Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Islam and Power
ebruary 13, 2006
Islam and Power
Is President Bush's plan to spread democracy turning into a fiasco? It doesn't have to. But it does need to change.
By Fareed Zakaria
George W. Bush is not a man for second thoughts, but even he might have had some recently. Ever since 9/11, Bush has made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East the center-piece of his foreign policy, and doggedly pushed the issue. Over the last few months, however, this approach has borne strange fruit, culminating in Hamas's victory in Gaza and the West Bank.
Before that, we have watched it strengthen Hizbullah in Lebanon, which (like Hamas) is often described in the West as a terrorist organization. In Iraq, the policy has brought into office conservative religious parties with their own private militias. In Egypt, it has bolstered the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest fundamentalist organizations in the Arab world, from which Al Qaeda descends. "Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror," Bush said last week in his State of the Union address. But is this true of the people coming to power in the Arab world today?
This is an issue that deserves serious thought, well beyond pointing to the awkwardness of Bush's position. Bush's prescription is, after all, one accepted by many governments: it is also European policy to push for democratic reform in the Middle East. And in fact, little has happened over the last few months that makes the case for continued support of Muslim dictatorships. But recent events do powerfully suggest that if we don't better understand the history, culture and politics of the countries that we are "reforming," we will be in for an extremely rocky ride.
There is a tension in the Islamic world between the desire for democracy and a respect for liberty. (It is a tension that once raged in the West and still exists in pockets today.) This is most apparent in the ongoing fury over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a small Danish newspaper. The cartoons were offensive and needlessly provocative. Had the paper published racist caricatures of other peoples or religions, it would also have been roundly condemned and perhaps boycotted. But the cartoonist and editors would not have feared for their lives. It is the violence of the response in some parts of the Muslim world that suggests a rejection of the ideas of tolerance and freedom of expression that are at the heart of modern Western societies.
Why are all these strains rising now? Islamic fundamentalism was supposed to be on the wane. Five years ago the best scholars of the phenomenon were writing books with titles like "The Failure of Political Islam." Observers pointed to the exhaustion of the Iranian revolution, the ebbing of support for radical groups from Algeria to Egypt to Saudi Arabia. And yet one sees political Islam on the march across the Middle East today. Were we all wrong? Has Islamic fundamentalism gotten a second wind?
There are those who argue that the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process, the war on terror, and the bloodshed in Af-ghanistan and Iraq have all contributed to the idea that Islam is under siege-providing radicals with fresh ammunition. This is not, however, a wholly convincing case. For one thing, opposition to the Iraq war is not a radical phenomenon in the Middle East, but rather an utterly mainstream one. Almost every government opposed it. Moreover, the rise and fall of Islamic fundamentalism was a broad and deep phenomenon, born over decades. It could hardly reverse itself on the basis of a year's news. Does anyone believe that if there had been no Iraq war, Hamas would have lost? Or that the Danish cartoons would have been published with no response?
The political Islamist movement has changed over the last 15 years. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Islamic fundamentalists had revolutionary aims. They sought the violent overthrow of Western-allied regimes to have them replaced with Islamic states. This desire for Islamic states and not Western-style democracies was at the core of their message. Often transnational in their objectives, they spoke in global terms. But it turned out that the appeal of this ideology was limited. People in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and countless other places rejected it; in fact, they grudgingly accepted the dictatorships they lived under rather than support violent extremism. In this sense, political Islam did fail.
But over time, many of the Islamists recognized this reality and began changing their program. They came to realize that shorn of violent overthrow, revolution and social chaos, their ideas could actually gain considerable popular support. So they reinvented themselves, emphasizing not revolutionary overthrow but peaceful change, not transnational ideology but national reform. They were still protesting the dictators, but now they organized demonstrations in favor of democracy and honest politics.
There were extremist elements, of course, still holding true to the cause of the caliphate, and they broke off to create separate groups like Al Qaeda. (Some of this radicalism remains within the diaspora communities of Europe more strongly than in the Middle East itself.) But it is notable that well before 9/11, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood condemned terrorism directed against the Mubarak regime, and it recently distanced itself even from the tactics of the Iraqi insurgency. It has sought instead to build support for its own social and political program in Egypt. For its part, not only did Hamas decide to participate in the elections–for the first time–but it campaigned almost entirely on a platform of anticorruption, social services and assertive nationalism. Only Al Qaeda and its ilk have condemned any participation in elections, whether by Iraqi Islamist groups or by Hamas.
