Tag: Afghanistan

China plots to encircle India

Mustafa Malik July 31, 2020

“Yay!”

I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh.

Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a packed parking area. Sylhet, too, is close to the Indian state of Assam, where I was born. I felt good about the prospect of traveling more comfortably from Sylhet to see my friends and relatives in India.

I was browsing through news sites on my laptop in my living room in the Washington suburbs. I now wanted to know more about the airport project and gradually found out, through Google search, that it was a much bigger story than I had thought. The modest $248 million project was just the tip of an iceberg of growing bitterness between Bangladesh and India, and more startlingly, part of a grand Chinese strategy to contain India.

The Chinese venture in Sylhet was big news in the Indian media. Some Indian bureaucrats and pundits were fuming at the Bangladesh government for cozying up to China and giving the airport contract to a Chinese company when India was reeling from its border clash with the Chinese in the Himalayas that killed 20 Indian troops. One commentator pointed to Sylhet being next door to Assam, a caldron of unrest against India. Was the Bangladeshi airport going to be a nest for Chinese spies, fomenting trouble for India in Assam? The Bangladeshi government was ignoring these Indian criticisms and not making secret of serious strains in its relations with India.

A report attributed to the Bhorer Kagoj (Morning paper), a Bengali-language Bangladeshi daily, revealed that for four months the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had been turning down requests for a meeting with the Indian high commissioner (ambassador) to Dhaka, Riva Ganguly Das. Some in the media speculated that Hasina did not want to hear any Indian carping about the growing Bangladeshi-Chinese ties. In mid-July India finally decided to remove its envoy from her Dhaka post.

The relationship between Dhaka and New Delhi had been flustered, as never before, by two apparently anti-Muslim measures adopted by the Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A new Indian law provides Indian citizenship to immigrants of all faiths from neighboring countries – with the exception of Muslims. And nine out of 10 Bangladeshis are Muslim. Then a new survey of citizenship status of people in Assam, widely criticized as a Muslim witchhunt, has stripped 2 million Assamese, mostly Muslims of Bangladeshi origins, of their Indian citizenship. As a result, anti-Indian outrage was sweeping Bangladesh, and the Hasina government, which had been chummy with New Delhi, had to downgrade its ties to India to an all-time low.

China obviously lost no time in exploiting the animus between Dhaka and New Delhi and reached out to Bangladesh with largesse. Besides taking up the Sylhet airport project, Beijing is working on other trade and investment ventures in Bangladesh. On June 19 Bangladesh and China signed a trade agreement under which China provides duty-free access to 97 percent of 8,200 Bangladeshi products, an undreamed of bonanza for Bangladesh. Then Beijing signed an agreement with the Hasina government to build a submarine base at the Cox’s Bazar harbor of Bangladesh.

While this was going on, the Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, surprised the region by making a widely publicized phone call to his long-estranged Bangladeshi counterpart, Hasina. Khan complained to her about India’s annexation of the Muslim-majority Kashmir state. The call had considerable optical implications. In 1971 India went to war with Pakistan to let Bangladesh (then Pakistan’s eastern province) secede from Pakistan and become an independent state. Ever since, relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan had been on the rocks. It appeared that China’s long arm of diplomacy had got Khan to call up Hasina as part of Beijing’s broader anti-Indian strategy.

Besides Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal has also been at loggerheads with India. For years the Nepalese have been accusing India of having illegally annexed three of their territories. The festering feud led Kathmandu to try to wiggle out of India’s economic orbit by courting China. Beijing grabbed the overture enthusiastically, dishing out loans, aid and investments to Nepal. Last year, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Kathmandu, the two countries upgraded their relationship to a “strategic partnership.”

The Nepali-Indian tensions heated up in May when India opened a new road through the territories claimed by Nepal, which reached the Chinese border. China was not amused. New Delhi also put out a map showing the territories claimed by Nepal are part of India. Nepal responded by publishing its own map showing the disputed territories to belong to Nepal. Indian politicians and news media are accusing China of orchestrating Nepal’s anti-Indian moves. They are branding Kathmandu a Chinese “proxy,” trying to create troubles for India at Beijing’s behest.

China isn’t bothering to deny these Indian accusations. On the contrary, it apparently has decided to put its potentially anti-Indian ducks in a row. On July 27 Beijing held a virtual conference with Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan, ostensibly to adopt a four-point plan to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. But significantly, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, also discussed plans to boost economic recovery in the region and prodded Afghanistan to get on with Beijing’s global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Largest of its kind in history, the BRI is focused on making huge investments in transportation, communication, education, power grid, iron and steel manufacture, and so on. China expects the initiative, involving more than 68 nations, to accelerate economic growth across the Asia Pacific region, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

Pakistan was among the first countries to jump into the BRI. Bangladesh and Nepal then joined in. And impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely to pass up the opportunity to embrace the mammoth project that would accelerate its economic growth.

