Tag: Yemen
Couphobia
Fear of coups (couphobia?) has broken out in all too many places. Turkey’s President Erdogan is cracking down on the Gulen movement members for fear they are plotting against him. Russia’s President Putin has done the same with foreign funding of nongovernmental organizations. Egypt’s President Sisi fears the Muslim Brotherhood will do to him what he has done to their (former) President Morsi, who languishes in prison.
Even in Macedonia, an EU candidate country, the Prime Minister says the opposition was plotting to oust him. Then again, the United States is said to be orchestrating an anti-Victor Orbán coup d’état in EU member Hungary.
I can’t be sure all these claims are as baseless as that last one. Washington just doesn’t care enough about Hungary to engineer a coup there. My guess is that Sisi has plenty to worry about, as he has vastly overdone the repression, creating a growing reservoir of resentment that might fuel an effort to oust him one day, though Egyptians are so tired of disorder (and the army so satiated) that it is unlikely a coup there would be popular. Erdogan and Putin are likewise doing their best to fulfill their own prophecies by making life hard for their legitimate opponents, whose natural reaction will be to think about their options. A coup might be one of them.
Then there are the guys–and they are guys–who really should fear a coup. Syria’s President Asad has destroyed his country in order to prevent anyone else from challenging his hold on power. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un presumably thinks he protected himself, but who knows which uncle or cousin still alive might make the attempt?
Yemen’s President Hadi is facing a coup in everything but name. The Houthi rebels who have him trapped don’t want to displace him, partly for fear that would end military assistance against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from the Americans the Houthis love to hate. Libya can’t have a coup because it is unclear who has power. It is having a civil war instead.
All the couphobiacs should remember Nouri al Maliki. He was so afraid of a coup that he appointed cronies to command his army and grabbed as much direct control over the other institutions of the state as he could. The result was collapse of the Iraqi Security Forces when faced with the Islamic State and his removal from power because even the Iranians and his own Dawa party turned against him. It doesn’t always work that way, but the example should serve to illustrate the perils of concentrating power too much.
The couphobiacs are unlikely to be chastened however. Once they start down the road of repression, it is hard to turn around or back out. They fear removal from power means they lose their lives as well. What Erdogan, Putin and Sisi need more than anything else is assurance that they can retire gracefully and live out their natural lives. Not everyone can afford to keep autocrats in power well into senility, as the Saudis do. But countries that want their autocrats to retire need to follow the Vatican’s lead and provide funding and protection (before they start committing war crimes and crimes against humanity). Come to think of it, that’s America’s solution too.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Peace picks February 2-6
- Fighting ISIS: News from the Front Lines in Kurdistan | Tuesday February 3 | 10:00-11:30 | The Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS | REGISTER TO ATTEND | The Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS is hosting a discussion with Aziz Reza, senior advisor to the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government. The talk will also feature Mousa Ahmed Agha, Deputy Head, Barzani Charity Foundation and will be moderated by Sasha Toperich, Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS
- Yemen – If this is a policy success, what does failure look like? | Tuesday February 3 | 12:30-1:45 | Georgetown University | REGISTER TO ATTEND | Last September, in announcing military operations against ISIS/ISIL, President Obama referred to Yemen as a US policy success, to the bafflement of many within and outside the country at the time. The jury was still out on our drone-dependent security/CT operations, the economy was in disarray and the political transition – a relative bright spot – was dimming. Recent events call the September judgment into even more question. What is really happening, and what does it mean for the US, the region, and the Yemenis? Georgetown University invites to a discussion with Ambassador Barbara K. Bodine, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
- Countering Violent Extremism: Improving Our Strategy for the Future | Wednesday February 4 | 14:00-15:00 | Brookings Institute| REGISTER TO ATTEND | The recent deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the Jewish market in Paris were sharp reminders of the continuing threat of violent extremism in the West. With similar attacks in Ottawa and Sydney, and a concerning number of Westerners moved to fight in Syria, preventing acts of violence by extremists has become a top priority. To help the United States and its allies move forward, the White House announced that it will host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism on February 18. Bringing together a panel of experts on counterterrorism and radicalization, the conversation will raise questions about the efficacy of the current U.S. approach, successful practices of counterterrorism programs both domestically and abroad, and strategies for countering violent extremism going forward.
