Ed Webb's List: democratization_WoT

• maybe America can win the war on terrorism without winning the war in Afghanistan

• Pipes has his model, and he’s sticking to it. He needn’t dismiss evidence inconsistent with it, because he can’t really see the evidence to begin with.

   

  This same tendency may now be impeding America’s ability to conduct the war on terrorism wisely.
• Pipes isn’t wrong to say that there is a doctrine of offensive jihad — he’s just wrong about how it has played out historically and how it plays it out today.) But the reason people accept these arguments so uncritically is that they have a fear of Islamic radicalism that dwarfs the actual threat.
• It’s only natural to attribute to your enemy more cohesion and menace than is in order. We used to do this with communism, and now we do it with radical Islam — and radical Muslims, for their part, do it with us. It’s a temptation we all have to fight. Maybe if we fought it as hard as we fight other enemies, we’d have fewer of them.

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• Had Dr. Hasan become "an Islamist extremist"? It sure looks that way. But was the horrific slaughter he carried out intended to "intimidate or coerce" anyone? We've heard no evidence to that effect. These terrible killings may have just been an expression of inchoate rage. And if we don't know whether coercion or intimidation was the goal, than we certainly don't know if it was done "for political purposes."
• If we learn that Malik Hasan left a note saying "anybody who serves in the US Armed Forces must know they will face retribution," we'll know that he is a terrorist. He will have committed his murders in order to intimidate or coerce. But right now we don't have any evidence that suggests Hasan is any different than the civilian who killed 23 people at a cafeteria right down the road from Ft. Hood, shouting "This is what Central Texas did to me!"
• Christian extremist Scott Roeder's act of murder was terrorism, too, because he wants doctors to stop performing abortions. (He and others like him have nearly achieved their goal, too, which makes it pretty effective terror.)
• The Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people in 1946, was also an indisputable act of terrorism, designed to intimidate occupying British personnel and encourage their withdrawal from Palestine. The Irgun's behavior provoked the World Zionist Congress to condemn "the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare," much as mainstream Muslim groups have repeatedly condemned Al Qaeda.
• As Robert Pape's data analysis showed in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, even suicide bombers are more likely to be driven by powerlessness than religion.
• If we had applied Lieberman-like logic after the Knoxville shooting we would have started profiling anybody carrying a book by Hannity or O'Reilly. (I can hear some of you saying "Good idea!" Knock it off, guys - this is America.)
• The Lieberman definition of terrorism would have us squander our investigative resources by pursuing a lot of Muslims rather than a lot of potential terrorists.
• I don't object to the Joe Liebermans of the world because they're conservative. I object to them because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Their goal is indiscriminate military aggression toward the Muslim world, not effective security for the United States. They seem to believe that comments like these build a case for that agenda and prove that they can keep us safer than those now in power.

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• Prominent women and tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province delivered the same hostile message that she'd heard the two preceding days from students and journalists: Pakistanis aren't ready to endorse American friendship despite an eight-year-old anti-terrorism alliance between the countries and a multi-billion-dollar new U.S. aid package.
• "We are fighting a war that is imposed on us. It's not our war. It is your war," journalist Asma Shirazi told Clinton during the women's meeting. "You had one 9-11. We are having daily 9-11s in Pakistan."
• "The problem is that we want American dollars but we, as a country, hate Americans," Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, told McClatchy. "We're not perfect, but we want the Americans to be perfect."
• Islamabad routinely protests the strikes, even though the Pakistani military secretly co-operates with them. Pakistani officials are unwilling to explain the rationale; the government here rarely defends the American relationship.

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• Terrorism, in some of its forms, may be a campaign of war—but it manifests itself in criminal acts. And while the military has a role in combating terrorist organizations (see the war in Afghanistan, the drone attacks on al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan, etc.), the acts are often best pre-empted, foiled, and punished by the routine procedures of a well-trained police force and intelligence organizations.
• a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—"the natural proprietors of the street"—provide "eyes upon the street."
• Research project for a sociologist: Have terrorist attacks in Western cities taken place more often, or less often, in areas with lots of street vendors?
• the use—and popularity—of public security cameras will certainly get a boost.
• These cameras are probably permanent fixtures in American cities. And city dwellers (as well as tourists) may have come to accept that privacy cannot be presumed when they're out on public streets.

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• Al-Qaeda is not really active in Afghanistan anymore, and it is not equivalent with the Taliban (either the Afghan or Pakistani variants).  Al-Qaeda Central still matters, but the decentralized network and ideological narrative around the world no longer depends on it.   Nothing the U.S. does or does not do in Afghanistan will defeat al-Qaeda -- the failure of that movement will happen for its own reasons, if it happens (as it already largely has in the Arab world).
   
