Tag Archives: terrorism

Saudi Arabia

In naming son as Saudi crown prince, Salman skips an entire princely generation

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In a stunning move, Muhammad bin Salman, the son of the current king, has been named crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (SPA)

Just a few years ago, Saudi Arabia and its oversized royal family faced a conundrum.

With the ascension of Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the age of 79 in January 2015, it confirmed that the Saudis weren’t yet prepared to turn over the reigns of government from the legendary second generation of sons of Ibn Saud, generally seen as the founder of the modern Saudi state. Salman, the 25th son of Ibn Saud, ascended the throne, while Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, an even younger brother, became crown prince. Not long ago, it was conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia had become a gerontocratic horizontal monarchy where power passed from brother to increasingly infirm brother, with no plan for transitioning to a younger monarch.

Salman, now 81, who effectively governed the country was rumored to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease when he ascended the throne. Today, however, he presides over a kingdom that’s taken a much more muscular role regionally, from a devastating proxy war in Yemen against Houthi rebels and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh(and, really, against Iran) to a deepening diplomatic crisis with Qatar over its alleged funding of Islamic terrorism (including  relatively pro-democratic groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood), despite the Saudi kingdom’s own funding of hard-line Wahhabists.

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RELATED: Why Trump’s outreach to Saudi Arabia
might not be so clueless

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But within three months, he had replaced Muqrin as crown prince from a member of the next generation — the revered interior minister Muhammad bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, now 57 years old, the deputy crown prince who became a beloved Saudi figure among American policymakers in the 2000s and early 2010s for his effectiveness in Saudi counterterrorism efforts that proved largely successful (by either bribing and rehabilitating would-be jihadists or eliminating them).

In recent years, there were reports that Muhammad bin Nayef, who suffered ill effects from a 2009 assassination attempt, was in increasingly ill health.

That may have been an issue in Salman’s decision today in removing Muhammad bin Nayef, both as interior minister and crown prince. Instead, Salman’s own son, the 31-year-old Muhammad bin Salman Al Saud, who replaced his father as the Saudi defense minister upon his father’s ascension to the throne in January 2015, will now be elevated as crown prince. In the last two and a half years, Muhammad bin Salman’s star has been on the rise, just as Muhammad bin Nayef’s star has been on the wane. His tenure as defense minister hasn’t always been smooth, given the aggressive and sometimes over-hasty steps he took in 2015 to intervene in Yemen before his country’s security services and armed forces seemed ready to carry out his plans. But no one paying attention could have missed the ambition of the king’s son. Continue reading In naming son as Saudi crown prince, Salman skips an entire princely generation →

United Kingdom

Blair, once unstoppable in British politics, reviled as worst postwar PM

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Former prime minister Tony Blair appeared a sad shadow of his once dominant self responding to the Chilcot report on the mistakes of the Iraq war.
Former prime minister Tony Blair appeared a sad shadow of his once dominant self responding to the Chilcot report on the mistakes of the Iraq war.

It’s staggering to think that the man who stood in front of a drab yellow backdrop earlier this month, still defending his decision to join the US invasion of Iraq, was the same man who once charmed the British electorate with a staggering electoral haul of 418 seats in the House of Commons that once reduced the Conservative Party to a rump movement in British politics.United Kingdom Flag Icon

Nineteen years ago, Blair bestrode British politics with a mandate that not even Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher ever claimed. To this day, the 418 seats that Blair won as the head of a re-energized, re-focused, and rechristened  ‘New’ Labour in 1997 is the most sweeping victory that any prime minister has claimed since the 1930s. To put that into perspective, if Conservative prime minister Theresa May called a snap election today, polls show that Labour, even under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, would do better than the Tories in 1997, when Labour swept to power on a 12.5% national margin of victory.

Blair pulled his party out from the disastrous shadow of the 1970s, when Labour’s Britain was falling far behind continental Europe, infamously amending the Labour Party constitution’s ‘clause IV’ that committed the party to socialism and nationalization. There’s no dispute that Blair approached ‘New Labour’ with enthusiastic acceptance for much of Thatcherism and free markets. Of course, it’s fair to say that 18 consecutive years of Conservative government and dysfunctional divides in the later years of John Major’s cabinet left British voters willing to take a chance on anything. It’s not incredible to surmise that a lesser political talent — like Neil Kinnock, Labour’s leader from 1983 to 1992, or the late John Smith, whose 1994 death paved the way for Blair’s ascension — would have won the 1997 election with ease.