This coming to terms with democracy, however, should not be mistaken for a coming to terms with Western values such as liberalism, tolerance and freedom. The program that most of these groups espouse is deeply illiberal, involving the reversal of women's rights, second-class citizenship for minorities and confrontation with the West and Israel. The most dramatic example of these trends is in southern Iraq, where Shiite religious parties rule without any checks. Reports abound that civil servants and professors are subjected to religious and political tests, women are placed under strictures never before enforced in Iraq, and all kinds of harmless entertainment are being silenced by vigilantes. When entering the office of Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, one now sees women swaddled in veils and gloves, a level of zeal rarely seen elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Some of these forces have gained strength because of a lack of other alternatives. For decades the Middle East has been a political desert. In Iraq, the reason that there are no countervailing liberal parties is that Saddam Hussein destroyed them. He could not completely crush mosque-based groups and, by the end of his reign, he actually used them to shore up his own legitimacy. In much of the Muslim world Islam became the language of political opposition because it was the only language that could not be censored. This pattern, of dictators using religious groups to destroy the secular opposition, played itself out in virtually every Arab country, and often beyond. It was the method by which Pakistan's Gen. Zia ul-Haq maintained his own dictatorship in the 1980s, creating a far stronger fundamentalist movement than that country had ever known.
The broader reason for the rise of islamic politics has been the failure of secular politics. Secularism exists in the Middle East. It is embodied by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Kaddafi and Hosni Mubarak and Yasir Arafat. Arabs believe that they have tried Western-style politics and it has brought them tyranny and stagnation. They feel that they got a bastardized version of the West and that perhaps the West was not the right model for them anyway. Islamic fundamentalism plays deeply to these feelings. It evokes authenticity, pride, cultural assertiveness and defiance. These ideas have been powerful sources of national identity throughout history and remain so, especially in an age of globalized economics and American power. In face of the powerlessness, alienation and confusion that the modern world breeds, these groups say simply, "Islam is the solution."
Inevitably we have to ask ourselves what to do about these movements that are rising to power. The first task is surely to understand them-understand that they thrive on pride and a search for authenticity. These forces play themselves out in complex ways. It is obvious by now that the United States–and Europe as well–understand countries like Iraq and Iran very little. In Iraq, the United States overturned old social structures and governing patterns with little thought as to what would replace them. We believed that democracy and freedom would solve the problems of disorder, division and dysfunction.
Or consider Iran. Many Americans had become convinced that the vast majority of Iranians hated their regime and were trying desperately to overthrow it; all we needed to do was help them foment a revolution. There's little doubt that the regime is brutal and unpopular. But it also appears to have some basis of support, in mosques, patronage systems and poorer parts of the country. And those who do not support it are not automatically Western liberals. After all, there was an election in Iran and, despite low turnout, the eventual vote was free and secret. (Back when the winner of Iranian elections was a liberal, Mohammed Khatami, people often cited the vote as proof that the fundamentalists were failing.) Five candidates took part in the most recent race. The pro-Western liberal came in fifth; the conservative West-basher came in first.
My own guess, and it is just a guess, is that some Iranians-not a majority, but not a tiny minority, either-accept their current regime. This is partly because of its ideology and patronage politics, and partly because of general inertia. (We have only to look at Iraq to see that Shiite religious figures do have some hold on their populations.) Add to this an apparatus of repression and $60-a-barrel oil and you have a regime that has many ways to stay in power. President Ahmadinejad understands these forces. He emphasizes in his daily television appearances not Islamic dogma but poverty alleviation, subsidies, anti-corruption projects and, above all, nationalism in the form of the nuclear program. Ahmadinejad may be a mystic, but most of his actions are those of a populist, using the forces that will work to keep him in power. This picture of Iran, gray and complex, is much less satisfying than the black-and-white caricature. But it might be closer to the truth.
Elections have not created political Islam in the Middle East. They have codified a reality that existed anyway. Hamas was already a major player to be reckoned with in Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood is popular in Egypt, whether or not Hosni Mubarak holds real elections. In fact, the more they are suppressed, the greater their appeal. If politics is more open, these groups may or may not moderate themselves, but they will surely lose some of that mystical allure they now have. The martyrs will become mayors, which is quite a fall in status.
