Center for a New American Security

From Tablet Magazine, where Lee Smith asked me to grade the Obama Administration's efforts in the Middle East:

I tend to believe the actions of local actors are more significant than those of U.S. policymakers. And experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has taught me that U.S. military force alone cannot decisively protect most U.S. interests. I also believe U.S. interests in the Middle East should be prioritized against one another within the region and also against U.S. interests elsewhere.

As someone who has spent the past decade getting to know the Arabic-speaking world, I should act in my interests and claim the Arabic-speaking world to be the single most important region from the perspective of U.S. interests. But I can't do that honestly. As I read documents like the National Intelligence Council's 2025 survey, I grow to suspect that specialists of East and South Asia will be far more important to the United States than we would-be Arabists going forward. (All you young whipper-snappers out there reading this blog, in other words, should also be working on your Mandarin flash cards.)

How one feels about the first and second sentences in that paragraph, though, really determines how one feels the United States should orient and use our power in all parts of the globe. In general, we Americans -- especially some of our friends on the American Right -- tend to overestimate the importance of what we do in comparison to what local actors do. (Iraq and Afghanistan, seriously, should have taught us better.) That doesn't mean we fold up our tents and head home: we just have to be realistic about what we can hope to achieve through the application of U.S. power, military force especially.

My officemate Abe has a good new report he edited on the global commons worth checking out.

Londonstani spent most of the summer on a housing estate clinging to the outskirts of Bristol. The job in hand was to investigate racism for a documentary by living as an immigrant in the kind of area many recent arrivals are housed in by local councils. But the experience also shed light on how the process of radicalisation plays out on the streets of modern Britain. Considering the recent debate about Prevent in the UK, Londonstani thinks it'll be useful to share his observations.

British readers will have little difficulty guessing Londonstani's identity from this post, but he would very much appreciate they keep it to themselves as full disclosure will threaten continued posting from Pakistan.

(preemptive apologies to Ma Exum and Lady Muqawama for some of the language in this post)

I'm used to hearing people in the Muslim world talk about life in Britain as a utopian fantasy. In Pakistan, on a daily basis, i hear rich and poor people talk about Britain's civilised society, it's impartial justice system and the humanitarian founding principles of a health system that provides care for all. Sometimes, I try to inject a little realism into the discussion by pointing out our social problems and the frequent complaints about the deteriorating quality of the country's social services. But I can almost see the words bounce off people's glazed expressions. This is not restricted to Pakistan. Even people in more stable countries like Egypt allow themselves to think of life in a developed economy as a heaven-like dream.

This summer, I saw reality hit home for those few who make it to Britain. I was sitting at a bus stop on the edge of Bristol's Southmead Estate. Beside me was a Sudanese man with his young daughter, who seemed about six years old. We sat on the same bench as he asked her about school and her homework. He had no reason to think I understood his northern Sudanese Arabic dialect, and I felt guilty being an unintended party to a private conversation between a father who looked like he'd just finished a long shift as a security guard at a supermarket and a child, who was plainly excited to be out with her father. 

I reached into the paint-splattered overalls that were meant to make me look like a Pakistani immigrant doing odd jobs to survive in his new home and pulled out a cigarette, hoping that leaning against the bus stop away from the Sudanese family would let me tune out of their conversation. On the other side of the road was another bus stop. A group of local girls, none older than 15, were talking to each other loudly. Amongst all the squealing, the only words I could make out were "fuck", "bastard" and "cunt". Occasionally one of the girls would pull her skirt up at a passing car of boys and the others would cheer and hand her a bottle of brightly coloured liquor to swig from. Every now and again, one of the cars would stop and another girl might stand in front of the passenger window and pull down her top. The boys would try and persuade them to get in. Eventually, two of the girls got into a crowded little car with wide tyres and lowered suspension.

I had been absent mindedly watching the events in front of us. After the car drove away, the Sudanese father turned to his daughter and said; "That's what English girls are like. Never talk to people like that."

