Tag: Libya
Obama laps to the wrong side of history
While he is wisely not spiking the football, President Obama is still taking a few victory laps. The problem is that there are other races still going on in the stadium. He is supposed to be competing in those as well: the autocrats in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria should not be left to win their competitions. How do we think they will behave if they are successful in their current efforts to repress the demonstrations?
The picture is different in each of these countries. Obama has made it clear enough that Gaddafi must leave Libya, but the NATO military effort seems to be falling short and the diplomatic maneuvering hasn’t yet produced the desired result. In Yemen, the slippery president has refused to sign an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council to step down and has returned to beating up on demonstrators. King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa in Bahrain is busy bulldozing Shia mosques, as if that will make the 70% Shia population go away. In Syria the supposed reformer Bashar al Assad has killed hundreds, rounded up thousands and subdued towns one by one using grossly excessive military force against civilians.
We are not hearing much from either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton about these developments. I would argue that the outcome of the still ongoing rebellions in the Arab world are more important to U.S. vital interests than the killing of Osama bin Laden, who wasn’t living much better in Abbottabad than he would have in Guantanamo (though he was clearly in better communication with his network). Yemen is already a weak state where terrorists hide and Syria provides support to Hizbollah and Hamas. Libya has undertaken state-sponsored terrorism in the past and may well revert in the future. Bahrain? How does the Sunni king expect his Shia majority population to react once he is finished depriving it of its political rights as well as many houses of worship?
I won’t propose a full package of solutions. What it seems to me is needed is simpler than that: a Presidential decision to make the cause of democracy in the region his own, and a tasking to the State Department to come up with the (non-military) propositions that will make it real. Failing that, Obama risks lapsing to the wrong side of history.
PS: Jackson Diehl treats the Syrian case well in this morning’s Washington Post, as does Brian Whitaker in The Guardian.
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Slippery slope, moral hazard and tall order
The big questions for me in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death are how it will affect America’s relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as the Arab Spring. I leave it to others to consider the impact on Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and the terrorist enterprise in general, but I have to assume that the already weakened enterprise will suffer some further fragmentation and demoralization, even as it tries (and occasionally succeeds) to exact revenge.
Pakistan has got some explaining to do. It seems likely someone in the Pakistani government knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a garrison town not far from Islamabad. There is no sign they tipped off the Americans, their putative allies. How come? How many other Al Qaeda principles harbored in Pakistan? And if no one in the Pakistani government knew that OBL was there, that would suggest true incompetence, no? So too would failure of the Pakistani government to intervene to block the American operation, if the Americans are telling the truth about not having informed the Pakistanis.
My best guess is that some Pakistanis (army? intelligence service?) knew where bin Laden was hiding. They likely also knew about the American operation, or at least knew something was “going down.” So they both hid him and allowed him to be captured. That sounds like the kind of duplicity we’ve witnessed for years, practiced to our detriment. Glad it was at someone else’s expense this time. The unexcited and even congratulatory reaction of official Pakistan to the news suggests this was the case.
So what do we do now? Is it business as usual with the Pakistanis? Or is it time for a shift toward a more demanding stance? Should we make military assistance conditional on greater cooperation? Surely someone in the Congress will push that idea. The problem is we would then have to be prepared carry out the threat, which would surely reduce military and intelligence cooperation further. That’s a slippery slope. Are we really reduced, as Madeleine Albright suggested on the PBS Newshour this evening, to “working with” the Pakistanis?
Maybe. With OBL out of the way, Al Qaeda is a lot less interesting to the Pakistanis, whose purposes inside Afghanistan might just as well be served by the Taliban without all the international complications OBL necessarily engendered. Besides, they’ve now got lots of homegrown jihadis to throw against India when the need arises. OBL wasn’t so good in that direction anyway.
What about Afghanistan? President Karzai, in his usual uncharitable mood, took the occasion of OBL’s death to suggest that the Americans and their allies have been wasting a lot of time and Afghan lives looking for him inside Afghanistan. Meanwhile, American senators were suggesting that OBL’s death might make it possible to draw down American troops in Afghanistan faster than currently contemplated, leaving Karzai to his fate. Of course the two ideas are compatible: Karzai would like less U.S. military effort, and so would the Americans.
This “beggar thy ally” approach on both sides does not bode well for continuing anything like the current level of effort in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are proving resilient and resurgent. I confess to temptation: maybe we should try withdrawing faster than had been anticipated, making it clear to Karzai that we are in part responding to his pressure. He pushes us out because he has been pretty sure we wouldn’t take him up on it. If he thought we might, he would be getting his act together faster.
This is what is called “moral hazard.” Leon Panetta, about to become Defense Secretary, was big on the idea of giving the Iraqis a quick time line for U.S. withdrawal when he served on the Iraq Study Group (I’m not breaking confidence–he said so publicly on many occasions). I wonder if he might adopt the same posture on Afghanistan. Of course David Petraeus, whether in his current job or his future one, is likely to be on the other side of that argument.
