Saturday, October 25, 2008

Saudi Efforts Paying-Off


Saudi Arabia is making headway in the fight against Terrorism. The country has long been the fountainhead of jihadist radicalism. Saudi courts have begun procedures to try 991 prisoners held on terrorism charges, in the most sweeping legal action yet taken in the global campaign against the extremists. What is unique about the Saudi court prosecutions is the trials take place under strict Islamic law before a panel of judges who are, like all those in the arch-conservative kingdom, schooled in the strict Wahhabist interpretation that has helped to inspire the ideology of groups such as al-Qaeda itself. Sharia sentences carry greater legitimacy than those given by military tribunals the rest of the World is so keen to hold. The Saudi’s accused not only include active members of al-Qaeda, which carried out some 30 attacks in the kingdom between 2003 and 2006, killing more than 90 civilians and 74 policemen, but also of prominent sheikhs whose sermons justified the violence of the attacks.

The Saudi campaign is unique to the Middle East because unlike other countries that have relied strictly on security forces to counter the threat, the kingdom chose a multi-pronged approach involving public awareness campaigns, legal and educational reforms and religious counseling. Saudi Arabia has another program that seeks to combat jihadist ideas on the internet, where the Saudi government hires moderate religious scholars to engage in debate on extremist chat sites. New laws have made incitement to terrorism over the internet a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Since the September 11th attacks three of the four best-known radical websites that carry publicity releases and chat forums for al-Qaeda have been inactive. Such sites, which are carefully monitored by intelligence agencies, have experienced interruptions before, but this is the first time that several have remained out of action for a long time. The lone surviving site, al-Hesbah, is thought by some experts to have been infiltrated by the Saudis, so as to keep tabs on campaigners elsewhere.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

What about Jude Kenan?

Pakistani officials said Jude Kenan will be detained for another two weeks and that's all they would say. The current claim as to why Kenan was found in the FATA area of Pakistan was because he was visiting his Pakistani father. There have been no official statements from his American family in South Carolina. Guess we will have to wait another two weeks for an official Pakistani report.

More about Kenan can be found in The Washington Times.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Unripe for "Dialogue"

The former Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, the country's most powerful opposition leader, called Sunday for dialogue with militants, citing the example of the Northern Ireland peace process. President Zardari and the current government says it will negotiate only with groups that renounce violence. Realistically the Taliban militants in the tribal region are unlikely to renounce violence anytime soon, ESPECIALLY when it is believed Osama bin Laden is hiding in the region.

The bottom line is that the increased violence and conflict between Taliban militants and pro-government forces in the tribal region in Pakistan renders the country unripe for mediation. While Sharif can remain hopeful for a future outcome in Pakistan similar to the Northern Ireland peace process (which has yet to become consigned to history itself), it is not in the country’s best interest to focus on such an unrealistic means to accomplish the goal of peace.

What Sharif fails to account for is the Northern Ireland peace process was over 150 years in the making, while the conflict in the tribal region in Pakistan started relatively recently. Unlike the conflict in Northern Ireland, the conflict in Pakistan has been developed and exacerbated by external and transnational conflicts, especially the war in Afghanistan and continued al-Qaida activity.

The Northern Ireland peace process was mediated by the US with support from Ireland and the United Kingdom, giving legitimacy to the conflicting groups in Northern Ireland. No outside countries have voiced a willingness to nurture a dialogue with the Taliban militants and examine the needs of the Taliban militants.

While Sharif may want to get behind the Taliban militants and give them some legitimacy, unless George W. Bush invites Osama bin-Laden to chat at the White House, like Bill Clinton did with Gerry Adams (the leader of the IRA), Sharif’s call for a dialogue similar to the Northern Ireland peace process is just not going to happen.

Where the current leadership in Pakistan needs to look is towards the future. Taliban militants must not gain a stronger foothold within the country as it is currently in a very volatile situation. The violence in the north is compounded with the dire economic crisis Pakistan has been experiencing over the past year, which accrues to the benefit of militant groups.

The downward economic spiral aids recruitment to extremist groups because it forces more poor families to send their children to free madrassa schools (teaching exclusively religious curriculums). As the former Interior Minister acknowledges, "The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute."

"It's not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred," he warns.

