Lessons from a whirlwind
By Donald K Emmerson
At this phase in a still unfolding process, all one can safely say of the overthrows in Tunis and Cairo and their spreading repercussions is that they have thrown into question the future of autocracy from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. There are things one can unsafely say, however. Events to date evoke three broad, and broadly revisionist, conclusions:
1. The domino theory is not always wrong
In 1975, when the Indochinese dominos fell to communism, they did not bring down the chain of adjacent Southeast Asian states from Thailand through Malaysia to the Philippines and Indonesia. What toppled was the domino theory itself - the expectation that this would happen. The radical Islamists who seized power in Tehran in 1979 could not knock over the governments of neighboring states in the name of that revolution.
More recently, the Wolfowitzean fantasy of toppling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and setting off a chain reaction that would democratize the Middle East was revealed for what it was - absurd. By then the entirely reasonable idea that countries were not inert objects whose stability depended on having stable neighbors had congealed into a conventional wisdom.
Fast forward to 2011. Less than a month separated the January 14 and February 11 ousters of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunis and of Hosni Mubarak from Cairo. Major protest demonstrations have also broken out in Algiers, Amman, Benghazi, Manama, Rabat, Sana'a and Tehran.
Each of these situations is unique; the sequence has been not neatly linear; and it remains to be seen how many more regimes will succumb to pressure from the streets. But the whirlwind across North Africa and the Middle East certainly has illustrated the power of events in one place to inspire them elsewhere in the same region, as a domino theorist would expect.
Proliferating linkages in cyber-space have enhanced the chance that what happens in one place will be quickly and widely known in another. Imitation is not the necessary outcome of awareness. Without their own, home-grown reasons for revolt, the texting and tweeting Cairenes who filled Tahrir Square would not have followed the Tunisian example. That said, however, and other things being equal, access to electronic networks has everywhere lowered the barriers to local mobilization.
A first lesson of these events is that we are likely to see more electronically facilitated demonstration effects spilling across national borders, and more reliance on the Internet to achieve local change.
2. The medium is not the message
There is no such thing as "liberation technology" if by that we mean that cyber-space is intrinsically or inevitably anti-tyrannical - that "information wants to be free" in a political sense. Information does not "want" anything. Democracy is not a tweet. A camera phone with Internet access empowers whoever holds it. But cyber-linkages can be put to progressive or regressive use.
Democrats are the not only ones capable of drawing inferences from recent events. What Ben Ali and Mubarak did or did not do is doubtless already being studied by more than a few of the world's remaining autocrats for clues to avoiding the same fate.
When Mubarak shut down the Internet, he behaved as if cyber-space itself had become the enemy of his regime. If dictators are intrinsically fearful of change, if instead of using new technology they ignore it, and if they close themselves off from information about the way things really are, they will tilt the electronic playing field against themselves. An early student of cybernetics and politics, Karl Deutsch, used to say that power is the ability not to have to listen, to which one could add: until it's too late.
For clever autocrats, on the other hand, the lesson of Tahrir Square may be that their incumbency depends on innovating and manipulating "repression technology": that if halting the flow of information is futile, managing and using it is not. Coercion can be calibrated, as Cherian George has argued with reference to the hitherto successful maintenance of Singapore's illiberal regime.
The uniqueness of conditions in that city-state sharply limits the exportability of its synoptic and thermostatic model of control. But the Internet among other channels of communication can and will be used in efforts to postpone plural politics in the name of state performance - trying to sideline the desire for democracy by acknowledging and responding to the need for welfare.
Striking in this context is the February 9 decision by Syria's authoritarian president Bashar al-Assad to reverse Mubarak's pull-the-plug tactic by canceling long-standing bans on Facebook and YouTube inside Syria. His reasoning, including his timing, is unclear. But it may reflect a sense of confidence following the failure of an anti-government protest to materialize on the previous weekend despite the willingness of some 15,000 people to join the Facebook page calling for "days of rage". A cyber-strategy of surveillance and co-optation is rendered all the more plausible by Assad's previous leadership of the Syrian Computer Society, whose advertised goals include shaping and regulating the local use of information technology.
