• Middle East and North Africa
    The Laws of Armed Conflict and Ethics in the Israel-Hamas War
    Play
    As military operations resume in Gaza, panelists analyze the application of the laws of armed conflict, ethical and moral considerations, and the complexity of applying these principles in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.
  • Politics and Government
    War Reporting—Experiences From the Front Lines
    Play
    Three of CFR’s Edward R. Murrow Press Fellows and veteran foreign correspondents discuss their experiences reporting from the front lines, including the dangers of working in conflict zones and the importance of investigative journalism.
  • Bahrain
    Can Bahrain Be Saved?
    Yesterday the government of Bahrain condemned a leading human rights activist, Nabeel Rajab, to five years in prison. His crime: tweeting. Rajab has been in and out of prison for years for such “crimes,” all of which involve the government’s effort to eliminate freedom of speech and stop all criticism of the government. Freedom of speech is supposedly guaranteed by the Bahraini constitution, which also says “No person shall be subjected to physical or mental torture, or inducement, or undignified treatment.” Rajab wrote that there was torture taking place, for which he was prosecuted; he had violated a law against “insulting” a government agency. Nothing Rajab has done would be a crime in any free country. His conviction is tragic for him and his family, but it is also tragic for Bahrain. Since 2011, when protests arose in the context of the Arab Spring, the government has reacted to them with repression. It will not work. Resentment of the royal family, which is Sunni while most Bahrainis are Shia, will only widen among Shia citizens and all citizens who want a free society. The worst fears expressed in 2011 and after—that the repression would create disaffection, which would lead to more repression and then Iranian meddling—have been borne out. Today, there is real Iranian subversion including shipping weapons into Bahrain. Bahrain is in a downward spiral. Whether it can be stopped is not clear, at least to me. The current path will lead to more and more repression, more and more Iranian subversion, and more and more violence. Moving off that path would require courageous national leadership, from the Shia community to be sure but above all, and first, from the royal family. It has been absent. If it remains absent in the months and years ahead, Bahrain’s future will be darker and darker. A joint effort by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE is the only solution I can imagine. Together these three governments have the influence to broker a solution—assuming it is not already too late. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry made an effort in 2011, but that was in essence a private effort and the implementation of its excellent recommendations depended entirely on the royal family’s good intentions. What is needed now is a higher-powered effort that takes into account both the fate of the Fifth Fleet (headquartered in Bahrain) and the likelihood of increasing Iranian subversion and the violence it can produce. Such an effort may fail, but we will not know whether Bahrain can really be saved from increasing repression, subversion, and violence unless and until we try.  

Experts in this Region

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Ed Husain

Senior Fellow

  • Middle East and North Africa
    The Crime of Writing to The New York Times
    You might think that publishing a letter to the editor in The New York Times cannot possibly be a crime. But you probably don’t live in Bahrain. Nabeel Rajab has been in prison since June in Bahrain, facing a sentence of up to 15 years for things he has written criticizing that government’s repressive policies. From prison, he sent a letter to the Times which was published on September 4th and can be found here. Mr. Rajab has exposed human rights abuses in Bahrain and does so again in that letter. For writing the letter he has now been charged with “intentionally broadcasting false news and malicious rumours abroad impairing the prestige of the state.” Nothing could possibly "impair the prestige of the state" as much as this prosecution, and Bahrain’s own repeated human rights violations. Mr. Rajab is trying to repair the prestige of the state by pressing it to act decently. And the part about “intentionally broadcasting false news and malicious rumours" is right out of the Soviet playbook. What is false news, after all? In Soviet days, whatever the Party said was false news; today in Bahrain, it’s whatever the government and the royal family say is false. Criminal laws against publishing "false news" are unfortunately not rare, but they are increasingly being recognized as indefensible violations of freedom of speech and press. To take one example, in Zimbabwe--a dictatorship ruled by Robert Mugabe--a court had the courage in 2014 to strike down the "false news" statute because it "violated the right to freedom of expression and was not reasonably justifiable in a democratic society." Similarly, the High Court in Zambia that same year struck down the "false news" statute there, saying it did “not pass the test of being reasonably justifiable in a democratic society.” Bahrain is moving in the wrong direction. The additional charges against Nabeel Rajab, for writing a letter to The New York Times, show how very far it has traveled away from the decent and lawful society it seemed to be just a few years ago. That’s what is destroying "the prestige of the state."  