But with the release of the Chilcot report’s damning verdict about the leadup to the Iraq invasion, just six words from a pre-invasion memo in 2002 to then-US president George W. Bush will forever define Blair’s legacy:

I will be with you, whatever.

Six words. But they contain everything explaining how Blair went in two decades’ time from electoral behemoth to politically radioactive. The Chilcot Report, commissioned in 2009 by Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, found that Saddam Hussein in 2002 and 2003 posed no imminent threat to the United States or to the United Kingdom, that both American and British leaders embellished intelligence suggesting the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and that post-invasion planning by both US and UK officials was horrifically inadequate. In short, the worst British foreign policy disaster since the Suez crisis in 1956 and, perhaps, even worse than that.

Just as David Cameron’s legacy will now begin and end with Brexit, Blair’s legacy will forever begin and end with Iraq.

Continue reading Blair, once unstoppable in British politics, reviled as worst postwar PM →

Belgium, Flanders

It’s time for Flanders to put up or shut up… and leave

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Citizens in Brussels took to downtown to write messages of love and peace in the wake of horrific terror attacks Tuesday. (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)
Citizens in Brussels took to downtown to write messages of love and peace in the wake of horrific terror attacks Tuesday. (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)

At the heart of the tragic jihadist assault on Brussels this week lies what economics and political scientists know as a collective action problem.Belgium Flagflanders flag

Within the hollowed-out central state of Belgium, virtually no one wants to foot the bill for the kind of counter-terrorism, security and police investigation operations that Brussels needed to avert Tuesday’s horrific simultaneous airport and subway attacks. The European Commission, which calls Brussels home, has neither the power nor the inclination to provide a supranational layer of security to the city.

Brussels, a majority French-speaking city, is its own region, though it lies completely outside the borders of the left-leaning, French-speaking Wallonia. Meanwhile, the more economically vibrant Flemish-speaking Flanders has, as a condition for keeping the Belgian union together for the past half-century, increasingly demanded more regional powers from both Wallonia and Brussels.

No one — at the European level, at the national level or at either of the Walloon or Flemish regional level — has a proper incentive to fund what’s obviously become a disproportionate security cost for Brussels, in particular (and not, say, Antwerp or Ghent or Charleroi).

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RELATED: Is Belgium destined for breakup after
another inconclusive vote?

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While there are obviously many reasons for Tuesday’s terror attacks, it’s no surprise that Brussels recurs as the setting for jihadist attacks. Radical Islamists in the Molenbeek community, now an infamous byword for jihadist agitation in Europe, were central to planning the 2004 Madrid attacks, last November’s attacks in Paris and, now, the terrorist strike that Belgian authorities feared four months ago — and that forced Brussels itself into a four-day lockdown as police forces tried to stymie a terrorist plot last November.

Just four months after the Paris attacks, planned from Brussels, brought the Belgian capital to a standstill for 96 hours, and just four days after Belgian police, at long last, captured Salah Abdeslam, the remaining suspect in last year’s Paris attacks, Belgian authorities were already on high alert.

That didn’t matter. Tragedy still struck. Continue reading It’s time for Flanders to put up or shut up… and leave →

Iran, United States

One chart that explains Obama era Middle East policy

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BoA ChartChart credit to Bank of America.

Within a half-century, the most important fact of the Obama administration might well be that it presided over an energy boom that de-linked, for the first time in many decades, US dependence on Middle Eastern oil and foreign policy.USflagIran Flag Icon

No other fact more explains the deal, inked with the Islamic Republic of Iran, that brings Iran ever closer into the international community — and no other fact brings together so neatly the often contradictory aspects of US president Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East today.

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RELATED: Winners and losers in the Iran nuclear deal

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With the exception of a small peak in the mid-1980s, when prices tanked after the oil shocks of the 1970s, US imports of foreign oil are lower than ever — and that’s a critical component to understanding Tuesday’s deal between the P5+1 and Iran. Thanks, in part, to the shale oil and fracking revolutions, US oil reserves are at their highest levels than at any point since 1975. Bank of America’s chart (pictured above) shows that US dependence on foreign oil — net imports as a percentage of consumption — dropped to 26.5% by the end of 2014.

