Don't ask

That Pentagon policy of "don't ask, don't tell" from the 90s is still in force. By itself, not such a problem, but the military is still discharging servicemen who are "outed" somehow, sometimes through their own inadvertence.

The policy isn't just silly, but since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually harmful. Gay service members with critical skills are being discharged when they're needed most. In some cases, the Defense Department rehires them as civilians. But still -

Here's Deroy Murdock in the Boston Herald explaining what's wrong with this policy. The Pentagon has released a new report on this subject. There's no real excuse for this. If serving in a conservative Muslim country means gay soldiers can't be open about it, the solution is a little discretion. Female soldiers have to observe some rules along these lines as well.

Murdock is right: it's a Clinton-era relic, like Monica's kneepads and other talismans of 90s frivolity. "Don't ask, don't tell" can't be defended.

Afghanistan, bin Laden, and all that

A mindworm has returned, one familiar from 2001 and 2002. Inspired by the book and recent movie, Charlie Wilson's War, and Pakistan's troubles, the worm says something like this: in the 80s, "the US supported bin Laden," or "bin Laden supported the US," or the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan is somehow responsible for al Qa'eda. None of this is true. Those events and forces do have significance today, most of it not foreseen back then. But the Afghan anti-Soviet war (1978-1989) helped to delay the rise of al Qa'eda and Sunni radicalism directed at the US, rather than accelerate it. And Sunni radicalism needed certain prerequisites - the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988), the end of the Cold War (1990), American troops stationed in the heart of the Muslim world (Arabia, 1990-2003), the rise of Arabic satellite television (after 1994) - that didn't start falling into place until the end of the 80s.

Few people in the Western world in the 1960s and 70s foresaw the rise of radical Islam. Superficially, at least, the Middle East was dominated by ideologies familiar in a Western context: nationalism, and various types of socialism. Not understanding that the Middle East is really a distinct civilization with a history very different from the West or Asia, most pundits and experts projected the future as more of the same. Most people unthinkingly believed in an automatic secularization, modernization, and so on. The Middle East was mentally lumped into an artificial construct, the "Third World," made up of non-white peoples either patronized as "noble savages" or feared as simply "savages."

The Islamic revival of the late 1970s came as a shock to the West, the communist bloc, and Westernized elites in the Middle East. Several events marked turning points and milestones in the return of political Islam. The failure of modernization and the Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 helped to discredit secular regimes. At the same time, Saudi Arabia's successful orchestrating of the 1973-74 oil embargo - taking the industrialized world's economy hostage, in effect - marked a power shift away from secular governments like Egypt's and Syria's, once the centers of the Arab world. The Saudis already enjoyed a unique prestige from their position as keepers of the Muslim holy cities (Mecca and Medina) and as the strictest Muslims. There and elsewhere in the Middle East, Muslim radicals began to argue that Islamic purism was an authentic identity Muslims should return to and reject alien imports like nationalism, secularism, and socialism. The 1977 and 1979 hostage crises, one in Washington DC, the other in Mecca, were both carried out by Sunni radicals enraged by the gap between the Saudi regime's purist rhetoric and its modernizing, semi-cosmopolitan, and often corrupt reality. These marked the first of what would, later in the 1990s, become a familiar stream of events. At the same time, a double opposition to the Shah's regime of autocratic modernization in Shi'ite Iran put the region's secular autocrats on notice. Most Western observers expected the liberal, secular opposition to win and were stunned when the 1979 Iranian revolution turned Islamic.

In those days, everyone in the West viewed the Cold War as far more important and failed to take Islamic radicalism seriously. The war between North and South Vietnam had just ended (in 1975) with a communist victory. Only in the Iranian case was Islamic revolutionary politics viewed as genuine and threatening: by the US, because of the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-81),* and by the conservative Gulf monarchies, who rule over significant Shi'ite populations and live next door to Iran. In fact, the Gulf governments were thrown into a panic, one that led them in 1980 to prod Iraq into launching the Iran-Iraq war.** Few could see how Muslims from the ultra-conservative Gulf states would experience a growing and intolerable tension between the supposed purity of Islam in Arabia (its home) and the reality of the Gulf kingdoms, then being showered in oil wealth.