The United States, India, Japan, Australia and some other pro-Western countries have stayed away from the BRI. Some have denounced the project as China’s mega strategy for world domination, a mechanism to financially trap countries into the Chinese orbit. Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros warned governments against joining the venture, calling China a “mortal threat to open societies.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had joined the BRI, has dissociated his country from it, citing Chinese persecution of Uighur Muslims.

All the same, China has invested billions of dollars in India’s neighborhood – in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It obviously is now using those investments and the lure of the BRI to stitch these countries together into a pro-Chinese albatross around India’s neck.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

War on terror winding down

Mustafa Malik May 6, 2019

ON EASTER SUNDAY a bunch of Islamic State terrorists bombed several Sri Lankan churches and hotels, leaving more than 250 dead and nearly 500 wounded. The terrorist group said the carnage was meant to avenge the March 15 shootings at two New Zealand mosques by an Islamophobic Christian, Brenton Tarrant. Forty-nine people had died in those attacks.

Surprisingly, the Trump administration’s response to these attacks has been muted. No denunciation of “radical Islamic Islamic extremism.” No thunders about rooting out terrorism. It appears that President Trump – unlike his two predecessors in the Oval Office – is considering washing his hands of the “war on terror.” He had hinted doing so earlier. Does it mean he has finally realized the futility of the bloody, gargantuan, global anti-terror enterprise?

The Muslim and Christian terrorists who staged the killings in New Zealand and Sri Lanka echo bygone days when religious violence in both Islamdom and Christendom was not only acceptable, but often laudable.

During my early teens in my three-centuries-old ancestral village, Polashpur, in what is now Bangladesh, one of my aunts used to hold “puthi reading” reading sessions her guest rooms. Puthi in old Bengali means a folk history book, narrating exaggerated or fictionalized stories of history, love affairs, etc. Many villagers believed them to be true.

I attended a session in which aunt Sakina was reading out Jangnama (war history) in Sylheti Nagri script about a battle (I forget which one) between Arab Muslim invaders of a non-Muslim tetorry. A cluster of my other relatives had gathered around her, chewing pan – sliced betel nuts mixed with tobacco and lime and wrapped in betel leaves – and listening with rapt attention.

When Sakina came upon an anecdote about Muslim invaders slaughtering “hundreds of thousands of infidels,” native non-Muslim defenders of the territory, her audience broke into a chorus of applause: “Subhan Allah” (glory to God). My second cousin Mukaddas Ali Tafader sprang to his feet, punched the air with his right fist, roaring: “Fi naari jahannam,” a Quranic phrase meaning, “into the fire of hell.” My relatives obviously viewed the massacre of the “hundreds of thousands” of people defending their homes and families from the Muslim invaders as a virtuous act approved, if not mandated, by Allah. Never mind the Quran teaches Muslims to regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths and their practitioners as fellow partisans of the Abrahamic tradition.

But in the late 1950s the mostly illiterate village Muslims in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) thought Jangnama and other accounts of folk Islam were Islamic scripture. Thanks to the spread of education and modernization of Muslim societies, most Muslims today know more about Islamic values and principle and have critical views about folk Islam. During trips through Muslim countries in South Asia and the Middle East I am amazed by everyday Muslims’ discriminating views about and Islamic tenets, culture and tradition. As anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out in the 1990s, Islam has now been going through “a major cultural revolution,” barely noticed or acknowledged in the West.

Today the Islamic mainstream no longer approves of religious violence. By the way, Muslim armed struggles against the Israeli apartheid and colonialism in Palestine; Indian occupation of Kashmir; American invasion of Afghanistan; and Muslim monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East are reactions to foreign subjugation or domestic repression – not religious passion per se. And support for those struggles is widespread among Muslims and many non-Muslims around the world.

Religious zealotry against perceived enemies of Islam is confined to the fringes of some Muslim societies. The IS in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya in Somalia, Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and some other Muslim guerrilla groups belong to those fringes.

The history of Christianity, by which I mean Western Christianity, used to be much more violent that those of Islam and other faiths. During the Thirty Years’ War, fought in the seventeenth century between Catholics and Protestants, 25 percent to 40 percent people in German states perished. In Brandenburg, the losses amounted to half its population. Württemberg lost three-quarters. The pogroms, the Inquisition and other flare-ups of violence against the Jews, Christian heretics and “pagans” racked Europe and North America for centuries.

The Crusades were an epic orgy of hair-raising Christian savagery against Muslims and Jews. In July 1099 when the Crusaders stormed into Jerusalem, they wept in joy. Having thanked God for enabling them to enter the holy city, the Crusaders streamed through the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, killing everyone in sight. They beheaded men, rapaciously raped and murdered women, and thrust children’s heads against walls, smashing their skulls. Thomas Asbridge has written that “blood-hungry, ravening packs” of Crusaders plunged in a two-day bacchanalia of random murder, rape and plunder that “left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses.” These Christians’ cruelty to Muslims and Jews was no different from their brutality to Christian heretics inside Europe. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council anathemized all heresy and proclaimed rich rewards in the hereafter for those who would kill heretics, or enslaved them and seized their property.

