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These past weeks it has been hard to decide which politician is more completely out of touch with reality: Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, who apparently sought to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who seems uninterested that thousands of his people are suffering and dying from cholera.

Of course, whatever Blagojevich has done is peanuts compared to Mugabe, who has driven his once-successful country into the ground with a 231 million percent inflation rate (which sounds almost comically impossible—unless you’re there), a ruined physical infrastructure, the destruction of property rights, commonplace violence, an economy that has contracted more than 40 percent in the past decade, and now epidemic diseases. And, of course, there is the fact that he lost the national election last spring. He stays in power because the Zimbabwean military and the ZANU-PF party thugs have an interest in keeping him in power.

Anyway, Mugabe’s days are numbered. His country is in a slow death spiral; he’s also 84. The question is what happens to Zimbabwe after his end. Sure, there’s Morgan Tsvangirai, the guy who more or less did win the elections—but members of the military are already engaged in an internecine struggle for supremacy. This week, one of the Zimbabwean military’s own, Air Marshall Perence Shiri survived an assassination attempt considered by many to have been an inside job. Whatever happens to Mugabe, these commanders will not quietly accede to change that will cost them prerogatives and power.

What is in the offing, according to U.S. Ambassador James McGee, is a collapsed or failed state.

In his recent book on development, The Bottom Billion, noted economist Paul Collier tells of being told why, after decolonization, the developing world’s governments turned out so inept: the homegrown technocrats (of which Africa had precious few) were shoved aside from power by those with a less educated, more military background. Those who could run a government competently were replaced with cronies.

No doubt political power is a much more direct and sexy proposition to understand and pursue than attempting the frustrating and complex workings of a functioning economy. But they are both essential and they have to grow together. One of the lessons of the post–Cold War period is that strongman politics just don’t hold up without foreign sponsorship. States do fail. Recuperation from collapse is agonizingly slow, difficult, and fraught—Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, are still in shambles, and Sierra Leone and Liberia are flat with corruption and sluggish development.

Some kind of intervention in Zimbabwe seems essential, but no one is ready to bell the cat. Continue reading »

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Michael Soussan’s Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Nation Books, 2008) is a compelling, fascinating, and humorous account of his years working with the UN’s Oil for Food program. This by no means a definitive account of the program, but rather a personal and highly impressionist view from an insider. But his impressions have the ring of truth for anyone who has observed the UN at close range and even more so for anyone who knows the characters with whom he worked. As a writer, he was blessed, since the Oil for Food program was short on gray bureaucrats and big on distinctively eccentric characters.

In fact, he does not appear to realize just how much the pugnacity and stubborn-ness of his boss, “Pasha” Benon Sevan, may have been critical in getting the program up and running. If he had played by the bureaucratic rules, Iraqis would have been waiting for their rations while memos piled up on desks across the Secretariat.

But eccentricity has its limits. There are echoes of Catch 22 in Soussan’s narrative, not least of which is a female ex-PFC Wintergreen, “Cindy,” the administrative assistant, whose attempt to secure promotion and recognition included fighting a war of bureaucratic attrition that at times almost brought the program (that was feeding the bulk of the Iraqi population) to a halt.

Inexperienced and idealistic, Soussan soon realized that had joined “an organization riddled with internal turf wars, petty office politics, dramatic personal rivalries, and in our case, a shameless competition for control over more money than the UN system had ever seen.”

Outraged by the general insouciance to Saddam’s schemes to bypass the sanctions, Soussan was one of the first to testify about the program in Washington, which did not endear him to his former colleagues. Conservatives used the allegations to attack and weaken Kofi Annan and the UN, at a time when the secretary-general was engaged in navigating through important global initiatives such as the “Responsibility to Protect” and the Millennium Development Goals. Indeed, to this date, there have been more congressional committees investigating Oil-for-Food than looking into the Sub-Prime meltdown, which indicates some distorted priorities. Continue reading »

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However tense the relationship between India and Pakistan becomes, the government of Manmohan Singh is highly unlikely to initiate or participate in a nuclear war with Pakistan. That would go against the deeply held moral beliefs of the prime minister. Both he and the Congress Party chairman, Sonia Gandhi, have told me privately that they both are utterly repulsed by such an act.

