Cairo's Campaign Against NGOs: Egypt Stands To Lose More Than Aid

For seven months, Egypt's minister of planning and cooperation has been pushing an investigation into the practices of American pro-democracy NGOs. But what began as a struggle for local power has turned into a game of international brinkmanship that has the potential to upend the security calculus of the Middle East.

By Stephen McInerney

                    Many are watching this impasse closely. (peasap / flickr)

This weekend, the fracas over foreigners in Cairo is set to escalate when hearings begin against 43 workers (including 16 U.S. citizens) charged with operating without a license, receiving unauthorized foreign funds, and engaging in political activity. The drama is seven months in the making. Last July, Egypt's Ministry of Justice opened an investigation into the activities and funding of numerous (possibly as many as 400) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The move came at the behest of Fayza Abul Naga, minister of planning and international cooperation. In the months that followed, her department refused to officially state or confirm any details of the wide-ranging probe. Then, in late December, Egyptian security forces raided the offices of several of the NGOs under investigation. And what began as an effort by one Egyptian minister to assert her control has turned into a game of international brinkmanship that has the potential to upend the security calculus of the Middle East.

After tensions escalated in December, numerous members of Congress made clear that the actions of the Egyptian government could jeopardize the annual $1.55 billion aid package to Egypt -- the United States' second largest, after the $3.1 billion it gives Israel annually. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a resolution calling for an immediate end to the harassment and prosecution of NGO staff. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went much further when he introduced legislation that would suspend all U.S. aid to Egypt until the matter is resolved. On Monday, a group of U.S. senators including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) visited Cairo to meet with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and other Egyptian leaders, trying to relieve some of the tension. They returned home with optimistic messages, suggesting that the Egyptian brass offered strong assurances of a swift resolution to the impasse.

How much faith Washington can put in those assurances, however, remains to be seen. Fueling the United States' impatience have been Cairo's confusing, and often conflicting, messages. Unlike the Mubarak era, when there were relatively clear lines of command, the past year in Egypt has been marked by the rapid emergence of multiple centers of power competing for political control. Egypt's actual foreign policy has been almost indecipherable. For example, after security forces raided the NGO offices, top Egyptian officials, including Tantawi, Prime Minister Kamal Ganzouri, and Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr, were quick to assure the United States that the maltreatment of U.S. citizens would cease, that all seized materials would be immediately returned, and that the offices would be able to reopen. Six weeks later, those have proved to be empty promises.

Conversations in Washington reveal that U.S. officials, by and large, do not believe that their counterparts in Cairo are being intentionally deceptive -- they assume that the Egyptians have simply promised more than they can deliver. For years, Abul Naga, who is one of the few top officials remaining from the days of Mubarak, has been opposed to any foreign funding that bypassed her ministry. And now she seems to be targeting U.S. influence specifically. Last week, the Egyptian press quoted Abul Naga as having portrayed the U.S. as trying to hijack Egypt's revolution. "The United States decided to use all its resources and instruments to contain [the January 25 revolution]," the government's official news agency, MENA, quoted her as saying, "and push it in a direction that promotes American and also Israeli interests."

But her charges against the NGOs ring hollow. For instance, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute have made more than reasonable efforts to comply with Egyptian law. Both groups applied for registration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2005 and have communicated regularly with the authorities about their activities and programs ever since. Both groups were told repeatedly that their registration would be granted, but it never was and no explanation was given. This experience is characteristic of that of many other organizations that have focused on politically sensitive issues, while groups with more innocuous goals have had their registration granted promptly. It is disingenuous for the Egyptian government to refuse to grant U.S. NGOs registration on political grounds and then claim that the investigation against them is an apolitical matter for the judiciary. Moreover, that many other international organizations operate in Egypt today without official registration underscores the selective, political nature of these attacks.

Members of Egypt's ruling military council have generally avoided the issue in public, perhaps in order to give them plausible deniability with Washington. Privately, they consistently argue to U.S. officials that they cannot intervene in independent judicial processes. But even if the generals are not the driving force behind the crackdown, it is quite unlikely that the investigation could have moved forward without their support. The military has held executive authority and ultimate decision-making power for the past year -- all cabinet ministers were appointed by the generals and report to them.

Assuming that Abul Naga had to get the military on board before pushing forward with the NGO persecution, her case to them was simple and compelling. Egyptian democracy and human rights organizations are vocal critics of the military. As large protests have continued, it makes sense for the ruling cadre to cut off such organizations at the knees while also reinforcing the public narrative that the protests are the work of foreign agents seeking to sow chaos in Egypt.

Yet it appears that some ranking members of the Egyptian military may have severely underestimated the backlash from Washington. In both private conversations and public statements, Pentagon and State Department officials who have recently visited Egypt and discussed the crisis describe the generals as initially incredulous that such a minor issue (in their view) could actually threaten the aid package. U.S. officials attest that they have been successful since in conveying how potentially explosive the issue could be, but it is unclear how much that has changed anyone's thinking in Cairo.

As for a resolution, one possible scenario is that Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs could grant registration to some of the targeted NGOs in the days ahead. This would clear the way for the courts to dismiss the charges against the NGOs or, perhaps more likely, for them to find those charged innocent. Such an approach could ease tensions while allowing Egypt's generals to officially maintain distance from the case. Yet Abul Naga could easily derail such a plan; throughout this debacle she and her allies have repeatedly employed carefully timed public remarks and leaks to reignite tensions.

There is one more important faction in Cairo to consider: the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party, which now boasts a plurality of seats in the Egyptian Parliament. The People's Assembly has only been in session since January 23 and has yet to pass any legislation pertaining to the NGO crisis. Eventually, however, it will be up to the parliament to decide whether to pass a more permissive NGO law in line with international standards.