Most Western Christians today would believe that the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Puritan violence against Quakers and other American Christians were prompted by misinterpretations of the Gospel. (I don’t know, though, about Vice President Mike Pence or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo!) Christianity has since gone through a three-fold transformation: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. These revolutions catalyzed the secularization and modernization of Western societies, fostering religious tolerance and pluralism. Most Western Christians no longer view non-Christian groups through religious lenses, let alone fight them in the name of religion.

For Western Christians the Other now is defined by secular ideologies nationalism, racism and economic creeds, which have triggered warfare and violence on far greater scales than witnessed during the earlier eras of religious violence.

There remain, however, fringe groups such as followers of evangelical preachers, Ku Klux Klan, anti-abortion campaigners, and white supremacist gangs. Racism and anti-immigrant zealotry inform the French National Front, Sweden Democrats, Greek Golden Dawn, Polish Law and Justice, Dutch Party for Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party. Affiliates and supporters of these groups and political parties engage in cross burning, bombing mosques and synagogues, and attacks on non-white individuals and institutions.These days Christian terrorist and extremist groups lurch on the fringes of Western societies, as do their prototypes in the Muslim world.

Violence and bigotry among fringe groups isn’t confined to Muslim and Christian societies, however. It’s as or more prevalent among Israeli Jews, Indian Hindus and Buddhists in Myanmar and other southeast Asian countries. The question is whether these violent fringes of religious communities will eventually evolve and join the mostly peaceable mainstreams of their faiths? Or would their ideologies spread further in their countries? I won’t venture any answers, and social anthropologist are all over the place on these questions. Violence or social disorder must of course be tackled legally and socially, but the problem is we don’t know and often can’t figure out their sources.

Despite its bigots and warmongers, the Trump administration seems to have come to the same conclusions. Their slow-pedaling of the war on terror, slackening of the Afghanistan war and pullout of American troops from Syria are further proofs of this trend.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Terrorism feeding on U.S. amnesia

Mustafa Malik June 21, 2016

WHILE AMERICA MOURNS the slaughter of 49 innocent people in Orlando, Florida, by an ISIS-inspired Muslim man, the CIA director warns that more of this kind of tragedy may be in store for the West. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams and other terrorist groups are throwing evermore killers into the West, John Brennan said.

He also told the Senate Intelligence Committee that ISIS already “has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West.”

What’s going on!

Six weeks ago the man who leads the State Department’s counterterrorism programs assured us, a group of journalists, that while “it’s understandable that [people] would be worried” about terrorist attacks in America, “chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are very low.” Justin Siberell said the United States has put in place programs in many countries, which are “addressing the roots of radicalization [of Muslim youths] and disrupting the recruitment into terrorist organizations,” and that supposedly had lessened the threat from ISIS and other terrorist groups.

When I mentioned to Siberell that I saw units of ISIS and Al Qaeda mushrooming in different countries, he said those were “highly localized” events, and that the Obama administration was working with the countries involved to “develop the tools” that would “help governments better address these threats.”

The diplomat apparently was trying, pathetically, to cast a smokescreen around the administration’s dismal failure to “destroy” anti-Western terrorist groups that it promised over and over to accomplish. That failure was glaring at us in Orlando, San Bernadino, Boston, Paris, Brussels, London, Madrid and other Western sites.

So why is it that terrorism has so blatantly defied the West’s anti-terrorism wars, diplomacy and surveillance programs? As I see it, the medicine isn’t working or is aggravating the affliction because the prognosis isn’t right. The West, especially America, attributes Muslim terrorism to one expression of Islam or another. Some folks also link Muslim terrorism to poverty, backwardness, autocratic repression and other problems plaguing Muslim societies.

President Obama is being roasted by Republicans for not calling Muslim violence against the West “radical Islamic terrorism,” as they do. The president’s main argument against using an Islamic label on terrorism is that that would alienate many Muslims around the world. Deep down, he believes that some strands of Islam are indeed fueling murderous proclivity among some Muslim youths. He told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that “the real problem” fomenting Muslim terrorism is “the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.”

Obama seems to be oblivious to the fact that Islam has been going steadily through religious and social reforms since the late-colonial era, but it’s not following the path that Martin Luther, John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli did a half millennium ago. The leaders of the Protestant Reformation broke away from the long-established Christian doctrines and tradition, while Islam has been reforming and evolving from its core beliefs, values and epistemology.

My grandfather was a traditional Muslim cleric who got up at 3 a.m. every night and prayed till sunrise and devoted the last 23 years of his life in prayers, teaching children the basics of Islam and building and managing a tin-shed mosque in the hill town of Haflong in northeast Indian state of Assam. My father, an Islamic scholar and political activist, was deeply concerned about the plight of impoverished and repressed Muslim minority in British India. He worked simultaneously with a Muslim clerical organization and Mahatma Gandhi’s Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress to struggle for the liberation of Indians from British colonial rule. I’m a Western-educated secular Muslim, but I defend and take pride in Islamic principles of community, charity and justice. And I seem to have inherited from my father concern for Muslims and lower-class Hindus in India and Bangladesh. Like most other Muslim families around the world, mine has been evolving, peacefully and steadily, from our Islamic religious and cultural roots.

