Tremors from the January 12 earthquake that devastated the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, reached all the way to the Dominican Republic, which shares the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola. In the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, new high-r ...
In light of the encouraging reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be moderating his position toward peace, I wanted to bring attention to this revealing New York Times article published on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Not out of some desire to counter good news with bad. But rather, the juxtaposition of these two stories could easily be described as a lesson in the futility of intransigence.
The Times describes the pervading security mindset within Israel, one which emphasizes the need to “shorten and intensify the period of fighting and to lengthen the period [of relative peace] between rounds.” That is, Israeli security officials make the calculation that because conflict of some sort is inevitable, be it with Hezbollah or Hamas or even perhaps Iran down the road, it is in Israel’s best interest to maximize its firepower in brief bursts to temporarily subdue the enemy, ostensibly ensuring a longer peacetime environment before the next campaign is needed. In a modern era of asymmetric warfare, they view this as preferable to a drawn out guerrilla conflict that would cost countless more lives and drain Israel’s economy.
This formulation has become known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Shi’a district in Beirut destroyed during Israel’s war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. It calls for the disproportionate use of force. It does not distinguish between military compounds and the civilian properties that immediately surround them. It seeks to crush vital infrastructure. But above all, it does these things in order to set a memorable precedent. Attack Israel, and it will respond ten-fold.
In a January 8 article for the World Policy Blog, Charles Cogan argued recently that the United States should not attempt to mediate the long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, as doing so could jeopardize America’s good relations with India and further muddle U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. On the contrary, only by accepting that India-Pakistan relations are a key part of the larger security problem can the United States end the war in Afghanistan. Thus, an active U.S. role in mediating the dispute over Kashmir and other issues dividing India and Pakistan is very much in America’s national interests.
First, tensions between India and Pakistan are hindering the latter’s efforts to aid the U.S. military in fighting militant Islamists along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Indeed, senior American military officials like Admiral Michael Mullen have pointed out that Pakistan’s need to maintain a heavy troop presence on its border with India limits the resources it can divert to fighting the Islamist insurgency elsewhere in Pakistan. These officials agree that such a presence is justified, given the history and current level of tension between the two states. While some commentators argue that the Pakistani Army is unwilling to fight extremists on its own soil, Admiral Mullen himself has suggested that casualty statistics show Pakistan to be very much engaged in the struggle against Islamist terror.
Indeed, Pakistan’s military has already suffered more casualties in its own fight against militant Islamists than has the American military in Afghanistan. Suicide bombings within Pakistan have already claimed more than 11,000 victims. Thus, the Pakistani army’s slow progress in its war against militant Islamists is due not to a lack of zeal, but rather is tied largely to its inability (because of lack of capacity) to focus exclusively on fighting terror as long as Indo-Pakistani tension persists. An easing of the tensions would likely enable Pakistan to redeploy more troops to the fight against insurgents, which would be to the benefit of American forces in Afghanistan.
Second, poor India-Pakistan relations are central to longer-term but no less serious issues that plague the daily lives of Pakistanis and contribute to the conditions that drive some of the nation’s poorest citizens into the hands of extremists.
Pakistan’s current water crisis is one case in point. While religious identity is at the core of the Kashmir dispute, water also is a root cause of the conflict. The region is the source of the main rivers flowing through much of the Indian and Pakistani Punjab (literally, “land of the five waters”) that is South Asia’s breadbasket. Antagonistic relations only encouraged India to construct the dams that, in turn, now limit the flow of water to Pakistan, threatening its agricultural heartland and creating water shortages nationwide. Of course, myopic policymakers and political horse-trading in Pakistan have only made matters worse.
But poor India-Pakistan relations remain the major contributing factor to the crisis. Far from fostering cooperation on the issue, they actually create an incentive for India to withhold water from Pakistan. The water crisis in Pakistan hurts the poorest of the poor in Pakistan—prime targets for Al-Qaeda’s recruiters.
So, this is what it means to be “pat-down.” I first heard the words after the Christmas Day attempt by the 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to blow up a Northwest plane over Detroit, Michigan. It was, however, not until nine days and nearly 9,000 miles later before the meaning of the words hit home, with a personal force.
My daughter and I departed Lagos on the night of January 4 and by morning had cleared two international airports—Lagos and Frankfurt—without fuss. We had one more stop to make at Dulles International Airport, in Washington, on our way to Austin, Texas. At the Lagos airport, little had changed. It was business as usual. Check-in and airport security officials were happy to do things a bit quicker and to return a smile or two in exchange for a Christmas kola nut.