The secular pro-western government in Pakistan is getting a lot of heat from its citizens for submissively cooperating with US military operations on the Afghan and Pakistan border. With the country on the brink of a revolution, Zardari’s government cannot risk defeat by the Taliban militants. At this point in time in the history of the Pakistani tribal conflict, dialogue is not a conceivable notion. As long as groups like the Awami National Party, the current ruling coalition based in the insurgency plagued tribal region, question the sincerity of the Pakistani Army’s pursuit of the extremists, there is too much corruption and duplicity for a peace process to succeed.

Government organizations, internal corruption in the Pakistani government, party and group alliances, and NATO and US operations, along with domestic Pakistani issues like the 30% inflation rate need to be addressed before a “dialogue” can be used to advance the peace process in the tribal region.

The Northern Ireland peace process is a desirable course but the “process” should be re-evaluated, developed and tailored to the Pakistan tribal region situation. While the IRA was an extremely dangerous terrorist organization, it can by no means be used as a comparison to al-Qaida that spans globally. President Zardari should remain steadfast in his unwillingness to negotiate with groups who do not renounce violence but maintain a pro-active role in regards to the Taliban militants and their operations in the tribal region.

Sharif should focus on garnering support for the emergency $10bn bailout from the international community that the Pakistani Parliament is seeking or work on the severe shortage of electricity that is crippling Pakistani businesses and households.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

A Backpacker or an al-Qaeda Agent?


The London Times is running an article about an interesting development in Pakistan this morning after an American Jude Kenan was arrested at a tribal area checkpoint. Rumors are swirling as to why in the world the 20 year old was traveling around the militant infested tribal area of Pakistan. He was found in the area where western intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden is hiding. Is he a US spy, an al-Qaeda agent, a would-be American Taleb, an ambitious young journalist or just a backpacker pushing the boundaries of adventure? The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad is still waiting for confirmation on the Pakistani police reports. Interestingly the situation sounds similar to the capture of a US citizen John Walker Lindh in November 2001 while he was fighting with the Taliban.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Regulation Paying Off


While the rest of the world stumbles with bailout plans and sudden economic insecurity, Africa is benefiting from is isolation from the rest of the world. A recent article in The Economist highlights that despite many problems on the continent, optimism and confidence in the continent’s future is abound. Most African countries excluding Zimbabwe have been bringing inflation. GDP has been growing at 5% over the last five years and even with the current economic crisis it is predicted to grow at 6.6%. Africa is predicted to escape the current economy less battered than most places because of the very factors that damaged her in the past are now working in her favor. The African banking sector is excessively regulated, foreign exchange is heavily controlled to prevent heavy investment in Western financial instruments, and foreign ownership of banks is very limited. This de-linkage from the Western financial system has allowed African banks have almost no exposure to the subprime market wreaking havoc everywhere else in the world. Where Africa will be negatively affected by the current economic crisis is the decreasing demand for African commodities. Foreign capital and foreign aid will probably be in decline as well. How Africa will fair in regards to the financial crisis remains to be seen but everything is essentially “so far so good.”

Monday, October 6, 2008

Colonialism and Conflict


Colonialism and Western foreign occupation of the early 20th century in the Middle East has contributed to the current political atmosphere in the region. Western imperial powers created arbitrary nation-state boundary lines, forced the adoption of distinctly western political and economic ideologies, and implemented puppet leadership and oppressive regimes. Current political, religious, tribal, and sectarian tensions in the Middle East have origins in the region’s past of western imperial domination. Although these tensions are indicative of why Winston Churchill’s artificially created boundaries are ineffective in organizing Middle Eastern nation-states, the West cannot be blamed for Middle Eastern governments’ inability to nurture a socio-political atmosphere conducive to creating successful, modern cosmopolitan states. Colonialism cannot be blamed for why countries like Iraq lack success in governance because there are far too many examples of successful Middle Eastern governments that were born out of colonialism.

National boundaries artificially created by the West may be the root cause for much of the conflict in the Middle East, but as John Lukac’s points out in his article for the Boston Globe, Winston Churchill’s Role in the Middle East and Iraq, they did result in stability:
The results of the (West’s) grandiose remaking of the map of the Middle East have remained till this day: Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia among others are extant entities even now. Whereas twenty years after WWI, Poland and the Baltic states ceased to exist, albeit temporarily, and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia no longer exist.
This observation illustrates that if sectarian and religious turmoil were the result of poorly designed boundaries that defined the West’s role in decolonizing the region, then these states would have broken apart long ago. What is failed to be recognized by those who have decided the damage from the history of Western imperialism (which was relatively brief compared to the foreign occupation of the Mongols, the Turks, and the Persians in the Middle East) is the reason for turmoil in the Middle East, is that there have been plenty of success stories within the Middle East like Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

This is not to say these countries did not have their share of struggles, but what modern nation has had a conflict free history? The United States as a British imperial colony fought a revolution against its colonizer Britain. The United States also experienced deep ideological divisions that led to an extremely bloody civil war. Presupposing the Middle East would have been better off without the boundary-making West, it leads one to wonder what would the Turks have done in the Middle East if the Ottoman Empire had not been defeated in WWI.