   The moment where Obama recognized this reality was both reassuring and terrifying:  when he mentioned Somalia and Yemen.  He understands that Afghanistan is not the only, or even the primary, location where those motivated by al-Qaeda's ideas can operate.  But  if the next move is to bring  governance and stability, and counter-terrorism and COIN, to every ungoverned space on Earth -- or even every Muslim-majority ungoverned space on Earth -- then we are truly facing bankruptcy.  Intellectually, financially, militarily, and politically.   We can't afford to do this in Afghanistan. We certainly can't afford to do it in Somalia and Yemen... even if we should, which I strongly doubt.
• I haven't heard anybody yet say that they believed that Obama would really start drawing down in June 2011, no matter what he says.  And yet the strategy depends upon that commitment being credible, because that is what is supposed to generate the urgency for local actors to change.
• the best way for skeptics such as myself to help this strategy to succeed is to keep a sharp focus on the proposed mechanisms of change, demanding evidence that they are actually happening, and to hold the administration to its pledges to maintaining a clear time horizon and to avoiding the iron logic of serial escalations of a failing enterprise.
• Generating domestic pressure to make his commitments on a time horizon and this not becoming an endless series of futile escalations credible will be one of the most important things which Obama's skeptical supporters can do over the next year.

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• internet freedom program focused on Iran is called the Near East Regional Democracy (NERD). Bureaucrats have all the fun. 

• More than $180 million in U.S. foreign aid to promote democracy in Egypt over the past four years has produced few measurable results, in part because the Egyptian government has stymied the effort, a newly released government audit says.

   

  The "impact of (American-funded) democracy and governance programs was unnoticeable"
• after USAID spent $618,000 to train 2,100 poll watchers in 2007 local elections, most were denied access to the polling places.

• In this issue, we consider three democracies and their relationship to Muslim minority communities.

  
     

  Martha C. Nussbaum examines how the stereotype of the “Muslim terrorist” is further marginalizing Muslim liberals in India

    

  John R. Bowen probes how the emergence of sharia tribunals serving a Muslim minority will affect English law and women

    

  David Mikhail on what the experience of Shakir Baloch, a Muslim moderate detained after 9/11, means for the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world 

• A reconstituted Somalia would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world's most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of sharia law. 

   

   Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the region. Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League member, sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The African Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade separatist movements that if they just fight hard enough, they'll eventually get their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by pointing out that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as surely as Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks whether peaceful and responsible democracy isn't something worth incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia, Somaliland's closest regional ally, hasn't bestowed recognition, and there is no sign it intends to. 

• Globally, one in 10 Internet users is a Muslim living in a populous Muslim community.

   

  Often young and digitally savvy, these users spread information independently of governments and beyond manipulation by cultural and religious elites.

   

  The researchers found that day-to-day civic discourse, not cyber terrorism, is the most important political aspect of the Internet in Muslim countries, and that the Internet is helping societies get better at running elections, providing civic services and exposing corruption.

   

  Researching their topic, Howard and his team determined that "The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" would be the first book to move beyond potential and hypothetical relationships between the spread of communication technology, such as mobile phones and the Internet, and empirical evidence about democratic outcomes.

• It is widely accepted among those working in, or on, international organisations, from the UN to the EU, UNDP, NATO or the World Bank, that statebuilding offers a way out of contemporary conflicts around the world: local, civil, regional and international conflicts, as well as complex emergencies, and for developmental issues. Most policymakers, officials, scholars and commentators involved think that they are applying proven knowledge unbiased by cultural or historical proclivities to the conflicts of others. This is not the case.
• The broader idea has been that liberal democratic and market reform will provide for regional stability, leading to state stability and individual prosperity. Underlying all of this is the idea that individuals should be enabled to develop a social contract with their state and with international peacebuilders. Instead - in an effort to make local elites reform quickly, particularly in the process of marketisation and economic structural adjustment - those very international peacebuilders have often ended up removing or postponing the democratic and human rights that citizens so desired, and which legitimated international intervention in the first place. A peace dividend has only emerged for political and economic elites: the vast bulk of populations in these many countries have failed to see much benefit from trickle-down economics, or indeed from democracy so far.
• this liberal peace is itself in crisis now
• What began as a humanitarian project has turned into an insidious form of conversion and riot control which has had many casualties. It has been profoundly anti-democratic in many cases, including in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From the ground, for many of its recipients, the various iterations of this liberal peace project have taken on a colonial appearance. It has become illiberal
• local actors are reframing what they require from a viable, just, and durable peace, often quietly and in the margins, drawing on the liberal peace as well as their own customs and interests.
• Talk of ‘human security’, ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘do no harm doctrines’ and ‘local ownership’ seems very empty from the perspective of most of the peoples these concepts have been visited upon. This in turn has often elicited from subject communities a 'post-colonial response', criticising peace interventions as self-interested, imperialistic, orientalist, and focusing on the interveners' interests rather than local interests. A local (transnational and transversal) attempt is under way to reclaim political agency and autonomy from the new post-Cold War 'civilising mission', which has over the last twenty years, shown itself unable to provide for basic needs, rights, security (state or human) at levels local actors expect, or to respect or understand local differences and non-liberal, and even non-state patterns of politics. Non-liberal and non-western forms of politics, economics, society, and custom, are clamouring for discursive and material space in many post-conflict zones, with mixed implications for sustainability and for the purpose of achieving a normatively (to liberals at least) and contextually acceptable, locally sustainable peace.
• In some cases, as in Kosovo and Timor Leste this has led to a modified form of state emerging, heavily influenced by both liberal norms and local customs, practices, identities, and national agendas. Very difficult issues arise here for 'international planners' of peace and world order, not least in how they respond to such confrontations between very different political systems, customs, and agendas. But, it is also the case that synergies may arise, where these are sensitively handled and properly understood.
• peace requires well-being via human needs stemming from rights defined by their contexts, (where context may mean local, customary, state, market, regional or international, not merely the 'local' it is often taken to mean). These contexts are of course connected to the ambit of liberal state and international institutions, but they are not defined by them. As a result, millions of people around the world do not have adequate rights or needs provision, nor proper access to representation, despite the best intentions of liberal peacebuilders.
• To achieve this the ethically and methodologically dubious privatisation of security and peacebuilding and its connection to neoliberal marketisation strategies in the context of a classically sovereign state should be abandoned. The privatisation of peacebuilding means that no accountability is possible until after a specific development project has failed, and only then by refusing funding often to those who need it most. Such strategies have attracted to this sector a dangerous fringe of arrogant bureaucrats, 'ambulance chasers' and 'cowboys' rather than imbuing peacebuilding with the dynamics of grounded reconciliation.
• democracy is rarely resisted other than by the most extreme of actors, but it is often criticized for being distant in outcome to local communities.
• At the moment the impulse appears to be to illiberalise, to postpone democracy, to open markets further, and to depoliticise because a lack of local agency is seen to be the cause of these failures, rather than faulty international analytic and policy approaches and mistaken idealism.