I don’t believe that Westerners who view Islam as an inherently obscurantist and violent religion, offshoots of which are breeding terrorists, are innately hostile to Muslims or their faith. I see most of them unfamiliar or inadequately familiar with Islam and Muslim values and worldviews. As we have seen in the past, encounters with unfamiliar people and cultures often breed many Americans’ hostility toward those people and their values. Remember the days Americans thought Jews were “greedy,” Irish “dirty,” Germans “swarthy,” Poles “stupid,” and Italians “mafia,” and denounced Chinese as harbingers of “yellow peril”? How many Americans today use any of those labels for any of these racial and ethnic categories? For most Americans and other Westerners, Muslims are the new kids on the block or the horizon. No wonder they’re “terrorists.”

Yes, for several decades now a bunch of Muslim terrorist groups from across the Mediterranean and their fellow travelers in the West have been committing acts of terror against Westerners. And Westerners, unsurprisingly, are anguished and enraged by these terrible incidents. What surprises me, though, is that most Western politicians and intellectuals who blame Islam and or some of its strands for terrorist acts don’t seem ever to ask of themselves this question: Why did Muslims in developing countries admire America and view it as the only good Western country when European nations had colonized and plundered their lands and slaughtered and persecuted them? The Muslim world then was more deeply steeped in Islam, more impoverished, far more backward, and lived under as brutal kings and dictators. Muslim admiration and good will for the United States was fostered, mainly, by the US abhorrence of European colonialism. That good will turned into gratitude after Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, an outline for peace negotiations at the end of World War I, which underscored the “right of self-determination” for colonized peoples. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the would-be founder of Pakistan, was so taken with Wilson’s anti-colonial stance that a decade later, in 1928, he outlined a 14-point demand for political and cultural rights of British Indian Muslims.

Anti-American sentiments in the Muslim world have been fueled, as I mentioned elsewhere, by America’s economic exploits and military invasions and incursions in many Muslim countries. The exploitation of mineral and other resources in Muslim countries began with the 1944 Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement, dividing Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. And it continues. America’s military, intelligence and diplomatic offensives in the Muslim world date back to 1948, when the Harry Truman administration became the first in the world to recognize and support the state of Israel, set up by European Jews on the land they had ethnically cleansed of more than 700,000 of its native Palestinians. Muslim grievances against America deepened through the overthrow or destabilization of democratic and other Muslim governments by successive American administrations, who installed or supported repressive pro-American dictatorships and monarchies. U.S. military aggression and interventions in Muslim societies reached a high watermark with the outright invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As during the Crusades and the colonial era, Muslims have always proclaimed the sanction of their faith in their struggle against foreign aggression and hegemony. But ever since the Crusades, the sources of their hostilities with Western countries have, almost always, been Western aggression, exploitation or hegemony, not Islam or any of its theological branches. The same is the case with anti-Americanism, smoldering today around the Muslim world, strands of which have, deplorably, degenerated into terrorism.

Yet most, but not all, American and Western politicians and pundits fail to see the connection between Western policies and actions and Muslim hostility toward the West. Many of us know, and in fact several American politicians, including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), have said publicly, that ISIS was born as a Sunni Arab response to America’s invasion of Iraq and replacement of its Sunni Arab regime with Shiite ones. Under Shiite governments, Sunni Arabs in Iraq have been slaughtered, persecuted, thrown out of their jobs and driven away from their homes and lands. Two days ago Iraq’s Shiite government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, with American-trained, equipped and guided troops and American air support, completed the war in mostly Sunni Fallujah against Sunni guerrillas from ISIS. The devastating U.S. bombardment and Shiite ground war have all but emptied Fallujah of its population, who have fled into intense suffering. I’m afraid many of the thousands of Sunni Arab youths who have fled Fallujah will join ISIS to try to avenge their travails on America.

At last month’s State Department briefing, I asked Siberell if he thought U.S. invasion of Iraq, support for its Shiite regime and military interventions in other Muslim countries had contributed to the emergence of ISIS, Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist organizations.

“I reject the suggestion,” replied the terror-fighting diplomat, “that the United States is responsible for all these different terrorism movements you’ve mentioned.”

America’s refusal to take a hard look at the sources of terrorism and its bombing of Muslim countries and demonization and witchhunt of Muslims are only helping to strengthen and multiply terrorist groups. The CIA’s Brennan wants us to brace for more acts of terror by these groups without saying what we or our government can do about them. I wonder how long this self-destructive amnesia has to continue before American political elites, especially policy makers, begin to take a bold and honest look at the real causes of the horrible tragedies being unleashed by vengeful terrorists.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is the host of the blog ‘Muslim Journey,’ (https://muslimjourney.com).

