Revolution — in a teacup

By Rasul Bakhsh Rais

Published: February 13, 2011

The writer is professor of political science at LUMS rasul.rais@tribune.com.pk

A revolution is a mass rebellion against an existing social and political order and rests on some vision about how to reorder the society and redefine state-society relations. Rebellions against existing regimes with strong armies, intelligence agencies, police and torture houses are great social enterprises, partly inspired by the dream of a progressive future society and partly by the spirit of sacrifice. The desire to rebel is linked to a lack of faith in the existing political order’s ability to deliver justice, peace, security and well-being to citizens.
Revolutions are interesting subjects for a number of reasons, but one thing common among them is that nobody can predict where they will occur, when and for what reasons? Who knew three weeks ago that a revolutionary situation would emerge in Egypt and a man in charge for over 30 years would be forced to resign.
Thinking of the Middle East and the wider region, including Pakistan, and whether or not a similar mass rebellion is likely to happen, we must know one thing for sure: Revolutions often are based on radical and new ideas. Perhaps we are witnessing, in the core of the Middle East, a revolutionary spirit which mandates that people must have the right to have their own government. In the current political order, hegemonic regimes have imposed themselves on the people through either, dynastic family monarchies or through the militaries under the facade of a national party. One uses tradition and service to the nation as a source of legitimacy, while the other uses modernity and national emotions. The latter variety that we see in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen has used national emotion. The fruits of modernisation are limited and their distribution is inequitable.
There is much media talk and intellectual speculation about a similar revolution in Pakistan. The big, really big question is, have we reached that stage or has the system, democratic in procedural terms, completely broken down? Although revolutions never call before happening, we can have a fair assessment of a particular social and political order and its relationship with the society and its people. An abrupt change within an existing system doesn’t occur if it has strong shades of democratic colours. By this I mean, a strong commitment of political parties and the people to democracy. The question of democratic values and culture is equally important.
Pakistan has a mixed system of democracy and authoritarianism that it has retained under, both, civilian and military governments. What may guard Pakistan against revolutions is its constitutional order, tradition of change through democratic means and democratic consensus, both among the ruling elite and the masses. True, the commitment to democracy at popular level remains questionable, primarily because democratic governments have repeatedly failed to deliver according to popular expectations. It is for this reason that some sections of the populations have in the past celebrated military takeovers. I will cast my vote with those who argue that mass unrest is possible, but that it can only force fresh elections if the political elite remain together in the democratic transition project. If they become polarised, as they have in the past, and a protest movement takes to the streets and paralyses the government, the military will take over with a promise of ‘genuine’ democracy.
Pakistan is in a grey zone today because of the undemocratic behaviour of its elected political executives. I believe that the current political party leaders are capable of sorting out things among themselves and the political system has a legal and constitutional mechanism to do some path correction. Before a big popular uprising occurs, let us be content with the storm in the cup of tea.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2011.

A history of anti-Americanism in Pakistan

by Nadeem F. Paracha on 02 16th, 2011 |

In 2009 the monthly Herald published the results of an elaborate survey that it undertook to determine the extent of anti-Americanism in Pakistan. The findings suggest nothing that we do not already know.
Though anti-Americanism during the Cold War (1949-89) was mostly the ideological vocation of pro-Soviet leftists, today (some twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union), one can safely suggest that America is experiencing its most detested hour.
It hasn’t been hated across the board with so much fervour as it is today, mainly thanks to the bungling of the arrogant Bush administration and its utter deficiency in the art and skill of empathetic and prudent diplomacy.
However, the anti-Americanism virus — at least in most Muslim countries — today is such that the critique that comes with it is largely rhetorical and at times, rather obsessive-compulsive.
Take for example the ‘debate’ that took place on Pakistan’s electronic media over the Kerry-Lugar Bill in which it was quite clear that certain politicians, TV talk show hosts and their audiences among the country’s ever growing chattering classes, who were quick to attack the Bill, had not even read the document!
Their single cue in this respect was the Pakistan Army’s concerns about certain conditions mentioned in the aid bill, and off they went on a rampage.
This may also suggest that the nature of anti-Americanism one often comes across TV news channels in this country, is primarily the animated vocation of two interlinked entities: i.e., electorally weak religious and conservative parties and certain former military men who felt alienated after the American dollars for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency dried up.
Couple these with a string of highly-paid TV anchors and televangelists who are ever willing to sacrifice objectivity to grab the ratings-boost that rabid anti-American rhetoric promises and you get burning, blinding hot air all around.
From a perceived friend to an imagined foe
Let’s try to trace the history and evolution of anti-Americanism in Pakistan. According to a research paper written by Dr Talukder Muniruzaman in 1971 on the politics of young Pakistanis, a majority of Pakistanis viewed America positively and admiringly in the 1950s.
The paper also suggests that right up until Pakistan’s 1965 war with India, most Pakistanis saw America as a friend, especially in the context of the Soviet Union’s close ties with India.
According to another lengthy paper (published by Chicago University in 1983) on the ideological orientation of Pakistan’s university students (by Kiren Aziz and Peter McDonough), anti-Americanism among most Pakistanis remained somewhat low even during the celebrated movement (in 1967-68) against the Ayub Khan dictatorshiop – in spite of the fact that the movement was largely led by leftist students, activists and politicians.
Some leading leftist activists of the movement also suggest that there were precious little incidents in which an American flag was torched.  The following is what Badar Hanif, a radical member of the left-wing National Students Federation (NSF)  in the late 1960s,  wrote in a recent email to me: ‘We were focused. We not only wanted to topple the US-backed Ayub dictatorship, but the whole capitalist system.’
When I wrote back asking him whether the US was a target as well, Badar replied: “Some of us were pro-Soviet and some pro-China Marxists. Yes we were against the US, but more due to the fact that soon after Ayub’s fall, the US and the Pakistan military began aiding and backing Islamic parties like Jamat-i-Islami (JI). The JI offered themselves to them to work as a bulwark against the rising leftist tide in educational institutions and the streets.”
The Kiren Aziz and Peter McDonough paper suggests that anti-Americanism in the 1970s was ripe among many Arab countries due to the United States’ single-minded support for Israel, which finally made its way into Pakistani society during the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1972-77). Especially so when Bhutto started to expand his ‘Islamic Socialism’ doctrine at the international level by striking firm relations with various radical Muslim states and Arab countries.
However, the build-up to this was the otherwise sympathetic Richard Nixon’s administration’s failure to militarily help its sub-continental ally during the 1971 war with India.
Seyyed Vali Nasr in his excellent book, ‘Vanguards of the Islamic Revolution’ writes that the religious parties (especially JI)  began attributing the Pakistan Army’s defeat in 1971 to the ‘decadence and debauchery of men like General Yahya Khan’ and due to ‘Pakistanis’ failure to become good Muslims.’ However before that, a large number of Pakistanis began blaming the US because it had ‘failed to help Pakistan in the war.’
In his book ‘Political Dynamics of Sindh 1947-1977’ Tanvir Ahmed Tahir suggests that the post-1971 anti-Americanism in Pakistan was more an occupation of progressive and leftist groups. This is confirmed in Hassan Abbas’ book, ‘Pakistan’s drift into extremism: Allah, the Army and America’s War on Terror’.
This brings us back to the suggestion that I would rather treat as a question: Were the religious parties really being escorted by the US against the perceived threat of a take-over of pro-Soviet forces in Pakistani politics?
Progressive student leaders, activists and politicians of the era would answer in the affirmative. Many of them explain this happening as a consequence of Pakistan religious parties’ strong links with oil-rich Arab monarchies, especially the Saudi Arabia, a country that was a close ally of the US.
Anjum Athar who was associated with the Liberal Students Federation (LSF) at the University of Karachi in 1974-75 once shared with me an interesting observation. He said: “In those days (the ’70s) being socially and politically conservative did not necessarily mean being anti-West. Even the most militant Islamic student groups in the 1970s who wanted the imposition of Shariah were never seen badmouthing the US.”
Athar then added, “The reason behind this was that parties like the JI and IJT and other religious groups were more threatened by the rise of communism, a threat they shared with the US and Saudi Arabia – the two countries that became their main financiers and backers. That is why anti-Americanism was more rampant among Pakistani leftists as compared to the religious parties.”
This trend continued much into the 1980s as well.
In spite of this, America remained Pakistan’s leading aid donor. According to Lubna Rafique’s 1994 paper, ‘Benazir & British Press,’ it was only in the last year of Z.A. Bhutto’s regime (1977), that he started to allude to moving out of the ‘American camp,’ calling the US a ‘white elephant.’ He also went on to accuse the Jimmy Carter administration for financing the religious parties’ agitation against him in 1977.
Throughout the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s, anti-Americanism remained a much polarised affair in Pakistan. Most political-religious parties and their supporters, and the industrial/business classes that supported Zia, were either openly pro-America or ambiguous on the subject.
This was due to the fact that Zia was an ‘Islamist’ military dictator who was backed by the Ronald Regan administration with military hardware and dollars during the US proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and against ‘communism in the region’. Consequently, anti-Americanism became even more rampant among those opposing Zia.
For example, though anti-Americanism among most PPP workers and the student wing grew two-fold after Z.A. Bhutto’s ‘judicial murder’ at the hands of the Zia dictatorship, the party’s new chairman, Benazir Bhutto, advised her party to concentrate on the removal of Zia alone.
In 1986 when she returned to Pakistan from exile and was greeted by a mammoth crowd in Lahore, groups of PPP’s student wing, the PSF, began torching a US flag at the crowded rally. Benazir is said to have stopped them from doing this, pointing out that they would not be able to fight a superpower if they weren’t even able to remove a local dictator.
Though by the late 1980s the intensity of anti-Americanism had grown in Pakistan (compared to the preceding decades), it never became violent. The only violent case in this respect had taken place in 1979 in Islamabad when the US consulate was attacked by a crowd enraged and provoked by a broadcast from Iranian state radio that had blamed the US for engineering that take-over of the Ka’aba that year by a group of militants.
Though the notorious take-over of the Muslims’ sacred place was masterminded by a band of armed Saudi fanatics, Iran’s new revolutionary regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, used its media to claim that the attack was backed by ‘American and Zionist forces.’
According to Yaroslav Trofimov’s telling tale of the attack on Ka’aba vividly captured in his book,‘The siege of Mecca’, confusion about who planned and executed the attack arose when the Saudi regime blacked out the news.
Anti-US agitation in Pakistan only rolled back when it became clear that the siege was the work of a group of armed Saudi fanatics to whom even the kingdom’s puritanical Wahabi regime wasn’t puritanical enough!
The switch
In the 1990s as America largely divorced itself from the region after the end of the Afghan civil war, anti-Americanism in the country actually receded and Pakistanis got busy tackling the bitter pitfalls of the Afghan war in the shape of bloody ethnic and sectarian strife.
However, this also meant the drying up of American patronage and funds for religious groups and parties in the country.
Anti-Americanism returned to the fore (but with far more intensity) after the tragic 9/11 episode in 2001 and not surprisingly, the religious groups now became its main purveyors.
According to veteran defense analyst, Hassan Askari, this post-Cold-War version of anti-Americanism in the country is an emotional response of most Pakistanis to the confusion that set in after 9/11.
Naushad Amrohvi, a member of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) in 1972, before leaving for Sweden after the Zia coup said: “Anti-Americanism was more popular with leftist youth before the 1980s. It was more of an intellectual pursuit. We were more into negating the US policies by intellectually attacking capitalism and modern imperialism and for this we read and discussed a lot. We read a lot of Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Faiz Ahmed Faiz… we even read a lot of Abul Ala Maududi so we could puncture his theories about an Islamic state and tackle the then pro-US Jamat-i-Islami!”
Amrohvi laments the fact that anti-Americanism in Pakistan today has become an excuse to hide one’s own failures: “We wanted to fight America with ideology and politics, and not suicide bombers and naked hatred,” he added.
Columnist Fasi Zaka in one of his columns suggested that the kind of anti-Americanism found these days (among the middle-classes of the country) is extremely ill-informed. He wrote that a lot of young Pakistanis are basing their understanding of international politics by watching low-budget straight-to-video ‘documentaries’ on Youtube!
These so-called documentaries that Zaka is talking about are squarely based on rehashed conspiracy theories that mix age-old anti-Jewish tirades and paranoid fantasies about Zionists, Free Masons and the Illuminati. Locally, all these are then further mixed with flighty myths about certain Muslim leaders, sages and events recorded only in jihadi literature and flimsy ‘history books.’
Thus, the post-9/11 confusion and emotionalism in Pakistan was largely given vent and an ‘intellectual tilt’ by Islamist apologists of all shapes and sizes – among them being those had once been recipients of US funds and patronage during the Cold War.
Whereas there was a prominent streak of individualism and romantic rebellion associated with the anti-Americanism of Pakistani leftists during the Cold War, nothing of the sort can be said about the widespread anti-Americanism found in Pakistan today.
In fact, the present-day phenomenon in this context has become an obligatory part of populist rhetoric in which American involvement is blamed for everything — from terrorist attacks, to the energy crises, to perhaps even the break of dengue fever!

