Calvinball plays out in Egypt

The euphoria over the appointment of Egypt’s first democratically elected President has been dampened by the Army’s efforts to emasculate that high office, prompting speculation of a soft coup. But there’s no clear winner. Just an open playing field and a game without any rules

The world had seen it before. The million-strong crowd, the triumphant flag waving, the sloganeering, the firecrackers and the life-size posters, and the relentless victory dance. The images that were broadcast from Egypt this past Sunday, when the name of that country’s first democratically elected President was announced, were both expectedly and yet ironically similar to the ones that had flickered on our screens 14 months ago when a popular pro-democracy movement led to the ouster of Egypt’s long-serving autocrat. The process of democratic transition that had started then with the resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak, in effect came full circle on Sunday with the appointment of his successor — Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. Expectedly then, the day’s celebrations matched in fervour and tenor the victory pitch of February 2011. But given the fact that Mr Morsi’s high office has already been emasculated by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces — the handful of Army Generals who currently run the country —Sunday’s euphoric revelry over a process that had surely started with a bang but has now been reduced to a whimper seemed rather silly.

SCAF’s sudden diktat came last week just as the counting of votes polled on June 16 and 17 had got underway. Issued in the form of an amendment to the original Constitutional Declaration, it severely limits the powers of the President, denying him not just oversight over the military but also negating his control over the key Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs. Moreover, through the amendment, SCAF has also conveniently accorded to itself sweeping powers over the Constitution drafting process that is yet to begin. And that is not all. Only days before the presidential election began, SCAF nullified a previous election law that disqualified a majority of Egypt’s elected legislators and effectively dismantled Parliament — this time through the Supreme Constitutional Court.

The popular mood was further dampened by the fact that Egypt found itself faced with two unpalatable choices for the post of President. With most of the leading candidates having been thrown out of the race on flimsy grounds in the first round itself, it was the Muslim Brotherhood’s second-choice candidate, Mr Morsi, and the military’s pro-regime candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, who found themselves catapulted to the forefront.

For many Egyptians, this last round polling was not about voting for a leader but against another. On the one hand was Mr Morsi — an unremarkable Muslim Brotherhood functionary barely known outside of his party offices with little political experience. On the other hand was Mr Shafiq — the military-backed, former Air Force commander who had briefly served as Mubarak’s last Prime Minister in the heady days of the ‘revolution’ in 2011. The deeply polarising nature of the presidential run-off was evident in the final votes tally. While Mr Morsi garnered 52 per cent of the votes, Mr Shafiq was snapping at his heels at 48 per cent. It was a close fight that was followed by a nail-biting week of anxiety as SCAF delayed the announcement of the results, leading to speculation of electoral fraud.

After all, the military had been understandably nervous of the Muslim Brotherhood capturing a lion’s share of the Egyptian political space. Little else explains its rash decisions to abolish the democratically elected Parliament where the Islamists held an overwhelming majority of the seats, and soon after clip the wings of the President at a time when there was a very real possibility that a member of the Brotherhood would occupy the high office.

There were also legitimate concerns that the SCAF might fudge the results and install Mr Shafiq as President. But manipulating an election is not that easy — especially not when the numbers have already been leaked and there are too many independent observers. Also, a Shafiq presidency would have earned the military tremendous public wrath that could have led to violence and instability.

For now, it seems like the SCAF chose to play safe and go with Mr Morsi as the President. However, that does not in any way diminish the chances of a showdown between the two parties. Already, a confrontation is brewing with Mr Morsi insisting that he be sworn in by a Parliament that, according to the SCAF, does not even exist. But then again, the Speaker of the House has made clear that he does not consider Parliament to be dissolved and, therefore, will be holding sessions as usual!

The situation remains fluid. The present is still unravelling and it is next to impossible to predict the future. Talks of an ‘Islamist winter’ and a soft coup by the military abound. Many have wondered if Egypt will go back to being a military dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. Others remain more concerned about the kind of governance Mr Morsi will provide. Will he protect Egypt’s Coptic Christians or will he impose shari’ah law that will discriminate against women and religious minorities? Will the Brotherhood form radical alliances with other Islamist groups across the region? Will there be the possibility of war with Israel?

But these are questions for the future. For now, there are more pressing concerns, such as how the new President-elect will even function without a Parliament and a Constitution, or how he will share political space with the military? There is no doubt that both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood need each other for their survival. And while they will do well to learn to live with each other, the judiciary, as the third key player in this situation will also have to act more responsibly. In recent months, it has shown an unending capacity for the imaginative and the ludicrous that has significantly eroded its credibility and rendered it a wild card of sorts.

At this time, anything is possible. There is no definite authoritative figure, no laws, no goals, and no principles — just an open playing field. As a commentator recently observed, the situation in Egypt is akin to a game of Calvinball — the game that has no rules. Introduced by Bill Watterson in his widely popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in this game players make up the rules as they play along. Through the course of the game, players change, goals change, scoring techniques change. To win, the players have to respond quickly, imaginatively and effectively to the ever changing circumstances.

