Comment October 2008 Atlantic Monthly
Iraq-style counterinsurgency is fast becoming the U.S. Army's organizing principle. Is our military preparing to fight the next war, or the last one?
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The Petraeus Doctrine
iraq soldiers
Image credit: Benjamin Lowy/VII Network
For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the U.S. Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.
Anyone who cares about the Army's health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future U.S. national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.
What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.
The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today's Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.
Like any bureaucracy, today's military prefers to project a united front when dealing with the outside world, keeping internal dissent under wraps. Nonetheless, the Great Debate is unfolding in plain view in publications outside the Pentagon's purview, among them print magazines such as Armed Forces Journal, the Web-based Small Wars Journal, and the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.
The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam.
The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives.
The Crusaders consist of officers who see the Army's problems in Iraq as self-inflicted. According to members of this camp, things went awry because rigidly conventional senior commanders, determined "never again" to see the Army sucked into a Vietnam-like quagmire, had largely ignored unconventional warfare and were therefore prepared poorly for it. Typical of this generation is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, once the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, who in late 2003 was still describing the brewing insurgency as "strategically and operationally insignificant," when the lowliest buck sergeant knew otherwise.
Younger officers critical of Sanchez are also committed to the slogan "Never again," but with a different twist: never again should the officer corps fall prey to the willful amnesia to which the Army succumbed after Vietnam, when it turned its back on that war.
Among the Crusaders' most influential members is Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a West Pointer and Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University. In 2002, he published a book, impeccably timed, titled Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. After serving in Iraq as a battalion operations officer, Nagl helped rewrite the Army's counterinsurgency manual and commanded the unit that prepares U.S. soldiers to train Iraqi security forces. (Earlier this year, he left the Army to accept a position with a Washington think tank.)
To Nagl, the lessons of the recent past are self-evident. The events of 9/11, he writes, "conclusively demonstrated that instability anywhere can be a real threat to the American people here at home." For the foreseeable future, political conditions abroad rather than specific military threats will pose the greatest danger to the United States.
Instability creates ungoverned spaces in which violent anti-American radicals thrive. Yet if instability anywhere poses a threat, then ensuring the existence of stability everywhere—denying terrorists sanctuary in rogue or failed states—becomes a national-security imperative. Define the problem in these terms, and winning battles becomes less urgent than pacifying populations and establishing effective governance.
War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military "not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies."
Of course, back in the 1960s an earlier experiment in changing entire societies yielded unmitigated disaster—at least that's how the Army of the 1980s and 1990s chose to remember its Vietnam experience. Crusaders take another view, however. They insist that Vietnam could have been won—indeed was being won, after General Creighton Abrams succeeded General William Westmoreland in 1968 and jettisoned Westmoreland's heavy-handed search-and-destroy strategy, to concentrate instead on winning Vietnamese hearts and minds. Defeat did not result from military failure; rather, defeat came because the American people lacked patience, while American politicians lacked guts.
The Crusaders' perspective on Iraq tracks neatly with this revisionist take on Vietnam, with the hapless Sanchez (among others) standing in for Westmoreland, and General David Petraeus—whose Princeton doctoral dissertation was titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam"—as successor to General Abrams. Abrams's successful if tragically aborted campaign in Vietnam serves as a precursor to Petraeus's skillfully orchestrated "surge" in Iraq: each demonstrates that the United States can prevail in "stability operations" as long as commanders grasp the true nature of the problem and respond appropriately.
For Nagl, the imperative of the moment is to institutionalize the relevant lessons of Vietnam and Iraq, thereby enabling the Army, he writes, "to get better at building societies that can stand on their own." That means buying fewer tanks while spending more on language proficiency; curtailing the hours spent on marksmanship ranges while increasing those devoted to studying foreign cultures. It also implies changing the culture of the officer corps. An Army that since Vietnam has self-consciously cultivated a battle-oriented warrior ethos will instead emphasize, in Nagl's words, "the intellectual tools necessary to foster host-nation political and economic development."
Although the issue is by no means fully resolved, the evidence suggests that Nagl seems likely to get his way. Simply put, an officer corps that a decade ago took its intellectual cues from General Colin Powell now increasingly identifies itself with the views of General Petraeus. In the 1990s, the Powell Doctrine, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent. According to the emerging Petraeus Doctrine, the Army (like it or not) is entering an era in which armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous—with the application of force becoming a lesser part of the soldier's repertoire.
Nagl's line of argument has not gone unchallenged. Its opponents, the Conservatives, reject the revisionist interpretation of Vietnam and dispute the freshly enshrined conventional narrative on Iraq. Above all, they question whether Iraq represents a harbinger of things to come.
A leading voice in the Conservative camp is Colonel Gian Gentile, a Berkeley graduate with a doctorate in history from Stanford, who currently teaches at West Point. Gentile has two tours in Iraq under his belt. During the second, just before the Petraeus era, he commanded a battalion in Baghdad.
Writing in the journal World Affairs, Gentile dismisses as "a self-serving fiction" the notion that Abrams in 1968 put the United States on the road to victory in Vietnam; the war, he says, was unwinnable, given the "perseverance, cohesion, indigenous support, and sheer determination of the other side, coupled with the absence of any of those things on the American side." Furthermore, according to Gentile, the post-Vietnam officer corps did not turn its back on that war in a fit of pique; it correctly assessed that the mechanized formations of the Warsaw Pact deserved greater attention than pajama-clad guerrillas in Southeast Asia.
Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the Petraeus era, attributing security improvements achieved during Petraeus's tenure less to new techniques than to a "cash-for-cooperation" policy that put "nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, … on the U.S. government payroll." According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events.
All of this forms a backdrop to Gentile's core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as "a constabulary," adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.
The concern is not idle. A recent article in Army magazine notes that the Army's National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, long "renowned for its force-on-force conventional warfare maneuver training," has now "switched gears," focusing exclusively on counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than practicing how to attack the hill, its trainees now learn about "spending money instead of blood, and negotiating the cultural labyrinth through rapport and rapprochement."
The officer corps itself recognizes that conventional-warfare capabilities are already eroding. In a widely circulated white paper, three former brigade commanders declare that the Army's field-artillery branch—which plays a limited role in stability operations, but is crucial when there is serious fighting to be done—may soon be all but incapable of providing accurate and timely fire support. Field artillery, the authors write, has become a "dead branch walking."
Gentile does not doubt that counterinsurgencies will figure in the Army's future. Yet he questions Nagl's certainty that situations resembling Iraq should become an all-but-exclusive preoccupation. Historically, expectations that the next war will resemble the last one have seldom served the military well.
Embedded within this argument over military matters is a more fundamental and ideologically charged argument about basic policy. By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, Nagl is effectively affirming the Long War as the organizing principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish. Observers differ on whether the Long War's underlying purpose is democratic transformation or imperial domination: Did the Bush administration invade Iraq to liberate that country or to control it? Yet there is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades. In this sense, Nagl's reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate—and perpetuate—the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.
Gentile understands this. Implicit in his critique of Nagl is a critique of the Bush administration, for which John Nagl serves as a proxy. Gentile's objection to what he calls Nagl's "breathtaking" assumption about "the efficacy of American military power to shape events" expresses a larger dissatisfaction with similar assumptions held by the senior officials who concocted the Iraq War in the first place. When Gentile charges Nagl with believing that there are "no limits to what American military power … can accomplish," his real gripe is with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
For officers like Nagl, the die appears to have been cast. The Long War gives the Army its marching orders. Nagl's aim is simply to prepare for the inescapable eventuality of one, two, many Iraqs to come.
Gentile resists the notion that the Army's (and by extension, the nation's) fate is unalterably predetermined. Strategic choice—to include the choice of abandoning the Long War in favor of a different course—should remain a possibility. The effect of Nagl's military reforms, Gentile believes, will be to reduce or preclude that possibility, allowing questions of the second order (How should we organize our Army?) to crowd out those of the first (What should be our Army's purpose?).
The biggest question of all, Gentile writes, is "Who gets to decide this?" Absent a comparably searching Great Debate among the civilians vying to direct U.S. policy—and the prospects that either Senator McCain or Senator Obama will advocate alternatives to the Long War appear slight—the power of decision may well devolve by default upon soldiers. Gentile insists—rightly—that the choice should not be the Army's to make.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/petraeus-doctrine.
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
By Sunny Lee Korea Times Correspondent BEIJING ―
By Sunny Lee
Korea Times Correspondent
BEIJING ― The view that North Korea is likely to collapse after the all-powerful Kim Jong-il dies is a reflection of wishful thinking by some countries, rather than a reflection of North Korean reality, Chinese scholars argue.
Although Kim is a very important figure in North Korea ― probably the most important ― nonetheless the scholars point out that an internal bloody power struggle is unlikely in the post-Kim era by military generals because the ``ruling class'' in North Korea is well aware that if they destroy each other, it will eventually destroy the world's most isolated nation.
This consciousness of ``shared destiny,'' they argue, will unite the seasoned North Korean cadre to ensure the stability of North Korea in the post-Kim era.
Amid news reports of Kim's critical illness, speculation and theorizing has been in full swing to the obvious ``what's next?''
That is what is going to happen to North Korea in case the ``Dear Leader'' dies. Pundits in South Korea, America and Japan, for example, have been pushing predictions on the ``imminent death'' of, or a permanently impaired Kim, who may not be in full charge of running the country. With that, they have been paying attention to likely scenarios in the post-Kim era. Many of them paint a gloomy picture. Namely, North Korea is a country run by one dictator and his death would therefore result in a drastic change in the world's most isolated state, even its collapse.
All these views are a construct of wishful thinking, rather than a conclusion based on intimate knowledge of the reclusive country, Chinese scholars point out.
They beg to differ, first of all, from their foreign colleagues in that they don't want the collapse of North Korea. ``We want North Korea to be stable,'' said Cui Zhiying, director of the Korean Peninsula Research Office under the Asia-Pacific Research Centre of Tongji University in Shanghai.
``China wants stability in North Korea because it also relates to the stability of its northeast region,'' Cui said, alluding to concerns there that a deluge of refugees may spill into the region that borders North Korea after Pyongyang's collapse, destabilizing the area.
Residents who are Chinese nationals but ethnically Korean also heavily populate Northeast China, which includes Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang. China is concerned that once a flood of North Korean refugees migrates to this region, they bring them with them Korean identity and assimilate local Chinese residents who speak the same language, scholars in South Korea and America argue. Ethnic uprisings are a very sensitive issue in China, which has 55 ethnic minorities besides the Han majority.
Cui, however, views the scenario of an army of refugees spreading into the northeast as unlikely. ``I don't think that will be the case because North Korea has the ability to manage the crisis,'' he said apparently alluding to the recent reports of Kim's alleged illness.
``The recent Western reports are not reliable. North Korea has the ability," Cui said without elaborating.
Zhu Feng, a well-known Chinese security expert and a former fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, said even if Kim dies, North Korea was unlikely to implode in a bloody power struggle among military generals, as some observers predict. ``The possibility of North Korea's collapse is slim. The North Korean leadership is run by a group of ruling cadre. If North Korea collapses, they also collapse. If they engage in an in-fight, they know they will destroy themselves,'' he said.
``So, the people in the ruling class in North Korea are very clear. They share the same interests. They will work hard to preserve their interests,'' Zhu said, hinting that the post-Kim era will be governed by a group of experienced military personnel who will ensure stability.
Zhu's view differs from that of some experts in South Korea and the United States who anticipate a successor to Kim to show up, most likely from among Kim's three sons. However, since Kim has not designated an heir and since he is in a critical condition, they predict a massive power struggle may ensue if he dies without doing this publicly.
Song Chengyu, a professor of Korean Studies at Peking University, downplays such a view. ``Western reports make a big fuss about Kim. They don't know what's happening internally in North Korea. Years ago, there was turmoil in Rumania after a dictator had died there. The same thing won't happen in North Korea. The West and East are different,'' he said.
Some observers predict that if Kim dies and North Korea falls into a state of ``unclaimed ownership,'' China may send in troops and absorb the collapsed country.
Zhu dismissed such an idea. ``In the case of Kim's death, China won't act alone. China won't intervene in North Korea,'' he said, adding ``China will work within the framework of a multinational system such as the United Nations or six-party Talks.
``Some South Korean media have actually said that if Kim dies, China would go in and absorb North Korea. That's very strange. I've been reading Korean newspapers on the Internet and I don't think they get it right. Also their idea that China regards North Korea as a security `buffer zone' is no longer valid either.''
