Deal for Everybody and Nobody

The US-Russia deal on Syria will neither bring peace nor will it punish the Assad regime. Yet, it is being dubbed a success because it makes world leaders, who have failed to stop the killing of more than a lakh people, feel good about themselves

At a Press conference in London on September 9, US Secretary of State John Kerry was asked if there was anything the Assad regime could do to stop Western military intervention in Syria, which at the time seemed imminent. America’s top diplomat replied somewhat oddly: “Sure”, he said, adding, “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it. And it can’t be done, obviously.”

The State Department downplayed Mr Kerry’s response saying that he was just being rhetorical. But Mr Kerry’s counterpart in Russia, a diplomat of far greater calibre, Mr Sergey Lavrov, seized the moment. He spoke to Mr Kerry in-flight and before the American had even landed in Washington, DC, the situation on the ground had shifted considerably: Russia had offered to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, its friend and ally in Damascus, to hand over to the international community his chemical weapons stockpile — and in the process, had suddenly averted war, at least for the time being.

After that 14-minute-long in-flight  conversation on Monday (September 9) between Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov, things moved at breakneck pace. With America having consented to the deal, Mr Obama called off the scheduled Congressional vote on military intervention; Mr Kerry, Mr Lavrov and their posse of security aides hurriedly met in Geneva on Thursday to hammer out the details; the deal was finalised on Saturday and quickly accepted by the Assad regime which, by the way, until then had not even acknowledged the existence of its chemical weapons stockpile.

The following Monday, UN inspectors confirmed that chemical weapons were used in the August 21 attack in east Ghouta that triggered this international response, but stopped short of pinning the blame on the Assad regime; on Tuesday, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council met in New York to discuss the deal and negotiations will continue over the next few days.

Anyway, a final resolution that can be presented before the entire 15-member Council is not possible unless the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Executive Council in The Hague approves a plan on how to deal with Syria’s chemical weapons. This plan is not expected until Friday at the earliest.

In the meantime, the deal, dubbed as the greatest US-Russia joint diplomatic effort since the unification of Germany, has already run into troubled waters. While the rest of the Western powers want military intervention in case of non-compliance to be part of the deal, Russia believes that such a clause would hamper the peace effort and make the Assad regime uncooperative — especially since there is no definite proof that it was Damascus that carried out the August 21 attack. Russia is also opposed to the draft resolution being covered by Chapter 7 of the UN Charter which gives the Security Council authority to enforce its decisions through the use of force or the imposition of sanctions. Instead, in case of non-compliance, it wants members to come back to the Security Council and seek a fresh mandate for military intervention. In all probability, UN diplomats will just draft a resolution whose deliberately vague language will appease all parties.

So let us assume that the UN Security Council will pass a resolution paving the way for the transfer and eventual destruction of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons. The question then is:How will it be implemented? The answer is President Assad will lead UN weapons inspectors to his stockpiles and then stand aside while they take over his weapons — even as a civil war rages in the backdrop.

If you are sceptical already, wait till we get to the details. First, there is no clarity on what will be covered under the chemical weapons tag and what kind of delivery systems will be neutralised since many of these systems also deliver conventional weapons. Second, there is no solid intelligence on the quantity of chemical weapons stocked in Syria and/or their exact locations. There were supposedly 42 sites before the war but now the regime has been moving the weapons all over the country. Third, after the chemicals have been located, it will still take several months, if not years, to destroy them (think of the nightmarish Iraqi experience). And it will require boots on the ground — apart from the UN inspectors, the Pentagon estimates at least 75,000 troops will be needed to secure the sites. Finally, of course, all of this will have to happen in the middle of a civil war wherein UN inspectors and foreign troops will be walking right into the heart of the Syrian battlefield with the Assad regime as their guardian angel.

This overt dependence on the Assad regime is one of the biggest pitfalls of the deal because Damascus has proven itself to be unreliable and untrustworthy. In the past three years, it has repeatedly made promises to buy time from the international community and then violated them. There is no reason to believe that President Assad will now cooperate with the West. Even Muammar Gaddafi, who voluntarily gave up his chemical weapons to end Libya’s international isolation, had put away a secret stash that was discovered unguarded in the middle of the desert after his death in 2011.

For all practical purposes, this Syria peace deal is ready to crash even before it gets off the ground. So why are world leaders scrambling all over the globe to bring this together? The answer is simple: Because it makes them, all of them — Messrs Putin, Obama and Assad — look good.

The deal is a diplomatic coup for Mr Putin who has resurrected Russia’s image from a Cold War relic to a 21st century superpower that is capable of protecting its allies and resisting the US-led West. It has also helped him reiterate Moscow’s influence in West Asia where it had been relegated to the position of a bit player vis-à-vis Washington.

