Pakistan & Iran Challenge the World

Iran and Pakistan–albeit dramatically different in terms of history, culture, ties to the U.S., religion, and government structure—nevertheless each pose a fundamental and strikingly similar challenge to the current world political system: each threatens to upset the international applecart by refusing to play by the rules of the current system. Pakistan’s longstanding policy of passing nuclear weapons technology around the Islamic world; Iran’s refusal (in principle, at least) to accept the permanence of Israel’s current military preeminence in the Mideast; Iran’s military and political support for subnational actors on Israel’s border struggling to escape from Israel’s shadow; and Pakistan’s military and political support for subnational actors fighting for control of Afghanistan and Kashmir are all enduring examples of the challenge these two states pose to the global political system as currently structured. Both states also pose a distinct implicit threat to the global system: the extreme danger that would be likely if the organs of state power controlling either state were to collapse. Whatever one may think of the governments in power in Iran and Pakistan, “the devil you know” is not an argument to be dismissed lightly, something of which the Pakistani Army, for one, is clearly well aware.

These remarks are not intended to imply any value judgments about the desirability of the current international political system; that is another issue entirely. It is simply a fact that Pakistan–a U.S. “ally” that may turn out to be on the edge of collapse or on the road to greater international power–and Iran—a U.S. “enemy” that has clearly been rising on the international scene during the years of the Bush Administration despite its severe domestic constraints—each pose a challenge sufficiently similar so as to raise the question:

Should the approach of the world community or any major player in it
toward these two countries be based on a single set of principles?

Before discussing further the implications of this question, it may be worthwhile to review the ways in which Pakistan and Iran constitute either a) two cases of the same class or b) two distinct classes.

Both:

• Have fervently adhered for a generation to a policy of enhancing the Islamic World’s position vis-à-vis the West;
• Both offered help to the U.S. when it invaded Afghanistan;

• Have made the development of a domestic nuclear industry a core state policy for many years;
• Have military establishments that greatly influence if not control their nuclear industry;
• Have military establishments in which there is great sympathy for radical Islamic politics;
• Have military establishments that operate to a significant degree outside of the control of the civilian government;
• Have strictly constrained democratic space and are ruled by institutions that exist outside that democratic space and have frequently imposed their control over democratic institutions with extreme harshness;



• Fund Islamic militant groups to manipulate domestic politics and as a foreign policy tool;
• Are ruled harshly, with a storm of demands for better government seething just beneath the surface and repeatedly exploding into the open;
• Have relatively good ties to China;



• Constitute major foreign policy challenges for the U.S.;
• Have powerful Islamic militant political forces whose domestic popularity is being enhanced by the U.S. policy of high-visibility pressure on them.

Source

But the two countries differ in that:

• Pakistan has developed nuclear bombs and proliferated the technology; Iran has done neither.
• In Iran, the key power center is religious, albeit closely tied to the military; in Pakistan, the key power center is military, albeit closely tied to religion.
• Pakistan created the Taliban; Iran was an enemy of the Taliban.
• The US has been extremely hostile to Iran but calls Pakistan an ally and accuses Iran of dreaming of doing what Pakistan actually has long been doing.
• Sunni Pakistani is very close to Saudi Arabia
  in terms both of state-to-state ties, educational systems, and ties between Pakistani political figures and the Saudi regime; Shi’ite Iran has a very delicate relationship with Saudi Arabia resulting from competition over control of the Persian Gulf, competition for influence in Iraq, and differing attitudes toward both Lebanon and Israel, all of which raises the specter of a proxy war between the two in Iraq.
• Iran is emerging as a regional power, a process accelerated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq; Pakistan is overshadowed by India.
• U.S. pressure on Iran is strengthening the regime against domestic proponents of democracy; U.S. support for the Pakistani military dictatorship is weakening domestic proponents of democracy.
• Iran challenges Israel’s military domination of the Mideast; Pakistan does not, though there is little reason to assume that attitude is etched in stone.



• Pakistan has been proliferating nuclear technology for years; Iran is on the receiving end.
• Iran’s government effectively controls its territory, so Iran represents an island of stability in the Islamic world; insurgents control increasing stretches of Pakistan, in part because of sympathy from within the government for Islamic militants, in part because U.S. pressure enables the militants to appear (rightly or wrongly) as defenders of Pakistan, in part because the government has failed to address the grievances of ethnic minorities (e.g., Baluchistan).

In sum, then, are these two countries sufficiently similar so that it would be more effective to view them as two examples of the same class from which one might anticipate obtaining the same behavior in response to the same treatment? Following from this are two obvious further questions: 1) how should that “class” be defined? And 2) what behavior should be desired?

The class of which Iran and Pakistan are members would be something like the following: large Islamic states that “deserve” (as a function of their size and achievements) higher international status than they have, whose people deserve greater freedom and a better economic deal than they have, whose level of technological achievement makes them a serious long-term actor, and whose domestic conditions threaten to generate any number of disasters over the short-term (collapse and chaos, nuclear proliferation, nuclear war, or international terrorism).

As for the behavior to be desired, logically one would think that any foreign country that wanted to maintain the current global political system would want to minimize any terrorist threat, nuclear proliferation, domestic repression, ideological extremism, nuclear brinkmanship from each of these states.