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• Monday, December 20, 2004
• Each week in Baghdad, sermons to the faithful offer a tale of two Fridays. Both sermons -- one Sunni, the other Shiite -- dwell on the issues that color Baghdad's weary life: the insurgency, elections planned for next month and the U.S. military presence. But the messages are so diametrically opposed as to speak to two realities and two futures for the country.
• Elections are subjugation at the Sunni sermon, liberation at the Shiite one
• row after row of literature: a book on jihad by a renowned Arab fighter in Afghanistan in the 1980s, tales of Saladin, the medieval Muslim warrior, and a biography of Hassan Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Another leaflet, wrapped around the green columns of the mosque's corridor, pleaded to worshipers: "Brother Muslim, remember that the enemy is targeting your religion, your country, your honor."
• rows of other books -- on the life of Shiite saints or the teachings of the grand ayatollahs whose words carry the force of law among Shiites. Posters celebrate them, both the living (Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani) and the dead (Mohammed Bakir Hakim, killed in a car bombing in 2003, and Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, assassinated in 1999).
• "Participating in elections is a religious, national and moral duty." Or, more directly: "The enemy of Iraqi is the enemy of democracy, justice and elections."
• The sectarian lens can sometimes blur the nuances in Iraqi politics
• along with the insurgency, elections represent perhaps the sharpest fault line through Iraq's sectarian landscape
• held lectures, organized meetings and, most powerfully, delivered the message in Friday sermons
• For Shiites, the elections are a way to inherit by peaceful means power that was long monopolized by Sunni Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the country's population. For some Shiites, the elections will undo mistakes made when Iraq was founded. In 1920, the Shiite clergy led a revolt against the British occupation after World War I. Once it was put down, the clergy kept up their opposition, rejecting Shiite participation in elections that followed and discouraging a role in the government and its institutions, which were soon dominated by Sunnis.
• history remains resonant
• narrative
• Moqtada Sadr's Shiite movement prides itself on its nationalist message and its outreach to Sunnis. From the very first days after Saddam Hussein's fall, Sunni and Shiite clerics stressed the slogan, "No Sunni, no Shiite, only Islam." In opinion poll after opinion poll, when asked to list their affiliation, more people will simply list "Muslim," rather than "Sunni" or "Shiite."
• Given the sermons' reach -- for many religious Iraqis, they are the window through which news and events are received and interpreted -- they amount to more than words uttered to the converted over a loudspeaker. They convey a sense of popular sentiments, of everyday conversations.
• the Sunni community is fashioned as the bulwark against U.S. and Israeli designs on the country. Shiite Iranians posing as Iraqis are flooding the country, the preachers say, and the Kurds are serving as stooges of the U.S. presence. The Sunnis are the nation's defenders against an occupation, and they are being called upon to act.

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• In the region that was Osama bin Laden's stronghold, 81 percent say that al-Qaeda will come back if the Taliban returns to power, and 72 percent say that al-Qaeda will then use Afghanistan as a base for attacks against the West.