Tag: us

U.S. hopes to arm Pakistani tribes against Al Qaeda

U.S. hopes to arm Pakistani tribes against Al Qaeda:

WASHINGTON: A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.

If adopted, the proposal would join elements of a shift in strategy that would also be likely to expand the presence of American military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists, officials said. The United States now has only about 50 troops in Pakistan, a Pentagon spokesman said, a force that could grow by dozens under the new approach.

The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province in Iraq that has been hailed as a great success in fighting foreign insurgents there. But it raises the question of whether such partnerships can be forged without a significant American military presence in Pakistan. And it is unclear whether enough support can be found among the tribes.

Can’t really comment about this stuff with any expertise whatsoever, but I would worry about long-term consequences of empowering local tribal chiefs. They’ve proved again and again to be fair-weather friends. But perhaps rewarding those that collaborate with what these areas have always needed — infrastructure and investment — and waving around a very big stick would work.

Links for 11/9/07, and a little on Saudis

Regarding the last article on Saudi Arabia, Hamid makes the argument that the US should put democracy-promotion at the forefront of its policy because lack of democracy creates terrorism and extremist ideology, and calls for conditionality on the US arms deal with Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of both Saudi Arabia and the US. The Saudi regime is an active exporter of terrorism and extremist ideology, and this has nothing to do with lack of democracy. It is a long-standing, deliberate policy backed at the highest levels of the royal family. This is a country that has funded and provided manpower to paramilitary movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and many other places. It has also exported and financed the most intolerant strands of Islamic theology throughout the Muslim world. At one point the US backed this, or was tolerant of it at least. But it is very much the same phenomenon that is taking place today, only this time against US interests.

With regards to conditionality, the Saudis could very well buy the weapons themselves, and the deal is a boon to the US arms industry. The important thing about the deal is not the money or weapons being delivered but the underlying strategic alliance that provides security for the Saudi royal family. But this regime will continue to promote extremist ideologies at home and abroad, and genuine democratic reforms in Saudi Arabia (a goal desirable in itself but that is certainly not linked to greater stability) would be better served by weakening, not strengthening, the al-Sauds — not that this is going to happen, for obvious oil and corporate power reasons.

Total Falafel Awareness

FBI Mined Grocery Store Records to Find Iranian Terrorists:

Bay Area FBI agents wanting to find Iranian secret agents data-mined grocery store records in 2005 and 2006, hoping that tahini purchases would lead them to domestic terrorists, according to Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein. The head of the FBI’s criminal investigations unit – Michael Mason – shut down the Total Falafel Awareness program, arguing it would be illegal to put someone on a terrorist watch list for simply sticking skewers into lamb, Stein reports.

Really this is getting ridiculous. Is that the best lead they can come up with? I also like the idea that would-be terrorist hiding in America are somehow exclusively eating their national foods. I bet Muhammad Atta and company ate tons of Twinkies, mexican food and loved the spicy chicken wings at Hooters.

Lewis, Ajami launch anti-MESA

The inevitable has happened: obviously frustrated that they are still a minority in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, a group of well-connected academics has set up an alternative to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the respected multi-disciplinary group that gathers the brightest minds in the field. Who better to do this than the usual suspects of Bush-friendly academia, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis? Thus was created the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. I’ll quote extensively from the Chronice of Higher Education piece about this:

Seeking to change the direction of Middle Eastern and African studies, a new scholarly organization was announced Thursday — with some big name scholars on board and some tough criticism for the discipline. The biggest scholarly names in the new group, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University, are associated with support for the Bush administration’s view of the Middle East, a decidedly minority opinion within Middle Eastern studies.

The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa aims to have a full range of services — conferences, a journal, newsletters, and so forth. Its council, in addition to Lewis and Ajami, includes Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of the Johnson and Carter administrations, and George P. Shultz, who was secretary of state under President Reagan.

Materials sent to reporters said that the new group was founded because of “the increasing politicization of these fields, and the certainty that a corrupt understanding of them is a danger to the academy as well as the future of the young people it purports to educate.”

A statement from Lewis said: “Because of various political and financial pressures and inducements, the study of the Middle East and of Africa has been politicized to a degree without precedent. This has affected not only the basic studies of language, literature and history, but also has affected other disciplines, notably economics, politics and social science. Given the importance of these regions, there is an acute need for objective and accurate scholarship and debate, unhampered by entrenched interests and allegiances. Through its annual conference, journal, newsletter, and Web site, ASMEA will provide this.”

