Tear gas fills the air Friday, April 20, near a damaged billboard for the Formula One Bahrain Grand Prix (r.) as riot police prevent Bahraini antigovernment protesters from marching toward the hub of last spring's pro-democracy uprising at the end of a mass rally just outside Manama, Bahrain. (Hasan Jamali/AP)
Teargas on democracy protesters? Bahrain Grand Prix sponsors say 'no problem'
Vodafone. Allianz. Reebok. Microsoft. Tag-Heur. All among the leaders in their respective fields. And these and dozens of other companies have, in effect, put their seal of approval on the actions of the monarchy in Bahrain.
The Bahrain Formula 1 Grand Prix takes place this weekend amid tens of thousands of protesters in Manama braving tear gas and birdshot as they demand political change in the tiny monarchy. Ferrari, Mercedes, and the other glamour teams are practicing today, will run in the qualifying round tomorrow, and will zoom off in the official race scheduled for Sunday, with an expected global TV audience of at least 100 million.
Some of the globe's best-known brands will have their logos spread across the barriers, the promotional literature, the broadcasts, and the cars themselves. That they're not concerned this amounts to a vote of confidence in a monarchy that has been accused of jailing and torturing peaceful demonstrators, with the aid of its powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia, is an indication that in the realm of international public opinion, the ruling Khalifa family is winning.
IN PICTURES: Formula One Grand Prix
Take this from Allianz, one of the largest insurers in the world, on its involvement with the sport: "The partnership between Allianz and Formula One is a trusted alliance designed to highlight the importance of risk management and road safety as well as build the Allianz brand globally."
Brand building must go on.
Major corporations spend a lot of money worrying about their brands, and their research has told them that there's more money to be made than lost by carrying on with this weekend's event. Consumers either aren't aware of what's been going on in Bahrain, or don't care.
The Business and Human Rights Information Center says it contacted all of the sponsors of F1 teams, the organization, and the race itself. Only about half issued responses. The ones that did were generally bland and non-specific. Microsoft was fairly typical, writing. "We recognize the important responsibilities we have to respect human rights and work every day to meet our responsibilities. We invite dialogue with stakeholders and look forward to engaging in thoughtful discussions.”
Vodafone responded in a similar vein: "We are monitoring developments very closely and are aware of international concerns. However, the decision whether or not to proceed with the event is a matter for the teams and Formula 1."
Reebok, which has a sponsorship agreement with the Sahara Force India team, was a little more direct, writing "we will reach out to this team to understand their position on participation... given the ongoing civil unrest and evidence of human rights violations."
Bernie Ecclestone, whose financial control of F1 has made him a billionaire, struck a defiant tone with reporters today when they asked about the departure of two members of the Sahara Force India team, who flew home after seeing a burning car in Manama.
"You guys want a story and it's a good story and if there isn't a story you make it up like usual, Nothing changes," Mr. Ecclestone said. "The political thing is going in so many countries. These things happen. We are not here to get involved in politics. There are many more countries higher up the priority list that you should be writing about. Go to Syria and write about those things because it is more important there."
Ecclestone can say as much as he likes that F1 isn't involved in politics, but it doesn't make it so.
The claim that "politics and sport should never mix" is often trotted out, as if sport is some pure sacrament untainted by the concerns of the profane work-a-day world. This is absurd. Major global sporting organizations like F1, FIFA, or the International Olympic Committee have confronted scandal after scandal through the decades, usually centered around the nexus of money, power and political influence they represent.
The decision to bring the F1 circus to town, or to award the World Cup to a host nation, is a political one as much as a business one. These events are enormous shop windows for tourism, lend prestige to the governments that host them, and amount to approval of the way they run their affairs.
What is the "political thing" in Bahrain at the moment? Human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja remains in jail and on hunger strike. Human Rights Watch says hundreds of others remain in jail for their political activism. At the end of March, the group wrote, "it seems that no high-ranking officials have been investigated for their roles in rampant torture or unlawful killing."
To be sure, the regime has its supporters. Among the most prominent in the US is Ed Husain, a fellow at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Husain appears to view Bahrain's protesters as largely in league with Iran (Bahrain is a Sunni monarchy, but the majority of its citizens are Shiite), judging by a recent series of tweets from him. "If Bahrain is good enough for the US Fifth Fleet, it's good enough for F1... Back away Iran's molotov hurlers," he wrote today.
IN PICTURES: Formula One Grand Prix
The US, which has close military ties with Manama and runs the Fifth Fleet out of the kingdom, has indeed been muted in its criticism of the country.
Though motor sport journalists have poured into the country, a number of political reporters seeking to cover the protests there this weekend have been denied visas.
The race could still be called off if security deteriorates. It was security concerns, amid the crackdown on protesters, that led to the cancellation of the race last year, and if today's protests devolve into something uglier, it's possible that security could be the reason again.
But for now, it's full steam ahead. And F1 and its sponsors have sent the message that they don't have a problem with how the government is treating its own people.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (l.) interviews Hezbollah's leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah during his new 'The World Tomorrow' talk show, in this frame taken from video footage provided by Russia Today on April 17. (Courtesy of RT/Reuters)
When Assange meets Nasrallah, you learn the most about Assange (+video)
Julian Assange's new talk show debuted yesterday on the Kremlin satellite channel Russia Today with a whale of a "get:" Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's politically and militarily dominant Hezbollah.
It's been years since Mr. Nasrallah has given an interview to a foreigner. The conversation took place in late February and there should have been plenty to talk about. There's the awkward position that Hezbollah, which styles itself a lion of Arab resistance to Israel, now finds itself in. The group is a client of Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has spent the past year using his army to flatten his domestic political opponents, and of Iran, which has been helping Mr. Assad and recently crushed an opposition movement of its own.