I also did not notice any remarkable changes in security at Frankfurt from when I last passed through in early summer 2009. The officials looked just as cold and stern as they ushered transit passengers through the metal-detectors. Luggage, as usual, was scanned separately. I didn’t observe any fuss, pat downs, or special lanes. The only hint of a tougher time ahead was the frequent announcement at the airport that travelers to the United States must be prepared to comply with restrictions about items they could bring into the country.
For me, that was nothing to worry about. On this trip, I had prepared myself for the worst—or so I thought.
I had excluded from my suitcases anything I suspected could cause delays and totally ruled out all foodstuffs, including noodles, my daughter’s favorite meal. Before we left Lagos, I took the extra precaution of stripping our suitcases and getting familiar with all their contents before padlocking them, just to be sure.
I also recalled the sad experience of another Nigerian traveler who caused alarm (and made headlines) for an overly long stay in the lavatory of a plane some two days later, and on the same route, of that which Abdulmutallab had attempted to bring down. I decided on this trip that once I was boarded, I would not stir for the duration of the flight. No in-flight exercises, no walking up and down the aisle, no food, little or no water. Nothing, I was determined, would make me take a step from my seat.
And so it was that in the six hour and twenty minute flight from Lagos to Frankfurt, I was a self-made couch potato in seat 14A. I was flying Business Class, but it would not have made any difference had I been in the luggage hold. Better to be still than sorry. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the ordeal at we were to face at Dulles.
America’s rapprochement with India, and its centerpiece nuclear agreement, is a bright star in the otherwise murky firmament of the George W. Bush years. India is a large power; it is a secular, democratic power, not influenced by Islamist radicalism. Its large Muslim population of 140 million seems generally—so far—not attracted to that kind of fanaticism.
India is a country with a population of 1.17 billion whose numbers are destined to exceed those of China by 2050. (Pakistan’s population, much smaller, but not insignificant, is roughly 180 million). The advantage of the U.S.-India rapprochement, in the short and medium term, lies in the fact that this huge country is right next to a string of Muslim countries whose populations are generally (though not universally) hostile to U.S. interests.
Because of the strategic importance that the United States places on both India and its troubled sister, Pakistan, policymakers in Washington have periodically tried to play the role of peacemaker in the region, hoping to push both nuclear-armed countries to resolve the bad blood between them—which, for the most part, has revolved around the contested province of Kashmir.
In 2009, U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke reportedly tried to include India in his Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) portfolio, which seemed to mean that he wanted to take a crack at the Kashmir problem. The Indians, however, would have none of it, and AfPak remains limited to the two nations that make up the somewhat unwieldy conjunction.
Steve Coll, in a New Yorker article on March 2, 2009, brought to light a parallel or “back” channel in Indo-Pak negotiations that took place during the regime of Pervez Musharraf. If the discussions had succeeded, and it appears they came close, it could have resulted in a sort of free movement of populations across the Kashmiri line of separation—without a change of sovereignty between the advantageous Indian and unimpressive Pakistani portions. However, Musharraf went into a political tailspin after his dispute with the Pakistan judiciary and had to leave office in August 2008. With his departure, the talks seem to have ended. Ironically, according to Coll, the Indians had come to trust Musharraf, despite the fact that he was the main instigator of the abortive Pakistani attack at Kargil, in Kashmir, in 1999.
The arrangement nearly worked out reflects the Indian insistence that the line of separation (called the Line of Control) must not be altered, as this could affect the status of the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir, the beautiful “jewel in the crown” of the whole affair. Moreover, from the Indian point of view, ceding any part of Indian-held Kashmir, in what would be seen as stemming from religious reasons, would compromise the Indian political philosophy of secular government.
In any event, a settlement now seems extremely unlikely in the short term, especially after the horrific attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 which originated in Pakistan. As long as Kashmir remains as it is, unequally divided, Islamabad will likely never be satisfied, which means we can expect more Pakistani agitation inside India and an increasingly stronger riposte from New Delhi. There is definitely a fear that the two Pakistan-sponsored terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are not only still active; worse, extrapolating from the attack on Mumbai, these groups may have set their sights on more ambitious targets, unleashing havoc within India’s metropolitan cities rather than engaging India’s massive deployments in Jammu and Kashmir.
So where do things stand now?