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

Southern Sudan: Birth of a Nation
Or World’s Newest Failed State?

by Larry Luxner

IIt’s July 9, 2021, and the 17 million people of southern Sudan are wildly celebrating their 10th anniversary of independence. Former Ambassador Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, now the country’s foreign minister, proudly gazes down at rows of housing units from his gleaming office tower in Juba, the capital city.

Juba’s apartment blocks — along with hospitals, factories, power plants and an estimated 20,000 miles of paved roads — have all been financed by $15 billion in annual oil revenues made possible by record-high commodity prices and favorable terms that have lured petroleum giants from Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Thanks to the rush of petrodollars, every southern Sudanese child is now in school, the literary rate exceeds 80 percent (the exact opposite from a decade earlier, when 80 percent of the population was illiterate), and malnutrition is all but a distant memory. In the course of a decade, what was once among the world’s poorest countries has become a prosperous beacon of democracy for all its citizens — regardless of their religious beliefs, tribe affiliation or skin color. Oh, and they’ve made nice with their neighbors to the north after decades of war and bloodshed.

Pie in the sky? Probably, but that’s exactly the vision Gatkuoth has for his struggling nation, which in early January ended decades of second-class subservience and voted overwhelmingly to secede from Sudan.

Never mind that the world’s newest nation, which occupies an area the size of France, has barely 30 miles of paved roads.

“You cannot define the wealth of a country based on roads,” Gatkuoth says. “Yes, the infrastructure is very poor, but with our potential, we could be the richest country in Africa. We have oil, gold, copper, uranium, agriculture and timber. We could become a breadbasket for the whole world.”

For now, Gatkuoth’s official title remains head of the Government of Southern Sudan Mission to the United States. He spoke to The Washington Diplomat from his Dupont Circle office on Jan. 5, four days before the start of the weeklong referendum.

Gatkuoth, like 9,000 of the estimated 150,000 southern Sudanese living in the United States, voted in absentia. In his case, the 37-year-old diplomat showed up the morning of Jan. 9 at a polling center in Alexandria, Va., one of eight set up around the country. (Southern Sudanese also voted in Australia, Canada, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and the United Kingdom.)

A few days after voting began, more than 60 percent of registered voters cast ballots, crossing the threshold needed for the referendum to be valid. The Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, an independent body based in Khartoum, won’t release preliminary results until Feb. 2, and depending on whether appeals are submitted to courts or not, the final results could be declared on Feb. 7 or 14. But indications are that more than 98 percent of the nearly 4 million people registered to vote chose secession over unity. Among them is Gatkuoth, who after casting his ballot proudly held up his ink-stained thumb for the TV cameras back home.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for the last 50 years,” he declared as an emotional crowd of fellow south Sudanese milled around behind him. “Finally I’ve managed to vote. I have decided my own future, and on the 9th of July, I will start celebrating.”

On that day, under the terms of the U.S.-brokered 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that brought an end to a 22-year civil war between north and south, secession will formally occur. The very next day, the Republic of South Sudan — which by all indications will be the country’s new name — will at last declare its independence and become the 193rd member state of the United Nations.

In the meantime, the six-month separation period is critical to ongoing negotiations between the north and south on sensitive post-referendum issues such as oil-revenue sharing, the division of Sudan’s foreign debt, border demarcation, currency and citizenship rights.

Yet the divorce of what was always an awkwardly arranged marriage could still become pretty ugly. Although the prospect of widespread bloodshed has diminished with the relatively smooth staging of the referendum — a logistical nightmare that just a few months looked like it might not even happen on time — the worst-case scenario of a renewed civil war is never off the table when it comes to Sudan.

Sadly, the 42 million inhabitants of Sudan proper — which at least until July can claim the title of Africa’s largest country in size — have never known peace for very long, regardless of where they lived.

“Southern Sudan was almost an independent country, but when the British left in 1956, they decided to merge the two entities which are so completely distinct from each other,” Gatkuoth said. “This forced marriage created all these problems. Even before independence in 1956, we said no, we are not a part of this country.”

The result was two wars — the first lasting from 1955 to 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005.

That first war saw the Anyanya movement — representing mainly Christian and animist black Africans in southern Sudan — battling Arab Muslim government forces from the north. Civil war resumed in 1983, when the dictatorship ruled by Gaafar Nimeiry restricted southern autonomy and imposed Islamic law, known as Sharia, on the entire country.

In 1993, Gatkuoth moved to Kenya and resettled in the United States the following year. After going to school in Texas, he became the deputy representative of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in this country, even as the civil war continued to rage back home.

The Second Sudanese Civil War, as the 22-year conflict came to be known, displaced some 4 million people and killed an estimated 1.9 million — one of the largest civilian death tolls since World War II. It ended in May 2004, though Sudan’s economy was left in shambles, the result of strict United Nations sanctions imposed on it by an outraged world.