History shows that case-by-case efforts to achieve any one of the above goals by means of short-term deals involving trade-offs that offer a pass on one (e.g., proliferation) in return for focusing on another (e.g., the Soviet presence in Afghanistan) just serve to make the situation more difficult and more dangerous over the not-very-long-term. One could be cynical and conclude that the leaders of the rest of the world really don’t care about the long-term survival of us all, or one could give them the benefit of the doubt and conclude that dealing with every problem that comes up regarding Pakistan and Iran on a case-by-case basis is simply too complicated. At a minimum, it seems fair to conclude that decision-makers need a theoretical framework to organize how they interpret the behavior of Iran and Pakistan. If this framework turns out to constitute a broader class of behavior that usefully informs our understanding of, say, the whole Islamic world, then so much the better.

Military Control of Politics: Twin Dynamics

Military analyst Ayesha Siddiqa’s pathbreaking 2007 study of the Pakistani military, Military Inc. was, needless to say, brilliantly timed. Among many other interesting points, she describes (pp. 43-44), though without using system dynamics language, a very interesting double dynamic that helps to explain the political prominence of the military in countries with poorly developed democratic institutions.

First is the dynamic that builds up the military’s power. The military takes over, setting up a dictatorship. If this provokes resistance by the people, the military may either fight back or return to the barracks. The harder the military fights against the people to retain political power, the more likely it will be to commit civil rights abuses in the process of repressing dissent and strengthening its power. This happens because in a country where the populace is willing to stand up to the military, the military will be unlikely to be able to retain power without coercion: preventing free speech, breaking up demonstrations, attacking the media, etc.

Second is the dynamic that undermines the military’s power. In addition to provoking a response from the military, popular resistance may create an elite consensus that military rule is illegitimate, which in turn generates external support for the resistance.

As the first dynamic loops around, the military’s political power is enhanced; as the second dynamic loops around, the military’s political power is undermined. But both dynamics are caused by the same process and take place simultaneously (though of course not necessarily at the same rate). The existence of one begets the other: a neat example of why politics is unstable. Victory sows the seeds of defeat. It is incorrect, then, to ask which is occurring. Rather, one should assume that both are occurring; the question simply concerns the relative importance of the two dynamics which are constantly competing for dominance.

Africa’s Horn: Blowing a Warning about an Islamic Political Fault Line

A map of current conflicts and areas of political tension that could soon turn into conflicts in the Islamic world appears to show a single, almost continuous political fault line. If the various individual political issues in the Islamic world are indeed being united by the emergence of such a fault line threatening to crack open the Islamic world over a single issue, then it should be possible to find in any of the individual issues evidence of a broader pan-Islamic contest. While the answer might seem intuitively obvious for such cases as Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, or Afghanistan, what about an area at one end of the alleged fault line? What about the Horn of Africa?

Hypothesis = If the various individual political contests in the Islamic
world are being united by the emergence of an Islamic political fault line, then within each of those contests evidence of a broader pan-Islamic contest.

The failure of the international effort to settle the Eritrean-Ethiopian border dispute is now official,[1] an outcome that should have surprised no one because the border dispute is just one part of a must larger regional dispute that has entangled 1) Somalia’s struggle to re-create a national government, 2) a revolt by ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and 3) the broader Western struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Linkage among issues has historically been disparaged by political scientists with good reason for serving as an excuse for the failure to make progress on anything, but it is highly questionable whether or not real progress can indeed be made toward resolving conflict in the Horn of Africa unless all these problems are dealt with simultaneously.

The reality of a political dispute is layered like an onion, except worse, since it is seldom clear which layer is the core or how they should be ordered. Perhaps the basic layer in the Horn of Africa is a broad socio-political struggle to reconstitute an ordered society, lost during the long struggle against the predatory interference of colonialism and Cold War antagonists. While the struggle in the Horn of Africa certainly resembles struggles elsewhere by local populations to re-order societies smashed by interaction with the West, this struggle in the Horn of Africa is at its core a local affair. Other local layers complicating the onion of political contention are a social struggle for economic survival and justice as well as a political struggle for power. More precisely, one could view each of the above layers existing independently in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia—three of the four countries (along with Djibouti) today making up the Horn of Africa—or even break the process down more finely, with numerous spatial and temporal variations. One glimpse into the complexities of the situation is offered in the observation that by 2005 opposition to the Transitional Federal Government that had been formed in Somalia included “businessmen, warlords, organizations such as Al Itihad Al Islaami and dissident ministers of TFG,”[2] with both sides rapidly importing weapons, a situation that may have been local at its core but which opened the door to all manner of outside exploitation and interference.

The importance of local issues notwithstanding, a regional competition linking the whole Horn together complicates efforts at resolving the local issues. Eritrea and Ethiopia have been struggling directly with each other since Eritrea became independent in the early 1990s after a 30-year war with Ethiopia.

• A border war between the two in 1998 led to some 70,000 casualties. [3]
• According to the UN, the two sides now have a total of 200,000 along their 1000-kilometer border,[4] and they have yet to reach agreement on where the border should lie.
• Al-Ittihad al-Islamiah (Islamic Union), a Somali group with ties to the Islamic Courts Union, has been working for many years for the secession of the ethnic Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia,[5] and the establishment of an Islamic state in Somalia.[6]
• Ethiopia has been interfering in Somalia’s domestic situation since at least 2002[7] and Eritrea on the opposing side probably equally long.