Making sense of the Obama administration’s Mideast contradictions

One of the sharpest criticisms of the Obama administration is that it has no overweening strategy for the region. On the surface, the contradictions are legion. To take just three examples: Continue reading One chart that explains Obama era Middle East policy →

Cuba, United States

Obama’s move to remove Cuba from terror list was long overdue

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obamaraulPhoto credit to Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.

Fully 15 out of 19 hijackers in the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were Saudi nationals, products of a country governed by a royal family in a centuries-long symbiotic relationship with fundamentalist Wahhabism. When US special forces finally found and killed Osama bin Laden (also a Saudi national) in 2011, he was being protected by Pakistani forces, with plenty of sympathizers within Pakistan’s  military and intelligence community.USflagcuba

Neither Saudi Arabia nor Pakistan, however, have ever been designated by the US State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism’ list, which has always had more to do with the geopolitics of American foreign policy than with reality.

So on the heels of US president Barack Obama’s meeting with Cuban president Raúl Castro at the Summit of the Americas last weekend (pictured above), the Obama administration announced on Tuesday that it would recommend removing Cuba from the ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ list. The recommendation will take effect in 45 days, following the Obama administration’s notification to the US Congress. Though Congressional action is unlikely to halt Obama’s decision, Obama will need the Republican-controlled Congress to approve any measure to lift the embargo initially imposed on Cuba in 1960 by the United States. Former president George W. Bush took a similar decision with respect to North Korea in June 2008 in consideration for the reclusive country’s decision to allow greater inspection of its nuclear sites.

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RELATED: Six key questions about the landmark Cuba deal

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Republican president Ronald Reagan initially added Cuba to the list in 1982, when it became clear that its leader Fidel Castro was supporting leftist guerrilla movements across Latin America that the Reagan administration believed imperative to stop. Nevertheless, Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua in the 1980s and Hugo Chavez’s firmly anti-American government in Venezuela in the 2000s never landed on the list. The most recent 2013 State Department review that justified Cuba’s continued ‘terror sponsor’ status reads like satire, noting that the Cuban government is harboring fugitives from the US justice system, Basque nationalists and Colombian rebels. Never mind the Spanish government concluded a ceasefire with the Basque guerrilla ETA in 2011 and even though Havana was by 2012 hosting talking between the Colombian government and the left-wing FARC.

Though a few dozen US nationals are currently in Cuba evading American law, Cuba is hardly the only country guilty of this. Edward Snowden has been in Russia nearly two years. Yemen, Somalia and dozens of other countries are likely harboring individuals who pose much greater threats to US national interests than Cuba these days. The decision leaves just Syria, Sudan and Iran on the list, all of which have ties to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah or the Palestinian group Hamas.

Cuba participated in the pan-American summit last week in Panama City only for the first time since 1994 when the first summit was held, and though Obama and Castro outlined their countries’ respective differences at length, Obama argued that the longstanding enmity between the two countries originated in another time:

“The United States will not be imprisoned by the past — we’re looking to the future,” Mr. Obama, 53, said of his approach to Cuba at the summit meeting’s first plenary session on Saturday. “I’m not interested in having battles that frankly started before I was born.”

“The Cold War,” he added, “has been over for a long time.”

Critics, from hawkish Republicans to Democrats like former Senate foreign relations committee chair Robert Menendez condemned Obama’s decision, and it’s not clear that Obama will succeed in his quest to lift the embargo in the remainder of his administration. Obama’s critics also include the Miami-born Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and the son of Cuban immigrants. Rubio, who became the third major Republican to announce a presidential campaign on Monday, sharply denounced the Obama administration’s overtures to Cuba, putting him out of step with many American voters, including increasingly younger Cuban Americans.

Though the decision to remove Cuba is mostly symbolic, it will open Cuba to the global payments system because international banks with links to the United States have largely avoided handling Cuban funds, out of fear of repercussions from the US department of justice. That, in turn, will facilitate the formal re-opening of embassies in both Havana and Washington. Lifting the designation also means that the US government may now provide greater economic assistance.

Domestic policy considerations have long delayed the thawing of US-Cuba relations, but Cuba hasn’t been sponsor of terrorism in decades, and there’s no evidence that Cuba ever supported any kind of terrorism that truly threatened US national interests. Even in the absence of the parallel US opening to Cuba, the Obama administration’s decision to remove Cuba from the list of terrorism sponsors was long overdue.