That civil war is entirely separate from the current crisis in Darfur, which has pitted militias backed by the Arab government in Khartoum against various rebel groups. According to the United Nations, some 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur and 2.7 million displaced since ethnic rebels took up arms in 2003.

Today, in both Darfur and in the south, the big question mark has largely hinged on one man: Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who faces international sanctions and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and genocide in Darfur.

Days before the referendum began, Bashir — perhaps resigned to the inevitable — arrived in Juba and declared that if southern Sudanese voted for secession, he would be the first to recognize the new country.

“I personally will be sad if Sudan splits,” said Bashir, who, despite the long history of acrimony, was welcomed to Juba with a red carpet and an honor guard. “But at the same time I will be happy if we have peace in Sudan between the two sides. We cannot deny the desire and the choice of the people of the south. This is their right.”
Bashir added: “Even after the southern state is born, we are ready in the Khartoum government to offer any technical or logistical support and training or advice. We are ready to help.”

Reports have even suggested that Bashir offered to take on all of Sudan’s crushing $35 billion in national debt, a magnanimous gesture that would give the south a fresh fiscal slate — assuming Bashir has any intention of following through on that pledge.

For his part, Gatkuoth remains deeply suspicious of the man who for so many years waged brutal war against his southern compatriots.

“Bashir changed his mind only because President Obama wrote letters to all the neighboring countries telling them that the referendum must be held on Jan. 9,” he said. “The man was left with no choice but to accept the reality. If he had had a choice, he would not have agreed to this.”

Now that the referendum is a done deal, Gatkuoth said, “Bashir has committed himself to reaching an agreement with us and has even accepted the choice of the people. This is historic for us because never in the history of Sudan have we had a leader from the north who was committed to making sure we have the right to self-determination. It has been a culture of lies and deceit. They’d have an agreement with us and dishonor it later.”

Asked if the Sudanese president is still a war criminal, Gatkuoth said: “Personally, I think he committed some atrocities in Darfur. As a senior member of the SPLM leadership, I think anybody accused of [war crimes] has to prove that he’s innocent, so we expect him to cooperate with the ICC.”

But when asked if he trusts Bashir, the diplomat replied, “Absolutely not.”

“I have met him many times, as a member of the SPLA leadership, but I will never trust him. I have no reason to trust him.”

Many experts agree with Gatkuoth’s skepticism. “President Bashir is in political survival mode, trying to decide how best to ride out the coming storm and seeking to appeal to multiple and conflicting audiences, at home and abroad,” said Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“But ultimately, the president’s calculations will be determined by pressures from inside, rather than outside,” Downie added, citing Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party. “So while the message toward the South is placatory right now, it is liable to change in an instant if Bashir feels his own position to be under imminent threat.”

Indeed, it remains to be seen whether the regime in the north will wage a campaign — whether by violence through proxy rebel groups or legal challenges — to block or draw out secession. Bashir himself remains unpredictable and at-times bipolar: Shortly before his red-carpet appearance in Juba, he announced that the north would readopt Sharia law based on fundamentalist Islamic tenets if the south parts ways.

“Sharia and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language,” the Sudanese strongman told his countrymen, most of whom are already Muslim.

The provocative comments were hardly surprising. “Bashir relishes the role of standing up to the West, and the south’s secession gives him the chance to pander to his base in Sudan and beyond,” Eliza Griswold, an expert on conflict and human rights at the New America Foundation, told the New York Times.

Gatkuoth said imposing a constitution that no longer recognizes the country’s ethnic and religious diversity would be a disaster because an estimated 1.5 million south Sudanese  — most of them Christians — currently live in the north, and they would not be free to practice their faith.

“If Sharia is implemented, that would be very bad,” he warned. “You cannot define Sudan just as an Arab and Islamic country. This is what created the problem in the first place. If he declares northern Sudan an Islamic state, the same thing will happen again.”

But Bashir isn’t the only problem southerners have to worry about. After the jubilation and exuberance of voting to determine their destiny, the southerners now face a grim new reality: How to build a nation that has previously known little but strife, poverty and neglect. Even assuming there’s no major eruption of violence, the birth of southern Sudan could be a recipe for the world’s newest failed state.

The latest census shows 8.5 million people living in southern Sudan — an area the size of Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda combined — but Gatkuoth says that in reality, southern Sudan has between 12 million and 15 million inhabitants. The majority of those people are destitute.

According to the humanitarian group Oxfam, a 15-year-old girl in southern Sudan has a greater chance of dying in childbirth than finishing her primary-school education. In fact, one in seven Sudanese women who become pregnant die from complications, according to the United Nations, which notes that nine out of 10 people in the region live on less $1 a day. In addition to a lack of roads, basic infrastructure such as schools and hospitals is almost nonexistent.

What’s more, it remains to be seen whether the neophyte government in the south will actually be able to govern. A number of opposing factions came together with the ruling SPLM party to project a united front ahead of the referendum, but that unity could quickly dissipate as rebel leaders, political parties and armed actors jockey for power in the new state.

And although the conflict is often portrayed as one between the Muslim, Arab north versus the black, Christian south, Sudan’s divisions are far more complex and unwieldy. The south in fact is the rife with feuding ethnic and tribal groups and is widely split along various economic and even linguistic fault lines.

Gatkuoth, a veteran of the SPLM, doesn’t dismiss the enormity of the task ahead, but he told The Diplomat that he has faith in his people, who are only now “rediscovering themselves” after years of suffering — but who share a sense of national unity and determination.

“The southern Sudanese are very proud of themselves,” he told us. “We will not accept to be a failed state, unable to manage our own resources. That’s why in southern Sudan, people are talking about corruption openly. In many other countries, including the north, they’re not even talking about it.”

A much more immediate concern is the disputed oil-rich border region of Abyei, a flashpoint for violence. Since the referendum, at least 36 people have been killed in Abyei province, which was scheduled to hold its own referendum on Jan. 9 to decide whether to become part of the north or south. Preparations for that vote though quickly fell apart —overshadowed by the mammoth undertaking of organizing the independence referendum.

“The referendum [on Abyei] was supposed to happen, but the National Congress Party is not allowing it,” Gatkuoth charged. “We’re hoping to have an agreement soon. If we cannot have the referendum, the only solution is to have Abyei transferred back to southern Sudan like it used to be.”

But the northerners insist on guaranteeing political rights for the nomadic Misseriya tribe that regularly migrates to the area during the dry season, while southerners want to ensure ownership of the land by the Dinka Ngok tribe who live there year-round. The two tribes did recently sign a U.N.-facilitated peace agreement on issues such as migration and weapons proliferation, although deep mistrust lingers.

“Bashir and his party want oil, and they’re using the Misseriya as a pretext. But all they really need is water and grass for their cattle,” argued Gatkuoth, insisting that the recent clashes in Abyei were the result of “Misseriya tribesmen being instigated by the north to go and fight the Dinkas.”

Threats could also come from Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army and various rebel factions in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. But Gatkuoth doesn’t seem too worried.

“The government of South Sudan has a very strong security force on the ground. Our police have been trained with the help of the United Nations and neighboring countries,” he said.

“The referendum was peaceful, transparent, credible and fair. We want the U.N. to help stabilize the country, and we need the U.N. [presence] to continue even after the referendum and independence for at least two years.”

He added: “I don’t know what will happen in the north, but it will be a different country altogether.”

For its part, the north might be able to shed its status as an international pariah if Bashir doesn’t stand in the way of southern independence. After being criticized for neglecting Sudan — and not being tough enough on Bashir — the Obama administration went into high gear last fall to ensure a successful referendum, offering to reward Sudan if the vote and subsequent independence proceed according to plan.

The Obama administration has already offered to normalize relations between Washington and Khartoum, meaning ambassadors would finally be appointed in each other’s capitals. The United States is also prepared to remove Sudan from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism — leaving only Cuba, Iran and Syria on that list — and may also allow additional licenses to increase trade and investment opportunities in Sudan.

“We want to do something in the immediate term to recognize a successful referendum, and we are thinking of ways we can do that,” a senior U.S. official who asked not to be named told the Washington Times. “But we also need to be sure that the achievements to date are at a place where they can’t be rolled back.”

The south already enjoys good relations with Washington. Gatkuoth said his government has bipartisan support in Congress, naming Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as among his strongest backers. Kerry — who’s traveled to the region numerous times — also introduced the Sudan Peace and Stability Act of 2010, which calls for the U.S. government to boost aid to southern Sudan and develop a multiyear strategy to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Gatkuoth, who in the days since the referendum has been interviewed by CNN, Fox, MSNBC and Voice of America, says that if this “amicable divorce” can be pulled off, Sudan can also establish an embassy in Juba, and the south will open an embassy in Khartoum.

Upon independence, Gatkuoth will become a full-fledged ambassador in Washington, though his day-to-day responsibilities aren’t likely to change.