Questions about the UN tribunal which indicted members of Hezbollah last year in connection with the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri would not have gone amiss. More general and obvious questions could have been about Lebanese politics, and under what conditions Hezbollah might be willing to give up its private army. Perhaps some challenges on whether Hezbollah is a threat to Lebanon's fragile democracy, or the risks of the sectarian fighting in Syria spilling over the border.
But while Mr. Assange touched on Hezbollah's ties to Syria, his highly deferential and general interview of Nasrallah didn't press him very hard (this was no Mike Wallace vs. Ayatollah Khomenei). Six years ago, Hezbollah's image was soaring in the region as a direct opponent of Israel and of the US. Today's environment is far more complex, with a clamoring for democratic change and Hezbollah closely linked to two of its greatest regional opponents. The word "Iran" wasn't mentioned at all. And the choice of questions, the apparent lack of background knowledge, and Assange's typically flat and robotic delivery, were all reminders that he isn't a professional journalist.
He'd be probably respond that he wouldn't have it any other way. After all, he's repeatedly lambasted the traditional press as an aider and abetter of perfidy. For instance last year he said: "The media in general are so bad we have to question we'd be better without them all together. They're so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is that we see wars and corrupt governments continue on... nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been the result of media lies."
At the risk of being branded as hypocrite defender of the "mainstream media" to which I (sort of) belong, to lay responsibility for Vietnam, the scores of wars in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan at the feet of "media lies" may be a bit of simplification.
But his own avowed disdain for propaganda and branding of himself as a tireless seeker of the truth makes the station he's tied up with all the more interesting. RT is a Kremlin propaganda channel, and its reporting on the Middle East (the area of its coverage I'm most familiar with) isn't merely slanted by the interests of the Russian government. It's often outrageously biased to the point of making things up out of whole cloth. For instance, a string of reports by the station from Tripoli, Libya in July and August of last year made obviously false claims about advances for Muammar Qaddafi's army.
Even as Tripoli was falling, and throngs of celebrating rebels filled the capital's main square (with footage carried live around the world) RT, insisted it wasn't happening. The station's main on the ground reporter Lizzie Phelan made her own biases clear as day on her blog: "While the journalists suffering from cabin fever in Tripoli’s Rixos hotel, publish their dreams that imperialism’s lackies (the rebels/rats) have taken Zawiya, Ghuriyan and Sorman, they are ignoring a decisive moment in the crisis. That is the liberation of the hitherto rebel-held area of Misratah." (No, Misurata was never retaken by Qaddafi's forces).
Assange anticipated complaints about his work with RT. "There’s Julian Assange, enemy combatant, traitor, getting into bed with the Kremlin and interviewing terrible radicals from around the world," Assange told RT, describing what he said would be the line of attack against him. "But I think it’s a pretty trivial kind of attack on character. If they actually look at how the show is made: we make it, we have complete editorial control, we believe that all media organizations have an angle, all media organizations have an issue. RT is a voice of Russia, so it looks at things from the Russian agenda. The BBC is a voice of the British government. Voice of America is a voice of the American government. It is the clashing of these voices together that reveals the truth about the world as a whole."
No. The BBC, which has many flaws, has an independent board. The Voice of America, far more directly an arm of the US government than the BBC is for the UK, aint perfect, but has demonstrated far more faithfulness to basic facts over the years than RT. These things are simply not equivalent, nor is the Russian state analogous to the democracies of the UK and US, their warts aside.
Assange should know this. A US diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks summarized the comments of Jose "Pepe" Grinda Gonzales, a Spanish prosecutor who concentrates on organized crime, this way: "Grinda stated that he considers Belarus, Chechnya and Russia to be virtual "mafia states" and said that Ukraine is going to be one. For each of those countries, he alleged, one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and (organized crime) groups."
Assange, still under house arrest in England fighting extradition to Sweden where he's wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations, is clearly hoping his new show will be a hit. His organization is struggling for relevance after its dramatic score of a huge archive of US diplomatic cables. Wikileaks hasn't had a secure "drop box," the heart of its enterprise as initially conceived, since the middle of 2010.
Though its collaboration with Anonymous, an amorphous group of hackers, led to the theft and publishing of internal emails from the private intelligence and security company Stratfor earlier this year, that was a bit of dud from the relevance standpoint. Stratfor, though it likes to hype itself as a major player in international intelligence, mostly repackages open-source information for paying clients. Beyond embarrassment for them, there wasn't much there there.
Assange says he has an advantage over traditional interviewers. He told RT his interviews "revealed sides of very interesting and important people that are not normally revealed because they are not dealing with a standard interviewer, they are dealing with someone who is under house arrest, who has gone through political problems that they can sympathize with."
This advantage wasn't obvious in his discussion with Nasrallah, though there was on bit of news. Asked "why have you supported the Arab spring in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other countries but not in Syria” Nasrallah responded:
"I personally found that President Assad was willing to carry out radical and important reforms. … we contacted even elements of the opposition, to encourage them and to facilitate the process of dialogue with the regime, but these parties rejected dialogue and right from the beginning we’ve had a regime willing to undergo reforms and on the other side you have an opposition that is not prepared for dialogue… what it wants to do is bring down the regime.”
That was the first time Nasrallah has said in public that he's been in contact with the opposition, and encouraged them (as has Russia) to compromise with Mr. Assad. But the moment slipped away. Which opposition groups? How frequent have the contacts been? What's your view of the level of disunity among Assad's opponents? These obvious follows were not pursued.
Assange, to his credit, referred to civilian casualties in Syria, and asked if Hezbollah has a "red line," a specific number of casualties, at which point it might withdraw support from Assad. Nasrallah responded that Al Qaeda, a Sunni group and ideological opponent of the Shiite Hezbollah, has sent fighters to Syria and complained that while "Certain Arab countries are prepared to have a political dialogue (with Israel) for ten years non-stop, they won't give one or two years or even a few months for a political solution in Syria."