- Subcommittee Hearing: The Palestinian Authority’s International Criminal Court Gambit: A True Partner for Peace? | Wednesday February 4 | 2:00-5:00 | Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa | The House Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa is holding a hearing on the issue of the Palestinian Authority’s pursuit of membership in the International Criminal Court. Among the witnesses called to speak are Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President for Research, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eugene Kontorovich, Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law, Danielle Pletka, Senior Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute and David Makovsky, Ziegler Distinguished Fellow, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
- Why Corruption Threatens Global Security | Wednesday February 4th | 16:00-17:30 | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | REGISTER TO ATTEND The world seems to be on fire—the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq; the endurance of Boko Haram in Nigeria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine. Is there a common thread tying these events together? Sarah Cheyes, who spent a decade living and working in Kandahar Afghanistan, and serves as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will demonstrate how governments that resemble criminal organizations drive their indignant constituents to extremes. Drawing on her personal experience in some of the most venal environments on earth, Chayes will present examples of what emerges where kleptocracy prevails: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also rebuilding Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram.
- Advancing U.S-Afghan Ties: A discussion with Senator Tom Cotton| February 5 |9:oo -9:45| USIP | REGISTER TO ATTEND |The election of a reformist national unity government in Afghanistan and the signing of the Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States have restored bilateral relations that had badly deteriorated under President Karzai. The Afghan government, facing huge economic and security challenges, has requested significant and sustained assistance from the United States and the international community over the next decade. The United States has committed to provide civilian and military support up to the end of 2016. Several weeks before an anticipated visit by President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, the question of future of U.S.-Afghan relations becomes more critical. USIP and the Alliance in Support of the Afghan People is pleased to host Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), a U.S. Army veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and a newly elected member of the U.S. Senate, to provide his views on the shape of future U.S.-Afghan relations. Senator Cotton serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Uncharted territory
I did a quick interview today for Tomasz Zalewski of the Polish national press agency on the dramatic developments in Yemen. Maybe others will find it of interest:
Q: How serious – and why – is this Houthis rebellion?
A: It is very serious, because it has now collapsed the Yemeni state, whose president and prime minister have resigned. The Houthis cannot hope to govern all of Yemen, so if they take power it is more than likely that southern, and perhaps other, secessions will follow. If they don’t take power, chaos may reign.
They can however be relied upon to fight Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), since they are Shia-affiliated and will have no use for extremist Sunni group. It is also important to say that the state in Yemen may have collapsed, but the society has many other mechanisms for maintaining stability. I expect some of the inclination of Yemenis towards dialogue and away from the worst brutal violence to be in evidence, though it may not prevail.
Q: What international implications can this crisis have, especially in terms of balance of power in the region, considering that the rebels are Shiite Muslims fighting with a Sunni government?
A: The success of the Houthi insurgency is certainly a blow to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners, who had sponsored the peace process in Yemen and view the Houthis as sponsored by their adversary, Iran. But the Houthi success does not immediately alter the balance of power in the region, to which Yemen has never contributed much. The Saudis will be very concerned, but Yemen is a small part of the overall Gulf picture.
Q: How can this upheaval impact a broader war with Islamist terrorism, given the fact that Yemen is one of the strongest Al-Qaida center?
A: The Houthis will oppose AQAP, with which they have already been fighting. What is not clear is whether the US will be able to continue its engagement in the fight against AQAP if the Houthis take power in Sanaa, or if chaos prevails. We’ll have to wait and see.
Q: How can the situation develop there?
A: It can develop in many ways, but I imagine we will see things getting worse before they get better. We could see a move by former President Ali Abdullah Saleh to return to power. He is thought to be backing the Houthis. Rebellion and chaos could spread, with some in the southern Hiraak movement wanting to secede and AQAP taking advantage of the situation to recruit young Sunnis and attack critical infrastructure. As UN envoy Jamal Benomar puts it, “we are in uncharted territory.”
PS: If you want more and deeper on Yemen’s crisis, read Danya Greenfield’s Yemen’s Coup in All But Name and Charles Schmitz’s The Huthi Ascent to Power.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Nothing new
President Obama said a lot more about foreign policy in last night’s State of the Union message than many of us expected. But did he say anything new?
