Brookings Doha Conference

The Axis of Equals and the Arc of Turbulence:
Looming Changes in the Security Relationship Between the U.S. and the Muslim World
- By M.J.Akbar
Brookings Doha 16-17-18 Feb 2008


Executive Summary

America’s principal foe in the Muslim world is Iran. Its most important Muslim ally in George Bush’s “war against terror” is Pakistan. Iran and Pakistan straddle the principal battlefields, with Iran sandwiched between two American war zones, Iraq and Afghanistan. 2007 witnessed the re-emergence of an emboldened Iran, buoyed by survival in its diplomatic, economic and military confrontation with the United States. Conversely, Pakistan degenerated into a “jelly state”, unable either to stand up or dissipate into inconsequence. As the Arc of Turbulence gradually shifts from the Palestine-Lebanon-Iraq space to the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan axis, the Muslim world is taking a fresh look at regional priorities, Iran and wondering whether American power, super or hyper, is the best option for the preservation of self-interests.

THEME PAPER

2007 was a year of trends rather than events, of consequences rather than sequences; perhaps an uncertain third act of a five-act drama. The political crystal ball is never crystal clear at the best of times, so one attempts a gaze at the next five years, a period of flux, with some trepidation.

But certain developments stand out in the complicated jigsaw puzzle called the Muslim world: the growing confidence of Iran, the implosion of Pakistan, and a slow shift of the epicenter of conflict from the Palestine-Iraq zone to the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan axis. Iran is the rising power, Pakistan is debilitating, and Afghanistan is again a quagmire that threatens to suck anyone foolhardy enough to step into it. A new Arc of Turbulence is becoming visible.

There is a growing perception in the Muslim world that Iran has not only turned the tide in its confrontation with the Bush administration, but may even be in control of the stream of future events. Of course Iran has substantial domestic problems, not the least of them being a government that has not delivered on basics like bread and development to an increasingly agitated youth. One estimate puts the figure of unemployed at over two million out of a working population of 21 million. But little unites Iranians more easily than the idea of Iran as the natural leader of the region, capable of defending the interests and honor of a Middle East rife with regimes that have sold out to the West in return for dynastic security.

Iran will seek the role of a major player not just to its west (where Iraq is already an undeclared ally) and south (where the Gulf is nervous) but also to its east and perhaps into Central Asia. Iran is now the most influential player in Iraq, active when it so desires, discreet when necessary, ambivalent when opportune. To its east it has a common interest in the defeat of the Taliban, but is content to let Nato bleed in slow drips. The Gulf and Arabia are beginning to appreciate that an American defence screen might end up being a deceptive mesh; while they will never reject it, they need no lessons on what happened to the Maginot Line.

The problem is not anxiety over Iran’s ambitions, but capability: can anyone do anything about it? By repeatedly hinting at, or even threatening, war Bush raised the ante so high that he has stumbled on the way back to ground-level. The case for war was lost on the battlefields of Iraq, and other options are being construed as victory for Iran because they are softer. Soft is easily synonymous with timid in the region; or at least that the cost of war has become too high for America after Iraq. The arguments for both war and tougher economic sanctions have been sabotaged by the national intelligence estimate report giving Iran a pass on its “central guilt”, building a nuclear arsenal. President Ahmedinijad called this document a “declaration of surrender”. Even if we disregard his habitual triumphalism, it is obvious that the Bush administration, which always claimed that all options were on the table, has removed the option of war from that table.

America’s new Iran strategy, to confront as well as engage, contrasts sharply with previous belligerence. The Sunni ring around Iran is crafting a nuanced response: to hunt with the American hound in public, while running with the Iranian hare in private. Washington might seek a steel ring around Iran but at best it will be a plastic circle. Those who have been traditionally suspicious of Iran have begun to make gestures of conciliation towards Tehran. Over the last year, the Gulf States have invited Ahmedinijad to speak at their annual meeting in Manama; Bahrain, homeport of the American fleet in the Gulf, has made overtures; and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited Ahmedinijad to join this year’s haj as the King’s personal guest. Tehran accepted the invitation – after a studied delay. Maureen Dowd quoted an unnamed “insider at the Saudi royal court” (International Herald Tribune, 17 January 2008) as saying “We don’t need America to dictate our enemies to us, especially when it’s our neighbor”. This person may have chosen anonymity, but we can be certain that the quote was not given accidentally, or without clearance.

