Tag: Nuclear weapons
Tehran’s options
While the world debates the significance of the Hamas/Israel prisoner exchange, let me turn back to something that really counts for the United States: Iran’s nuclear program. In the aftermath of the Iran(Car)Tel plot, friend Rashad Mahmood, formerly of Cairo, asks “What would be reasonable Iranian policy to having their nuclear scientists killed (by admittedly much finer spycraft since they haven’t aired any proof of who has done it)?”
This is a reasonable question with some scary answers. Let’s look at some of the (not mutually exclusive) options:
1. They can respond by killing the nuclear scientists of those countries they think responsible for the attacks on their own (presumably Israel, but as Rashad says there is no proof in the public domain). I assume they’ve tried this and haven’t succeeded, or at least we haven’t heard about it.
2. They can accelerate their nuclear program, hide it better, protect the people who work in it and try to get nuclear weapons as soon as possible. They may be trying, but they appear to be failing.
3. They can begin to wonder whether the nuclear program is worth the trouble it is causing and reach an arrangement that reassures friends and foe alike that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons even if it acquires the “fuel cycle” technology required to do so. President Ahmedinejad has proposed something along these lines, but no one is taking him seriously yet, so far as I can tell.
4. They can kill diplomats or citizens of third countries, say Saudi Arabia, that may have little to do with the killing of the Iranians but are hated enemies anyway.
My impression is that they’ve tried at one time or another Nos. 1-3, so far without success. No. 4 doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe it does to someone in Tehran (and certainly it does to some in DC). The jury is still out on the extent of official Iranian involvement in the IranTel plot.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration seems to me to be doing the right thing: keeping the focus on the nuclear program and ratcheting up sanctions implementation. This may not bring immediate results, but at least it provides some incentive for no. 3. The trick is knowing when to take Ahmedinejad’s proposition seriously. It is really difficult for outsiders to judge when the right moment comes–we are going to have to trust the White House to call that shot.
Here is the version of what Ahmedinejad has said about limiting uranium enrichment published by the Washington Post:
Q: I understand that you were in favor of the deal you had reached with the United States in 2009, according to which the U.S. would sell you 20-percent-enriched uranium in exchange for Iran exporting low-enriched uranium. But you were attacked by your critics and came under assault and people here could not reach a consensus and the deal fell apart.
Ahmedinejad: In Iran, people are free to express their views. Every day some people criticize the policies of the government. This doesn’t mean that the government is going to abandon their policies. We felt that they wouldn’t give us the fuel required here for our reactor. There were some political leaders who gave interviews in the United States and Europe and they said they want to keep Iran from having access to such fuel. So we realized that they wouldn’t give us that fuel so we had to do it ourselves. Even if they gave us now uranium grade 20 percent, we would not continue with the production of this fuel.
Q: So if the United States sold you the enriched uranium, would you stop enriching yourselves?
Ahmedinejad: Yes. We don’t want to produce uranium of 20 percent. Because they did not give us that uranium, we had to make our own investments. If they start to give us that uranium today, we will stop production.
Q: You reached a deal in Geneva in 2009, and you came back here and the deal fell apart here, and now people in Washington don’t believe a deal is possible.
Ahmedinejad: If they give us uranium grade 20 percent, we would stop production. Those negotiations took place in Vienna. Apparently they know everything. I repeat: If you give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production. Because uranium grade 20 percent can only be used for such reactors, nothing else.
This is the proposition some commentators think worth considering. Many think it a mirage, but time is on Tehran’s side: even if their nuclear program has slowed, they will eventually get there if there is no verifiable agreement for them to stop.
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The damndest problem
Somehow this invitation to a discussion of India/Pakistan relations prompts me to ask a different but related question: how should the United States deal with Pakistan?
I confess to colossal ignorance when it comes to anything east and south of the Durand line. All I really know is that Pakistan is populous (170 million), ethnically complex (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and many others) and mostly poor (about $1000 per capita GNP). It has nuclear weapons and an enduring existential fear of India. The army plays an often outsized role, but civilian politics can be dauntingly agitated as well.
So why should this matter? It is the nuclear weapons that really count to the United States–they are approaching 100 warheads. Their main purpose seems to be to prevent an Indian attack, or to respond to one. American concern is not only that Pakistan might use them, triggering an unpredictable but likely devastating series of events, but that they might fall into the hands of terrorists. Pakistan has a record of having exported nuclear technology to North Korea and elsewhere.