But to accept these forces is not to celebrate them. It is important that religious intolerance and antimodern attitudes not be treated as cultural variations that must be respected. Whether it is Hindu intolerance in India, anti-Semitism in Europe or Muslim bigotry in Saudi Arabia, the modern world rightly condemns them all as violating universal values. Recent months have only highlighted that promoting democracy and promoting liberty in the Middle East are separate projects. Both have their place. But the latter-promoting the forces of political, economic and social liberty-is the more difficult and more important task. And unless we succeed at it, we will achieve a series of nasty democratic outcomes, as we are beginning to in so many of these places.
This fight is not one the fundamentalists are destined to win. The forces of liberalism have been stymied in the Middle East for decades. They need help. Recall that in Europe for much of the last 100 years, when liberal democrats were not given assistance, nationalists and communists often triumphed through the democratic processes.
Above all, the forces of moderation thrive in an atmosphere of success. Two Muslim societies in which there is little extremism are Turkey and Malaysia. Both are open politically and thriving economically. Compare Pakistan today-growing at 8 percent a year-with General Zia's country, and you can see why, for all the noise, fundamentalism there is waning. If you are comfortable with the modern world, you are less likely to want to blow it up.
There are better and worse ways to handle radical Islam. We should not feed the fury that helps them win adherents. The Bush administration's arrogance has been a great boon to the nastiest groups in the Middle East, which are seen as the only ones who can stand up to the imperial bully. We should recognize how varied these groups are: some violent, others not, some truly anti-modern, others not-and work to divide rather than unite them. When, for example, Bush added Chechen brutalities to his list of crimes of "radical Islam," he made a mistake. Russia has waged a horrific war against Chechnya for two decades, killing more than 100,000 civilians. To speak of that conflict in the same breath as the London bombings, as Bush did, is to suggest that any time a Muslim kills, whatever the provocation, it's all the same to him.
Give Bush his due. He has correctly and powerfully argued that blind assistance to the dictatorships of the Middle East was a policy that was producing repression and instability. But he has not yet found a way to genuinely assist in the promotion of political, economic and social reforms in the region. A large part of the problem is that the United States-and the West in general-are not seen as genuine well-wishers and allies of the peoples of these countries in their aspirations for a better life. We have stopped partnering with repressive Middle Eastern regimes, but we have not yet managed to forge a real partnership with Middle Eastern societies.
Losing Another War ... in Asia
April 30, 2007
Losing Another War ... in Asia
If you want to know which way the breeze is blowing in Asia, check out a bookstore in Hanoi. The two I went to while visiting there last week were stocked with the usual stuff - the writings of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap - and many signs of the new Vietnam, which meant books on business and management plus a seemingly legal Vietnamese translation of Hillary Clinton's memoirs. Prominently displayed along with all these wares were the collected speeches of Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
The Vietnamese have no particular love for China. One official there, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the relationship, said to me, "We are clear-eyed. China has occupied Vietnam for 1,000 years. It has invaded us 13 times since then. But China is a huge presence, our biggest exporter." And everyone I spoke to in Hanoi agreed that the Chinese were handling them with great dexterity. Before arriving in Vietnam I had been in Tokyo, during Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's state visit, and I heard a similar refrain from the Japanese. Wen finessed the many points of tension between the two countries and instead accentuated the positive - their booming economic ties.
Talk of China's "soft power" has grown over the last year. But what I saw last week was not evidence of soft power in the sense Harvard professor Joseph Nye meant when he coined the term-the attractiveness of a country and its values. Few people in Asia are actively pining for "the Chinese Dream" because it's not really clear what that is-and to the extent that there is one it sounds suspiciously like the American Dream.
Really, it's China's hard power that is on the rise. Beijing has become remarkably adept at using its political and economic muscle in a patient, low-key and highly effective manner. China's diplomacy emphasizes its core strengths-a long-term perspective, a nonpreachy attitude and strategic decision-making that isn't bogged down by internal opposition or bureaucratic paralysis. Over the last decade, for example, China has greatly improved its historically tense relations with Southeast Asia. It's taken a more accommodating political line, provided generous aid packages (often far outstripping those provided by the United States) and moved speedily on a free-trade deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Japan wanted to cut a similar deal but has dithered, racked by power struggles between political and bureaucratic factions in Tokyo. The United States can't even begin such a conversation with ASEAN because we will not talk to Burma. One result: this summer China plans to hold military exercises with some of these countries, most of which have been U.S. allies for decades.