So far, the signals from the Brotherhood have been contradictory. On one hand, it is in the group's interest to support a freer environment for NGOs, considering the large number of Islamist associations aligned with the movement. This was reflected in a recent op-ed by Brotherhood General Guide Mohammad Badie, who wrote, "All political, intellectual, social, cultural and economic trends and forces in the country -- along with civil society -- must be allowed to operate and express their views." On the other hand, some Brotherhood leaders are taking a hard stand against foreign funding, unsurprising given that the movement is funded almost entirely by its Egyptian members and supporters.

As lawmakers, however, Brotherhood members have also made comments about what a change in the U.S.-Cairo aid relationship could mean. On February 12, Essam el Erian, vice chair of the Freedom and Justice Party and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in the new parliament, made news when he pronounced that an interruption of U.S. aid would be a violation of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty and would open the door for Egypt to change other terms of the treaty. That is no small claim. For more than three decades, that agreement -- including the billions in aid every year from the United States -- has served as a foundation for security arrangements throughout the Middle East.

Many observers have argued that the U.S. must maintain its assistance in order to preserve its leverage with the Egyptian military. But this crisis is exactly the moment to use this leverage. The fate of civil society in Egypt and beyond is very much at stake. If the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid can attack pro-democracy organizations with no real consequences, authoritarian governments worldwide will be emboldened to follow suit. As such, the administration should take a tougher line, making clear that military aid will certainly be interrupted unless the attacks on NGOs are halted and all charges are dropped. The White House deserves credit for having made support for civil society an important pillar of its approach to strengthening democracy worldwide. Now is the time to demonstrate the strength of that commitment.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Affairs on 22/02/2012

When Assad Won

A bloody six-year civil war fought against Bashar al-Assad's father presents a cautionary tale for Syria's modern-day rebels.

BY DAVID KENNER

It was a massacre. On June 16, 1979, Capt. Ibrahim Yusuf ordered some 200 cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School to attend an urgent meeting in the mess hall. Once they were assembled, he opened the door to a squad of gunmen who opened fire on the defenseless crowd. At least 32 cadets, most belonging to then President Hafez al-Assad's Alawite sect, were cut down in the hail of gunfire and grenades.

The civil war that raged in Syria from 1976 to 1982 was -- until the past 11 months of unrest -- the most severe threat to the Assads' grip on power. The uprising would be crushed, brutally and infamously, with the Hama massacre in 1982. But even before the bloody assault on Hama, the long guerilla war had claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians, and resulted in the imprisonment of at least 10,000 more. The events leading up to the final confrontation should provide the current generation of protesters with a blueprint for how not to overthrow the Assad regime.

The Aleppo attack was not only the bloodiest strike to date against the government, it raised disturbing questions for the Damascus political elite about the fundamental pillars of their power. Yusuf, a Sunni officer, was himself a member of the ruling Baath Party. Assad's enemies, it seemed, had not only risen through the ranks of the army -- they had penetrated into the political heart of the regime.

As the shadow war between the Alawite-dominated security forces and their Sunni opponents continued, Assad's opponents formed an umbrella organization called the Islamic Front in Syria. In November 1980, the front published a manifesto that noted the Alawite community "cannot [indefinitely] dominate the majority in Syria," and that "the [Alawite] minority has forgotten itself and is ignoring the facts of history." It ended with an appeal for the Alawites to abandon "the imposed scourge Hafez al-Assad and his butcher playboy brother [Rifaat] ... [in order to] participate in preventing the tragedy from reaching its sad end."

The campaign of assassinations against leading Syrian officials and Alawite personalities was also gaining steam -- in August 1979, Assad's personal doctor, Muhammed Shahada Khalil, was killed. Other victims included the head of the military's garrison in Hama, the rector of Damascus University, and the prosecutor of the Supreme State Security Court. "Assassination is the only language with which it is possible to communicate with the state," said one of Assad's opponents during his trial in September 1979, according to Nikolaos van Dam's The Struggle for Power in Syria.

The winter of 1979 might have been the most perilous time for the regime: Its leading lights were slowly being snuffed out, its support within key segments of the army and broader population was in doubt, and even its top officials were beginning to breaking away. On Dec. 27, Syrian ambassador to the United Nations Hammud al-Shufi abruptly resigned, due to what he termed "the anti-democratic and repressive methods and corruption of the Assad regime." (No Syrian ambassadors have yet defected during the present unrest.)

The chill of civil war even fell across cities that were not at the center of the violence. Samuel Pickering Jr. -- an acclaimed English professor who would later go on to serve as the model for Robin Williams's character in Dead Poets Society --  taught as a Fulbright scholar in the city of Latakia from the winter of 1979 until the summer of 1980. "The good are silent, and violence has spiraled as the government's secret police have viciously repressed dissent or potential dissent," he wrote in a memoir of his year in Syria. "At times during the year, Aleppo and Hama seemed foreign countries brought back under Damascus's rule only by tank law. ‘You don't know,' a student told me with tears in her eyes. ‘The people die like rain.'"

History is written by the victors, and the story of Syria's civil war is no exception. The Assad regime painted the revolt as a terror campaign waged by "the Muslim Brotherhood," a catch-all phrase that it would wield against its many opponents during the crisis. The story is more complicated than that -- not all opposition to Assad was expressed through violence, and the insurgents did appear to enjoy substantial latent support among segments of Syrian popular opinion. What does appear clear, however, is that the revolt was driven by a wide array of groups that resented the Alawites' rise to preeminence and believed that the Sunnis, which account for roughly 75 percent of the population, were Syria's natural rulers.