The interviewer then turned to the question of Al Manar, Hezbollah's television network, which has been blocked in the US since 2004 because the group is on the State Department's designated terrorist list. Asks Assange: "The United States is blocking Al Manar from broadcasting ino the US at the same time the United States claims that it is a bastion of free speech. Why do you think the US government is so scared of Al Manar?" Nasrallah answers that "they want to tell people that Hezbollah are terrorists (and) we don’t have the very basic right to defend ourselves.”
Assange follows that up with this hard-hitting question: "As a leader in war, how did you manage to keep your people together in the face of enemy fire?” This generated the predictable and usual generalities.
His final question was, in many ways, the most intriguing -- and certainly not one that a working journalist would ever think to ask a politician whose organization is called "The Party of God." It says a lot about how Assange sees the world.
"You have fought against a hegemony of the United States," says Assange. "Isn’t Allah, or the notion of a god, the ultimate super-power, and shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god?”
Nasrallah's answer, in summary, is that he believes in a benevolent God, that his struggle against the "hegemony" of the US is a moral one that God would support.
Afghan students listen to a speech by Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai during a gathering in Kabul on April 17. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters)
Afghanistan: overinterpreting the Kabul attack
The simple fact was that Kabul was hit by a coordinated attack, probably by the Haqqani Network (though the Taliban were happy to take credit) on Sunday. The attacks in Kabul and in Nangarhar, Paktia, and Logar provinces ended in defeat for the assailants. Of 37 attackers in Kabul, 36 were killed and one captured, at the cost of 11 Afghan soldiers' deaths and four civilians.
What it means is another thing.
On balance, the answer is "not much." Sure, there was overheated handwringing in some quarters. A Reuters report speculated that the day-long attack might have the same effect on US public opinion as the months-long Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, which saw assaults on dozens of cities and the bloodiest year of the war for US troops, with over 10,000 killed by June (no Americans died in Sunday's attack).
On the other side was Gen. John Allen, commander of international troops in Afghanistan, who spun the attack as evidence of insurgent weakness. "The very fact that the enemy chose these particular targets speaks volumes about where we are in this campaign and the degree to which we have advanced the very things the enemy fears the most – a sovereign Afghanistan responsive to its people and an enduring commitment by the international community. Each attack was meant to send a message: that legitimate governance and Afghan sovereignty are in peril. The ANSF response itself is proof enough of that folly."
The gap between these points of view is a reminder that the war in Afghanistan is a war of perceptions now.
For US officers and supporters of the war, the task is to send a message of steady progress that just a little more commitment can cement. For the Taliban and other insurgent groups, it's to send a message of unhindered ability to strike. On both sides, the arguments over the insurgency's strength or weakness also feeds directly into proposed peace talks with the Taliban. The stronger they are, or can at least make themselves to look, the better their bargaining position (the talks are currently on hold).
But the reality is that we know very little today that we didn't know last week. Afghanistan remains a dangerous place, with President Hamid Karzai, the man installed as Afghanistan's leader by international forces, still a very uncertain call. President Karzai called the Kabul attack an "intelligence failure for us and especially NATO."
Max Boot, a conservative commentator who can be relied on to insist the Afghan war (or any US war, really) is going well, maintained his record with a piece for Commentary magazine in which he portrays the attacks as good news.
"For all the headlines about the capital city being “rocked” by gunfire and explosions, the impact of the insurgent attacks–most likely the work of the Haqqani Network, not the Taliban per se–was negligible," he writes. "I visited the capital two weeks ago and found, as I have previously noted, that the streets are thronged with people: hardly the sign of a city under siege. I remember Baghdad in the dark days of 2006-2007 when entire neighborhoods were ghost towns. There is nothing like that going on in Kabul..... If this is the best the Haqqanis could do for a comeback, their efforts are indicative of the growing weakness of the insurgency and the growing strength of the security forces."
He goes on to caveat his position by saying: "that is not to say that a positive outcome in Afghanistan is inevitable–it is anything but. However, it does indicate that if we lose, it will be because of our ardent desire to pull out–not because the Taliban have the capacity to evict us or to defeat our Afghan allies."
Well, I lived in Baghdad during the "dark days" and while my experience of Afghanistan is far more limited (a one-month visit in 2010) what I can say is that the two should not be compared. Baghdad was then in the grips of a vicious sectarian civil war that burned in the presence of tens of thousands of US troops. The flames eventually cooled, with whole neighborhoods stripped of their Sunni inhabitants, or vice-versa. I remember the frequent statements from the US government and military that individual insurgent attacks were signs of "desperation" on the part of the attackers.
The Afghan conflict is very different, the Afghan people very different from the Iraqis. Kabul has generally been an oasis throughout 10 years of war. One reason the city's population has swelled (it's tripled since 2001, to about 5 million now) is because it's far safer than much of the rest of Afghanistan. So what the attacks demonstrated was that one of the safest places in the country, where billions have been spent on economic development and training of Afghan security forces, can still be touched.
Most analysts of Afghanistan are most worried about the future and whether the center around Karzai will hold in the face of the inevitable drawdown of US forces. Their concerns don't focus on a successful Taliban march on a capital filled with people who recall the Taliban reign with horror, but on the chances that the military could splinter along the ethnic lines that drove the Taliban civil war after the Soviet Union's departure, with warlords running their own enclaves.
The Kabul-based blogger at "It's Always Sunni in Kabul," has an informed take that occupies the sensible middle ground. Yes, Afghan forces performed well (good news). But no, this was not ANSF's success alone: US Blackhawks fired on some of the attackers in the capital, and ISAF advisers were there with Afghan forces almost every step of the way, "advising." This doesn't mean Afghan troops aren't getting better, just that this performance isn't a meaningful data point on how they'd do on their own.
He agrees with Mr. Boot (and most everyone else) that this was not a tactical success for the attackers by any stretch. They were quickly pinned down and surrounded and all eventually killed or captured.