Today, both are now so deeply involved in Somalia’s efforts to reconstitute itself as a functioning society with an effective government that the internal Somali conflict has been described as an Eritrean-Ethiopian proxy war.[8] Indeed,

• Eritrea sent arms and soldiers to help the Islamic Courts Union;[9]
• leaders of the Islamic Courts Union met this fall in Eritrea to “establish a political organization” to “liberate” Somalia from the Ethiopians” according to one of the party’s leaders;[10]
• a year ago when it became clear that the Islamic Courts Union was about to unify Somalia, U.S.-backed Ethiopia intervened with overwhelming military force and temporarily defeated the Islamic Courts Union, before becoming bogged down;
• The US is reportedly supporting Ethiopia’s brutal effort to suppress a long-standing successionist movement in its Ogaden region, where the Ethiopian use of untrained troops, the blockade of food supplies to civilians to punish the population by the Ethiopian government,[11] and Ethiopian army massacres of villagers are alleged.

The result is a steady spread of the epidemic of violence throughout the region, with Somalia and the Ogaden[12] region of Ethiopia now engulfed in intensifying violence and the Ethiopian-Eritrean border threatening to be the next battleground.

On top of these layers lie broader pan-Islamic issues that Washington is guilty of both stimulating and aggravating. As William Minter warned a year ago in an article comparing U.S. behavior toward Iraq with its behavior toward Somalia,

The United States and Ethiopia cut short efforts at reconciliation and
relied on hyped-up intelligence. They disregarded Somali and wider African
opinion in an effort to kill alleged terrorists. And while chalking up
military “victories,” they aggravated long-term problems. Far from advancing
an effective strategy against terrorism, the intervention is providing
opportunities for terrorist groups to expand their reach.[13]

The evidence suggests that outside forces have been working to radicalize the Horn of Africa.
According to a 2002 UN report, not only has Ethiopia been arming militias in Somalia but so have the U.S., as well as Middle Eastern and East European countries.

• On top of the original al Qua’ida presence in Somalia in the 1990s, in 2003 a new network emerged and the U.S. built up a network to oppose it.[14]
• The UN reported in late 2006 that Somali activists had supported Hezbollah’s effort to resist the summer 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.[15]
• US support for Ethiopian military involvement broadens the war from a regional conflict to a global one, tempting in forces whose primary interest is fighting against the U.S.[16]
• US viewing the war as anti-Islamic makes the fighting worse, compromise more difficult.[17]

The evidence that significant forces within the Horn want their societies to be on the frontline of a global attack on the West, however, is very thin indeed. An argument that any one of these societies itself constitutes a threat to the West and thus needs to be attacked and suppressed would be difficult to support. Whatever threat to the West may be coming from this region appears to exist because the internal chaos opens the door to outside intervention and exploitation. It follows that the resolution of the problem is likely to come through providing help for these societies to stand on their own, not through military attacks that spread further violence.

The implications of the trend toward broader conflict and more outside involvement are ominous. First, the problem becomes steadily more complicated and more difficult to resolve. For example, in recent years, social chaos increasingly dissatisfied the business community in Mogadishu, so it backed the creation of Islamic courts,[18] which both worked to bring social peace and rules of behavior in accordance with Islamic precepts. The more these courts focused on Islamic legal principles, the more they were accused of being in league with “terror”; the more they were so accused, the more military pressure was brought on them by the U.S., Ethiopia, and their Somali allies. The courts, which seem to have started as a reasonable response to the social chaos that existed, are now united as a political party. In fact, this party also appeared to be bringing peace and order to Somalia until it was overthrown by force in 2007 by Ethiopian troops. In the event, the party is now running a rebellion against that Ethiopian army, and is accused of being part of a jihadi terror movement. Which is chicken and which is egg is hard to say: it is not at all clear what the likelihood was that the Islamic Courts Union, if allowed to unify the country, given international diplomatic recognition , and offered international aid, might have ended up being a proxy for al Qua’ida, willing to put Somalia on the front line in a global conflict against the West. One can only wonder what the result might have been if the courts had been welcomed and supported by the West for bringing justice to a land plagued by chaos; instead of pushing all Moslems together and alienating them all, what if moderate Islamic activism were encouraged by the West as a means of providing local justice?

Second, the more the U.S. supports the military intervention of an anti-Islamic country using extreme violence and punishment of the civilian population, the more this will come to be perceived as a crusade for all Islamic activists. Even when justified in an immediate sense, counterterrorist efforts that are perceived as heavy-handed alienate the population. Like Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, the Horn of Africa will become a target attracting radicals.

Third, the more violence is used as the method of resolving conflict, the more it tends to be exploited for criminal purposes, e.g., armies stealing property, attacking hospitals, using horrendous weapons such as white phosphorus that undoubtedly create more antagonism than their military value.[19] As violence increases, the tendency of the TFG and its allies to exploit the chaos by making alarmist accusations of “terrorism” to enhance their influence rises.