Drawing on interviews from Baathist officials in Aleppo, Patrick Seale's Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East estimates that more than 300 leading supporters of the Syrian regime were killed in the city from 1979 to 1981. The violence soon prompted Assad to take a more radical course: In the Seventh Regional Congress, held in December 1979 and January 1980, Assad's younger brother Rifaat won Baathist support for a war to exterminate the Sunni terrorists once and for all. To end the insurgency, he promised to fight "a hundred wars, demolish a million strongholds, and sacrifice a million martyrs."

Rifaat made good on his promise. In March, 30,000 troops of the Third Army Division, under the command of Gen. Shafiq Fayadh, moved from Damascus and Lebanon to seal off Aleppo. They were soon joined by Rifaat's Defense Brigades, a paramilitary force of Assad loyalists that echoes today's shabbiha. According to the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report "Syria Unmasked," which surveyed human rights abuses under the Assad regime, Fayadh stood on a tank turret in the early days of the operation to proclaim that he was "prepared to kill a thousand people a day to rid the city of the Muslim Brother vermin."

The violence wielded by the Syrian military far exceeded anything that the Sunni insurgents could muster. In the year-long occupation of Aleppo, HRW estimates that Assad's security forces killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people -- "some at random, many in summary executions" -- and arrested 8,000 more.

Resistance to the Assad regime was not expressed solely through military means. In March 1980, the same month the military moved on Aleppo, the opposition convinced the markets in Aleppo to strike for two weeks -- a tactic that soon spread to centers of unrest such as Hama, Homs, and Idlib, threatening to destroy Syria's already battered economy.

Trade unions and professional associations also represented a thorn in Assad's side. In early March, they organized street demonstrations in which thousands of people took part across the country, with the striking exception of Damascus. On March 31, the Syrian Bar Association led a number of other professional groups -- such as the Medical Association, the Association of Engineers, and the merchant class -- in a nationwide strike.

Assad's response was as cunning as it was ruthless. He retaliated by dissolving the associations and arresting their leaders. By mid-April, according to HRW, the regime had imprisoned hundreds of doctors, engineers, and lawyers -- many of whom were tortured, and some of whom were summarily executed. Meanwhile, he found allies in the Damascene merchant class and was able to weather the economic storm. According to Seale, the merchants' support for Assad at this critical juncture cemented the regime's relationship with the Damascus businessmen -- an alliance that has persisted through the present day.

Having cut off all avenues of dissent but violence, the Assad regime then moved to ensure that its enemies had no hope of winning through armed revolt. After a failed assassination attempt against Assad on June 26, 1980, the regime's strongmen determined to make the Muslim Brotherhood pay. Less than 24 hours after the attack, Rifaat's Defense Brigades were helicoptered to the desert city of Palmyra, where they were joined by members of the army. In the early morning hours of July 27, they were let loose in Tadmor Prison, one of the primary detention centers for Islamists at the time. They gunned down an estimated 500 prisoners in cold blood.  "The operation lasted about half an hour," an Alawite soldier who took part in the operation told HRW. "During it, there was a terrible tumult, with exploding grenades and cries of ‘Allah Akbar!'"

The Sunni insurgents responded by escalating their campaign of terror in Damascus. In 1981, they bombed the prime minister's office in August, the Air Force headquarters in September, and a military recruitment center in November. In February 1982, the "Islamic Revolution Command in Syria" claimed credit for bombing the Damascus offices of the regime's al-Baath newspaper, killing at least 76 people. "It was a great accomplishment to be added to the series of tremendous explosions carried out by the mujahidin," the statement read. "We draw attention to the fact that all the Syrian information media are nationalized and that the explosion was timed for all the authority's hirelings to be present."

For all the stresses put on the Syrian regime, the sharp and unbridgeable sectarian rifts that the conflict had opened made it virtually impossible for the Alawite ruling class to do anything but fight to the death. "[The Muslim Brotherhood] has succeeded in widening the distance between the government and the majority of the people, but not in destabilizing the regime," wrote the historian Hanna Batatu in December 1982. "Instead of splitting the ‘Alawis and thus weakening their foothold in the army, they have, by their anti-‘Alawi practical line, frightened the ‘Alawi community into rallying behind Asad."

With the military remaining largely loyal, nothing could stop Assad from crushing the opposition's strongholds. By the time the city of Hama rose in open revolt in February 1982, the stage was set for a final confrontation between Assad's opponents and more than 10,000 well-equipped Syrian security forces -- a battle the Sunni insurgents could not hope to win. The Hama massacre, which claimed the lives of anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, according to an Amnesty International report from the period, may have permanently stained the reputation of the Assad dynasty in the eyes of the world, but it also crushed the organized Islamist insurgency in Syria and paved the way for three more decades of relatively unchallenged rule by the Assads. In the end, the Sunni insurgency of the late 1970s and early 1980s was too focused on Sunni revivalism, too shadowy -- simultaneously too violent to attract widespread support and not violent enough to pose an existential threat to the regime.

Could the modern-day opponents of Bashar al-Assad, Hafez's son, suffer the same fate as the insurgents of years past? Luckily for today's opposition, it is no carbon copy of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most notably, popular nonviolent protests have been a mainstay of the effort to topple Assad. In major cities such as Hama, Homs, and recently Damascus, Syrians have taken to the streets to call for the end of the regime -- lending the opposition a degree of popular legitimacy it never achieved in the 1980s. Defections from the Syrian military are also higher than they ever were under Hafez al-Assad's watch, and by all accounts are growing more numerous and effective. And the opposition's political representatives, such as the Syrian National Council, may have myriad problems -- but they are still savvier than the underground "Islamic Front" that guided the opposition to Hafez.