The Muslim world is preparing for a new equation in which Iran has shifted from the Axis of Evil to the Axis of Equals.

Obviously it is not the equal of America across the globe. But within the conflict zones of the Middle East and Afghanistan, slowly coalescing into an inter-related contiguous battlefield, Iran has become an effective counterpoint to the world’s sole superpower.

This may not be a reality yet; but policy planning is often a child of perception. The American occupation of Iraq has set in motion a series of consequences that have tilted the regional balance in favor of Iran. The ironies of Iraq demand a book. Saddam Hussein was as bitter a foe of Iran’s Ayatollahs as the United States: he is gone, replaced by a government in Baghdad that has the most cordial relationship with Tehran. It has been noted in a new book [Napoleon’s Egypt by Juan Cole, Palgrave Macmillan] that there have only four instances in the Middle East, if you include Afghanistan in the term, when Muslim clerics came to power: “under the republican French in Egypt, under Khomeini and his successors in Iran, under the Taliban in Afghanistan and, it could be argued, with the victory of the United Iraqi Alliance in the Iraq elections of 30 January, 2005 9the U.I.A. was led by the Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim)”.
The Shia insurgents, who have largely achieved their objective [the virtual elimination of the British presence in their areas], are allies of Tehran. Iran, which was once bottled up with little room for maneuver, now has extended its geopolitical space from the west of Afghanistan to the west of Baghdad. This is not to suggest that Iran and Iraq will be anomalous to an individual state, or that they will not have varying interests – but the political and economic isolation of Iraq is no longer feasible.

The most important change seems to be, however, the American realization that it cannot declare victory in Iraq – a compulsion before departure – without ground-level accommodation with Iran. That message has already reached regional capitals.

Iran is responding to America in more than the shrill tones of an Ahmadinejad. It is pertinent that Ayatollah Ali Khamanei has just declared that he is not permanently opposed to ties with the United States. There is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that this turnaround can be traced to the change of guard at the Pentagon, the starting point of a graded implementation of the Baker-Hamilton recommendations on Iran, which was essentially to talk to Tehran without changing the objective of eliminating its weapons capability. Ground realities have dulled the confrontation and sharpened the engagement. It is not a matter merely of talks at diplomatic levels, or the capture and release of British navy personnel as Iran’s ‘friendly gesture’. The region believes, even if it will not say so, that America and Iran have come to a working arrangement on Iraq. It would require some extreme foolishness on the part of Iran’s radicals to disturb this understanding by senseless provocation, and it is unlikely that Khamanei will permit it. He has already placed his own man, Muhammad Zolghadr, as deputy head of Basij, the volunteer militia. Ahmedinijad had dismissed Zolghadr in December as deputy interior minister for security affairs. Ali Larjani, who was eased out from the critical position of chief nuclear negotiator, recently visited Egypt as a representative of Khamanei. [Egypt gave asylum to the ousted Shah of Iran, and Iran broke off ties when Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979.]

London’s Sunday Times reported [January 13, 2008] that the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps “slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month [December 2007] to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week. Iraqi government sources say that Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, traveled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appeared to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s ‘most wanted’ list. Last year Washington declared the guard a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’ and imposed sanctions on it. One of the accusations that led to the designation was the charge that the Quds Force, as branch of the guard, was supplying rockets, mortars and roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles [EFPs] to Shiite militias in Iraq…At the inistence of the Americans, the talks between Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Hassan Kazemi Qomi, his Iranian counterpart, have been kept to the issue of security in Iraq. But Tehran wants them broadened to include the release of Iranian diplomats being held in Baghdad by the Americans. It is understood Jafari was sent to Baghdad to ensure that this happened”.

A significant, if studiously unmentioned, prelude to General Petraeus’ “Surge” was the withdrawal of the Shia leader Moqtada Sadr from the battlefield. Sadr announced a “ceasefire” a little before “Surge” became fully operational. In the middle of January 2008 Sadr warned that the ceasefire could be coming to an end. We do not know his compulsions; perhaps it was meant to warn against any gratuitous declaration of American victory.

In practice, British forces have moved out of the Iran zone of influence, Americans are concentrating their combination of money power and firepower on the Sunni insurgency, and the Shia insurgents in the south are being co-opted into the establishment. In other words, American forces are doing the work that Shias would have had to do in a post-withdrawal scenario. Nothing could suit Iran or Iraq’s Shias better.