For at least as long as U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, there will be another concern: terrorists harbored in the Pakistan’s border areas. We can quarrel about whether the Pakistani government knew Osama Bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, but it is clear that at least some religious extremists have de facto permission from the Pakistani government to destabilize the southern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan, in order to gain “strategic depth” for Islamabad (that is, deny India a foothold in a stable Afghanistan). Our many drone strikes inside Pakistan, with something like tacit permission from Islamabad, are the current stopgap in deal with this problem.
What are our options in dealing with Pakistan?
1. Walk away. Too complicated, too difficult, too far away. We’ve tried this several times over the last few decades. We always end up regretting it and going back, whether because of the nukes or the border with Afghanistan.
2. Get engaged. Pakistan has lots of problems: political, economic, security. We could try to engage more actively in resolving some of these. Dick Holbrooke is said to have thought we needed to help resolve the India/Pakistan conflict, especially over Kashmir, if we wanted Pakistan to help us out more against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But what makes us think we can have much impact on Pakistan’s internal political and economic problems, never mind its more than 60-year conflict with India?
3. Get selectively engaged. So some things are too hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ante up to get Pakistan to do the things we need done, like police its border with Afghanistan more effectively and guard its nuclear weapons more carefully. This is pretty much current policy, plus the drone strikes. We don’t know if the American assistance on guarding the nuclear weapons is effective, but we do know that the Pakistani military has been pocketing a lot of our assistance and doing very little in return. So we’ve cut off some of that assistance and they are cozying up to the Chinese.
4. Go with India and contain Pakistan. India is Pakistan’s natural regional rival. We could just throw in our lot with the Indians and use them as a counterbalance to Pakistan, which in turn would become a Chinese surrogate. This kind of “offshore” balancing is much the rage these days among those who resist American intervention abroad but recognize the national security problems that motivate it. But offshore balancing in this case amounts to putting our interests in the hands of New Delhi–does that sound wise? And it might do nothing to prevent nuclear war or nuclear terrorism, and certainly nothing to prevent Pakistan from destabilizing Afghanistan, which are our main concerns.
5. Go regional. Rather than splitting Asia between American and Chinese spheres of influence, we could try to promote the kind of regional cooperation that has proved so effective in Europe and Latin America. Freer trade and investment would eventually lead India and Pakistan to have a bigger stake in peace and stability that they would maintain themselves. But at best this is a long-term bet, not one that produces results in the next year or two, or even five or ten.
Having trouble choosing your preferred option? That’s what I said: the damndest problem.
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Meltdowns, nuclear and economic
We are going to be hearing a lot about nuclear meltdowns in the next few days. Here courtesy of Reuters is a decently comprehensible explanation of what may have happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant:
Nuclear power plants cannot explode the way a nuclear weapon does. But they can spew a lot of dangerous radioactive material if the containment is breached (this has not happened so far). That could make things a lot worse. Check here for more on this and other nuclear issues.
At the very least, we are looking at colossal economic losses due to the earthquake in Japan. The reactors alone cost on the order of $10 billion each, and that is small in the context of the other physical damage done in Japan. But the really big impact is likely to come from increased energy costs worldwide–uncertainty about whether nuclear reactors are safe will drive up electricity and other energy bills, which are already soaring due to Middle East uncertainties.
So…anyone who thought our budget problems might ease in a year when the economy is recovering, as I did, will have to reevaluate. Whatever budget constraints we were feeling before the earthquake, they are going to get a good deal tighter now. This unquestionably affects the way we think about war and peace, in particular how much we are willing to pay for either one. Tea partiers were already prepared to cancel funding for peace, and they were looking shaky on support for war too. How about the rest of us?
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Dominoes anyone?
The metaphorical game in international relations is often chess, or escalation, or maybe just the adjectival “great” game. But these days we seem to be playing that old standby, dominoes, more than anything else: will Iran getting nuclear weapons lead to others getting them? will Tunisia’s revolt spread? will North Korea’s erratic behavior precipitate in one way or another refugee flows into China that Beijing will want to prevent?
As Stephen Walt points out, revolutions don’t usually spread like wildfire. The demonstration effect of what happens in Tunisia may be strong, but it is uncertain what the outcome is and therefore what events there will “demonstrate.” I still wouldn’t call it a revolution, since the prior regime is very much in place, not only in the salubrious sense that the constitution is being implemented but in the less salubrious sense that the old guard remains in key offices. Only the President and his coterie are gone. Tunisia is looking for the moment more like a palace or military coup in response to popular uprising than like a real revolution. I can imagine that being imitated in more than one Arab country.