A few days later at the same bus stop, two Indian low-grade computer technicians were discussing their new home. They probably assumed I understood their Hindi, but they didn't seem to care. They spoke of near daily verbal abuse and friends who had been attacked by teenage thugs.  England, they decided, wasn't what they thought it was. Just before they got on their bus, a group of teenagers outside the chip shop behind us proved the technicians' point by rounding on a passing elderly local.

"Look out, he's a perv," shouted one boy. Before another pushed the girl standing next to him in front of the old man and said, "I bet you wish you could fuck her". They all then burst into laughter.

Southmead is the Britain that most people do not see. This is perhaps understandable if you live abroad. But judging from comments after the broadcast of the documentary, people in Britain's more affluent areas are unaware of what happens in neighbourhoods literally on their doorsteps. The little attention places like Southmead merit on the public's radar, is inversely proportional to their physical presence. Places like Southmead exist on the borders of every British city and inside the largest ones. A very large proportion of Britain's immigrants live in places like Southmead and a sizeable chunk of the white population has grown up in similar surroundings. 

I saw these surroundings at close quarters. Hundreds of cans of high-strength cider littered the streets every Saturday and Sunday. I saw unemployed drunken youths accost shoppers in the mornings. The green spaces that looked inviting from afar were littered with used condoms, pregnancy test kits and the excrement of pitbull dogs that were popular pets amongst residents. In the daytime, teenage mothers pushed young children around the estate. I saw the partner of one young mother call a toddler a "fucking little shit" before smacking him hard enough on the back of the head to make the child drop to his knees and cover his head in the expectation of further violence. In the early evenings, young teenagers would sit at benches swigging from bottles of cheap alcohol. On one occasion, I became their target.

As an immigrant in Southmead, segregating yourself and your family was an act of self preservation. Two young British-born Pakistani boys I talked to told me earnestly that they were good because "we aint got no white friends". There were many helpful and kind local people living on the estate. But the few I bumped into were often quick to distance themselves from their environment. A retired man who used to try to talk to me every morning at another bus stop would freeze when tatooed men with aggressive dogs walked by. Young mothers who used the same stop would talk about needing to move out "for the sake of the kids".

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. "Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge". "Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they've even got here" "The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain" These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don't usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

Walking around the estate, I often thought of British Pakistani and Somali boys growing up thinking their experiences were an accurate portrayal of what Britain was about. I imagined growing up with such a view of Britain would make the idea of fighting UK forces in Muslim lands seem righteous. On the battlefields of Iraq and/or Afghanistan, the young soldiers they would face would likely include the white youngsters who joined up hoping the army was their way out of Southmead.

But the army wasn't the only way out. There was also religion. If you decide that the dysfunctional reality of Southmead is a product of a permissive society, austere religion is a logical answer.

I met one man from Southmead who had made that decision. A local man had embraced a strict form of Islam. He told me that the problems of the area resulted from weak family values and a moral laxity that allowed the misuse of drugs and alcohol. Islam had provided him a way out and a template for a better life than the one he had seen growing up. Although we talked for literally minutes, it was easy to tell I was talking to a mature adult who made a considered decision that had helped him live as a productive and responsible member of society.

I heard of at least another local man who had embraced Islam. I didn't meet him but I read about him in the newspapers while he was on trial for trying to bomb a shopping centre in the city. When police raided his flat they found a suicide vest and explosives hidden in a biscuit tin.

Andrew Ibrahim is the son of middle class parents, who news reports said were Egyptian Christians. During the trial, a picture emerged of a young man with serious emotional and drug abuse problems. It was a picture I had come across before when looking at a new emerging breed of extremists who came from criminal backgrounds and actively sought out extremist Islam as a way of depicting their activities as more than mere criminality and a route to a new identity as warriors in a cosmic battle.

News reports said Ibrahim described the UK as a "dirty toilet". How much of his view was influenced by the surroundings of his upbringing?

The judge presiding over the trial, which ended with Ibrahim getting a life term, summed up the prosecution's portrayal of Ibrahim as one of a young man who suffered a disturbed adolescence and went on to become lonely, angry and alienated from society. The description could fit any number of young men in Southmead and other places like it. Not all will turn to extremism, but they will likely be drawn to other forms of angry destructive behaviour.