Fighting phantom terror

Mustafa Malik February 28, 2015

THE ISLAMIC STATE has sent new shock waves through the world by capturing more than 200 Syrian and Egyptian Christians. The terrorist group’s gruesome killing of other hostages has heightened concerns among many about the fate of these hostages.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration and the Iraqi government reportedly have shelved their long-publicized plans to try to retake Mosul. The second-largest Iraqi city has been under IS occupation since last summer. If true, the news would further embolden the IS terrorists. They probably will further consolidate their occupation of the Syrian and Iraqi territory, which is already larger in size than the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, the IS campaign of terror goes on. The New York Times describes it as a “rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan.” The reporter Anne Barnard depicted the horror as “entire villages emptied, with hundreds taken prisoners, others kept as slaves; the destruction of irreplaceable works or art; a tax on religious minorities, payable in gold.”

The last time the Middle East saw such repugnant sights was during the American invasion of Iraq, spotlighted by Abu Gharib; and of Afghanistan, where American soldiers not only slaughtered countless innocent Afghan and Pakistani men, women and children, but showed little concern for the humanity of their victims. Nothing symbolizes the dehumanization of the Afghans as the pictures of U.S. soldiers peeing before rolling cameras on the corpses of Afghan guerrillas. The pictures, like those from Abu Gharib, weren’t isolated events. We know from leaked reports of CIA atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan that high echelons of the Bush and Obama administrations were aware of these war crimes or condoned them after learning about them.

Leave aside the morality of the two administrations’ insensitivity toward these Muslim peoples and their values. What worries me most is that this see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude is a stumbling block to the search for a solution to the U.S.-Islamic imbroglio. In fact the same attitude has led American policy makers to decide that the Muslim rage against America and the West is actually confined to a fanatic fringe of Muslim societies. Studies after studies have shown that more than 80 percent of people in most Muslim societies are seething with anti-American rage. The IS and other Muslim terrorist groups enjoy tacit or vocal support of large numbers of people in these societies.

Most Americans apparently don’t know about it because American politicians and flag-waving American news media are more interested in mud-slinging against Islam, variously described, than looking inward into America’s role in the confrontation. In a prayer breakfast three weeks ago Obama condemned the IS for “twisting and distorting” religion for their heinous acts. But he also reminded his audience that Christians had engaged in similar crimes in the past.

“[R]emember,” the president said, “that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Nobody questioned the validity of his remarks, but his words triggered an avalanche of fury among Western politicians and intellectuals. Rudy Giuliani blamed the president’s upbringing for his reference Christian extremism. “I do not believe,” added the former mayor of New York, “that the president loves America.”

Sen. Ted Cruz also didn’t dispute the veracity of Obama’s comments. But the Texas Republican blasted him for not mentioning Islam as the source of IS terrorism. “The words ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ do not come out of the president’s mouth,” fumed the presidential hopeful, “The word ‘jihad’ does not come out of the president’s mouth. And that is dangerous.”

“Any use of the word ‘Crusade,’’ said the University of London historian Thomas Asbridge, “has to be made with great caution.” Asbridge, who has written a series of books about medieval history, didn’t say why “great caution” needs to be used in references only to the Crusades, but not to Muslim extremism.

Their own neocolonialist attitudes and policies toward the Muslim world remain hidden to most Americans and Westerners in their dangerous blind spots. Americans, especially American policy makers, need to remember that the IS, and its predecessor Al Qaeda in Iraq, didn’t exist before the uncalled for and catastrophic Iraq war. The IS, appallingly cruel as it is, emerged as the only defender of the members of Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority who had survived the horrifying slaughter, ethnic cleansing and persecution by the successive U.S.-backed Shiite governments. Iraq’s sectarian Shiite leaders had collaborated with the George W. Bush administration in its invasion of Iraq. Most of them had returned to Iraq from exile “on the backs of American tanks,” said Columbia University scholar Rashid Khalidi.

In Afghanistan, Pashtun guerrillas, who organized as the Taliban militia, never had an argument with the United States until it invaded and occupied their country. In fact the CIA collaborated with Pashtun guerrillas, then known as the mujahedeen, or freedom fighters, during their 1980s war against the Soviet invaders. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan not only made the Taliban hostile to America, but also led to the birth of the Taliban in Pakistan.

An of course, 9/11 was a direct fallout of the 1991 deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen who was America’s ally in the Afghan war against the Soviets, was among the most vocal Saudi voices against the U.S. troop presence in “the land or Muhammad.” Expelling “the Crusaders” from the Muslim holy land was the first item on bin Laden’s agenda, as he outlined in his 1996 fatwa. Seventeen of the 19 plane hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.

In April 2003 when America finally pulled out its troops and base from Saudi Arabia (under pressure from the Saudi monarchy, scared by 9/11), Al Qaeda groups in the Middle East celebrated it as a vindication of 9/11.

Western politicians and intellectuals are deluding themselves and their people by blaming Muslim terrorism on Islam, “radical Islam,” “Islamic extremism,” “a twisted [Islamic] ideology,” and so forth. Of course some of the Muslim terrorism stems from Muslims’ sectarian and ethnic fissures. But most of it has been a reaction to foreign occupation.