While the announcement didn’t mention it by name, the Middle East Studies Association has to date been the scholarly organization for that region. The kinds of criticisms made by Lewis in his statement are similar to those others have made about MESA — charges that scholars in the group feel are an unfair slur on their group and on their work. The new group arrives at a time that Middle Eastern studies has been the subject of intense debate on many campuses, with dueling charges that academic freedom is at risk.

Mark T. Clark, president of the new association, is a professor of political science and director of the National Security Studies Program at California State University at San Bernardino. In a brief interview Thursday, he said that the new group was started “by mutual interest by a bunch of us” who wanted an association “that would be more independent and reflect the academic community more than interest groups.”

He said that his interest in the Middle East is strategic, rather than just historic or cultural, and that he thinks it is good for American scholars to have a strategic view of the region in addition to more traditional approaches.

Asked about MESA, he described it as “kind of a closed circle” of people with similar views. Asked if he had ever participated in that association’s activities, he said he had not. Asked why he didn’t try to add his perspective to the existing group, he said that would be, “for lack of a better word, apartheid,” in which his views would be separated off from the rest. “We’re going to have a greater mix of perspectives than MESA ever had,” he said.

While some of the scholars involved in the new group are known for similar political views, Clark said that “it’s not neoconservative at all” and that scholars of a range of views are welcome to join.

The goal of the association is to be supported entirely by members’ dues, to preserve its independence. To get off the ground, the association also has received some “private donations.” Clark declined to say who had given the funds.

It’s somewhat appropriate that ASMEA’s new president is someone from the field of security studies, a field whose very purpose is to provide consulting services to governments and tends to be of the same mindset as policymakers (not always of course). This has been one of the key arguments by the people behind Campus Watch, who are unhappy about the fact that the top experts on the region tend to be rather negative about current US policies or about the extraordinary (and misguided) amount of support for Israel that America provides. That is naturally a rubbish argument, because policymakers should be listening to experts who tell them what they need to know, not what they want to hear.

One of the great ironies behind ASMEA is, of course, that it claims to want to fight the “politicization” of the field. Ironic, then, that its entire board appears to be composed of people who focus on politics, whereas MESA has plenty of academics who do nothing even remotely political.

Ironic, then, that its founders are people with a reputation for fierce partisanship (Victor David Hanson is up there) — in fact they appear almost exclusively to be conservatives who wear their politics on their sleeve. Also all supporters of Israel, including the non-Americans on the board like Cevik Bir, a former Turkish general who played a key role in building the Turkish-Israel alliance and was decorated by Israel. Others include Kenneth Stein, the former Carter advisor who made a big hullabaloo about rejecting his book on Israeli apartheid.

Ironic, then, that its vice-chairman Fouad Ajami is a well-known public defender of the Bush administration who told Dick Cheney that “the streets will erupt in joy” if the US invades Iraq. (See Adam Shatz’s classic profile of Ajami.)

Ironic, then, that its chairman Bernard Lewis is increasingly seen a kook because of his predictions last summer that eschatological concerns drive Iranian policy. I would say merely leaving it at that is not enough — Bernard Lewis, perhaps once a serious scholar (his work on Ottomans is appreciated by experts in the field), has turned into a racist apologist for imperialist policies. I don’t use the word “racist” lightly, but I think it’s warranted. Take for instance a recent column he penned for the Atlantic Monthly — I don’t have a link and am copying from the November 2007 magazine’s page 23, where Lewis was asked to write about the “American idea”:

The better part of my life was dominated by two great struggles– the first against Nazism, the second against Bolshevism. In both of these, after long and bitter conflict, we were victorious. Both were a curse to their own peoples, as well as a threat to the world, and for those peoples, defeat was a liberation.

Today we confront a third totalitarian perversion, this time of Islam — a challenge in some ways similar, i
n some different.

Note that he doesn’t say “Islamism” or “political Islam” or “Islamic extremism” — just Islam. This is hardly a constructive, nuanced approach to take, although perhaps not a surprising one from a cheerleader for the Crusades. There are more examples of his strange politics here.

In other words, while there would be nothing wrong with starting another (or many others) alternatives to MESA, or more specialized scholarly associations, ASMEA appears from the get-go to have been founded with a very political purpose: to denounced as “politicized” academics who do not agree with their views. The involvement of people who are no doubt embittered by their estrangement from mainstream academia (i.e. the general consensus of a majority of experts in their field) speaks volumes about their intentions. In other words, this is the next step up from Campus Watch.

