger massive public protest that would make the current cold peace untenable with very negative consequences for the Egyptian economy and role in the world.

Tunisia and Egypt are well past the morning after the night before and well into the long, tedious and sometimes frustrating process of creating a new political order that works.