The 1978 communist coup in and December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought this budding Sunni radicalism to a stop, or rather temporarily transformed and redirected it. Suddenly the region was under a genuine threat, not from the US, but from the Soviets. After the 1978 coup, the US began to support Afghan groups directly. The most important was the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik and not a member of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. The US continued to support Massoud, but later in the 80s, found itself shut out of the more important channels for helping the Afghans, controlled by Pakistan and its military intelligence service (the ISI). (This is the part where Charlie Wilson came in.) The US, which has always had a rocky relationship with Pakistan, upgraded its ties and kept them there until 1990, when they were downgraded again, because of Pakistan's nuclear program.

Here truly a devil's bargain was made, but it has nothing to do with the Afghans. (No Afghan has been involved in terrorist attacks on the US.) The problem is Pakistan and the later involvement of Saudi religious institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which began after the anti-Soviet war was over, in the 1990s. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89, the US made a terrible (if familiar) mistake of just walking away from Afghanistan. It entered into a vicious, three-way civil war pitting against each other the remains of the pro-Soviet regime, Massoud's forces and allies, and radical Islamic groups sponsored by Pakistan. From the Saudi seeds and Pakistan's continued attempts to take over Afghanistan sprang the Taliban, whose core were madrassa (religious school) students determined to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic utopia.† After coalescing in 1994 and obtaining widespread popular support for bringing the civil war to an end, the Taliban (with massive Pakistani aid) took over most of the country by 1996. Popular support evaporated, once Afghans got to see the Islamic utopia close up (as in The Kite Runner), but by that point, popular Afghan sentiment meant little. Poor and isolated, Afghanistan had been unwillingly and unwittingly turned into a "jihad theme park," with Islamic radicals implementing the vision they could not in their home countries.

As for the rest of the myth, it's almost all fabricated, largely in retrospect by al Qa'eda, its supporters, and credulous Western journalists. The "Afghan Arabs" who supposedly fought against the Soviets actually did no fighting, confining their support of the Afghans to monetary donations. The religious motives for Sunni radicalism are rooted in Arabia, the home of Islam, and fundamentally result from the large contradiction between its dominant Wahhabi (Salafi) type of Islam and the materially modern life made possible by all that oil wealth. Pakistan, an artificial country lacking a national identity, finds promoting Islamic radicalism an almost irresistible temptation. It's a practical good as well, since it helps the ISI run an insurgency next door in the Indian province of Kashmir (claimed by Pakistan) and promote Pakistani control of Afghanistan, its geographic "rear," through the dominant Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghani border. To come full circle, when the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, its local allies were made up of - you guessed it - the same Northern Alliance we started supporting in 1978, but then abandoned in 1989. Massoud had visited the US in the summer of 2001 to warn Americans about the Taliban and its al Qa'eda allies. After his return to Afghanistan, he was assassinated, two days before the 9/11 attacks, by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber posing as a journalist. The Taliban and al Qa'eda guessed correctly that their upcoming attacks on the US would lead to a US invasion. Killing Massoud, in advance, deprived the US of an important local ally, one we had supported in the past.

The radical Islamic project remains today, among Sunnis, a violent cult inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and largely hosted by Pakistan. That these are supposedly American "allies" just adds what history will view as a cruel twist. From this perspective, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are, not diversions, but sideshows, chasing around and killing or capturing terrorists whose beliefs and activities are the result of the policies and religious proclivities of countries we dare not touch. A year-and-a-half after invading Afghanistan to overthrow a government made possible and supported by Pakistan, we failed to logically take the struggle home to the countries that hatched the crisis and instead invaded Iraq.

There are some important lessons here, but they have little do with lachrymose theories of "blowback" and other "radical" claptrap.†† The most important is the damaging American habit of walking away from a foreign involvement after a period of intense engagement, abandoning hard-won friends in the process. The US has always had, and probably will always have, a strong isolationist streak, reinforced by our attention-challenged media and short election cycles. But foreign policy is not about one-night stands and can't be built on dubious "allies" and so-called "friends." And the other lessons are familiar to readers of this blog: the sinister roles played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the rise of radical Sunni Islam and our strange relationship with Saudi Arabia. Even an enormity like the 9/11 attacks was not enough to shake that relationship, in the end. Our descendants will stare at this fact in wonder.

