Tag: Syria
Syria needs a good negotiated settlement
I have generally appreciated the work of Andrew Tabler and his colleagues on Syria. It is hard-hitting, clever and up to date. But their piece on “No Settlement in Damascus,” which opposes a negotiated solution, is not up to standard.
Bilal Saab and Andrew Tabler reject the idea of a negotiated outcome, ignoring the nature of that outcome. They implicitly discount the possibility that at some point Bashar al Assad will decide he has had enough. If that day arrives, in my view it will be far preferable for him to negotiate his exit and a turnover of power than to depart from the country, leaving the state to collapse and the country to find its own equilibrium.
A negotiated solution does not necessarily mean a power-sharing arrangement, as Saab and Tabler assume, though inclusivity is an important characteristic of regimes that survive over the long term. A surrender is also a negotiated outcome, one that the Americans unwisely did not bother obtaining in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Syrian revolutionaries would be making a serious mistake not to accept a negotiated transfer of power that genuinely leads to Assad’s ouster and the end of the regime.
Saab and Tabler are unimpressed with the record of negotiated settlements in civil wars. Their appreciation of the examples they cite is faulty. I know the Balkans ones best. Negotiated settlements in Bosnia and Macedonia (both power-sharing arrangements) have certainly been frustratingly difficult to implement, but they saved both countries from almost certain fragmentation and much more death and destruction. They also cite renegotiation of settlements in Africa as evidence of failure. While power-sharing does not correlate with post-election peace in Africa, renegotiation of agreements does.
Their description of the reasons for preferring no negotiated outcome includes this:
At a time when no legitimate government and no legal institutions exist to enforce a contract, warriors are asked to demobilize, disarm, and prepare for peace. But once they lay down their weapons, it becomes almost impossible to enforce the other side’s cooperation or survive attack. Adversaries simply cannot credibly promise to abide by such dangerous terms.
In fact, warriors are not always asked immediately to demobilize and disarm in a negotiated agreement. Good agreements have often recognized the need to allow belligerents to keep their arms, at least for a transition period. This is something that a thorough-going defeat at the hands of their enemies will not allow and a principal reason why belligerents will sometimes negotiate.
Saab and Tabler offer a flat statement about rebel victories:
More durable than negotiated solutions are rebel victories. Monica Duffy Toft, an associate professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has argued that rebels typically have to gain significant support from fellow citizens in order to win. Once in government, rebels are also more likely to allow citizens a say in politics to further bolster their legitimacy.
Tell that to the Rwandans, or to anyone living in a country where the rebels or the government takes on a sectarian or ethnic tinge. In Syria you are going to have a hard time convincing the Alawites and other die-hard supporters of Bashar al Assad that their say in politics will be greater after this revolution. There are losers in revolution–the question in this one is whether they will be slaughtered en masse or get a chance to survive.
The specific issues Saab and Tabler raise with respect to Syria are not, unfortunately for their argument, only issues that arise in negotiated settlements:
- Assad may well escape rather than be captured or killed, so the complete victory the rebels seek may be frustrated even without a negotiated settelement.
- Trust will be hard to come by, but that is going to be true in the absence of a negotiated settlement as well.
- Enforcement of a negotiated settlement is a big issue, and I entirely agree that 10,000 UN peacekeepers are unlikely to be sufficient. But who is going to prevent atrocities in the aftermath of a rebel victory?
- Yes, a negotiated settlement would require allowing Iran a place at the table, but that will be necessary without a negotiated settlement too, witness Iraq and Afghanistan.
The main trouble with their argument is that Saab and Tabler simply don’t acknowledge the very real horrors that are likely to occur without a political settlement. I’d definitely want one that ends the regime and definitively removes Bashar al Assad from power and from Syria. But so long as it does, a negotiated settlement is far preferable to the violence absence of one will bring.
PS: Here’s a message sent by a Syrian colleague:
This arrived as a link attached to following message:
Last year was full of tragedies for me, as I lost some of my closest friends when they were killed by Assad soldiers. I was also detained and tortured, my house was destroyed, and my family was forcibly displaced. I dreamed that the end of the year would bring a glorious freedom to the Syrian people, the freedom for which I and my people have sacrificed a lot. Instead, the end of the year brought new massacres, which should not occur in the 21st century.