The ingredients that make a British terrorist are numerous, interact with each other in different ways and are changing constantly. Just looking at "Britishness" or identity fails to take into account the growing numbers of extremists that are emerging from non-Muslim backgrounds. But what affects one person doesn't necessarily affect another. Ibrahim's brother Peter was reported to be a Oxbridge educated lawyer. But whatever the ingredients are, it was clear from my time in Southmead that it's easier to find them in places that suffer social deprivation. And the UK has many of them.

The discussion about Muslim immigrants turning to extremism often centres around them not wanting to integrate into British life. But it never addresses the fact that many come with high hopes of a new life, and find reality bitterly dispiriting. They come to take advantage of social mobility and a law-abiding society to build a better life for their families. They end up feeling they need to protect their families from the very society they had idolised. Why don't they go home? Many people I met from more stable parts of the world talked about it "after saving enough". But like others before them, chances are that they will stay. People who had come with a fantasy of Britain ended just seeing it as an opportunity to earn and a contagion to avoid.

Government policy seeks to target resources to fix problems in the most cost effective manner. However, the problem of extremism now involves society as a whole. Pre 9/11 it was limited to a section of a section of the population. That has grown with the advent of the Iraq war and the emergence of an image of Muslim militants as righteous men ready to stand against a superpower and the ability to make the established powers of the world look impotent. It's an image that appeals to people of diverse backgrounds who are disillusioned with their societies. People who aren't necessarily observant Muslims, or even Muslims at all. But at the same time, the increasingly obvious bloodlust of the men and women drawn to the cause has alienated most Muslims.

What does that mean for initiatives like Operation Contest's Prevent aspect? (thanks davidpfbo) On the one hand, allies and partners are easier to identify, but the work that needs to be done has to reach out to more people and address wider issues in our society. Despite the protests of individual voices lobbying for the adoption of their own outlook, work on identity, engagement with more authentic Islamic voices and community work (including seemingly unconnected activities like sports) all have a roll to play. The undertaking is huge and constant fine tuning is vital. It also involves sums that the British government will struggle to find.

The UK's Department of Communities and Local Government is conducting an enquiry into the UK's government's Prevent strategy, one strand of the government's overall plan to tackle terrorism and its causes.

Before relocating to Pakistan, Londonstani spent a fair amount of time looking at extremism in the UK as well as efforts to counter it. Prevent seems to have started out very much as a "work in progress", meaning that the idea was to try a bunch of stuff and see how it played out before fine tuning the strategy. The broadbrush approach has drawn in community partners with differing views on the nature of the problem.

The way to see Prevent, Londonstani thinks, is as an effort by the government to draw in partners to help it understand an issue it realised was beyond its present capacity. The problem is that the partners might have had a snap-shot understanding of the areas in which they operate but who also lacked an overall understanding of the problem. This isn't a criticism of any given group - the problem is vast and the issues involved in it are manifold and constantly evolving.

Among the submissions to the enquiry are some interesting points made by the Quilliam Foundation, an influential think tank in the UK.

The argument that radicalisation is driven by grievances, in particular about foreign policy and the idea that of a "War on Islam", is a popular one but one that is undermined by a comparison between Britain and America. If British foreign policy feeds into a narrative of a "War on Islam" then America's foreign policy must also equally or more so. Yet, despite American Muslims sharing British Muslims' concerns about a "War on Islam"[5], America has seen nothing like the home-grown 7/7 attacks. This can be explained by the greater accessibility immigrants to America have to a shared identity built on universal values than is granted to immigrants to Britain.

Quilliam, to take this example, is very keen on the "inclusive British identity" approach. Others think extremists rise from disadvantaged communities and the main focus should be based on social services that tackle education, social exclusion etc.