POSTSCRIPT: There's another angle to Afghanistan, besides the fact that its security problems are all baked next door in Pakistan. We've heard over and over in the last few years how much the US needs to be multilateral and follow the NATO model of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and not the Iraq model of largely unilateral action. But there's trouble on the horizon for NATO. It's an organization that was founded to cope with the Cold War, which it did, with great success. But in the 1990s, it was pressed into service in new ways not part of its original mandate and which are now proving more difficult, costly, and unpopular than originally anticipated. Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, supposedly models of multilateralism, may instead prove its graveyard. US military action in the future will probably look a lot more like Iraq than people think.

Another important development that our wonderfully unbiased and objective news media are all over - right?
---
* Notice how often the word "hostage" comes up in this posting.

** Here's a place to lay to rest another myth, that the US supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. While the US did quietly grant security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms, it was officially neutral in the conflict ("it's too bad both sides can't lose," was Kissinger's famous quip). It was the Gulf kingdoms themselves that directly supported Iraq with money. Using that and his own oil money, Saddam bought weapons mainly from the Soviets and, to a smaller extent, from France. (The French had their own reasons to back Iraq against the Iranian revolutionary mullahs.) Iraq didn't fight Iran with American weapons, but with Soviet ones: AK-47s, not M-16s; T-55s and T-62s, not M1s; MiGs, not F-16s. But the price of oil collapsed in the later 1980s, and Saddam's income dried up. Unable to pay off his loans from the Gulf states, he invaded one of them and threatened to invade the others.

† In Farsi (Persian) and related languages, taliban just means "students."

†† As for "blowback," the ultimate in tragic backfiring is the death of Benazir Bhutto. It was during her terms as Pakistani prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96) that the ISI turned into a dedicated machine for promoting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. And of course, it is just those groups who were responsible for her assassination.

Again, these developments started after the end of the anti-Soviet war. Only once Pakistan was no longer an object of superpower interest did it unabashedly and recklessly go full-time into the Islamo-radicalism business, picking up the thread dropped in 1980.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Further thoughts

One of the most interesting features of Ali's thinking is her view of Islam as failed social utopia. She says: I'm from a clan in Somalia; long ago we accepted Islam and following the divine will as the path to an ideal society, and we have failed. This approach marks an arresting starting point and allows her to connect the civil war anarchy she escaped with the "theologico-political problem" of early modern Europe (à la Spinoza, Hobbes, etc.), as well as the great failed secular utopias of our own time. Of course, she is a political scientist by academic training - the University of Leiden in Holland, to be exact. Her drive to understand why the modern West has succeeded and the floundering of the tribal-theocratic world she came from is why she decided on graduate school in the first place. It was academic, but not just academic.

There is a line of thinking - exemplified by Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle - that postulates the problem of the Islamic world, not as religion, but as a failed overcoming-of-tribalism. There is a serious case to be made for this view. The tribal world is not a "civil society" - there is no voluntary, peaceful cooperation, the kind required for progress. Instead, everything cancels everything else out - the closed circle. The relation of Islam to political power is different from Christianity or Judaism: there is neither a separate state with a monopoly on power, nor a voluntary self-organized community. Religion, politics, family or clan - all are mixed together in primitive society. This gives exceptional urgency to the problem of succession to Muhammad (khalifa). Without a single, agreed-upon successor, there is no legitimacy. Yet such a figure is a necessity in classical Islamic political thought for truly legitimate political authority. In reality, there is a void, filled by plausible or implausible claimants.