“For the last five years we’ve been operating here; we’ve been functioning as an embassy. It’s just a matter of a formality,” he said. “What I do as head of this mission, I will continue to do as ambassador — making sure I maintain relations with the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Congress, think tanks and also the faith-based organizations which were so instrumental in helping southern Sudanese reach where we are today.”

He said the mission — established Jan. 16, 2007, and now staffed by 15 full-time employees — will definitely grow as the new nation takes shape. It’s unclear whether the mission will remain at its present location on the sixth floor of an office building at 20th and M Streets, or will be relocated to a mansion along Embassy Row. Interestingly, unlike many African embassies that suffer from peeling paint and general neglect, the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) office here is new and sharp-looking, and the mission boasts a sophisticated, user-friendly website that puts the sites of many larger, wealthier nations to shame.

Gatkuoth refused to say how much the Washington mission’s annual budget comes to, but insisted that it does not employ lobbyists. “We have no need for a lobby,” he said, noting that a New York-based firm, Independent Diplomat, provides his government only with strategic advice and assistance. “You hire a lobbyist to repair relations that are worsening. But we had excellent relations with the former president [George W. Bush] as well as the current president.”

The Government of Southern Sudan’s official budget is now $2 billion a year, Gatkuoth said, but “after independence, it’ll go up to $8 billion” thanks to an influx of oil revenues. After independence, southern Sudan would be able to keep 100 percent of the revenues generated by the petroleum extracted from its territory. Currently, it must split those revenues 50-50 with the central government in Khartoum.

“This is our oil. We’ll just need to pay Sudan fees for the pipeline and using the refineries,” Gatkuoth explained. In fact, some 80 percent of Sudan’s oil lies in the south, but it all gets shipped through the north for export — which means the two sides are joined at the hip for the near future, offering hope that they’ll be forced to cooperate regardless whether they like it or not.

“Our relations with the north will be excellent, because we are interdependent,” Gatkuoth said. “The oil is in the south, and the pipeline is in the north. The north needs oil and we need the pipeline. This mutual relationship will link the two countries together.”

When asked how south Sudan would avoid the “resource curse” that has plagued so many other Third World countries awash in oil wealth — Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Venezuela come to mind — Gatkuoth assures The Diplomat this won’t be an issue.

“One thing we have done is establish an anti-corruption commission with the power to arrest, prosecute and investigate. This commission will be fully in control of fighting these vices.”

And unlike those oil-rich African states where the wealth tends to end up in the pockets of cruel and corrupt dictators, leaving the vast majority of citizens impoverished, Gatkuoth insists south Sudan will be different.

“We have been fighting for democracy, so ours will be a democratic country — a secular system that respects the rights of individuals, and a multiparty system where everybody enjoys freedom and human rights.”
As rich as south Sudan may be in petroleum, Gatkuoth says his new country’s mineral potential can bring in even more money — not to mention exports of gum arabic.

Harvested commercially from wild trees, gum arabic is used in the food industry as a stabilizer; it’s also a key ingredient in lithography and is used in printing, paint production, glue, cosmetics and various industrial applications. Southern Sudan accounts for at least 50 percent of the world’s gum arabic production.

“We also expect tourism to take off. We have lots of animals and our Boma National Park is second only to the Serengeti in size,” Gatkuoth told The Diplomat, noting that East Africa’s largest, most intact savannah ecosystem covers 77,000 square miles, about the size of New York state. “So tourism in Boma and our other national parks will boom.”

That leaves one final issue: what to call the new country.

“I’m a member of the Nuer tribe, and in our culture, you don’t name your babies before they’re born; you name them after. So because southern Sudan has not yet been born, we cannot name the country yet. But of course our parliamentarians are discussing some options,” he said.

Those options have included the Republic of Kush — the Biblical name for the ancient land occupied by present-day Sudan — as well as the catchy-sounding Nile Republic, a reference to the famous river that forms its eastern border (although Egypt would most likely object to that name).

But a third option seems the most likely, which is to simply call the new entity South Sudan. Members of a steering committee on post-independence governing have already indicated that the Republic of South Sudan will become the official name, as early as Feb. 14. Gatkuoth promised that in addition to the name, the government will work fast to take its place on the world stage by July, when formal independence is declared.

“Southern Sudan will have relations with all countries in the world. We are a peace-loving nation and we’ll have relations with anybody who is interested in having relations with us,” he said.

That includes Israel — where thousands of Sudanese, especially from the Darfur region, now live as refugees, having fled across Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in recent years.

In the meantime, while initial reports following southern Sudan’s historic referendum look quite promising, the United Nations isn’t taking any chances. As of press time, the 11,000-strong U.N. Mission in Sudan is intensifying its peacekeeping patrols in the troubled border area. The mission is on standby to reinforce its presence if needed and is urging all parties to defuse tensions and prevent a further escalation of hostilities.

In his report in late December, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that tensions were building on the ground in Abyei, and that historical complexities are making it difficult for either party to consider options that could be viewed as concessions by their constituents.

“In this charged environment, any major security incident could be damaging for the last stages of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement process,” he said, warning of the disastrous humanitarian consequences of renewed conflict.

“In the unlikely event that the referendum leads to large-scale violence, approximately 2.8 million people could be internally displaced and another 3.2 million affected by breakdowns in trade and social service delivery,” Ban said.
Gatkuoth suggested that the consequences for his nascent country could be far worse than that.

“If this agreement is allowed to unravel, then you’ll have another Rwanda,” he warned. “The war we’re going to have if the CPA is not implemented fully will be bloodier than the first war.”