But at the same time, Syria's revolutionaries have not been able to make a complete break with the past. After months of largely peaceful protest, the effort to topple Assad is increasingly defined as a struggle between Syria's security forces and an armed insurgency. According to activists' own figures, the past two months have seen a higher proportion of Syrian soldiers killed than at any other point in the revolt -- totaling roughly 25 percent of the total deaths. This surge in violence has also been marked, in the past two weeks, by devastating car bombings in Aleppo and the first assassination of a Syrian general -- tactics that carry an echo of the dark days of civil war.

This new generation of Syrian revolutionaries has brought the Assad regime closer to collapse than it has ever been in its four-decade history. But if they are to push it over the edge, they would do well to learn from the cautionary tale of their elders.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 22/02/2012
-David Kenner is an associate editor at Foreign Policy

The Battle Of Homs: War Reporting Legend Marie Colvin And Photographer Rémi Ochlik Are Killed

By Vivienne Walt

                                                                             Marie Colvin

A celebrated American-born war reporter and a young French photographer were killed on Wednesday morning when Syrian forces bombed a makeshift media center in the besieged city of Homs. The tragedy shook the disparate community of conflict journalists gathered there, not least in highlighting the degree to which risks are intensifying for those covering Syria's march to civil war.

Marie Colvin, an American who was one of Britain's most honored combat journalists, and Rémi Ochlik, an award-winning photojournalist who was just 29, died when the regime's military hit the building where a growing number of foreign journalists were covering the Homs battle. British photographer Paul Conroy, whose work illustrated Colvin's chilling dispatch from Homs in the London Sunday Times last weekend, was reported severely injured, along with an unnamed American woman journalist. Those details have not yet been confirmed.

Within seconds of the news breaking on the BBC and Syrian Twitter feeds, the closed Facebook group for conflict journalists lit up with frenzied messages, many of them unable to believe that their colleagues were gone. And Colvin's own Facebook site was jammed with messages from friends, one saying, "Please God not Marie! Marie are you OK?"

She was not. Just one day before, Colvin had posted a message to the war-reporters' Facebook group, urging colleagues to break her newspaper's firewall and post her extraordinary report from inside Homs. With her characteristic passion and wry self-deprecating humor, she offered to "face the firing squad" for whoever illicitly reposted her work, while not forgetting to praise Conroy's "amazing photos" which accompanied it. "I don't often do this but it is sickening what is happening here," she wrote.

At 55, Colvin was no novice in witnessing sickening events. She was a victim of violence herself, having lost her left eye after coming under government fire in Sri Lanka in 2001. While many might long since have sought a prosthetic eye, Colvin chose instead to wear a black eye patch, something of a badge of honor for conflict journalism, instantly making her the most distinctive journalist in any combat zone.

She was also surely one of the more dedicated, rarely missing a conflict — and believing to the end that the perils were simply a journalist's duty. "Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history," she said in 2010, in an address at a packed ceremony for fallen war reporters at St. Bride's Church in London. "In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same — someone has to go there and see what is happening," she told the audience. "You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you."

For Ochlik that horror came as he was just beginning his career. He was with his friend Lucas Dolego, the French photographer, on the streets of Tunis during the revolution there last January when Dolego was hit and killed by a police teargas canister. "We had come to work, so I kept on working," he said in a recent interview, after being honored for his Arab Spring photos. "As a little boy I always wanted to become an archeologist, for the travels, the adventures," he continued. That changed when his grandfather gave him his first camera. He began photographing his friends, and later traveled to Haiti, to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya last year — and last week, to Syria.

Colvin's last dispatch from Homs was a video, which aired on the BBC on Tuesday, describing the appalling conditions and deep terror felt by residents who have been encircled by Syrian forces for weeks. Later, she called Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch's Emergency Director, to discuss what she'd seen. "She contacted me not because she wanted to boast about reaching Homs, but because she wanted to reach out to people she thought could make a difference to the people of Homs," Bouckaert said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. "I could just imagine her happily chatting away with me as the shells fell around her building, and being totally in her element. She was one of the most fearless and dedicated reporters I have ever met."

After months of being shut out of the conflict, journalists have increasingly sneaked into Syria through smuggling routes from Lebanon and Turkey, coordinating their life-threatening journeys with local activists. As the coverage of the Homs siege filtered out of Syria, the small corps of journalists in the city has appeared ever more a target of attacks, from a government that has been intent on keeping journalists away from rebel territory. The shock among journalists on Wednesday came while many were still absorbing the loss of Anthony Shadid, the celebrated New York Times correspondent, who died in Syria last Thursday of an apparent asthma attack after sneaking into the country illegally; many colleagues and friends were still gathered in Beirut for Shadid's memorial service, which took place there on Tuesday, when news hit of Colvin and Ochlik's deaths.

Born in Oyster Bay, New York, Colvin graduated from Yale University, and became renowned in Britain largely through her gripping coverage of the 1990s Balkans War, and the war in Chechnya. But Colvin was not all about work. With her crackling wit, and her knack for great story-telling, she was an excellent companion for lengthy dinners after a day's reporting, not least during the past year's revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Over dinner in each of those places, Colvin — despite being in the thick of a compelling revolution — spoke about where she might go next, and how to get there ahead of the press pack, which was increasingly more young and nimble than herself.

In her address at St. Bride's Church in 2010, Colvin touched on the issue of whether war reporters perhaps risked their lives for professional ambitions, rather than a humanitarian drive to expose injustices. The answer, apparently, was not entirely clear to her. "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story," she said. "What is bravery, and what is bravado?" Shaken by the losses, many journalists will be wrestling with that question in the days and weeks ahead.