The game sometimes resembles other sports such as football but often turns out to be something entirely different — much like Egypt seems to be in the process of a democratic transition but no one really knows how the ‘revolution’ will actually play out. In the comic strip, a game of Calvinball provides much humour as ball players become spies and spies become double agents with hidden goal posts. The situation in Egypt too would have been rather funny given how power has shifted from Mubarak to the military to Morsi and now may be back to the military. Only, if it had not been so confusing.

(This article was published in the Op-ed section of The Pioneer on June 28, 2012.)

Arming rebels won’t resolve Syrian crisis

President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the violence, but his rivals are no saints

Another Friday, another massacre, another round of international condemnation, and another hundred dead.

That essentially is the sum of much of what happened in Syria this past weekend, and indeed over many such weekends in the last 15 months. On Friday, more than a 100 people were killed as the central Syrian town of Houla and its surrounding villages in Homs Province came under fire. An attack on a regime checkpoint was followed by relentless shelling and firing until armed militants rode into the town early evening and summarily executed residents, most of whom were Sunni Muslims and defectors from the Syrian Army. The dead included a disturbingly high number of children and women.

In the aftermath of Friday’s horrific killing, several Western nations expelled Syrian diplomats from their capitals even as Mr Kofi Annan, the UN-appointed peace envoy, travelled back and forth from Damascus to assess the situation in Houla and may be, just may be, convince President Bashar al-Assad to give up his violent ways. Ultimately, Mr Annan ended his efforts in the case with the unremarkable observation that, after a year of conflict, Syria was at “tipping point”, and then appealed to Mr Assad for “bold steps, now — not tomorrow, but now”. This is hardly the kind of rhetoric that can be expected to bring about a change of heart in Mr Assad. Then, what can bring about that change of heart?

Peaceful negotiation with the stakeholders is perhaps the easiest answer available, but these recent months have shown that at the end of the talk is, well, just that — talk. One diplomatic initiative after the other has failed in Syria, including Mr Annan’s peace plan. The UN may continue to add more peaceniks to the Syrian Team but the fact remains that it will take more than one miracle to change anything at all.

If the manner in which Mr Assad first accepted Mr Annan’s six-point ceasefire plan and then systematically trampled upon its every term and condition is anything to go by, it is time we stop pretending that diplomacy is the way out. Sure, it was an effort worth making — diplomacy has succeeded in the past, most recently in 2008 when Mr Annan himself resolved through peaceful negotiations a violent electoral dispute between warring parties in Kenya — but the time for talking while Mr Assad continues killing is now perhaps over.

Or, is it? When is it ever the right time to invoke the Responsibility to Protect? How do you decide that now, and not three weeks or six months later, is the time to militarily intervene in the affairs of another nation even at the cost of endangering the other’s sovereignty? How do you ensure that your actions today will not be used to justify the illegitimate plans of tomorrow? Finally, then, when do you know that the time has come wherein the risk of inaction will be greater than the risk of action? The July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica was the catalyst that finally compelled Nato to take action and launch a bombing campaign. Will the horror of Houla provoke a similar international effort in Syria? It seems unlikely. So, will be powers-to-be wait till it is too late to make a difference like they did in Sudan or Rwanda?

There are no easy yes-or-no answers here, not with the failure of a similar mission in Libya still looming large. Nato’s carpet bombing campaign of Libya in the summer of 2011, in a supposed bid to assist that country’s rebel groups against Col Muammar Gaddafi, may have helped end the Libyan leader’s tyrannical regime but it has not brought either peace or democracy to the North African nation which now teeters on the brink of anarchy.

As of now, it seems like there are no best — no, not even good — options on the table. Diplomacy has failed and military intervention with a UN mandate is not possible. But then, so is allowing the carnage to continue, and arming the rebels should never have been on the table in the first place. The world must decide which option, of the few that exists, will lead to the least possible damage. Worryingly though, it seems like a covert decision has been made in favour of one of the most damaging options ever — arming the rebels.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that US officials have confirmed that they are seriously looking into the possibility of “vetting” members of the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella group of Syrian rebel fighters that include some military defectors, to decide if they may be “suitable recipients of munitions to fight the Assad Government”. The US already provides non-lethal aid, such as communication devices and medicines, to the Syrian rebels — a move that already makes Washington, DC vulnerable to the same charges of forcing a regime change that it faced during the Libyan campaign. Now, it seems like it is only a step away from actively arming the rebels.

This is hugely problematic but only made worse by reports that some other countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and a few Gulf nations may have already begun the process of arming the rebels.

Indeed, there has been a slew of credible reports that private businessmen in Turkey are smuggling weapons into Syria. Weapons are also being stockpiled in Damascus, in Idlib near the Turkish border and in Zabadani on the Lebanese border, the Washington Post reported. Syrian rebels have been quoted in the international media as saying that the shortage in weapons is no longer as acute as before, possibly because of the millions of dollars in funding from Arabia. They also claim to have contacted weapons dealers in Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia and Azerbaijan, although it remains unclear if they have received any positive responses.