But the Afghan war is one of perceptions. The Taliban (and Haqqani) strategy, such as it is, is to keep reminding everyone that they're still capable of inflicting damage after 10 years of being hunted by the most capable military on the globe. That's heartening to their supporters, and something to frighten Afghans who don't support them about their future. As the blogger writes:
Kabul is supposed to be the most secure city in Afghanistan, and once again, some insurgent group managed to stockpile weapons and supplies in a half-constructed building at the edge of the diplomatic area here in Kabul and light the city up for hours at a time. If the message is: “We can get you anywhere,” message sent. Just, once they get there, they don’t tend to accomplish much. This speaks to increasing levels of proficiency by the ANSF in their response to the situation, but also to the lack of quality intel/planning to make sure these kinds of events do not happen again. If the playbook had changed dramatically from the events of September of 2011, then those things happen, but in this case it’s almost identical. So someone’s making it very clear that the government of Afghanistan really can’t stop them from doing what they want to do.
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Egypt's ad hoc transition plan
Pity the reporters, political activists, and academics trying to keep up with Egypt's transition "plan." Every day, it seems, new moves by the ruling military, the courts, and the quasi-independent electoral commission turn expectations on their head.
It's human to want a see a pattern in all this, find a guiding hand behind all the maneuvering (a Machiavellian or a benevolent one, depending on your inclinations). Analysis is supposed to tease out the broader pattern, identify a narrative that helps make sense of events. But in the daily flow of statements, revelations, and warnings, I can't find anything but an unguided mess.
Writing at Foreign Policy, political scientist Nathan Brown calls "the phrase 'Egyptian transition process'... tragicomically oxymoronic in light of the dizzying series of developments over the past month."
The latest news is the disqualification of 10 Egyptian presidential aspirants a little more than six weeks from the scheduled May 23 vote. Most were no-hopers, but three are heavyweights.
Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a fiery, and to many frightening, salafy leader (he called Osama bin Laden a "martyr" after the Al Qaeda leader was killed in Pakistan) was tossed from the race because his deceased mother was a US citizen (it's Egypt's own birther controversy; Abu Ismail denies the claim).
Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's long-time intelligence chief and confidante, was kicked from the race because the Presidential Elections Commission ruled that his petition to run didn't receive signatures from a wide-enough range of locations (Egyptian rules require 30,000 signatures, with at least 1,000 of those from each of 15 different governorates). And Khairat al-Shater, the top Muslim Brotherhood political strategist, was disqualified because a 2006 security conviction by the Mubarak government hasn't been voided.
Others were disqualified because of political convictions during the Mubarak era, or disputes over the leadership of their political parties, and in the case of Ashraf Zaki Barouma, over allegations of draft-dodging in his youth.
With the election looming, it's unclear what comes next. Some may be reinstated, others not. Shater, Abu Ismail and Suleiman all lodged appeals of the ruling today. The electoral commission has promised a final candidate list on April 26, less than a month before the vote. Street power as a solution can't be ruled out. The Muslim Brotherhood called tens of thousands of its supporters to Tahrir Square last week, and a lawyer for Abu Ismail promised a "major crisis" if his man isn't allowed to run.
The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party appears best placed, since it nominated another candidate, Muhammed Mursi in case Shater was disqualified. But a recent poll by Egypt's Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies indicates it may not do them much good. The disqualifications leave Ahmed Shafiq and Amr Moussa, two long-time servants of Mubarak, as front runners. The poll, conducted before the disqualifications, found Islamist voters had high enthusiasm for both Shater and Abu Ismail, but not for Mr. Mursi.
Mr. Moussa was Mubarak's foreign minister before a falling out, and went on to run the Arab league; Mr. Shafiq served as Mubarak's aviation minister for almost a decade, before being named prime minister by the president in the waning days of his rule last January.
So, yes, in Egypt's first presidential election since Mubarak was deposed in Feb. 2011, two lieutenants of his regime are in line to take power. And because of the now uncertain plan for writing a new constitution, that could give them enormous power relative to the newly seated parliament, dominated by the FJP and its Islamist ally, the salafy Al Nour Party.
On his Twitter feed in the past few days, former presidential hopeful Mohammed ElBaradei has attacked the current schedule for writing a constitution. Earlier this month, an Egyptian court disqualified the 100 member body selected by parliament after about 30 secular members walked out, complaining that the other members were all Islamists. The court said parliament erred in appointing a number of MPs to the body, but it was seen as a slap at the Muslim Brotherhood, which is trying to turn its success at the ballot box into real power. Under the current constitution, the president, not parliament appoints the government. Egypt's current prime minister and cabinet members are serving at the pleasure of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. As things stand now, that will be up to the next president.
Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, the officer who heads SCAF, has called for a constitution to be written by the start of the presidential election. That time frame alarms ElBaradei, a secular politician and former head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. He hinted that the presidential elections should be postponed until the constitution – and a new, more equitable division of powers – is sorted out. In English, he wrote "result of bungled transition" and "the travesty continues." Switching to Arabic, he wrote "electing the president under the constitutional declaration is a continuation of electing authorities with incomplete powers. Who will be the commander in chief of the armed forces? Who will be able to declare war?"
The "constitutional declaration" he's referring to was a hasty set of principles drawn up after Mubarak fell, and ratified in a referendum with over 70 percent support.
Where real power will lie in Egypt, and whether its attempted revolution will yield a meaningful change in the way the country is governed in the years ahead is the big question. The military, with its vast business holdings and tradition of holding itself apart from civilian oversight, remains a powerful player with interests to protect. It is clearly maneuvering to massage outcomes to its liking, but some see a process that is beyond the ability of the generals, who have shown themselves frequently incompetent in navigating the new political clime, to control.
Brown writes the current mess is SCAF's fault, but in some ways they have a tiger by the tail.