One can hope that the Internet will help civil societies grow, but cyber-space will remain contested terrain.
3. The secular should not be discounted
In many academic and policy circles, the rise of religion around the world has become, so to speak, an article of faith. The faith is not misplaced. Since the 1970s, Islam has indeed become a more visible frame of personal and social reference among Muslims around the world. The local versions and extents of that global phenomenon have varied substantially from time to time and place to place, but not enough to refute the existence of the trend itself.
It is accordingly fashionable in Western academic and policy settings to downplay the relevance of the secular in the Muslim world. The toponym itself privileges religious affiliation as the defining characteristic of societies from Morocco to Mindanao. Yet Islam is only one reference point in the typically multivalent lives of populations whose actual - as opposed to self-acknowledged - daily fealty to their faith may range from pious to perfunctory.
If religion really had the behavioral weight that the notion of "rising Islam" implies, the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries lumped together in such an avowedly "Muslim world" would already have inspired the slogans if the not also the aims of the demonstrators.
That has not been true. In Cairo, the slogan that "Islam is the solution" was replaced on Tahrir Square by a motto that paid homage to another nation: "Tunisia is the solution." In country after country, far from rallying under the banner of Islam, the young demonstrators waved or wore the national flag, or showed their familiarity with hypermodern - that is, virtual - reality in signs proclaiming "GAME OVER" for dictators.
Nationalism and cyber-space are not "secular" in an anti-religious sense. Islam has inspired nationalism in Muslim-majority countries since colonial times. Muslim and Islamist websites dot the net. Yet while some protesters have shouted "Allahu akbar!" and prayed in the streets, most have not couched their demands in Islamic terms.
The Shi'ite majority's resentment of Sunni-minority rule has been a key subtext of the protests in Bahrain. But that example hardly reflects the rise of Islam as a single, shared identity. On the contrary, it re-expresses sectarian grievances that have long divided Muslims. And even those grievances have been less theological than socioeconomic. If "secular" means simply non-religious, then the whirlwind so far has been a secular affair.
This may change when the wind dies down, as Islamist political parties and movements become involved in post-euphoric or "morning after" processes of actual - or, at any rate, ostensible - reform, including prospective elections.
Islamists in exile have already come home in the hope of influencing events - Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunis, Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Cairo. The Barack Obama administration's recent decision to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal will add Islamist, Arabist, and nationalist anti-American fuel to political fires. But the young people who started the storm were not trying to recreate the caliphate. Nor were their demands for freedoms, jobs, and justice, or their disgust over corruption, distinctively Koranic.
If the mainly secular-nationalist minorities who protested are rewarded with majority rule, more explicit religious preferences will have to be taken into account. Yet their likely future influence should not be exaggerated. It is time to retire the fear that an Islamist party that wins an election and becomes the government is bound to cancel all future balloting in order to remain in power. The record of democratically empowered Islamism does not corroborate that suspicion.
From Jakarta to Cairo to Damascus and back
Muslim-majority Indonesia became a democracy more than a decade ago. Since then, no Islamist party has won a national election by a wide enough margin to form a government on its own. More and less Islamist parties have joined ruling coalitions, and their leaders have become ministers in cabinets. Yet the behavior of these ostensibly religious politicians has not deviated much from what one would expect of their secular counterparts.
Pious candidates who invoke ethical behavior as an Islamic imperative do, however, run the risk of failing to practice what they preach. If politics is the art of compromise, it can also be compromising. Leaders who claim to cleave to a higher standard of morality are especially vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if their practices transgress their principles. An Indonesian example is the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), an Islamist member of the current ruling coalition. Allegations of corruption leveled at the PKS have been particularly damaging because they so sharply contradict the party's association with pious probity.
A more risible illustration occurred in November 2010 when Indonesia's cabinet ministers lined up to welcome Barack and Michelle Obama to Jakarta. One of the ministers was a leading PKS politician, Tifatul Sembiring. He had prided himself, as a "good Muslim", on shunning physical contact with any woman who was not a relative. Nevertheless, when his turn came to greet the US's First Lady, he shook her hand.