Song said, ``There are different possibilities in the post-Kim North Korea. But China will act in accordance with multi-party agreements, including the peace mandates of the United Nations. Kim is an important factor, but he is not all there is to North Korea. There are also the military and political figures who participate in running the country. One person does not represent North Korea. And they have been preparing for this leadership change for many years. The West is wrong. They don't understand North Korea. There are internal elements in North Korea that are capable of managing the country even without Kim.''
China Wants Reunification of Koreas
Zhu acknowledges that some Chinese scholars have concerns about a reunified Korea. Once reunited, the view goes, the new Korea, more powerful and confident, will reclaim old territory that once belonged to it. Much of this land is currently Chinese territory.
But all the Chinese scholars The Korea Times approached, said China wants the reunification of the two Koreas.
``China has always supported a peaceful reunification of the two Koreas,'' said Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University. The influential scholar, who is widely dubbed as ``personal advisor to President Hu Jintao,'' dismissed the view of some South Korean scholars that China wants the status quo on the Korean peninsula.
Song also said, ``China wants the peaceful unification of Korea because it's good for China as well. This is the view of the majority of Chinese scholars. It also wants it to be done without outside forces,'' adding ``It is also not likely that North Korea would embark on a war with South Korea after Kim dies.''
Zhu put it this way. ``Will a unified Korea turn against China? I personally don't think that will be the case. In terms of reunification, if Koreans can resolve their issue on their own, others don't have to intervene. But South Korean newspapers said China would intervene.''
As for unification, Zhu said, ``This is your business, not China's. Actually, it's the conservatives in South Korea that don't favor unification because of the expected financial burden.''
Chinese scholars think that North Korea doesn't believe it's the right time for opening up to the outside world because doing so would destabilize the country. ``North Korea is definitely facing pressure to open up. At present, they don't want this. It is not just Kim's idea, but also one shared by the other rulers. But eventually, they will want to open up. They have a so-called 2012 Opening-up Project. So, we have reason to believe that North Korea will eventually head toward opening up,'' Zhu said.
He does not believe that the departure of Kim from the North Korean scene will benefit the opening up scenario.
Song observed, ``Externally, North Korea faces a challenge that threatens the very existence of the country.'' When asked whether the `challenge' indicated the United States, he said, ``Yes, that's America,'' adding ``Internally, North Korea has to manage its reforms, including feeding its people. We often forget that North Korea's land size is larger than that of South Korea and North Korea has less people. If it's managed well, it can sustain the livelihood of its people.'' Zhu disagrees, predicting North Korea will have to rely on foreign aid to feed its people.
Chinese scholars all point out that the reunification of the two Koreas is not something that is imminent though. ``The former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung said it would take about 20 to 30 years,'' Cui said, adding North Korea's biggest challenge for now, besides Kim's health, is to develop its economy and raise the living standards of the people. ``That's its homework.''
Korea Times Correspondent
BEIJING ― The view that North Korea is likely to collapse after the all-powerful Kim Jong-il dies is a reflection of wishful thinking by some countries, rather than a reflection of North Korean reality, Chinese scholars argue.
Although Kim is a very important figure in North Korea ― probably the most important ― nonetheless the scholars point out that an internal bloody power struggle is unlikely in the post-Kim era by military generals because the ``ruling class'' in North Korea is well aware that if they destroy each other, it will eventually destroy the world's most isolated nation.
This consciousness of ``shared destiny,'' they argue, will unite the seasoned North Korean cadre to ensure the stability of North Korea in the post-Kim era.
Amid news reports of Kim's critical illness, speculation and theorizing has been in full swing to the obvious ``what's next?''
That is what is going to happen to North Korea in case the ``Dear Leader'' dies. Pundits in South Korea, America and Japan, for example, have been pushing predictions on the ``imminent death'' of, or a permanently impaired Kim, who may not be in full charge of running the country. With that, they have been paying attention to likely scenarios in the post-Kim era. Many of them paint a gloomy picture. Namely, North Korea is a country run by one dictator and his death would therefore result in a drastic change in the world's most isolated state, even its collapse.
All these views are a construct of wishful thinking, rather than a conclusion based on intimate knowledge of the reclusive country, Chinese scholars point out.
They beg to differ, first of all, from their foreign colleagues in that they don't want the collapse of North Korea. ``We want North Korea to be stable,'' said Cui Zhiying, director of the Korean Peninsula Research Office under the Asia-Pacific Research Centre of Tongji University in Shanghai.
``China wants stability in North Korea because it also relates to the stability of its northeast region,'' Cui said, alluding to concerns there that a deluge of refugees may spill into the region that borders North Korea after Pyongyang's collapse, destabilizing the area.
Residents who are Chinese nationals but ethnically Korean also heavily populate Northeast China, which includes Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang. China is concerned that once a flood of North Korean refugees migrates to this region, they bring them with them Korean identity and assimilate local Chinese residents who speak the same language, scholars in South Korea and America argue. Ethnic uprisings are a very sensitive issue in China, which has 55 ethnic minorities besides the Han majority.
Cui, however, views the scenario of an army of refugees spreading into the northeast as unlikely. ``I don't think that will be the case because North Korea has the ability to manage the crisis,'' he said apparently alluding to the recent reports of Kim's alleged illness.
``The recent Western reports are not reliable. North Korea has the ability," Cui said without elaborating.
Zhu Feng, a well-known Chinese security expert and a former fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, said even if Kim dies, North Korea was unlikely to implode in a bloody power struggle among military generals, as some observers predict. ``The possibility of North Korea's collapse is slim. The North Korean leadership is run by a group of ruling cadre. If North Korea collapses, they also collapse. If they engage in an in-fight, they know they will destroy themselves,'' he said.
``So, the people in the ruling class in North Korea are very clear. They share the same interests. They will work hard to preserve their interests,'' Zhu said, hinting that the post-Kim era will be governed by a group of experienced military personnel who will ensure stability.
Zhu's view differs from that of some experts in South Korea and the United States who anticipate a successor to Kim to show up, most likely from among Kim's three sons. However, since Kim has not designated an heir and since he is in a critical condition, they predict a massive power struggle may ensue if he dies without doing this publicly.
Song Chengyu, a professor of Korean Studies at Peking University, downplays such a view. ``Western reports make a big fuss about Kim. They don't know what's happening internally in North Korea. Years ago, there was turmoil in Rumania after a dictator had died there. The same thing won't happen in North Korea. The West and East are different,'' he said.
Some observers predict that if Kim dies and North Korea falls into a state of ``unclaimed ownership,'' China may send in troops and absorb the collapsed country.
Zhu dismissed such an idea. ``In the case of Kim's death, China won't act alone. China won't intervene in North Korea,'' he said, adding ``China will work within the framework of a multinational system such as the United Nations or six-party Talks.
``Some South Korean media have actually said that if Kim dies, China would go in and absorb North Korea. That's very strange. I've been reading Korean newspapers on the Internet and I don't think they get it right. Also their idea that China regards North Korea as a security `buffer zone' is no longer valid either.''
Song said, ``There are different possibilities in the post-Kim North Korea. But China will act in accordance with multi-party agreements, including the peace mandates of the United Nations. Kim is an important factor, but he is not all there is to North Korea. There are also the military and political figures who participate in running the country. One person does not represent North Korea. And they have been preparing for this leadership change for many years. The West is wrong. They don't understand North Korea. There are internal elements in North Korea that are capable of managing the country even without Kim.''
China Wants Reunification of Koreas
Zhu acknowledges that some Chinese scholars have concerns about a reunified Korea. Once reunited, the view goes, the new Korea, more powerful and confident, will reclaim old territory that once belonged to it. Much of this land is currently Chinese territory.
But all the Chinese scholars The Korea Times approached, said China wants the reunification of the two Koreas.
``China has always supported a peaceful reunification of the two Koreas,'' said Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University. The influential scholar, who is widely dubbed as ``personal advisor to President Hu Jintao,'' dismissed the view of some South Korean scholars that China wants the status quo on the Korean peninsula.
Song also said, ``China wants the peaceful unification of Korea because it's good for China as well. This is the view of the majority of Chinese scholars. It also wants it to be done without outside forces,'' adding ``It is also not likely that North Korea would embark on a war with South Korea after Kim dies.''
Zhu put it this way. ``Will a unified Korea turn against China? I personally don't think that will be the case. In terms of reunification, if Koreans can resolve their issue on their own, others don't have to intervene. But South Korean newspapers said China would intervene.''
As for unification, Zhu said, ``This is your business, not China's. Actually, it's the conservatives in South Korea that don't favor unification because of the expected financial burden.''
Chinese scholars think that North Korea doesn't believe it's the right time for opening up to the outside world because doing so would destabilize the country. ``North Korea is definitely facing pressure to open up. At present, they don't want this. It is not just Kim's idea, but also one shared by the other rulers. But eventually, they will want to open up. They have a so-called 2012 Opening-up Project. So, we have reason to believe that North Korea will eventually head toward opening up,'' Zhu said.
He does not believe that the departure of Kim from the North Korean scene will benefit the opening up scenario.
Song observed, ``Externally, North Korea faces a challenge that threatens the very existence of the country.'' When asked whether the `challenge' indicated the United States, he said, ``Yes, that's America,'' adding ``Internally, North Korea has to manage its reforms, including feeding its people. We often forget that North Korea's land size is larger than that of South Korea and North Korea has less people. If it's managed well, it can sustain the livelihood of its people.'' Zhu disagrees, predicting North Korea will have to rely on foreign aid to feed its people.
Chinese scholars all point out that the reunification of the two Koreas is not something that is imminent though. ``The former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung said it would take about 20 to 30 years,'' Cui said, adding North Korea's biggest challenge for now, besides Kim's health, is to develop its economy and raise the living standards of the people. ``That's its homework.''
DE BORCHGRAVE: An existential crisis
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/sep/15/an-existential-crisis/
DE BORCHGRAVE: An existential crisis
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Monday, September 15, 2008
Alarm bells suddenly went off in government offices from Washington to Ottawa to London to The Hague when Pakistan's newly minted democratic government, after almost nine years of military rule, suddenly closed the border to all NATO resupply traffic to Afghanistan.
NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan are resupplied by endless convoys of trucks that snake over 1,200 miles from Karachi on the Arabian Sea to Peshawar and the Khyber Pass to reach Kabul and points north and east, and more than 600 miles for the more direct route through Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, and Chaman on the border to reach Kandahar and points south and west in Afghanistan. Oil, food, heavy equipment, hospital supplies, all are trucked at a cost of $1 million a day in Pakistani road tolls.
This was Pakistan's retaliatory action for a U.S. Special Forces raid against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in the lawless tribal border areas. In conjunction with Predator drones that drop precision-guided bombs, the raid came up empty, but once again civilians took the hits, including women and children.
Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, made clear there would be no more Predator bombings or Special Forces raids into FATA (seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas), where Taliban and al Qaeda operate with near-impunity, unless done with Pakistan's OK. And Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani left no doubt this would not be forthcoming. Cross-border commando raids, Gen. Kiyani said, only stoke the fires of anti-American resentment, not only in FATA, but throughout Pakistan.
The problem is that Pakistan's new President Asif Zardari had told his White House friends consent would be forthcoming - with a wink and a nod from him, now that he has the same powers as outgoing military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts began to suspect that Taliban deliberately shows U.S. spies-in-the-sky what could be interpreted as a busy guerrilla venue in FATA, and then makes sure there are lots of women and children at the site when the bomb drops. In World War II, German submarines in the Atlantic, cornered by sonar and depth charges, would release tattered uniforms and detritus to make it seem the U-Boat had sunk.
There was also a little matter of unpaid border tolls and Washington cut a check for $365 million in record time - and traffic resumed bumping along rutted roads through some of the poorest villages on Earth, competing for space with swarms of donkey carts, camel-drawn rigs and bicycles.
Last week's Special Forces surprise attack against a Taliban target was a first for U.S. forces, also a first for a new Bush administration policy that authorizes operations inside FATA without any green light from the Pakistani side
The U.S. had grown tired of Pakistani pledges to take care of Taliban in FATA. The Pakistani army had also grown tired of taking casualties while fighting its own people. The final straw was an Interior Ministry order to cease-fire during the holy month of Ramadan, which, of course, would have given Taliban time to regroup and plan their next operations with impunity. Gen. Kiyani ignored it.
U.S. patience was at an end. Taliban had announced it was planning for a 20-year insurgency campaign to victory while NATO's only member nations doing the fighting in Afghanistan - Canada, Britain and the Netherlands - said they were authorized by their parliaments for two more years, and then out. Meanwhile, America's allies wanted no part in U.S. operations inside Pakistan.