Despite all this, I recall some bright aspects in the past year, among them getting to make many friends around the world who may not share my race, religion, or language. However, they share with me common human values for which we started our Revolution in Syria.
I am very proud to have met each one of you, and what I have seen of you of compassion to help my people and to promote the common noble human values in which we believe. I hope you had a Merry Christmas and wish you a happy new year filled with joy. However, please do not forget your brothers and sisters in humanity who are dreaming of being able in the coming year to restore basic rights, to which you have already gotten. They desperately need your help and support.
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War with Iran in 2013?
Reuters published this piece today, under what I regard as the misleading title “Will this be the year that Israel goes to war with Iran?”
Israel did not bomb Iran last year. Why should it happen this year?
Because it did not happen last year. The Iranians are proceeding apace with their nuclear program. The Americans are determined to stop them. Sanctions are biting, but the diplomatic process produced nothing visible in 2012. Knowledgeable observers believe there is no “zone of possible agreement.” Both the United States and Iran may believe that they have viable alternatives to a negotiated agreement.
While Israel has signaled that its “red line” (no nuclear weapons capability) won’t be reached before mid-2013, it seems likely it will be reached before the end of the year. President Barack Obama has refused to specify his red line, but he has made it amply clear that he prefers intensified sanctions and eventual military action to a nuclear Iran that needs to be contained and provides incentives for other countries to go nuclear. If and when he takes the decision for war, there is little doubt about a bipartisan majority in Congress supporting the effort.
Still, attitudes on the subject have shifted in the past year. Some have concluded that the consequences of war with Iran are so bad and uncertain that every attempt should be made to avoid it. Most have also concluded that Israel could do relatively little damage to the Iranian nuclear program. It might even be counter-productive, as the Iranians would redouble their efforts. The military responsibility lies with President Obama.
There has been a recent flurry of hope that the Iranians are preparing to come clean on their past nuclear weapons activities, which could be a prelude to progress on the diplomatic track. The issue is allegedly one of timing and sequencing: the Iranians want sanctions relief up front. The Americans want to see enrichment to 20 percent stopped and the enriched material shipped out of the country, as well as a full accounting for past activities, before considering any but minor sanctions relief. Some would also like to see dismantling of the hardened enrichment plant at Fordow.
But the fundamental issue is whether Iran is prepared to give up its nuclear weapon ambitions, or whether it is determined to forge ahead. Iranian behavior in the last year suggests no let-up in the country’s regional (and wider) pretensions. It has supported Bashar al-Assad to the hilt in Syria, armed Hamas for its confrontation with Israel, continued to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, assisted North Korea’s ballistic missile satellite launch and made trouble in Iraq. Why would it not also seek nuclear weapons, which would make it immune (or so many in the Iranian regime seem to think) from American regime change efforts?
There are not a lot of good answers to that question, except this: a reasonable man in Tehran might well conclude that Iranian national security is better served by stopping the nuclear program before it actually produces weapons. Once Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the United States will target it. Israel will launch on warning. This hair trigger situation will be more perilous than the nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, when each side assumed the rationality of the other and communications between them were good. Neither Iran nor Israel assumes the other will behave rationally, making deterrence unreliable, and communications between the two governments are virtually non-existent. The distance between Tehran and Jerusalem makes quick decisions necessary.
Two big political uncertainties loom over the nuclear issue next year: Iran is scheduled to hold presidential elections in June and the Supreme Leader is thought to be ill. The identity of neither Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s successor as president nor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s as Supreme Leader is clear. While it may be too much to hope that the successors will be any better than the incumbents, any transition introduces diplomatic delays and uncertainties, even though the nuclear program should be expected to proceed. But will the transitions be orderly, or will the Greens who roiled Iran’s political sphere last time around revive? Iran’s regime has deep roots in revolutionary fervor, which has made it more resilient than Egypt’s. But that does not mean it will last forever.
There is still a slim hope for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. The prospects are not good, but the consequences of failure are dreadful. The Obama Administration has managed to avoid overt commentary on Iran in the last couple of months. Candidate Romney was cautious during the campaign. The door is clearly open to the Iranians, if they want to come in from the cold of sanctions and isolation. If they fail to do so, and continue to buck the international community, war in 2013 is likely. Not because it is a good solution, but because President Obama might regard it as the only solution, albeit a temporary and highly uncertain one.