A completely different example of the impact of tribal custom is the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation.* Mentioned nowhere in the Qu'ran, female genital mutilation, where it is practiced (in some Muslim countries - not all - as well as some non-Muslim ones), is intended as a kind of female-chastity protector and female-sexual-pleasure-destroyer. It's rationalized as a way to keep girls and young women "pure." This sort of tribal-custom-rationalized-by-Islam is at work in the purist Wahhabi or Salafi Islam of Saudi Arabia and the tribal code (Pashtunwali) of the Pashtuns of Pakistan and Afghanistan.** One of the basic dilemmas posed by Muslim immigration to Europe is the assertion of tribal custom in Europe's cities, in a way not compatible with the rule of law or state sovereignty. In some ways, "Talibanism" is an assertion of extreme tribal reaction against urban, middle-class life. This cycle has a long history in Islam, discussed in the classical sources such as ibn Khaldun's Muqadimah. Such ways of thinking have almost been lost to us here in the West, and so we often have a hard time recognizing them for what they really are when we encounter them elsewhere.

These are among the many not-just-academic questions that arise from Ali's Infidel and The Caged Virgin, as well as the other recent additions to the bookshelf on Islam by Muslim women. Ali's autobiography blends the personal and political in a powerful way that illuminates both, leaving the chatterboxes of post-modern academia far behind in the dust.
---
* Sometimes mislabeled "female circumcision." The actual male equivalent, were it practiced, would be something like cutting off a quarter or more of the male sexual organ - depending on size, of course :)

** The link between the two is the 19th-century Deobandi school of Islam on the Indian subcontinent. Both the Salafi and the Deobandi schools were early reactions to the incipient clash of Islam and modernity, one in the context of the Ottoman empire, the other in the context of a polyreligious India under the British Raj.

A horrifying milestone

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: It's another Middle East sick-humor moment - but it's real: Pakis flee to the relative safety of Afghanistan (via Instapundit). It's also a measure of how rapidly the situation is evolving.
---
There's not much to add to what's been said about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. She wanted to return to Pakistan and, with Musharraf weakening in the last couple years, agreed with Rice and the State Department to a strange "arranged marriage" with the Pakistani government. While there's a lot of tongue-clucking about Bush's policy being dead, the reality is the opposite: it was the old policy of giving Musharraf a blank check that is now not only dead, but dead and buried. Bhutto's assassination was carried out by al Qa'eda-Taliban operatives, extremist groups that owe their existence to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) service and Saudi money and ideology. These groups do not and have never had widespread support from Pakistanis, and the government's main repressive actions have been directed against liberal and secular movements, not against the extremists.

What Rice and others in the administration realized a couple years ago was that giving Musharraf a blank check after 9/11, when Pakistan decided to at least officially side with the US, was good short-term strategy, but bad in the long run. As with many of these apparently clever "realist" strategies, we're now living in the long run. The era of "he's our bastard" realpolitik is over.

The future of fighting these extremist movements lies with allying ourselves to and strengthening Muslim governments that have greater legitimacy. They don't necessarily have to be electoral democracies. They can also be conservative monarchies, if they are open to reform. Relying on rulers with narrow bases of support is a deadend.

For Pakistan itself, the problem isn't just radical Islam, because in the Islamic world, religion isn't just a belief system as we think of it. Radical Islam comes with a political program (the caliphate fantasy versus nation-states) and social forces (the world of village clans and tribes versus the urban, the middle class, and the liberal). The resurgence of purist Islam is a result of the failure of "modernization," itself a relic of European colonialism. All of these older forms of Westernization had a narrow basis and limited appeal. Without a broader popular demand for better government, the rebarbarization of former European colonies is a real possibility. And because we live in a smaller and smaller world, we will not be able to run away from the consequences.

Mark Steyn put it well:

Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability ....

Since her last spell in power [in the 1990s], Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation .... Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee ....

When you invent an artificial country, you better be sure that your artificial identity will stick. Pakistan today is not what the British and Jinnah had in mind, nor Ayub Khan, nor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nor General Zia, nor Nawaz Sharif. Instead, across 60 years, their failures incubated an identity that would have seemed utterly deranged to even the more excitable Punjabi Muslims of the early 1940s. As ... noted earlier, according to one recent poll, 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Laden.