However, Quilliam's above statement is a good example of the superficial nature of present extremism analysis. How does the greater accessibility that American universal values are supposed to offer immigrants explain events at Ft. Hood? An isolated incident? Well, what about, Najibullah Zazi, who planned "Mumbai-on-the-Hudson" with help from extremists in Pakistan. Or, Byran Neal Venas, a Hispanic American convert, who was captured in Afghanistan and admitted to helping with initial plans to launch an attack in the US. Or David Hedley, an American who planned to kill an editor at the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen. If he had managed, the US would have joined the list of nations that have become a launching pad for extremist violence.

Read Peter Bergen's Foreign Policy article where he outlines these cases and others in more detail and effectively makes the case that the US has basically just been lucky so far. And as we know, luck is no basis from which to argue for policy direction.

Drawing together lots of views and opinions is definitely a good approach, but Londonstani doesn't envy the people who have to navigate all the competing interests and ideologies that underlay the different views and come out with a better policy.

Kerry Lugar is the talk of Islamabad. And as tempted as Londonstani was at first to assume everyone was referring to a new pop star rival to Britney it turns out Kerry Lugar is actually a piece of US legisation that triples non-military aid to Pakistan.

Londonstani can only justify his shocking lack of knowledge of the wierd way in which Americans name their legislative acts by pointing out that reporting on this bill has been fairly scarce. But its low profile in the Western media is inversely proportional to the amount of air and conversation time the bill is receiving in Islamabad.

Reuters describes the bill as; "legislation (that) authorizes $1.5 billion a year for the next five years as part of a bid to build a new relationship with Pakistan that no longer focuses largely on military ties, but also on Pakistan's social and economic development."

An op-ed in the Boston Globe wonders why Senator John Kerry described his bill as a landmark achievement "when we have no idea where aid to Pakistan goes."

This is a totally sensible line of questioning when you consider how US aid to Pakistan during the Afghan war was diverted and used to build nuclear weapons or lined the pockets of corrupt officials and politicians.

But, from a Pakistani perspective, this is all missing the point. And Londonstani couldn't help but feel that the cross currents of the debate in Pakistan and the US is highly illustrative of the communication problem between the two countries.

At first glance, Pakistan is getting a bunch of cash from the Americans who  want to know that its not going to end up in military programmes, training for Bombay style attacks while securing assurances that the nuclear supermarket the Pakistanis were running until very recently will be put to an end. Any right thinking Pakistani would want foreign aid to actually help alleviate poverty and not fund the generals, right? Everyone should be happy. In fact, your average Pakistani should be ecstatic, right?

Well not exactly.. not even close. Government officials have been on TV and radio day and night trying to convince the public that the aid is a good idea. Parliament is bogged down with MPs asking pointed questions and demanding answers about the strings attached to the cash. What's their problem? Well, in a word, dignity.

A Pakistani friend who works with foreign missions and international bodies sums it up; "People want to know that the government hasn't sold the interests of the nation to an outside power.

It's that potential for differences of interpretation that's worrying my friend. For example, Reuters says "the bill also stipulates that U.S. military aid will cease if Pakistan does not help fight "terrorists," including Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda followers taking sanctuary along its borders with Afghanistan."

Do Pakistanis trust America to stipulate who is Taliban and who isn't? Would the Americans wave the bill infront of Pakistani officials and tell them to kill people protesting a drone strike? A lot of Pakistanis think so.

According to figures dug up by AP only $500 million of $6.6 billion in U.S. aid between 2002 and 2008 for fighting insurgents has actually been used for what it was intended. So aren't Pakistanis worried that whatever money is around will end up in politicians' pockets anyway? Well, yes, said my friend, but the bigger worry is that it looks like we are for sale. 

Ever tried to tell a black community worker in Brixton that her friends and relatives needed to sort out the problem of errant fathers? No? Londonstani wouldn't be that stupid either, but has seen a local official try. After the meeting fell apart amid near violence, the community worker said, "sort out the discrimination, before you tell us how to live our lives." And that's what the Pakistani view of Kerry-Lugar reminded Londonstani of. "We have problems, but we won't be talked down to by the people responsible for our misery."

Pakistan's information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, on national TV earlier today concentrated on the theme of Pakistan's national honour.