War Against Islamic Extremism or War by Western Extremism? The evidence concerning the root causes of conflict in the Horn of Africa make it clear that local causes are critically important. The failure to replace functioning traditional methods of governance over the last half century with new forms after the harsh process of contact with the Western world destroyed those traditional methods as well as the ensuing local collapse of political structure, starvation, militarization of society, and injustice form the core of the region’s conflict. Regional competition for power both by ethnic groups desiring some mixture of respect, equality, autonomy, or sovereignty and by arrogant politicians exploiting real problems for personal gain is exacerbating the local issues.

Conflict in the Horn has surely become complicated by a global struggle between Islam and the West. The evidence does suggest that the conflict in the Horn of Africa is being exploited by outside forces on both sides. Both Islamic extremists and some Western politicians, eager to provoke a titanic conflict that each side believes it can win, are increasingly pushing the people of the Horn into extreme positions, undercutting the moderate middle, in order to fight a proxy war at the expense of the populations of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. As in the Cold War, local people are being forced to choose sides in a fight that is really not their fight. The battle in the Horn of Africa, as it was in the Cold War, is primarily about justice, security, and governance, but the world will not leave the Horn alone…in part, for sure, because in any disrupted society, volunteers can always be found to help bring the world’s battles into the local backyard. As the political arena is polarized by the efforts of outside forces to win through military means and social problems are intensified by the resultant chaos, individuals who might have become reformers become radicalized. As war eliminates the option of moderate reform, reformers turn into radicals and join sides with extremist outside forces, which, if nothing else, can at least offer money and weapons.

It remains far less clear, however, that the Islamic groups, such as the Islamic Courts Union, operating today in the Horn of Africa would participate in an international military jihad against the U.S. if offered the choice of concentrating on reestablishing a just and peaceful society at home. The U.S. needs to examine conflict in Islamic societies with much finer resolution…to distinguish between Islamic extremists bent on violence against civilians and Islamic activists whose goal is domestic reform. These two groups agree that their societies have problems–at least in part created by contact with the West–that need to be resolved, but they do not necessarily agree on the methods or the end goal. Lumping these groups together not only creates a much more powerful opponent, it leaves the local population with little choice but to support the extremists.

To resolve this conflict, methods of undercutting local extremists and preventing them from joining the world’s battles without bringing those battles to local societies that are simply struggling for domestic justice must be found. The issue is not about convincing the societies of the Horn of Africa to support some Western global struggle; the issue is about insulating these long-mistreated societies from outside problems so they can deal with their own problems. Both Washington and al Qua’ida emphasize military power and political polarization: is this approach working? The explosion of Somali refugees during the year of U.S.-supported Ethiopian military intervention in the Somali civil war makes the answer clear: 1,000,000 Somalis, some 15% of the population, is now displaced. For those who see chaos as the way to achieve their goals, yes, the method is working.

Notes:
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7120834.stm.
[2] Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia pursuant to Security Council resolution 1587 (2005) in http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/2005/unsc-som-07Oct.pdf.
[3] “Ethiopian President Calls for Military Buildup to Counter Eritrea,” Associated Press, Octobder 8, 2007, in http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-796F2F?OpenDocument&rc=1&cc=eri.
[4] Jack Kimball, “Eritrea Accuses Ethiopia of Having ‘Declared War,’” Reuters, November 21, 2007, in http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-796F2F?OpenDocument&rc=1&cc=eri.
[5] Jonathan Stevenson, “What’s Going On in Somalia?,” December 27, 2006, in http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009440.
[6] Meron Tesfa Michael, “Somalia: Rocky Road to Peace, March 25, 2003, in http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/1016.cfm.
[7] Meron, op cit.
[8] http://oromiatimes.blogspot.com/2007/01/eritrea-warns-of-somalia-quagmire-for.html
[9] Jonathan Stevenson, “What’s Going On in Somalia?,” December 27, 2006, in http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009440.
[10] “Islamic Courts at Eritrea Meeting,” in http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B54AA636-A618-459C-9FC3-C785A5FC7D39.htm.
[11] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/22231.html
[12] http://www.hiiraan.com/news2/2007/Nov/ogaden_locals_allege_abuses_by_soldiers.aspx
[13] http://www.africafocus.org/editor/som0701_projo.php
[14] “Counter-terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds?” International Crisis Group, Africa Report No. 95, July 11, 2005.
[15] http://www.cfr.org/publication/12021/.
[16] http://www.hiiraan.com/op2/2007/nov/the_u_s_secret_war_in_the_horn_of_africa.aspx .
[17] http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/just-when-it-se.html .
[18] http://talk.islamicnetwork.com/showthread.php?t=9323.

[19] http://www.hiiraan.com/comments2-op-2007-aug-security_situation_in_somalia.aspx.

Grading Global Governance

How well are we running this world, anyway?

Everyone argues about what is right or wrong with the world, but figuring out how folks actually justify their opinions is a bit harder. It might be easier to figure out how well we are governing the world, if we had standard metrics for measuring the quality of governance. Many metrics can be devised . What follows is designed to be as simple as possible.