  • Middle East and North Africa
    Bahrain Slips Further into Repression
    The Project on Middle East Democracy sums up the week in Bahrain: First, "A Bahraini court ordered the suspension of all activities by al-Wefaq, the island-nation’s largest opposition party. The Justice and Islamic Affairs Ministry, which asked the court to issue the order, said al-Wefaq’s shuttering was needed to "safeguard the security of the kingdom...." Second, "Bahraini authorities arrested prominent activist Nabeel Rajab at his home during the early hours of the morning of Monday, June 13. Rajab is the President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and the Founder of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, and he has reportedly been charged with ’spreading false news.’" Third, "Human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja was forced to flee Bahrain after her recent release from prison, saying that the government told the Danish embassy that if she did not leave the country she would be rearrested and separated from her son indefinitely." Fourth, "Bahrain refused to allow a delegation of human rights activists from attending the 32nd session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) on Monday. The five activists were given travel bans, the largest number of people Bahrain has placed under a travel ban at a single time, and prevented from traveling by passport officers at the Bahrain International Airport." Those are the developments in one week! It is in that context that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein criticized Bahrain and noted that “Repression will not eliminate people’s grievances; it will increase them.” Even Ban ki-Moon criticized these developments, a rare occurrence for a UN Secretary-General. Samantha Power tweeted that this was all "serious backsliding" on human rights, which is true, although it does not appear to affect U.S.-Bahraini relations in any visible way. The Brits are worse: in January the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said that Bahrain "is a country which is travelling in the right direction. It is making significant reform." That was nonsense in January and is even greater nonsense today. And it is dangerous, because the royal family is loading a powder keg. Grievances will grow, as Prince Zeid said, and so will violence, and repression, and more violence. And it is all a wonderful opportunity for Iran to continue and increase its subversion, preying on the real grievances the Bahraini Shia majority face. What is U.S. policy? To speak softly and carry no stick. To tweet about the problem, but not to act. So the danger grows.
  • Human Rights
    “Closing that Internet Up”: The Rise of Cyber Repression
    Brandon Valeriano is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and author of Cyber War versus Cyber Realities on Oxford University Press. Allison Pytlak is a policy and advocacy specialist at Control Arms. Donald Trump calls for “closing that Internet up” due to the rise of Islamic extremism, Hillary Clinton says the same thing, just a bit more diplomatically, asking the great disrupters to go to work disrupting the so-called Islamic State. Given that it is impossible to shut down the Internet in the United States, even if Russian submarines were to cut transatlantic cables, this move by Trump to enter the arena of information security demonstrates one of the most pernicious challenges in our digital era: the rise of cyber repression. Even the New York Times is exploring challenging the First Amendment in the age of digital extremism, which suggests Trump’s ideas are not at all fringe. While the actions of the Islamic State and other malicious actors online pose security problems, especially in their ability help recruit and promote offensive ideologies, the rush to react to this threat may harm civil liberties, or as Trump says “oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.” The great hope of the Internet as a path to digital freedom has quickly given way to the reality of the structural control imposed by states on activists in cyberspace. The danger posed by digital threats is not severe enough to warrant a challenge the freedoms and liberties inherent in Western political ideologies. There has been a precipitous rise in malicious hacking but it is not exhibited between states, rather it is from within them by governments seeking to maintain control over their populations. There is increasing utilization of cyber technology to silence dissent, often in direct contradiction with human rights law. The dramatic rise of digital control by the state is a development that has been relatively overlooked by both mainstream media and the United Nations compared to the concern exhibited for the as of yet mythical cyberwar. The latest Citizen Lab report exposes the efforts of an espionage team named Packrat to silence dissent in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina. The group used malware, phishing and disinformation, even going so far as to threaten an investigator looking into their activities. The scope, funding, and targets suggest this group is either directed or serves as a proxy for state interests. The story of Hacking Team, which made headlines earlier this year, also illustrates the ability of governments to use malicious code to target activists. Based in Italy, Hacking Team is an information technology company that sells intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments, law enforcement agencies, and corporations. While it claims to not sell to governments with poor human rights records, evidence from a counter hack points to the contrary. Hacking Team software was found on the office computers of Mamfakinch, an award-winning