-This article was published in Time Magazine’s blog on 22/02/2012

Helping Syria Without War

By Marc Lynch

How should the United States, and the international community, respond to the escalating bloodbath in Syria?  Over the last two months, the overwhelming weight of  editorial and op-ed commentary has been in the direction of calling for military action of some sort --- especially to arm a Free Syrian Army.  The calls for military action span the spectrum:  from John McCain and Lindsey Graham and the FPRI-FDD group of conservative hawks to liberal interventionists and even... FP bloggers.  For people desperate to do something to help the Syrian people, and at the same time for people keen to deal a blow to Iran or bring down a long-hated regime in Damascus, the time seems right for some form of military intervention. 

I was a strong supporter of the intervention in Libya. But the diversion of the debate about Syria towards military options has been counterproductive.  None of the military options on offer, including arming the Free Syrian Army, are likely to significantly help the Syrian people and most risk making things far worse.  But the recent display of a broad-based international consensus, including the 137-12 vote in the United Nations General Assembly condemning the regime's violence, and the first meeting of the "Friends of Syria" group on Friday in Tunisia make this a crucial time to seriously explore non-military options which have a more realistic chance to be adopted.. and to succeed. 

In a new report released today by the Center for a New American Security, I argue that if the goal is to help the Syrian people and not just to hurt an Iranian ally then the international response to the Syrian crisis must focus less on whether to use military options than on ways to improve the prospects for a "soft landing" after the fall of the Assad regime.    The report lays out a number of concrete suggestions for mobilizing diplomatic pressure and breaking the intensifying polarization between two Syrian communities in order to push for a political transition. I can't offer any guarantees that this strategy will work quickly or cleanly... but neither can those now recklessly calling for poorly conceived military action.

I am not going to summarize every detail of the report in this post -- please download it here.  The first half of the report assesses in some depth each of the major military options which have been put on the table:  No Fly Zones, Tactical Air Strikes, Safe Areas, Armed Observers, and Arming the Opposition.  For each of the first four, I argue that the military means would not respond effectively to the violence, would be far more complicated than advocates acknowledge, and would likely soon pave the way to further escalation upon failure.

I spend the most time arguing against the currently fashionable idea of arming the Syrian opposition (about whom, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey noted this weekend, little is really known). It is unlikely that arms from the outside would come close to evening the balance of power, and would only invite escalations from Syrian regime forces.  While advocates assume that a better-armed opposition would encourage a wave of defections from the Syrian army, it is just as plausible that growing militarization will harden the polarization in Syrian society and the resolve of Syrian troops.   Those currently on the fence, disgusted with Assad but afraid of the future, could well be frightened back onto the side of the regime and move even further away from any kind of realistic political solution.   

Finally, there is the reality of the deeply divided, fragmented nature of the Syrian opposition, which is more than just an inconvenient point to be noted and then waved away.  Most enthusiasts for arming the FSA preface their call by insisting that it is necessary that the Syrian opposition first unify.  But it hasn't, and shows no signs of unifying politically any time soon. There is quite simply no prospect that the Syrian opposition will unify politically in the time frame envisioned by those who hope to rush weapons to the front lines to protect civilians in besieged areas like Homs.  But this reality doesn't seem to actually blunt their enthusiasm for arming the Syrian opposition anyway. This waving away of supposedly "necessary" conditions reminds me all too clearly of those who insisted that COIN must have a legitimate national partner to work with but then insisted on carrying it out in Afghanistan anyway despite the manifest absence of such a leadership in Kabul.

But the report is not only a brief against military options. It tries to lay out a political and diplomatic strategy to increase the pressure on the Assad regime while building the conditions for a political transition.   Those grappling with the Syria crisis too often do not take seriously enough that Syrians remain sharply divided over the crisis.  Many Syrians continue to support the regime, some out of genuine fear of the future, some out of true commitment, some out of sectarian solidarity, some because they believe the narrative which the regime has crafted about foreign conspiracies. Ignoring or scoffing at their beliefs, or lobbing propaganda across a hostile divide, isn't going to help. No post-Assad Syria is going to be stable if it can't include and command the loyalty of that sizable portion of its population -- and so a political strategy must be designed to engage them in a plan for transition.

That does not mean engaging Assad or accepting his farcical reform proposals. The report argues that the time for negotiations with the top levels of the Assad regime has passed, and if they refuse to engage immediately then they should be moved towards indictment at the International Criminal Court.  A real choice should be given to lower level state officials, who should understand that their window is rapidly closing to defect or be indicted.  Targeted sanctions should increase the pressure on the top of the regime.  The Friends of Syria group should coordinate international activity, and every possible international forum should be mobilized to isolate and shame the Syrian regime.

But pressure is not enough.  Efforts should be stepped up to reach out to the broad base of the regime's remaining political support and to persuade them to take a frightening, risky leap into the unknown of a transition.  Particular attention should be paid to breaking through the polarized narratives which have Syrians increasingly living within mutually isolated narrative bubbles. The international community should work to bring credible information about regime atrocities to those Syrians who doubt their reality, and to reassure them about their place in a post-Assad Syria.  To the latter end, I lay out some proposals for drafting a political pact with international guarantees to which the Syrian opposition would commit itself as a way of reassuring those key parts of the Syrian fabric.   This may still be possible, despite the increasing polarization and hardening divide... but not if military options are chosen or major arms flow in to the various groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

The choice is not between political options which won't work and military options which will work.  The hard truth is that the available military options have little chance of quickly or decisively turning the tide against Assad's regime. They are more likely to simply ratchet the violence up to a higher level, while badly harming the chances of any kind of political transition which could create a stable, inclusive Syria.  I hope that this political proposal will be given a chance, even if its success if far from assured.   Please download the whole report here for more details, and I look forward to discussing the ideas.  

