Tag: United States
Peace picks July 7-11
- Transitional Justice in Colombia: What Lessons Can Be Learned from Other Countries? Monday, July 7 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Washington Office on Latin America; 1666 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 400, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Since peace talks commenced in October 2012, the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have reached agreements on three key points—land, political participation, and drug policy—further than any prior peace process. Yet while hope for an agreement is growing, significant obstacles remain. Professor Jo-Marie Burt, Senior Fellow at WOLA, has closely followed transitional processes throughout Latin America, including most recently in Guatemala and Peru. In conversation with Senior Associate Gimena Sanchez, she will provide lessons learned from those experiences that could help shape the debate in Colombia.
- Whither the Palestinians Monday, July 7 | 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm Woodrow Wilson Center, Sixth Floor; 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Iraq and Syria may be dominating the headlines, but the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains a volatile and unpredictable piece of the Middle Eastern puzzle. Hussein Ibish, Senior Fellow at American Task Force on Palestine, Shibley Telhami, Peace and Development Professor at the University of Maryland, and Aaron David Miller, Vice President for New Initiatives, will discuss the Palestinians and their politics, including the recent unity agreement, the impasse in the peace process, and the prospects for elections in the West Bank and Gaza.
- Facing a Revisionist Russia: Discussion from Carl Bildt Tuesday, July 8 | 9:00 am – 10:30 am Atlantic Council of the United States; 1030 15th Street, NW, Twelfth Floor, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Europe must find a way of dealing with the new, revisionist Russia, even as it faces the growth of political forces with ties to Moscow and seeks to lessen its own energy dependence. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has long been at the center of European efforts to develop a coherent EU foreign policy, including towards Russia. One of the initiators of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, he has been keenly involved in EU relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. He will discuss his views on European Union and transatlantic relations with Russia, as well as recent developments within the EU and the impact on EU foreign policy.
- Countering Violent Extremism: A Peacebuilding Lens Tuesday, July 8 | 9:30 am – 11:00 am Johns Hopkins University- SAIS; 1740 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Georgia Holmer, senior program officer in the Center for Gender and Peacebuilding at the U.S. Institute of Peace; Mike Jobbins, senior program manager for Africa at Search for Common Ground; Irfan Saeed, senior policy advisor in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and Haroon Ullah, member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, will discuss violent extremism in the twenty-first century that threatens world stability.
- Iran Sanctions: What the U.S. Cedes in a Nuclear Deal Tuesday, July 8 | 9:30 am – 11:00 am US Institute of Peace; 2301 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND The panelists will address the complex questions and challenges of sanctions in the Iran nuclear talks. It’s the last of three discussions hosted by an unprecedented coalition of eight Washington think tanks and organizations to coincide with the last three rounds of negotiations. SPEAKERS Suzanne Maloney, Brookings Institution, Kenneth Katzman, Congressional Research Service and former CIA analyst, Elizabeth Rosenberg, Center for New American Security, and Robin Wright, USIP and Woodrow Wilson Center.
- Modern Day Slavery: What the U.S. Government and the International Community Can do to Combat Migrant Labor Abuses and End Human Trafficking in the Gulf Tuesday, July 8 | 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm United States Capitol Visitor Center, Room 268, Washington, D.C. Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch, James Lynch, Amnesty International, James Suzano, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, as well as Shawna Bader-Blau, Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, examine the legal and customary systems in the Gulf that govern migrant labor, as well as the status of migrant and trafficked workers in GCC countries, and what Congress can do to combat migrant labor abuses and end the suffering of victims of human trafficking.
- Afghanistan’s Future: Politics, Prosperity, and Security Under New Leadership Wednesday, July 9 | 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Asia Society; 1526 New Hampshire Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Across the country, millions of Afghans have cast their ballots to select the next president. The second round of elections was held on June 14, 2014, with two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani. While Afghans await the results of the election, Ambassador Omar Samad, Senior Central Asia Fellow at New American Foundation, Clare Lockhart, Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness, and Hassan Abbas, Senior Advisor at Asia Society, will explore from different perspectives what Afghans and Americans can expect in each of these areas in the new Afghan administration and with the U.S. military drawdown.
- Voices from the Middle East: The Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of New Story Leadership Thursday, July 10 | 9:00 am – 12:00 pm Johns Hopkins SAIS, Nitze Building; 1740 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Ten students from Israel and Palestine will share their stories and projects on this topic.