Moroccan news website that is critical of the Moroccan government. The Hacking Team’s products have also surfaced in Ethiopia, a country notorious for its repression and strict governmental control over all channels of communications, as well as in Sudan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Digital tools clearly have as much potential for harm as good because governments, with their many resources, can leverage these tools to suppress dissent as described. As well, the ability of social media to facilitate rapid organization or protest, or to share video or photo footage is tremendous but not foolproof. Governments have been known to respond to digitally organized protests with traditional weapons. For example, agents of the Thai government killed dozens of protesters after the Red Shirt uprising, which was coordinated largely via Twitter. There are similar examples from Iran and Belarus. This kind of digital repression may not seem as dire, dramatic, or tragic as other crimes that occur regularly against civilians, but it does constitute a human rights violation. This is largely based in Article 19 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” The question then is, what must be done to help activism flourish and protect civil liberties? The first step should be collect better data to obtain a realistic picture of how and when cyber repression happens. Valeriano and Maness catalog attacks between states but now the focus must shift towards collecting data on domestic attacks perpetrated by states and their proxies. Data collection should start with defining a list of actions that constitute cyber repression, the perpetrator, target, degree of severity, goal of operation, and method of attack. This goes beyond Freedom on the Net’s ranking of countries based on Internet openness or the former OpenNet Initiative’s measuring of information controls, instead we must catalog specific abuses and methods. Once this information is collected, like any human rights abuse, action can be taken. Parties cannot be credibly named and shamed without evidence. Repression by digital means deserves attention and action. Our future is not one of constant cyber war between countries, tracing dots as they bounce around the digital map between countries, but rather one of digital violence and repression directed at both internal and external enemies. To address digital repression, we first need better awareness of the extent of the problem, followed by actions seeking to end the harm. This is a call for a control over the digital arms of repressive regimes, and the need to construct a digital society that even Russia, China, and the United States could agree to.
  • Syria
    The Middle East Is in for a Tumultuous 2016
    This article was originally published here on Fortune.com on Wednesday, January 6, 2016.   Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia cut off diplomatic ties with Iran after authorities executed a popular Shiite cleric. Anyone watching this meltdown unfold has every reason to think of worse-case scenarios, as it will only deepen the Middle East’s widening sectarian divide, intensify the region’s multiple conflicts, and set back efforts to defeat the Islamic State and end the bloodshed in Syria.   For years, the Middle East has been defined by political instability, and the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and subsequent attack on the Saudi embassy in Teheran is only the most recent episode in a longstanding rivalry between the two powers dominating opposite shores of the Gulf — the world’s most important oil chokehold through which 30% of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows. Each claims to be the face of the true and authentic variant of Islam. Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s two leading holy places in Mecca and Medina, sees in the Islamic Republic of Iran a revolutionary Shiite Persian power expanding its reach into the Sunni Arab heartland. Having seen Tehran spread its influence into Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, the Saudis, led by a new and more activist king, are sending a strong message to the world that it will not sit by passively. The most immediate casualty of intensified Saudi-Iranian tensions will be the recently launched U.S.-led diplomatic effort to end the horrific Syrian war that has already claimed more than 250,000 dead. Iranian forces are fighting and dying in Syria to preserve president Bashar al Assad’s regime, while Saudi Arabia is actively backing rebels seeking to topple the dictator. Just getting the Iranian and Saudi foreign ministers into the same room last month was touted as a major accomplishment by Secretary of State John Kerry. While Iran and Saudi Arabia profess a desire to cooperate diplomatically, both countries are now sure to double down their support for the opposing sides in Syria’s war. The Syrian opposition, meanwhile, has urged all Arab countries to break relations with Tehran. A second casualty of Iran’s strained relations with Saudi Arabia is likely to be the regional effort to combat the so-called Islamic State, or Daesh, that currently occupies a large swath of territory across Iraq and Syria. While the United States and Europe, reeling from Islamist terrorism, see defeating Daesh as the paramount objective in the Middle East, this sense of priority is not shared by many Arab allies within the anti-Daesh coalition. That a number of Gulf states have followed Saudi Arabia’s lead and suspended relations with Tehran reflects the fact that they see Shiite Iran, not the Sunni Islamists in Daesh, as their paramount enemy.   Continue reading on Fortune.com  
  • Middle East and North Africa
    Guess Who’s Coming to (the GCC) Dinner?