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What is to be done
Hashem Alshamy, a Syrian reader, criticized peacefare.net today:
Sincerely, I have been disappointed with your overtly focus on “post-conflict” suggestions, solutions and suggestions, while taking the events of the past 22 months for granted. It seems that the crimes committed by the regime, military and militia should be taken as fait accompli, while the world should be watching out until the hotheads take over and start their witch hunt against regime henchmen and the minorities who supported them.
He goes on to suggest:
I still appreciate your interest in following up the Syrian “conflict” and writing about it, but my suggestion is to read more about its history and its composition to provide pragmatic solutions to your followers, including me.
Thank you, Hashem, you are precisely correct. I should be thinking more about what the regime is doing and how to prevent it from generating a negative reaction that will haunt the transition period.
I’ve already pointed in one direction: a UN or Arab League peacekeeping force that would seek to establish a safe and secure environment in which the new authorities can begin to establish the justice mechanisms required to assign accountability for past crimes.
But I’ve also pointed out that it will be difficult to find and deploy an international force of the size and capability required. So what else can be done?
The Day After report prepared by Syrian opposition representatives recommends beginning the transitional justice efforts before the fall of the regime:
- establishing a Preparatory Committee to begin to map a strategy of transitional justice;
- preparing to safeguard records and documentation;
- beginning public messaging and outreach to avoid revenge attacks and raise awareness of transitional justice mechanisms;
- anticipating international interest;considering appropriate frameworks to coordinate and integrate the variety of transitional justice mechanisms; and
- preparing personnel who will be engaged in transitional justice institutions.
I see some sign of effort to document abuses and to safeguard records. I imagine there has been some public messaging against revenge attacks, but I’ll be glad if others would enlighten me further on that. To my knowledge, little else of this has happened so far, but I would be happy for an update.
The Day After report also recommended immediate measures for the security sector:
- building trust between the political leadership of opposition groups and the Free Syrian Army;
- initiating efforts to improve command and control among armed opposition groups, ensure their compliance with human rights standards, and secure their acceptance of civilian authority;
- creating an oversight committee to manage the process of SSR in the transitional period;
- preparing for the establishment of a transitional security force based on the Syrian National Police and other resources, including by providing the police with appropriate training; and
- conducting a preliminary vetting of retired and active high-ranking officers in the army and police to identify trustworthy individuals who might take leadership roles in security sector reform.
I see some effort to build trust and coordinate between the political leadership (the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces) and the Free Syrian Army, which itself is more unified than in the past. But I don’t see a lot of the rest of this happening. Again, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
What is missing from the Day After report is something I would consider vital: efforts at the local level to establish a safe and secure environment and begin to deliver services to all citizens. I am hoping that organizations like the Civil Administration Councils will make this effort. Syrians are naturally more concerned with their current circumstances than with some abstract future enterprise that the internationals call “transitional justice.” Yes, preparation now for the post-war period can help, as the Day After suggests, but so too can cooperation now to meet immediate human needs in areas that have already been liberated. There is a lot of evidence that cooperation on providing services and enabling economic activity helps to prevent sectarian and ethnic violence when the usual forces of law and order break down.
This is the opposite of the answer Lenin gave to the question “What Is To Be Done?” What Syria needs urgently is not central direction by Lenin’s revolutionary vanguard. The Ba’ath party has arguably provided that to no good effect for many years. Syria needs grassroots efforts by its citizens to establish locally the kind of inclusivity and participation that will prevent future bloodletting.
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War’s end can be deadly too
My Twitterfeed this morning is full of references to a video of Syria’s thugs finishing off rebels with knives and concrete blocks. Fortunately for you, the video did not work for me, so I am not even tempted to post it.
The behavior is, however, worth noting, as it is precisely what makes revenge killing highly likely. How would you feel if one of Asad’s thugs bludgeoned to death your brother, uncle, cousin? Of course you might not know precisely who did it, but you might suspect, or you might know someone working for the Shabiha whom you suspect of doing such things, or you might just feel someone needs to be taught a lesson. If a law and order vacuum follows the fall of Asad, it will be tempting to teach these people a lesson, prevent them from disappearing into the woodwork, or just satisfy the thirst for justice. Once it starts, tit for tat violence is difficult to stop. Police are no longer on the streets, courts have ceased to function as judges flee, prosecutors are seek refuge from infuriated relatives of people they sent to prison.