February 2, 2011

SNAPSHOT

The U.S.-Egyptian Breakup

Washington's Limited Options in Cairo
Steven A. Cook
STEVEN A. COOK is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book on Egyptian politics will be published in the fall by Oxford University Press.With Hosni Mubarak's announcement yesterday that he would not seek a new term as president, the Mubarak era in Egypt came to an ignominious end. Although the Egyptian military may yet find a way to allow for a relatively graceful exit, Mubarak's historical legacy is sure to be colored by the very factors that led to his downfall: political alienation, economic dislocation, corruption, and the precipitous decline in Egypt's regional influence. After the chaos of this past week, not even his claim to have brought stability to Egypt will survive. 
Yet the seeds of Mubarak's demise were sowed long ago. Although he came to power promising reform and vowing not to seek more than one term, Mubarak quickly became enamored with the power of the presidency and saw himself as indispensable to Egypt's future. He had witnessed first hand the drawbacks of Gamal Abdel Nasser's experiments with socialism and Arab nationalism and Anwar Sadat's efforts to correct the excesses of both. Instead, Mubarak eschewed ideology for a bland pragmatism that emphasized "stability for the sake of development" -- hardly an appealing political vision. He built a small, narrow constituency for his rule among big business, the police, and the army and relied on force and the threat of violence to keep the population under control.
By the end, Mubarak's disdain for the Egyptian people was so complete that last November, when the opposition sought to establish a shadow parliament after stunningly fraudulent parliamentary elections, he smirked and declared before his rubber-stamp People's Assembly, "Let them have fun." 
The United States was not responsible for the inequity of Mubarak's rule, but it did enable and benefit from it. Mubarak was long Washington's man in Cairo: he kept open the Suez Canal, repressed the Islamists, and maintained peace with Israel. In return, the United States provided much for Egypt, contributing billions in economic assistance over the years to build up the country's infrastructure, agricultural technology, and public health programs. Yet this U.S. assistance, while certainly contributing to Egypt's development, also served to undermine the nationalist legitimacy of the regime. After all, how could Mubarak boast of Egyptian pride and ability when USAID employees were nestled in many government ministries?
At the same time, Egyptians came to see that their country's foreign policy was being warped for the sake of U.S. largesse -- and that the jackboots of the Interior Ministry awaited those who objected too loudly to this bargain. The original sin was Sadat's separate peace with Israel, which Mubarak inherited and scrupulously upheld. 
From the perspective of many Egyptians, this arrangement hopelessly constrained Cairo's power while freeing Israel and the United States to pursue their regional interests unencumbered. Without the threat of war with Egypt, Israel poured hundreds of thousands of Israelis into settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, invaded Lebanon (twice), declared Jerusalem its capital, and bombed Iraq and Syria. For the United States, Mubarak was pivotal in creating a regional order that made it easier and less expensive for Washington to pursue its interests, from the free flow of oil to the protection of Israel and the prevention of any one country in the region from becoming too dominant. The benefits to Mubarak were clear: approximately $70 billion in economic and military aid over 30 years and the ostensible prestige of being a partner of the world's superpower.  
For Egypt, the particular policy ramifications of this deal have been plentiful, including Egypt's deployment of 35,000 troops to Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War of 1991, its quiet support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, its implicit alliance with Israel during the war in Lebanon in 2006, and its complicity with Israel in the ongoing blockade of Gaza. Mubarak believed that these policies served Egypt's interests -- at least how he defined them -- but they ran directly against the grain of Egyptian public opinion.
Mubarak thus faced two irreconcilable positions: he could either be Washington's man or a man of the people -- but not both. He chose the former and tried to fill in the resulting legitimacy gap with manipulation and force.
It is no surprise, then, that the relationship between Egypt and the United States runs like a live wire through the popular opposition to Mubarak's rule. As protesters in Cairo declared in March 2003, just as U.S. forces were pouring into Iraq, only a democratic Egypt would be able to resist Israeli and U.S. policies in the Middle East. More recently, opponents of Mubarak expressed a similar sentiment, calling Mubarak's presidency the "Camp David regime."
No Egyptian leader will make Mubarak's mistake again, which does not portend well for Washington's position in the Middle East. In the coming days, analysts and policymakers in the United States will voice loud recriminations of decades of U.S. policy. This debate will not focus on finding out who "lost" Egypt; Mubarak had become odious to most in the United States except his paid consultants and a few remaining die-hard supporters. Instead, commentators will argue over how to deal with the sudden explosion of Arab people power and how to fortify Washington's allies in the region. Yet simply retooling U.S. assistance to focus on promoting democracy, creating benchmarks for a new Egyptian government, and making Washington's expectations (whatever they are) known to Egyptian political actors is unlikely to influence the trajectory of Egypt's transition.
The United States should greatly lower its expectations of what is possible in the post-Mubarak era and come to terms with the end of the strategic relationship. Expecting the new Egyptian president -- whoever that may be -- to carry on a partnership with Washington is like Václav Havel asking the Soviets for assistance after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989. To be sure, there are no Havels in Egypt, and Washington is not Soviet-era Moscow -- but the analogy rings true enough for those people in Cairo's Tahrir Square or the Alexandria corniche who saw U.S.-made F-16s fly overhead or were choked by tear gas produced in the United States.
The urge among many in Washington to try to shape Egyptian political change betrays the belief that Egyptians have no agency, politics, or interests of their own. This attitude is the product of an old canard, popular among regime loyalists and some old Middle East scholars, that Egyptians are preternaturally passive and will always seek stability. Yet the nationalist revolution in 1919, the Free Officers'coup in 1952, the student revolts in 1968 and 1972, the broad-based opposition to Sadat at the end of his tenure in the early 1980s, and the last decade of street protests suggest otherwise. Clearly, Egyptians can help themselves.
Where, then, does this leave Washington? The best the United States can do to salvage its position in Egypt is for President Barack Obama to make a statement in support of a democratic, tolerant, and pluralist Egypt -- and then get out of the way to let Egyptians build a new political system. Obama's statement calling for a "meaningful transition" was particularly important, because it indicates that Washington will not look kindly upon a shift from Mubarak to Omar Suleiman or some other regime figure.
Washington has become such a negative factor in Egyptian politics that it risks doing more harm than good if U.S. officials give in to the temptation to do much more than emphasize so-called "first principles" on a peaceful, orderly, and transparent political change. Implicit demands that call into question the continuation of the U.S. assistance package or even suggestions on how Egyptians should proceed after the Mubarak era will be met with tremendous resistance from those seeking to lead, if only because Egypt's politicians will need to demonstrate their nationalist credibility.
But such restraint seems beyond the U.S. diplomatic character, especially if the Egyptian political arena gets messy. Still, Washington would be wise to remember that a handful of grants from the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a few USAID projects, and expressions of deep concern are unlikely to have much influence as Egypt's disparate political groups wage a struggle among themselves.
What sort of political future will emerge in Egypt is hard to predict. At the very least, however, Egypt does have a parliamentary history. The country's 1923 constitution established a parliament that functioned on and off to varying degrees until the Free Officers' Revolution in 1952. This era was destabilized by the British presence in Egypt, which ultimately ushered in Nasser and his comrades, who constructed the regime against which Egyptians are currently rebelling. Washington does not occupy Egypt, but it risks playing a malevolent role in the transition if it tries to interfere. The United States should learn the lessons of the past, stand aside, and let the Egyptians pick up where they left off when the Free Officers took over.

February 7, 2011

SNAPSHOT

Egypt's Democratic Mirage

How Cairo’s Authoritarian Regime Is Adapting to Preserve Itself
Joshua Stacher
JOSHUA STACHER is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. He is writing a book comparing authoritarianism in Egypt and Syria. Despite the tenacity, optimism, and blood of the protesters massed in Tahrir Square, Egypt's democratic window has probably already closed.
Contrary to the dominant media narrative, over the last ten days the Egyptian state has not experienced a regime breakdown. The protests have certainly rocked the system and have put Mubarak on his heels, but at no time has the uprising seriously threatened Egypt's regime. Although many of the protesters, foreign governments, and analysts have concentrated on the personality of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, those surrounding the embattled president, who make up the wider Egyptian regime, have made sure the state's viability was never in question. This is because the country's central institution, the military, which historically has influenced policy and commands near-monopolistic economic interests, has never balked.
As the headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party burned to the ground, NDP members chaotically appeared on TV with a pathetically incoherent message; meanwhile, the message from the ruling military elite was clear, united, fully supportive of Mubarak, and disciplined practically down to a man. Indeed, this discipline could be seen throughout the military ranks. Despite the fact that a general with a megaphone stated his solidarity with the protesters while other protesters painted "Down to Mubarak" on tanks across central Cairo, no acts of organizational fragmentation or dissent within the chain of command have occurred.
Since January 28, the Mubarak regime has sought to encircle the protesters. Egypt's governing elites have used different parts of the regime to serve as arsonist and firefighter. Due to the regime's role in both lighting the fire and extinguishing it, protesters were effectively forced to flee from one wing of the regime to another. This occurred on two levels: first, the regime targeted the protesters, using the police as its battering ram. During the first days of demonstrations, uniformed officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowds. Beginning on February 2, plain-clothes officers posing as Mubarak supporters -- some on horseback and camels -- carried whips and sticks to intimidate and injure those protesting against the system, teaching them a repressive lesson.
Although it is impossible to say that every single member of the "pro-Mubarak" crowd was in the security forces, enough of them had their credentials taken to illustrate an indisputable police presence. Moreover, the violence has been selective and targeted, not chaotic, as Mubarak has described. The disappearance of police officers on January 29, leaving the neighborhoods to criminal elements and neighborhood watch groups, and their reappearance 24 hours later suggest that they were acting on orders, rather than haphazardly dispersing and returning.
While the army kept order in the streets, the Interior Ministry and police were functioning as the regime's repressive arm, performing the dirty work of trying to force the protesters from Tahrir back into their homes. 
The military's rank and file, who are deployed on the streets, became part of a different regime strategy. There is no doubt that solidarities developed between protesters and soldiers as fellow citizens, but the army's aloof neutrality underscores that its role on the sidelines was intentional. This was prominently on display when the "pro-Mubarak" demonstrators attacked antigovernment protesters in Tahrir on February 2. That the siege of a major city square took place over the course of 16 hours, leaving 13 dead and more than 1,200 wounded, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Health, suggests that the military's orders were conceived to cast its officers as potential saviors from the brutal violence.
This containment strategy has worked. By politically encircling the protesters, the regime prevented the conflict from extending beyond its grasp. With the protesters caught between regime-engineered violence and regime-manufactured safety, the cabinet generals remained firmly in control of the situation.
The generals that now man the cabinet also sought to wage a war on the non-protesting population, and they did so without firing a single shot. As the state framed the demonstrators as troublemakers, non-protesting Egyptians experienced the uprising's effects. Banks have been closed since January 27, ATMs have been emptied of their cash, and the prices of food and staples have slowly risen at a time when school is cancelled, offices are closed, and curfews are in effect. Similarly, the Internet and cellular networks were shut off and have been patchy at best since their return.
Although some of these citizens may have sympathized with the protesters initially, their mood appears to be shifting. People are tired of being cooped up in their apartments, made anxious as their stockpiles of food and money decrease, and they are ready for a sense of "normalcy" to return. Ironically, the normalcy they pine for resembles the police state so many tried to banish just thirteen days ago. This method of wearing down the non-protesting public seems just as strategic as the violence employed on those airing their grievances in the streets.
The story that the news media have largely crafted is that of the good protesters pitted against the bad Mubarak dictatorship. Despite the accurate reporting of incidents and often horrifying images, the fact that the Egyptian regime has played a good-cop, bad-cop routine to contain the situation remains lost in the din of 24-hour coverage. Despite many of the protesters pointing out this dynamic, such as Hossam el-Hamalawy and Mahmoud Salem, it has failed to take hold as the prevailing thread.
Nevertheless, as the crisis has deepened, the push for Mubarak's resignation has intensified. According to The New York Times, the Obama administration will seek to have Mubarak retire early instead of waiting until the September election. The United States has repeatedly insisted on an "orderly transition."
If those guiding the transition choose to direct it toward a democratic end, then it will have to include forces that are currently banned in the country, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and individuals who have been tortured or imprisoned, such as Ayman Nour. It will have to include the youth elements from the street organizing committees as well as the irrelevant figures that head the country's existing opposition parties. Managing such a transition from dictatorship to democracy is a massive challenge even in the best of times. The leader of the transition will therefore determine whether it results in a genuine democracy or continuous authoritarian rule. If that person is General Omar Suleiman, who was sworn in as vice president on January 30, the prospects for democracy are grim.
Suleiman is cut from the same undemocratic cloth as Mubarak. They have collaborated since 1993, and Suleiman shares many of Mubarak's policy preferences and his worldview. He is known for his skill as a negotiator and his disdain for the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the vice president may now seem a stabilizing force for the Egyptian state during a transition period, U.S. officials should consider that he might seek to stay in power long beyond September.
Indeed, some of Suleiman's earliest public statements since becoming vice president do not bode well for democracy. In fact, they sound eerily familiar. On February 2, the bloodiest day in Tahrir Square to date, Suleiman said the regime now refuses to negotiate until "the Egyptian street returns to normal." Sensing that the regime had the upper hand, Suleiman declared that a new constitution is out of the question in advance of the presidential election later this year and asserted that the unrest had been the result of "a conspiracy" directed by "foreign countries, the Muslim Brothers, and some parties." Lastly, echoing the paternalistic tone that Mubarak has employed for nearly 30 years, Suleiman recommended, "We will ask [protesters] to go home. And we'll ask their parents to ask them to go home." Hence, he effectively called out potential transition partners as traitors and children before pledging to conduct another presidential election under a desperately flawed constitution.
The protesters have been given an ambiguous choice about this transition. Go home and -- perhaps -- be invited to the negotiating table later, or continue protesting and be excluded from Suleiman's negotiations. Some independent figures, such as Amr Moussa and Nabil Fahmy, have broken ranks with the protesters and met with Suleiman. Given that many of these individuals held previous appointments in Mubarak's Egypt, protesters will likely be skeptical of their intentions as agents of change.
There is no doubt that the post-Mubarak era is afoot, but it is not necessarily a democratic one. The Egyptian military leaders that are governing the country seem content to leave Mubarak in his place so Suleiman can act as the sitting president. Indeed, even leading government officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have begun to direct their concerns to Suleiman's office. Hence, as the protesters in Tahrir Square -- and the non-protesters facing empty refrigerators and wallets at home -- have begun to feel the state's squeeze, the regime has so far maintained its ability to control how the conflict is unfolding.
When the uprising began in Egypt, many linked the events in Tunis and Cairo and declared that 2011 might be the Arab world's 1989. Instead, 2011 is showing just how durable and adaptable the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world truly are. Faced with real challenges and moments of potential breakdown, Egypt's military did not hesitate or even break a sweat. In fact, the regime remained cohesive throughout by pursuing a sophisticated strategy of unleashing violence upon the people and then saving them from it.
This latest adaptation of autocracy in the Arab world is more honest than its previous incarnations. Before the uprising in Egypt began, the military ruled from behind the curtain while elites, represented by public relations firms and buoyed by snappy slogans, initiated neoliberal economic policies throughout Egypt. In this latest rendering, with Suleiman at the helm, the state's objective of restoring a structure of rule by military managers is not even concealed. This sort of "orderly transition" in post-Mubarak Egypt is more likely to usher in a return to the repressive status quo than an era of widening popular participation.