With respect to Iran and nuclear weapons, Johan Bergenas argues his case against the dominoes falling well, but unfortunately the argument against a nuclear Iran remains strong even without the worst case scenario, as he acknowledges. While diplomats, spooks and geeks (or maybe I should say spoogeeks?) in the U.S. and Israel are chuckling over Stuxnet’s damage to Iranian centrifuges, the problem remains as great as always. We just have more time to find, or not to find, a solution. I’m no fan of Hillary Mann and Flynt Leverett’s triumphalist version of today’s Iran, but I also don’t buy Tehran Bureau’s defeatist version. President Ahmedinejad still looks pretty strong, having managed his personnel challenges to the Supreme Leader as well as his economic reforms and their political impact better than many expected.
China’s willingness to save our bacon with North Korea is but one of the Washington myths that Mort Abramowitz pooh-poohs, suggesting that if we had a clearer and more consistent policy of our own we might be better off than relying on Beijing to do the right thing. In any event, the Chinese seem to be finding the discomfort that North Korea causes “not unwelcome,” as the diplomats say, and they fear more refugee flows arising from the regime change Washington might like than anything else.
So dominoes don’t look like such a good game, and in my experience they are not, being a Vietnam generation fogy. That said, I feel reasonably certain that our weak response to North Korea’s nuclear testing has in fact encouraged the Iranians to move ahead to acquiring whatever technology they think they need to become at least a virtual nuclear power. Did we ever deprive Brazil of its technology after it forswore nuclear weapons and signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco? Or South Africa?
That is the thing about dominoes. When they fall, the consequences are often irreversible, and the directions they fall in unpredictable. I hope that the outcome of last week’s events in Tunisia is not only democratic but relatively liberal and Western-oriented. Many of us–I include myself–will regret the cheering we did from the sidelines if Al Qaeda in the Maghreb finds haven in North Africa, where its recruiting efforts are already strong.
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Iran’s hyperactive president
President Ahmedinejad may have fired a lot of advisors, but someone is working overtime in Tehran. Today there is news of Iran’s invitation to Russia, China, the European Union and others in the Arab and developing world to tour its nuclear sites, before the late January meeting with the P5+1 in Turkey.
There is no real, substantive significance in a visit by non-technicians to a nuclear facility. Even a well-trained and equipped physicist can be led around by the nose and shown geegaws of all sorts that may or may not have the significance attributed to them by the tour guide. And of course the Iranians will show their visitors whatever they want, and not show them whatever they don’t want.
But you’ve got to admire the pace and daring. Here is Ahmedinejad seemingly locked in a power struggle with the Supreme Leader (what about that appellation does he not get?), firing the foreign minister and a baker’s dozen or more advisers, removing oil product price subsidies, executing supposed miscreants and still able to stage a show visit to Iranian nuclear facilities for gullible foreigners. Can he get away with all this in an Iran that is resistant to newcomers and change? Or is comeuppance around the next corner? Are we seeing the emergence of a much stronger president, or his last hurrah?
Before answering, let’s remind ourselves that Ahmedinejad is a millenarian who believes the twelfth imam is not far (and probably regards himself as a deputy empowered to help make his return possible). No need to watch all of this, the millenarian vision gets really clear about 5:15:
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The end is nigh…
Not really, but 2010 is coming to a close. Never easy to look ahead a year, but let me give it a try. It’ll make for a nice mea culpa post a year from now. And if I cherry pick a bit maybe I’ll be able to claim clairvoyance!
- Iran: the biggest headache of the year to come. If its nuclear program is not slowed or stopped, things are going to get tense. Both Israel and the U.S. have preferred sanctions, covert action and diplomatic pressure to military action. If no agreement is reached on enrichment, that might change by the end of 2011. No Green Revolution, the clerics hang on, using the Revolutionary Guards to defend the revolution (duh).
- Pakistan: it isn’t getting better and it could well get worse. The security forces don’t like the way the civilians aren’t handling things, and the civilians are in perpetual crisis. Look for increased internal tension, but no Army takeover, and some success in American efforts to get more action against AQ and the Taliban inside Pakistan. Judging from a report in the New York Times, we may not always be pleased with the methods the Pakistanis use.
- North Korea: no migraine, but pesky nonetheless, and South Korea is a lot less quiescent than it used to be. Pretty good odds on some sort of military action during the year, but the South and the Americans will try to avoid the nightmare of a devastating artillery barrage against Seoul.
- Afghanistan: sure there will be military progress, enough to allow at least a minimal withdrawal from a handful of provinces by July. But it is hard to see how Karzai becomes much more legitimate or effective. There is a lot of heavy lifting to do before provincial government is improved, but by the end of the year we might see some serious progress in that direction, again in a handful of provinces.