    On May 13 and 14, President Obama will be hosting a summit meeting with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation. The members nations are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. The problem is, it may not exactly be a "summit" meeting at all. Sultan Qaboos of Oman has been ill, as is Sheik Khalifa, president of the UAE. Two down. I imagine the king of Bahrain, King Hamad, will attend, and so will the young Emir of Qatar, Sheik Tamim. I’d also bet on the Emir of Kuwait, Sheik Sabah, but it may be 51/49. He is 85, and a quick trip to the United States cannot be very appealing. If the Saudi king skips this meeting, Sabah may as well. The key question is whether Saudi Arabia’s new King Salman will attend. As with Emir Sabah, age is a consideration: Salman is 79. But there is more: he became king in January and has not been to the United States in that capacity. Normally, such a visit would be a very big deal: it would be an official or even a state visit, with great fanfare. Does he want to visit the United States for the first time as king in this way-- merely as one of a group? And merely as one of a group that will for the UAE and Oman, and perhaps others,  not consist of heads of state? So the "summit" might just have two heads of state, Qatar and Bahrain-- and that’s a problem in itself. After all, Qatar has been a foreign policy problem for the United States (and its GCC partners) for a decade or more, backing extremist Islamist groups that we oppose (like the Muslim Brotherhood, or radical groups in Libya and Mali). And in Bahrain there is a significant human rights problem, with the Sunni monarch crushing the political hopes the Shia majority population. The president should not have announced the "summit" until he had the agreement of the Kuwaiti and Saudi to attend. If they said no, he should have called a meeting of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, perhaps hosted by hosted jointly by Ashton Carter and John Kerry, with himself as the honored guest. Instead, he may host a dinner for GCC heads of state and get only the two of them he would probably least like to have. Bad planning, bad staff work, if it turns out that way.  
  • Middle East and North Africa
    Bahrain: "Insulting a Public Institution" Means Prison
    Americans who complain about the post office, or more seriously the police, or (God forbid) whoever happens to be president do not expect to be jailed, but Bahrainis do. This week a leader of the (peaceful) opposition and founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Nabeel Rajab, was sentenced to six months for the crime of "insulting a public institution." His criminal act was publishing a tweet last September that said, in full, this: many #Bahrain men who joined #terrorism & #ISIS came from security institutions and those institutions were the first ideological incubator Rajab’s tweet was in part a response to a Global Voices article that noted a tweet by a Sunni Muslim military officer Mohamed Albinali saying "I Mohamed Isa Albinali, a lieutenant in Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior declare my defection from this regime since over four months." More broadly, one recent HuffPo article stated that "members of the state security apparatus have expressed sympathy with Daesh and other Sunni extremist groups." An analysis last fall noted that "books printed and distributed by the Bahraini Army itself have promoted the takfiri thought that underpins IS and other extremist groups." Presumably, if the authors of those last two pieces were in Bahrain they too would be arrested for "insulting a public institution." The Bahraini royal family is pursuing a path that cannot lead anywhere good. Not only is the government narrowing the rights of Bahraini citizens, it is watching as Bahraini Sunnis become radicalized and attracted by violent Islamist groups. The royal family’s dangerous game, which is to deepen the fissures among Bahrainis along Sunni vs. Shi’a lines, lends itself to Sunni extremists--whom the government does too little to combat. The HuffPo article explains the risks: The monarchy of Bahrain -- led by the Al Khalifa family, which has ruled the island nation for more than 200 years -- faces a unique threat from Daesh. Last September, Daesh released a propaganda video containing four Bahraini members of the group walking on a desert hill, carrying Kalashnikovs, and calling on Bahraini Sunnis to abandon loyalty to the monarchy and pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi. The video, which was released in response to Manama’s decision to join the U.S.-led bombing campaign against Daesh in Syria, accused the Al Khalifa family of having "inserted themselves as gods next to Allah" by not imposing Sharia law in Bahrain. And if a Bahraini comments on any of this and worries about it, he is arrested for "insulting a public institution." Instead of jailing Rajab, the Sunni royal family ought to realize that all he wants is free speech and a vote. The Sunni extremists want the royals in exile or dead.    