Interestingly, Mr Putin had first suggested the deal to Mr Obama at the G-20 summit in St Petersburg (before the Kerry-Lavrov talk) but neither the US President nor British Prime Minister David Cameron, with whom the matter was also discussed, saw any merit in the idea. But clearly, the Russian President was a few steps ahead — which explains why at a Press conference soon after, he referred to a possible peace deal without giving any detail.

As for President Obama, the deal is the desperate face-saver he needed to extricate himself from the ‘Red Line’ narrative in which he had foolishly entwined himself. It also means he no longer has to go to a war he didn’t want to in the first place — that Nobel was beginning to feel heavy.

Finally, for President Assad, the deal allows him to also breathe easy now that the chances of a military intervention have been drastically reduced. It also means he can continue with his daily massacres, as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons again — which works just fine for him.

In fact, the deal has effectively taken the spotlight away from the killings by conventional weapons and focussed it narrowly on chemical weapons. This brings us to the only losers in the deal: The people of Syria, who will continue to be butchered by both the regime and the rebel forces.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 19, 2013)

Maldives Gets a Second Chance at Democracy

By securing the largest vote-share in the September 7 election, deposed President Mohamed Nasheed has re-established his popular credentials. But he still has to complete an uphill trek before he can move back into the Muliaage

Nineteen months after their first democratically elected leader was coerced out of office, on September 7, the people of Maldives returned to the hustings once again to take a second shot at democracy. They came in large numbers — voter turnout was at an impressive 88 per cent — and reinforced their mandate in favour of deposed President Mohamed Nasheed. The charismatic leader who first came to power in 2008 after defeating Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Asia’s longest serving autocract, this time received  an impressive 45.45 per cent of the votes. Former Minister and Mr Gayoom’s half-brother Abdulla Yameen came in second with 25.35 per cent votes, edging past business tycoon Gasim Ibrahim, who secured 24.07 per cent, while incumbent President Mohamed Waheed trailed far behind with 5.13 per cent of votes. However, even though Mr Nasheed has the largest vote-share, it still falls about five per cent (or approximate 10,000 votes) short of the stipulated 50 per cent-plus-one vote minimum needed to take charge. And so, on September 28, Mr Nasheed will face Mr Yameen in an electoral run-off.

This one will be a close call. Unlike in the first round of polling where it was a foregone conclusion that Mr Nasheed, arguably Maldives’s most popular leader, will secure the largest vote bloc, the dynamics change significantly in the second round as the non-Nasheed votes will tend to coalesce in favour of Mr Yameen. In this context that Mr Gasim, supposedly the country’s richest man, may emerge as the king-maker because his vote-share —considered to be the most transferable — could go either way.

If Mr Gasim throws his weight in favour of Mr Nasheed, as he had done back in 2008, the former President will have a strong chance of returning to power. However, Mr Gasim already has a loose (although some say reluctant) alliance of sorts with Mr Yameen. The two reportedly also have some commercial joint ventures planned together as well as share the other’s view of Maldives as a staunchly Islamic nation. If they do come together in the second round, Mr Nasheed will have a tough battle ahead of him as the Yameen-Gasim vote-share combine just about makes it to the 50 per cent mark. In such a situation, Mr Nasheed will absolutely have to win over the five per cent that went to Mr Waheed in the first round.

This is not an entirely unimaginable prospect. Mr Waheed contested as an independent candidate but represented a coalition of two small political outfits alongside two major players, the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and the religious Adhaalath Party. It is unlikely that Mr Nasheed with win over AP supporters but he should be able to convert the significant support base of the DRP — a party that he believes is ideologically most similar to his own MDP.

Ultimately, though, these are all backhand calculations and unless more details emerge about pre-poll alliances it is difficult to make a detailed assessment. As for New Delhi, it would, of course, like to see Mr Nasheed return to power not only because he is an avowed friend of India but also because he is Maldives’s best bet for a stable and prosperous future which again is in India’s interests given the archipelago’s strategic location in the Indian Ocean region. After all, Mr Nasheed was the only presidential candidate who had a clear and detailed policy blueprint for the country.

Having initially bungled its response to the crisis in Male last year, New Delhi has since been able to get its act together. The Indian High Commission in Male did well to give refuge to Mr Nasheed earlier this year.India also worked with the US and other international partners to ensure that Mr Nasheed could fight the election in the first place — a major achievement given that the incumbent regime tried repeatedly to put him behind bars.  

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 13, 2013)

Reckless or feckless in Syria

The US is determined to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons and violating ‘red lines’ through a military intervention. Inadvisable as this may be, even a narrow targeted attack might be effective if well-planned. However, this does not seem to be the case

The debate on foreign military intervention in Syria is as complicated as the situation in Syria is itself, and it is difficult to do justice to the whole horde of issues — political, ideological, economic and strategic — that shape the conversation in this regard. So, let’s strip the discourse to its bare essentials and focus on two key issues here: First, why does President Barack Obama want to intervene in Syria? And second, what exactly does he plan to do?