It’s all coming along very nicely—the recent efforts to arrest war criminals and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Who would have thought during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, or in the midst of the dark days of the Rwandan genocide that the hand of international justice would be reaching out to arrest the patrons of criminal activity, trying and imprisoning them? At some point, we may even see the architects of torture in the recent U.S. administration of George W. Bush investigated.
Global recognition of the importance of international criminal justice has been marred by fits and starts throughout most of the twentieth century, gaining momentum only recently. After the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in 1945 and 1946, there was a hiatus in the pursuit of international justice–a lapse that was finally broken when, in 1975, most of the world signed the Convention Against Torture. Twenty years later, the world community went even further, crafting the Convention Against War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in June 1998. More commonly known as the Rome Statute, the Convention Against War Crimes is indeed a momentous document, the first of its kind to take as its mission the need to “to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators” of the world’s most serious crimes, “and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes.”
The aftershocks of this latest convention were immediately felt by the world’s worst dictators, its principles being invoked by domestic courts throughout the world. A few months after the Rome convention, for example, Scotland Yard arrested the former dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, in London. After long court hearings, for the first time anywhere a high court declared that sovereign immunity must not be allowed to become sovereign impunity. Alas, he was released on humanitarian grounds two years later, and died of a heart attack in 2006 without ever being brought to justice.
Since that time, the ball has only rolled with gathering speed. Just last month, a London judge issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the former prime minister of Israel and a current leader in the Knesset. She was indicted for her role in last year’s Operation Cast Lead, which authorized the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip. Ms Livni avoided arrest by cancelling a pending trip to Britain. The British government was embarrassed, but could do nothing.
The investigations of U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan’s November 5 murder of 13 soldiers at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, and of the December 25 failed attempt by a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate a bomb inside a 300-passenger plane en route to Detroit, have revealed links between these terrorists and a spawning Al Qaeda network in Yemen.
Major Hasan reportedly exchanged e-mails and sought spiritual guidance from a radical U.S.-born Islamic cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, who grew up in Yemen. Mr. Abdulmutallab, for his part, said he received training and explosive devices from the Al Qaeda operatives during his four-month stay in Yemen last year.
Yemen’s involvement in these terrorist acts has also shed light on its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom Washington urged to launch a vast antiterrorist operation, now underway in the volatile Arab nation.
Mr. Saleh is a seasoned war horse. He served as North Yemen’s president for 12 years, before 
merging the north and south in 1990, following decades of colonial and ideological division. He has been president of this Sunni-dominated nation ever since, although the real extent of his authority is questionable.
The government repeatedly clashed with separatists in the south through the 1990s, and the insurrection flared again in 2008. Moreover, violence has escalated in the country’s northwest, along the border with Saudi Arabia, and repeated attempts to quash these Shiite insurgents (led by Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi) have been largely unsuccessful. In the northwest, Al-Houthi insurgents crossed into Saudi Arabia last month, murdering two Saudi patrol guards and triggering a joint Saudi-Yemeni airstrike against guerrillas. Today, the government’s control is effectively limited to the areas surrounding the capital, Sana’a.
Although newspapers and 24-hour news channels seem keen to highlight Yemen as the new front in the “war on terror,” the nation actually surfaced as a breeding ground for international terrorists in the early 1990s, when impoverished refugees escaping violence in neighboring Somalia were recruited by Al Qaeda in Yemen. In October 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists blasted a hole in the American Navy destroyer USS Cole harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors. And, in September 2008, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, killing ten non-American citizens.
For the most part, the Bush administration’s engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq prevented it from allocating resources to confront the burgeoning terrorist network in Yemen. One critical mark of escalation in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism tactics was a CIA-sponsored drone strike in Yemen at the end of 2002 that killed six Al Qaeda operatives, including Qaed Sinan Harithi, the suspected organizer of the USS Cole incident. Today, the reoccurrence of domestic terrorism puts pressure on Obama to eradicate the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before it gathers strength and threatens the stability of that nation.
Indeed, the “systemic problems” that President Obama referenced in his speech about intelligence failures leading up to Mr. Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing could just as well describe the state of affairs within Yemen. The country is plagued by numerous socioeconomic and political ills, including an excessive reliance on rapidly dwindling oil resources, severe water shortage, pervasive corruption, inter-regional tensions, and illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, and population growth rates that are among the highest in the Middle East. While protracted sectarian and territorial disputes have made the task of state-building increasingly difficult for Mr. Saleh, most of the problems the country faces today are the product of his own heavy-handed and short-sighted policies.