Sembiring claimed to have done so only because she had stuck out her own hand, effectively forcing him to touch it against his will. His blame-the-guest gambit backfired, however, when he was shown on video smiling and extending his own hand proactively to her. The scene went viral in cyber-space. The minister had managed to turn inconsistency into hypocrisy - and himself into an object of amused derision among more cosmopolitan Indonesians. He had also reinforced an image of Islam as a forbidding religion in both senses of that adjective.
In North Africa and the Middle East, the Muslim Brothers may be more skilled in public relations. But Sembiring's case illustrates the difficulty of observing exclusionary prohibitions in a modern democracy whose citizens want to engage with, and be included in, the larger world.
The views of the arguably moderate Egyptian Islamist Qaradawi are instructive in this context. Accessible at IslamonLine.net, his recommendations on "Shaking Hands with Women" rest on a complex scholarly analysis of contrasting texts and opinions. His major conclusion amounts to a series of negations: that it is not forbidden for a Muslim man to shake the hand of a woman who is not his relative by blood or marriage, provided that doing so is not motivated by, and that it will not stimulate, sexual temptation.
Should a conscientious Muslim be able to predict the future? Where does an aesthetic appreciation of beauty end and the risk of physical attraction begin? What if they co-occur? Does avoiding contact to prevent temptation prolong and encourage irresponsibility and immaturity by precluding occasions in which the man allows himself to feel tempted, but then overcomes the feeling by practicing self-control? Is dating the enemy of marriage? What is the nature of love?
It is not disrespectful of either Islam or of Qaradawi to wonder whether such questions could conceivably arise in the mind of a believer trying to follow his advice. Political parties that are committed to religious strictures that imply social closure and reinforce communal identity are likely to have limited appeal.
In Indonesia recently, fearing that its Islamist coloration might have become a political liability, the PKS has tried to soften its image and broaden its popularity among secular Muslims and non-Muslims as well. Still more recently in Egypt, in a Friday sermon delivered to a crowd of more than a million people gathered in Tahrir Square, Qaradawi made a point of honoring the country's Coptic Christian minority and urging respect for freedom and pluralism.
The future of democracy in North Africa and the Middle East is still up in the air, but the whirlwind to date points toward these conclusions:
Politically consequential spread effects will become more common, and as they do, those resisting change will try to rival, divert, co-opt, filter, and block the offending cyber-traffic.
In Muslim-majority societies that do manage to democratize, although anti-religious secularism will remain rare, non-religious secularity will be amply evident in many contexts: demands for modern education and employment in this life; nationalist pride that is not slanted to favor the pious; disgust with corruption especially by religionists with double standards; and the moderating compromises that absolutist politicians in competitive politics will have to make if they want to win.
Donald K Emmerson is an affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a co-author of Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (2010). His website is http://seaf.stanford.edu/people/donaldkemmerson/ . | Clinton off the mark on Afghanistan
By M K Bhadrakumar
The Barack Obama administration's choice of Marc Grossman as successor to the late Richard Holbrooke, former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is significant for three reasons. If Grossman's diplomatic career spanned Pakistan and the Afghan mujahideen at a time when Pakistan was a "frontline" state for the United States, his two stints in Turkey in a bygone era, including as ambassador, make him an "expert" on the strange workings of a political democracy run by the country's military.
Indeed, Grossman also devoted his career to the remaking of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the denouement to the alliance's first "out-of-area" operations in the Balkans. Thus, Grossman's appointment gives away a certain shift in Obama's thinking - gradually moving away from the military "surge" in Afghanistan to a diplomatic and political track of reconciliation with the Taliban.
The "leaks" last week by administration officials to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll appeared almost alongside Grossman's appointment - that the US administration is engaged in direct talks with the Taliban. Coincidence or not, this was also the gist of the policy speech delivered by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Asia Society at New York on Friday regarding the war.