As for the Arab Spring, it seems to me that OBL’s death should reduce the fear some have of Al Qaeda exploitation of the demonstrations and weaken the argument that we need autocrats to repress international terrorists. Those arguments have not gained much traction with me these past few months, but I hope those who believe them will reexamine the situation and come to the obvious conclusion: the faster we can help get something like democratic regimes up and running in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria the better off we will be. I wish I could say the same about Bahrain, but it seems to have fallen hostage to the regional sectarian standoff. We’ve already got what most would consider a tall order.
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Yemen at stake
President Saleh has refused to sign the agreement to step down in 30 days in return for immunity from prosecution. This is not really a surprise. He is notoriously slippery and has wiggled out of several previous promises to give up power.
Now the question is what the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will do. Its oil-endowed members (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman) were to be the guarantors of the agreement the GCC had negotiated with Saleh and the opposition political parties. Individually and collectively they presumably have a good deal of leverage over Saleh. Will the GCC show its teeth, as it did by deploying troops in Bahrain? Or will it roll over and play dead, leaving Saleh to see if he can defeat the protests, now that he has rejected the deal with the political parties?
It is easy to imagine that Saleh is watching Bashar al Assad’s repression of protests in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi’s war against Libya’s population and wondering, “why can’t I survive if they can?” Of course the right answer to that question is that none of them should remain in power: each has delegitimized his own regime and by all rights should step aside.
But life is not often fair. I am reasonably confident that Gaddafi is finished, sooner or later, but the jury is still out on Bashar, who seems willing to imitate if not rival his father in killing and arresting Syrians. Saleh has so far been less heavy-handed in Yemen, but I wouldn’t put it past him to double down and try to intimidate the protesters. They have proven adept and savvy so far; let’s hope they can maintain their good humor, massive presence and commitment to nonviolence. They merit success.
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Not so Good Friday
I had originally said it was best in Syria, but as the news of dozens of deaths at the hands of security forces comes out that would be wrong. The demonstrations were not massive (thousands rather than hundreds of thousands) but widespread. Wissam Tarif circulated this from Zabadani, a Damascus Suburb, with demonstrators chanting “people want to topple the regime”:
President Bashar al Assad seems unlikely to fall right away, but the protests have already gone farther in Syria than many people anticipated. As I noted originally, what they lack still is mass–they are too small for safety, which of course discourages more people from joining them. The security forces have already killed a dozen or more today. PS (note added at noon): it looks like at least two dozen now. PPS (note added at 3:30 pm): it looks like more.
In Yemen, President Saleh is still playing rope-a-dope, seeming to accept proposals for transition while imposing conditions he knows the opposition won’t accept. The GCC is proving ineffective in mediating, but there is no surprise in that. But the demonstrations today are big in both Sanaa and Taiz.
Today’s big news in Libya is the American introduction of Predator drones into the fight, a unique capability some believe will make a difference by enabling more precise targeting in built-up areas. I do hope it will work, but Admiral Mullen is talking stalemate. Jeffrey White at the Washington Institute argues well that stalemate favors Gaddafi. NATO needs to end this war successfully, and soon.
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Lessons from Serbia applied in Middle East and North Africa
The press has caught on to some of the connections between Serbia’s Otpor legacy and popular rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa. Srdja Popovic is one of the links. Here is his presentation at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on April 1, 2011. A powerpoint is no substitute for Srdja, but I can’t figure out (yet) how to upload him to a blog post!
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Getting Gaddafi out also requires diplomacy
Tony Cordesman’s tirade against the half-hearted effort NATO is making against Gaddafi’s forces in Libya is all the rage today on my twitter feed. I don’t really disagree with anything he says, but I hope his piece does not distract attention from what really matters: the effort to get Gaddafi out of Tripoli and out of Libya, preferably to someplace that will keep him on a short leash.
Cordesman is of course correct that intensifying the military effort is an important part of the effort to get him to leave. But it should not be the only thing we are doing.
It is hard to write about this because whatever is happening is necessarily out of the public eye. While there are rumors of Washington and London looking for a place to park the Gaddafi family, it is to be expected that we won’t know where that is until the time comes. I trust London and Washington will be prepared to ensure that the family has access to the financial resources it might need to live a prosperous life, though not one in which it can continue to hire a mercenary army (or suborn its hosts). Immunity from prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity is not available (to anyone), but I trust the country that takes the Gaddafis will not be a state party the International Criminal Court.
The problem of course is that Gaddafi may not go. Military means have proven repeatedly and frustratingly ineffective against individuals, whether they be Ratko Mladic (an accused Serbian war criminal), Charles Taylor (who was finally snagged by his Nigerian hosts), Saddam Hussein (who wasn’t captured for more than six months after the U.S. occupied Iraq) or Laurent Gbagbo (the recently surrendered former president of Ivory Coast). Nor is American intelligence much good at predicting where foreign leaders will be so that they can be snagged by the specially trained Special Forces that do that kind of thing.
But if there is something that needs doing besides the intensified military effort that Tony Cordesman recommends, it is an intensified diplomatic effort to get him out of there. I take the Libyan Foreign Minister’s attempt to suggest that Gaddafi might be ready to retire in place, allowing free and fair elections, as a pretty clear sign that the Colonel is feeling the pressure. But it would be foolish to fall for that as a solution. He has to go if Libya is to be free. Even then, it will have a long road ahead.
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