Salah on the permanent black cloud in US-Egypt relations

Al Hayat‘s Muhammad Salah uses Cairo’s seasonal “black cloud” of pollution as a metaphor for Egypt-US relations. There are some interesting ideas there about mutual blackmail, notably over Hamas — which Cairo has visibly warmed up to recently — and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The conviction even prevails among Egyptians that US reform plans have evaporated and that the pressure the White House can exercise to achieve political and economic reforms in Middle East countries, headed by Egypt, are no longer operative and are unlikely to take place in the future. However, Cairo believes that the Americans are using some domestic Egyptian issues to blackmail the country’s foreign policies and direct them on a path that satisfies Washington, as is the case with issues such as Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Iran. Although Rice’s visit to the region, which included Egypt, focused on the fall conference on peace and trying to reach a joint Israeli-Palestinian document that doesn’t face Arab opposition, in addition to the request from Arab parties, including Egypt, to alleviate its criticism of the conference and try to make it a success, a “black cloud” continues to darken the sky of US-Egyptian relations and it will be hard to hide it.

Adding to this is the official Egyptian sentiment about the conference and criticisms by officials, with President Hosni Mubarak at their head; the president was surprised at the lack of a clear agenda for such a meeting. If the Americans were busy preparing for the conference, the secretary of state avoided getting into a debate that might anger the Egyptians. She didn’t raise the issue of Ayman Nour or the demands of the opposition, but this did not prevent her from expressing her rejection of joint Egyptian-Sudanese efforts to arrange a dialogue in Cairo between Fatah and Hamas, to treat the deteriorating situation in Gaza and achieve a reconciliation among Palestinians.

Thus, another black cloud arrived to cover the skies of the visit and what took place during it. The Americans, who have rejected and continue to reject any dialogue with Hamas or on the movement’s future role, have equated their position on Islamist Palestinians with Cairo’s position on Egyptian Islamists. They believed that Cairo, which rejects any dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, is asking the Americans to accept Hamas as a partner in rule over Palestine. Meanwhile, Egypt sees this link as further American blackmail and an absence of a realistic vision of conditions on the ground in Palestine. Thus, Rice visited Egypt and left, but it appears that the black cloud remains.

Like an old married couple, (unevenly) co-dependent and set in their ways, two countries plod ahead in policies based on the denial of reality.

Audio: Classic VOA interviews

The US Embassy recently produced a CD of old interviews from the Voice of America Arabic service archives. (VOA Arabic was canceled a while ago, to be replaced by the much-criticized, pop-heavy Radio Sawa). The interviews — of major Egyptian writers, artists, singers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Tahia Carioca — are also available online. I haven’t had a chance to hear more than the opening minutes of the Mahfouz interview, but I look forward to furthering my Mahfouz obsession by listening to the whole thing soon. In general, it’s nice to see the US Embassy support a cultural initiative like this.

Zoellick, the World Bank and the Arab world

The WSJ is running an interview with Robert Zoellick, the new president of the World Bank,in which Zoellick’s idea of increasing the Bank’s focus on the Arab world is explored, albeit briefly. The impression I get from the interview excerpts below is that Zoellick is very much informed by his experience as US Trade Representative in the Bush administration, which coincided with the launch of a Middle East Free Trade Area and US policy of aiming at bilateral FTAs that would eventually create a super-FTA between the Middle East and the US.

While the Europeans have been aiming at something similar for a while to encourage both EU-Arab world trade and inter-Arab trade, much attention was given to the new US policy because it was implicitly and explicitly tied to other Bush administration aims, notably the “Forward Agenda for Freedom” and its desire to cultivate “moderate” regimes with a commitment to economic liberalization. For those who followed the US-Egypt trade relationship in the last few years, it was notorious that Zoellick was often exasperated with his Egyptian counterparts and dealt very brashly with them. Eventually, one of his successes was pushing for a QIZ agreement with Egypt and Israel (arguably something that Egypt needed to do anyway to protect its garment and textile industry, but that is another argument.) He also cultivated that part of the Egyptian regime that was willing to carry out economic reforms, and helped them to some extent face off more conservative elements.

One then wonders, then, whether Zoellick might not pursue, even more strongly than his disgraced predecessor Paul Wolfowitz, aggressive promotion of neo-liberal economic policies and tie them to political reform issues. Considering the debates that have taken place in the World Bank in the past decade (Wolfensohn, Stiglitz, Sachs etc.) one might be tempted as this trend as going to the bad old ways of the 1990s, with a pro-Israel element to boot. Not that, mind you, Zoellick is wrong to say that the Bank should play a role in boosting social peace by promoting job creation and so forth. But one wonders what strings will be attached.

WSJ: You’re interested in putting together an initiative aimed at the Arab world. Tell us why?