"Pakistan is not a country that needs saving from outside.. We are not begging. No, we have been the world's battlefield. We were conceived as a social security state, but we became a security state... This was not of our choosing. We were hostage to fortune. Since we have been founded we have been key in the world's major conflicts. From the time of the U2s flying from our territory to the present fight against al Qaeda."

He avoided the other important theme - corruption - which Londonstani can't help but feel would have got a rather more cynical reception.

A bill with a girl's name that aims to improve the lives of Pakistan's people is attacked in Washington as huggy feely and unrelated to military aims. But the real tragedy is in Pakistan where it is dismissed as another Western plot to dismember the nation.

This is the real cost of the communication problem between U.S. officialdom and media on one hand and the people

of Pakistan on the other. Not the government, but the public. Without a basic level of trust amongst Pakistanis in U.S. aims, the likelihood is that the money will end up fueling the kind of resentment it was meant to address. After five years, it might well have been more useful to have just chucked the cash in the sea.

Right, so how to communicate with the people? Any ideas?

Here's an idea of what communication problems lead to on the mean streets of Islamabad.

Unless my alma mater has suddenly ceased to be the stingiest institution in the Levant, I'm thinking the American University of Beirut wasn't the one that paid for Christopher Hitchens to travel to Beirut. The word on the street is that Hitchens was in Beirut as part of a junket paid for by Lebanon's March 14th coalition and its stateside lobby.

If you're looking for more dirt on Hitchens' ass-kicking or his talk at AUB, by all means check out my friend Sean's blog as well as Qifa Nabki, a blog I had not seen before but which has an amusing "take-down" of a piece that ran in Forbes. (This Hitchens thing has been a source of much hilarity for the journalists and scholars who make Beirut their home. This is at least as amusing for them as it is for me when Major Junior writes on Hizballah.)

I find this whole thing really interesting for an entirely different reason. Whatever your position is on Lebanese politics, there can surely be little disagreement that March 14th was left wrong-footed by the U.S. presidential election. For several years, March 14th cultivated an enthusiastic group of defenders in the U.S. media and think tanks: Tony Badran, Lee Smith, David Schenker, and Michael Totten -- just to name a few. The problem was, almost all of these guys only have influence in a very narrow band along the ideological spectrum. Put another way, a favorable op-ed printed in the Weekly Standard carried a lot more weight in 2004 than it does today. And if you're looking to carry the March 14th message to policy-makers in Barack Obama's Washington, none of these guys -- nice enough guys, all of them -- are really going to be effective.

For the life of me, I have no idea why they weren't doing this in 2006 and 2007, when, after the mid-term elections, anyone with half a brain could see the way the political winds were starting to change in the U.S.

Oh man. Poor Condoleezza Rice. Her honest-to-God worst fear was that our hardline stance on Syria was going to leave us looking stupid because, in the end, we would be the only ones not talking with Syria. She warned the Israelis time and time again not to talk with the Syrian regime. And yet, as the BBC reports today:

Israel says it is holding indirect talks with Syria to reach a comprehensive peace agreement.

A statement by the Israeli prime minister's office said both sides were talking "in good faith and openly".

This has happened before, of course. The U.S. ended up being the last people to meet with the PLO, too, and was embarrassed to discover that Israel -- on whose behalf we weren't meeting with the PLO -- was secretly meeting with, ahem, the PLO. Abu Muqawama would hate to be Tzipi Livni when she gets that call from Condi. ("You %$#@ed us! Again!") And what must the president be thinking? It was just last week that he stood in the Knesset and made that bold speech about not dealing with radicals or some such. How many members of the audience were, at that very moment, engaged in talks with the Asad regime as they stood and applauded the president's words?

Update: David Hearst has an invaluable "explainer" in the Guardian.

Abu Muqawama bought and read the New York Review of Books yesterday mainly because of Max Rodenbeck's review of Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. Rodenbeck -- the excellent Middle East correspondent for the Economist -- had mostly good things to say about Wright's book but concluded with this rather damning criticism:

In many ways Dreams and Shadows is an admirable book. Yet despite Wright's determination to be objective and her skill at her craft, there is something unsatisfying about the approach to journalism that she represents here. Perhaps it is a symptom of listening to the world from Washington, where the rumble of think tanks, the clatter of talk shows, and the whine of politicians synthesize into an agenda that often clashes with the sounds of the Middle Eastern jungle. Wright does try to challenge that agenda, yet does not really escape being informed by it.