Canada

What makes Canada (and Ottawa) great is its open society

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A policeman flagged me down when I was poking around Canada’s parliament earlier this year in Ottawa. I’m sure that I looked somewhat suspicious peering into old windows, after a tour spent nosing into closed-off corridors, trying to catch just the right angle to snap a photo of the official portraits of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and other prime ministers. Canada Flag Icon

The officer, however, didn’t yell at me or scold me. He didn’t say that the parliament was off limits. Instead, he gave me a Canada flag pin and welcomed me to his country, and said he was glad that I was visiting Ottawa.

It’s a moment that captured perfectly one of the real differences between American and Canadian culture — and not just politically. It also made me realize how instinctively I wince when I see any security officer of any kind, living for more than a decade in post-2001 New York and Washington.

That difference in tone is one of the many, real differences between American and Canadian culture.

What’s most tragic, from a long-term policy perspective, about today’s horrible shooting on Parliament Hill is that Canada might one day feel the kind of anti-terror paranoia that has led so many US politicians of both major parties to leap overboard when it comes to security theater and willingly shred and abuse civil and political rights (including the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure) all in the name of ‘protecting the homeland.’ Canada’s immigration policies and its open society have made it, in many ways, a more welcoming destination for the rest of the world outside North America. Half of Toronto’s residents, for example, are foreign-born.

No one knows the reasons for today’s awful attack, and US-based pundits will find a way to turn it into another exhibit for their pet causes.

Today’s attack already ended the life of a Canadian soldier, Nathan Frank Cirillo. It would be even sadder if it reduced the open, decent and welcoming culture with which Canada has become synonymous.

Russia, Ukraine

Malaysia Flight 17 will hasten Ukraine-Russia cooperation

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If you’re like me, you won’t be able to erase the mental image of seeing a dead woman’s corpse on Thursday.Russia Flag IconUkraine Flag Icon

Like it or not, that will be, for me and for many millions more, the indelible image of the tragic and horrific attack on Malaysia Airlines 17 on Thursday, her black skirt, her bare feet, the corpse of a man in a green short-sleeved shirt lying beside her. It’s a moment when anyone who has ever flown internationally felt a sinking feeling in his or her gut. It reminded me of my first trip to Latin America, which took us through Cuban airspace, something I found inordinately odd, given the absolute lack of cooperation between the U.S. and Cuban governments otherwise.

The world is now holding its collective judgment over the issue of whether Ukraine, Ukrainian dissidents or Russian officials share more blame for the attack on Malaysia Airlines 17. (Plenty of us have our guesses, and the Kremlin’s defensiveness in the hours following the attack speaks volumes). But in many ways, it doesn’t matter. If Russia is at fault, you can be sure Vladimir Putin will stonewall the investigation as much as possible. That doesn’t change the fundamentals that Putin must now make the peace.

Putin has, for some time, realized that he needs to be working with, and not against, Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, to bring eastern Ukraine to peace. That doesn’t mean that Putin will end his campaign of political dirty tricks in Ukraine. But since mid-May, when Putin distanced himself from the Donetsk and Luhansk referenda, thereby refusing to envelop eastern Ukraine in the same way as Crimea, the Kremlin has increasingly avowed responsibility for the separatist campaign that it tacitly encouraged in March and April. Putin further recognized Poroshenko’s election and, while Ukrainian-Russian relations might still be strained, they’re less tense than they were before May 25. We don’t know, and we might never know, whether the separatists gained anti-aircraft missiles from Moscow or simply took them over from eastern Ukraine army installations, but Putin now has an imperative to shut down the separatists and work with Poroshenko to secure eastern Ukraine. It does Putin no favors to have civilian aircraft shot out of the sky a spit’s throw away from the Russian border.

We still don’t know how many U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, but there are estimates of 25 or so. When was the last time that 25 American citizens died in a terrorist attack? Who, before Thursday, thought that it could happen over eastern Ukraine’s skies, for all of the FAA warnings? The Middle East, east Africa maybe, but not Europe.

As has been true since former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych ordered fire on civilian protesters in Kiev in February, a European country is going through more lethal conflict than at any time since Yugoslavia’s brutal civil war.