"The lion's share of responsibility lies with the SCAF's generals who pursued an approach that was politically and legally incoherent. It was not one that has always served their interests very well, but they have been powerless to change it (as was clearly demonstrated by the failure of an apparent – and audacious – attempt to parachute in some "supraconstitutional principles" serving the SCAF's vision last fall). Hope for a transition to a more pluralist and democratic Egypt has certainly not died. Egypt's saving graces – the fact that the gunfire is mostly metamorphic; the continued strength of its political institutions, however deeply corrupted and implicated many are; and the inability of any single political actor to dominate the country –may still carry it through. But the lack of any controlling process or authority may make Egypt's political actors feel a bit like they are not only living in a Chekhov drama or deafened by the volley at the OK Corral but also as if they are trapped in Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author."
Volunteers load a truck with medical supplies for a humanitarian shipment funded by Malian donations and destined for rebel-controlled Timbuktu and Gao, in the capital, Bamako, Mali, Friday, April 13. (Aliou Sissoko/AP)
Coup predictions: Africa doesn't look as volatile as you might think
In the office the other day, after reading about the coup in Guinea-Bissau, I wondered what two African coups in March and April (the first being Mali) meant. There's been a lot of research and reporting in recent years pointing out that the period of terrible conflict in Africa that followed the end of the cold war was well behind us and that regional states were handling differences far more often at the ballot box, with regional militaries largely back to barracks when it came to domestic politics.
It turns out, there's very little to worry about so far, at least according to Jay Ulfelder, who writes at his fascinating blog "Dart-throwing Chimp." Mr. Ulfelder is a political scientist with a focus on the quantitative side, using statistical analysis to try to forecast trends in everything from famine to conflict. While I'm generally in the camp that sees modern political scientists as far too focused on math, at the expense of considering culture and psychology, I've enjoyed browsing his blog in the days since I discovered it.
In a post last week, he addressed my musing head on: "Has African Gone Coup-Crazy in 2012?" The short answer is a clear "no." In his post, he has a chart that measures the frequency of coups in Africa. The details of the statistical tools are laid out on his blog. The takeway is that Africa has had three distinct coup spikes. "In the mid-1960s, a few years after the start of decolonization; another in the early 1990s, after the end of the cold war; and a third in the late 1990s, when the rate of coups in the region takes a sharp dip. Meanwhile, the pair of events observed so far in 2012 looks perfectly normal, just about average for the past decade and still well below the recent peak of six events in 2008."
To be sure, there could well be more coups this year. It's just that it would take at least a half a dozen to push Africa out of its recent statistical range.
I first came across Ulfelder's blog when someone posted his January article "Assessing Coup Risk in 2012." He made the calculation that runs a algorithm with four "risk factors": infant mortality rate, degree of democracy, recent coup activity, and the stability of a country since the end of the cold war.
Of his top ten most at risk countries (he provides a chart of the 40 most "at risk" countries, in his estimation) eight are in Africa, with Guinea-Bissau at No. 2, and Mali at 10. Niger, which has some similarities with Mali (a restive Tuareg population and a history of entanglement with Muammar Qaddafi's Libya) is number one. Rounding out the list in order are Chad, Guinea, Madagascar, Congo, Mauritania, Bangladesh, and the Central African Republic. Sudan is No. 11, with practically the same score as Mali.
His assessment of risk isn't a prediction that a coup is highly likely in a given country in a given year, just of danger. As he writes: "As usual with all statistical forecasts of rare events, the estimates are mostly close to zero. (On average, only a handful of coup attempts occur worldwide each year, and they’ve become even rarer since the end of the Cold War; see this earlier post for details)."
And remember, "coup" and "uprising" are not the same thing, as is the case of Syria, which didn't crack his top 40.
"To make sense of this forecast, it’s important to note that assigning a low probability to the occurrence of a coup attempt in Syria in 2012 isn’t the same thing as a prediction that President Bashar al-Assad or his regime will survive the year. It might seem like semantic hair-splitting, but the definitions of coups used to construct the data on which these forecasts are based do not include cases where national leaders resign under pressure or are toppled by rebel groups. So the Syria forecast suggests only that Assad is unlikely to be overthrown by his own security forces. As it happens, my analysis of countries most likely to see democratic transitions in 2012 put Syria in the top 10 on that list."
I've really enjoyed poking about in his blog archives and highly recommend giving Dart-Throwing Chimp a look.
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Belarus plainclothes policemen detained protesters during a ‘Revolution via social network’ event in Minsk last year. (Dmitry Brushko/AP )
Good Reads: No cyber-utopia for activists
That we are living in a world increasingly connected by the digital revolution is a given. But are the Internet, social media, and the expanding array of technologies that can detect signs of a famine as easily as they can help an authoritarian state track dissidents, a boon or an Orwellian bane?
The answer is, of course, somewhere in the middle. But the positive side of the ledger has generally gotten a lot more attention in the press than the negative. Now, that’s starting to change.
The end of 'cyber-utopia'
Jamie Kirchik has a long essay in The American Interest just out on Evgeny Morozov’s 2011 book “The Net Delusion” (highly recommended by me), and summarizes his central argument this way: “Morozov argues that the Internet is not the unmitigated boon that … assorted “cyber-utopians” make it out to be. It’s a tool that, in addition to serving as a resource for democracy activists and their well-intentioned supporters in the West, is no less useful, and at times more so, for the authoritarians attempting to repress them.”
Take Syria, where Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook have been successfully used by activists to get information and video about the war there to the world, but have also increasingly been penetrated by Syrian intelligence agents, who can find a treasure trove of personal links, movements, and information from data mining.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, David Blair argues that “the 13 months of Syria’s revolt have starkly illustrated the limits of social media as an engine of revolution, and of the claims made for the Internet’s transformative power.”
He writes that linking up on Twitter makes activists today more vulnerable to the regime they’re fighting, than, say the Algerian insurgency was against the French in the late 1950s. The Algerian fighters had tight, person-to-person cells that were difficult to penetrate. “The whole point of these platforms is ease of access and use … they are inherently easy to penetrate. As such, social media is the exact opposite of a useful tool for a revolution. Had Twitter existed in the 1950s, perhaps Algeria would have stayed French for another decade or two.”