She takes pride, for instance, in relying on local sources rather than distant "experts." Yet many of her local informants are famed talking heads, working in institutions that are furrowed pitstops for foreign correspondents. Often, too, the sort of questions they are asked reflect priorities set elsewhere. At one point, for instance, Wright describes three vital issues that Middle Eastern governments must address in order to accommodate pressure for change: political prisoners, womens' rights, and political Islam. Perhaps, but that sounds closer to concerns in Washington than to the more mundane things, such as jobs, the corruption of local officials, and the soaring cost of marriage, that actually exercise many Middle Easterners.

It occurs to Abu Muqawama that the attention of journalists based in the region to the issues people actually care about is probably why Rodenbeck is a better guide to the Middle East than, say, Robin Wright. DC-based journalists like Wright are probably better guides to U.S. policy toward the Middle East than they are to what's taking place on the ground. The reverse would be true of someone like Rodenbeck. But if you're a policy maker, to whose journalism would you defer? Abu Muqawama has his answer.

With today's announcement that the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N will seek to reinstate the Pakistani Supreme Court and its Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the contest for democracy in Pakistan enters a crucial stage. Beyond reinstating the court, the two parties will seek to undo a Constitutional amendment that allows the President to suspend Parliament. They will also pass a bill which will undo all rulings of the puppet Supreme Court established by Pervez Musharraf three months ago.

The announcement establishes an all but certain confrontation with Musharraf. The result of these moves if allowed to go forward would almost certainly be the invalidation of his election as President.

Musharraf has already indicated that he has no intention to go quiet into this good night.

To date, the US has backed Musharraf due to his tepid support of the War on Terrorism. As recently as this week, US representatives indicated to the leader of the lawyers' movement that they would prefer a compromise in which Chaudhry was not restored.

It is time to stop backing the wrong horse.

First, it is not entirely clear that with Musharraf's resignation as Army Chief that he will still receive the backing of the Army if he wishes to continue in power. Second, Pakistanis indicated at the ballot box that they have almost no tolerance for extremists.

Is continued support for an increasingly marginalized dictator the best we can do in response to an electoral uprising in the World's sixth-largest state against dictatorship and radicalized Islam?

As I sit somewhere in the former Soviet Union, I long for a simpler world of mutual destruction where Colin Gray is relevant and congressmen still know how to party.

Longing complete--the Soviet Union is after all a distant element of my childhood—I consider a small hypocrisy in our foreign policy.

Policy is obviously a complicated matter, and it should at times be no surprise that elements are contradictory, e.g., our simultaneous support for democracy and Musharraf. Never should it be taken too seriously as a reflection or predictor of US action in the international arena.
I have not been greeted in this particular Republic with the normal plethora of pirated DVDs and software that have become the hallmark of travel in the third world. Officially, the US government raises hackles over piracy year after year, particularly when upset about the yuan.

US and Coalition soldiers, however, must be among the largest consumers of pirated DVDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have not been to a company-sized or larger forward operating base in either theater where the sale of pirated disks was not condoned. Most bases, (thankfully, otherwise soldiers might read books or learn the local language) including ISAF headquarters in Afghanistan, have command-authorized purveyors of these goods. Pirated movies are likely a revenue stream for insurgent and criminal elements in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We must be entertained, however, and AAFES seems only capable of acquiring the least appealing movies at prices 17 times what we would pay at the local dealers and then, only after the movie’s release to DVD. There is only so much of a crowd for Nativity Story in a war zone. Even if AAFES does acquire something worth watching, it’s not like AAFES is available in the remoter and smaller bases of the theaters.

And so we’ll watch Charlie Wilson’s War (although not the Kite Runner , of course) with its warning that it is “provided for your screening and has an identifiable watermark” and dream again of a day when the bad guys speak their haltering English with Russian accents and our enemies wear uniforms.