In a country the size of France or Texas, the outgoing NATO commander said the Afghan mission required at least 400,000 troops. Current in-country force: 60,000. The withdrawal of 8,000 U.S. troops from Iraq would allow for the transfer of another brigade to Afghanistan, still a far cry from rock-bottom requirements.
Pakistan is fighting an existential threat comparable to 1971 when Pakistanis lost half their country in a war with India. East Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, became Bangladesh. This traumatic shock to the body politic also sparked Pakistan's drive for nuclear power.
Now Pakistan is fighting a large-scale insurgency against a wing of Taliban that has spilled out of FATA into the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), and beyond with attacks on the army's principal ordnance plant and other army installations.
The army has also taken its licks in FATA - 1,400 killed and 4,000 injured. Steeped in infantry and tank warfare tactics for war with India, the army is ill-equipped for counterinsurgency. It is not ready for low-intensity conflict. And in FATA, the army is seen as an alien force.
For most of its 61 years as an independent nation, the army has been Pakistan's most respected institution, and in power for half the country's lifetime. But polls now show the army as the country's least respected institution after journalists and lawyers.
Shuja Nawaz, the author of a current best-seller on the Pakistani Army ("Crossed Swords," Oxford University Press), says there is nationwide turmoil but no real debate on what kind of Pakistan the people want. "The national pastime is the blame game." FATA, he reminds us, became Taliban and al Qaeda territory through a half-century of neglect. These tribal areas became the Petri dish for Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for the "education" of young jihadis right out of some 12,000 madrassas (Koranic schools).
The Pakistani economy is in a free fall with inflation at an official 30 percent but closer to 60 percent. The average family now spends over half its income on food. Almost nine years of military rule spawned some 1,400 military officers who staffed the upper echelons of all major civilian agencies of government. Gen. Kiyani has ordered all such officers in civilian endeavors to return to barracks. But it is hard to untangle these links and find suitable civilians to do these jobs, hence a semi-paralyzed bureaucracy.
In authorizing this month's recent raid into south Waziristan, one of seven tribal agencies on the Afghan border, President Bush was testing the boundaries of the new government - and the authority of Mr. Zardari over the army.
In Afghanistan, the future of the Atlantic alliance is at stake. In Pakistan, the state itself is at stake.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
DE BORCHGRAVE: An existential crisis
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Monday, September 15, 2008
Alarm bells suddenly went off in government offices from Washington to Ottawa to London to The Hague when Pakistan's newly minted democratic government, after almost nine years of military rule, suddenly closed the border to all NATO resupply traffic to Afghanistan.
NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan are resupplied by endless convoys of trucks that snake over 1,200 miles from Karachi on the Arabian Sea to Peshawar and the Khyber Pass to reach Kabul and points north and east, and more than 600 miles for the more direct route through Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, and Chaman on the border to reach Kandahar and points south and west in Afghanistan. Oil, food, heavy equipment, hospital supplies, all are trucked at a cost of $1 million a day in Pakistani road tolls.
This was Pakistan's retaliatory action for a U.S. Special Forces raid against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in the lawless tribal border areas. In conjunction with Predator drones that drop precision-guided bombs, the raid came up empty, but once again civilians took the hits, including women and children.
Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, made clear there would be no more Predator bombings or Special Forces raids into FATA (seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas), where Taliban and al Qaeda operate with near-impunity, unless done with Pakistan's OK. And Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani left no doubt this would not be forthcoming. Cross-border commando raids, Gen. Kiyani said, only stoke the fires of anti-American resentment, not only in FATA, but throughout Pakistan.
The problem is that Pakistan's new President Asif Zardari had told his White House friends consent would be forthcoming - with a wink and a nod from him, now that he has the same powers as outgoing military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts began to suspect that Taliban deliberately shows U.S. spies-in-the-sky what could be interpreted as a busy guerrilla venue in FATA, and then makes sure there are lots of women and children at the site when the bomb drops. In World War II, German submarines in the Atlantic, cornered by sonar and depth charges, would release tattered uniforms and detritus to make it seem the U-Boat had sunk.
There was also a little matter of unpaid border tolls and Washington cut a check for $365 million in record time - and traffic resumed bumping along rutted roads through some of the poorest villages on Earth, competing for space with swarms of donkey carts, camel-drawn rigs and bicycles.
Last week's Special Forces surprise attack against a Taliban target was a first for U.S. forces, also a first for a new Bush administration policy that authorizes operations inside FATA without any green light from the Pakistani side
The U.S. had grown tired of Pakistani pledges to take care of Taliban in FATA. The Pakistani army had also grown tired of taking casualties while fighting its own people. The final straw was an Interior Ministry order to cease-fire during the holy month of Ramadan, which, of course, would have given Taliban time to regroup and plan their next operations with impunity. Gen. Kiyani ignored it.
U.S. patience was at an end. Taliban had announced it was planning for a 20-year insurgency campaign to victory while NATO's only member nations doing the fighting in Afghanistan - Canada, Britain and the Netherlands - said they were authorized by their parliaments for two more years, and then out. Meanwhile, America's allies wanted no part in U.S. operations inside Pakistan.
In a country the size of France or Texas, the outgoing NATO commander said the Afghan mission required at least 400,000 troops. Current in-country force: 60,000. The withdrawal of 8,000 U.S. troops from Iraq would allow for the transfer of another brigade to Afghanistan, still a far cry from rock-bottom requirements.
Pakistan is fighting an existential threat comparable to 1971 when Pakistanis lost half their country in a war with India. East Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, became Bangladesh. This traumatic shock to the body politic also sparked Pakistan's drive for nuclear power.
Now Pakistan is fighting a large-scale insurgency against a wing of Taliban that has spilled out of FATA into the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), and beyond with attacks on the army's principal ordnance plant and other army installations.
The army has also taken its licks in FATA - 1,400 killed and 4,000 injured. Steeped in infantry and tank warfare tactics for war with India, the army is ill-equipped for counterinsurgency. It is not ready for low-intensity conflict. And in FATA, the army is seen as an alien force.
For most of its 61 years as an independent nation, the army has been Pakistan's most respected institution, and in power for half the country's lifetime. But polls now show the army as the country's least respected institution after journalists and lawyers.
Shuja Nawaz, the author of a current best-seller on the Pakistani Army ("Crossed Swords," Oxford University Press), says there is nationwide turmoil but no real debate on what kind of Pakistan the people want. "The national pastime is the blame game." FATA, he reminds us, became Taliban and al Qaeda territory through a half-century of neglect. These tribal areas became the Petri dish for Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for the "education" of young jihadis right out of some 12,000 madrassas (Koranic schools).
The Pakistani economy is in a free fall with inflation at an official 30 percent but closer to 60 percent. The average family now spends over half its income on food. Almost nine years of military rule spawned some 1,400 military officers who staffed the upper echelons of all major civilian agencies of government. Gen. Kiyani has ordered all such officers in civilian endeavors to return to barracks. But it is hard to untangle these links and find suitable civilians to do these jobs, hence a semi-paralyzed bureaucracy.
In authorizing this month's recent raid into south Waziristan, one of seven tribal agencies on the Afghan border, President Bush was testing the boundaries of the new government - and the authority of Mr. Zardari over the army.
In Afghanistan, the future of the Atlantic alliance is at stake. In Pakistan, the state itself is at stake.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Quagmire, Phase 2: The Invasion of Pakistan
Quagmire, Phase 2: The Invasion of Pakistan
Posted on Sep 11, 2008
By William Pfaff
The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970, the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al-Qaida bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial “collateral damage.”
George W. Bush has now authorized independent ground assaults on Taliban and al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without consultation with Pakistan authorities. These already have begun.
This follows a period of tension, with some armed clashes, between American and Pakistani military units, the latter defending “Pakistan’s national sovereignty.” Pakistan public opinion seems largely against “America’s war” being fought inside Pakistan.
Washington’s decision was made known just in time for the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that opened the first phase of the “war on terror,” after which “nothing could ever be the same.” We no doubt have now begun phase two.
The eventual outcome of the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970 was Communist overthrow of the American-sponsored military government in that country, followed by genocide. The future consequences in (nuclear-armed) Pakistan await.
There is every reason to think they may include civil protest and disorder in the country, political crisis, a major rise in the strength of Pakistan’s own Islamic fundamentalist movement and, conceivably, a small war between the United States and the Pakistan army, which is the central institution in the country, has a mind of its own and is not a negligible military force.
In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have been complaining for many months that victory over the Taliban was impossible so long as there were secure Taliban bases in Pakistan’s largely inaccessible Tribal Territories.
Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, was told by his American allies to clean the Taliban out of the Territories or the U.S. Army and NATO would do it for him. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made the same threat. John McCain concurred. Musharraf had been looking for a negotiated arrangement with the tribesmen.
Pakistan’s military intelligence services created the Taliban while they were collaborating with the CIA to form the mujahadeen that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Many in the service still support the Taliban as a useful instrument against India, and to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of more dangerous enemies.
Musharraf was forced out of office. The U.S. brought in exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, expected to be cooperative. She was assassinated, presumably by Islamic extremists. Her widower has been elected to take her place and declares himself an enemy of terrorism. However, the United States has already taken the matter into its own hands.
In the Vietnamese case, the American military command held that it could win the war by invading Cambodia to cut the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which supplies and arms for the Viet Cong Communist insurrection were being transported. The argument made was that cutting this route would starve the Viet Cong of supplies.
Initially, the unhappy Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, desperately trying to keep his country out of the Vietnam War, was persuaded to turn a blind eye to U.S. bombing of the trail. A military coup followed in 1970, installing an American puppet general. B-52 saturation bombing ensued, without the desired military effect, but killing many Cambodians.
The joint U.S. and South Vietnamese “incursion” to cut the trail came in April 1970; it simply pushed the supply operations deeper into Cambodia. Richard Nixon said he acted to prove that the United States was not “a second-rate power.” “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
The native Cambodian Khmer Rouge subsequently defeated the American-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Genocide followed, the “killing fields,” on which the United States turned its back, condemning the triumphant Vietnamese Communist government when it later invaded Cambodia to stop the killing.
Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080911_quagmire_phase_2_the_invasion_of_pakistan/
Posted on Sep 11, 2008
By William Pfaff
The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970, the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al-Qaida bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial “collateral damage.”
George W. Bush has now authorized independent ground assaults on Taliban and al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without consultation with Pakistan authorities. These already have begun.
This follows a period of tension, with some armed clashes, between American and Pakistani military units, the latter defending “Pakistan’s national sovereignty.” Pakistan public opinion seems largely against “America’s war” being fought inside Pakistan.
Washington’s decision was made known just in time for the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that opened the first phase of the “war on terror,” after which “nothing could ever be the same.” We no doubt have now begun phase two.
The eventual outcome of the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970 was Communist overthrow of the American-sponsored military government in that country, followed by genocide. The future consequences in (nuclear-armed) Pakistan await.
There is every reason to think they may include civil protest and disorder in the country, political crisis, a major rise in the strength of Pakistan’s own Islamic fundamentalist movement and, conceivably, a small war between the United States and the Pakistan army, which is the central institution in the country, has a mind of its own and is not a negligible military force.
In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have been complaining for many months that victory over the Taliban was impossible so long as there were secure Taliban bases in Pakistan’s largely inaccessible Tribal Territories.
Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, was told by his American allies to clean the Taliban out of the Territories or the U.S. Army and NATO would do it for him. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made the same threat. John McCain concurred. Musharraf had been looking for a negotiated arrangement with the tribesmen.
Pakistan’s military intelligence services created the Taliban while they were collaborating with the CIA to form the mujahadeen that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Many in the service still support the Taliban as a useful instrument against India, and to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of more dangerous enemies.
Musharraf was forced out of office. The U.S. brought in exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, expected to be cooperative. She was assassinated, presumably by Islamic extremists. Her widower has been elected to take her place and declares himself an enemy of terrorism. However, the United States has already taken the matter into its own hands.
In the Vietnamese case, the American military command held that it could win the war by invading Cambodia to cut the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which supplies and arms for the Viet Cong Communist insurrection were being transported. The argument made was that cutting this route would starve the Viet Cong of supplies.
Initially, the unhappy Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, desperately trying to keep his country out of the Vietnam War, was persuaded to turn a blind eye to U.S. bombing of the trail. A military coup followed in 1970, installing an American puppet general. B-52 saturation bombing ensued, without the desired military effect, but killing many Cambodians.