Immediately after the Mumbai atrocities, tough talk towards Pakistan seemed to billow like smoke from the Taj hotel out of quarters of India’s military and foreign affairs establishment—but, to his credit, Singh quickly fanned it away.

On the Pakistani side, President Asif Ali Zardari appears to be in a peace-making mood. Not long before the atrocities in Mumbai, he publicly abandoned his country’s “first use” doctrine, which held that Pakistan could use its nuclear weapons even without an Indian nuclear attack. He has also, like General Pervez Musharraf before him, reached out to India for a deal on the central flash point: the disputed state of Kashmir. Neither this president nor Musharraf (once he was in power) ever showed they were the type to reach for their nuclear guns.

Nevertheless, Singh has had few qualms about supporting the build up of India’s nuclear deterrent—regarding it as an inevitable process given India’s place in the world—and has been a passionate advocate of the new nuclear deal with the United States, which has recently lifted its 30 year-old embargo on nuclear supplies for India.

But does that mean we don’t have to fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? Continue reading »

Posted in India, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan | 1 Comment »

Since the publication of my retrospective article on Israel in the fall 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal, a few colleagues have wondered if I considered revising my somewhat “pessimistic outlook” (the way one of my correspondents put it) about the chances of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with Barack Obama in office. So have I changed my tune?

First, what I was trying to do in my WPJ article was to highlight the gap between the high expectations that many of us seemed to share regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 1991 (the end of the Cold War, increasing globalization, etc.) with the depressing reality of today’s Holy Land—post-9/11, post-Iraq War, and amidst the present global economic crisis. If anything, my retrospective reflected my sense of realism about the ability and willingness on the part of Israelis and Palestinians—with or without outside intervention—to settle their differences and achieve peace in the near future.

I was not encouraged after reading David Unger’s article in the same issue of WPJ that seemed to be trying to lift our spirits by forecasting that “by 2033, two states, Israel and Palestine, will be living side-by-side in uneasy peace.” Unger makes all the right arguments to support his thesis that a resolution of their conflict would serve the long-term interests of both the Israelis and Palestinians. But same arguments that focus on the horrific human and economic costs of a long and protracted conflict and the potential enormous benefits resulting from a peace agreement could apply to the national, ethnic, and religious clashes over Cyprus, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Darfur. These are just few of the regional disputes that have remained unresolved and to some extent “frozen,” neither full-blown war nor peace. The main reason for that reality is that, for most players in these conflicts, the costs of challenging the status-quo outweigh the perceived benefits of taking action to end the dispute (either through military victory and/or a peace settlement).

This kind of cost-benefit analysis explains why President George W. Bush and his aides decided after 9/11 not to invest too much time or resources in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Operating under the assumption (or self-delusion) that the promotion of the “Freedom Agenda” in the Middle East, starting with Iraq, would create the conditions for resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians (witness the oft-repeated neoconservative argument that the “road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”).

Indeed, Bush’s advisors were committed to the axiom that what is good for America is good for Israel (and vice versa). They argued that a Pax Americana in the region would also tilt the balance of power in favor of Tel Aviv, forcing the Palestinians to accept an arrangement that would favor Israeli interests. Hence, it made no sense to spend Washington’s diplomatic capital by pressing Israel, a so-called “strategic ally in the war on terror” to relieve the pressure from, and to make concessions to, the Palestinian leadership. Instead, Washington decided to “park” the Palestinian issue while trying to remake the Middle East by force. 

However, by moving beyond the Palestinian-Israeli issue and dealing with the threat of “Islamo-fascism,” the Bush administration has pursued policies that have only exacerbated Israel’s relations with other Arab countries. Hence, it tried dissuade Israel from pursuing Turkish-backed negotiations with Syria (a junior member of the Axis of Evil). Bush also gave Israel the green light to attack the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, leading to a war that ended with a strategic stalemate and possibly tipped the balance of power against the American-Israeli alliance.