====================================================

November 2007 Scorecard

Worsening:

• Meeting at Annapolis freezes out Hamas
• Fatah beats nationalist demonstrators
• Pakistani dictator defeats middle class pro-democracy movement
  & retains power
• Rising war threats on Eritrean-Ethiopian border
• Rising violence by Islamic militants in Pakistan met by rising
  government violence
• Rising violence in Somalia
• Ahmadinejad calls opponents of his nuclear policy
  “traitors”
• Turkey threatens to invade Iraq
• Growth of Iraq militias
• Anti-democracy trend of Russian government
• Burmese repression of democracy movement
  

Continuing:

• Lebanese political crisis
• Israel military attacks on Palestine
• Darfur fighting
• Iraqi political stalemate
• Tensions between Iran and U.S./Israel
• Colombian civil war
• Egyptian government suppression of democracy
  advocates
  

Improving:

• Australia’s new leader pro-Kyoto
• Agreement with N. Korea to Disable Yongbyon

==========================================================

I will make the simple assumption that all these are equally important, leading to the following

November Global Governance Score: -11/+2

I challenge readers to propose logical, understandable ways to rank them.

I also hasten to note that these are not judgments about the ultimate outcome of anything – just what I see as having occurred this November. Thus, I rate the Annapolis meeting on Palestine negatively because of the way it was convened; leaders may still manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat. I also rate the Colombian civil war as continuing as it was, though there are some occasional signs that the government there may be trying to improve the way poor rural Colombians are treated. I also rate Darfur as continuing because the positive concept of an international peacekeeping force still remains more concept than practice.

Finally, would someone please send me some more improvements that occurred during November?

Time & Space in One Complex System: Islamic Politics

Continuing remarks on how complex dynamics act across time and space in international relations, and, more particularly, Islamic politics.

Many longstanding local political crises exist in Moslem countries, each with its own local origins and explanations.

• Palestinians continue their long struggle for statehood.
• Ethiopian and Eritrean visions of how the Horn of Africa should move into the future continue to clash.
• Pakistan continues to struggle over the choice of military dictatorship or liberal democracy or an Islamic form of government.
• Kurds continue to fight for recognition without even being able to agree on whether it should be statehood or differing versions of autonomy or absorption within Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.
• Afghanistan continues its long struggle to figure out what system it wants to employ to restore its shattered society.
• Bangladesh continues to struggle to improve the quality of governance in its vigorous but weak democracy, even as that system comes under increasing attack from radical Islamist forces that reject it.

However, on top of this local variation, a new phenomenon seems to be emerging, which it seems reasonable to call “Islamic politics,” i.e., a particular type of politics centered around Islamic activism where the activists perceive themselves as members of a global community with a shared history, moral perspective, and set of grievances. Moreover, politics in the region where Islamic politics dominates the political scene seems to be taking on more and more of the characteristics of a complex adaptive system. To what degree that is currently true and to what degree it is becoming the case are important questions that go far beyond this brief post and, indeed, merit serious research. Suffice it to say for the moment that an Islamic political fault line extending from South & Central Asia to the Horn of Africa appears to be emerging.

Research Challenge: We need a research program to investigate the degree to which an Islamic political complex adaptive system may be emerging in the region from, at the very least, Bangladesh up to Afghanistan, through the Mideast, and down into Africa as far as Somalia (if not in addition including Indonesia and North Africa).

However, the question I wish to address at the moment concerns the particular spatial and temporal characteristics of the evolution of this emerging complex system. How dynamics play out over time and across space in a complex adaptive system is in general an interesting subfield of complexity. As it concerns the alleged Islamic political fault line cutting through this emerging complex system, the role of space and time are important because it is precisely the possibility of a single, unified political crisis occurring simultaneously throughout this region that makes the issue of such critical importance for the peace of the world. In a word, will political trends and attitudes spread rapidly throughout this region and unify it at some significant level so that the problems of the whole region will have to be resolved simultaneous or will politics remain primarily local, crises separate and amenable to solution one by one? If the former becomes the case, it is not at all clear that the international community will be able effectively to meet the challenge that will result.

A system is complex because it is made up of parts that have both some freedom of movement and some mutual dependence; they are distinct but also must react and, indeed, adapt in response to the behavior of the other parts. The parts are thus constantly changing, not moving back and forth like a thermostat but evolving into something new, and not something they planned to evolve into but something at least in part unforeseen: what they become depends in part on the behavior of the other parts.

How will the fact that this series of separate countries is strung out in a long line along the Indian Ocean coast affect their potential for constituting a meaningfully complex system? Can we anticipate spatial variations in, say, the intensity of Islamic activism as a function of the geographic location of the particular society? Might the rate of change also be in part a function of the geographic location? Might there consequently be “sweet spots” where intervention of a particular type would have particularly beneficial system-wide impact or “danger zones” where intervention of the wrong type would have particularly harmful system-wide impact?

Such questions may sound academic, but the alternative to identifying some overarching patterns is the almost overwhelmingly complex challenge of simultaneously dealing with a dozen crises (and pretending that they are in fact “separate” crises), of which half are already at the stage of actual warfare. The record so far offers little hope that the global political system is sufficiently sophisticated to achieve this. Therefore, it is to be hoped that complexity theory can offer insights to guide the development of practical political solutions to the grievances of Islamic societies.

Why Tehran Needs Conflict with the U.S.

As in the U.S., power in Tehran is held by two generations of conservatives.