In the meantime, Moqtada Sadr has used his “ceasefire” to further the theological education necessary to become a full-fledged Ayatollah. [The Shia religious hierarchy begins from talebeh, student, from whence the word taliban, to alim, teacher, masalegu, one who can explain problems, vaez, preacher, mojtahed, interpreter of the law, and then to Ayatollah, a rank equivalent to marja-e-taqlid, one worthy of emulation.] The growing theocracy in the Basra administration is possibly a sign of things to come in post-American, Shia-majority Iraq.

Sadr surely sees himself as the Khamanei of Iraq. Iraq cannot be another Iran, if only because the population is not homogenous, but Shias will be in effective control of Baghdad. That, in essence, has been Bush’s gift to the Shia community. There will be political accommodation of Sunnis and Kurds, but neither will be allowed the luxury of independence by either Baghdad or the neighbourhood. Whether they say so publicly or not, Iraq and Iran are likely to be allies. Time reports [9 January 2008] that when a major American oil company showed interest in some Iraqi oil fields, it was told by the oil ministry in Baghdad that it might be worthwhile to get Tehran’s approval for the deal.

The governments of the Middle East are assessing the consequences of an American withdrawal over the next five years, the process to begin either in the last days of Bush or on the next watch. What they do know already is that the logistics of withdrawal cannot function without the cooperation of Iran, and Iran will not this provide this cooperation as a humanitarian gesture. It will demand greater regional influence in return.

The more cynical analysts in regional capitals see the American intelligence certificate to Iran as part of the trade-off. Those with a sense of humor are wondering at the conundrum: Saddam, who did not have the capacity to set off a bush fire, is dead because American intelligence was convinced that he had weapons of mass destruction. Iran, which has the capability of producing them, is getting a free ride.

There is also a growing suspicion that the NPT regime is on its last legs. An immediate fallout – the word is appropriate – is the revival of defunct departments of nuclear energy. France has just signed a deal with the UAE to supply nuclear reactors; Nicolas Sarkozy, unlike his predecessor, works in coordination with the White House. Naturally, the official veil is used: this energy is needed for “peaceful” purposes. No one believes the excuse. With A.Q. Khan neutralized, China opened a nuclear counter, if not a shop, during its Africa summit last year. A weakened America cannot enforce its dual-logic argument on nuclear weapons, where America can continue to make its own weapons more miniature and sophisticated; and the Middle Three [Israel, India and Pakistan] are permitted to join the Big Five while the rest of the world is denied entry into the club. Two of the Middle Three are American allies and India is on its way to becoming one.

Paradoxically, the new conventional wisdom is that the only guarantee against American intervention, or defense against occupation, is a nuclear armory. The cost of a war against a nuclear state is simply too high. Iran is the latest bit of evidence. A minor nuclear power may not be able to stave off international pressure, but the pressure will stop short of war, as in the case of North Korea. That is an unintended byproduct of America’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In the last five years, Iran has also built up credibility on the Arab and Muslim street. Its ability to stand up in the diplomatic confrontation with Bush has won it respect. Its surrogate, Hezbollah, turned back an Israeli invasion in Lebanon and won unprecedented admiration. This was the only war in which an Arab force emerged with its self-respect intact, its pride enhanced. The closest claim to an Arab victory was in 1973, but by the end of that conflict, Israel had seized the initiative; its troops were on the Egyptian mainland when a ceasefire was negotiated. Hezbollah, on the other hand, achieved the near-impossible without the resources of a state, lending legitimacy to another perception: that the real power in the Muslim world has shifted to shadow armies led by committed believers, rather than standing armies under corrupt or compromised autocrats.

America needs Iran’s cooperation in Afghanistan as well. Fortuitously, Iran’s principal objectives in Afghanistan are largely concurrent with those of the United States, for Iran does not want the return of the Taliban. [The only nations that had diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime were Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia; and only Pakistan had an effective mission in Kabul. Iran, incidentally, lobbied very hard to save the Bamiyan Buddhas. It offered Mullah Omar’s regime hard cash, and was prepared to physically carve out the statues from the mountain and take them to Iran for safe-keeping.] Iran’s interest in Afghanistan is a zone of influence across the Herat region and the Shia population. America can live with that.
Iran is wedged between the two zones of conflict: Iraq-Palestine-Israel to the west and Afghanistan-Pakistan to the east. The indication of 2007 is that the second could emerge as the more dangerous place over the next five years. The Taliban has reasserted itself against Nato, and the instability in Pakistan is threatening not only the country but the region and beyond.