In any case, when Bush’s Middle East “Freedom Agenda” crashed into the reality of the Hamas’s electoral victory in Palestine and the strengthening of Iran and its satellites in the region, the administration decided to placate the members of the Saudi-led Arab-Sunni coalition by going through motions of a grand peace-process in Annapolis earlier this year. This same Saudi coalition, based on neoconservative wishful thinking, was expected to form a “strategic consensus” with Israel to contain Iran. Continue reading »

Posted in Israel, Obama, U.S. Foreign Policy | 1 Comment »

Since Barack Obama’s victory on November 4, I’ve been musing about the parallels between this amazing moment and another world-altering event I was privileged to witness in November almost two decades ago—the demise of the Berlin Wall. Then, too, a barrier that had seemed insurmountable fell. Then, too, the desire for unity helped propel momentous change. For Germans, though, ambushed by their own differences, unity has proved elusive. Their experience may be a cautionary tale for Americans working to bridge our own particular divides.

I lived in West Berlin in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and had been making regular forays across the Wall to East Berlin, helping dissidents and getting to know their society. After sharing in their struggles, in a small way, for two years, I watched East and West Germans party together and experienced the joy and disbelief, the exhilaration and sense of limitless possibility that accompanied the unexpected end to decades of German separation.  

Last month, I watched a similar outpouring of emotion as Barack Obama was elected our first black president. Once again, I saw people dancing together in the streets, yearning to transcend longstanding divisions. It was, once again, a moment full of hope. But I was also reminded that change does not happen overnight, and that overcoming legacies of distance and distrust—as Germany’s experience shows—is an ongoing and difficult process. Continue reading »

Posted in Berlin, Germany, Obama | 1 Comment »

One of the many reasons Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games was that, it was hoped, a massive influx of international visitors—journalists in tow—would help push the central government to lessen restrictions on China’s own domestic media. One dramatic outcome would have been a lasting breach in the Great Firewall of China, the country’s highly advanced internet censorship apparatus.

While policies relaxed for foreign journalists reporting from China during the Olympics appear to be a welcome, permanent fixture, citizens reporting on events within China still have their work cut out for them. Four months after the lighting of the Olympic torch there seems to be little official progress in the movement to expand internet free speech to the masses of the great Middle Kingdom. China’s citizens, however, think otherwise.

Glowing praise issued from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on the success of the Beijing games conveniently did not mention the few crackdowns, arrests, and internet censorship activities that occurred during the month-long spectacle.

Such admonishment was left to others, like Human Rights Watch’s Minky Worden, who chastised the IOC for leaving out of its fact sheets “the extent to which the International Olympic Committee lowered its standards on human rights around the Beijing Olympic Games.” Similarly, Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) commented, “I think, in the end, the government’s approach to the media hasn’t changed that much.”

Indeed, a recent report from CPJ concludes “more Internet journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists working in any other medium…45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors.” China continues its ten-year streak at the top of this list. Continue reading »

Posted in China, Citizenship, Democracy, human rights | 2 Comments »

When Barack Obama announced his Foreign Policy and National Security team, the best news was that journalists like Robert Dreyfuss, Leslie Savan, and Robert Kuttner weren’t impressed. Hoping for leftists in moderate’s clothing, they are now faced with a global affairs team that makes the President-elect look more like a moderate-conservative in liberal’s clothing. Hillary Clinton—judged by her Senate record and campaign positions on foreign policy—certainly appears more hawk than dove, though her all-too-clever triangulation on the Iraq did not serve her candidacy well. Either way, clearly she is someone most Republicans and Joe Lieberman Democrats (is there more than one?) can live with.

Naming James L. Jones, the trusty marine and former supreme allied commander in Europe, as national security advisor spells continuity. On Iraq he has been publicly non-critical of the war itself but pointedly critical of its implementation and forward strategy. If one believes Bob Woodward (a coin-toss these days), Jones always opposed the invasion in private counsel. More importantly, he is a tough customer who won’t be run over like Condoleezza Rice was by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Company in her hapless stint as NSA. And finally keeping George W. Bush’s nonpartisan Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is the epitome of “continuity we can believe in.” Continue reading »

Posted in Iraq, U.S. Foreign Policy | 2 Comments »

“Those whom the gods destroy they first make mad.”
- Euripides

There is a madness about the triangular relationship between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. They all have resented and often hated each other; made alliances against each other; worked together when it was opportune; supported or, at least, turned too much of a blind eye to terrorists in each other’s countries; and became profoundly angry if terrorism was unleashed against them.