Mr. Zoellick: This is a set of countries [that have] probably been underserved by the bank, and so what I’m trying to identify how can we work with some of these governments and the private sector to create additional opportunity and development. I think you have a changed approach among a number of these governments, that they’re trying to pursue economic reforms to create opportunity, create jobs, but — critically important — also meet social development needs. If you look at Egypt, one of the challenges will be, can people create jobs and opportunity and have a sense that the government is meeting social needs? [If not], others will try to meet those needs, as you have seen elsewhere in the Arab world.

WSJ: Does your work as U.S. trade representative inform your ideas?

Mr. Zoellick: The U.S. Congress had created something called QIZs, qualified industrial zones, which Jordan used to great effect. What they permitted was duty-free access to the United States for goods produced in these zones. But the country had to work out with Israel a certain percentage of Israeli investment, and that was to be negotiated by the countries.

Egypt had held off, and so one of the last things I did [as U.S. trade representative] in 2004 was to participate in an event in Cairo with [Israel’s Ehud] Olmert, who was then the trade minister, and [Rashid Mohamed] Rashid, who was commerce minister, to create a number of these QIZs.

What stuck in my mind is that as I was leaving for the airport, there were reports of two demonstrations. One was of about 300 intellectuals that were protesting Egypt’s doing an agreement with Israel. The other was thousands of workers who were protesting that there weren’t more QIZs, because they wanted the jobs. It’s a good example of how economic development is not only necessary to drive jobs, but fits into hope and better relations as well.

Also from the article that accompanied the interview:

Mr. Zoellick says he plans to focus more on the Arab world and encourage the kinds of reformers he met when negotiating free-trade pacts with Oman, Bahrain and Morocco and pushing for stronger trade ties among Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Boosting employment is a huge challenge in the Middle East, where the birth rate is high and economic growth isn’t. Mr. Zoellick believes that focusing on labor-intensive export industries, like textiles, could help. His theory: The bank can help “create societal cohesion by giving people the chance to have opportunity and development.”

To come up with specifics, Mr. Zoellick has consulted his onetime economics professor at Swarthmore, Howard Pack, now at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Mr. Pack says trade liberalization won’t work unless other changes are made too, including building better ports and roads and making customs systems less corrupt. Education and social mores are critical, too. When Asian nations in the 1970s and 1980s jumped into textiles and manufacturing, they began with workers trained in manufacturing and women willing to work outside the home. That is often not the case in Arab nations.

One thing about Zoellick is that he was always one of the best elements (in terms of talent and ability to get things done) of the Bush administration, and appears to be a much more skilled, and tougher, operator than Wolfowitz. So this kind of initiative could really have legs, for better or worse.

Dipnote, the State Department blog

The State Department has launched its own blog, Dipnote. I expect much spin and PR for Karen Hughes, and hopefully some helpful tips about seating arrangements and other etiquette issues. Since policy issues will not be discussed with any degree of seriousness (after all there is a press office to handle that) it’d be nice to see some juicy anecdotes from FSOs (that’s Foreign Service Officers).

Hodeiby: Your best friend hates you

Your best friend hates you: prolific Muslim Brother Ibrahim Houdeiby’s latest article, perhaps his best one yet, on Egypt’s promotion of anti-Americanism and how it relates to the “engage the MB” debate. He concludes with an interesting argument:

In the era of “neo-terrorism,” or micro-terrorist groups, this increasing hostility only means a threat to American national security. With the rapid boom in technology and communication, it takes no more than a connection to the Internet and a few dollars to develop a bomb and threaten the security and lives of innocents anywhere. Therefore, relying on the strong relations with Egypt’s dictator as a substitute for building bridges of understanding with the Egyptian people is a strategic mistake.

The current and next American administrations have one of two possible alternatives. The first is to continue supporting a regime that complies with all their demands yet spreads embedded anti-Americanism on the domestic level, and suffer the possible consequences of that, which will be devastating to everyone. The second alternative is to support real democracy in Egypt, and realize that the outcome would be a government that would not necessarily serve America’s short term interests in the region. The outcome will be a government that pursues Egypt’s interests, and manifests the people’s will, yet does not fuel widespread inherent hostility towards the United States.

On the other hand, the MB is not exactly known for its pro-US rhetoric either, is it? So the message is, if you encourage democracy in Egypt, even if it will inevitably strengthen the MB (at least initially), Egypt will continue to play more or less within the limits imposed by American regional hegemony. And presumably refrain from doing things like sending soldiers to defend Lebanon from Israel. Or am I reading it wrong?

Report Says Hussein Was Open To Exile Before 2003 Invasion

Report Says Hussein Was Open To Exile Before 2003 Invasion:

“The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “He seems to have indicated he would be open to exile if they would let him take one billion dollars and all the information he wants on weapons of mass destruction.”

I can think of several others I’d happily make the same deal with. But what is this bit on WMD information if there were no WMD?