- Ethiopia’s Democratic Transition: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Thursday, July 10 | 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm National Endowment for Democracy; 1025 F Street, NW, Washington D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Despite the introduction of a new constitution in 1995, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has suppressed meaningful democratic change during its two decades in power. The resulting gap between popular expectations and Ethiopia’s political reality has increased frustrations among citizens, and ongoing violence, indicating the depth of unresolved tensions. Merera Gudina Jefi will evaluate the EPRDF regime’s performance by outlining the contours of the country’s political development and identifying major democratic setbacks. He will offer recommendations for domestic actors, including the Ethiopian government and opposition parties, and for the international community, including the diaspora.
- BRICS Summit 2014: Agenda and Implications Friday, July 11 | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Brookings Institution; 1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND Brazil hosts the leaders of Russia, India, China, and South Africa for the 2014 BRICS Summit on July 15-17, days after the end of the World Cup. This BRICS summit will take place against the backdrop of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the Russia-China gas deal, the election of Narendra Modi in India, the likely establishment of a BRICS Bank, and the Rousseff-Biden talks to improve U.S-Brazil relations. The panel will discuss the summit and examine its implications for U.S. foreign policy and the broader international order. Bruce Jones, senior fellow and director of the Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS), will lead the conversation, which will feature Brookings Foreign Policy scholars Fiona Hill, Kenneth Lieberthal, Harold Trinkunas, Tanvi Madan and Thomas Wright.
- The Many Faces of Tyranny: Why Democracy Isn’t Always Possible Friday, July 11 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Heritage Foundation; 214 Massachusetts Ave., NE, Washington D.C. REGISTER TO ATTEND History has not ended. Across the world today, we are witnessing both a heroic struggle for democracy and reform and the disturbing strength of tyrannical regimes and movements. Whether it be the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, the aggressiveness of Putin’s Russia or the increasing bellicosity of China, the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny are in a dead heat. Waller R. Newell, Political Science Professor at Carleton University, asks how should the West respond? How should we make the difficult choice between better and worse kinds of non-democratic authority when overthrowing today’s dictatorship may only bring about a much worse totalitarian alternative tomorrow?
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Help, or else
Things are not going well for Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, whose calls for foreign assistance have grown increasingly frantic. While Iraqi Kurds agitate for an independent state, the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) consolidates power in northern and western Iraq. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iraqi Ambassador to the United States Lukman Faily Tuesday tried to make a case for increased military assistance to Iraq. His argument came down to this: if you don’t help us, someone else will.
The Obama Administration is understandably reluctant to send weapons into what has become an increasingly sectarian conflict. However, the ambassador said that his country needs American assistance “to turn the tide against ISIS.” Until more robust US aid materializes, Iraq cannot decline offers of assistance from other countries, including Iran, Syria, and Russia. Iraq will not get involved in the Syrian conflict, but he said that Maliki “welcomes” Assad’s help. He added that Iran and Iraq have a shared history, and Iran considers many of Iraq’s Shi’a shrines as within their sphere of influence. “Their expertise is welcome.” The two will continue to cooperate as long they face a shared enemy.
He claimed that ISIS has been cleared in Tikrit, contradicting a number of media reports. The area remains heavily booby-trapped, however, and Iraq’s security forces cannot win with ground troops alone. Echoing Maliki’s earlier statements, Faily said that air supremacy is key to defeating these insurgents. A political solution must arrived in tandem with military force.
Faily, who is Kurdish, said that the Iraqi constitution was written to ensure Kurds are adequately represented, and 95% of Iraqi Kurds agreed to these provisions. While acknowledging Kurdish president Massoud Barzani’s aspirations for an independent state, he said that Kurds are still expected to play a role in shaping Iraq’s future. He left open the question of whether Kurds deserved their own independent state. Still, as long as ISIS controls the border between Iraq and the Kurdish region, it will be difficult for the two sides to cooperate against ISIS. His government welcomes Kurdish cooperation, but an independent Kurdish state is not feasible in the current political situation.
I asked the Ambassador if he would be willing to involve ex-Ba’athists, including those who have colluded with ISIS, in any future reconciliation process. He answered that no members of ISIS could be included, but that he welcomes any homegrown elements of the insurgency, as long as they have “not been involved in bloodshed.”