And yet no one is comfortable with an Asia dominated by China. Singapore's shrewd prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who will be in Washington this week, urges the United States to be far more actively engaged. "You have many friends in this region," he says. "But the attitude of many Asian nations is that China will be here for 2,000 years. America is here today but may go away. And if you stop paying attention to us, we have only one suitor and only one option."
The Bush administration's basic policies in Asia have been intelligent. Washington has maintained good and productive relations with China while also strengthening ties to Japan, India, Australia, Singapore and Vietnam. But the relationship is plagued by two problems. First, the administration has been obsessed with Iraq, and so everything else, including Asia, gets too little sustained and strategic attention. Second, America is still beleaguered by the total collapse of its image abroad, which makes it difficult for countries like Indonesia and Thailand to take measures that are seen as pro-American.
When I asked Prime Minister Lee how to change this dynamic, he reminded me that nearly half of Southeast Asia's population is Muslim and said, "The single most important thing that the U.S. could do to shift its image in the region would be to take a more active role on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in a balanced way. The issue is more important for Southeast Asia's Muslims than even Iraq." Singapore's strategic elite, with close ties to the United States and Israel, aren't trying to score ideological points. They don't offer the usual stinging criticism of America's Iraq policy, for example. When I asked Lee about it, his concern was simple: "If you lose standing [because of] Iraq, it's bad for us."
The real problem with our Asia policy is not the Bush administration but the U.S. political system. Congress is in a narrow-minded and protectionist mood, unlikely to see the need for trade agreements, foreign aid and far greater engagement with a crucial country like Vietnam. Minor issues, ideological obsessions and small but tenacious domestic lobbies hold back sustained strategic movement in foreign policy. There is little time for this. Singapore's senior statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, believes that the United States will be able to bounce back from its current troubles. But, he says, "by the time you get around to focusing on the region, you will find a very different Asia."
We Are Not Losing The War Against Radical Islam
July 2, 2007
We Are Not Losing The War Against Radical Islam
Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, are strangely united on one point: the threat from global jihad is growing dangerously. Republicans use that belief as a way to remind the American people that we live in a fearsome world-and need tough leaders to protect us. For Democrats, the same idea fortifies their claim that the Bush administra-tion has failed to deal with a crucial threat-and that we need a new national-security team. Terrorism experts and the media add to this chorus, consciously or not, because they have an incentive to paint a grim picture: bad news sells. Amid the clamor, it is difficult to figure out what is actually going on.
In the two decades before 9/11, Islamic radicalism flourished, while most governments treated it as a minor annoyance rather than a major security threat. September 11 changed all that, and subsequent bombings in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Madrid and London forced countries everywhere to rethink their basic attitude. Now most governments around the world have become far more active in pursuing, capturing, killing and disrupting terrorist groups of all kinds. The result is an enemy that is without question weaker than before, though also more decentralized and amorphous.
Consider the news from just the past few months. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, the government announced that on June 9 it had captured both the chief and the military leader of Jemaah Islamiah, the country's deadliest jihadist group and the one that carried out the Bali bombings of 2002. In January, Filipino troops killed Abu Sulaiman, leader of the Qaeda-style terrorist outfit Abu Sayyaf. The Philippine Army-with American help-has battered the group, whose membership has declined from as many as 2,000 guerrillas six years ago to a few hundred today. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were Al Qaeda's original bases and targets of attack, terrorist cells have been rounded up, and those still at large have been unable to launch any major new attacks in a couple of years. There, as elsewhere, the efforts of finance ministries-most especially the U.S. Department of the Treasury-have made life far more difficult for terrorists. Global organizations cannot thrive without being able to move money around. The more that terrorists' funds are tracked and targeted, the more they have to make do with small-scale and hastily improvised operations.