  • Saudi Arabia
    Weekend Reading: After Sultan Qaboos, Bahrain Goes To The Polls, and Saudi Arabia’s Elites
    Georgia Travers considers the implications of rumors about Sultan Qaboos’ health on Omani political society. Faten Bushehri assesses the state of Bahrain on the eve of its parliamentary elections. Roberto Iannuzzi argues that the dangers facing Saudi Arabia’s political elite are their own doing.
  • Middle East and North Africa
    Bahrain: Jail for Insulting the Ministry of Interior
    A number of states still imprison people for offending the head of state. When Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was president of Egypt, he did it all the time. As I’ve written here before, Bahrain still jails people for insulting the king. Such laws have an ancient provenance: many countries jailed people for insulting the monarch--at least until the twentieth century. The laws remain on the books in several monarchies and there was a prosecution in Spain as recently as 2007. (The crime was a cartoon on a magazine cover portraying the Crown Prince--now King--Felipe and his wife having sexual intercourse, and the punishment for each of the two cartoonists was a fine of three thousand Euros.) But there is a related and in a way even more grotesque version still extant in communist countries and a few others: jail for insulting some institution like the communist party, or the army, or "the nation." In Bahrain, you can be jailed for insulting the Ministry of the Interior. That’s not a misprint, and this week the human rights activist Nabeel Rajab returned home from abroad (after having served a two year prison sentence already) and was hauled in by the police immediately. His crime was this tweet: many #Bahrain men who joined #terrorism & #ISIS came from security institutions and those institutions were the first ideological incubator His lawyer stated that "The crime which they are alleging he committed is offending or insulting the MOI. This crime is punishable by a fine and also punishable by a prison sentence that could go up to three years." According to Reuters, "Bahrain’s Public Prosecution confirmed it had charged a person with publicly insulting a government institution on social media and had detained him for questioning...." For most Americans this is ludicrous and Kafkaesque. Every member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee would be in jail now if the United States had similar laws, for every one of them insulted the Secret Service at their hearing this week. Americans have had a great time insulting government institutions right from the start. One recalls Mark Twain’s remark made over a century ago that "There is no native criminal class except Congress" and "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." In Bahrain he’d be a goner. No government can legislate respect for government institutions, and Bahrain will fail here. The Ministry of Interior will be respected when it respects the rights of citizens. Jailing citizens who comment on the performance of their government is backward, repressive, and self-defeating.      