Time Magazine’s Michael Crowley asked the ambassador about an attack on the al Askari, or Golden Dome, mosque, one of the holiest shrines in Shi’a Islam. Al Qaeda destroyed the mosque in 2006, sparking a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. Faily admitted that the outer perimeter of the mosque had been hit, and several people were killed, but would not say if the shrine itself had been damaged. He added that ISIS had been evicted from Samarra, calling the attack a “hit and run” operation.
Faily also acknowledged that dozens of Sunni prisoners had been executed while in custody of Iraqi forces and Shi’a militias, and said the government “was looking into it.”
300,000 people were displaced when ISIS came into Mosul, and 120,000 in Tal Afar. These displaced people also threaten Iraq’s stability, and his government needs material support from the US to deal with them. Last week, he told US Secretary of State John Kerry, “We need your help now. Do not put conditions” on assistance to Iraq, because the threat is to immediate. He called this an “acid test” for the US-Iraq relationship.
Both the US and Iraq are “forever tied together because of the lives we lost and the treasure we spent in the past decade in the fight against terrorism.” ISIS is not only a threat to all Iraqis, but regionally and indeed internationally. If they are allowed to consolidate the gains they have made, ISIS will have a safe haven from which to launch attacks on American interests. And if America does not help, Russia, Syria, and Iran are more than happy to step in.
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Merging battlefields
The past several weeks have revolved around the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) insurgency in Iraq and the likelihood of a future divided state. With these recent advances, many have overlooked what this ultimately will mean for President Assad and the ongoing civil war in Syria. On Tuesday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS-US) hosted “Syria After Geneva, the Elections, and ISIS: Partition, Fragmentation, and Escalation.” Author and IISS-US Senior Fellow for Middle East Security, Emile Hokayem, led the discussion and examined Assad’s presidency and the effective merger of the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.
President Assad’s regime is in a better situation right now than it has been at any point since 2012. The pressure on Damascus is at its lowest in years, which has given Assad the opportunity to rebuild the pretense that Syria will again be a functioning state. The presidential election in June has provided the president with the chance to put pressure on urbanites and “fence-sitters” in order to support the pretense of “rebuilding Syria.”
Hokayem highlighted that Assad’s main strategy in reconstruction lies in the conquest of land rather than of people. It has become futile for him to spend precious time and resources in an attempt to win back the loyalty of people he has left to suffer for the past several years. His priority is to push recalcitrant citizens out of important territory instead of attempting to gain control over them. This approach shifts the burden onto the international community and human rights organizations to address a massive displacement crisis.
“This humanitarian problem is not an unfortunate outcome of the ongoing civil war,” Hokayem said. It is a deliberate strategy to debilitate the people and continue the conquest of land. This is a strategy, not an accident, and need to be addressed as such.
Meanwhile, ISIS has made momentous gains in neighboring Iraq. It has now gained control of nearly half of Iraq and has declared a state. ISIS has been successful at mobilizing local resources and support in an area that transcends national borders. We are now seeing the effective merger of western Iraq and eastern Syria .
It is not clear what effect the ISIS offensive will have on President Assad. Some argue that President Assad will benefit. The ISIS success validates the narrative that Assad has attempted to craft since 2011. Assad will be satisfied with the heated debate in the West as to how to address the recent ISIS gains.
Others believe that the ISIS offensive doesn’t help Assad at all. He has failed to get Westerners to share his narrative. Secretary of State Kerry has remarked that Assad cannot be the answer to fighting ISIS because he is a magnet for terrorism.
All eyes are currently on Iraq and whether or not the country will emerge from the ISIS insurgency in one piece. The Iraqi conflict cannot be viewed as an independent issue and must be observed alongside Syria’s instability and humanitarian crisis.
The Syrian conflict can no longer be contained. The Iraqi battlefield has now merged with the Syrian battlefield and ISIS must now be addressed in this context.
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Ba’athists are running the ISIS show
For two weeks, stories of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) spectacular takeover of large swaths of territory in Iraq have captivated the world. In a matter of days, we are told, a few hundred members of an irregular militia managed to subdue an entire army and millions of Iraqi civilians. At a Freedom House discussion on Thursday, however, Iraqi pollster Munqith al Dagher offered an alternative narrative. The uprising, he suggested, is led by former Ba’athists, while ISIS fighters only play a supporting role.