North Africa has seen an uptick in activity, particularly Algeria. But the main group there, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (known by its French abbreviation, GSPC), is part of a long and ongoing local war between the Algerian government and Islamic opposition forces and cannot be seen solely through the prism of Al Qaeda or anti-American jihad. This is also true of the main area where there has been a large and troubling rise in the strength of Al Qaeda-the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. It is here that Al Qaeda Central, if there is such an entity, is housed. But the reason the group has been able to sustain itself and grow despite the best efforts of NATO troops is that through the years of the anti-Soviet campaign, Al Qaeda dug deep roots in the area. And its allies the Taliban are a once popular local movement that has long been supported by a section of the Pashtuns, an influential ethnic group in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In Iraq, where terrorist attacks are a daily event, another important complication weakens the enemy. From a broad coalition promising to unite all Muslims, Al Qaeda has morphed into a purist Sunni group that spends most of its time killing Shiites. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda makes no mention of Shiites, condemning only the "Crusaders" and "Jews." But Iraq changed things. Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, bore a fierce hatred for Shiites, derived from his Wahhabi-style puritanism. In a February 2004 letter to Osama bin Laden, he claimed that "the danger from the Shia ... is greater ... than the Americans ... [T]he only solution is for us to strike the religious, military and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis." If there ever had been a debate between him and bin Laden, Zarqawi won. As a result, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam.
The split between Sunnis and Shiites-which plays a role in Lebanon as well-is only one of the divisions within the world of Islam. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners and, importantly, moderates and radicals. The clash between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories is the most vivid sign of the latter divide. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so the manyvarieties of Islam weaken its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. It would be even less dangerous if Western leaders recognized this and worked to emphasize such distinctions. Rather than speaking of a single worldwide movement-which absurdly lumps together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India,Shiite warlords in Lebanon and Sunni jihadists in Egypt-we should be emphasizing that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies and friends. That robs them of their claim to represent Islam. It describes them as they often are-small local gangs of misfits, hoping to attract attention through nihilism and barbarism.
The greatest weakness of militant Islam is that it is unpopular almost everywhere. Even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has some roots, it was widely reviled. And now, when Taliban fighters occasionally take over a town in southern Afghanistan, they disband the schools, burn books, put women behind veils. These actions cause fear and resentment, not love. Most Muslims, even those who are devout and enraged at the West, don't want to return to some grim fantasy of medieval theocracy. People in the Muslim world travel to see the glitz in Dubai, not the madrassas in Tehran. About half the world's Muslim countries hold elections-representing some 600 million people. In those elections over the past four or five years, the parties representing militant Islam have done poorly from Indonesia to Pakistan, rarely garnering more than 7 or 8 percent of the vote. There are some exceptional cases in places suffering from civil war or occupation, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hizbullah in Lebanon. But by and large, radical Islam is not winning the argument, which is why it is trying to win by force.
If this sounds like an optimistic account, it is, up to a point. The real danger, and the reason this will be a long struggle, is that the conditions that feed the radicalization and alienation of young Muslim men are not abating. A toxic combination of demography, alienation and religious extremism continues to seduce a small number of Muslims to head down a path of brutal violence. And technol-ogy today-most worryingly the large quantities of loose nuclear material throughout the world-ensures that small numbers of people can do large amounts of damage.
The current issue of Britain's Prospect magazine has a deeply illuminating profile of the main suicide bomber in the 7/7 London subway attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan, who at first glance appeared to be a well-integrated, middle-class Briton. The author, Shiv Malik, spent months in the Leeds suburb where Khan grew up, talked to his relatives and pieced together his past. Khan was not driven to become a suicide bomber by poverty, racism or the Iraq War. His is the story of a young man who found he could not be part of the traditional Pakistani-immigrant community of his parents. He had no memories of their Pakistani life. He spoke their language, Urdu, poorly. He rejected an arranged marriage in favor of a love match. And yet, he was also out of place in modern British culture. Khan was slowly seduced by the simple, powerful and total world view of Wahhabi Islam, conveniently provided in easy-to-read English pamphlets (doubtless funded with Saudi money). The ideology fulfilled a young man's desire for protest and rebellion and at the same time gave him a powerful sense of identity. By 1999-before the Iraq War, before 9/11-he was ready to be a terrorist.
Britain, the United States and most other countries have not found it easy to address the root causes of jihad. But clearly, they relate to the alienation, humiliation and disempowerment caused by the pace of change in the modern world-economic change, migration from Third World to First World, movement from the countryside to the city. The only durable solution to these ongoing disruptions is for these people to see themselves-and, most important, the societies they come from and still identify with-as masters of the modern world and not as victims. How to open up and modernize the Muslim world is a long, hard and complex challenge. But surely one key is to be seen by these societies and peoples as partners and friends, not as bullies and enemies. That is one battle we are not yet winning.