His first entry point to international affairs was notable: he got there via exports and trade, pivoting quickly to TTP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and TTIP, the Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. Though he didn’t name them, that’s what he was referring to when he appealed for Congress to provide him with what is known as trade promotion authority to negotiate deals with Asia and Europe that are “not only free, but fair.” Nothing new here, just an interesting elevation of economic diplomacy to pride of place. Ditto the plea to close tax loopholes that encourage American companies to keep their profits abroad.
But after a detour to the internet and scientific research, the President was soon back on the more familiar territory of national security. He plugged smart leadership that builds coalitions and combines diplomacy and military power. He wants others to do more of the fighting. But there was little or no indication of how collapsed states like Syria, Yemen and Libya might be governed in the future.
Leaving it to their own devices hasn’t worked out well, but this is a president who (like all his predecessors) doesn’t want to do nationbuilding abroad and who (unlike many of his predecessors) has been disciplined enough to resist it. He talks non-military means but uses force frequently and says he wants an authorization from Congress to use it against the Islamic State, which he is doing anyway.
Russia is isolated and its economy in tatters, the President claimed, but it also holds on to Crimea and a large part of Donbas in southeastern Ukraine. He offered no new moves to counter Putin but rather “steady, persistent resolve.” On Cuba, the Administration has already begun to restore diplomatic ties. The President reiterated that he wants Congress to end the embargo, which isn’t in the cards unless Raul Castro gets converted to multi-party democracy in his dotage.
Iran is the big issue. The President naturally vaunted the interim Joint Plan of Action and hopes for a comprehensive one by the end of June. He promised to veto any new sanctions, because they would destroy the international coalition negotiating with Tehran and ruin chances for a peaceful settlement. All options are on the table, the President said, but America will go to war only as a last resort. Nothing new in that either, though I believe he would while many of my colleagues think not.
Trolling on, the President did cybersecurity, Ebola, Asia-Pacific, climate change and values (as in democracy and human rights), stopping briefly at Gitmo and electronic surveillance along the way. Nothing new here either, just more of that steady, persistent resolve.
Notable absences (but correct me if I missed something): any mention of the Israel/Palestine “peace process,” Egypt, Saudi Arabia (or the Gulf), India (where the President will visit starting Sunday), Latin America (other than Cuba), North Korea.
What does it all add up to? It is a foreign policy of bits and pieces, with themes of retrenchment, reduced reliance on US military power (but little sign of increased diplomatic potency), prevention of new threats and support for American values woven in. The President continues to resist pronouncing a doctrine of his own but wants to be seen as a moderate well within the broad parameters of American internationalism. He is wishing to get bipartisan action from Congress on a few things: trade promotion authority, the authorization to use force, dismantling the Cuba embargo, closing Guantanamo. But none of this is new ground.
He is also prepared to forge ahead on his own. As I’ve noted before, this lame duck knows how to fly.
In case you didn’t watch it last night and have more patience than I do, here is the whole thing:
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Producing more enemies than you can kill
No doubt one of the few international issues President Obama will highlight in tonight’s State of the Union speech is the threat of international terrorists associated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. He will cite the American military response in Iraq and Syria as vital to our national interests and claim we are making progress, at least in Iraq.
He is unlikely to acknowledge that the problem is spreading and getting worse. In Libya, there are two parliaments and two governments, one of which has ample extremist backing. In Yemen, rebels have laid siege to the government the Washington relies on for cooperation against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram is wrecking havoc. In Syria, moderates have lost territory and extremists have gained. Taliban violence is up in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Fourteen years ago when the World Trade Center was attacked in New York City Al Qaeda amounted to a few hundred militants hiding out mainly in Afghanistan, with small clandestine cells in Europe and the US. Now estimates of the number of extremists change so rapidly it is hard to know which to cite, but there are surely more than 100 times as many actively engaged in extremist Islamist campaigns or recruitment efforts in close to a dozen countries, including (in addition to the ones cited above) Somalia, Egypt, Niger, Mali, Algeria, Palestine and Tunisia. Counting the numbers of sympathizers in Europe, Russia and the United States is just impossible.
The long war against Islamist extremism is not going well. It can’t, because we are fighting what amounts to an insurgency against the existing state system principally with military means. Drones and air strikes are killing lots of militants, and I am even prepared to believe that the collateral damage to innocents is minimized, whatever that means. But extremist recruitment is more than keeping up with extremist losses. We are making more enemies than we are killing. Insurgencies thrive on that.