The joint U.S. and South Vietnamese “incursion” to cut the trail came in April 1970; it simply pushed the supply operations deeper into Cambodia. Richard Nixon said he acted to prove that the United States was not “a second-rate power.” “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
The native Cambodian Khmer Rouge subsequently defeated the American-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Genocide followed, the “killing fields,” on which the United States turned its back, condemning the triumphant Vietnamese Communist government when it later invaded Cambodia to stop the killing.
Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080911_quagmire_phase_2_the_invasion_of_pakistan/
Sunday, September 14, 2008
New Atlanticist Saudis Better Prepared for Post-Oil World than Us?
New Atlanticist
Saudis Better Prepared for Post-Oil World than Us?
Robert Manning | September 12, 2008
Al Faisaliah Complex Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
It may be the ultimate irony of our horrendous energy predicament. Amid all the talk and admonitions about "foreign oil" and alternative energy, it appears the Saudis and the other Persian Gulf oil and gas exporters are further along in preparing to diversify their economies for a post-petroleum world than the United States.
While we hotly debate about secondary, short-term issues like offshore drilling, the Arab Gulf oil exporters have been quietly taking advantage of one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history: Mid-East oil exporters income from the world's oil addiction is projected to reach $800 billion in 2008. Unlike last time around in the 1970s, the Arabian Gulf states (when they are not busy buying stakes in US financial firms) are recycling much of their oil billions into investment in non-energy industrial development in the region, looking ahead to 2020 and beyond.
Revenge of the Gulfies
We have all seen the dazzling photos of futuristic towers and high-end resorts construction frenzy in Dubai, a would-be hybrid of Singapore and Las Vegas in the desert. But Bahrain, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are not far behind. Their broad vision ("Fly Emirates") is to transform themselves into glittering high-tech transport/tourism/financial hubs taking advantage of their geographical centrality at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
Earlier this year, Dubai rolled out the world's biggest airport (the size of London Heathrow and Chicago O'Hare combined), complete with a new city designed for nearly 800,000 people (total current pop. of Dubai: 700,000) located in the Jebel free-trade zone. Then there are the artificial islands dredged with imported sand and shaped like palm trees, creating hundreds of high-end beach front properties. Dubai is replete with megaports, IT parks, and would-be science centers. Not to mention an accompanying $27 billion tourist complex, and an Internet City which only a few years ago was nothing but desert. And of course, Dubailand, an Arab version of Disneyland. And this is just for starters.
Dubai's efforts are paralleled on a smaller scale by other of the emirates like Abu Dhabi and neighboring states of Bahrain and Qatar. Qatar, is trying to compete with Dubai as an international conference site, with posh facilities, media center (home of Al-Jazeera) and an instant world class university, Education City, by creating branches of key departments of prominent U.S. universities (e.g Texas A&M [engineering] , Carnegie Mellon [business], Georgetown [Foreign Service], and Cornell (medical)].
The Saudis' $500 Billion Dream Future
Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and his close advisors, have been trying to realize a still larger vision: more than $500 billion is being invested to create six new megacities and a massive world class university seeking to turn Saudi Arabia into a major industrial power over the next quarter century.
If this is to be more than a pipedream or a bunch of enormous White Elephants, it will take a lot more than petrodollars. The Saudis have been engaging some of the top strategic business planners in the world. They seek to develop a competitiveness center, map out a business strategy, and build six complimentary, in theory, synergistic cities for more than five million people. They are focusing on energy-related (e.g.petrochemical, chemicals, and water-intensive industries like aluminum, transport, and knowledge industries (e.g. IT, biotech, computational sciences).
At the center of the plan is the $26+ billion King Abdullah Economic City, a planned "smart" high-tech environment with a megaport, industrial area, finance and business district and educational and recreational zones on the Red Sea. One showcase of this venture will be the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a $25 billion project with a $10 billion endowment and a $100 million a year research partnership program to lure scientists and researchers from around the globe, with research institutes in biotech, materials science, engineering, environment,etc. To render it credible, the plan is to make it an independent institution early on.
What Does it Mean?
Whether these oil-rich Arab regimes can buy their way into the 21st century is obviously an open question. It is not clear whether this is the cutting edge of the Arabs finally shaking off ninety bad years (since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) and coming to terms with modernity, or just a contemporary version of extravagantly throwing wealth around, as was done in the 1970s.
For openers, in order to have any chance of success, the Saudis and the Gulf states would need to unleash the labor and talent of the fifty percent of the population whose activities are greatly suppressed: women. Moreover, it would require developing a work ethic in cultures that have been largely rentier economies running on imported South and Southeast Asian labor. Those two things alone would constitute such sweeping change it would amount to almost a cultural revolution and a modernization of Islam in the Arab world.
But to raise serious questions about the viability and chances of success does not remove the stark reality that these petro-states appear fully cognizant of the path of history. They are off and running trying to create a future that a generation hence during a period that will likely be a transition to a post-petroleum based global economy by mid-century.
As we get hot and bothered in our presidential silly season over offshore drilling and ANWAR (perfectly reasonable ideas, but hardly solutions to the intertwined energy and enviroment question), the character of our discourse does not have, shall we say, gravity commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.
We might do well to consider whether it is time take a deep breath and begin that quintessentially American act of properly grasping the sheer magnitude and the challenge of shaping our energy future with a vision, urgency and common purpose that we saw in the Sputnik generation, when science and engineering took off. Creating cost-competitive new, non-GHG producing energy technologies is the sine qua non for not only a graceful transition out of the petroleum-based economy, but for a sustainable planet. That OPEC oil exporters are already preparing for such a future ought to get our attention.
Robert Manning is a Senior Advisor to the Atlantic Council. The views expressed here are solely his own, not those of any U.S. government agency. Photo of Riyahd's Al Faisaliah Complex via Wayfaring.
Trackback URL for this post:
http://www.acus.org/trackback/868
Saudis Better Prepared for Post-Oil World than Us?
Robert Manning | September 12, 2008
Al Faisaliah Complex Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
It may be the ultimate irony of our horrendous energy predicament. Amid all the talk and admonitions about "foreign oil" and alternative energy, it appears the Saudis and the other Persian Gulf oil and gas exporters are further along in preparing to diversify their economies for a post-petroleum world than the United States.
While we hotly debate about secondary, short-term issues like offshore drilling, the Arab Gulf oil exporters have been quietly taking advantage of one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history: Mid-East oil exporters income from the world's oil addiction is projected to reach $800 billion in 2008. Unlike last time around in the 1970s, the Arabian Gulf states (when they are not busy buying stakes in US financial firms) are recycling much of their oil billions into investment in non-energy industrial development in the region, looking ahead to 2020 and beyond.
Revenge of the Gulfies
We have all seen the dazzling photos of futuristic towers and high-end resorts construction frenzy in Dubai, a would-be hybrid of Singapore and Las Vegas in the desert. But Bahrain, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are not far behind. Their broad vision ("Fly Emirates") is to transform themselves into glittering high-tech transport/tourism/financial hubs taking advantage of their geographical centrality at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
Earlier this year, Dubai rolled out the world's biggest airport (the size of London Heathrow and Chicago O'Hare combined), complete with a new city designed for nearly 800,000 people (total current pop. of Dubai: 700,000) located in the Jebel free-trade zone. Then there are the artificial islands dredged with imported sand and shaped like palm trees, creating hundreds of high-end beach front properties. Dubai is replete with megaports, IT parks, and would-be science centers. Not to mention an accompanying $27 billion tourist complex, and an Internet City which only a few years ago was nothing but desert. And of course, Dubailand, an Arab version of Disneyland. And this is just for starters.
Dubai's efforts are paralleled on a smaller scale by other of the emirates like Abu Dhabi and neighboring states of Bahrain and Qatar. Qatar, is trying to compete with Dubai as an international conference site, with posh facilities, media center (home of Al-Jazeera) and an instant world class university, Education City, by creating branches of key departments of prominent U.S. universities (e.g Texas A&M [engineering] , Carnegie Mellon [business], Georgetown [Foreign Service], and Cornell (medical)].
The Saudis' $500 Billion Dream Future
Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and his close advisors, have been trying to realize a still larger vision: more than $500 billion is being invested to create six new megacities and a massive world class university seeking to turn Saudi Arabia into a major industrial power over the next quarter century.
If this is to be more than a pipedream or a bunch of enormous White Elephants, it will take a lot more than petrodollars. The Saudis have been engaging some of the top strategic business planners in the world. They seek to develop a competitiveness center, map out a business strategy, and build six complimentary, in theory, synergistic cities for more than five million people. They are focusing on energy-related (e.g.petrochemical, chemicals, and water-intensive industries like aluminum, transport, and knowledge industries (e.g. IT, biotech, computational sciences).
At the center of the plan is the $26+ billion King Abdullah Economic City, a planned "smart" high-tech environment with a megaport, industrial area, finance and business district and educational and recreational zones on the Red Sea. One showcase of this venture will be the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a $25 billion project with a $10 billion endowment and a $100 million a year research partnership program to lure scientists and researchers from around the globe, with research institutes in biotech, materials science, engineering, environment,etc. To render it credible, the plan is to make it an independent institution early on.
What Does it Mean?
Whether these oil-rich Arab regimes can buy their way into the 21st century is obviously an open question. It is not clear whether this is the cutting edge of the Arabs finally shaking off ninety bad years (since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) and coming to terms with modernity, or just a contemporary version of extravagantly throwing wealth around, as was done in the 1970s.
For openers, in order to have any chance of success, the Saudis and the Gulf states would need to unleash the labor and talent of the fifty percent of the population whose activities are greatly suppressed: women. Moreover, it would require developing a work ethic in cultures that have been largely rentier economies running on imported South and Southeast Asian labor. Those two things alone would constitute such sweeping change it would amount to almost a cultural revolution and a modernization of Islam in the Arab world.
But to raise serious questions about the viability and chances of success does not remove the stark reality that these petro-states appear fully cognizant of the path of history. They are off and running trying to create a future that a generation hence during a period that will likely be a transition to a post-petroleum based global economy by mid-century.
As we get hot and bothered in our presidential silly season over offshore drilling and ANWAR (perfectly reasonable ideas, but hardly solutions to the intertwined energy and enviroment question), the character of our discourse does not have, shall we say, gravity commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.
We might do well to consider whether it is time take a deep breath and begin that quintessentially American act of properly grasping the sheer magnitude and the challenge of shaping our energy future with a vision, urgency and common purpose that we saw in the Sputnik generation, when science and engineering took off. Creating cost-competitive new, non-GHG producing energy technologies is the sine qua non for not only a graceful transition out of the petroleum-based economy, but for a sustainable planet. That OPEC oil exporters are already preparing for such a future ought to get our attention.
Robert Manning is a Senior Advisor to the Atlantic Council. The views expressed here are solely his own, not those of any U.S. government agency. Photo of Riyahd's Al Faisaliah Complex via Wayfaring.
Trackback URL for this post:
http://www.acus.org/trackback/868
Saturday, September 13, 2008
The stability of the Gulf is now a global responsibility Emile Hokayem
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080911/OPINION/773619685/1080&profile=1080
The stability of the Gulf is now a global responsibility
Emile Hokayem
* Last Updated: September 11. 2008 9:41PM UAE / September 11. 2008 5:41PM GMT
The body of water that separates the UAE from Iran forms what is unquestionably the world's most strategically important sea. It has had several names throughout history, reflecting the dominant regional power of the day. Even its changing nicknames reveal much about the ever-altering geopolitics: "Arab pool", "Persian pond", and more recently, "American lake".
So, if the occasional bursts of nationalism are understandable in a region of such cultural pride and historical heritage, they should not mask the reality that today the Gulf's fate has become an international concern. Indeed, the fact that many have settled on the name "the Gulf" to refer to our region is not as much an attempt to flee controversy as it is a reflection of the fact that the Gulf has become way too important to the entire world. Stability in the Gulf is now best understood as a global public good given the impact that events here can have on all other nations. And those shouldering that responsibility, be they local leaders or great powers, struggle every day to walk the thin line between regional stability and confrontation.
The recent history of the region is indeed cause for worry: in the span of three decades it has witnessed no fewer than three major wars and regular internal unrest that, thankfully, never fatally destabilised local governments. And today's uncertainties – Iran's regional and nuclear ambitions, the potential American reaction to them, the possibility of a contagious collapse in Iraq, or al Qa'eda-style terrorism – are too great to allow for complacency.
The maturing Gulf states were once minor players in the great game that involved the Cold War powers, revolutionary Iran and various other Arab countries, most prominently Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Opposed to communism, khomeinist thought and Arab nationalism, they threw their weight behind the United States to guarantee regional stability.