- Iraq: no one expects much good of this government, which is large, unwieldy and fragmented. But just for this reason, I expect Maliki to get away with continuing to govern more or less on his own, relying on different parts of his awkward coalition on different issues. The big unknown: can Baghdad settle, or finesse, the disputes over territory with Erbil (Kurdistan)?
- Palestine/Israel (no meaning in the order–I try to alternate): Palestine gets more recognitions, Israel builds more settlements, the Americans offer a detailed settlement, both sides resist but agree to go to high level talks where the Americans try to impose. That fails and Israel continues in the direction of establishing a one-state solution with Arabs as second class citizens. My secular Zionist ancestors turn in their graves.
- Egypt: trouble. Succession plans founder as the legitimacy of the parliament is challenged in the streets and courts. Mubarak hangs on, but the uncertainties grow.
- Haiti: Not clear whether the presidential runoff will be held January 16, but things are going to improve, at least until next summer’s hurricanes. Just for that reason there will be more instability as Haitians begin to tussle over the improvements.
- Al Qaeda: the franchise model is working well, so no need to recentralize. They will keep on trying for a score in the U.S. and will likely succeed at some, I hope non-spectacular, level.
- Yemen/Somalia: Yemen is on the brink and will likely go over it, if not in 2011 soon thereafter. Somalia will start back from hell, with increasing stability in some regions and continuing conflict in others.
- Sudan: the independence referendum passes. Khartoum and Juba reach enough of an agreement on outstanding issues to allow implementation in July, but border problems (including Abyei) and South/South violence grow into a real threat. Darfur deteriorates as the rebels emulate the South and Khartoum takes its frustrations out on the poor souls.
- Lebanon: the Special Tribunal finally delivers its indictments. Everyone yawns and stretches, having agreed to ignore them.
- Syria: Damascus finally realizes that it is time to reach an agreement with Israel. The Israelis decide to go ahead with it, thus relieving pressure to stop settlements and deal seriously with the Palestinians.
- Ivory Coast: the French finally find the first class tickets for Gbagbo and his entourage, who go to some place that does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (no, not the U.S.!).
- Zimbabwe: Mugabe is pressing for quick adoption of his new constitution and elections in 2011, catching the opposition off balance. If he succeeds, the place continues to go to hell in a handbasket. If he fails, it will still be some time before it heads in the other direction.
- Balkans: Bosnians still stuck on constitutional reform, but Kosovo gets a visa waiver from the EU despite ongoing investigations of organ trafficking.
If the year turns out this way, it won’t be disastrous, just a bumpy downhill slide. Hard to see it getting much better than that, but I could have made it much worse:
- Iran: weaponizes and deploys nukes.
- Pakistan: finally admits it can’t find two of its weapons, which have likely fallen into AQ hands.
- North Korea: goes bananas in response to some provocation, launches artillery barrage on Seoul.
- Afghanistan: spring Taliban offensive sweeps away Coalition-installed local institutions; Kandahar falls.
- Iraq: Kurds and Arabs fight, without a clear outcome.
- Israel/Palestine: Israel attacks Hizbollah in Lebanon, third intifada begins with Hamas suicide bombings inside Israel.
- Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood challenges Mubarak in the streets, prevents orderly succession process.
- Haiti: hurricanes, food riots, political strife, reconstruction blocked.
- Al Qaeda: big hit inside the U.S., thousands die.
- Yemen/Somalia: both go south, with AQ establishing itself firmly on both sides of the Bab al Mandab.
- Sudan: post-referendum negotiations fail, fighting on North/South border, chaos in Southern Sudan.
- Lebanon: Hizbollah reacts with violence to the Special Tribunal indictments, taking over large parts of Lebanon. Hizbollah/Israel war wrecks havoc.
- Syria: succeeds in surreptitiously building nuclear facilities on commission from Iran, Israeli effort to destroy them fails.
- Ivory Coast: Gbagbo tries to hold on to office, imitating Mugabe’s successful effort. Ouattara plays ball and accepts the prime ministry, pressured by internationals who don’t want to do what is necessary to airlift Gbagbo out of there. A real opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of international solidarity is squandered.
- Zimbabwe: Mugabe succeeds, Tsvangirai is out, state in virtual collapse.
- Balkans: the EU unwisely begins implementing the acquis communitaire in Republika Srpska due to delays in formation of a national Bosnian government, investigations in Kosovo drag on and make progress towards the visa waiver and other EU goodies impossible.
There are of course other places where we might see bad things happen: Venezuela, Burma, Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia, Russia–but I’ll leave the imagining to you.
Happy New Year!
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