And it’s not just regimes like Syria that are interested in using Twitter as an intelligence tool.
Contest: can you find these faces in the crowd?
Oliver Belcher, a PHD candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia, writes at his Darpa Dreaming blog of recent innovations in using crowd-sourcing and social media as a form of intelligence gathering and surveillance. It’s of interest because as much as Twitter and Facebook have gained reputations as leveling tools for revolutionaries, they also can and are being used for spying and tracking the movements of people, at ever greater levels of sophistication.
The “Tag Challenge” sponsored by the US State Department had five people who agreed to serve as “suspects” and to be in public during the day of March 31 in Washington DC, New York, London, Bratislava, and Stockholm. Their pictures were posted on the Internet, with no other identifying information. The challenge? To find them and take a picture of them that day. The individual or team with the most pictures would win a $5,000 prize.
A team from MIT called “Crowdscanner” won the prize with three of the suspects snapped. They did it by recruiting agents for cash on Twitter and other social media sites. They offered $1 for recruiting a new member of the team (up to 2,000 members), $500 for sending in a picture of one of the suspects, and $100 to anyone who recruited someone who captured a picture (leaving them on the hook, in the worst case, for $5,000 – the same amount as the offered prize). They won by tracking down three of the suspects in 12 hours.
Mr. Bechler points out that these efforts are being driven to develop new intelligence and military tools, and that social and computer scientists are increasingly getting in on the act. “I’m writing an article on how this kind of research is integral to contemporary US military operations. And, it should come as no surprise that the computer scientists who are winning these prizes are consultants either for the US military, or are members of scientific advisory boards which contract through the military. “
Finally, new forms of technology are making life difficult for some agents of the state.
At Wired magazine’s Danger Room, Jeff Stein writes on how the expanding use of eye scanners and biometric passports are cramping spies’ style – a boomerang for surveillance advocates.
“The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities,” he writes, and goes on quote a former field operative. “’If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,’” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time.”
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Fear not!
Foreign policy professionals and the reporters who cover them have a natural bias towards seeing the world as a dangerous place. After all, if your assessment of a country or an issue is "mostly harmless" (as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy famously described our planet), you're going to lose your audience and some of your funding. I'm not saying this is a conscious decision (at least not in most cases), but fear is to foreign policy as sex is to advertising and Hollywood: It sells.
Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen do a good job of revealing this bias -- and how far it is from reality -- in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.
They point to a survey that shows that 69 percent of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations (the definition of the foreign policy establishment) feel the world is as or more dangerous for the US than it was during the Cold War and recent statements from politicians. Near-certain Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says the world is growing ever more perilous and President Barack Obama's Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appears to agree, saying in a speech last year that "security, geopolitical, economic, and demographic shifts in the international order (are making) the world more unpredictable, more volatile and, yes, more dangerous."
Yet by every objective measure the world at large is remarkably safe by historical standards. Why the love of fear? Zenko and Cohen argue:
"The disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering results from a confluence of factors. The most obvious and important is electoral politics. Hyping dangers serves the interests of both political parties. For Republicans, who have long benefited from attacking Democrats for their alleged weakness in the face of foreign threats, there is little incentive to tone down the rhetoric; the notion of a dangerous world plays to perhaps their greatest political advantage. For Democrats, who are fearful of being cast as feckless, acting and sounding tough is a shield against GOP attacks and an insurance policy in case a challenge to the United States materializes into a genuine threat. Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government -- defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments."
They write that in the past 20 years, war and terrorism have become much less prevalent and that when the world does fight, it does so with much less ferocity. Al Qaeda is scattered and weakened, and fears of a nuclear Iran are highly exaggerated, particularly when the country does not have a single working warhead or delivery system yet, compared to the thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the US by the Soviet Union (and vice versa) during the Cold War. As for the "war on terrorism"? "Of the 13,186 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15, or 0.1 percent, were U.S. citizens. In most places today -- and especially in the United States -- the chances of dying from a terrorist attack or in a military conflict have fallen almost to zero," the authors write.
The next time you turn on the television and get a dose of a "we're all doomed" screaming from a politician or commentator, read the Foreign Affairs piece as an antidote.
Soldiers stand guard at junta headquarters in Kati, outskirt Bamako, Mali, Tuesday. With coup leader Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo refusing to step down, surrounding nations have imposed severe financial sanctions on Mali, including the closing of the country's borders and the freezing of its account at the regional central bank. (Rukmini Callimachi/AP)
Did Libya's revolution topple Mali into crisis?
This year, Mali's restive Tuareg minority has erupted into rebellion after four years of relative quiet, the army has mutinied and seized control of the capital city of Bamako, and today Tuareg separatists declared an independent republic in the country's vast north.
Is this all NATO's fault?
Not exactly. But the law of unintended consequences is (as usual) rearing its head. In this case, the successful popular uprising against Muammar Qaddafi's regime in Libya, which was substantially aided by the air power of NATO members, has sent Mali tumbling back into chaos, something that neither France nor the US (two of the major backers of the war to oust Qaddafi) are happy about. Far from it.
The traditionally nomadic Tuareg and their independence aspirations were championed off and on by Qaddafi for decades. During his desperate and bloody war to hang on to power, Tuaregs that had settled in Libya fought on his side. And there are claims that even more Tuaregs were recruited to come to Libya and fight as mercenaries on his behalf.
With Qaddafi's defeat and the seething rage of the Libyan victors against the "African mercenaries" who fought against them – a rage which has also been vented on multiple occasions on people simply guilty of being "in Libya while black" – armed and trained Tuaregs returned home. A renewed insurgency in the north followed.