Foreign Policy

In Egypt, the Time Has Come for Mubarak to Go

Egypt, Middle East Unrest, Middle East, Foreign Policy

Martin S. Indyk, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy

Meet the Press

January 29, 2011 —

Events in the streets of Cairo and Egypt's other cities are unfolding at a dizzying pace as the Egyptian people demand an end to the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak. In the past four days, the much-feared security police have lost control of the streets, the Egyptian army has entered the main squares but is embracing rather than shooting the demonstrators, President Mubarak has dismissed his government, and—for the first time in his very long reign—has now appointed a successor (that is not his son). None of this was even imaginable a week ago. And it all has profound significance for American interests in the Middle East.

Since the Nixon-Kissinger era, Egypt has served as the strategic cornerstone of U.S. policy in this volatile region. As the largest, militarily most powerful, and culturally most influential country in the Arab world, Egypt has disproportionate influence on the course of events there. And the Egyptian-U.S. alliance has been fundamentally important both to war and peace in the Middle East.

The peace between Egypt and Israel, forged in the 1970s by Mubarak's predecessor Anwar Sadat, with the active involvement of the United States, has made it impossible for other Arab states to consider going to war with Israel. With Egypt out of the picture, they have all now come to the point where they are willing to end the conflict with Israel. Similarly, the wars the United States is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have been made possible by the flow of forces and materiel through Egypt's Suez Canal and Cairo West air base. And Egypt's support for U.S. endeavors in both arenas has been critically important in ensuring broader Arab support.

Put simply, all of our interests in the Middle East—from promoting stability, to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, to ensuring the free-flow of oil at reasonable prices, to containing the influence of Iran and its radical Hamas and Hezbollah proxies—all of them will be much harder, if not impossible, to protect, if we lose Egypt.

But here's the horrible dilemma that President Obama now finds himself in. If he distances the United States from Mubarak, he risks toppling a critically important Arab ally which could generate a tsunami of instability that could shake the foundations of all of America's autocratic Arab allies across the region. Yet if he does not distance the U.S. from the Egyptian pharaoh, he risks alienating the Egyptian people, helping to open the way to a theocratic regime that would be fundamentally anti-American.

Fortunately, we know the consequences of being on the wrong side of history, because we have been living with them ever since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1978 and his replacement by the anti-American ayatollahs. The Shah, like Mubarak, represented a strategic pillar, protecting U.S. interests in the critically important Persian Gulf. Jimmy Carter pressed the Shah to undertake political reforms and respect the human rights of his people, but then backed off for the sake of stability. Similarly, George W. Bush pressed Mubarak to open up political space for a moderate Egyptian opposition to emerge and then backed off after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

At this point, facing by far the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency, Obama cannot afford to backtrack. Yesterday, he came out publicly on the side of the Egyptian people, insisting that Mubarak undertake significant reforms. But it is surely clear by now that the people will settle for nothing less than the removal of Mubarak. So Obama's options are narrowing. He will soon have to decide whether to tell Mubarak that the United States no longer supports him and that it's time for him to go.

Fortunately, Mubarak's appointment of Omar Suleiman, the head of Military Intelligence, as his vice president and successor, has made it more possible for Obama to pursue this option with less fear of the potential destabilizing consequences. The United States has a good deal of leverage on the Egyptian military because we have trained, equipped and paid for their armaments. They now hold the key to a positive resolution of this crisis. Mubarak may have appointed Suleiman to shore up military support for his presidency, but he is now dependent on the same military for his survival and they may be willing to abandon him to ensure their own.

That's the door on which Obama now needs to push. Suleiman needs to be encouraged to take over as Egypt's new president, order the military to prevent looting but not harm the demonstrators, and announce that he will only serve for six months until free and fair elections allow for a legitimate president to form a new government. If he can put this understanding in place, Obama then needs to call Mubarak and tell him gently but firmly that for the good of his country it's time for him to go.