And judging from the US record, they did well. In the 1980s, when Gulf tankers were hit by Iranian missiles, and in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the US, as much out of commitment to the security of its allies as to self-interest and international credibility, proved indispensable in protecting their interests. America made good on its guarantee at a time when no other country would or could. This was a lesson not lost on Gulf leaders.
Then, along came the Iraq war and America's subsequent loss of prestige and influence. No longer could US strategic wisdom be assumed. No longer could US operational and bureaucratic efficacy be trusted. No longer would US military might awe allies and deter enemies as it once did. A weakened US has now to cope with the fact that the only winner of the Iraq war is much-feared Iran.
This is, of course, the most pessimistic appraisal of US power. By virtue of its technological dominance and global reach, the US will remain the paramount player in the region. A $7 billion deal to provide the UAE with top-of-the-line missile defence technology is nearing completion. Other Gulf states are upgrading their defensive capabilities with US-provided weapons systems. And with US technology comes US training, maintenance and integration.
But America's credibility has been irreparably damaged, and unless the next administration pulls off an improbable masterstroke the security of this region will depend on a new mix of factors of which the US will be a principle but no longer unique feature.
Indeed, flush with cash and mindful of their new global standing, the Gulf states have fully embraced the notion that the security of their neighbourhood is an international responsibility. Operationally, this means that while the Gulf states continue to count on US physical guarantees, the first and perhaps most important level of protection is an international consensus that prevents and, when necessary, manages any increase in regional tensions.
This explains why the Gulf states are investing so much in their relationships with every permanent member of the UN Security Council and rising powers such as India, Turkey and Indonesia. By investing in the economies of these countries, building cultural and educational ties with the West as well as Asia, diversifying their weapons procurement and even welcoming powers like France and military organisations such as Nato, the Gulf states are creating a web of interdependence.
Similarly, the Gulf states expect the international community to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-capable power without resorting to force – which would greatly damage the entire region. But a concerted international effort on Iran has fallen victim to other considerations. Few realise how the Georgia conflict or Arab-Israeli tensions complicate their goal of a nuclear-arms free Gulf.
This strategy of internationalising Gulf security is proving a major irritant to Iran, which views external political attention and a foreign military presence in the Gulf as a threat to its security and an impediment to its ambitions. This is why Iran insists on "indigenising" Gulf security, and why the Gulf states fear a grand bargain between the US and Iran that would consecrate Iran as the foremost regional power.
The Gulf states were once accused of strategic laziness because they subcontracted their security to the US. This is no longer the case as they shrewdly take advantage of the new distribution of global power to identify and cultivate new alliances. But they need to take their thinking to the next level to become shapers of their own security destiny. Indeed, the missing element is the lack of progress on regional cooperation on security and defence issues. Surely someone can show that way.
Emile Hokayem
Political Editor
The National
Abu Dhabi Company
P.O. Box 111434, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Tel +971 2 414 5399
Mob +971 50 285 9747
ehokayem@thenational.ae
www.thenational.ae
The stability of the Gulf is now a global responsibility
Emile Hokayem
* Last Updated: September 11. 2008 9:41PM UAE / September 11. 2008 5:41PM GMT
The body of water that separates the UAE from Iran forms what is unquestionably the world's most strategically important sea. It has had several names throughout history, reflecting the dominant regional power of the day. Even its changing nicknames reveal much about the ever-altering geopolitics: "Arab pool", "Persian pond", and more recently, "American lake".
So, if the occasional bursts of nationalism are understandable in a region of such cultural pride and historical heritage, they should not mask the reality that today the Gulf's fate has become an international concern. Indeed, the fact that many have settled on the name "the Gulf" to refer to our region is not as much an attempt to flee controversy as it is a reflection of the fact that the Gulf has become way too important to the entire world. Stability in the Gulf is now best understood as a global public good given the impact that events here can have on all other nations. And those shouldering that responsibility, be they local leaders or great powers, struggle every day to walk the thin line between regional stability and confrontation.
The recent history of the region is indeed cause for worry: in the span of three decades it has witnessed no fewer than three major wars and regular internal unrest that, thankfully, never fatally destabilised local governments. And today's uncertainties – Iran's regional and nuclear ambitions, the potential American reaction to them, the possibility of a contagious collapse in Iraq, or al Qa'eda-style terrorism – are too great to allow for complacency.
The maturing Gulf states were once minor players in the great game that involved the Cold War powers, revolutionary Iran and various other Arab countries, most prominently Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Opposed to communism, khomeinist thought and Arab nationalism, they threw their weight behind the United States to guarantee regional stability.
And judging from the US record, they did well. In the 1980s, when Gulf tankers were hit by Iranian missiles, and in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the US, as much out of commitment to the security of its allies as to self-interest and international credibility, proved indispensable in protecting their interests. America made good on its guarantee at a time when no other country would or could. This was a lesson not lost on Gulf leaders.
Then, along came the Iraq war and America's subsequent loss of prestige and influence. No longer could US strategic wisdom be assumed. No longer could US operational and bureaucratic efficacy be trusted. No longer would US military might awe allies and deter enemies as it once did. A weakened US has now to cope with the fact that the only winner of the Iraq war is much-feared Iran.
This is, of course, the most pessimistic appraisal of US power. By virtue of its technological dominance and global reach, the US will remain the paramount player in the region. A $7 billion deal to provide the UAE with top-of-the-line missile defence technology is nearing completion. Other Gulf states are upgrading their defensive capabilities with US-provided weapons systems. And with US technology comes US training, maintenance and integration.
But America's credibility has been irreparably damaged, and unless the next administration pulls off an improbable masterstroke the security of this region will depend on a new mix of factors of which the US will be a principle but no longer unique feature.
Indeed, flush with cash and mindful of their new global standing, the Gulf states have fully embraced the notion that the security of their neighbourhood is an international responsibility. Operationally, this means that while the Gulf states continue to count on US physical guarantees, the first and perhaps most important level of protection is an international consensus that prevents and, when necessary, manages any increase in regional tensions.
This explains why the Gulf states are investing so much in their relationships with every permanent member of the UN Security Council and rising powers such as India, Turkey and Indonesia. By investing in the economies of these countries, building cultural and educational ties with the West as well as Asia, diversifying their weapons procurement and even welcoming powers like France and military organisations such as Nato, the Gulf states are creating a web of interdependence.
Similarly, the Gulf states expect the international community to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-capable power without resorting to force – which would greatly damage the entire region. But a concerted international effort on Iran has fallen victim to other considerations. Few realise how the Georgia conflict or Arab-Israeli tensions complicate their goal of a nuclear-arms free Gulf.
This strategy of internationalising Gulf security is proving a major irritant to Iran, which views external political attention and a foreign military presence in the Gulf as a threat to its security and an impediment to its ambitions. This is why Iran insists on "indigenising" Gulf security, and why the Gulf states fear a grand bargain between the US and Iran that would consecrate Iran as the foremost regional power.
The Gulf states were once accused of strategic laziness because they subcontracted their security to the US. This is no longer the case as they shrewdly take advantage of the new distribution of global power to identify and cultivate new alliances. But they need to take their thinking to the next level to become shapers of their own security destiny. Indeed, the missing element is the lack of progress on regional cooperation on security and defence issues. Surely someone can show that way.
Emile Hokayem
Political Editor
The National
Abu Dhabi Company
P.O. Box 111434, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Tel +971 2 414 5399
Mob +971 50 285 9747
ehokayem@thenational.ae
www.thenational.ae
The Veep Goads Russia Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy
The Veep Goads Russia
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy
By ROBERT FANTINA
While Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is getting all the attention, the current vice president, Dick Cheney, was able to pontificate about Russia and Georgia with barely any notice from the media. However, while hardly anyone was watching, Mr. Cheney echoed the hypocrisy of his boss, President George Bush. While traveling in Italy, Mr. Cheney decided to become the moral arbiter of Russia's foreign policies. His incredible remarks are worth studying.
"Recent occurrences in Georgia, beginning with the military invasion by Russia, have been flatly contrary to some of our most deeply held beliefs. Russian forces crossed an internationally recognized border into a sovereign state; fueled and fomented an internal conflict; conducted acts of war without regard for innocent life, killing civilians and causing the displacement of tens of thousands."
If anyone doubted the vice president's disdain for those who elected him and kept him in power, this speech should have been an eye-opener. How he could make that statement with a straight face is beyond comprehension. Was he not a major force in the U.S. military invasion of Iraq? Mr. Bush may not have needed much encouragement to embark on this deadly oil grab, but whatever encouragement he may have needed was gladly provided by the vice president.
Did not U.S. forces cross an internationally recognized border into a sovereign state? At least Russia's incursion was to a country it bordered; the U.S. sent 130,000 soldiers halfway across the world to invade and occupy sovereign Iraq.
Russia, says Mr. Cheney, 'fueled and fomented an internal conflict.' It has been some time since people have been talking about civil war in Iraq, possibly because with the increase of 30,000 soldiers, Iraq may have finally, after five bloody, terrifying years, been cowed into submission. The U.S. overthrew the government with nothing to put in its place, disbanded the police, and turned a once peaceful nation into an inferno of deadly, daily violence.
He goes on to decry the idea that Russia 'conducted acts of war without regard for innocent life, killing civilians.' When Mr. Bush's horrific and unspeakable 'Shock and Awe' campaign began, residential areas were targeted. The president said he was invading Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction aimed at the U.S., but since he didn't know exactly where they were, he would simple practice genocide on the Iraqi people and hope the weapons of mass destruction would turn up eventually (they didn't). At the time his bombers were dropping death from the air over Baghdad, over half the population of that city was under the age of 15.
As far as conducting acts of war is concerned, could someone point out to Mr. Cheney that the invasion of a sovereign nation is probably the ultimate act of war? Occupying it for years, killing a million of its citizens and terrorizing much of the population for over five years may be business as usual for U.S. foreign policy, but that does not make those actions any less acts of war.
One could also point out that torturing political prisoners, some as young as 15, is an horrific act of war. The torture chamber that the U.S. operates at Guantanamo Bay is only the most famous; the U.S. uses 'rendition' sites around the world to torture those it considers dangerous. The supposedly cherished rights, such as due process, that the U.S. is said to stand for are meaningless to those who get in the way of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's imperial designs.
The Russian incursion, said Mr. Cheney, caused 'the displacement of tens of thousands.' That number pales in comparison to the millions who have been displaced in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion and occupation. At least a million Iraqis are in crowded refugee camps, forgotten by the media and certainly ignored by that master terrorist, Dick Cheney. Perhaps two million more have had to leave their homes, although they remain in Iraq.
"The United States and many in Europe have made clear that Russia's actions are an affront to civilized standards and are completely unacceptable." Mr. Cheney did not bother to explain why these behaviors exhibited by Russia are 'an affront to civilized standards,' and why they are 'completely unacceptable,' but when the exact same acts are perpetrated by the U.S., although on a far larger scale, they are, apparently, just fine.
"For its part, Russia has offered no satisfactory justification for the invasion -- nor could it do so." In over five years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, it has offered 'no satisfactory justification' for doing so. All the original lies, including the falsehoods that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was close to developing nuclear weapons, etc., have faded into oblivion, like the blood of millions of Iraqis on the desert sands. Mr. Bush also stated the need for 'regime change;' why he and his neocon cohorts felt this was their right has also never been explained.
"Differing views on the status of these two areas, within the sovereign borders of the Georgian democracy, cannot justify a sudden and violent incursion by Russia. This much, at a minimum, should be understood by all people of good will in the year 2008."
Yet apparently the belief that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S., despite the fact that United Nations weapons inspectors were combing Iraq and finding nothing, could justify a sudden and violent incursion by the U.S. People of good will in the year 2008 understand that that is simply wrong, as they did in 2003.
"This chain of aggressive moves and diplomatic reversals has only intensified the concern that many have about Russia's larger objectives." The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, continued threats against Iran and Cuba, and the fact that the U.S. has enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy the entire planet several times over have certainly intensified concern about the U.S.'s larger objectives.
Eight long years ago, Mr. Bush promised to bring dignity back to the White House. In his war-mongering mind the fact that President Bill Clinton had had an extra-marital affair was so disgraceful that the reputation of the U.S. was in tatters as a result. Today, following the Iraqi invasion and occupation that most of the world, including most of the U.S.'s allies, opposed from the start, the U.S. is the most hated and feared nation on the planet. With Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney now prancing around the world, criticizing Russia for actions that parallel in action but not in scope, the exact behaviors they have practiced and continue to practice, another mark of hypocrisy has been struck against the U.S.