Accordingly, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 could bring Poroshenko and Putin, finally, on the same page. If 25 U.S. citizens were indeed on board, Putin is going to face hell from US president Barack Obama, and probably from the rest of the United Nations Security Council, including the typically ambivalent China. But certainly, the dozens of dead Dutch citizens will also anger prime minister Mark Rutte, an ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel. As angry as the Obama administration must be, Thursday’s civil aviation disaster is now a direct threat to European civilian security, a game-changer in Brussels, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Though he can avoid culpability, Putin certainly can’t ignore this. Poroshenko, literally days after signing an association agreement with the European Union, can’t either. Though the next few days will almost certainly involve a lot of diplomatic smoke, the macabre, silver lining of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is that it may hasten more stability in eastern Ukraine, uniting Poroshenko and Putin in the cause of avoiding another similar horror.

India, Pakistan

Photo of the day: Modi, Sharif meet at India’s inauguration

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Former Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was sworn in today as India’s 14th prime minister in New Delhi today.India Flag IconPakistan Flag Icon

But as historic as his inauguration is, which brings to power Modi’s conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) after a landslide victory in India’s April/May national elections with the largest mandate of any Indian political party since 1984, it’s been eclipsed by the presence of Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

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It was the first time that a Pakistani leader has ever attended an Indian inauguration, and the handshake between Modi and Sharif is an audacious start for the Modi era. Modi, who has evinced a hawkish line on foreign policy, especially regarding India’s Muslim-majority neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, made the surprising invitation to Sharif late last week. Sharif, much to the world’s surprise, and likely in opposition to hardliners in his own conservative party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) and within Pakistan’s military and intelligence communities, accepted invitation over the weekend. 

Sharif joins a handful of regional leaders from within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to attend Modi’s swearing-in ceremony, including Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapaksa and Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai.

Modi’s invitations weren’t without controversy at home — Modi’s hard-right, Hindu nationalist allies in Shiv Sena (SS, शिवसेना) opposed the outreach to Sharif, and Tamil Nadu leaders in both Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa decried the invitation to Rajapaksa.

But Modi’s mandate is so sweeping that he has enough political capital to do just about whatever he wants, no matter what his allies think. Modi’s hawkish reputation, in combination with his parliamentary majority, could give him the space to pursue the kind of closer economic ties that have eluded prior Indian governments. Continue reading Photo of the day: Modi, Sharif meet at India’s inauguration →

United States

Questions on the U.S. war on terror, Obama’s big speech and its effect on world politics

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dronetanamo

There’s a lot to unpack from the wide-ranging speech that U.S. president Barack Obama gave this afternoon on the United States and its ongoing military action to combat terror organizations.USflag

I got the sense that Obama’s been anxious to make this speech for some time and to make the terms of debate over targeted attacks from unmanned aircraft — ‘drones’ — public.  The speech itself came after U.S. attorney general Eric Holder admitted in a letter for the first time that U.S. drones killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as three other U.S. citizens accidentally.  It’s important to recall, furthermore, that Obama only first publicly acknowledged the drone strikes in Pakistan last year during an online chat.

It’s far beyond my blog’s realm to delve far into the speech in specificity — Benjamin Wittes has already done that in a series of blog posts (here and here) at Lawfare that are more articulate than anything I could produce in such a short time frame.  But when the president of the United States delivers a wide-ranging address on the U.S. war on terror, it has so many effects on world politics that it’s impossible not to think about how policy may change in the remaining years of the Obama administration.

Those policy decisions are incredibly relevant to international law and politics, but also in the domestic politics of two dozen countries — Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so on.

What I do have, however, are a lot of questions that remain following the speech — perhaps even more than I had before I watched the speech.