Interview with Juan Cole

By John Feffer, February 4, 2011

Juan Cole is a professor history at the University of Michigan and the author of Engaging the Muslim World. His blog, Informed Comment, is a go-to resource for analysis of U.S. and Middle Eastern policy. Here he talks with FPIF's John Feffer about Egypt, Islamofascism, and "America anxiety" in the Muslim world.
John Feffer: How will the protests in Tunisia and Egypt alter U.S. public perceptions of the relationship between Arabs and democracy? How will it alter U.S. policy of supporting dictators in the region?
Juan Cole: The interesting thing is, I looked at opinion polls on American attitudes toward, say, Egypt, and interestingly enough, the American public likes Egypt. I think that’s because of years of being told by the press that it's an ally. Since Egypt’s foreign policy has aligned with that of the United States, I'm not sure that the public will see these developments as positive. The American public takes a lot of cues from its politicians. And we saw Joe Biden the other day question whether Mubarak was a dictator!
I have to say that the U.S. government liked things the way they were, with regard to foreign policy. I'm not accusing the U.S. government of wanting repressive regimes to be there. But they were perfectly willing to cooperate with those regimes. Yes, they would criticize them in the annual State Department human rights report. But the status quo – symbolized by Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali – was perceived to have benefits for Washington. Both Tunisia and Egypt had correct relations with Israel in the 1990s (though Tunisia eventually broke them off). Egypt has adhered to the Camp David accords. We have military cooperation with Egypt; we even conduct joint military exercises. Behind the scenes, Egypt allowed itself to be used for logistical purposes by the United States, even during the invasion of Iraq. Egypt objected to the invasion, but it allowed us to fly material over the country.
John Feffer: The White House recently announced plans to eliminate the color coding warning system created after 9/11 under the Bush administration. Earlier it got rid of the phrase “global war on terror.” On the one hand, it seems to be dialing back the fear. On the other hand, it’s increasing drone strikes in Pakistan? Is this a contradiction?
Juan Cole: Getting rid of the color code was more because it was a scattershot approach. Every time the federal government went on a high alert; the police in Nevada also had to go on high alert. They want to go to a system that allows them to be more targeted in threat assessment so that they don't have to put the entire country on alert. That would save a lot of money. So, I don't think it has anything to do with dialing down the fear factor.
The rhetoric of the Obama administration is a lot different from what's become the mainstream of the Republican Party. But it’s not that different from the George W. Bush administration. Obama justifies being in Afghanistan in terms of destroying al-Qaeda even though the National Security Council admitted that there are only 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. The program of drone strikes in northern Pakistan has increased enormously in the past year. This is something that the administration is very determined about. It is said that the CIA is convinced that it’s having great success in causing enemy attrition. So, in a way, that approach is more robust than what Bush was doing in the tribal belt.
I don't see anything changing in the next two years under Obama. He's pretty committed to the course he's on. A lot depends on whether there's another important terrorist operation on U.S. soil. If there's not, then the salience of terrorism in policymaking will decline. People won't respond to it. If there is, then it’s already been demonstrated that the U.S. government puts a high priority on responding to that kind of threat.
John Feffer: You’ve written that the social problem of violent fundamentalism is a short-term phase like the Baader-Meinhof gang was in Germany in the 1970s. Is al-Qaeda on the way out?
Juan Cole: I think that groups like al-Qaeda or its constituent parts like the Islamic Jihad in Egypt have a history. They grew up in certain situations and are fostered by certain forces. They have their historical moments. Ironically, Osama bin Laden might have written the epitaph for his movement. People gather around a strong horse, he has said, the horse that wins the race. And al-Qaeda and its strategy have clearly been a dead-end. They were a dead-end in the Mideast before they were demonstrated to be a dead-end internationally. One of the achievements the Mubarak regime could point to was that it did take on the Islamic radial movement, and it devastated them. The movement tried to blow up things, shoot people, tourists, all through the 1990s. But by the late 1990s, their methods had made them unpalatable to most of the Egyptian population. The Egyptian security forces had their number. They jailed between 20,000-30,000 Muslim activists. They made it impossible for these radicals to operate, even in an authoritarian and relatively unpopular state like Egypt.
Al-Qaeda mounted the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan and Germany. They wanted to bring down the United States the way they thought they brought down the Soviet Union. But the United States turned out to have more resources than the Soviet Union had, and more staying power. From a practical point of view, it’s difficult to view al-Qaeda’s strategy as anything but a failure.
John Feffer: But the Egyptian state jailed extremists in the past, even executed Sayyid Qutb. And that wasn’t the end of that extremist movement.
Juan Cole: In contrast to Qutb, the people jailed in Egypt in the 1990s tended to be reflective about what happened to them, about whether they were right about shooting down innocent tourists. The Islamic group Gama’a Islamiya actually broke with the blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, and the leadership in prison started to issue repentance pamphlets. These are short chapbooks in which they reinterpret their own history and the Qur'an. They argue, at least on a practical basis, for a non-violent strategy. The leadership of the movement was announcing themselves as peaceful activists henceforth.
You might say that this is the only way they think they can get out of prison. Others however have stuck by their guns. So, I think it's sincere. Most of the people in prison have been released. The hardcore hasn't been. But basically the radical strain of fundamentalism determined to use violence to deprive the regime of stability and sources of revenue was crushed.
John Feffer: You’ve written that Muslims suffer from “America anxiety,” the perception that America is determined to undermine Muslim religious identity and take resources from Muslim lands. Has this anxiety diminished at all in the Obama era?
Juan Cole: As Obama withdraws from Iraq, one of the major sources of America anxiety is declining, namely the perception during the Bush era of the United States as a grasping, aggressive militaristic force in the region. The successful withdrawal from Iraq will reassure the publics in that region that the United States doesn't have the intention to occupy a major Arab country forever.
On the other hand, the collapse of the peace process that Obama attempted to initiate between Palestinians and Israelis will not redound to the U.S. credit in the Arab world. That form of America anxiety, which centers on a perceived U.S. unwillingness to pressure Israel to cease its settlement of the West Bank, will continue. And we might see new forms of America anxiety around these mass protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and less so Algeria -- to the extent that the United States is a status quo power, that the United States liked things the way they were, that the crowds may see the United States as unhelpful to their political objectives. That would be another black eye for Washington in the region.
John Feffer: The link between the PATRIOT ACT and the global war on terror was clear. What about the connection between overseas contingency operations and the "enemy within" today?
Juan Cole: Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have been careful not to foster the demonization of American Muslims. Certainly the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are vigilant. There's obviously some domestic surveillance going on, some of it unhelpful because it can include, essentially, techniques of entrapment. This means encouraging small groups to adopt a more radical rhetoric or plan out some act. That kind of FBI entrapment technique, which hasn't fared well when it goes to the court, is a danger in and of itself. But it seems to be relatively rare. There's a continuity between the two administrations in this regard.
A lot of the most important tips identifying American Muslim radicals have come from American Muslims themselves. American Muslims have been remarkably well integrated into the mainstream of American society. Every community has its radicals. The situation is very unlike that in the United Kingdom where the Muslim community is clearly alienated by the policies of the mainstream community and the British government. Also, the American Muslim community is socio-economically much higher. According to polling, they are much more fervent in their patriotism.
So, the emphasis of Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who wants to hold congressional hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims is very unhelpful and not in accordance with the reality we know.
John Feffer: Why the controversy this last summer over Park51, the Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, when the organizer of the initiative actually has rather conservative politics? Why did people like Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes choose that target?
Juan Cole: Demagoguery, which is what this is, always focuses on situations where the majority community appears to have advantages over the minority. The attack on the idea of a Muslim community center was launched with reference to the hallowed sacredness of Ground Zero, the target of the September 11 attacks. In mainstream white American consciousness, this could be configured as a form of desecration. It was just a pragmatic matter. I don't think it had anything to do with the personnel involved. It wouldn't have mattered if the imam of the proposed community center was a stalwart Republican. They were just using this issue for demonization purposes.
Ultimately people like Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes were driven to demonize Muslims because they believe if they can succeed in making Muslim Americans taboo for mainstream American politics and comment, they can deprive Muslim American of a legitimate voice in the debate. They believe that most Muslim Americans are hostile to Israel, so there are advantages to hardcore supporters of Israel in delegitimizing a group like that. The techniques and rhetoric used in the Park51 campaign is the same as McCarthyism: an attempt to deprive left-of-center Americans a legitimate voice in public affairs.
John Feffer: Have we seen the end of the term "Islamofascism"? Or does this concept still hold sway in influential circles?
Juan Cole: I don't think the term was ever very popular in most of the State Department. Of course, the people stationed in the Muslim world for the State Department would have been in contact with local people who objected to this way of speaking. But there were elements or are elements in the Pentagon and maybe some in the law enforcement agencies who do want to configure Islam as a successor to the great Central European challenges -- communism and fascism -- that faced us in 20^th century.
If you look at the FBI indictments, when they went after a small sectarian group in Florida (who weren't even apparently Muslims), the indictments mention sharia and jihad, the doctrine of holy war in Islamic thought. So, whoever wrote that indictment was influenced by this rhetoric around Islam. I don’t think it's completely gone. But certainly the Obama administration doesn't talk like that.
However, if you look at the midterm elections, the rhetoric of many of the candidates toward Muslim Americans was quite extreme. I expect the accusation of Islamofascism to resurface in the next presidential campaign. People will try it out as a campaign tactic.
I think the Republican leadership, Rudy Giuliani and others, is committed to demonizing Muslims as a campaign tactic. It worked for them with regard to communism in the old days, and they want to see if they can get a rise out of the American public by demonizing Muslims. It's just fear-mongering politics as usual.