  • Saudi Arabia
    How Personal Politics Drive Conflict in the Gulf
    David Roberts, lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, based at the Joaan Bin Jassim Staff College in Qatar, offers expert insight into the recent tensions among the major GCC states. “I love all the countries of the Gulf, and they all love me.” With this less than subtle statement, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the vocal Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood scholar tried to do his part to repair regional relations in the Gulf that have badly frayed in recent weeks. Long-brewing discontent erupted in early March with the unprecedented withdrawal of the Saudi, Emirati, and Bahraini ambassadors from Qatar. Subsequent mediation from Kuwait’s Emir has led the protagonists to the cusp of a modus vivendi, and a vague document has been agreed upon. But core differences remain. Qatar is alone in the region in providing financial, material, and rhetorical support for popular governance around the Middle East. It can do this because its domestic security is strong and, without internal restrictions to speak of such as a strong Parliament, its elite is unusually unconstrained and capable of pursuing unusual foreign policy tangents such as assiduously supporting the new movements in the wake of the Arab Spring. Such aid, which has been frequently channeled through Brotherhood connections, resonated favorably across much of the region. This allowed Qatar to play an important role in emerging popular revolts, keeping the autocratic monarchy with no meaningful elections on the right side of wider public opinion, while also laying the foundations for new, potentially close regional relations. Qatar’s Gulf neighbors, however, without as pliant a domestic context and driven by the intention of thwarting new Islamist actors, seek the firm reinstatement of the regional status quo ante. In November 2013, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah presented Qatar’s new, 33-year-old Emir – a man one-third his age – with a document demanding a total reorientation of Qatar’s foreign policy under the guise of promoting regional security. In the face of conflicting interests between Saudi and Qatar, this was Abdullah’s attempt to cow Qatar and get its renegade regional foreign policy under control; something he had tried but failed to do for decades with Tamim’s father, Hamad. Tamim demurred, but  Abdullah was nevertheless led to believe that the Emir had acquiesced to the Saudi leader’s way of thinking. Yet Qatar’s rhetorical support of the Brotherhood continued and Qaradawi stoked ire across the region in early 2014. In January he accused Saudi Arabia’s leaders of not believing in sharia law and he also declared that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has “always been against Islamic rule” prompting its foreign ministry to summon the Qatari ambassador to explain the lack of an official denunciation or apology. In March of this year, Qatari representatives facilitated the release of thirteen Greek Orthodox nuns held in Syria since in December 2012 with – according to some reports – a ransom of $67 million. From the Saudi perspective this was a clear example of Qatar adversely intervening in the conflict and further fermenting a petri dish in which jihadi groups grow, prosper, and strengthen. Saudi authorities also see Qatar fermenting similar problems in Saudi’s own backyard in Yemen where Doha stands accused of channeling its support through the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Al Islah party. Despite their own material and financial support for suspect groups in such conflicts, Riyadh clearly believes that Qatari actions encourage jihadism, which represents a threat to Saudi security. Given the bitter Saudi experience with domestic terrorism in the mid-2000s and its large, relatively porous borders with Yemen and Iraq, fears are growing in the Saudi elite of the impact or ‘blowback’ of returning, more radicalized, and battle-tested jihadis. This is the reason that the remit of Minister of the Interior Muhammed bin Nayef has recently been extended to cover Syria and Yemen and why the Saudi leadership issued a decree in February making it illegal for their citizens to fight in regional conflicts. The withdrawal of the ambassadors from Doha had little practical effect. Gulf diplomacy is conducted at a much higher level, but it was a public and unprecedented rebuke. Leaks to the press about the potential Saudi escalation including the cancellation of an impending airline deal by Qatar Airways in Saudi Arabia or potentially closing the land border to Qatar, added to a sense of near naked extortion. The nature of the mooted compromise agreement that the Kuwaitis hammered out does not augur well for long-term stability. The agreement is thought to demand that Qatar curtails funding for a range of media organizations in the Middle East that are critical of the policies of the Gulf States; expels Brotherhood members currently living in Doha; halts its support of the Brotherhood and the Houthis in Yemen; and stops naturalizing Gulf citizens fleeing states as opposition members or Islamists. Though Qatar has, according to reports, now agreed to implement these statutes, it is difficult to see how Doha could possibly do so without fundamentally shifting its foreign policy, something it is most unlikely to do. Since the late 1950s Qatar has provided various kinds of support for the Brotherhood. Even without a meaningful religiously based commonality – Qatar being theoretically closer, ironically, to the Saudi interpretation of Islam – Qatar often found Brotherhood members both available and sufficiently qualified to staff its emerging bureaucracies. This