With Grossman's appointment, the past two months' drift in US policies has been punctuated. But the US's capacity to pull off a denouement to the war that Clinton outlined remains in doubt. The principal points in her speech were:
The transition to Afghan-led security will commence as planned in the coming weeks and the drawdown of US troops will be completed by end-2014. Washington will continue to pursue a three-track strategy running on "mutually reinforcing tracks": a military "surge" combined with a civilian effort to revitalize the political economy of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a diplomatic "surge" to end the war. Reconciliation with the Taliban is subject to well laid out conditions. The US will relentlessly degrade the Taliban and they will face international "ostracism" until they choose political compromise. At the same time, the US recognizes "we will never kill enough insurgents to win this war outright". Therefore, US civilian and military efforts will aim at supporting a durable political settlement and the US will "intensify our regional diplomacy to enable a political process".
Did Clinton break new ground? The answer is "no". The war is fast morphing into a "bleeding wound", to use Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's famous words of another superpower's Afghan war. Clinton tacitly acknowledged the stalemate. So, all that the Taliban need to do is to simply "wait it out". Just as Washington has preconditions, so do the Taliban.
In a statement on Saturday, the Taliban zeroed in on precisely the aspect of the ongoing US-Afghan negotiations for American military bases in the post-2014 phase (although Clinton deftly glided over the issue in her speech): "Afghanistan is not a country where the native people will tolerate the presence of foreign troops ... The Americans should know that neither the rulers of the puppet regime nor the hand-picked parliament is entitled to trade on the destiny of Afghanistan ... establishment of permanent bases in Afghanistan is an American pipedream and is not realizable."
Most significantly, the Taliban concluded, "The regional countries unmistakably realize the goals and objectives of America behind their prolonged presence in Afghanistan. Naturally, the regional countries will not accept this notion but rather will oppose it. They will even forge an alliance against it if they find an opportunity to do so and will make efforts to hand out a forceful and devastating blow to the American plan."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai seems to agree with the Taliban. He said in Kabul on Saturday: "This [agreement on US bases] is not something to be done only by the Afghan government and it neither has the authority. It is Afghans who should come up with a decision. In any case, Afghanistan needs peace as a precondition and it wants to make sure that neighboring countries don't feel any threats."
Interestingly, Karzai echoed a Russian Foreign Ministry statement earlier in the day: "This information [regarding US bases] makes one think and it raises questions. Why will the US military bases be needed if the terrorist threat in ... Afghanistan is ended? Will Kabul be able to combine negotiations on a long-term American military presence with the reconciliation process? How will Afghanistan's neighbors view the establishment of a foreign country's military bases near their territory?"
Karzai is convinced that Washington is systematically weakening his authority. He and the Pakistani military leadership will see the new approach in Clinton's speech as a ploy to scatter their nascent endeavor to kickstart an "intra-Afghan" peace process and, generally speaking, to create confusion among Afghan protagonists.
Clinton failed to concede a pivotal role for Pakistan in the search of a settlement. She defined Pakistan's role in terms of cracking down on Taliban sanctuaries, keeping up cordial state-to-state relations with Afghanistan, maintaining non-interference in Afghan affairs and principally moving onto a sustained trajectory of settlement of differences (including over Afghanistan) and normalization with India. In short, Clinton offered to Pakistan a "peace dividend" in terms of its own internal stability and enhanced regional cooperation with India.
She failed to acknowledge Pakistan's "special" interests, a broader security matrix that also includes the alarming prospect (from Islamabad's point of view) of a regional imbalance emanating out of the cascading US-India military cooperation and Washington's unilateral recognition of India as a nuclear-weapon power.
On the other hand, Clinton made it abundantly clear that the key levers of the political process to reconciling the Taliban as well as regional politics over Afghan problem would remain very much in Washington's hands.