Most of the Syrian opposition will say it does not seek revenge. They will proclaim loudly that anyone who does not have Syrian blood on their hands can remain in their jobs and continue to provide public services. We have nothing against the Syrian state, they will say, only against those individuals who abused power and mistreated its citizens.
But who does not have Syrian blood on their hands? How do they prove it? It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative, and very hard to respond to accusations outside the neutral space of a serious justice system. It will take years to determine who was responsible for the killing of 45,000 or so opposition victims. Why should perpetrators be allowed to get away with their crimes in the meanwhile?
These are some of the issues that lead me to conclude that Syria is going to need an international peacekeeping force to prevent the worst from happening after the fall of the Asad regime. Such a force cannot bring justice or prevent all abuses, but it can–properly mandated, resourced and led–create what the military refers to as a “safe and secure environment,” provided the warring parties reach at least a temporary political accommodation against further bloodshed. There will still be incidents and reprisals, but if they can be kept below the level of mass atrocity it will give Syria a much better chance to move in a more democratic direction.
A commenter on a previous post suggested Indonesia and Malaysia might be able to contribute several thousand troops. That’s a start, though it seems likely Syria will require tens of thousands. The UN and Arab League–the two most likely leaders of such a peacekeeping force–should be developing the plans, not only for the peacekeeping forces but also for meeting other urgent requirements: humanitarian relief (food, water, shelter and sanitation), macroeconomic stabilization to prevent the currency from collapsing altogether, and support to whatever political process the Syrians can agree on.
America’s luminaries are still focused on a no-fly zone and arms for the rebels. We are past the point where either makes much sense. The rebels have obtained sufficient arms to contest the Syrian security forces throughout most of the country, and they are quickly downing most of the Syrian air force. The death toll is way up–around 400 per day recently–as Asad unleashes what little he has left that he hasn’t already used. I’ve got to hope that UN Envoy Brahimi is successful in getting the Russians to pressure Asad to step aside. Nothing short of that will open the door to a negotiated outcome, which is far more likely to reduce the death toll than continuation of the fighting.
War is deadly, but post-war can be deadly too. It is time to be thinking about how to end this war and begin the peace in an orderly way.
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It is not too early
UN special envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi said Friday in Moscow of the Russian Foreign Minister:
I think Sergey Lavrov is absolutely right that the conflict is not only more and more militarized, it is more and more sectarian…And if we are not careful and if the Syrians are not careful, it will be a mainly sectarian conflict.
The day was a particularly bloody one: more than 200 people are said to have been killed in Homs.
The fear of sectarian conflict is well-founded. No matter how many times Syrians tell me that their revolution is not sectarian and aims at a civil state and open, democratic society in which all citizens are equal, the normal mechanisms of violent conflict lend themselves to increasing polarization along sectarian lines. I am afraid, so I seek safety where I can find it, which for Alawites and some other minorities is with the government while Sunnis seek protection from the Free Syrian Army.
Of course there are Sunnis who fight for the Syrian government and minorities who fight for the rebels, but there will be fewer and fewer as time passes. Then when Assad goes, individuals will try to recover property and seek revenge for the harm done to themselves and their families, even if the more organized and disciplined military units on both sides remain disciplined. Revenge killing spirals quickly, polarizing people further and driving them into the arms of their family, tribe, sect or ethnicity. Building a state on the ruins of a fragmented society is far more difficult than anyone imagines in advance.
That’s why I also welcome something else Brahimi said:
Perhaps a peacekeeping force may be acceptable. But it must be part of a complete package that begins with peacekeeping and ends with an election.
This is the first I’ve seen the obvious mentioned at his level: peacekeeping forces are going to be needed in Syria. They will be needed not only to protect minorities but also to support the post-war state-building effort. We’ve seen in Libya what happens when the new state does not have a monopoly on the means of violence. Extremists of all sorts, including Al Qaeda franchisees, set up shop. State-building without a monopoly on the means of violence becomes a dicey proposition. There will be more than two armed forces in Syria at the end of the civil war: Syrian army, local militias, regime Shabiha, Free Syria Army, Jabhat al Nusra and other jihadi extremists.