As the U.S. plods towards the conclusion of its every-four-year election farce, the race for president is said to be too close to call. The Republican presidential candidate, the elderly Arizona Senator John McCain, the man who is so wealthy he does not even know how many houses he owns (or perhaps it is simply senility), calls for change by offering more of the same. This is the model his idol, Mr. Bush, used following the 2006 Congressional elections. After the war-mongering Republicans were thrown out of Congress, replaced by the spineless but equally war-mongering Democrats, Mr. Bush led the country on a 'new way forward,' by escalating the war. Mr. McCain has consistently supported Mr. Bush's worst policies.
Mr. McCain's Democratic challenger, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, has inspired many with his call for 'change we can believe in.' Whether or not we can actually believe in his idea of change, at the very least he offers a glimmer of the hope that U.S. citizens and the world have lived without for eight long years. He selected as his running mate Senator Joe Biden, a distinguished senator with a thorough knowledge of foreign policy, having served for many years on the senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he currently chairs. Mr. McCain selected Mrs. Palin, an (almost) one-term governor of a state with a population of less than 1,000,000. Her previous political experience was as mayor of an Alaskan town with a population of less than 7,000. She opposes every progressive movement known to man, encourages the shooting of wolves from airplanes, and believes that global warming is a natural occurrence, and not a man-made threat.
One wonders how more of the same will help to rebuild the reputation of the U.S. throughout the world, especially when it is ushered in by a cowgirl brandishing a gun and a chastity belt. Yet that is what change means to Mr. McCain.
The world is watching to see if the U.S. voters will make the same disastrous mistake in 2008 that they made in 2004. There was no excuse for it then, and there will be even less so if they do it again. The consequences of those mistakes grow with each one. It will not be long before those consequences are irreversible, to the detriment of the entire world population.
Robert Fantina is author of 'Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776--2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/fantina09132008.html
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy
By ROBERT FANTINA
While Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is getting all the attention, the current vice president, Dick Cheney, was able to pontificate about Russia and Georgia with barely any notice from the media. However, while hardly anyone was watching, Mr. Cheney echoed the hypocrisy of his boss, President George Bush. While traveling in Italy, Mr. Cheney decided to become the moral arbiter of Russia's foreign policies. His incredible remarks are worth studying.
"Recent occurrences in Georgia, beginning with the military invasion by Russia, have been flatly contrary to some of our most deeply held beliefs. Russian forces crossed an internationally recognized border into a sovereign state; fueled and fomented an internal conflict; conducted acts of war without regard for innocent life, killing civilians and causing the displacement of tens of thousands."
If anyone doubted the vice president's disdain for those who elected him and kept him in power, this speech should have been an eye-opener. How he could make that statement with a straight face is beyond comprehension. Was he not a major force in the U.S. military invasion of Iraq? Mr. Bush may not have needed much encouragement to embark on this deadly oil grab, but whatever encouragement he may have needed was gladly provided by the vice president.
Did not U.S. forces cross an internationally recognized border into a sovereign state? At least Russia's incursion was to a country it bordered; the U.S. sent 130,000 soldiers halfway across the world to invade and occupy sovereign Iraq.
Russia, says Mr. Cheney, 'fueled and fomented an internal conflict.' It has been some time since people have been talking about civil war in Iraq, possibly because with the increase of 30,000 soldiers, Iraq may have finally, after five bloody, terrifying years, been cowed into submission. The U.S. overthrew the government with nothing to put in its place, disbanded the police, and turned a once peaceful nation into an inferno of deadly, daily violence.
He goes on to decry the idea that Russia 'conducted acts of war without regard for innocent life, killing civilians.' When Mr. Bush's horrific and unspeakable 'Shock and Awe' campaign began, residential areas were targeted. The president said he was invading Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction aimed at the U.S., but since he didn't know exactly where they were, he would simple practice genocide on the Iraqi people and hope the weapons of mass destruction would turn up eventually (they didn't). At the time his bombers were dropping death from the air over Baghdad, over half the population of that city was under the age of 15.
As far as conducting acts of war is concerned, could someone point out to Mr. Cheney that the invasion of a sovereign nation is probably the ultimate act of war? Occupying it for years, killing a million of its citizens and terrorizing much of the population for over five years may be business as usual for U.S. foreign policy, but that does not make those actions any less acts of war.
One could also point out that torturing political prisoners, some as young as 15, is an horrific act of war. The torture chamber that the U.S. operates at Guantanamo Bay is only the most famous; the U.S. uses 'rendition' sites around the world to torture those it considers dangerous. The supposedly cherished rights, such as due process, that the U.S. is said to stand for are meaningless to those who get in the way of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's imperial designs.
The Russian incursion, said Mr. Cheney, caused 'the displacement of tens of thousands.' That number pales in comparison to the millions who have been displaced in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion and occupation. At least a million Iraqis are in crowded refugee camps, forgotten by the media and certainly ignored by that master terrorist, Dick Cheney. Perhaps two million more have had to leave their homes, although they remain in Iraq.
"The United States and many in Europe have made clear that Russia's actions are an affront to civilized standards and are completely unacceptable." Mr. Cheney did not bother to explain why these behaviors exhibited by Russia are 'an affront to civilized standards,' and why they are 'completely unacceptable,' but when the exact same acts are perpetrated by the U.S., although on a far larger scale, they are, apparently, just fine.
"For its part, Russia has offered no satisfactory justification for the invasion -- nor could it do so." In over five years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, it has offered 'no satisfactory justification' for doing so. All the original lies, including the falsehoods that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was close to developing nuclear weapons, etc., have faded into oblivion, like the blood of millions of Iraqis on the desert sands. Mr. Bush also stated the need for 'regime change;' why he and his neocon cohorts felt this was their right has also never been explained.
"Differing views on the status of these two areas, within the sovereign borders of the Georgian democracy, cannot justify a sudden and violent incursion by Russia. This much, at a minimum, should be understood by all people of good will in the year 2008."
Yet apparently the belief that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S., despite the fact that United Nations weapons inspectors were combing Iraq and finding nothing, could justify a sudden and violent incursion by the U.S. People of good will in the year 2008 understand that that is simply wrong, as they did in 2003.
"This chain of aggressive moves and diplomatic reversals has only intensified the concern that many have about Russia's larger objectives." The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, continued threats against Iran and Cuba, and the fact that the U.S. has enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy the entire planet several times over have certainly intensified concern about the U.S.'s larger objectives.
Eight long years ago, Mr. Bush promised to bring dignity back to the White House. In his war-mongering mind the fact that President Bill Clinton had had an extra-marital affair was so disgraceful that the reputation of the U.S. was in tatters as a result. Today, following the Iraqi invasion and occupation that most of the world, including most of the U.S.'s allies, opposed from the start, the U.S. is the most hated and feared nation on the planet. With Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney now prancing around the world, criticizing Russia for actions that parallel in action but not in scope, the exact behaviors they have practiced and continue to practice, another mark of hypocrisy has been struck against the U.S.
As the U.S. plods towards the conclusion of its every-four-year election farce, the race for president is said to be too close to call. The Republican presidential candidate, the elderly Arizona Senator John McCain, the man who is so wealthy he does not even know how many houses he owns (or perhaps it is simply senility), calls for change by offering more of the same. This is the model his idol, Mr. Bush, used following the 2006 Congressional elections. After the war-mongering Republicans were thrown out of Congress, replaced by the spineless but equally war-mongering Democrats, Mr. Bush led the country on a 'new way forward,' by escalating the war. Mr. McCain has consistently supported Mr. Bush's worst policies.
Mr. McCain's Democratic challenger, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, has inspired many with his call for 'change we can believe in.' Whether or not we can actually believe in his idea of change, at the very least he offers a glimmer of the hope that U.S. citizens and the world have lived without for eight long years. He selected as his running mate Senator Joe Biden, a distinguished senator with a thorough knowledge of foreign policy, having served for many years on the senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he currently chairs. Mr. McCain selected Mrs. Palin, an (almost) one-term governor of a state with a population of less than 1,000,000. Her previous political experience was as mayor of an Alaskan town with a population of less than 7,000. She opposes every progressive movement known to man, encourages the shooting of wolves from airplanes, and believes that global warming is a natural occurrence, and not a man-made threat.
One wonders how more of the same will help to rebuild the reputation of the U.S. throughout the world, especially when it is ushered in by a cowgirl brandishing a gun and a chastity belt. Yet that is what change means to Mr. McCain.
The world is watching to see if the U.S. voters will make the same disastrous mistake in 2008 that they made in 2004. There was no excuse for it then, and there will be even less so if they do it again. The consequences of those mistakes grow with each one. It will not be long before those consequences are irreversible, to the detriment of the entire world population.
Robert Fantina is author of 'Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776--2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/fantina09132008.html
The Return of the Misery Index
The Return of the Misery Index
By FLOYD NORRIS
It has been almost three decades since the term "misery
index" gained political currency, as President Jimmy Carter
confronted the twin problems of rising inflation and
unemployment.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/business/economy/13charts.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
By FLOYD NORRIS
It has been almost three decades since the term "misery
index" gained political currency, as President Jimmy Carter
confronted the twin problems of rising inflation and
unemployment.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/business/economy/13charts.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
Series: The world reordered- We friends of liberal international order face a new global disorder
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/11/1
guardian.co.uk
The Guardian,
September 11 2008
Timothy Garton Ash
Series: The world reordered
We friends of liberal international order face a new global disorder
On the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, China, Russia and climate change all vie with al-Qaida for our attention
The seven years since 9/11 reveal an old truth: problems are usually not solved, they are just overtaken by other problems. Those of 8/8, for instance. On August 8 2008, two mighty nations announced their return to history. Russia, invading Georgia, did it with tanks. China, launching the Beijing Olympics, did it with acrobats. The message was the same: world, we're back.
Don't get me wrong. A grave threat from jihadist terrorists, potentially armed with atomic, biological or chemical weapons, hangs over us still. They have a faith-based ideology with proven appeal to a minority of disaffected Muslims, especially those living in the west, and the means to wreak cut-price mayhem are alarmingly easy to find. Even as you read this, another hard-to-detect groupuscule, working in a back room close to you, may have taken the occasion of the 9/11 anniversary to try again. They won't always be foiled. Protecting us from another 9/11, while not destroying our freedom in order to save it, remains a major challenge to political leadership in every free country.
What has proved false is the neoconservative claim that this single threat defines the whole pattern of world politics in our time; that, as Norman Podhoretz puts it, the struggle against Islamofascism is world war four. Returning to the United States after a year's absence, I'm struck by how relatively little even the American right is talking about the "war on terror".
Beyond terrorism, two giant changes define our world. Both can, to a large extent, be traced back to the worldwide spread of marketised economic development (or globalisation). The first is the "rise of the rest", made manifest on 8/8. Non-western powers challenge the economic dominance of the west. They are beating the west at the game it invented, and quietly changing the rules along the way. Analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that by 2040, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico will have a larger combined economic output than today's G7. The date matters less than the trend. Even today, the shifts in economic power are translating into political and military power faster than many anticipated.
At the same time, worldwide economic development on the basis of the free movement of goods, capital, services and, to a lesser extent, people, is exacerbating transnational problems. CO2 emissions that accelerate climate change, mass migration, the risk of pandemics: all these cry out for international, cooperative responses. The need for liberal international order has never been greater. Yet, by contrast with the 1990s, when president George HW Bush hoped to replace the cold war with a "new world order", the prospects of achieving it no longer look so good. Power is diffused to too many competing states, many of them illiberal, as well as elusive networks like al-Qaida.
So we of the FLIO (friends of liberal international order) must now confront the prospect of a new world disorder. Or rather old-new, for disorder rather than order is the more natural condition of international society. International order, which may also be called peace, is a fragile achievement. It hardly needs repeating that in its response to the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has, over these seven lean years, contributed to the erosion, rather than the building, of international order. The Russian invasion of Georgia was, among other things, payback for the US invasion of Iraq.
While order is threatened, liberty is no longer on the forward march. The French refer to their 30 years of economic growth after the second world war as the trente glorieuses. Future historians may regard the three decades from Portugal's revolution of the carnations in 1974 to Ukraine's Orange revolution in 2004 as trente glorieuses for the spread of liberty, in Europe but also in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.
Russia and China are not just great powers challenging the west. They also represent alternative versions of authoritarian capitalism, or capitalist authoritarianism. Here's the biggest potential ideological competitor to liberal democratic capitalism since the end of communism. Radical Islamism may appeal to millions of Muslims, but it cannot reach beyond the umma of the faithful except by conversion. More important, it cannot plausibly claim to be associated with economic, technological and cultural modernity.