  • Associated forces.  Obama mentioned al-Qaeda’s ‘associated forces’ four times, but what exactly is an associated force?  The lack of any meaningful definition lingered awkwardly with every mention.  In many ways, this goes to the heart of the legal issue with the drone strikes in places like Yemen and Somalia, and whether they’re even authorized under the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).  Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) share a name, and key links, but it’s really difficult for me to believe that impoverished radical Yemenis or Tuaregs are really so associated with the original iteration of al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden led in 2001. Somalia’s al-Shabab is often described as a home-grown al-Qaeda, but is it an associated person? It’s even more doubtful than AQAP and AQIM.  Hamas and al-Qaeda are certainly mutually sympathetic and may well have mutual ties over the past two decades, but does that make Hamas an associated force?  In the same way, the Taliban in Afghanistan is not affiliated with the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (i.e., the Pakistani Taliban), but they’ve been a particular target of the Obama administration’s drone strikes in Pakistan — so much so that drone strikes were a top issue in Pakistan’s recent national elections.  So there’s a real question as to whether those actions legal — if those targets aren’t associated forces, the targets aren’t subject to the use of military force under the AUMF.
  • The precision of future drone strikes.  Obama has committed to more judicial use of drone strikes that have, as Obama admitted, killed civilians in the past, and though he didn’t exactly outline it in his speech, it’s reported that the U.S. military will take over some of the role that the Central Intelligence Agency has played in the drone strikes in recent years.  Nonetheless, the CIA has been reported to have used so-called ‘signature strikes,’ which target young men who live in areas known to be dominated by radical terrorist groups, though the strikes aren’t based on specific identification or intelligence that ties the targets to clear engagement against the United States.  Obama didn’t mention ‘signature strikes’ today.  But he argued that the use of drones is ‘heavily constrained’ and further bound ‘by consultations with partners’ and ‘respect for state sovereignty,’ and that drone strikes are only waged against terrorists ‘who pose a continuing and imminent threat’ when there are not other governments ‘capable of addressing’ that threat,’ and only when there’s a ‘near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.’  That’s a much higher standard than what’s been reported in the past.  So was Obama describing past policy on drone strikes or future policy? What do assurances of more precision in the future mean when we don’t know the level of care with which the drone strikes have been effected in the past?
  • The oversight of future drone strikes.  It’s also unclear how the Obama administration believes oversight should be handled.  Obama, in his speech, noted that he’s asked his administration to review proposals for extending oversight on drone strikes, and he outlined several options, including something similar to the FISA courts that authorize electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens in the fight against terrorism.  But he’s in year five of his administration — shouldn’t this be something that his administration has already considered?  Will his administration be able to enact a system in time for Obama’s successor?  Will it even be based in statute so that it’s binding on future administrations?  All of this is unclear. Continue reading Questions on the U.S. war on terror, Obama’s big speech and its effect on world politics →

Russia, United States

Boston bombing suspects could cause uptick in anti-Chechen feeling in the US

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Russia map

UPDATE:  Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, has come out with a statement disclaiming Chechen culpability, but in a way that blames American ‘attitudes and beliefs,’ and I doubt it will do much to lift American hearts and minds in favor of Chechnya:

Tragic events have taken place in Boston. A terrorist attack killed people. We have already expressed our condolences to the people of the city and to the American people. Today, the media reports, one Tsarnaev was killed as [police] tried to arrest him. It would be appropriate if he was detained and investigated, and the circumstances and the extent of his guilt determined. Apparently, the security services needed to calm down the society by any means necessary.

Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs — if they are guilty — is futile. They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America. The whole world must struggle against terrorism — that we know better than anyone else. We hope for the recovery of all the victims, and we mourn with the Americans.

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It’s a small Caucasian republic in Russia with barely over one million people, but Chechnya attracted attention worldwide in the 1990s when it fought two wars against Russia to become a separate republic.

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Now, with word that the two bombing suspects are/were Chechen (or perhaps from neighboring Dagestan, it’s unclear to me), Chechnya is likely to come to the forefront as a topic of U.S. foreign relations, even as one of the suspects has been killed overnight and a wide manhunt continues for the second suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

We still have more questions than answers at this point, and there’s no evidence, as far as I can tell, that this is some concerted plot concocted in Grozny or Makhachkala, so I’m wary to make any sweeping statements.

But Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution worries that it will destroy the chances of the U.S. Congress passing a comprehensive immigration bill later this year, and while I think that’s a valid concern, I worry more that this will cause  huge anti-Chechen sentiment in the United States, emboldening Russian president Vladimir Putin to effect a crackdown on the North Caucasus, which still features some amount of insurgent activity since Russian troops asserted control over Chechnya in 2000.