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 21/02/2012
-Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University

Tunisia At A Crossroads

By Rob Prince

                                    The movie Persepolis generated protests in Tunisia

At exactly 1:02 pm on December 17, 2011 — one year to the minute that Mohammed Bouazizi lit the match that set both himself and the region aflame — a giant portrait of Zine Ben Ali was rolled out in downtown Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, and burnt to the ground. In its place was raised a giant portrait of Bouazizi, marking the first celebration of his immolation as a national holiday.
But for all that has happened since Bouazizi’s act of rebellion, are the changes in Tunisia deep and enduring, or simply cosmetic? And where there has been real change, has it been for the better?

The overthrow of the Ben Ali government was a genuine and inclusive revolutionary upsurge. A year later, the whole country remains proud of what it has achieved and relieved that Ben Ali was overthrown. Tunisians are basking in what continues to be a spirit of openness and political dialogue unknown for the past quarter of a century.

But a little more than a year after the onset of the Arab Spring, some of the jasmine has begun to wilt. In the wake of a bloody civil war in Libya, ongoing carnage in Syria, and an incomplete transition in Egypt, the region is a much more sober place now than it was a year ago.

Tunisia is often portrayed as a bright spot in this increasingly somber regional picture. Indeed, after an orderly election, the country’s leaders successfully put together a three-party coalition transitional government, and now a constituent assembly is working on a new constitution. The country appears to be on track to elect a more permanent government, as promised, during the next year. Despite the problems it faces, Tunisia is more stable and seems to have the potential to come out of this crisis far better than its neighbors — in fact, better than almost any country with a Mediterranean coast. Yet even this comparatively rosy picture is somewhat overstated and misleading.

A New Polarization

No doubt, Tunisians have won the freedom of speech and expression long denied them, and the relatively smooth election process has given Tunisia the kind of political stability that a country like Libya could only dream of. The new ruling coalition led by Ennahda could be a stabilizing force.

But in some ways, the political atmosphere has hardened. There is a new polarization along cultural lines that has relegated the deepening socio-economic crisis to the sidelines.

A week before the October 23 elections in Tunisia, a political storm broke out over the screening in of Persepolis, a film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s novel of the same name. One scene in the award-winning animated film personifies Allah as a kindly elderly man, which offended some of the country’s more fundamentalist elements. A storm of protest followed led by Ennahda, the moderate Islamist political party now supported by the Obama administration.

There is some speculation that Ennahda initiated the campaign to strengthen its position in the elections, encouraging voters to overlook the party’s poorly defined economic vision for the country in favor of cultural issues. A week after the Persepolis controversy broke, Ennahda won 41 percent of the vote in Tunisia’s constituent assembly election and, as a result, a defining role in the country’s transition government.

Of course, Ennahdha probably did not need to go on the stump so actively against the film; it would have won a large plurality of the Tunisian electorate anyway. It has been an active and oppressed social movement for 30 years, functioning under difficult conditions that have left it hardened and politically sophisticated. It has a genuine base throughout the country, no doubt bolstered by the sympathy many Tunisians feel for the persecution the party suffered in years past.

And yet, it’s hard not to be cynical.

Curiously, Persepolis played in Tunisian movie theaters several years ago without much fanfare or criticism from Islamist elements. But this time around, the uproar triggered by the film continues until this day. This protest kicked off nothing less than an ideological offensive by the country’s Salafist constituencies. This has included campaigns to allow more religious women to wear the niqab (full veil) at Tunisian universities, the radicalizing of mosques and religious preschools along Salafist lines, and an unambiguous targeting of the country’s more secular-oriented women and cultural figures.

The Persepolis campaign also changed the political playing field in the country. Before the flap, the main issues covered in the Tunisian media concerned the country’s socio-economic crisis and the dismantling of Ben Ali’s extensive security apparatus. These issues – the need for greater economic security and greater democracy – triggered the Tunisian revolution in the first place.

Now, while the country continues to bleed jobs and its interior remains in a state of near collapse, the socio-economic crisis has been upended by these religious-cultural issues.

Old Hands, New Partners

Among those things that have not changed is the security apparatus. In a country of 10 million people, the Ben Ali regime hired no less than 250,000 to spy on, intimidate, torture, frame, and murder their fellow citizens. Although there have been a few changes at the top, most of the personnel hired by Ben Ali’s Ministry of the Interior remain in place. The extensive spy files collected during the Ben Ali years remain closed to public scrutiny.

There have been several reports of negotiations between the ruling Ennahda Party and the Ministry. Rather than dismantling the Ministry and replacing it with a more democratic structure, deals are being apparently negotiated to preserve it. In exchange for amnesty, will the Ministry work for Ennahda the way it worked for Ben Ali?

The police have followed suit, more or less asking for a similar arrangement. And although Ben Ali’s political party has been dissolved, many former members of his government are, formally or informally, gravitating toward Ennahda.

It is unfortunate but not particularly surprising that the people who made the revolution — the young and the poor — are not the ones elected to power in its wake. Sometime during the election campaign, the energies of the population shifted from solving the economic crisis to cultural questions that favored more traditional and conservative elements.

Ennahda is a mixed bag. The top layers are genuinely “moderate,” but much of the base has a distinctly fundamentalist tilt. To date, the leadership has hardly reined in the base, nor is it clear it wants to. The more secular parties in the ruling coalition, additionally, are hardly parties at all, having been largely scraped together only after Ben Ali departed. Ennahda, by contrast, has a rich history of more than 30 years.

This gives the moderate Islamist party a free hand to rule as it wants. Most of the powers formerly held by the country’s president have been eliminated and shifted to the prime minister, leaving Moncef Marzouki, the country’s center-left president, with little more than ceremonial responsibilities.

