Middle East
A Sunni extremist takeover of Pakistan would be an immense threat to the US and hard to counter, Bruce Reidel writes in The National Interest.
Such a takeover
would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda’s capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world.
“A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future,” he writes. It would require the Taliban expanding eastward, and teaming up with the radical group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Punjab, assisted by harnessing the grievances of Pakistan’s vast impoverished classes.
A jihadist Suni emirate would face significant internal resistance, Reidel writes, including from Shia, who make up a fifth of the population. To counter potential opposition within the army, the new regime would likely create a parallel military force, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
“In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers,” Reidel suggests.
External effects would be severe:
- Pakistan would increase its influence in Afghanistan, with some of the Pashtun areas all but incorporated into Pakistan.
- Afghanistan would be split between Pakistan-backed Pashtun and their Tajik, Uzbek, and Shia opponents backed by Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian countries.
- Iran and Pakistan would face off in Afghanistan, and support separatists movements. Iran would accelerate its nuclear program in the face of the Pakistani threat.
- India and Pakistan might easily come to blows, with anti-Indian extremists in power in Islamabad.
- Israel and Pakistan would be active adversaries, but Israel would have few options for countering the distant Asian state.
- All Muslim countries would face the prospect of a newly energized radical movement using Pakistan as a support and training base.
- The United States would lack military options, and a blockade would be difficult to carry out and hard to sustain.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy)
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace made several forecasts for Iran in the course of an interview last week with Middle East Progress:
- “The combination of oil at $60 a barrel and heightened economic sanctions is going to be much more difficult for the Ahmadinejad government to endure, I think it’s going to require the use of very repressive means to stay in power. And again, the political and economic costs of this repression are significant over the long term.”
- ” The reality is that as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and company are in power, we’re never going to reach a nuclear accord which sufficiently allays our suspicions—and Israel’s suspicions—that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.”
- “Ahmadinejad would welcome an Israeli strike in order to try and achieve the same outcome as Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran—namely to unite disparate political factions against a common threat and keep giddy Iranian minds busy with foreign quarrels.”
- “If Saudi Arabia—whose relations with Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president—were to quietly increase output in order to provoke a price drop it could prove devastating to Iran, far more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated.”
This week the threat of war in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds was made explicit, with the Washington Post reporting that Kurdish officials are saying that “Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region and the Iraqi government are closer to war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”
Kurdish and Iraqi army units have engaged in standoffs over the disputed border areas, where Kurdish and Arab populations mix.
Little is being done to resolve issues: Prime Minister Maliki and Kurdish President Barzani have not even spoken in a year.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
The International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a report today on Israel’s religious right and the settlements, arguing that this sector of Israeli society must be dealt with if a peace process is to advance.
The driving trend is that “national-religious and ultra-orthodox Israelis have gained influence and leverage. Entrenched in many West Bank settlements, they benefit from demographic trends: Israel’s army is increasingly dependent on their manpower and politicians on their votes.” The report goes on:
Together, the national-religious and ultra-orthodox carry weight far in excess of their numbers. They occupy key positions in the military, the government and the education and legal sectors, as well as various layers of the bureaucracy. They help shape decision-making and provide a support base for religious militants, thereby strengthening the struggle against future territorial withdrawals from both within and without state institutions.
(For more on the military, see this UPI article from earlier this month; it says that “The infiltration of the military by religious zealots has been under way for three decades, and much of the officer corps — up to 30 percent by some estimates — now consists of men from religious extremist groups.” The ICG report has more detail.)
The ICG continues:
The religious right believes it has time on its side. Its two principal camps – the national-religious and ultra-orthodox – boast the country’s highest birth rates. They have doubled their population in West Bank settlements in a decade. They are rising up military ranks.
The ICG offers a number of ameliorative measures. The most interesting is this: “While some settlers will be determined no matter what to remain on what they consider their Biblical land, here, too, ideas are worth exploring. In negotiations with Palestinians, Israel could examine whether and how settlers choosing to remain might live under Palestinian rule.”
In some sense, Israel seems to be becoming Middle Eastern: Western values are being replaced by religious and nationalist fervor. The consequences could be severe:
- A fundamentalist Israel may simply be incapable of seeking a just peace, suggesting increasingly dark prospects for the nation.
- American values and interests will diverge ever more sharply from such an Israel, straining the bonds between the two countries.
- Secular and moderate Israelis may find their country increasingly unwelcome, which could drive a brain drain that would undermine Israel’s creativity and competitiveness.
- This change could speed the estrangement of American Jews from Israel, a process that some say has already begun. And American Jewish support is the central driver of American support for Israel.
In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman predicts the rise of Turkey to great power status. “It will likely soon reemerge in its old role, as the dominant force in the” Middle East, he writes (p. 81).
Yigal Schleifer of the Christian Science Monitor provides some clues as to how that scenario might develop in recent reporting.
- Turks are importing Arab brides to rural areas, with the aid of “Turkey’s growing clout and visibility in the Middle East.” A Turk says that Moroccan brides are willing to come east because they “think Turkey has prestige, that it’s a strong country. They also trust Turkey – they know it’s a Muslim country and that we pray and read the Koran.” Turkish TV is helping to bolster the Turkish image as well. (Schleifer points out the curiosity that in this case the Internet is reinforcing polygamy, which is illegal, and widely considered backward, in Turkey.)
- Turkish officials have spoken out strongly against perceived Chinese oppression of the Uighurs, who are a Turkic people. Prime Minister Erdogan went so far as to say that “The incidents in China are, simply put, tantamount to genocide.” This of course upset China, putting Turkey in the position of deciding between pan-Turkic emotional solidarity, and its realpolitik goals.