The situation in Pakistan represents not only an internal systems failure, but also a collapse of American policy. Anarchy, or a vacuum of governance in large areas of Pakistan could extract, over time, a higher price than Iraq. Pakistan is America’s most important ally in the Muslim world. Bush has invested heavily in both capital and political capital, supporting General Pervez Musharraf’s lone-hand regime with at least five billion dollars in return for support in America’s parallel wars in South Asia, against terrorists and the Taliban. In 2007 America discovered, perhaps to its own surprise but to no one else’s, that much of this money had been diverted for Pakistan’s defence requirements on the Indian border. Despite a 100,000-strong army put into the field against them, the Taliban, or its allies, control what the Economist calls “a vast and spreading swathe of territory” in Pakistan. A new leader has emerged, Baitullah Mehsud, elected chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban.

The biggest danger if Nato withdraws from Afghanistan is not that Afghanistan will go to the Taliban, but that the Taliban could sweep to power in Islamabad. America must, in fact, prevent the worst possible consequences of its own intervention in the region by a combination of hard and soft power, for economic progress will be key to success.

George Bush has compromised three fundamental policy objectives in order to keep Pervez Musharraf in power in Pakistan.

Bush went to war in Iraq to eliminate nuclear weapons, dictatorship and terrorists.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, dictatorship and terrorists. The first two were tolerated as the price for the war against the third. Evidence has now emerged that Pakistan became a nuclear power with the tacit help of successive American administrations. [When Richard Barlow, a CIA agent working in the directorate of intelligence on proliferation during George Bush Senior’s administration, protested that the Pentagon was manipulating intelligence to ignore Pakistan’s bomb programme, he was sacked and denied his pension, according to The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets…and How We Could Have Stopped Him by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.]
Six years after 9/11, dictatorship has been tacitly legitimized in the preservation of Musharraf in power through a pseudo-democracy that the Pakistani people do not want; there are more terrorists in Pakistan now than perhaps the rest of the world put together; they can threaten Musharraf with impunity and assassinate Benazir Bhutto in the heart of Rawalpindi [a city which is the headquarters of the army]; and it is widely feared that a part of Pakistan’s nuclear cache could one day become part of a terrorist arsenal.

The conclusion that the Muslim, and indeed the rest, of the world have reached is that the only principle that sustains American policy is the adjustment of principles for tactical gains.

The result is not a safer Pakistan, but a more dangerous one. Those who assassinated Bhutto, and their peers across the Muslim world, do not only want to destroy America; they also want to change their domestic regimes and take over their countries. The potential for chronic instability cannot be underestimated.

If American prescriptions had worked in Pakistan, cynics and realists who crowd the capitals of the Muslim world, and have their own contradictions to protect, might have applauded, or at least breathed more easily. Instead, they have watched a nation hostile to America, Iran, gain out of confrontation; and Pakistan, an ally of America, slip dangerously towards anarchy. It is fairly conventional to suggest that failure in Afghanistan will be more dangerous than failure in Iraq. No one seems to be estimating the implications of failure in Pakistan. It is in the vested interest of even India, let alone West Asia or the West, to prevent the degeneration of Pakistan. This cannot be done with the half-baked thinking currently on display. Cancer cannot be cured with a band aid. Pakistan will not break, but it could turn into a “jelly state”, quivering all the time, its military capability bogged in a mess that neither collapses nor turns stable.

America finally recognized that Army rule had become unviable when early in 2007 Pakistanis bravely challenged their military dictatorship. A bizarre scheme emerged out of this recognition: a marriage of civilian flesh to military muscle. It was the sort of thing that probably looked pretty on Foggy Bottom letterheads but had little resonance either in principle or reality.

Then, instead of leaving the civilian choice to an honest election, giving at least partial legitimacy to the civilian-military partnership, Washington pre-selected the winner and brokered a deal with Musharraf that surpassed even the high current levels of cynicism. First, Musharraf imposed the 13th Emergency in Pakistan’s 60 years in order to play out a charade which amounted to a coup against his own government. He had to sack 60 judges, destroying the already-damaged reputation of Pakistan’s judiciary, in order to become a “civilian” President. His place in the power structure has been kept above the accountability principle inherent in a popular election.