A study of Britain’s prestigious think tank Chatham House has found that foreign occupation and domination is the wellspring of modern terrorism: Palestinian, Lebanese, Tamil, Kurdish, Buddhist, Chechen, Kashmiri, and so forth. In one of the most comprehensive studies of suicide terror attacks during 1980-2004, Robert Pape found that 95 percent of them were targeted at what the terrorists considered foreign occupation of their or their allies’ homelands.

In his landmark book Dying to Win, the University of Chicago professor recalls that Arabs learned suicide terror techniques from Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka and Marxist Kurds in Turkey. He says terrorists use religion as an inspiration only when they have “a religious difference” with the occupying or hegemonic power.

I’m afraid that even if the Obama administration’s repeatedly articulated plans to “defeat ISIL ever materialized, that of itself wouldn’t diminish Muslim terrorism against America and its allies. The Bush and Obama administrations succeeded in expelling Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, only to see it spread to the Middle East and north and West Africa. America and the West have to come to grips with the root cause of the Muslim rage against them: foreign occupation and hegemony.

Terror bred by grievances, not Islam

Mustafa Malik February 21, 2015

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech at this week’s terrorism conference in the White House sounded to me like a broken record from the George W. Bush administration. Bush and his advisers attributed Muslim terrorism to Islam.

“Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” said John Ashcroft, Bush’s attorney general. “Christianity is a faith where God sent his son to die for you.”

President Obama, too, believes that Islam is a major source of Muslim terrorism. His aides have lined up a group of Muslim clerics, activists and governments to present a “moderate” interpretation of Islam to their fellow Muslims. But unlike his Republican predecessor, Obama is more sensitive about the sentiments of mainstream Muslims, who resent linking their religion to heinous acts like terrorism. Hence he camouflaged his reference to Islam with the phrase “distorted ideology.”

The Muslim “religion,” in the sense religion is understood in the West, has little to do with terrorism. I tried to explain in my last segment that Islam, unlike Western Christianity, doesn’t segregate a Caesar’s domain from God’s. All Muslim domains, private and public, belong to God. In practical terms, the Muslim public sphere is suffused with Islamic values and social outlook.

Of late that the Muslim public sphere has all but submerged under waves of anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. Surveys after surveys have shown that between 72% and 94% of populations in Muslim countries are hostile or antipathetic to America. Their antipathy derives mainly from U.S. foreign and defense policies toward Muslim societies.

Muslim societies are modernizing fast, while becoming more and more attached to Islamic values and Islamic cultural patterns. They’re more concerned about Islamic causes and the global Muslim community.

Obama’s attribution of Muslim terrorism showed his gross misunderstanding of Islam as well as the motives that propel some Muslims into acts of violence. The president came into office with very little grounding in international affairs, and has stuffed his administration with holdovers from the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He is, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, getting the same kind of off-the-wall, jingoist advice that doomed both previous administrations’ Muslim world policies.

Islam, as I said, is a both a private- and public-sphere religion. These days most Muslims are channeling their grievances against America or their own governments in the public sphere through the democratic process. They’re engaged in democratic movements and, when permitted, pushing their agendas through the electoral process. It signals a dramatic and healthy evolution of these movements since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their watchword was “Islamic revolution.” Those days some of my Islamist acquaintances in Pakistan and Bangladesh espoused armed struggle against the “enemies of Islam” at home and abroad.

Among them is Motiur Rahman Nizami, the head of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh, now on the death row for his alleged involvement in the killing of Bangladeshi independence activists in 1971. I met him in 2003 after the Jamaat had won the second-largest number of seats in a Bangladeshi parliamentary election, catapulting him to the post of industries minister.

His sparsely furnished office was tucked away in the Motijheel business district in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.

Did the Jamaat “still believed in armed struggle?” I asked.

He smiled, and instead of answering my question directly, he said, “Democracy is the best tool for us to spread the message of Islam.”

Because Islamic spirit and values are spreading quite rapidly in most Muslim countries, mainstream Islamists everywhere have come to believe that they no longer need violent methods to pursue their Islamization agenda. They’re avidly participating in democratic activism.

A second group of Islamists, known as terrorists, continue armed struggle to achieve their goals. They’re generally focused on resisting occupation and aggression by armed opponents. They include Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Kashmir, Riadus Salikin and the Islamic International Brigade in Chechnya, the ETIM in China’s Xinjiang province, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad and Niger, and so on. All these terrorist groups see themselves fighting to liberate their peoples from foreign occupation or defend them against domestic persecution.

Obama was talking, specifically, about the Islamic State terrorism in Syria and Iraq. The IS emerged to defend Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who suffered horrible persecution and ethnic cleansing from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi Shiite governments and Shiite militias and the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. As many other terrorist groups do, the IS also has engaged in gruesome slaughter and brutal persecution of innocent civilians. The world shouldn’t tolerate such crimes.

The fact remains, however, that these terrorist groups have been fighting for political, not religious, causes. They’re inspired or instigated by political and social grievances, not by the Quran or some “distorted ideology” based on it. Whether their causes or methods of operation are justified (Nobody would justify the slaughter of innocent people), is another matter.