By contrast, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, like the skyscrapers of Shanghai, show us how authoritarian capitalism already stakes that claim. In the Bird's Nest stadium, the latest audiovisual hi-tech was placed at the service of a hyper-disciplined collectivist fantasy, made possible by financial resources no democracy would have dared devote to such a purpose. Zhang Yimou, the artistic director of the games ceremonies, said only North Korea could have matched such feats of mass synchronisation.
For close to 500 years, modernity has come from the west. The historian Theodore von Laue called this The World Revolution of Westernisation. In 20th-century Europe, liberal democracy faced two powerful versions of modernity that were western but illiberal: fascism and communism. Part of these systems' appeal was precisely that they were modern. ("I have seen the future and it works," said one enthusiast, returning from Moscow.) Liberal democracy finally saw them both off, though not without a world war, a cold war, and a lot of help from the US.
In China, we glimpse the prospect of a modernity which is both non-western and illiberal. But is authoritarian capitalism a stable, durable model? That, it seems to me, is among the greatest questions of our time, which is still a post-9/11 time, but also a post-8/8 time, and, ecologically, a five-minutes-to-midnight time.
As we of the FLIO think about how to respond to this multiple-front challenge, I have more sympathy than many Europeans do for the notion, canvassed by American policy intellectuals supporting both John McCain and Barack Obama, of a "concert of democracies". We should look first to those countries who share our values in the way they govern themselves - and there are more of them now, after these trente glorieuses for liberty. But only with several vital caveats.
First, we should not kid ourselves that we can have only liberal democracies as partners. Our values may pull us that way, but our interests will necessarily push us to relationships and even partnerships with currently illiberal states as well. So any institutionalised League of Democracies, arrayed against an Association of Autocrats (Robert Kagan's vivid term), is a seriously bad idea - even assuming you could agree who merits inclusion in the league. Bipolar disorder would be no improvement on multipolar.
It's also not the smartest idea to identify this vision of a concert of democracies too emphatically with the west, as in the former French prime minister Edouard Balladur's proposal for what he calls a Western Union. Historically, both modernity and liberalism have come from the west. But the future of freedom now depends on the possibility of new versions of modernity evolving - whether in India, China or the Muslim world, which are distinctly non-western yet also recognisably liberal, in the core sense of cherishing individual freedom. I wouldn't bet on this outcome, but working towards it is the best long-term chance we have. Pessimism of the intellect must be matched by optimism of the will.
Timothygartonash.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
guardian.co.uk
The Guardian,
September 11 2008
Timothy Garton Ash
Series: The world reordered
We friends of liberal international order face a new global disorder
On the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, China, Russia and climate change all vie with al-Qaida for our attention
The seven years since 9/11 reveal an old truth: problems are usually not solved, they are just overtaken by other problems. Those of 8/8, for instance. On August 8 2008, two mighty nations announced their return to history. Russia, invading Georgia, did it with tanks. China, launching the Beijing Olympics, did it with acrobats. The message was the same: world, we're back.
Don't get me wrong. A grave threat from jihadist terrorists, potentially armed with atomic, biological or chemical weapons, hangs over us still. They have a faith-based ideology with proven appeal to a minority of disaffected Muslims, especially those living in the west, and the means to wreak cut-price mayhem are alarmingly easy to find. Even as you read this, another hard-to-detect groupuscule, working in a back room close to you, may have taken the occasion of the 9/11 anniversary to try again. They won't always be foiled. Protecting us from another 9/11, while not destroying our freedom in order to save it, remains a major challenge to political leadership in every free country.
What has proved false is the neoconservative claim that this single threat defines the whole pattern of world politics in our time; that, as Norman Podhoretz puts it, the struggle against Islamofascism is world war four. Returning to the United States after a year's absence, I'm struck by how relatively little even the American right is talking about the "war on terror".
Beyond terrorism, two giant changes define our world. Both can, to a large extent, be traced back to the worldwide spread of marketised economic development (or globalisation). The first is the "rise of the rest", made manifest on 8/8. Non-western powers challenge the economic dominance of the west. They are beating the west at the game it invented, and quietly changing the rules along the way. Analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that by 2040, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico will have a larger combined economic output than today's G7. The date matters less than the trend. Even today, the shifts in economic power are translating into political and military power faster than many anticipated.
At the same time, worldwide economic development on the basis of the free movement of goods, capital, services and, to a lesser extent, people, is exacerbating transnational problems. CO2 emissions that accelerate climate change, mass migration, the risk of pandemics: all these cry out for international, cooperative responses. The need for liberal international order has never been greater. Yet, by contrast with the 1990s, when president George HW Bush hoped to replace the cold war with a "new world order", the prospects of achieving it no longer look so good. Power is diffused to too many competing states, many of them illiberal, as well as elusive networks like al-Qaida.
So we of the FLIO (friends of liberal international order) must now confront the prospect of a new world disorder. Or rather old-new, for disorder rather than order is the more natural condition of international society. International order, which may also be called peace, is a fragile achievement. It hardly needs repeating that in its response to the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has, over these seven lean years, contributed to the erosion, rather than the building, of international order. The Russian invasion of Georgia was, among other things, payback for the US invasion of Iraq.
While order is threatened, liberty is no longer on the forward march. The French refer to their 30 years of economic growth after the second world war as the trente glorieuses. Future historians may regard the three decades from Portugal's revolution of the carnations in 1974 to Ukraine's Orange revolution in 2004 as trente glorieuses for the spread of liberty, in Europe but also in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.
Russia and China are not just great powers challenging the west. They also represent alternative versions of authoritarian capitalism, or capitalist authoritarianism. Here's the biggest potential ideological competitor to liberal democratic capitalism since the end of communism. Radical Islamism may appeal to millions of Muslims, but it cannot reach beyond the umma of the faithful except by conversion. More important, it cannot plausibly claim to be associated with economic, technological and cultural modernity.
By contrast, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, like the skyscrapers of Shanghai, show us how authoritarian capitalism already stakes that claim. In the Bird's Nest stadium, the latest audiovisual hi-tech was placed at the service of a hyper-disciplined collectivist fantasy, made possible by financial resources no democracy would have dared devote to such a purpose. Zhang Yimou, the artistic director of the games ceremonies, said only North Korea could have matched such feats of mass synchronisation.
For close to 500 years, modernity has come from the west. The historian Theodore von Laue called this The World Revolution of Westernisation. In 20th-century Europe, liberal democracy faced two powerful versions of modernity that were western but illiberal: fascism and communism. Part of these systems' appeal was precisely that they were modern. ("I have seen the future and it works," said one enthusiast, returning from Moscow.) Liberal democracy finally saw them both off, though not without a world war, a cold war, and a lot of help from the US.
In China, we glimpse the prospect of a modernity which is both non-western and illiberal. But is authoritarian capitalism a stable, durable model? That, it seems to me, is among the greatest questions of our time, which is still a post-9/11 time, but also a post-8/8 time, and, ecologically, a five-minutes-to-midnight time.
As we of the FLIO think about how to respond to this multiple-front challenge, I have more sympathy than many Europeans do for the notion, canvassed by American policy intellectuals supporting both John McCain and Barack Obama, of a "concert of democracies". We should look first to those countries who share our values in the way they govern themselves - and there are more of them now, after these trente glorieuses for liberty. But only with several vital caveats.
First, we should not kid ourselves that we can have only liberal democracies as partners. Our values may pull us that way, but our interests will necessarily push us to relationships and even partnerships with currently illiberal states as well. So any institutionalised League of Democracies, arrayed against an Association of Autocrats (Robert Kagan's vivid term), is a seriously bad idea - even assuming you could agree who merits inclusion in the league. Bipolar disorder would be no improvement on multipolar.
It's also not the smartest idea to identify this vision of a concert of democracies too emphatically with the west, as in the former French prime minister Edouard Balladur's proposal for what he calls a Western Union. Historically, both modernity and liberalism have come from the west. But the future of freedom now depends on the possibility of new versions of modernity evolving - whether in India, China or the Muslim world, which are distinctly non-western yet also recognisably liberal, in the core sense of cherishing individual freedom. I wouldn't bet on this outcome, but working towards it is the best long-term chance we have. Pessimism of the intellect must be matched by optimism of the will.
Timothygartonash.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The Iron Wall That Was
Washington, DC, September 12, 2008 | Issue # 382
The Iron Wall That Was
Thirty-eight percent of Israelis support the Arab League Initiative (formerly, the Saudi peace plan) while 69 percent of Palestinians do.
That is the finding of a September poll conducted jointly by the Harry Truman Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.
The Saudi plan was first issued in 2002 and re-issued in 2007. It calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories in exchange for full peace, recognition, and normalization with the Arab world. Every Arab state has signed on to the plan committing themselves to peace with Israel in exchange for territories which have, over the past 41 years, been transformed from an Israeli asset to an Israeli nightmare.
The Saudi plan is not perfect. But it is not a peace treaty and does not claim to be the last word on anything. It envisions negotiations between Israelis and Arabs to work out the modalities of peace agreements, as called for in United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, which the plan specifically endorses. Under its terms, all final status issues would have to be worked out to the satisfaction of both Israelis and Arabs. The framers of the plan (most notably, Saudi King Abdullah) put it forth with the hope that Israel would accept the offer in principle so that negotiations on the particulars could commence.
So what was Israel's response?
Fifty-five years after the Arab world rejected Israeli statehood, it reconsidered and offered peace and recognition, and the Israelis yawned.
Professor Ian Lustick, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the fall issue of Middle East Policy that this Israeli attitude is something new. Traditionally, it was the Arabs who were the rejectionists while the Israelis said that they would go anywhere, at any time, to negotiate peace with the Arabs.
Most famously after the Six Day War, the Arab Summit in Khartoum issued the famous "three no's" which governed pan-Arab policy for thirty years: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel. This rejection occurred at a time when the Israelis might have been ready to withdraw from the territories (when there were as yet no settlers).
That is when everyone started saying that the Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
That shoe is on the other foot now.
So what changed?
According to Lustick, Israel abandoned the "Iron Wall" concept which governed its policies through its first five decades.
The "Iron Wall" was the creation of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism and spiritual leader of today's Likud Party.
Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, believed that the Jewish state would not be able to achieve acceptance by the Palestinians because the two nationalisms were in fundamental and irreconcilable conflict over the same territory.
He wrote this about the Palestinians in 1923: "There has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. . . . Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement."
Accordingly the Jews should not even seek Palestinian consent to Jewish settlement. They should, instead, build a Jewish state behind a metaphorical "iron wall." They should build a state so strong that the Arabs would have no choice but to accept its permanence. Peace would be achieved not by any Arab recognition of Jewish rights, but rather by recognition of the Israeli reality.
Jabotinsky wrote: "As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation. . . . Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace."
In other words, the Israelis should simply build their state and wait the Arabs out. Once they understood that Israel wasn't going anywhere, the Arabs would agree to peace.
The "Iron Wall" concept was first vindicated in 1977 when, after failing to defeat Israel in four wars, the Egyptians essentially threw in the towel. President Anwar Sadat announced that he would go to Israel and sign a peace agreement. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's political heir, welcomed Sadat and returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egyptian recognition. Begin had no illusion that the Egyptians had come around to accepting Israel, just that they accepted reality. That was good enough.
The Israeli-Egyptian peace has held for almost 30 years, 30 years without a single dead Israeli or Egyptian soldier.
"The Iron Wall" concept was also vindicated when Jordan agreed to sign a peace agreement with Israel in 1994. The Jordanians did not suddenly accept the premise of Zionism; they accepted reality. Most significantly, the Palestinians did the same when the PLO accepted the two-state solution in 1988 and signed the Oslo Agreement recognizing Israel in 1993.
So Jabotinsky's terms have been met. The Arabs (not the extremist minority but the mainstream) are finally reconciled to Israel's permanence. They are, essentially, suing for peace.
But now the Israeli government says that is not good enough. Now there's a new demand.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that the Arabs must "recognize the State of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state." Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has also said that they "must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but to exist as a Jewish state."
Suddenly, Israel needs not just security, but an endorsement by Arabs of its special character. But states don't recognize each other as anything in particular. The United States recognizes Canada without regard to the special character of Quebec. Germany recognizes Belgium without regard for whether the Flemish or the Walloons are dominant.
Why would Israel need Arabs to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state? That is nobody's business but Israel's. As the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once put it, "Our right to exist is independent of any recognition of it." That is even truer about Israel's right to exist "as a Jewish state."