The Iranian revolution a generation ago was led by that society’s traditional conservatives – the clerical, landholding elite. During the near-decade-long war against Saddam Hussein in the 1980’s, a new generation grew up, a generation that attained political power in 2005 with Ahmadinejad’s election to the presidency. Both of these conservative generations–the land-owning clerics of the revolutionary generation and the younger super-patriotic war generation–see some real benefits to the tense atmosphere being created by American neo-cons and their right-wing Israeli fellow-travelers.

The traditional conservatives, although infected by the hubris of revolution in the early 1980s, have increasingly supported a cautious foreign policy. Their hostility toward Israel’s expansion and oppression of the Palestinians has been expressed in terms of military aid to resistance groups. Their hostility toward Iraq was held short of open warfare until Saddam invaded Iran. Their hostility toward the U.S., despite the memory of the U.S. coup against Mossadeq in 1953 and U.S. support for the Shah’s ensuing dictatorship and U.S. support for Saddam’s invasion, has been tempered by occasional willingness to do business. Iran rapidly expressed condolences over 9/11 and provided significant support to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, for example. Their response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been assiduous efforts to support their natural allies combined with care to avoid outright conflict with U.S. troops in their neighborhood. Iran under the Islamic revolution has not started a war or attempted regime change despite continuing its historical efforts to attain regional prominence.

The war generation is similarly conservative on social and religious issues but emboldened by the personal experience of its members in the endless years of trench warfare, poison gas attacks, and rocket strikes on cities – a time when the U.S., the Soviet Union, West Europe, and Arab countries all ganged up on Iran. The leaders of this generation of neo-conservatives are not armchair draft-avoiding militarists from the privileged classes; they personally fought in one of history’s worst wars. They are unlikely to allow themselves to be bullied. For them, it is not a question of whether or not they can survive with the whole world against them; been there, done that.

So why might Tehran, faced with unprecedented threats of nuclear attack from the world’s only remaining superpower and the Mideast’s regional superpower, see a silver lining in the thunderheads on its horizon?

1. Exploit War Fears to Consolidate Power. Conservatives use fear to hold on to power. The deal offered by conservatives is stability in return for sacrifice of civil liberties and economic progress for the poor. The fear of foreigners is what “justifies” the sacrifice. Iran’s conservatives trumpet warnings about the negative influence of corrupt Western culture, but that increasingly does not seem to play too well among Iran’s youth. Any evidence they can find of a Western threat to Iran strengthens their hold on power. Public insults, economic sanctions, labeling Iran part of an axis of evil, and–obviously–threats of attack are invaluable contributions to the conservative war chest. In the contest between the traditional conservatives and the neo-con war generation, such evidence is of particular value to Ahmadinejad’s neo-cons.

2. The “End of Days.“ Like certain fundamentalists in other religions, Iran’s neo-cons seem to believe they have a special link to God (ensuring they can do no wrong) and seem to expect a war to end the world as a vengeful God comes to earth to destroy all evil (namely, all humans except themselves). It is certainly not the case that all conservatives in Iran (or the U.S. or Israel) believe this, but to the extent that they do (and Ahmadinejad, for one, seems to), they may welcome conflict as the final solution to life’s trials.

3. Protecting the Neighborhood. Iran’s traditional ties with the Iraqi people are as close as U.S. ties with Canadians – common history (the area created as an independent country by Britain after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has over the past 3,000 years frequently been part of Iran), common religion (both majority Shi’ite Moslems), much social intercourse, vast amount of travel for pilgrimages across the border, old school ties, etc. A foreign invasion of Iraq is as much a challenge to Iran as a foreign invasion of Canada would be to Americans. Iran cannot look with equanimity upon a US colonial project in Iraq or upon what appear to be permanent military bases designed for offensive action throughout the region. Given Iran’s success in stopping Western-backed Saddam in the 1980’s, America’s failure to pacify Iraq since 2003, and the exposure of U.S. forces in Iraq, Iran’s leaders may have good reason to think they can defeat a U.S. attack. Indeed, recent public comments by IRGC leaders about the benefits to Iran of asymmetric warfare suggest they do in fact have such a perception. Moreover, since they can certainly assume that Washington is capable of making the same calculations, it is not at all unlikely that Iranian decision-makers may calculate that bilateral tensions will in the end stop short of war, thus leaving the Iranian people scared and the conservatives and militarists with consolidated power. Tensions short of war work both ways: Tehran may well calculate that the tensions will end up persuading Washington to withdraw from Iraq.

4. The Ahmadinejad Administration Has Failed. The Ahmadinejad administration has failed to deliver upon its promise of economic progress. The greater the perceived foreign threat, the easier it is to make the Iranian people overlook this and rally around the flag. If anti-Iranian threats were to diminish, domestic attention to the price of gas and the absence of civil liberties would no doubt rise rapidly. Given the upcoming Iranian parliamentary elections, this could severely weaken Ahmadinejad for the rest of his tenure.

5. Becoming the new Nasser. The greater the perceived foreign threat to Iran, the more courageous Ahmadinejad appears, facilitating achieving his goal of becoming the new hero of the Mideast, a Nasser or Saladin capable of standing up to the West.