What should be easy to agree [upon] is that Pakistan is getting worse. Even those who thought at the time that its creation was one of the most unnecessary mistakes in British imperial policy wouldn't have predicted that a mere half-century later it would be a coup-prone nuclear basket-case exporting both its tribal marriage customs and irredentist jihadism to the heart of the western world. Fifty years ago, Pakistanis emigrating to England and Canada brought with them an essentially Britannic education and a moderate Sufi Islam that was not a barrier to integration. Today they bring a narrow madrassah education and [Wahhabi- or Salafi-inspired] Deobandi Islam, which is deeply hostile to assimilation. In other words, what a "Pakistani" is[,] is profoundly different. I liked Benazir Bhutto very much, but she represented Pakistan's past, and her murder is a horrible confirmation of that fact.

I'm sure Steyn would love to be wrong about Pakistan, but there's a good chance he isn't.

More about Iran versus Iraq

A friend took me to task for being too pessimistic in a recent posting about the prospects in Iraq, and for implying something not true about the neoconservatives.

My point about the neocons is not that they were clueless about radical Islam before the Iraq war. A few were even conscious of it before 9/11 (many were overly obsessed with China back in those days). My point was the misguided attempt to connect the new post-1991 trend of radicalism in the Middle East to Saddam. The fact that Saddam was making nice with some Islamic radicals only proves my point - he was cozying up to them because they (not he) were in the drivers' seat. It's like when he put Allahu `Akbar on the Iraqi flag after the Guf War. It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and he was trying to keep up with the latest. He was a trend-follower, not a trend-setter.

The major countries incubating Sunni radical Islam are clear: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and (to an extent) Egypt. A few other countries (like Algeria) playing a tag-along role under the influence of the more important ones. It's rather unfair to lump Egypt and Algeria together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on this score, because the Egyptian and Algerian governments have been tireless in their efforts to squash the radical movements. (In Egypt, there has been some compromise between the government and the radicals.) But the Saudi and Pakistani governments have a long-standing role in promoting radical Islam - on the world stage, since the 1970s, even before the fall of the Shah. Pakistan in particular suffers from an identity and legitimacy crisis, and that makes radical Islamic movements attractive because they're politically useful. Countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan have ended up as test laboratories for the Sunni radical movements to try out theocracy and take in jihadis, all with Saudi and Pakistani sponsorship.

The other axis of jihad is Iran, with its little brother, Syria, and its Shi'ite laboratory in Lebanon. Like its Sunni sibling, the Shi'ite version of radicalism took off in the late 70s, after the decline of secular ideologies in the Arab world set in and the fall of the Shah.

Iraq is not on either list.

At a high level, the neocon goal of promoting constructive political change in the ME is a good idea - no, better than good - necessary. Carried through consistently and subtracting out their obsession with Iraq, it would involve cooling relations with Egypt somewhat, sharply cooling them with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (even to the point of issuing them ultimatums), and engaging Iran with peaceful but unceasing pressure towards serious political change. The model should be Reagan in the 1980s, with Iran taking the place of the Soviet Union, and America's erstwhile "allies" - right-wing authoritarian governments then, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt now - subject to a serious push towards reform and opening up. Even a liberal revision of American policy - thought through its logical conclusions - wouldn't look that different. The stylistics and atmospherics might feel otherwise, but not the substance or goals.

It's a mistake to think of the Bush foreign policy as being neoconservative, because much of this agenda has not been translated into policy, only the obsession with Iraq - the one neocon idea that remains the flimsiest. Much of that can be attributed to personnel and history, not ideology. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith were all central in the Persian Gulf war, and Bush Jr.'s fixation on Iraq is obviously mixed up with Oedipal father-son issues. The Iraq obsession got translated into reality by Bush because it resonated the most strongly on a personal level with key administration figures. There's been no coherent reconsideration of policy towards Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Egypt. Iran has been faced as a problem only very recently.

The course of policy in Iraq has been on the whole poor in design and execution since the summer of 2003, with some bright spots here and there, especially in the Kurdish north. It's also been politically costly. But my earlier posting is really about Iran - Iraq is a secondary point. My pessimism about the Middle East might not be justified in the long run. There are positive trends, like the bloggers. But an overall positive direction of change is a hope and an assumption, not a proven fact.