Al Dagher, who is of mixed Sunni-Shia heritage, has conducted hundreds of thousands of interviews in Iraq since 2003. Thursday’s discussion was based on results a survey of 200 households in Mosul, carried out between June 19 and 21. The interviews, conducted by telephone and in person, included those who had connections to ISIS fighters.
Today, ISIS is said to control almost half of Iraq, including the entire Anbar province, and territory stretching from Nineveh to Diyala. Nonetheless, Al Dagher said, the evidence suggests that ISIS controls at most 20% of the allegedly captured territory. Their strength has been vastly exaggerated by a central government that wants to characterize its opponents as terrorists and rally international help. Bashar al Assad used the same strategy at the outset of Syria’s civil war, painting every rebel group with the same “terrorist” brush. Like Assad, Nouri al Maliki wants to portray his regime as a bulwark against religious extremism.
In fact, ex-Ba’athists are running the show. These men smoke, and some of them drink. They sit in cafes until late at night, allowing women to amble about unaccompanied. While parts of Mosul are under the sway of other factions (including Islamist groups like Ansar al Sunna, tribal rebels, and ISIS), the city is primarily under Ba’athist control. ISIS benefits from the perception that they singlehandedly defeated the entire Iraqi army. Disaffected Sunnis are joining in droves because ISIS has been cast as the victor. People like to play for the winning team.
According to the survey, 81% of the Sunnis polled support separating religion from the state, up from 60% in 2004. Sunnis were also the most likely to identify themselves as Iraqi, and not by sect. Two-thirds of all respondents cited religious extremism as a very significant problem, and both sects were equally concerned about proliferation of terrorist groups inside Iraq.
In fact, only 2% of Sunnis claimed to support ISIS, while 55% said they support the Iraqi security forces (support among Shia was at 96%). This begs the question: if a majority of Sunnis oppose terrorism and Islamic law, and almost none profess to support ISIS, then how were a handful of these fighters able to take half the country in a matter of days?
Going forward, Al Dagher said, a return to the status quo ante is untenable. The current crop of politicians, on both sides of the sectarian divide, has lost all legitimacy, and the US Administration should seek out new faces to engage with. Obama should also recognize that a failure to act at all would lead to disastrous consequences, allowing ISIS to consolidate and increase the momentum they’ve gained in the last few weeks.
While 77% of Sunnis believe Maliki should step down, he is not seen as the main driver of sectarianism in Iraq. Most believe that discrimination is embedded in the system, which was shaped by Coalition Provisional Authority’s de-Ba’athification policies in 2003. Nonetheless, most of the respondents said that only the US could play the role of “honest broker” in any future reconciliation process.
That said, US air strikes would only fuel ISIS’s propaganda machine, and boost recruitment. The only viable option, then, is to empower moderates on both sides. In 2007, General Petraeus recognized that the way to defeat al Qaeda was by cooperating with tribal leaders. The Obama administration should replicate this model, although it can only be sustained if moderate Shiites are also included.
It is difficult to know precisely what is going on in Iraq amidst the rising levels of sectarianism and enveloping chaos. Due to the survey’s relatively small size, the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, the conclusions are clear: Iraq’s Sunnis need a reason to fight ISIS, which is fighting the central government many Sunnis see their enemy. The answer is not to send Americans to fight on their behalf, but to enable the Sunnis to fight ISIS themselves. Iraqis will rise up to defeat ISIS when they believe their interests are served by ISIS’s defeat.
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Countering the extremist factory
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to gain more power and territory with each passing day, yet the Obama administration has failed so far to take significant steps to counter this impending threat. On Thursday morning, the Atlantic Council hosted “Losing Syria and Iraq to Jihadists” to discuss Atlantic Council Fellow Faysal Itani’s findings regarding US strategy to halt ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, and Barry Pavel, Vice President and Director of International Security at the Atlantic Council, joined the panel.
Itani‘s report details the successes of ISIS and the few effective responses available to the United States. Due to the current weak governmental systems in both Syria and Iraq, ISIS has risen to power and laid the groundwork to create its own state. It now has control over an area that spans the size of Jordan, and the options for the US are looking especially grim.
According to Itani, the sole logical option lies within Syria: we must fight this war against ISIS through the moderate Syrian opposition. The Administration should develop a strategy to strengthen, equip and empower moderate Syrian opposition groups with resources and intelligence in order to combat ISIS gains. This is the only logical way to reverse the worst possible outcome, which is currently happening before our eyes.