6. When You Have a Hammer….Iran is a developing country with a weak economy savaged by years of U.S. economic sanctions and surrounded by enemies, Shi’ite among Sunnis, Persian among Arabs, and surrounded by U.S. military bases. A rough and tumble conflict with the U.S. may well seem to some Iranian leaders to be a perfect opportunity to stride a world stage that today’s Iran might otherwise have trouble climbing on to.

In brief, the leaders of the Islamic Revolution…and in particular the leaders of the conservative factions…and more particularly the leaders of the neo-con war generation faction benefit in numerous ways from a tense relationship with the U.S.

Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam

The brilliant “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam” bumper sticker, which has been around since the beginning of the American war on Iraq five long years ago, got it right. Details about Iraq and Vietnam of course differ, but arguments over the details miss the point. Of course, Vietnam is (well, pre-agent orange, was) green; Iraq is brown. Vietnam’s insurgents were Marxist-Leninist; Iraq’s are many things (secular Sunnis, fundamentalist Shi’a, various stripes of patriot, and now all manner of outsiders to boot) but hardly Marxist-Leninists…

Iraq is Vietnam (and, for that matter, Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation) for broad, basic reasons that cannot be wished away by hairsplitting:

1. a local conflict enflamed by superpower intervention;
2. superpower involvement by the most in-your-face means – a huge superpower army (some 200-300,000 U.S. soldiers including U.S. mercenaries in Iraq);
3. heavy-handed behavior by the superpower’s soldiers, including frequent killing of the civilians they supposedly went there to protect;
4. superpower emphasis on military victory in a battle actually about the quality of governance;
5. superpower intervention for its own reasons, not to help the locals – justified as preserving freedom (Vietnam), bringing modernization (Afghanistan), eliminating nuclear weapons and later bringing democracy or stopping an insurgency that was a result of the invasion (Iraq) but in reality much more about stopping China (Vietnam), inoculating Soviet Central Asia against the Islamic virus (Afghanistan), and a combination of controlling oil and strengthening Israel (Iraq);
6. destruction of the liberal middle–because empowering liberal, patriotic moderates means truly giving control to the natives–and thus leaving the battlefield to extremists.

But most of all, Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam—and Afghanistan–because in all three cases, the superpower assumed it had the right to smash down the front door and enter another man’s house without permission. Is there, with the benefit of hindsight, persuasive evidence that in any of these cases the superpower in fact had such moral superiority or wisdom as to justify that assumption? If the answer to that question is anything less than a slam dunk, then the American public deserves a policy alternative so on election day it can make a choice.

The alternative to the war policy is not to salami-slice the number of troops, the amount of time they spend on the street, the level of criticism of the puppet regime, the particular forms of torture to be inflicted upon locals convicted of no crime. The alternative to the war policy is not to continue the war policy by fomenting a coup. The alternative to the war policy is not to remove the official U.S. Armed Forces but leave the (now perhaps 100,000?) mercenaries. The alternative is not to remove the men but leave under U.S. control the several permanent military bases.

The alternative to the war policy is a peace policy; the alternative is to confess that:

• we were wrong to go in;
• we are there under false pretenses;
• our presence led to the mess that resulted;
• we do not have the wisdom to manage the solution and our presence is indeed preventing resolution, so we must leave and do what we can from a distance–and frequently through others–to make amends.

That would be an alternative policy on which a candidate could run an electoral campaign that would mean something.

Addicted to Violence

Politics is the art of the possible. Without talking to opponents, one cannot find out what might be possible. Politicians who refuse to talk to opponents ensure that at least some of the potential solutions will not even be considered. Such behavior is, however, not necessarily the result of stupidity or sulking.

When political leaders refuse to talk to their opponents, the simplest explanation is the obvious one: they do not want a solution. They do not have a problem. They are satisfied with the status quo. A politician who proclaims loudly his or her desire for compromise provided that the opponent concede on the key issue in advance is simply talking to the gallery.

Politics is all about negotiating: that’s what they are hired to do. When they refuse to do their job, you are entitled to ask why they want failure. The answer may well be that they do not consider the absence of a solution a failure. “Solution” implies change. Regimes that refuse to talk to those who want to alter the system do so because they are benefiting from the status quo.

• Chaos and low-level insurgency may well be a price a colonial regime will be quite willing to pay in return for being able to use that violence as the excuse for keeping the colonized people in subjugation. After all, the very point of colonization is to preventing the colony from going its own way.

• The destruction of a conquered society may well be a price a conqueror will be quite willing to pay in return for gaining access to natural resources or military bases to be used in further adventures. Indeed, social chaos in the colony provides a nice cover for the establishment of military bases for totally unrelated purposes.

• Low-intensity rural insurgency may be a price a rich urbanized elite will be quite willing to pay if in return it receives massive amounts of military aid from foreign patrons. The military will be likely to enhance its prestige and acquire far more sophisticated weapons than it needs to use against rural rebels.

The elites who reject negotiation and compromise, who promise to “stay the course,” seldom end up on the front lines facing the insurgents whose “radicalism” they have provoked. Waste no time asking such politicians what they want. Rather, ask yourself how the violence in a remote rural jungle, or a colony, or a conquered land may be benefiting those elites. It is not the rebellious peasant whose land was stolen by a cattle baron who should be called an “extremist.” It is not the rebellious teenager raised in a refugee camp hearing how his parents were ethnically cleansed from their homeland who should be called an extremist. It is not the rebellious militiaman fighting against foreign invaders who should be called an extremist. Is a man who defends his home and family an extremist? No, the extremist is the politician who refuses to talk to his enemy, instead insisting on a policy of preconditions and force.