Schleifer writes that Turkey’s strong stand against Israel’s attack on Gaza helped its image with Arabs; this suggests that if Turkey really wants to be a regional leader, it may have to distance itself from Israel — unless Israel achieves peace with its neighbors.
(Image courtesy MichalFotos, Flickr)
Iraq may still destabilize, and one of the potential faultlines became clearer two weeks ago, when the Iraqi Kurdish parliament passed a new constitution for the region, in defiance of the central government and American pressure.
The New York Times writes that the action suggests the level of mistrust between Kurdistan and the central government, and “raises the question of whether a peaceful resolution of disputes between the two is possible.” A Sunni Arab member of parliament commented that “It is a declaration of hostile intent and confrontation. Of course it will lead to escalation.”
The constitution defines Kurdistan as including not only the established provinces, but also several disputed areas, setting the stage for more clashes. Conditions are already tense enough that Kurdish and federal security forces have had several standoffs.
The result of a failure to resolves these issues could be armed conflict between Arab Iraq and the Kurds (rather than the more general fragmentation that has been more likely in the past). Though the Kurds have been attempting to build separate ties to the US, the United States would likely stand aside in such a confrontation, even if it meant disaster for the Kurds, rather than throw away the American relationship with Iraq.
The constitution may also not bode well for future Kurdish governance, as it reportedly places few checks on the power of the president of Kurdistan, potentially enabling authoritarian tendencies in the dominant Kurdish parties.
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Middle East Progress this week interviewed retired Israeli colonel Shaul Arieli about Israel’s settlements, which are now arguably the chief obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Arieli made these points:
- Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories continue to expand, and “outposts” are being made more substantial. This expansion is occurring outside the main “settlement blocs,” including in settlements beyond the “separation barrier.”
- The Palestinian Authority “have fulfilled all of their Road Map commitments,” but Israel has contravened them by continuing to expand settlements.
- “Settlements change the reality on the ground in a way that makes the contiguity of the Palestinian territories less and less viable, not to mention the grabbing of private Palestinian lands.
- “To guarantee the settlers’ safety, Israel prevents the Palestinians from using more and more main transportation routes, which of course hinders the development of the Palestinian economy.”
- Israel has about 600 checkpoints and roadblocks in Palestinian territory, another impediment to the Palestinian economy.
- Since the 1993 Oslo Accords,” the number of Israelis residing beyond the Green Line multiplied two and a half times—today the formal number of settlers is 470,000 versus 222,000 in 1993, including in Jerusalem.”
- “Under any model of agreement, even under the Geneva Accords in which Israel annexes only two percent of the West Bank, not more than 100,000-120,000 settlers would have to be evacuated.”
- “Israel’s military supremacy combined with international guarantees and legitimacy as well as with the Palestinian interest to avoid risking the results achieved in a peace agreement would all protect Israel’s security after a withdrawal takes place.”
In other words, the trendline is still negative, but Arieli sees paths forward.
(Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)
Events of the last three week’s have unsettled Iran’s future, and the range of potential outcomes is now broader than it was before.
Regardless of how Iranians actually voted, “Iran is a divided country now,” as one analyst put it to the New York Times, with different forces backing more starkly competing visions of the world. As a result, all of these outcomes have become more likely:
- A shift to straight authoritarianism, unleavened by the partial democracy that had characterized post-revolution Iran, with the security forces and hard-line conservatives at their core
- A rapid transition to a less authoritarian version of Iran’s religiously based governance system, an idea supported by “many prominent first-generation revolutionaries”
- An outright collapse of the theocratic system, though this might plunge Iran into civil conflict
The forces driving these futures are quite complex. These are a few factors that have emerged:
- Some grand ayatollahs have expressed sympathy with the dissenters and have not sided with supreme leader Khamenei, the Washington Post notes.
- Powerful establishment figure Rafsanjani may be abandoning opposition candidate Mousavi, Juan Cole reports.
- The Basij volunteer militia, other security forces, and even the Revolutionary Guard may be less monolithic than thought, and might balk at some kinds of repression, analyst Afshin Molavi suggests.
- An Iranian student has suggested that Ahmadinejad could be in a position to do a “Nixon-to-China,” improving relations with the US on the basis of his conservative credentials.
Though Iran appears to be headed for more years with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, columnist Roger Cohen recently noted a potential long-term path for the nation.
Former president and powerful establishment figure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani “believes in a China option for Iran: a historic rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime.”
This could either mean simply less militancy abroad, which would greatly reduce external pressure on the country, or a the full Chinese option: greatly reducing the trappings of Islamic theocracy while maintaining control of key aspects of power. The analogy is not precise, however, as Iran is much more democratic than China, and indeed more democratic than most states in the Middle East, US allies included.
(Flag courtesy State Dept.)
Thomas Ricks, author of the acclaimed Fiasco, argued recently in the Washington Post that US involvement in Iraq may be only half over.
“A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for,” he writes, because Iraq is more fragile than it now seems.
- Iraqi factions will likely try to break out of the current arrangements now enforced by the US. This could mean full-scale civil war.
- A military takeover is possible. An expert suggests to Ricks that “the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people.”
- Power centers in Iraq are diverse and obscure, and include former Sunni insurgents and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Ricks suggests al-Sadr is likely to gain more power — and that he might become an American ally, as the Sadrists are Iran’s Shiite Iraqi foes, historically.
- The Iraqi army may revert to brutal Saddam-era tactics without American supervision.
The consensus in the US military, Ricks suggests, is that Americans will still be fighting in Iraq in 2015.