These cleavages have their roots in the Great Game, the nineteenth century British-Russian struggle for supremacy in Afghanistan and central Asia.

But ever since the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and was finally defeated by the Taliban (aided by American, Saudi Arabian, and Indian arms and training), the intensity of the regional rivalry has been ratcheted up and extended to frightening proportions, worsened by America’s decision to wage war in Central Asia. It is no longer just a Great Game. It has become a Great Madness. One hostile act impacts on another and then the two together create a third, then three together create a fourth…and so on.

It has long been known that the Pakistan-based terrorists who have struggled to liberate Kashmir from India’s grip have close connections with the Taliban. There is also little doubt that those Pakistani terrorists whose primary interest is a free Kashmir aim to wound India’s growing political and diplomatic interests in Afghanistan. India, in turn, has aimed to encircle Pakistan in order to have a counter against Islamabad’s Kashmir ambitions. Continue reading »

Posted in Diplomacy, India, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Terrorism | No Comments »

Security officials and cleanup crews are now combing through the carnage in Mumbai, following last week’s terrorist attacks in the city. As the citizens of this vast metropolis seek to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives, it is important to probe the sources of the violence in Mumbai, and consider the attacks’ implications for regional security in South Asia.

How and why did the Mumbai attacks occur? Information at this stage is still incomplete. Nonetheless, a few points seem clear.

There is considerable evidence that Pakistan-based entities were behind the Mumbai attacks. The sole surviving terrorist is Pakistani. He claims that the attackers trained with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for months inside Pakistan prior to launching their assault. And Indian officials have determined that the terrorists took a boat from Karachi to the Mumbai coast, leaving behind cell phones that had been used to call Pakistan.

None of this directly implicates the Pakistani government in the Mumbai attacks. It does, however, suggest that Pakistan bears some measure of responsibility for recent events; the Pakistani government is either unable or unwilling to prevent its territory from being used to launch terrorist attacks against India.

In fact, Pakistan has a long history of supporting anti-Indian militancy. For example, during the 1980s, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) began to provide training, arms, and financial and logistical support to insurgent groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. This transformed what had been a mostly spontaneous, local uprising into a low-intensity Indo-Pakistani war. Despite repeated Indian diplomatic entreaties and military threats, Pakistan has never fully ended its support for such groups.

These outside links notwithstanding, the complexity and organization of the Mumbai attacks suggest that they also employed local Indian support. Thus, even if the operation originated in Pakistan, the terrorists may well have had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.

Since independence, many Muslims have thrived in India, availing themselves of educational opportunities, achieving high levels of prosperity, and blending into the country’s vast, pluralistic society. On a day-to-day basis they have faced little religious discrimination.

Less affluent segments of the Muslim community, however, have not been so fortunate. They have long endured discrimination in aspects of everyday life ranging from employment to housing opportunities. Past generations acquiesced in these humiliations. Today’s lower middle class Muslims, however, are better educated and more politically aware than their predecessors, and thus less prone simply to accept their fate.

Against this social backdrop, two incidents have helped to spur a process of Islamist radicalization within India. The first was a spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India after Hindu zealots destroyed the Babri Mosque in 1992. Hundreds of Muslims died at the hands of Hindu mobs while the police looked on. The second episode was a 2002 pogrom in the state of Gujarat that occurred after Hindu pilgrims died in a train fire allegedly set by Muslim miscreants. Few, if any, individuals involved these incidents have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, these two episodes helped to radicalize a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims.

The Indian government has failed to devise a set of policies to address these social roots of Islamist zealotry. In addition, many of India’s state-level police forces have not mustered the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress the resulting violence. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, employed tainted evidence, and abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. Such actions have only worsened the situation, making it easier for foreign militants to recruit domestic sympathizers inside India.