Violence, Insurgency, Terrorism…& Burden Shifting?

Why is there so much rebellion against “the authorities” in the world today?

Is it the fault of “insurgents,” “radicals,” “extremists” or…the authorities?

Take a look at “Shifting the Burden.”

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Historical patterns repeat. System dynamics, the study of how underlying dynamics cause a system (e.g., a country’s political system) to behave, which I referred to in an earlier post as the “second lens” for studying international relations/world politics/global affairs, has identified a set of patterns that repeat. Called “archetypes,” these patterns occur not only in history but throughout human behavior. I discussed earlier how “Fixes that Fail” contributes to the rise of political instability; “Shifting the Burden” offers another way to think about such failures.

In the “Shifting the Burden” pattern, a symptomatic solution temporarily alleviates a problem, diverting attention from the fundamental solution; meanwhile, side effects of the superficial “solution” intensify the problem because the real cause is being ignored. That is, the “fundamental solution, on the left, is ignored, because the “symptomatic solution” is easier and, perhaps, seems to work at first. The ability of a symptomatic solution, i.e., one that alleviates a symptom without curing the disease, to appear successful at first, is a trap because people will assume that what worked at first should be tried even harder when it starts to fail.

Understanding that one may be faced with a fix that is failing will alert you to face up to the need to address the underlying cause when papering over the symptoms starts to fail.

When thinking about how societies deal with violence, this pattern can be critically important. The first step in the story of a violence-plagued society may be an effort by the establishment to stop extremism by the use of force rather than listening to the extremists’ complaints. Such use of force may well distract the regime and inhibit the flow of scarce resources into social welfare spending.

Whatever the short-term impact on extremism, over the long-term, frustrations in society over decline in the quality of governance may then well end up strengthening extremists.

This gives the following picture, in which the military fix has failed over the long-term because it had a negative impact on social welfare spending and enhanced civilian suffering, leading to a rise in recruitment into extremist ranks.

In any particular case, there may of course be any number of side effects instead of or in addition to constraints on social welfare spending. The point is to avoid the trap of being tempted to take aspirin to relieve a headache caused by a brain tumor.

Complexity & Context in the Palestinian Civil War

The global outbreaks of seemingly irrational and unpredictable violence that so consume our attention today would be much easier to explain and resolve if we adopted a systems perspective instead of reacting to each event as it occurs and rushing to label actors as “good” or “evil.” A “systems perspective” should incorporate concepts from both system dynamics and complexity theory, i.e., it should consider not just concepts such as feedback loops and delays but also interdependence of parts, attention to detail, emergence, and the context within which the system functions.

It is striking how easily we overlook this last issue—the influence on our behavior of context. The explosion of fighting this week between Fatah and Hamas is a perfect example of the critical impact of context.

Palestine is the contemporary version of the Warsaw Ghetto – totally surrounded by enemy soldiers, the Palestine people are now literally walled in (see Jimmy Carter’s chapter on “The Wall as a Prison” in his Palestine Peace Note Apartheid). Israelis enter periodically to arrest or kill Palestinian officials, guard roads crisscrossing Palestine from which Palestinians are banned, and practice economic warfare against both the Palestinian regime and the people. This context is critical to understanding Palestinian behavior.

Complexity theory asserts that the behavior of a system is a function of its parts in context. Behavior of actors in the Palestinian political system, thus, is a function of the interactions among the various Palestinian political parties in the context of their inability to overcome the Israeli occupation.

From this theoretical perspective, one may hypothesize that in the context of inability to control one’s environment, individuals will exhibit a range of behavior. As stress rises, variation in response will increase, with actors progressively trying an increasingly wide range of potential solutions. Over time, repeated failure is likely to lead to trying increasingly risky approaches. In accordance with complexity theory’s concept of behavior emerging at a collective level that could not have been inferred by observing behavior at the individual level (see Yaneer Bar-Yam, Dynamics of Complex Systems, pp. 9-10) one can hypothesize that counterintuitive patterns will be generated at the system level.

H1 = If a population fails to control its environment, as stress rises, individuals will exhibit an increasingly wide and risky range of behavior.

H2 = If individual behavior becomes increasingly varied and increasingly risky, behavior will emerge at a collective level that cannot be inferred from behavior at the individual level.

In the case of Palestine, different individuals may emphasize any of several obvious goals: gaining freedom from Israel, recovering their homeland, improving their lifestyle, or being treated with respect. Regardless of which of these goals an individual find most important, a Palestinian civil war is not a means of achieving the goal that could logically be inferred.

Complexity theory asserts that complex systems are constructed of interdependent parts, each of which modifies itself in response to modifications in the others. Complexity theory also teaches us to pay attention to the broad context within which people exist. It is not enough to identify the individuals and groups functioning in the Palestinian political system and to characterize them. It is not even enough to determine how the behavior of each actor influences the behavior of all the others. Their behavior and the labels one assigns cannot be absolute. Most unfortunately for those searching for easy answers, the behavior and nature of everyone is a function not just of innate nature but also of context.