Conceivably, Washington counts on its non-Pashtun allies inside Afghanistan to frustrate any Afghan-Pakistan peace process that gets beyond the US's control or defies its objectives and, second, it counts on Saudi Arabia to be the regional "balancer" vis-a-vis Pakistan and Iran, given Riyadh's old links with the Taliban. Washington seems confident it can play merry havoc within the Taliban leadership by splintering or atomising the group, thereby denying Pakistan its "strategic asset".
The US strategy outlined in Clinton's speech, wittingly or otherwise, could create misgivings in Islamabad regarding Karzai's game plan. It all seems rather an audacious hope. The hard realities are:
The US possesses very limited capability to persist with its much-touted civilian and military "surge".
The US claims that the Taliban are weakening and lack conviction. The security situation is deteriorating, war is spreading to the north and Kabul city's security perimeters have been breached.
The latest accord among militants in Kurram agency gives "strategic depth" to the Taliban operating out of the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan.
The US military faces the contradictory situation of adhering to a drawdown deadline while simultaneously degrading the Taliban on the battlefield and reinforcing the political and diplomatic "surge".
Washington's equations with Kabul and Rawalpindi are at an all-time low.
The Afghan-Pakistan relationship is way beyond the US's control.
India-Pakistan relations are fraught with huge question marks and Washington faces an uphill task balancing its ties with the two South Asian adversaries.
The US-Iran "standoff" is entering uncharted territory following the developments in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Major regional powers harbor misgivings regarding the US's "unilateralist" approach and its geopolitical objectives.
The war is increasingly controversial in Western opinion and Obama is gearing up for a tough re-election campaign. Clearly, the timeline favors the Taliban.
Clinton's optimism seems unwarranted. She said, "Today, the escalating pressure of our military campaign is sharpening a decision for the Taliban: break ties with al-Qaeda, give up your arms and abide by the Afghan constitution, and you can rejoin Afghan society. Refuse, and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to al-Qaeda as an enemy of the international community. They cannot wait us out. They cannot defeat us. And they cannot escape this choice."
Very tough talk, indeed. And no mincing of words, either. But, if only life were that simple and the road ahead that straightforward. British Pakistani author and commentator Tariq Ali once wrote that it is when such eloquent rhetoric appears that a resounding voice can be heard echoing through the valleys and hills of the Hindu Kush - loud, derisive Pashtun laughter......
Dominoes or a House Of Cards....???
وكي لا "نفلح في البحر" وكي لا تنطفئ شعلة الثورة المتنقلة من وطن عربي الى آخر، يجب ان نعي ان اطاحة الطاغية لا تعني بالضرورة الوصول الى الحرية والديموقراطية. هناك مسافة شاسعة بين اسقاط النظام واحلال نظام جديد. من الثورة الى الحرية طريق طويل وهناك على الطريق من يتربص لاغتيال الثورة ودفنها. وهناك على الطريق كثير من التحديات. سنركز على ثلاثة منها:
التحدي الاول، هو الفوضى. فالفوضى قد تقود الى حروب اهلية وحروب عبثية، وتضل فيها الثورة الطريق الى اهدافها. ولكي لا نقع في الفوضى تحتاج الثورة الى فرز قيادة شجاعة وحكيمة وحضارية. من دون قيادة لا تصل الشعوب الى مكان. قائد واحد في إمارة دبي اخذ الصحراء وجعلها جنة. وقيادات طائفية سياسية متخلفة في لبنان اخذت "الجنَّة" فيه وحولتها "صحراء". والقيادة الشجاعة والحكيمة لا تكون من دون تنظيم سياسي واجتماعي. فالقيادة والتنظيم هما القوة لإنجاح الثورة والوصول بها الى اهدافها