What are the Mumbai attacks’ implications for South Asian security? The Manmohan Singh government has sought to avoid confrontation with Pakistan in the wake of several recent terror attacks with potential Pakistani links. Instead, it has preferred to maintain regional stability in hopes of achieving continued economic growth. The Mumbai attacks, however, undercut this rationale for restraint; by attacking international targets in India’s financial hub, they threaten to inflict significant harm on the Indian economy. Also, considerable domestic political pressure for strong anti-Pakistani action is likely to emerge, both from the opposition Bharatia Janata Party (BJP), which has long accused the government of being soft of Pakistan, and from ordinary voters outraged by the attacks.

In 2001, a failed assault on the Indian parliament by Pakistan-backed militants managed to kill only five people and was over in the space of a morning. In response, India mobilized roughly 500,000 forces along the Indo-Pakistani border, triggering a major militarized crisis with Pakistan. The Mumbai attacks killed and wounded hundreds, and lasted for nearly three days. Given the scale of the violence, as well as the economic and domestic political factors discussed above, the Indian government will be hard-pressed to avoid a reaction similar to 2001 – particularly if the evidence from Mumbai continues to point toward Pakistan. Given that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, the stakes in any ensuing confrontation will be enormous. Nuclear weapons will give both sides strong incentives to behave at least somewhat cautiously, in order to prevent a crisis from escalating too far. But they will also leave less room for error, making the costs of miscalculation potentially catastrophic.

Will a serious Indo-Pakistani crisis emerge from the Mumbai attacks, or will the Indian government manage to continue its policy of restraint, even in the face of such a brazen provocation? The pieces would appear to be in place for a serious regional confrontation. But only the coming days will tell for sure.

Sumit Ganguly is the director of research at the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an adjunct senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles.

Paul Kapur is an associate professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Posted in India, Pakistan, Terrorism | 1 Comment »

On October 29, The New York Times published a major story entitled “Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity.” In the article, Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, is quoted as stating that spending on intelligence operations in 2007 increased by 9 percent, totaling $47.5 billion. Much of this increased funding understandably has been allocated to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the battle against Al Qaeda. All of these problems, as well as additional new threats including cyber warfare, will continue to dominate the intelligence budget over the coming year. That said, it is hard to predict just how the 2009 budget will play out in the context of the current economic crisis. In fact, there is speculation among some intelligence experts that the intelligence community might be vulnerable to significant cuts in future years.

This pressure needs to be resisted if we are to effectively face intelligence challenges of the future, described in my “Tomorrow’s Spygames” article in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.

Intelligence history is replete with examples of scaling back intelligence spending only to pay a very steep price in the future. In fact, there is general agreement among intelligence professionals that the 1990s cuts to the CIA’s operating budget (which necessitated a serious cutback in personnel) helped to lay the foundation for a greatly weakened intelligence community that has faced 9/11, an ongoing terrorist threat, and two wars, with insufficient training, expertise, and capacity to effectively do so.

Resisting similar cuts today should include more than simple opposition to the move; we must make clear to the new decision makers how a reduction in budget will impact U.S. intelligence capability and national security. Hopefully, we will be able to put forth a convincing argument for why the intelligence budget in the future should remain as robust as it has been since 9/11.

Understanding that the United States is now officially in a recession, and that sacrifices need to be made, the intelligence community (almost more so than any) has strong grounds to argue that its funding should take priority.

Regardless of the exact budget dollar amount, it is important to make sure that increasingly scarce intelligence dollars are allocated appropriately. This will require the new administration to focus quickly on the challenges of the future, encouraging a bipartisan approach in Congress for the assiduous tracking of the use of intelligence dollars. The new budget must be sufficient to strengthen the analytical, operational, and technological foundations that if properly funded, will imbue the intelligence community with the expertise and flexibility to face a future full of challenges.

Jack Devine, a career clandestine services officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, headed the agency’s Afghan Task Force from 1985–87, and served as the CIA’s acting deputy director of operations. He is currently president of The Arkin Group, a New York-based intelligence consulting firm. His article “Tomorrow’s Spygames” can be found in World Policy Journal’s 25th anniversary issue, on newsstands now.

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