The first domino to fall in Mali was a coup by a young army captain, Amadou Sanogo. The new ruling junta's initial complaint was that the government wasn't spending enough money and manpower in the fight against the Tuaregs. But the result of the coup has been to throw the military – trained extensively by the United States and France in recent years, largely because of fears of Islamist militants in the region – into disarray. This in turn has created more space for the Tuaregs' National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and today's independence declaration. ("Azawad" is a territorial term whose precise meaning is unclear, but includes much of the desert region where Tuareg live.)
The declaration has been rejected from almost every quarter that matters. The African Union, which opposed the intervention to depose Qaddafi, joined France and the European Union in dismissing the notion of a new independent nation.
And an AFP report indicates that the independence declaration is already dividing Mali's Tuareg. Ansar Dine, a smaller armed group led by a Tuareg but with declared pan-Islamist aims that had made common cause with the MNLA in recent months, came out against independence.
"Our war is a holy war. It's a legal war in the name of Islam," Ansar Dine military boss Omar Hamaha said in a videotape obtained by AFP. "We are against independence. We are against revolutions not in the name of Islam." Ansar Dine ("Helpers of Religion") appears to have seized control of the desert cities of Timbuktu and Gao, in the east.
Reports from Gao and Timbuktu suggest Mr. Hamaha's group is already imposing its rough-and-ready ideas about Islamic justice, and he said they have 120 men in custody, some of whom he described as thieves. "We have tied them up and taken their weapons. We beat them well and it's likely we will slit their throats," AFP quotes him as saying. Algeria says that seven of its diplomats working in Gao have been taken hostage.
Gregory Mann, a Mali scholar at Columbia University, wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy yesterday that while many Tuaregs fought on the side of Qaddafi, Ansar Dine aided the Libyan rebels.
The MNLA has been in a loose partnership with Ansar Dine, an Islamist group led by Iyad ag Ghali, a Tuareg who led a major rebellion in the 1990s. Ag Ghali's career is a testament to the tangled web of alliances in the region: His most recent gig was in Libya, where, according to reports, Libya's transitional government encouraged him to lead a large-scale defection of Tuareg fighters from Muammar al-Qadaffi's security forces. Ag Ghali obliged, but the Libyan rebels' gain was the Malian government's loss when he brought several dozen men in arms into a situation in which a rebellion was already simmering in the Malian Sahara. Since then, he's fallen in with the MNLA, and he seems to have a productive working relationship with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The warriors of Ansar Dine care less about an independent Azawad than they do about an extreme Islamist program.
Mr. Mann points out that Mali's central government was remilitarizing its northern reaches for the past 15 years and that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had extended its kidnap for ransom activities into the area since 2010.
"Did the Libyan conflict – and NATO's intervention in it – light this long fuse? Did Mali lose Timbuktu because NATO saved Benghazi?," asks Mann. "Informed observers disagree. Some think the conflict was virtually inevitable, with or without men and arms from Libya. Others see a direct knock-on effect from Libya that upset a delicate balance."
What seems clear is that the timing of all this is inextricably linked to events last year in Libya. But it's also true that tension between the Malian state and the traditionally nomadic Tuareg is longstanding. The Tuareg and related Berber cultures became dominant in North Africa's caravan trade after domestic camels were introduced about 1,700 years ago, with items like gold, salt, and slaves transported across the Sahara to Africa's Mediterranean coast. In modern times, the Tuareg practice a pastoral life style, herding goats, camels, and cattle, and traveling long distances to find fodder and water for their animals.
The Tuareg maintain a fierce independence to this day, with an estimated 600,000 living in Mali. Today's independence declaration comes almost four years to the day since the last peace agreement they signed with Mali's central government – in 2008, brokered by none other than Qaddafi.
Qaddafi had a long history of reaching out to Tuaregs, both to fight in his own causes and to use as leverage against his North African neighbors. In the 1970s, drought gripped North Africa, and poor Tuaregs and other Saharan groups poured into oil rich Libya in search of work. Many of them, and not all voluntarily, ended up in Qaddafi's new "Islamic Legion," a regional fighting force that Qaddafi hoped to use to expand his territory and influence.
The legion is most associated with fighting on Qaddafi's behalf in Chad during the 1980s, a conflict that helped ignite ethnic conflict in Darfur and Sudan. After giving up on the bloody effort in Chad in 1987, Qaddafi decommissioned the legion. Some stayed in Libya; others, with arms and encouragement from the self-styled "king of kings," went home.
Qaddafi had long supported ethnic-based separatists in his neighbors, and it was unsurprising that Tuareg rebellions had broken out in both Mali and Niger by 1990. Those fights burned fitfully, and inconclusively, until 1996, when another peace was made. But Tuareg resentment, it seems, never went away.
Syrian youth stand in a building damaged by tank shells in a neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, after a raid by Syrian troops killed several rebels and civilians April 5. Syrian troops launched a fierce assault Thursday, days ahead of a deadline for a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, with activists describing it as one of the most violent attacks around the capital since the year-old uprising began. (AP)
Assad pulling Syria troops out of cities by Tuesday? (+video)
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, now the UN point-man on the civil war in Syria, says he has full agreement from the regime of Bashar al-Assad that the fighting there will end next week.
"What we expect on April 10 is that the Syrian government will have completed its withdrawal from populated centers ... and then we begin a 48-hour period during which there will be a complete cessation of all forms of violence by all parties," Mr. Annan's spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said in Geneva earlier today.
This prediction should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
Mr. Assad is in a fight for regime survival. While large chunks of his country have fallen out of central government control, and the opposition has defied his military for over a year now in towns like Idlib, Homs, and Hama, his security establishment has largely hung together and hasn't suffered the sort of mass defections that undermined Muammar Qaddafi's forces during the uprising in Libya.
The application of force against his opponents is Assad's go-to means of keeping control, just as it was for his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad. With at least 9,000 Syrians dead from the fighting, and scores in detention, where many have been tortured, it's hard to see the calls for his overthrow dying down. And if he really does give up the use of political terror against his enemies, the chorus demanding his demise will probably grow louder still.