Predominantly Islamic, Chechnya largely held off the assertion of Russian political and military control following the First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996, and the Russian military’s failure was one of the reasons (aside from Russia’s economy) that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin became very unpopular in early 1996 months ahead of his reelection.  Yeltsin, and Putin thereafter, from 1999 to 2000 in the Second Chechen War, definitively brought Chechnya under federal control.  Ramzan Kadyrov, the current Chechen leader since 2007, is the son of a former-rebel-turned-Kremlin-ally, and his iron rule has restored some amount of political and economic stability to Grozny, though his tenure’s been marked by a number of accusations of human rights violations.

If anything, neighboring Dagestan has become the more recent problem as a seat of instability and violence, and the struggle in the two regions has transformed from a largely post-Soviet nationalist struggle into one that’s much more religious in nature over the past decade.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Bush administration, John Bolton, is already claiming they are hired killers in a grander conspiracy.

As Politico notes, U.S. presidents haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on the Chechen issue in the past:

For years before the Boston Marathon suspects were identified, American presidents have avoided talking about Chechnya — it’s been a prerequisite demanded by Russia’s leaders for maintaining strong relationships.

President Barack Obama and his administration have been quiet on the continued tensions between Vladmir Putin’s government and the area that is its federal subject. That follows the pattern of his predecessors: Bill Clinton pushed Boris Yeltsin to find a peaceful settlement to what began in 1994 as a war to gain independence from Russia, as did George W. Bush.

Since taking office, Obama hasn’t said the word “Chechnya” publicly. The Treasury and State Departments have, though, taken action.

Reports of Russian military abuses abound from its Chechen campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, many documented by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  Pro-Chechen groups have conducted a number of terrorist activities against citizens in Russia, many of them harrowing — the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, the 2003 Stavropol train bombing, the 2004 Moscow metro bombing, the 2004 Beslan school siege — but never outside Russia.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on current Chechen rebel activity, but I fear that Putin could use the Boston bombing — if indeed the link to Chechnya is confirmed — as a pretense for another campaign against Chechen and Dagestani rebels.

Photo credit to BBC News. 

Pakistan

Khan ‘peace rally’ near Waziristan border has implications for politics in Pakistan and beyond

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Imran Khan, the upstart cricket star-turned-politician, led a ‘peace march’ over the weekend, right up to the Waziristan border, in protest of the U.S.-initiated drone attacks designed to target terrorist forces.

Although the march was turned back at the Waziristan border — the Pakistani government literally blocked the road after warning Khan that it could not guarantee the safety of Khan and his entourage — it’s a minor watershed moment for Khan and Pakistani politics, and it marks one of the most high-profile criticisms of what has become an increasingly important element of U.S. ‘Af-Pak’ policy:

The much-publicized rally, which was originally meant to culminate in North Waziristan, ultimately did so in Tank. Amid rousing sloganeering and cheering, Imran Khan delivered his victory speech, thanked his supporters (and the police) and headed back. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief that no untoward incident took place. It’s very rare in Pakistan for a crowd of thousands to have a face-off with law enforcers and avoid a clash. A good precedent was set.

Khan has attacked the drone strikes as a human rights violation and illegal under international law.

Indeed, critics have alleged that the drone program has killed more civilians than intended terrorist targets — and a Stanford/NYU report released in September appears to corroborate that concern.  The U.S. military and the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama, however, claim that the unmanned flights deliver ‘surgical’ strikes against strategic pro-Taliban targets that are destabilizing both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the U.S. marked the 12th anniversary of its military protest last week — targets that the Pakistani military forces are unwilling or unable to control.

First and foremost, the march has boosted Khan’s exposure even further.  Khan is hoping to make gains in Pakistan’s parliamentary elections expected in February of next year.

Khan, who entered politics in the 1990s, leads the secular, liberal Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک), which is currently polling a strong second place nationally, with 24% against 28% for the conservative, rural-based Pakistan Muslim League (N) (اکستان مسلم لیگ ن,  or the PML-N) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.  Just 14% support the governing center-left, urban-based Pakistan People’s Party (اکستان پیپلز پارٹی, or the PPP).

President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and current prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf belong to the PPP.  The PPP has been in power since elections in 2008 following the military regime of Pervez Musharraf,  but has recently been bogged down by ever-present corruption accusations, economic malaise and a high-profile constitutional fight over the power of the prime minister.  Continue reading Khan ‘peace rally’ near Waziristan border has implications for politics in Pakistan and beyond →

Chile

The other September 11: the Chilean coup against Salvador Allende, 39 years on

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While most people in the United States today reflect upon the 11th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, DC, it is easy to forget that “September 11” marks an entirely different national tragedy for Chile.

On September 11, 1973, Chile’s military launched a coup against the country’s elected president, Salvador Allende.

On that day, the Chilean military took the port of Valparaíso at 7 a.m., closed the country’s radio and television stations by 8 a.m., and by 9 a.m., had moved in to occupy Santiago, the capital.

Coup leaders demanded shortly thereafter that Allende resign the presidency.  Allende, who remained in the president palace, La Moneda, refused, despite threats to bomb the palace, if necessary, to bring about his resignation.  Allende thereupon launched a dramatic speech live on Chilean radio, defending his economic policies and, above all, vowing not to resign in the face of a coup that aimed to overturn the results of a democratic election.

As troops moved in on the palace, Allende either shot himself or was assassinated by the military — the circumstances of his death remain unclear today, but by 2:30 p.m., the military had taken La Moneda.

The coup led to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet — and with it, the deaths of up to 3,000 Chileans and the imprisonment and torture of many more thousands of political prisoners during his regime.  Although Pinochet’s reforms are credited with restoring economic stability to Chile, and he ultimately conceded to demands for democratic reform (he stepped down in 1990 after losing a referendum for reelection), he was plagued with legal charges in Chile and abroad for human rights violations and embezzlement alike.

Today, 39 years later, Chile still grapples with the national trauma of the 1973 coup and the resulting Pinochet era.  The country has one of the most developed economies in South America (notching 6% GDP growth in 2011), and it became the first South American country to become a member of the Organization for Economic Development, which it joined in 2010.  There’s no doubt that today’s dynamic Chilean economy had its genesis in the policies of the Pinochet regime.

But political wounds from the 1973 coup and the Pinochet regime have been more difficult to heal.  The 1991 Rettig Report, which tallied the number of deaths, disappearances and human rights abuses perpetrated during the Pinochet era, became a textbook example of truth-and-reconciliation commissions.  Despite those efforts, the long legal fight against Pinochet cast a dark shadow over Chilean political life until his death just six years ago — he died awaiting trial in Chile; meanwhile, a statue of Allende (pictured above) now sits in the courtyard in front of La Moneda.

Although Chile returned to democracy with presidential elections in 1990, a coalition of center-left parties, the Concertación won every presidential election until just two years ago, when center-right candidate Sebastián Piñera narrowly won election in January 2010, marking the Chilean right’s first return to power in the post-Pinochet era. Continue reading The other September 11: the Chilean coup against Salvador Allende, 39 years on →

Pakistan

Everything you need to know about the showdown between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Supreme Court of Pakistan

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So you already know that Pakistan is, well, kind of a hot mess, as far as governance is concerned.

You also know that the Muslim country of 180 million has had, since Partition from India in 1947, a helter-skleter relationship with democratic institutions, with periods of civilian rule interspersed with healthy intervals of autocratic military regimes.  You know that on many vectors, Pakistan falls short of what even its neighbors have accomplished, not just with respect to democracy, but also with respect to rule of law, corruption, terrorism, press freedom and so on.  (Think of Pakistan, perhaps, as a 21st century version of mid-20th century Argentina, or any other South American country where democracy didn’t quite take, despite strong party identification.)

You know that Pakistan is a traditional U.S. ally and a key strategic relationship in the ongoing U.S. efforts in Afghanistan (and along the Af-Pak border), but that Pakistan’s political and military establishment rarely speaks with one voice and that Pakistan’s government more often hinders than helps the U.S. government in its ongoing anti-terror efforts.

But what of the latest political crisis there?  The prime minister has been dismissed by the Supreme Court? And the new prime minister may be dismissed as well? All because of some corruption charges against the president? But isn’t basically every public official in Pakistan corrupt?

It’s understandable that a crisis like this could leave your head spinning in a run-of-the-mill democracy, but in a place like Pakistan, with so many extrapolitical considerations, it’s nearly incomprehensible.

Without further ado, Suffragio presents a quick primer on what’s happened so far in the showdown, and what we might expect in the near future. Continue reading Everything you need to know about the showdown between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Supreme Court of Pakistan →