filled a basic need, while also allowing the Qataris to diversify away any existing dependency on Saudi Arabia in such matters. The Brothers, who settled in Qatar over the decades, whether notable ideologues like Qaradawi or those with the loosest of affiliation to the group, found Doha to be a safe and secure location. These relationships came into their own during the Arab Spring, when their potential for influence increased, for a time at least. Though the Brotherhood is once more deeply repressed across much of the region and should never be seen as a group in “Qatar’s pocket,” there is an unusually deep connection that has been cultivated over decades. Qatar enjoys this relationship because neither the Brotherhood nor any similar groups poses a challenge to the country. Indeed, the local Brotherhood branch disbanded itself in 1999. Additionally, Qatari society is so small and close-knit, and the socioeconomic bargain so strong, that the ruling elites feel entirely and understandably comfortable supporting a group that offers an alternative arrangement of government. Saudi Arabia, however, does face a challenge from the Brothers in two ways. Firstly, the Brotherhood offers a competing form of Islamic government, one that was realized for a time in Egypt and that directly challenges Saudi Arabia as the beacon of Islamic governance. Secondly, Saudi Arabia faces politicized Islam as an oppositional force: Discord throughout the Kingdom could be channeled by the Brotherhood and used to confront the royal family. The UAE has similar fears, stemming from the disparities in wealth between Abu Dhabi and Dubai and the northern Emirates. The government also insists that it has rooted out dozens of Brothers who were planning to disrupt the status quo. Equally, the UAE’s de facto leader, Mohammad bin Zayed, is known to have a deep distrust and dislike for the group that directly shapes the state’s policy. Given that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have recently labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, there is no turning back the clock; their antipathy is now institutionalized state policy. In the aftermath of the ambassadorial withdrawal, dozens of Qataris changed their Twitter profile pictures to photos of the Emir.  Qataris - even those who do not support the Brotherhood – were clearly signaling that they would not be  bullied into changing their policy. So while Qatar could theoretically change tack and join the bandwagon, such an about-face would be seen as a capitulation and would be received poorly back in Doha. Also, aside from the legacy of the policy toward the Brotherhood in Qatar, if there has been a central theme in the country’s foreign policy in the last twenty-five years it has been one of unambiguously asserting Qatar’s independence from Saudi Arabia. Reasonable accommodation has been made in the past, such as in 2008 when Qatar controlled to a greater degree Al Jazeera coverage of Saudi Arabia to ensure the return of the Saudi ambassador to Doha after a six year absence, but the current proposals seek strategic change. Part of the mooted accord attempting to resolve this latest crisis hints that once more Al Jazeera’s coverage might be on the table and Qaradawi is, for the time being at least, cooperating by toning down his rhetoric. But without precisely the kind of meaningful change that Qatar cannot undertake, relations seem set for an extended cold snap, punctuated by personally-led spurts of anger, potentially peripatetically lurching relations from one mini-crisis to the next.
  • Middle East and North Africa
    GCC Nations: Protections and Risks
    With the exception of Yemen, the member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council range from prosperous to extremely rich—but they are also vulnerable to security threats from terrorists and from Iran. The gathering in Syria of perhaps 25,000 jihadis, the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and Iranian subversion are the major perils they face, but the risks associated with such challenges are magnified when their major outside ally, the United States, appears determined to reduce its role in the region. The GCC states have reacted to these risks by increasing their military budgets, and this week’s news includes this story from the newspaper The National in the UAE: “Saudi Arabia becomes world’s fourth biggest military spender” after the United States, China, and Russia in 2013. Saudi expenditures now reach $67 billion, the story says. The UAE is now 15th in global expenditures on defense, at an estimated $19 billion, according to the source of all these numbers, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But this week the GCC states took another step: they appear to have invited Jordan and Morocco to send troops to help defend them. According to a Moroccan newspaper report carried in Defense News, the GCC envisions up to 300,000 troops, in exchange for which their governments will be given additional foreign aid. This is not at all unprecedented, and there are two explanations for it: the perceived quality of their troops, especially those of Jordan, and their own population levels. After all, Qatar has only about 225,000 citizens; the rest of its 2 million inhabitants are foreign workers. The UAE has perhaps 900,000 citizens among its 6 million inhabitants. These are small bases upon which to build capable militaries. Moreover, the practice of importing foreign workers to do jobs the local citizens cannot or will not do is well established. It works in commerce, so why not military affairs? And given that any Jordanian or Moroccan soldiers will speak Arabic and be Muslims, their presence may not present difficult cultural clashes. Because they will not be from any one of the GCC nations, they may help form a unified defense force that can serve the GCC governments without arousing the tensions among them that could result from having a neighbor’s soldiers on your territory. Yet there are risks that the GCC governments would do well to consider. In Bahrain, the use of foreign personnel to repress domestic political protests has aroused great resentment. In part, this was because the protesters are Shia and the imported policemen are Sunni, as are the government and royal family of Bahrain. Here is a VOA story from 2011: According to analysts and Bahraini human rights activists, Bahrain’s government has been recruiting former soldiers and policemen from Pakistan at a steady rate to bolster the security forces. Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who has extensive experience in South Asia, says Bahrain has been recruiting Pakistani veterans for decades.  But he says the eruption of the pro-democracy demonstrations in the Gulf state in March has sparked a sharp increase in the recruiting. "This winter, when the very serious demonstrations began and it looked like the regime might even be toppled at a certain point, their hiring of mercenaries went up substantially," said Riedel. "And they began sending out basically want ads in major Pakistani newspapers advertising well-paying jobs in the Bahraini police and the Bahraini National Guard for any experienced soldier or policeman in Pakistan." Using foreign troops and policemen to control citizens who are protesting human rights violations and political repression is a formula for trouble. In any country this will stoke nationalism and resentment. Riedel’s term “mercenaries” is tough, but warranted. The GCC leaders would be smarter to use any foreign troops exclusively as soldiers present to help defend member states against foreign aggression or subversion. This could include defending borders and critical infrastructure targets, for example, but should not include police functions resulting from tensions between citizens and their governments. Using these foreign security officers as police would be a dangerous move, to be avoided at all costs.
  • Iran
    Iran Continues Subversion Despite the Nuclear Negotiations
    The Obama administration is fighting strongly to prevent Congress from adopting new sanctions legislation that would go into effect one year from now if, and only if, the nuclear negotiations fail or Iran cheats on its commitments. It seems that adopting such legislation would anger the Iranian regime, and would be contrary to the spirit of the talks. Or something like that. But while we are told to walk on eggshells lest we offend the delicate Iranians, they continue to subvert their neighbors. Not for them this idea that, because there are talks, they should stop shipping arms. Syria is the obvious case, but now we have a new one: Bahrain.  This week Bahraini authorities discovered "plastic explosives, detonators, bombs, automatic rifles and ammunition" which "were found in a warehouse and onboard a boat intercepted as it was heading to the country." To be more precise, Gulf News reported that Iranian-made explosives, Syrian bomb detonators, Kalashnikovs, C-4 explosives, Claymores, hand grenades, a PK machine gun, circuit boards for use in bomb making, armour-piercing explosives, TNT and a raft of other materials used to manufacture bombs were discovered. Is this just propaganda from the Government of Bahrain? No; I’ve checked with US authorities and these reports are accurate. This is of course very worrying for Bahrain; an Iranian campaign of subversion and terrorism could turn the tiny country into a war zone. I’ve written on this site many times about the need for progress in negotiations between the royal family and the majority-Shia population (most recently here), but obviously the Iranian subversion is not an effort to promote peace and democracy in Bahrain. It is among other things an effort to tell the Gulf Arab states that Iran can make their lives miserable if they continue to oppose its policies. It is striking that at the very moment when the Obama administration is pleading with Congress to be very careful in its behavior, the Iranian regime has no fears and no hesitation to engage in this subversion. They must have calculated that the Obama administration is so committed to these nuclear talks, and so committed to the "Rouhani narrative" --that Rouhani is a moderate and we must help him succeed-- that nothing they do will affect administration policy. Sadly, and dangerously, they appear to be right. Not these arms shipments to Bahrain, nor shipments early last year to Yemen, nor the famous plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. have had the slightest impact on administration policy. This helps explain why the Arabs are so nervous: they see the United States hell-bent on a nuclear deal and willing to ignore everything else the Iranian regime is doing. It’s an analogue to Obama policy in Syria, where we have embraced a deal on chemical weapons that leaves Assad free to murder as many people as he likes as long as he does not use that one method. For a couple of years after the protests began in Bahrain, Iran limited itself to broadcasting nasty material in Arabic, and did not try to subvert the country. U.S. officials repeatedly told me we simply had no evidence of armed subversion. Well, now we do. What will the American reaction be? Nothing-- you see, this is a delicate moment and we don’t want to upset the nuclear talks. One can only imagine the satisfied laughter such a position causes in Tehran. And the fear it engenders in capitals like Manama, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi.