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I would like to discuss what I think are some of the salient features in the situations in the three countries on the agenda—Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan—and tie them where appropriate to one or two of what I think of as dynamic variables inside the broad region.
I don’t want to go too much into Israel‐Palestine but clearly that is one of the important variables. The situation there is at best politically stagnant, while the dimensions of the Israeli settlement enterprise continue to eat up the land on which any viable Palestinian state would be built. I would just point to an additional, truly combustible danger that, in my mind, comes from the Netanyahu coalition’s concentration on sealing off and de‐Arabizing Jerusalem (as well as laying permanent religious heritage claims in places like Hebron and Bethlehem). That risks turning a conflict that should, even at this late stage, be soluble in terms of a division of land, into a religious war.
Iran
One beneficiary of that would be Iran and its allies. Iran, I think, is at an important moment in the development of the Islamic Republic, with cracks beginning to open in its theocratic façade following the loss of legitimacy after last year’s presidential elections. The cracks in the cohesion of the regime that opened after the violent imposition of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have not closed. It is not mullah‐watchers who are saying this anymore but Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader, who you will remember, a few months ago publicly ordered the radical and conservative fundamentalists who divide up Iran’s complex institutions to stop their feuding.
His agitation seems to me understandable. The threat to his regime comes not from the protean and leaderless Green opposition it has ruthlessly put down but from within its own ranks.
Khamenei himself weakened the regime’s claim to legitimacy last year when he cast his lot with President Ahmadinejad, losing his faded aura as a religious leader above the fray and becoming a mere faction leader. The two leaders look increasingly like a figleaf for the Revolutionary Guards who led the post‐election crackdown, and who are determined to defend both their power and their vast network of business interests.
Since then, Iran’s mercurial president has been obtruding his Messianic beliefs, especially his devotion to the 12th or “Hidden” Imam. To this mixture of mystical murk and military rule, Ahmadinejad seems to have added the idea of dispensing with the clergy, one of the core tenets and structural pivots of Shiism. That seems to have made Khamenei really nervous.
High Shia clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Yusef Sanei have already made clear they are unhappy that an ostensibly religious regime—although one actually built on vested interests—is dragging Islam through the political dirt. Many of them, as you know, have always regarded Khamenei as an upstart with no theological standing and conspicuously withheld their support for the suppression of an opposition with which some of them have connections. The silence from Qom last summer was deafening. But a frontal attack on the clergy would be the last straw—especially at a time when the Bazaar is unhappy with the government’s mismanagement of the economy, and sanctions on Iran are at last beginning to bite.
The regime, in sum, is beginning to look brittle, belying its triumph over reformism—and Ahmadinejad, for my money, is starting to look expendable. Conservatives and reformists are angered by his disregard for institutions such as parliament, the mismanagement of the economy, his Holocaust denial provocations, and the continual breast‐beating that Iran is already a nuclear power.
My personal view about the latter is that Iran clearly wants the deterrent capability to make a bomb, that is: mastery of the full nuclear fuel cycle and the ballistic capability to assemble a weapon.
But there is no evidence it has decided to move from capability (which it seems not yet to have attained anyway) to weaponization. Top securocrats here and in Europe acknowledge the intelligence for that is thin, as I believe they still do in the U.S.
My view in any case is that anyone worried about Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be well advised to tread with great care. Any attempt to determine the outcome of the faction fighting in Iran—not to mention any assault on Iran—would stampede almost every Iranian back into the tattered tent of the theocrats. Attacking Iran would, of course, have cataclysmic results across the region—but we can come back to that.
Turkey and the Region
An important variable I would draw attention to here—a new element in the political chemistry of the region—is the confident re‐emergence of Turkey as a regional power. To me, the importance of Turkey’s attempt to marry Islam and democracy—its post‐Islamism experiment with an orientation towards the European Union under a secular framework—is self‐evident.
But I merely point here to the fact that Turkey— which is secularist and Sunni, pluralist and orthodox—is now in a three‐sided competition with Israel and Iran for dominant influence if not hegemony in the region, with the Arabs reduced to onlookers. Egypt looks exhausted, corroded by despotism and the vested interests built up around a regime that has surrendered public and cultural space to the clerical establishment in order to outflank an Islamist challenge on the one hand, and poised for a difficult transition from the ageing Hosni Mubarak on the other.
The House of Saud has money and oil, and the legitimacy of custodianship of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. But, although there is a fascinating debate going on in Saudi Arabia, it is still a gerontocracy confronting a succession like that faced by Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and it is still locked in a pact with the Wahhabi clerical establishment that cannot avoid projecting Saudi policy as sectarian and reactionary. Bashar al‐Assad’s Syria, for its part, can act as a spoiler (like its former Soviet sponsors) but lacks critical mass to shape events in the region.
A recent spate of commentary describing the foreign policy of Erdogan and his peripatetic foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, as anti‐ Western, anti‐Israeli, neo‐Ottoman—even a challenge to rival the threat from Iran—misses an important part of the point, it seems to me. By emerging as a popular champion of Palestinian rights, Turkey has ended Iran’s ability to make the running in the region. Tayyip Erdogan now eclipses Hassan Nasrallah of Hizbollah, Tehran’s most potent ally, in the fickle affections of the Arab street. That is something to work with.
Iraq
Turkey has also become an important force for stability in Iraq, which now, it would seem, after eight months is about to get a new government.
Forgive me if I repeat what I wrote in this morning’s leader in the Financial Times, but my views have not changed much overnight.
At best, this is a power‐sharing deal that ends eight months of menacing deadlock. But whether this means Iraq’s fractious and self‐serving politicians can come together to refloat their country is altogether another matter.
The backbone of the new government will be the alliance brokered by Iran between Maliki and Moqtada al‐Sadr. But the Sunni minority, clear loser of the 2006‐07 civil war in which the Sadrists were steeped in blood, has been bolted on to the new dispensation. The Iraqiya group led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (a secular Shia) will get the office of speaker of parliament, and it seems that Allawi will probably head a new national strategy council intended as a check on Mr. Maliki’s authoritarian habits.
Tehran seems easily to have outmaneuvered Washington, which, as I understand it, sought and failed to get Allawi—who did after all come first in the election—made president. That job instead stays with the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, also a long‐time Iranian ally.
But the larger and most immediate question is whether this deal has the makings of a government of national unity or is merely a patrimonial carveup of the offices and patronage of the state. It looks as though it could set in stone communal rivalries, on the Lebanese model—and I say that conscious that present here is a statesman, Lakhdar Brahimi, who through the Taif accord that ended the 1975‐90 civil war sought an outcome for Lebanon very different to that.
The test for this government, it seems to me will be in three main areas. First, it must face down a residual but virulent jihadi insurgency, which has turned its fire on the Shia and the Christians. It needs to demonstrate real cross‐community purpose, including bringing fully into the state the 100,000‐odd Sunni militiamen of the Sahwa or Sunni Awakening, who turned against al‐Qaeda only to be spurned and harassed in a sectarian way by Maliki.
Second, the new government has to rebuild the institutions of the state, stop treating them as factional booty and curb corruption. Parliament, where MPs have been drawing salaries in excess of $20,000 a month while meeting once in eight months for 20 minutes, could usefully raise its game too.
The new government also needs to show it can provide basic services such as water and electricity, as well as put in place the infrastructure to relaunch the economy. The prize for success would be the return of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals of the nearly five million displaced or in exile—doctors, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats— without whom, it seems to me, Iraq will have little chance of rebirth, of rebuilding its broken state and society.
Afghanistan
On Afghanistan, I defer to others much more knowledgeable than me. But I would just mention the following points.
The counter‐insurgency strategy—ambitious and theoretically impeccable though it may be—lacks the political support at home, the overwhelming military force that it would need on the ground, and, perhaps most of all, a reliable governing partner in Kabul to make it work. Hamid Karzai is neither a reliable nor legitimate partner, and heads a government riddled with corruption that dallies with extremists and warlords and promiscuously with a range of allies.
I have no idea how one would redefine success under these circumstances, but it seems to me the consequences of failure would be profound, for the U.S. and its NATO allies. The West has twice walked away from the people of Afghanistan, after the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s and in the damaging detour to Baghdad in 2003. One more retreat would leave them in a stew of lethal lawlessness. Tribe against tribe, warlords vying ruthlessly for supremacy, rampant jihadi extremism, India and Pakistan (and Iran) playing out their own Great Game, and a corrupt, illegitimate administration in Kabul masquerading as a central government—the ingredients are already all there.
Osama bin Laden’s western‐indulged, Soviet‐era jihadism made its leap to al‐Qaeda’s cult of death fired by the belief that unalloyed religious zeal plus western rocketry had humbled one superpower, and could take on another. If the layered, sometimes intertwined patchwork of jihadi groups now fanned out across the broader Middle East and central and south Asia gets the idea they have bloodied the sole remaining superpower, the region and the world is in for deep trouble. From what one can see, things are clearly not going according to plan. However much American and British troops fight to clear and hold, the government of Hamid Karzai needs to build—and establish a semblance of governance—and it doesn’t look willing or capable of doing so. Unless there is a credible government presence, offering security and visible hope of a better future, this enterprise looks doomed.
I imagine there are some obvious things to try. For instance: as this is primarily a Pashtun revolt, Afghan forces should be expanded to include more Pashtun. Aid should be devolved away from central government and focused on infrastructure. And so on. But the fate of the war seems to turn on two other factors.
Will the Taliban and allied insurgents be able to break the will of coalition governments and the Afghan people? Their tactics appear to be to outwait NATO, waging a war of attrition against its forces and a war of terror against a wavering populace, knowing that support for the war is ebbing and that the allies may not “stay the course.” Yet, the insurgents also know that if NATO continues to target their leaders, they will need a way into politics too. In those circumstances, successful military pressure could aim to: make the Taliban negotiate from a weaker position; sign up to the constitutional framework, including entrenched minority rights for Tajiks, Uzbeks and (Shia) Hazara; abandon links with international jihadism; and then, and only then, seek a place in government.
Everybody now knows that such talks must eventually happen—although President Karzai often seems more interested in talks aimed at securing his own future rather than that of his country.
Pakistan
But the current policy is not just hostage to the whims of Karzai but to the worldview and ambivalent practices of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment. That is why it always seemed to me that AfPak always was always missing a syllable—AfPakInd perhaps, or maybe AfPakMir.
The Pakistani dimension is—of itself—obviously critical. But so is the Pakistani worldview. There is an urgent need to change it through détente between India and Pakistan—above all over Kashmir—so that Pakistan’s spies and generals cease licensing jihadi groups as asymmetric counters to India’s far superior conventional forces. These proxies threaten not just Afghanistan but the whole region.
As long as Islamabad’s spies and generals believe they can hammer their jihadi proxies back into line whenever they develop their own agenda, and that India remains the greater threat that may hold a dagger to their back in Afghanistan once NATO leaves, they will not willingly surrender their assets. These are formidable. The Haqqani network in north Waziristan (which may well have aided the Jordanian al‐Qaeda “triple agent” who killed seven CIA agents in Khost in January), is arguably the deadliest force in the Afghan insurgency.
Lashkar‐e‐Taiba, licensed by Pakistan for Kashmir but now deployed in Afghanistan (and behind the 2008 Mumbai attack), is also deadly.
This dimension has been a blind spot because of allied deference to India’s bridling at any linkage to or foreign mediation on Kashmir. It seems to me a diplomatic imperative that this changes.
MEC International Ltd.
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