The Assad regime has been at war with its own people since 2011 when it first used brutal police force to crackdown on peaceful protestors. Since then, President Bashar al-Assad has slowly but steadily intensified his campaign, using artillery fire and scud missiles even, and each time the West has responded with nothing more than a bland condemnatory statement. What changed in recent weeks is the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime — President Obama had designated this as a ‘red line’ — that reportedly killed  almost 1,500 people on August 21.

This flagrant breach of what the White House now likes to believe was an ‘international red line’ has to be punished, the Obama Administration has decided. The problem is that there is still no concrete proof that it was, in fact, the Assad regime that ordered the CW attack. The US intelligence assessment in this regard is flimsy; the UN is still investigating the attack; the French are the only ones with a detailed analysis of Mr Assad’s CW stockpile but still cannot pin the blame firmly on Damascus.

Also, the French and American estimates for the number of dead — 400 and 1,400+ respectively — do not match. The British peg the figure even lower at around 300. This is an important distinction because there were chemical attacks prior to August 21 but none elicited such a response, presumably because the body count was low. This brings us to the fallacy of using chemical weapons attacks as a ‘red line’ in the first place.

First, there is no evidence to suggest that chemical weapons kill more people than conventional weapons. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Second, there is an underlying assumption that there is something especially horrific about using a chemical agent as opposed to a conventional weapon. That does not make much sense. As the chemist James Conant, involved in the United States’ chemical weapons programme, wrote: “I did not see in 1917…  why tearing a man’s guts out by high explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs.” In fact, some scholars have even argued that chemical weapons are more humane than conventional weapons but that is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that the international brouhaha over a CW attack is largely misplaced.

But still, let’s go with the flow and assume that President Assad who has been on a murderous spree for two years has now committed an exceptionally terrible crime by gassing his people, and therefore, deserves to be punished by the US (and the international community) or else it will be setting a dangerous precedent for other despots around the world. This brings us to the second aspect of how exactly President Obama intends to hand out this punishment — and it is here that the situation gets really murky. 

President Obama has proposed targeted, signature strikes — America fires a few missiles and bombs key military assets, thereby, weakening the regime and possibly forcing President Assad’s regime to the negotiating table. On the face of it, this seems like a quick, clean, surgical operation but dig below the surface and there lies a can of worms. First, what do these strikes hope to achieve? Is the US looking only to ‘deter’ further CW attacks or is it looking to significantly ‘degrade’ President Assad’s military capabilities?

If the elimination of chemical weapons-related targets is the only aim of US intervention, this is not a practical option. As military experts Chandler P Atwood and Michael Knights point out, the Assad regime is likely to be taking ‘defensive measures’ such as moving the stockpiles around, making it extremely difficult to target them unless the US can respond with persistent intelligence collection for which it will have to establish full control over Syrian airspace. Also, even after these stockpiles have been discovered, the US cannot bomb the chemical weapons. Boots on the ground will be needed. The US can choose to focus on CW delivery systems but even that will require rocket launchers, missiles and aircraft — in other words, a major military operation.

The other option, as Messers Atwood and Knight note, is to hit President Assad’s military assets such as the Damascus-based Fourth Armoured Division which was supposedly responsible for August 21 attack and the lethal 155th Brigade, led by the President’s brother. The US could also attack symbolic targets such as the Air Force intelligence headquarters and military bases in Dumair, Saiqal, Tiyas and Hama and ‘People’s Army’ units that are financed by Iran and trained by its militant Shia proxy Hezbollah. 

In fact, single targeted strikes can actually be quite effective, as Brigadier General Michael Herzog points out. For instance, this year Israel attacked two weapons shipments intended for Hezbollah and also the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in Damascus that was reportedly involved in the development of biological and chemical weapons. All three were targeted strikes (of the kind that Mr Obama fancies) and they were all successful in achieving Israel’s narrow goal of preventing Hezbollah from receiving weapons. But, the key to that success was careful planning and the element of surprise.

Unfortunately, President Obama does not seem to have planned targets and he has already frittered away the surprise advantage. In fact, he if really wanted to launch targeted strikes, he should have done it months ago when Mr Assad was losing ground and the rebels were advancing. A military intervention at that time could have actually tipped the balance in the Opposition’s favour (although, this is not to say that Syria’s Islamist infested, fractured rebel groups are a welcome alternative to the Assad regime). But the calculus has since changed, especially after Hezbollah threw in its weight in favour of the regime. Today, the Assad regime is in a stronger position and there is no reason for the President to willingly give up power.

There is also the matter of civilian casualties which cannot be ruled out, no matter how surgically precise the strikes, as most military experts acknowledge. Even Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that while the US can restrain its own actions, there are no guarantees for how the Assad regime (and its allies in the region) will retaliate.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 15, 2013)