The issue in Syria is where peacekeeping troops can be found. Even if they are needed, that does not mean they will be available. The obvious troop contributors have all been protagonists in the proxy war of the past two years: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The Turks and Russians may be willing, but won’t trust each other. The Americans will not want to put troops into Syria. Nor will the Europeans. China now has experience in 20 UN peacekeeping operations and might like to extend its reach into the Middle East, if the Americans and Russians will allow it. Iran is out of the question, though it will likely stir up trouble using some of the regime militia forces left over. There are lots of other possibilities, but few I can think of that meet the full panoply of desirable criteria: impartial, Arabic-speaking, experienced and self-sufficient in peacekeeping operations, available for deployment abroad. Algeria and Morocco?
A related question is who would authorize and supervise a peacekeeping operation. The UN is one possibility, but the divisions in the Security Council over the past two years hardly suggest it could act decisively. The Arab League is another. Still another is an invitation from a new Syrian government, which would have the advantage of picking which countries to invite and directing where they deploy. But that could defeat the whole purpose of inviting in a more impartial force.
If–against the odds–an international peacekeeping force is somehow put together and somehow properly authorized for Syria, it is important to remember Brahimi’s caution, written before he took up his present position:
Even if such peacekeepers are well-armed and well-trained, however, they will be no match for much larger and well organized forces intent on destroying the
peace or committing mass atrocities. It has to be said upfront that the military forces, civilian police, human rights experts and international aid workers will not provide security, protection, justice, social services and jobs for all of the millions or tens of millions of inhabitants of the country.
A solid political solution is a prerequisite to a peacekeeping deployment.
Syria is going to be a very difficult post-war operation. It is not too early to be thinking about who will conduct it and under what mandate.
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Hussein Saleh, you are not alone
My journalist (McClatchy) friend and fellow Haverford graduate Roy Gutman tweeted this moving short video about a Yemeni International Committee of the Red Cross worker, Hussein Saleh:
I Know Where I’m Going from Intercross on Vimeo.
It reminded me of what I know: most of the people who work for humanitarian and other organizations, nongovernmental and governmental, in conflict zones are host country nationals. They take enormous risks and get killed at an accelerating rate: they are most of the more than 300 humanitarian workers killed last year worldwide.
My first encounter with what the State Department now calls “Foreign Service nationals,” that is citizens of the country in which a U.S. government facility is located, was with Danilo Bracchetti, who worked in U.S. embassy in Rome from the late 1940s until retirement sometime after I left in 1993. When he started, Rome had no garbage collection, because no one threw anything out. He was the only Italian I ever met who admitted to having been in a fascist youth organization (virtually everyone was of course). By the time I came along in the late 1970s, Italy was still in the throes of the Red Brigades, so working for the Americans was not without risk. He never betrayed the slightest hesitation. So far as Danilo was concerned, working for the Americans was an honor and a privilege, one I’m sure he was proud of to his premature dying day.
I’ve met other “host country” nationals in more dangerous situations. Iraq was particularly challenging. The U.S. Institute of Peace employees there did not always tell their families for whom they were working. In 2006/7 especially, they lived in risky conditions. One of our security contractors–an Iraqi Kurd–was killed then in a militia hit. A number of our employees and collaborators later applied for and got visas to come to the U.S., on grounds that they were in danger if they remained. Others fled to Kurdistan, which is still relatively safe from the sectarian violence that plagues other parts of Iraq.
A number of the key players in Afghanistan’s bureaucratic upper crust these days spent the Taliban years working for international relief organizations, some of which were active even then. It is amazing how well acclimated they are to Western habits, even though they conserve their Afghan roots. It was no small thing to deliver international aid during the years in which the Taliban ruled.
In Syria today virtually all the people distributing substantial amounts of international humanitarian assistance during the civil war are Syrians. The risks they face every day are unimaginable. Or, depending on how you look at it, all too imaginable.
Despite the very real risks they run on behalf of Western governments and organizations, these host country nationals are largely invisible in today’s world. But talk to any journalist, aid worker or diplomat. They will recount tales of their heroism and devotion. The host country (and third country) nationals run risks every day. As the year comes to a close, I hasten to express what so many of us have felt: deep appreciation and respect for the commitment they demonstrate and the sacrifices they make. Hussein Saleh, you are not alone.
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