As part of the American arrangement, Musharraf dropped all corruption charges against the Bhuttos [the husband, Asif Zardari, is alleged to have collected a billion dollars and the wife had to appeal against a ruling of a Swiss court in a case of money-laundering] through a National Reconciliation Ordinance, an arbitrary fiat. The only person who could have challenged Benazir for the Prime Ministership, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was barred from contesting. Thousands were put under arrest because they would not accept such abuse of democracy. On the streets, Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party [PPP] was nicknamed Pervez’s People’s Party.

Assassins have shot that elaborate charade to pieces, and everyone is once again staring at a blank wall. There is neither democracy nor a Plan B.

A rudderless Pakistan, seething with more terrorists today than in 2001, is the inheritance of 2008. The Musharraf government is being forced to calm fears with periodic statements that Pakistan’s nuclear armory is safe from the reach of terrorists, even as it reassures its population that there is no question of America taking control of its nuclear bombs. On the ground, Jihadists are now operating between Afghanistan and Islamabad, north up to the secure mountains of Swat (from where their forbears fought the British Empire to a standstill in the 19th century) and south to Quetta, with pockets of strength in Karachi. The government has been unable to eliminate either Osama bin Laden or his followers. The Jihadi movement is far bigger than Al Qaeda which, in fact, may not be as strong as is projected in media. The future of the Jihadi spectrum will depend on internal measures of control, of course, but much will also depend on how Washington addresses the problems of the Muslim world. Popular support to Jihadis is probably in direct proportion to the anger against the West/America.

There is relief in the Muslim world that America stopped short of war against Iran. This would have led to contiguous conflict between Beirut and Lahore, and spilled over towards the Nile and the Ganges. This might be called the Arc of Turbulence.

America can destroy Iran’s infrastructure from the air, but cannot possibly extinguish the capability of an Iranian response against American allies in the region. An American attack will deepen turmoil in an already vulnerable region, crisscrossed by shadow armies in search of targets.

Very few of the present heads of government in the Arc of Turbulence are expected to be in place in 2013, as age or events catch up. A key American mistake has been to confuse an individual with stability, particularly among its friends. An external prop alone may not insufficient to guarantee continuity and calm. This will be a significant challenge to the present establishments in the Muslim world. Age is not on the side of Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah; ground realities are not on the side of Musharraf or Hamid Karzai; and the vote is probably not on the side of Ahmedinijad, Ehud Olmert, the ailing Nuri al-Maliki or Mahmoud Abbas. Some of the governments are, to put it bluntly, regimes on their last legs, and no one is certain who, or indeed what, might succeed them.

There are plenty of other imponderables. Any move towards an independent Kurdistan would be unacceptable to Turkey, Iran and Syria and perhaps invite a military response. These three neighbours of Kurdistan know that America’s appetite for direct war in the Middle East is exhausted.

Will a weakened America, paradoxically, be a better instrument for peace between Israel and Palestine? America may not be strong enough to send troops, but it is also not so weak that it can be ignored. If America and Israel realize that their military superiority cannot preserve the status quo, then the logic of peace will be more acceptable to them. Israel, surely, appreciates that it has nowhere to withdraw: it cannot change its neighbourhood, or now expect America to destroy Iran. The Arab states, and the Palestinian people, have also begun to accept that they must coexist with Israel, and there is no other definition of mutual security. What Bush and his successors could not achieve by shock and awe, they might induce by talk and persuasion.

The key security challenge will probably shift, during the next five years, from the Middle East to the Iran-Pakistan region. [Perhaps we could call it the Central East.] We have indicated the reason: a defeat for America and Nato could lead to the Talibanisation of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Will Iran have become a nuclear power by 2013? Will an alliance led by Taliban be in power in Afghanistan? Will an alliance that includes Tehrik-e-Taliban, or the various Jamaats, be in power in Pakistan? What could be the implications for India?

A nuclear Iran would complete the Nuclear Crescent: Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. Within the bowl of this crescent lies three quarters of the world’s known energy resources. What does this mean for energy security?

As ever, the horizon is streaked with too many questions and not enough answers.

The next five years will also demand immediate attention to the old challenges of the Muslim world: poverty, education and gender bias are at the top of a long list. These are not problems that can be solved by external intervention, positive or negative. These are challenges that the Muslim world has to address internally. It has the resources to do so; it needs to discover the will. If it does not, large parts of the Muslim world will not enter the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

MJ AT BROOKINGS DOHA 2008 FORUM : 16-18 FEB 2008