The Greatest Challenge

But by far the greatest challenge Tunisia faces is its economy, which badly needs investments in rural infrastructure and a workable vision for its future. Like so many peripheral and semi-peripheral countries in the global economy, Tunisia is plagued by a gaping urban-rural divide. The more prosperous urban areas — most especially Tunis, Souse, Sfax, and Bizerte — are highly developed, and although one can see and feel the overall social crisis there, its effects are far more muted.

But the rural interior remains in a state of near collapse, and the level of anger and frustration there is thick and obvious. The unemployment rate in the rural areas is soaring and could be as high as 50 percent, unreliable official statistics aside, or perhaps even higher.

There has been an explosion of strikes affecting virtually every sector of the economy and every region of the country, especially the interior. Although a year ago the Tunisian military eased the way for Ben Ali’s departure by refusing to fire on demonstrators, it is now used more and more to break strikes and demonstrations.

Very little has been done to date to address this crisis, which threatens the entire reform structure. Most of the solutions offered have been along the same neoliberal lines that triggered the social explosion in the first place. The market alone is clearly incapable of turning the country around, but any discussion of using state intervention to help the economy get back on its feet is muted for fear of driving away foreign investment from the Gulf States and the IMF.

There have been other political mass movements that toppled dictators and secured new political rights but ultimately fizzled — Chile, the Philippines, and Indonesia are among the more striking examples. In the end, the political changes won by these uprisings were more cosmetic than revolutionary. The economic structures, whose malfunctioning were key to triggering social crises in the first place, changed little.

Tunisia is at a crossroads. Which way will it turn? 

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy In Focus on 21/02/2012
- Rob Prince teaches at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. He writes the blog Colorado Progressive Jewish News, now in its eighth year

Yemen's Election Might Matter

By Danya Greenfield

With daily massacres in Homs and prosecution of U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Cairo, the simmering conflict in Sanaa has faded into the background. Yet on February 21 attention will turn again to Yemen on the occasion of its presidential election. The election might seem hollow, as there is only one candidate in the race, however, it is still a pivotal step in Yemen's political transition -- and the United States should use this moment to press for a real shift away from the former regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The national vote could be more aptly named a referendum, as the current Vice President Abed Rabbo Hadi Mansour, who assumed temporary authority via a deal advanced by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), will be anointed Yemen's next leader barring any catastrophic outbreaks of violence.

While on the surface the election might seem like window-dressing at best, the psychological impact for Yemen of moving into the next phase is powerful. At a minimum, the election turns the page on decades of disappointment, despair, and disillusionment. And definitively removing Saleh from power could pave the way for opening new space for real political competition and accountable governance. He is a man who has ruled Yemen for 33 years, in his own words, "by dancing on the heads of snakes," through masterful skill in manipulating tribal alliances, political allegiances, and patronage networks. After prior pledges to leave power were reversed -- and months of hand-wringing when Saleh agreed to sign the deal and then three times reneged -- just having this official exit stamp is a relief.

Removal of the head does not, however, change the body of the snake. Much deeper changes are necessary, but it is essential to remember that Yemen is not starting from scratch and actually enjoys some advantages over other Arab countries. Unlike Egypt, Yemen has a culture of multi-party competition and coalition politics; unlike Libya, Yemen has a developed parliamentary process with strong committee structures; and unlike Tunisia, Yemen has a history of a dynamic civil society that defends human rights and the freedoms of press and expression. There is a foundation upon which to build in Yemen, but democracy advocates need international assistance and support, not only financial, but moral and ideological as well. If the United States and its allies support a status quo that prioritizes security cooperation at the expense of democratic gains, then the United States will jeopardize the long-term stability and prosperity of the Yemeni people. A weakened Yemen fosters a growing al Qaeda presence, which ultimately compromises U.S. security as well.

The country faces endemic challenges, many of which preceded the conflict, including dire economic conditions, pervasive unemployment, and poor access to clean water, fuel, and electricity for millions of citizens. Then there are the new problems that the GCC deal created, such as a blanket immunity clause for President Saleh and all his cohorts that is proving to be divisive and potentially catastrophic. At the same time, the military and security apparatus is still controlled by Saleh's son, nephews, and other family members. Furthermore, the deal was agreed upon by the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), a coalition of Yemeni opposition parties, but did not include other important groups with legitimate grievances, such as the southern secessionists, the Houthi rebels in the north, and the non-aligned youth activists.

Despite these shortcomings, the GCC agreement is the current best hope for political transition in Yemen. Assuming that Saleh does indeed depart the stage, the United States and its allies should weigh in forcefully on unresolved issues that will determine whether Yemen emerges as a nation with optimism and hope, or one that is hampered by a legacy of corruption, abuse, and neglect from the past three decades. Specifically, the United States should actively engage its military and intelligence counterparts to ensure that security sector restructuring occurs beyond a superficial level and does not leave the same old power brokers in place that compete for fiefdoms within the country. Since the immunity clause is unlikely to be reversed, the United States should support alternative transitional justice mechanisms to address the wounds of war, and should foster a National Dialogue process that is truly inclusive and incorporates youth voices, which have been largely marginalized up to this point.

To date, U.S. policy has centered on counterterrorism cooperation with Yemeni security forces and assistance to combat al Qaeda operatives. However, it is clear that a policy focused solely on military assistance, weapons, and drone attacks will not eliminate the threat of terrorism toward American targets. The United States should more forcefully advance an approach in Yemen that focuses on economic growth, sustainable development, transparent institutions, and the rule of law in order to create long-term stability that will benefit both the United States and Yemen. Moving forward, the United States and its allies should actively hold the new government accountable for the implementation of the deal, and at the same time, exert every effort to support the democratic forces that are still advocating real, legitimate political change, rather than simply being satisfied with Saleh's removal.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 21/02/2012
-Danya Greenfield is the deputy director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council

Iran Raid Seen As A Huge Task For Israeli Jets

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

One possible Israeli target, the uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, was guarded in 2007 by antiaircraft artillery.

Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.

That is the assessment of American defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon, who say that an Israeli attack meant to set back Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge and highly complex operation. They describe it as far different from Israel’s “surgical” strikes on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

“All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going to be that easy,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official and who planned the American air campaigns in 2001 in Afghanistan and in the 1991 Gulf War.

Speculation that Israel might attack Iran has intensified in recent months as tensions between the countries have escalated. In a sign of rising American concern, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Sunday, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, warned on CNN that an Israeli strike on Iran right now would be “destabilizing.” Similarly, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that attacking Iran would not be “the wise thing” for Israel to do “at this moment.”

But while an Israeli spokesman in Washington, Lior Weintraub, said the country continued to push for tougher sanctions on Iran, he reiterated that Israel, like the United States, “is keeping all options on the table.”

The possible outlines of an Israeli attack have become a source of debate in Washington, where some analysts question whether Israel even has the military capacity to carry it off. One fear is that the United States would be sucked into finishing the job — a task that even with America’s far larger arsenal of aircraft and munitions could still take many weeks, defense analysts said. Another fear is of Iranian retaliation.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be done — handful of planes, over an evening, in and out,’ ” said Andrew R. Hoehn, a former Pentagon official who is now director of the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force, which does extensive research for the United States Air Force.

Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009, said flatly last month that airstrikes capable of seriously setting back Iran’s nuclear program were “beyond the capacity” of Israel, in part because of the distance that attack aircraft would have to travel and the scale of the task.

Still, a top defense official cautioned in an interview last week that “we don’t have perfect visibility” into Israel’s arsenal, let alone its military calculations. His views were echoed by Anthony H. Cordesman, an influential military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There are a lot of unknowns, there are a lot of potential risks, but Israel may know that those risks aren’t that serious,” he said.

Given that Israel would want to strike Iran’s four major nuclear sites — the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy-water reactor at Arak and the yellowcake-conversion plant at Isfahan — military analysts say the first problem is how to get there. There are three potential routes: to the north over Turkey, to the south over Saudi Arabia or taking a central route across Jordan and Iraq.

The route over Iraq would be the most direct and likely, defense analysts say, because Iraq effectively has no air defenses and the United States, after its December withdrawal, no longer has the obligation to defend Iraqi skies. “That was a concern of the Israelis a year ago, that we would come up and intercept their aircraft if the Israelis chose to take a path across Iraq,” said a former defense official who asked for anonymity to discuss secret intelligence.

Assuming that Jordan tolerates the Israeli overflight, the next problem is distance. Israel has American-built F-15I and F-16I fighter jets that can carry bombs to the targets, but their range — depending on altitude, speed and payload — falls far short of the minimum 2,000-mile round trip. That does not include an aircraft’s “loiter time” over a target plus the potential of having to fight off attacks from Iranian missiles and planes.

In any possibility, Israel would have to use airborne refueling planes, called tankers, but Israel is not thought to have enough. Scott Johnson, an analyst at the defense consulting firm IHS Jane’s and the leader of a team preparing an online seminar on Israeli strike possibilities on Iran, said that Israel had eight KC-707 American-made tankers, although it is not clear they are all in operation. It is possible, he said, that Israel has reconfigured existing planes into tankers to use in a strike.

Even so, any number of tankers would need to be protected by ever more fighter planes. “So the numbers you need just skyrocket,” Mr. Johnson said. Israel has about 125 F-15Is and F-16Is. One possibility, Mr. Johnson said, would be to fly the tankers as high as 50,000 feet, making them hard for air defenses to hit, and then have them drop down to a lower altitude to meet up with the fighter jets to refuel.

Israel would still need to use its electronic warfare planes to penetrate Iran’s air defenses and jam its radar systems to create a corridor for an attack. Iran’s antiaircraft defenses may be a generation old — in 2010, Russia refused to sell Iran its more advanced S-300 missile system — but they are hardly negligible, military analysts say.

Iranian missiles could force Israeli warplanes to maneuver and dump their munitions before they even reached their targets. Iran could also strike back with missiles that could hit Israel, opening a new war in the Middle East, though some Israeli officials have argued that the consequences would be worse if Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon.

Another major hurdle is Israel’s inventory of bombs capable of penetrating the Natanz facility, believed to be buried under 30 feet of reinforced concrete, and the Fordo site, which is built into a mountain.

Assuming it does not use a nuclear device, Israel has American-made GBU-28 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that could damage such hardened targets, although it is unclear how far down they can go.

Earlier this month, a Bipartisan Policy Center report by Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, and Charles F. Wald, a retired Air Force general, recommended that the Obama administration sell Israel 200 enhanced GBU-31 “bunker busters” as well as three advanced refueling planes.

The two said that they were not advocating an Israeli attack, but that the munitions and aircraft were needed to improve Israel’s credibility as it threatens a strike.

Should the United States get involved — or decide to strike on its own — military analysts said that the Pentagon had the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the United States has plenty of refueling capability. Bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.

Nonetheless, defense officials say it would still be tough to penetrate Iran’s deepest facilities with existing American bombs and so are enhancing an existing 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” that was specifically designed for Iran and North Korea.

“There’s only one superpower in the world that can carry this off,” General Deptula said. “Israel’s great on a selective strike here and there.”

-This report was published in The New York Times on 20/02/2012
-Scott Shane contributed reporting