There are already strong signs that Annan is not going to get his way on the cease-fire. The daily Al-Watan, linked to Syria's government, quoted an unnamed government official as saying "there is no... deadline" for pulling troops out of cities. Opposition activists said that tanks remain active in Deraa today, despite government claims to the contrary, and said dozens have died in ongoing fighting. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 62 Syrians were killed across the country yesterday.
Syrian opposition figures aren't the only ones who don't share the UN's optimism. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé said Assad "is deceiving us" and warned of a push for tougher international action against Syria. The UN is currently trying to negotiate the dispatch of 250 or so unarmed military observers to determine if a cease-fire is achieved. Mr. Juppé said further steps will be considered at the UN Security Council if Syria doesn't allow observers in soon.
Action at the Security Council is something that Assad may fear, and may push him to accept the measures being sought now. But his government has been shielded from tough action there until now by permanent members Russia and China, who have vetoed two Security Council resolutions on Syria to date. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters that his country might consider voting for a resolution now, but his comments came with a major caveat.
"When we consider a document at the Security Council, we shall proceed from the principle of not doing any harm," Mr. Lavrov said. "It would be good if we are able to reach a consensus aimed at helping Kofi Annan's mission and not use ultimatums that would escalate tensions."
For now, sadly, fighting looks set to continue in Syria next week. Annan's career is littered with over-optimistic public assessments of the situation in violent regions, and of the impact of his own diplomacy.
I remember attending the press conference in Dili, East Timor, given by Jamsheed Marker, Annan's personal envoy to the territory, shortly after voting closed in the Aug. 30, 1999, referendum on independence from Indonesia. I and others in the months before the election had chronicled how the Indonesian military was distributing weapons to street gangs and appeared to have a plan in the drawer to punish the territory's people if they chose independence as a warning to other restive parts of the sprawling nation.
Indonesian special forces officers were providing logistical help and training to pro-Indonesian Timorese, while the Indonesian Foreign Ministry had dispatched diplomats to work with the militias on the political side. This was all pretty much out in the open – there are few secrets in a place as small as East Timor.
Yet the UN had waved off concerns about widespread violence or suggestions that perhaps the vote should be postponed until better security arrangements could be made. In the run-up to the vote, Mr. Marker and Annan repeatedly told reporters they'd received Indonesian "assurances" that the vote could go ahead safely. That evening, as reports streamed in of violent outbreaks around the countryside (a UN worker was being stabbed to death as Marker spoke), Marker intoned: "The eagle of liberty has spread its proud wings over the people of East Timor.''
The eagle of violence was also spreading its wings. Within days, what was left of the foreign press was cowering in the UN's Dili compound (I made my way there past the bodies of Timorese hacked to death by machetes) and much of the country's paltry infrastructure was on fire. In the roughly two weeks until an Australian peacekeeping force landed in Dili, at least 1,000 Timorese were killed and more than 100,000 of the country's than 700,000 were driven across the border into Indonesian West Timor.
I dig into this history because it's a reminder that Annan has taken the word of governments involved in conflict in the past. And been badly wrong.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem, Tuesday. Netanyahu told reporters yesterday that he sees no evidence of any impact on Iran's calculations about its controversial nuclear program. (Bernat Armangue/AP)
Netanyahu says Iran sanctions aren't working. His UN ambassador disagrees.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as is his habit, sought to pour cold water over the notion that US-led international sanctions on Iran are having an effect on its controversial nuclear program.
Sure, the sanctions have undermined the Iranian currency, resulted in the expulsion of Iran's central bank from the international system that facilitates interbank transfers, and squeezed Iran's oil exports, the government's major revenue source. The rial has lost about 40 percent of its value against the dollar since December, and is now trading on the informal market at about 20,000 rials to the dollar. In the latest sign of the pain being inflicted on Iran's economy, a newspaper there today reports that the government has banned the import of 600 products.
But Mr. Netanyahu told reporters yesterday that he sees no evidence of any impact on Iran's calculations about its controversial nuclear program. Israel insists Tehran is seeking a nuclear weapon, but Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes only. (A report from the United Nations nuclear watchdog last fall estimated that Iran stopped the bulk of its weapons-related work around 2003, but continued some modeling and design work until 2009.) The Israeli prime minister also indicated that he hopes sanctions lead to regime collapse.
"The sanctions are painful, hard .. but will this bring about a halt or a retreat in the Iranian nuclear program? Until now, it has not happened," he said. The Iranian government "is struggling financially and it still hasn't turned back by even one millimeter from its nuclear program," he told reporters in Israel.
Not everyone agrees with Netanyahu, among them Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. On Friday, Ambassador Prosor told reporters that the sanctions have a good shot at changing Iran's behavior.
"I think the international community at this stage has really moved forward and have made at least clear to Tehran that there is a certain price tag for continuing," he said. "The decision on SWIFT [the global system for interbank transfers], the issue of the sanctions by the EU, are important and have an effect on Iran... I do see really a movement on the international stage, especially on the economic side.... It's much more effective than people think and it might change, hopefully it might change behavior patterns if we continue with it."
"SWIFT" is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which coordinates millions of secure communications and money transfer information between the world's banks every day. Last month, Iran was unplugged from the system in a highly unusual move, creating major obstacles for the country's banks, including the central bank.
Netanyahu has consistently insisted that Iran is moving implacably toward a nuclear weapon and characterized the country as an existential threat to the Jewish state, leading to speculation that he may decide to unilaterally attack Iran.
Recently there have been some hints, however, that Israeli's defense establishment is backing away from talk about attacking Iran, particularly as the Obama administration has sought to cool the war talk to give sanctions a chance to work. A story in the hawkish Jerusalem Post yesterday, for instance, reported that "a possible military confrontation with Iran may be postponed until 2013, senior defense officials said in recent weeks amid growing signs that the West’s economic crackdown on Iran is bearing fruit."
Currently the only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel, with a minimum of 100 warheads.
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