ISIS could trigger Arab revolution

Mustafa Malik October 5, 2014

On the darker upper strip of my computer screen I saw my eyebrows rising, as I read, for the first time, President Obama’s mission in Iraq and Syria. Now, as his aides and spokespersons drone on and on about that mission, I get ticked off or, alternately, amused.

Can the United States and its allies really “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL)?

Personally, I deplore this war because of the deaths and devastation it’s going to cause, and the piles of dough we, American taxpayers, are squandering on it. So far the war’s price tag is estimated to be $1 billion a month. It’s likely to rise.

Yet I also see the war having a far-reaching, liberating effect on Arab societies. I see it reviving and strengthening the Arab Spring, which Arab monarchies and dictatorships had foolishly thought they had behind them. More on this in a minute.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid Obama isn’t going to “destroy” ISIS. Remember his repeated vows to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” Al Qaeda during the Afghanistan war? Thanks mainly to that war, Al Qaeda and its many affiliates have mushroomed in the Middle East, North and West Africa, and elsewhere. If Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam had any lesson for the United States, it’s that conventional military establishments, however powerful, can’t defeat modern guerrilla forces that are ready to die to end their oppression and avenge their subjugation and humiliation.

Afghan Mujahedeen taught this lesson to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, then the world’s largest conventional military juggernaut. The Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian guerrilla groups in Gaza have driven it home to Israel, the superpower in Middle East.

Ignoring these glaring lessons and lurching into a new war in the hope of stamping out the world’s most powerful Muslim guerrilla force is just insane. Albert Einstein defined “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

The gruesome atrocities that ISIS has committed against civilians in Iraq and Syria are indeed heinous and inhuman. They’re repugnant to Islamic tenets and principles. Beheading innocent civilians, killing Yazidis and Christians or converting them to Islam by force are certainly not part of the “jihad,” struggle authorized by Islam, they claim to have waged.

Islam sanctions two kinds of jihad. The greater jihad, jihad al-kabir, is the struggle to resist one’s own immoral impulses and actions. The lesser jihad, jihad al-saghir, is armed struggle to defend one’s community or territory against outside aggression. ISIS obviously has proclaimed the lesser jihad against the Shiite government and militias in Iraq, the Alawite government in Syria as well as America and its allies. Islam would probably support its armed struggle if it is, or was, meant to resist the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Shiite pogrom against Sunni Arabs in Iraq or the suppression and oppression of people by the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria.

But Islamic law strongly prohibits its inhuman atrocities against civilians, mentioned above. These crimes belong to the categories of the brutal torture, murder and humiliation of mostly innocent Muslims in Abu Gharib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere by American forces. They’re as barbaric as American soldiers peeing on Afghan Muslim corpses, or Israelis slaughtering Gazan children.

In any case, the more America and its allies beat up on ISIS, the more it will attract recruits and monetary support from fellow Sunnis from around the world. Already, some 3,000 American and European Sunni youths and many thousands more from the Muslim world have joined the guerrilla organization. I expect the trend to accelerate in the months and years ahead.

It reminds me of a comment an Iraqi friend made to me during one of my three research trips to Iraq. In 1991 Subhy Haddad, a veteran Iraqi journalist, was working for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. I had him over for lunch at Baghdad’s Sagman Hotel, where I was staying.

Between bites on his eggplant Domla – eggplant with meat, vegetables and spices stuffing – Haddad said I wouldn’t be able to interview some of the Shiite intellectuals and politicians I had on a list. About half of them had fled to Shiite Iran to escape then Sunni Arab President Saddam Hussein’s persecution. If Sunni Arabs (as different from Sunni Kurds) ever got knocked out of power, he continued, Shiites would wreak vengeance on them. Iraq’s Sunni Arabs “would then turn to their fellow Sunnis in the region” for support. Iraqis, he added, were “more loyal to their ethnic groups than to Iraq.”

I remembered Haddad when successive Shiite governments in Baghdad and their brutal militias began slaughtering Sunni Arabs after the United States had overthrown the Saddam regime. Many of those persecuted Sunni Arabs joined Al Qaeda in Iraq to resist the U.S. invasion and the Shiite pogrom. ISIS has resumed that struggle and strengthened it manifold.

That the United States sired ISIS is missing from American discourse on that militant group. Senator Carl Levin was a rare exception. “ISIS did not exist before our invasion of Iraq,” said the chairman of the Senate Arms Services Committee at a hearing on the issue. “They are a consequence of our invasion of Iraq.”

Levin echoed a chorus of voices from politicians and pundits in the Middle East. ISIS is “the product of foreign invasion,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

And America’s expedition against ISIS is going to produce the same results as did its war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan: spread and bolster the movement, aggravating threats to American security.

If the Sunni Arab militancy in Iraq and Syria has alarmed the United States, it has spawned panic among Arab monarchies, which are its next targets. In fact ISIS, the Al Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist militant groups already are calling for the ouster of repressive Arab monarchies. No wonder five of those monarchies – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates – have jumped on America’s anti-ISIS bandwagon in a desperate effort to save their thrones.