Ambassador Hof contended that US involvement depends entirely on the Obama Administration’s stance, which is based on the conclusion that there is little the US can do to help Syria. Hof disagreed with this perspective. He believes that the current situation in Iraq is inspiring second thoughts in the White House. On Thursday afternoon, several hours after the panel, President Obama requested $500 million from Congress to train and equip members of the Syrian opposition. If approved, this would be the first significant move not only towards addressing ISIS’s advances, but also the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Barry Pavel then highlighted the many changes underway within the international community and how we are essentially embarking on a new era of international relations. The world is experiencing a massive shift of economic and military power to Asia, as well as a wave of trends that are empowering individuals, facilitated by new technology and the growth of the middle class. The global stage is changing significantly as non-state actors continue to have a greater impact in foreign relations.
The US nonetheless continues to focus solely on stability. The Obama administration should revamp how it addresses the world to a more “people-centric” strategy. Pavel calls this a “dynamic security strategy.” We need to reconsider our frameworks and institutions that were created in a WWII mindset. Time is not on our side if we keep our current approach with Syria. We should incorporate a more activist approach, as the situation with ISIS worsens each day.
Pavel agreed with Itani’s strategy to arm the Syrian moderate opposition in order to fight ISIS. It is the path of least resistance. He stressed that we must take action on this strategy quickly because as time goes on, ISIS will increasingly acquire what it needs to be a nation-state, which ultimately will make it far more dangerous than Al-Qaeda ever was.
“Iraq is currently a factory for extremism and it is time for the administration to take measures to address it,” Pavel said.
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The verdict and the Obama administration
Secretary of State Kerry in Cairo Sunday suggested that Egypt was in a critical moment of transition. On Tuesday, an Egyptian court handed down draconian sentences for Al Jazeera journalists accused of crimes allegedly committed in the pursuit of their profession. While standards vary around the world, I think it fair to say that in no democracy on earth is spreading of false rumors, even if they help “terrorists,” punishable by seven years in prison. Most of what the journalists were accused of would not make it into a courtroom even in many autocracies.
Egypt is not of course a democratic society. But the American administration has been pretending it is on course to becoming one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Egypt is on course towards restoration of the autocracy, this time dressed in civilian garb (only recently acquired). Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have bought and paid for this counter-revolution. They want the full metal jacket, not blanks. General Sisi is giving it to them.
The problem for the Americans is that they want to continue aid to Egypt, which is not permitted by US law unless the administration can credibly claim that there is a transition to democracy in progress. The verdict gives the lie to that assertion. No doubt the Egyptian government will say it is a consequence of their independent judiciary. Both Foreign Minister Fahmy and presidential advisor Amr Moussa said as much about judicial decisions when they were in Washington a couple of months ago. But that is nonsense. The Egyptian judiciary was part and parcel of the military regime under Hosni Mubarak, and it remains the same today.
There are really only two serious options now for the US Government:
- Go to Congress and explain why at least some of the aid needs to continue, despite the law, and seek legislative relief of some sort;
- Cut off the aid, sending the Egyptians into the arms of the Saudis, Emiratis and Russians.
To me, the former course of action is more sensible than the latter. It might, for example, lead to reshaping the assistance package more in the direction of aid to the Egyptian people, as Michelle Dunne has suggested. But even that will offend the powers that be in Cairo, where there seems to be an insatiable appetite for American military hardware that gets put into storage and (thankfully) never used. One can only imagine what some of the motives behind that are.
The Administration may well prefer to try to continue to muddle through. After all, it has Iraq and Syria to worry about at the moment, never mind Ukraine. But failing to seek clarity on Egypt, with either option 1. or 2., will do nothing to improve an image of foreign policy hesitation and drift that is hurting a president once upon a time lauded as having deprived the Republicans of their traditional advantage on national security issues.
Egypt’s attempt to repress its way out of the chaotic revolution its now jailed activists launched more than three years ago is unlikely to succeed. Extremist violence is on the upswing, especially in Sinai. The Muslim Brotherhood has gone underground, where it survived and even thrived for decades in the past and will again now. The Obama Administration has said all the right things about the need for more inclusive governance. Now it is time to do something, one way or the other.
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