Those who seek that kind of acceptance from the Arabs are barking up the wrong tree. Listen to Jabotinsky: it's not going to happen. The Israelis can argue among themselves about the nature of their state. The Arab world, and especially the Palestinians, can only offer security and peace. That used to be enough. It should be now.
MJ Rosenberg is the Director of Israel Policy Forum's Washington Policy Center.
Copyright 2008 Israel Policy Forum. All Rights Reserved.
The Iron Wall That Was
Thirty-eight percent of Israelis support the Arab League Initiative (formerly, the Saudi peace plan) while 69 percent of Palestinians do.
That is the finding of a September poll conducted jointly by the Harry Truman Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah.
The Saudi plan was first issued in 2002 and re-issued in 2007. It calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories in exchange for full peace, recognition, and normalization with the Arab world. Every Arab state has signed on to the plan committing themselves to peace with Israel in exchange for territories which have, over the past 41 years, been transformed from an Israeli asset to an Israeli nightmare.
The Saudi plan is not perfect. But it is not a peace treaty and does not claim to be the last word on anything. It envisions negotiations between Israelis and Arabs to work out the modalities of peace agreements, as called for in United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, which the plan specifically endorses. Under its terms, all final status issues would have to be worked out to the satisfaction of both Israelis and Arabs. The framers of the plan (most notably, Saudi King Abdullah) put it forth with the hope that Israel would accept the offer in principle so that negotiations on the particulars could commence.
So what was Israel's response?
Fifty-five years after the Arab world rejected Israeli statehood, it reconsidered and offered peace and recognition, and the Israelis yawned.
Professor Ian Lustick, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the fall issue of Middle East Policy that this Israeli attitude is something new. Traditionally, it was the Arabs who were the rejectionists while the Israelis said that they would go anywhere, at any time, to negotiate peace with the Arabs.
Most famously after the Six Day War, the Arab Summit in Khartoum issued the famous "three no's" which governed pan-Arab policy for thirty years: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel. This rejection occurred at a time when the Israelis might have been ready to withdraw from the territories (when there were as yet no settlers).
That is when everyone started saying that the Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
That shoe is on the other foot now.
So what changed?
According to Lustick, Israel abandoned the "Iron Wall" concept which governed its policies through its first five decades.
The "Iron Wall" was the creation of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism and spiritual leader of today's Likud Party.
Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, believed that the Jewish state would not be able to achieve acceptance by the Palestinians because the two nationalisms were in fundamental and irreconcilable conflict over the same territory.
He wrote this about the Palestinians in 1923: "There has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. . . . Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement."
Accordingly the Jews should not even seek Palestinian consent to Jewish settlement. They should, instead, build a Jewish state behind a metaphorical "iron wall." They should build a state so strong that the Arabs would have no choice but to accept its permanence. Peace would be achieved not by any Arab recognition of Jewish rights, but rather by recognition of the Israeli reality.
Jabotinsky wrote: "As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation. . . . Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace."
In other words, the Israelis should simply build their state and wait the Arabs out. Once they understood that Israel wasn't going anywhere, the Arabs would agree to peace.
The "Iron Wall" concept was first vindicated in 1977 when, after failing to defeat Israel in four wars, the Egyptians essentially threw in the towel. President Anwar Sadat announced that he would go to Israel and sign a peace agreement. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's political heir, welcomed Sadat and returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egyptian recognition. Begin had no illusion that the Egyptians had come around to accepting Israel, just that they accepted reality. That was good enough.
The Israeli-Egyptian peace has held for almost 30 years, 30 years without a single dead Israeli or Egyptian soldier.
"The Iron Wall" concept was also vindicated when Jordan agreed to sign a peace agreement with Israel in 1994. The Jordanians did not suddenly accept the premise of Zionism; they accepted reality. Most significantly, the Palestinians did the same when the PLO accepted the two-state solution in 1988 and signed the Oslo Agreement recognizing Israel in 1993.
So Jabotinsky's terms have been met. The Arabs (not the extremist minority but the mainstream) are finally reconciled to Israel's permanence. They are, essentially, suing for peace.
But now the Israeli government says that is not good enough. Now there's a new demand.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that the Arabs must "recognize the State of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state." Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has also said that they "must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but to exist as a Jewish state."
Suddenly, Israel needs not just security, but an endorsement by Arabs of its special character. But states don't recognize each other as anything in particular. The United States recognizes Canada without regard to the special character of Quebec. Germany recognizes Belgium without regard for whether the Flemish or the Walloons are dominant.
Why would Israel need Arabs to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state? That is nobody's business but Israel's. As the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once put it, "Our right to exist is independent of any recognition of it." That is even truer about Israel's right to exist "as a Jewish state."
Those who seek that kind of acceptance from the Arabs are barking up the wrong tree. Listen to Jabotinsky: it's not going to happen. The Israelis can argue among themselves about the nature of their state. The Arab world, and especially the Palestinians, can only offer security and peace. That used to be enough. It should be now.
MJ Rosenberg is the Director of Israel Policy Forum's Washington Policy Center.
Copyright 2008 Israel Policy Forum. All Rights Reserved.
Friday, September 12, 2008
The New 'Invasion of Cambodia'
The New 'Invasion of Cambodia'
William Pfaff
Paris, September 11, 2008 – The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it's the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970 the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al Qaeda bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial "collatoral damages."
George W. Bush has now authorized independent ground assaults on Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's Tribal Territories, without consultation with Pakistan authorities. These already have begun.
This follows a period of tension, with some armed clashes, between American and Pakistani military units, the latter defending "Pakistan's national sovereignty." Pakistan public opinion seems largely against "America's war" being fought inside Pakistan.
Washington's decision was made known just in time for the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that opened the first phase of the "war on terror," after which "nothing could ever be the same." We no doubt have now begun phase two.
The eventual outcome of the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970 was Communist overthrow of the American-sponsored military government in that country, followed by genocide. The future consequences in (nuclear-armed) Pakistan await.
There is every reason to think they may include civil protest and disorder in the country, political crisis, a major rise in the strength of Pakistan's own Islamic fundamentalist movement, and conceivably, a small war between the United States and the Pakistan Army, which is the central institution in the country, has a mind of its own, and is not a negligible military force.
In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have been complaining for many months that victory over the Taliban was impossible so long as there were secure Taliban bases in Pakistan's largely unaccessible Tribal Territories.
Pakistan's former President Pervez Musharraf was told by his American allies to clean the Taliban out of the Territories or the U.S. Army and NATO would do it for him. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made the same threat. John McCain concurred. Musharraf had been looking for a negotiated arrangement with the tribesmen.
Pakistan's military intelligence services created the Taliban while they were collaborating with the CIA to form the moudjahidine that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Many in the service still support the Taliban as a useful instrument against India, and to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of more dangerous enemies.
Musharraf was forced out of office. The U.S. brought in exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, expected to be cooperative. She was assassinated, presumably by Islamic extremists. Her widower has been elected to take her place, and declares himself an enemy of terrorism. However the United States has already taken the matter into its own hands.
In the Vietnamese case, the American military command held that it could win the war by invading Cambodia to destroy the Communist headquarters, the COSVN, imagined by the Americans to be an underground Pentagon, and to cut the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, along which supplies and arms for the Viet Cong Communist insurrection were being transported. The argument made was that finding the headquarters and cutting the route would destroy the insurrection.
Initially, the unhappy Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, desperately trying to keep his country out of the Vietnam war, was persuaded to turn a blind eye to U.S. bombing of Cambodia. A military coup followed in 1970, installing an American puppet general. B-52 saturation bombing ensued, without the desired military effect, but killing many Cambodians.
The joint U.S. and South Vietnamese "incursion" came in April 1970; it simply pushed the supply operations deeper into Cambodia, and COSVN proved to be a group of huts, long abandoned. Richard Nixon said he acted to prove that the United States was not "a second-rate power." "If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."
The native Cambodian Khmer Rouge subsequently defeated the American-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Genocide followed, the "killing fields," on which the United States turned its back, condemning the triumphant Vietnamese Communist government when it later invaded Cambodia to stop the killing.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com
The URL for this article is:
http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=341
William Pfaff
Paris, September 11, 2008 – The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it's the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970 the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al Qaeda bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial "collatoral damages."
George W. Bush has now authorized independent ground assaults on Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's Tribal Territories, without consultation with Pakistan authorities. These already have begun.
This follows a period of tension, with some armed clashes, between American and Pakistani military units, the latter defending "Pakistan's national sovereignty." Pakistan public opinion seems largely against "America's war" being fought inside Pakistan.
Washington's decision was made known just in time for the 7th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that opened the first phase of the "war on terror," after which "nothing could ever be the same." We no doubt have now begun phase two.
The eventual outcome of the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970 was Communist overthrow of the American-sponsored military government in that country, followed by genocide. The future consequences in (nuclear-armed) Pakistan await.
There is every reason to think they may include civil protest and disorder in the country, political crisis, a major rise in the strength of Pakistan's own Islamic fundamentalist movement, and conceivably, a small war between the United States and the Pakistan Army, which is the central institution in the country, has a mind of its own, and is not a negligible military force.
In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have been complaining for many months that victory over the Taliban was impossible so long as there were secure Taliban bases in Pakistan's largely unaccessible Tribal Territories.
Pakistan's former President Pervez Musharraf was told by his American allies to clean the Taliban out of the Territories or the U.S. Army and NATO would do it for him. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama made the same threat. John McCain concurred. Musharraf had been looking for a negotiated arrangement with the tribesmen.
Pakistan's military intelligence services created the Taliban while they were collaborating with the CIA to form the moudjahidine that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Many in the service still support the Taliban as a useful instrument against India, and to keep Afghanistan out of the hands of more dangerous enemies.
Musharraf was forced out of office. The U.S. brought in exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, expected to be cooperative. She was assassinated, presumably by Islamic extremists. Her widower has been elected to take her place, and declares himself an enemy of terrorism. However the United States has already taken the matter into its own hands.
In the Vietnamese case, the American military command held that it could win the war by invading Cambodia to destroy the Communist headquarters, the COSVN, imagined by the Americans to be an underground Pentagon, and to cut the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, along which supplies and arms for the Viet Cong Communist insurrection were being transported. The argument made was that finding the headquarters and cutting the route would destroy the insurrection.
Initially, the unhappy Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, desperately trying to keep his country out of the Vietnam war, was persuaded to turn a blind eye to U.S. bombing of Cambodia. A military coup followed in 1970, installing an American puppet general. B-52 saturation bombing ensued, without the desired military effect, but killing many Cambodians.
The joint U.S. and South Vietnamese "incursion" came in April 1970; it simply pushed the supply operations deeper into Cambodia, and COSVN proved to be a group of huts, long abandoned. Richard Nixon said he acted to prove that the United States was not "a second-rate power." "If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."
The native Cambodian Khmer Rouge subsequently defeated the American-backed military regime in Phnom Penh. Genocide followed, the "killing fields," on which the United States turned its back, condemning the triumphant Vietnamese Communist government when it later invaded Cambodia to stop the killing.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com
The URL for this article is:
http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=341
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated Juan Cole
INFORMED COMMENT
9/11/08
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated
Juan Cole
It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.
So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.
I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.
That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.
In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.
Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.
But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much ssnse to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.
That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.
Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.
So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:
1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.
2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.
3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups. They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.
One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.
4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.
While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.
Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).
While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.
Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.
It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.
As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.
Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?
Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur the rmore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'
No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!
The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.
"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.
My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.
For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.
9/11/08
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated
Juan Cole
It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.
So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.
I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.
That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.
In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.
Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.
But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much ssnse to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.
That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.
Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.
So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:
1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.
2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.
3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups. They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.
One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.
4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.
While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.
Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).
While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.
Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.
It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.
As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.
Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?
Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur the rmore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'
No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!
The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.
"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.
My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.
For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated Juan Cole
INFORMED COMMENT
9/11/08
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated
Juan Cole
It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.
So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.
I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.
That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.
In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.
Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.
But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much ssnse to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.
That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.
Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.
So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:
1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.
2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.
3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups. They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.
One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.
4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.
While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.
Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).
While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.
Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.
It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.
As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.
Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?
Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur the rmore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'
No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!
The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.
"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.
My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.
For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.
9/11/08
On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated
Juan Cole
It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.
So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.
I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.
That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.
In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.
Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.
But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much ssnse to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.
Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.
That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.
Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.
So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:
1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.
2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.
3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups. They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.
One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.
4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.
While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.
Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).
While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.
Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.
It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.
As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.
Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?
Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur the rmore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'
No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!
The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.
"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.
My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.
For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.
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