During the Treaty of Versailles, Churchill was praised by the League of Nations for having turned “a mere collection of tribes into a nation in Iraq” in the mandate system that the Sykes-Picot Agreement created to help administer governance in the Ottoman colonies after the war. The accepted doctrine at the time was that tribes should be combined to create larger nation-states. Collective tribes have proved to be extremely beneficial to the success of the governments in Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan, and more recently with Algeria, and Egypt. By addressing the concerns of the tribes within a country and not focusing on the Islamists, the Jordanian people were able to create an identity of national Jordanian and tribal allegiance before looking to their religious Islamic ties. In an article Mamoun Fandy wrote for The Middle East Policy Journal, Tribe vs. Islam: The Post-colonial Arab State and the Democratic Imperative, he confirms:
Tribe-Islam relations tend to lend support to the superiority of legitimate social organizations, such as the tribe, over ideologies, including Islam (including Shiite and Sunni groups).
King Hussein in Jordan was aware of the strength and ties the people in the Jordanian state held to their tribal affiliations, and his keen observations helped to create the Jordanian state.
What unsuccessful Middle Eastern states have failed to do in introducing and fostering tribal allegiance regardless of present post-colonial borders, discounts the Islam-tribe equation and allows external forces to transform the tribe into a military-backed force within the state. Hizbullah is a prime example of this result. Hizbullah shows the tremendous impact this militant group (a so-called military tribe) can have on the rest of the region as demonstrated by their transnational influence to Lebanon, one of France’s previous success stories until outside forces from Hizbullah and Israel engaged in combat within the sovereign borders of Lebanon. Hizbullah is the very military tribe that Mamoun Fandy warns of in his Tribe vs. Islam article. What is problematic about Hizbullah is there is not a state it is home to. Like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, such a military tribe can be based within a particular state’s borders that permits the military tribe to claim safe haven, but it still must operate across borders. As such, the military tribe poses a hindrance to the regional domination that Western colonialism has actually provided.

Bernard Lewis, in his article What Went Wrong? in the Atlantic Monthly, calls for a new approach in examining the Middle East he said:
For the oppressive but ineffectual governments that rule much of the Middle East, finding targets to blame serves a useful, indeed essential, purpose—to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have introduced. They seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects toward other outside targets.
Lewis examines the blame game in the Middle East and firmly adheres to looking forward for solutions, not re-examining how boundaries could have been drawn to accommodate all of the varied interests in the Middle East. If that were the case there would be a Kurdish Nation by now. This realistic approach is helpful in understanding why so many problems must be combated in the Middle East. For such historical divisions to be overcome, they need not be forgotten but merely set off to the side for larger strides to be made in the economic and political institutions that make up the Middle East.

For many Middle Eastern countries, their dependence on oil revenue has allowed for autocratic and tyrannical governments to remain in power despite popular opposition among their citizenry because the governments are not reliant upon their people for financial support. Greater opposition would be voiced by the citizenry, requiring more participation, if there was a unifying issue to protest such as taxation without representation (link to mamoun) and the unequal distribution of oil. Mamoun and Lewis both examine this proposition in their articles about the Middle East. Each claims that it is ludicrous for these countries to not find alternative sources of income because of the uncertainty of oil and outside aid to the countries. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of profits from oil among the people, especially amongst the tribal factions, creates an extremely unstable environment for the governments and the people.

Fair representation is a positive outcome of Western influence in the region. The lack of fair representation in many Middle Eastern governments, as compared to other similarly ethnically and religiously diverse former colonies like India, leads one to question whether Western imperialism was too brief in this region. In India, British occupation lasted a century, so Western culture could be understood and adapted to the Indian culture more fully. This is not to say that Western culture is necessarily superior to that of Middle Eastern or Indian cultures, but positive elements of both systems are more easily fused together when evident for a longer period of time, as was the case with India. Yemen and Jordan were able to identify that the source of a successful and respected government is freedom. Bernard Lewis in his article What Went Wrong? describes this freedom:
It is freedom of mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and persuasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny.
Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Syria adamantly oppose this Western idea of freedom because their leaders rule based on force and fear from the people. As Western experience amply demonstrates (France being a prime example), freedom and the road to democracy is long and hard, and full of pitfalls and obstacles. Realistic goals should be created for specific Middle Eastern countries. Just as tyrannical monarchies and dictators are in the past for the most part, imperialism is also in the Middle East’s past, and to keep looking back hinders what happens now and in the future for the Middle East.