The Obama administration is apparently prepared to make things worse, as it now leans towards supporting UN and Russian peace initiatives in Syria that are premised on allowing Bashar al Asad to stay in power. The Islamic State will welcome that, as it will push relative moderates in their direction and weaken the prospects for a democratic transition. Bashar has shown no inclination to fight ISIS and will continue to focus his regime’s efforts against democracy advocates.
President Obama knows what it takes to shrink extremist appeal: states that protect their populations with rule of law and govern inclusively and transparently. This is the opposite of what Bashar al Asad, and his father, have done. But President Obama has no confidence the US or anyone in the international community can build such states in a matter of months or even years. So he does what comes naturally to those whose strongest available means is military power: he uses it to achieve short-term objectives, knowing that its use is counter-productive in the longer term.
But producing more enemies than you can kill is not a strategy that works forever. The Union is recovering from a devastating economic crisis and can now afford to take a fresh look at its foreign policy priorities. I’ll be with the President when he calls tonight for completion of the big new trade and investment agreement with Europe (TTIP) and its counterpart in the Pacific (TTP). These are good things that can find support on both sides of the aisle, among Democrats and Republicans.
I’ll groan when he calls for a new Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) but says little or nothing about building the kind of states in the Greater Middle East that are needed to immunize the region against extremism. Support for restoration of autocracy in Egypt and for Gulf monarchies is not a policy that will counter extremism. We are guaranteeing that things are going to get worse before they get better.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Here we go again
French Prime Minister Valls declared war Saturday:
It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.
I guess that was inevitable, but it brings back un-fond memories of George W. Bush declaring war on terror. At least this time the enemy is well-framed: Bush’s war on a means was a lot worse idea than war on the people who use it and the ideas that support it.
But Valls’ is still a bad frame, because declaring “war” makes military and paramilitary means the prime weapons. They are unquestionably necessary, but just as unquestionably insufficient, to deal with the problem. The stand-offs in Paris with three hostage-takers required the French security forces to use their impressive military capabilities. Police vigilance was vital to protecting today’s massive demonstration in Place de la Republique. But countering violent radicalism over the next months and years will entail far more than effectiveness on the part of security forces.
The murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff, several police and four hostages at a Kosher deli were horrendous. But they are still a small percentage of the almost 700 murders per year in France (which has a murder rate one-fourth that of the US). Yes, the numbers are important because of the political purpose and what the incidents may portend for the future. But a crackdown “against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom and solidarity” is far more likely to elicit a violent reaction than to calm the situation.
If you doubt the relevance of this point, read Jonathan Turley’s description in this morning’s Washington Post of the French government crackdown on free speech in recent years. He argues:
Indeed, if the French want to memorialize those killed at Charlie Hebdo, they could start by rescinding their laws criminalizing speech that insults, defames or incites hatred, discrimination or violence on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, sex or sexual orientation. These laws have been used to harass the satirical newspaper and threaten its staff for years. Speech has been conditioned on being used “responsibly” in France, suggesting that it is more of a privilege than a right for those who hold controversial views.
Ironically, Charlie Hebdo was founded in response to a government ban on a predecessor. It is also ironic that today’s demonstration included the presence of such stalwart defenders of freedom of speech as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s the kind of audience a war on Islamic extremism gets you. It should make us all wonder whether we’ve got the signals right.
Protecting Western societies from violent Islamic extremism is a worthy cause. But it should not be conceived as war. Quite to the contrary. The essential tools are those of peacebuilding: a culture of lawfulness, inclusive governance that ensures wide and non-discriminatory distribution of economic benefits, protection of human rights, integration, good understanding and dialogue among diverse social groups, security forces committed to protection of citizens, and citizens committed to maintaining a society they perceive as just and free. There may still be terrorist incidents in such a society, but they will be far less frequent than in one that discriminates against those who wear the hijab and populates vast suburbs with unemployed Muslim youth.
I imagine that the French security services are among the most capable in the world. But they missed the radicalization of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher deli murders. Someone in Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, managed to reach deep into French society to find and mobilize extremists. Even in the most alert and just of societies, that could happen. But I don’t know anyone who would suggest that most Muslim youth in France feels it has a fair stake in the success of the country. Making that a reality will be far more important, and far harder, than the war on Islamic extremism.
RSS - Posts