If anything, these reports give credence to the Assad Government’s claims that foreign hands are behind the uprising and that there is a concerted effort by the West to bring about a regime change. It also lays the ground for a wide-ranging ethical debate on the issue. However, what is of far greater concern at the moment is the eventual fall out of the arming of the Syrian rebels.

Kalashshinov and AK-47s in the homes of average Syrians, children playing with automatic pistols, bullet marks on every wall of every building… the world has seen it before. Do we really need another Afghanistan in Syria?

(This article was published in the Op-ed section of The Pioneer on May 31, 2012.)

America reinvents policies to meet new challenges

By scripting the most dramatic shift in its foreign and defence policies since the end of the Cold War, the US prepares to confront a new world order 

When US  President Barack Obama said in a recent interview that, “I made a commitment to change the trajectory of American foreign policy …and I think we have accomplished those principal goals,” his statement was lot more true than popularly acknowledged. Indeed, the new set of ‘defence strategies’ unveiled by his Administration earlier this month marks the most significant shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

In the two decades since, Washing-ton, DC has actively played the role of a global hegemon that has maintained an absolute military superiority over the rest of the world, further strengthened by its economic prowess. Indeed, even after the threat of a communist take-over had been effectively eliminated by the late eighties, the US military was only nominally downsized from its War time proportions.

In the first half of the post-Cold War era, the continued maintenance of such a mammoth defence structure was justified by military engagements in Europe (think of the ‘humanitarian intervention’ of the US-led Nato forces in the Balkan Wars) and in West Asia (a successful Gulf War saw the containment of a belligerent Saddam Hussein). Then, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there emerged a new enemy in the form of Al Qaeda and its network ofjihadi groups. It was, and still is, a stateless, shadowy entity that has nevertheless been portrayed as an evil superpower, somehow akin to communist Russia or Nazi Germany, to once again rationalise the presence of a vast American military. Indeed, as the first US troops landed in Afghanistan, neo-conservatives even declared that this would be the fourth World War (the third being the Cold War), or the ‘Long War’.

A decade later, Mr Obama has now declared that war to be over. Osama bin Laden is dead (although the threat of global jihadists remains, but that is another story), US engagement in Afghanistan is winding down, and for all practical purposes, there are no longer any American boots in Iraq.

But that is not all — the past 10 years have also witnessed the sagging of America’s economic strength. Weighed down by a mounting national debt, the US economy which is yet to fully recover from the global financial meltdown of 2007-2008, can no longer afford a gigantic military — and definitely not one that had supposedly been prepped to fight two wars at the same time. Besides, the possibility of a traditional land war is almost obsolete in a nuclear and globalised 21st century.

It is against this backdrop that the new policy, which seeks to trim the US military and renounce the bipartisan consensus achieved post-1989, must be understood. From performing the traditional role of a hegemon fighting ‘nation-building wars’, Mr Obama’s new doctrine focuses America’s attention on balancing power equations among emerging nations such as India and China in the Asia-Pacific region.

This will be done through a network of regional allies on the front-stage, in diplomatic terms, and through sophisticated secret surveillance, un-manned drones and CIA-style special operations in the back-stage, in military terms. A preview of this kind of warfare is already available in the manner in which the US is carrying out counter-insurgency operations in the AfPak region.

Also, compare this to the far more boots (and weapons) intensive approach of traditional warfare and it naturally explains the smaller, leaner, more agile but technologically advanced military that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talked about at the release of this strategic document at the Pentagon. Finally, the new strategy also fits in with the narrative of fiscal discipline and domestic cost-cutting that has become an American imperative since the economic downturn.

Grounded in realism, the new policy is a classic example of realpolitik and marks a definite break from the quest for imperial hegemony of the neo-conservative years of former President George Bush and his deputy Dick Cheney who foolishly led US troops into an expensive and ineffective ground battle in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the new policy is not without flaws. For instance, if the Obama Administration hopes to contain China’s imperialist tendencies — and make no mistake that that is exactly what the new strategy is all about — then simply positioning ships across the Asia-Pacific from Japan to South Korea and even in far away Australia will not serve any purpose. If anything, this unnecessarily aggressive posturing of the US can only serve to provoke an already jittery China.

Ultimately, Mr Obama’s policy is a reflection of his people’s mood. Americans are tired of foreign wars and now simply want their boys to come back home and not in a body casket, please. There may have been a time when a John F Kennedy could have captured the nation’s imagination by promising that his country would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But those days of a zealous commitment to Americana or the rhetoric of freedom and liberty that surrounds it are long gone. Think of how quickly popular support waned for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though far more American soldiers died in the Vietnam and Korea. No one really bought the fourth World War logic, and they are no less glad that it is now over.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on January 26, 2012).