Mistakes from the past must be acknowledged and avoided in the future; such is the case with the recognition of the importance of tribes in Jordan. It was posited by Sarah Gualtieri in her article Revisioning the Colonial Middle East in the Radical History Review, that more emphasis should be put on tribal affiliations, not Islamist or secular designations, because the designations alienate too many. Tribal groups, unlike secularists, don’t ridicule Islam itself. They remain close to cultural values and make the important distinction that they advocate traditional Islam, which is closer to what is required to live in the real world than pure Islam regardless of sect. Islamists don’t have the broader appeal needed to include all tribal groups. It is important to note that to develop such a moderate government, the outlying groups must become involved; if the leadership remains concentrated the capital city, the leadership will be restricted and unrepresentative of the nation. Jordan’s greatest feat to date was, in empowering those traditionally not in power positions, to increase and widen participation and leadership in government.

Learning from the past is crucial, but obsessing over the past creates distrust and misguided agendas. Italy recently signed an agreement (Elegant Colonialism) to pay five billion dollars in compensation for its colonial rule and misdeeds in Libya. While I agree history must not be ignored, and on a surface level the restitution payment is an honorable gesture for Italy to make, it seems a little late in history for this money to affect those that were hurt most by Italian colonialism. There is no doubt that Italy damaged and retarded the native land and peoples of Libya. Italy, nonetheless, expects to reap great rewards from the agreement like multi-million dollar contracts and tighter security controls over the flow of illegal immigrants. It leaves you to wonder where this leads: if Italy is to go down a colonially themed memory lane, what about restitution for Somalia? There is no doubt Somalia, a former Italian colony, is one of the poorest, most unstable countries in Africa, Italian assistance would surely be of great assistance in Somalia.

In an article written for The Chronicle Review by Dinesh D’souza, Two Cheers for Colonialism, she concludes:
The academy needs to shed its irrational prejudice against colonialism. By providing a more balanced perspective, scholars can help to show the foolishness of policies like reparations as well as justifications of terrorism that are based on anti colonial myths. None of this is to say that colonialism by itself was a good thing, only that bad institutions sometimes produce good results. Colonialism, I freely acknowledge, was a harsh regime for those who lived under it.
While D’souza is referring to the Indian colonial experience, which lasted much longer than the Middle Eastern imperial experience, the message is the same: what’s done is done, it did produce some good results, and don’t get carried away in reaction to it to undo it.
The future is what Middle Easterners have control over, and it is in this realm the question of how the Middle East proceeds becomes so troubling. It is convenient to say “oh this should have happened” but much more difficult to make the decisions that decide the future. Outlying Middle Eastern countries have progressed more quickly in the last half of the century, because there have been incentives to do so. Advances like Turkey’s desired admission to the European Union, Georgia’s hope to be invited to NATO, and the success of federalist governed Iraq were motivated by outside influences. Intergovernmental organizations and institutions along with democratic governance provide the legitimacy and security to these Middle Eastern countries that is so desirable in a multi-polar world order.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Zardari Behaving Badly


You can add high-ranking Islamic clerics and Pakistani feminist groups to Pakistan’s president Asif Zardari’s to his opposition. Not only did Zardari’s inappropriate comments towards Governor Palin during their meeting last week get him in hot water with the Pakistani feminists, he was also issued Fatwa (an Islamic edict) regarding the meeting. What is most peculiar about the Fatwa is that it was not issued until last Thursday, more than a week after the meeting took place. Most of the media including Time magazine thought the whole incidence would blow over, but the Fatwa has made the meeting even more controversial. While the feminists accused the president of sexism and impropriety, the Fatwa was issued because the president shamed the nation with his "indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt" according to an article in The Guardian. While the incident is likely soon be forgotten because of the much more pressing issues in Pakistan like the failing economy and militancy on the rise. Zardari has got to be a little nervous though because many Fatwa’s have led to the assinations of Islamic rulers like the Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in October 1981. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” seems like fitting advice for Zardari.