U.S. Middle-East Policy: "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil -- Just Practice It, Then Act Surprised"

By Rob Prince, February 7, 2011

(Pictured: U.S. embassy outside Tunis.)
A bit of disconnected, but not irrelevant, history
Many years ago – 43 to be exact – Phil Jones and I, both Peace Corps volunteers stationed in Tunis at the time, walked into a reception in the garden of the U.S. embassy there where Hubert Humphrey was doing his best to give a pro-Vietnam War pep talk, trying to explain how the February 1968 Tet Offensive wasn't a U.S. military setback despite Walter Cronkite's suggestion on national television that indeed it was.
As Humphrey launched into his remarks, Jones and I, somewhat nervous and uncertain as to our impending fate, took out our anti-war posters from under our sports coats and held them high in the air. Humphrey immediately cancelled the talk and left the embassy as did everyone else. Left alone in the garden we looked at each other, placed our posters in an orange tree there in the embassy garden and casually left.
Much later I learned the purpose of Humphrey's trip was to canvas European and North African allies as to the political advisability of the United States using nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese.
So much for Hubert Humphrey as the "gentle warrior" as some anti-war liberals once described him.
No one, including Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, supported a U.S. nuclear escalation. Many warned that if the United States proceeded in that direction, that their own political futures might be jeopardized. Soon thereafter, hamstrung on all sides, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for another term of the presidency.
So much for nuking Vietnam although 'conventional' weapons – napalm, agent orange, phosphorous and cluster proved that with modern weaponry effects as devastating can be achieved without triggering much moral outrage.
At the time, the U.S. embassy, then one of the largest buildings in Tunis, sat on Avenue de la Liberte, close to downtown. We Peace Corps volunteers didn't visit the embassy often, but it had a snack bar/restaurant and especially during the first few months when I was still dreaming of cheeseburgers, I did indulge. As those dreams faded and a taste for Tunisian food grew – still love the stuff – my embassy visits, other than the Jones-Prince foray, pretty much ceased.
During the June 1967 Middle East War, the Tunisian military was out on the streets in force (as were enormous crowds in solidarity with the Arab cause). Soldiers with bayoneted rifles stood every 25 feet or so. I was told – never able to confirm or deny – that their rifles lacked ammunition and that the ammunition was instead stored for safe keeping (from whom?) in the very same U.S. embassy. Rumor for sure, but one that suggested the growing influence of the United States in Tunisian affairs, welcomed to a certain extent by the then President Habib Bourguiba as a counterweight to French diplomatic clout, still strong some ten years after Tunisian independence.
Much later, in 2002, just after 9-11, the U.S. embassy moved from Ave. de la Liberte, not far from the center of the city, to a large complex in La Goulette, a Tunis suburb. A sprawling building with very much of a post 9-11 embassy-bunker appearance, it occupies a vast space that, besides the current ambassador, Gordon Gray, and his staff, also houses the offices of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Middle East Partnership Initiative the latter being little more than a way to entice Middle East nations to accept World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs by offering them a few pennies of aid in return – short term gain, long term crisis.
From this description alone, one gets a sense of its political significance and influence in both the country and the region. If not as extensive as the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, than, nothing less than a city within the city, the Tunis embassy is imposing enough, a modern version of a crusader castle.
The U.S. Middle East strategy: buying time
Given its array of Crusader-like castle-embassies throughout the Middle East equipped with super duper modern communication systems, stuffed with various intelligence agency personnel both on the ground and in the air, with the inordinate amount of money and energy spent on 'protecting U.S. interests' (code for insuring the security of oil transit routes) it is logical to believe that the United States was well prepared, 'in the know' about the situation on the ground in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan and that they somehow anticipated the uprisings that the world is witnessing.
Add to this the fact that the signs of the political explosion which began in Tunisia a bare six months ago and has now spread region-wide have been long in the making:

• Long before WikiLeaks, 13 years ago, a U.S. ambassador to Tunisia warned of the dangers of spiraling unemployment rates, particularly youth unemployment.
• A series of reports – the Arab Human Development Reports – early in the millennium spoke of the dangers of growing youth unemployment, corruption and political repression. The fifth of these reports, published as recently as 2009, raised the same concerns in more worried and urgent language as does the 2010 version. These voices went essentially unheeded.
• A number of scholars, among them Georgetown's  Stephen Juan King and CCNY's David Harvey, have, in their work documented the erosive effect of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs on Middle Eastern economies. Others – Chalmers Johnson, Tom Engelhardt, Michael Schwartz, Immanuel Wallerstein – have warned that U.S. Middle East policy, with its support of regional dictators, is unsustainable.

But who in this or former White Houses listens to academics, especially if their knowledge/insights fly in the face of Washington policy?
It happens only during those rare moments when the carefully contrived Washington consensus collapses, as it has now in Tunisia and Egypt, that these more critical voices are, temporarily heard before being unceremoniously shipped back to their former academic anonymity.
Obama administration: couldn't read the political map
Truth of the matter is that the Obama Administration was essentially blind-sided by the protest wave and is in deep trouble. Its main goal in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and wherever else protests break out is in all cases: buying time:

• buying time to limit damage to U.S. strategic and economic interests (centering mostly around regional oil and gas flows),
• buying time to find suitable replacements for the regional dictators Washington has long backed,
• buying time to find figures who meet those increasing difficult standards – having mass appeal on the one hand, but willing to continue its military ties with Washington and not renege on World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs which have caused so much economic damage throughout the region.

It's not that the Obama Administration is unaware of the underlying socio-economic structural crisis which has plagued the entire region for some time now. Rather, it simply didn't know how to read the map or interpret events.
The Washington Media Group decides late in the game it can no longer put make-up on Ben Ali's political corpse
Instead Washington glossed over the simmering social storm about to break and magnified Tunisa's achievements while systematically playing down its growing failures. There seemed to be a consensus in Washington (and in Paris) not to see what was going on under the surface. In Tunisia's case, this was achieved until recently, with a little help from a Washington public relations firm, the Washington Media Group.
The Washington Media Group, which had to have known about the human rights violations in Tunisia, cancelled its contract with Tunisia on January 6, 2011. A question of principle or just a case of covering their butts?
Tunisia's 'positive p.r.' in Washington gravitated around two themes: Tunisia's women's rights policies (somewhat exaggerated by the way – it is something less than equal rights) impressed U.S. legislators. The more secular nature of the regime (also somewhat overstated) played well to American audiences inoculated since September 11, 2001 (and probably before) with the great fear of radical Islamic fundamentalism.
It never seemed to occur to U.S. policy makers that secular regimes, even one that to a certain degree supports women's rights, can be otherwise pervasively oppressive. But then, that just doesn't fit the State Department's cookie-cutter radical fundamentalist model. So how bad could it be?
Nor has the Washington establishment provided much of anything in the way of offering solutions to the crisis. Pretty impressive ostrich approach all in all. It is scurrying to put together an approach to the changes sweeping the region that in many fundamental ways were triggered or exacerbated by U.S. security and economic policies, to mention two specifically – the war on terrorism and U.S.-encouraged World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies.
Even as the Obama Administration suddenly tries to distance itself from Mubarak, and nudge him from power, the fact remains: he was the U.S. man in the Middle East par excellence.
It is not only his regime which has been discredited, but 32 years of U.S. support of that regime. Don't think that the people on the streets of cities all over Egypt are unaware of this fact.
3. From Sidi Bouzid to Tunis and Sfax, from Ma'ad to Cairo and Alexandria
As the revolt moved east from the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Sfax and Tunis in Tunisia to Ma'ad, Alexandria and Cairo, its center of gravity shifted to the very edge of the Middle East oil producing region. And now the world's military heavies weigh in:

• NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggests that the current Arab revolt puts both the world economy and the world order 'at stake'. (This is a bit of an overstatement, suggesting the degree to which NATO was 'ambushed' by events.)
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen related that due to the events in Egypt the U.S. Army has been 'put on alert', "and also that we've got our military ready, should any kind of response or support be required," he said. "That isn't the case right now, but I'm very focused on that."

The stakes for the United States (and Israel) in Egypt are considerably higher than in Tunisia. For Washington Ben Ali is expendable. The Obama Administration did little to help him in 'his moment of need.' Indeed there are some reports (in the French press) that the Tunisian Chief of Staff Ammar was in telephone contact with the head of AFRICOM, U.S. General William Ward, at a rather sensitive moment in the Tunisian crisis.
But Egypt is an entirely different matter. If Tunisia got $20 million in military aid over the course of Ben Ali's time in power, Mubarek has received $2 billion annually since 1979 – most of that for military purposes. Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, now the Brookings Institute Vice President ,is certainly right to underline the many services that Mubarek has provided U.S. strategic interests in the region.
Key elements of the strategic relationship include:

• keeping the Suez Canal open and safe for oil tankers from the Persian Gulf heading for Europe (and the Americas),
• assuring the flow of oil through oil pipelines from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through Egypt,
• cooperating with Israel on the blockade of Gaza,
• actively supporting the United States in the war on terrorism, participating in extraordinary rendition.

in making peace with Israel at Camp David in 1978, Egypt essentially permitted the Israel's to tighten their grip over the West Bank and Gaza, and concentrate their military ambitions elsewhere – Lebanon, and perhaps sometime in the future, Iran.
Finally, although it is sometimes forgotten, Egypt is not only Israel's neighbor, it is also Saudi Arabia's. Mubarak may not yet have joined Zine Ben Ali in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) but Aqaba, where he seems to be hiding out at the moment, is a five minute walk into Saudi territory. While both the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea separate Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the distances (especially across the Gulf of Aqaba) are minimal, the point here being that the kind of revolt taking place in Egypt will invariably have echoes in Saudi.
Right now, without much of a roadmap, the main U.S. goals are to buy time to insure damage control, to slow the processes of change everywhere in the region, hoping to minimize the damage to U.S. strategic interests (meaning specifically its control of the region's energy resources).
None of the Arab Revolts of 2011 have played themselves out as yet. So it will be a while before the Obama Administration can assess the damage to its interests: a setback or a debacle?