والتحدي الثاني الذي نخافه ويخافه العالم كله، هو ان تنتهز الاصولية الدينية المتمثلة في هذا الشرق العربي بالايديولوجيات الاسلامية المتطرفة الفرصة والفوضى لتخطف الثورة . فهناك خوف من ان تتحول الثورة في البحرين حكم الاصولية الشيعية. وها قد ارتفعت في اليمن اصوات تنادي بجمهورية اسلامية. وهناك خوف حقيقي في مصر من نفوذ الاخوان المسلمين وقوتهم. ان محور الثورة ليس الاسلام بل الانسان. وها قد امتزجت دماء المسيحيين مع دماء المسلمين في الشوارع. كلهم ثاروا. مسيحيون ومسلمون. كلهم رفعوا شعارات واحدة: الحرية والكرامة والديموقراطية. وكم هو مهم ان نفصل بين الدين والثورة حتى تبقى الثورة للشعوب ويبقى الدين لله
والتحدي الثالث هو عودة العسكر. قد يستغل العسكر الفوضى للعودة الى السلطة بحجة فرض النظام والاستقرار. فالعسكري قد يعي اهمية الاستقرار والسلام لكنه، على رغم احترامنا لما يقوم به من مهمة اساسية لحفظ الامن للمواطن، قد لا يعي ما هو أهم من الاستقرار، ألا وهو عظمة الانسان الفرد واهمية العقل والابداع وقوة الحرية. نحن نطلب من الثوار ان يرفعوا شعاراً كبيراً "لا عودة للعسكر"
بين الثورة والحرية طريق طويل. سيسقط الكثيرون وسيموت الكثيرون. ولكن هل هناك خيار آخر للثورة غير المضي الى الامام؟ ونتوجه الى النخب العربية ونقول لها: لقد دقت ساعة الحقيقة. في الماضي وفي الحاضر كان عتبنا عليكم كبيراً. اذ ان السواد الاعظم منكم إمّا لاذ بالصمت وإما تملّق للطاغية. ان الكثيرين منكم بدل ان يلتزموا قضايا شعوبهم التزموا مصالحهم الشخصية الآنية. وهنا لا بد لنا من ان ننحني اجلالا واحتراما امام القلة من هذه النخب الذين فضلوا السجون على الركوع للطاغية والقبول بالذل
هذه الثورة هي ثورتنا. هذه هي فرصتنا التاريخية. ويل لنا اذا قتلناها بجهلنا، وويل لنا ان اغتالوها. ان تحرير الانسان الفرد هو اكبر قضية في هذا الشرق. وتحرير الانسان هو الخطوة الاولى في الطريق الى الحرية، والحرية هي الطريق للابداع، والابداع هو الطريق للحضارة، والحضارة هي التي ستعود بنا ثانية الى التاريخ. من زمان كان العرب في التاريخ ثم خرجوا منه لقرون عدة وها هم اليوم يعودون اليه
حتى الأمس القريب كان مفكرون في الغرب يعتقدون ان الاسلام هو العقبة لدخول العرب التاريخ مرة ثانية. وهل يا تُرى، أدركوا بعد ان رأوا ما رأوا، وبعد ان مات من مات في سبيل الحرية، انهم كانوا على خطأ كبير؟
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This is the latest assessment from Egypt:
Omar Suleiman stands now as the main hope for a way out. There are two problems however with the General. First he still moves within a circle defined by the old set of things. The guy has no experience with the complexities of the current situation (who does). But when you have a head that was forged in a specific way it is difficult to change over night. Suleiman can not yet get out of the details and take a general look and come out with his OWN initiative. The second problem may perhaps explain the first at least partially. This problem is that he does not have total control over the military forces which were deployed to the streets. The presidential guard which some of its units were deployed in the 28th are under the control of the president alone. Certain units of armored brigades are under the control of the palace. Just examine the structure of the forces deployed. Suleiman is not free handed. But I wonder if he could take an initiative that could end the crisis if he was.
We are in a very sensitive phase now. Suleiman should move. Ease the President out some how or keep him as an honorary figure. Order a rebuild of the police and security forces. Cancel the emergency laws. Reorganize the country's political theater and start implementing a plan to rebuild the economy of the Egypt. Suleiman is the solution. But is he up to it?. He has a small window of opportunity. Some one should tell him to take a look over the horizon and have a vision to save Egypt. If you ask me whether I think he is the caliber that can put together a bold initiative and see it throw my answer will lean towards skepticism...unfortunately...