The thousands of Arab youths from Persian Gulf countries who are honing their fighting skills in this war will one day return home. They will almost inevitably revive and fire up the simmering revolutionary movements against their tyrannical monarchies, the most formidable they ever faced.

I don’t expect many of these anachronistic power structures to survive another Arab generation.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He covered seven Middle Eastern countries as a newspaper reporter and conducted fieldwork in five as a research fellow for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

Afghans show door to blind hegemon

Mustafa Malik March 13, 2014

“Fools!”

Tunu was talking about American troops in Afghanistan.

“Why were they spilling all this blood – ours and theirs?”

Now a shoe store owner, he had joined the Pakistani Taliban four years ago and fought NATO troops in Afghanistan for two. He was commenting on President Obama’s decision last month to pull out all American troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year.

A relative of mine, Tunu was visiting me and my ailing mother, 94, at the Osmani Hospital here in the Bangladeshi town of Sylhet. I was busy caring for my bedridden mother and couldn’t engage in a political conversation. I told him that his question was a good one for my next blog post. I agreed, however, not to mention his full name in it. The pro-American, terrorist-hunting government of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina Wajed could go after him.

So why were American troops “spilling all this blood” in Afghanistan? Tunu didn’t know much about the American political system and focused his anger on U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, not those who sent them to do the fighting.

In 1996 I met a group of Arab post-graduate and undergrad students at a hangout on London’s Seven Sisters Road. They obviously knew about the process in which decisions about war and peace are made in Washington. As I mentioned in a subsequent newspaper column, two of them – both Saudi Arabian – used that knowledge to support militant attacks on American government targets and, more amazingly, American civilians!

Their argument: American voters elect their governments who had imposed the devastating sanctions on Iraq after the 1991 Kuwait war that had killed half a million Iraqi children. Elected American governments, they continued, supported “Israeli colonialism” and Israeli oppression of Palestinians. The United States armed and protected autocratic “monsters” repressing Arab societies. And so on. Why kill the “poor, black soldiers,” asked one of the Saudis, who had joined the American armed forces “to feed their families”?

I remembered their argument 10 years later when Charles Rangel, the Democratic congressman from New York, said the United States and Iraq would have been spared the horrors of the uncalled for Iraq war if children of those who had decided to invade that country had been sent into the battlefields. Only 2 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress had their children in military services. The decorated Korean War veteran added that in 2004, 70 percent of New York City volunteers who enlisted in U.S. armed services were “black or Hispanic, recruited from lower-income communities.”

It all is true, but Americans are doing what most hegemonic powers have done throughout history – be they the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Persians, Brits or Soviets. They’ve used their superior military power to conquer, slaughter, plunder, subjugate and dominate other peoples. Some of those adventures have been stupid because power tends not only to corrupt people but also often blind them to reality.

In Afghanistan, Americans didn’t see – or want to see – the fate of other invaders to that country from the Greeks to the Brits to the Soviets. They were all defeated or expelled by the fiercely independent-minded Pashtun tribes. Power has even blinded many Americans to themselves and their deeds. They went about invading sovereign nations and overthrowing and sabotaging governments with abandon. They slaughtered and brutalized other people and bribed and bullied their governments. Through all this they saw themselves as “peace-loving” do-gooders, spreading freedom and democracy around the world.

There’s a tried-and-true cure for this blindness: resistance and exhaustion. Few aggressive military powers have ever heeded moral suasion, but all have eventually been tamed by the resistance of the victims of their aggression and the exhaustion of their own military or economic power. Without stubborn native resistance, the French wouldn’t have let go of their Algerian “department”; neither would the Soviets have fled Afghanistan. Hadn’t the Nazis crushed its economy, imperial Britain wouldn’t have conceded the independence of my native Indian subcontinent.

The Afghanistan war was doomed before it started because of the Afghans’ historic spirit of intolerance of foreign invaders. Their spirit of independence, as that of many other peoples, has been whetted further by the tide of freedom and democracy rising throughout the developing world.

The American economy, though still the word’s largest, has lost its vitality and dynamism. Administration spin-doctors would have us believe otherwise. They claim the economy is back on track after a temporary “Great Recession.” They try to buttress their argument by citing the slow rise in employment rates, improvements in home prices and housing starts, the upswing in the stock market, and so on.

All these indices camouflage the deep and seemingly irreversible downturn in the American economy. America is saddled with a $17 trillion debt burden, while its GDP growth is anemic (2.4%). About 70 percent of goods on American store shelves have been made abroad. It means that the Chinese, Indians, South Koreans, Pacific Islanders, and other foreigners fill 7 out of 10 job openings created by the U.S. economy. The stock market boom is profiting mostly the top 1 percent society, while workers’ real wages have fallen to their lowest shares of national income in more than 50 years. America just can no longer afford to fund the Afghanistan war, or any other war of choice.

Tunu should know that Obama ordered the total pullout American troops from Afghanistan because of the two main reasons that have historically stopped hegemonic aggression: exhaustion of the hegemons and resistance from the victims of their aggression.

Mustafa Malik, a Washington-based columnist, hosts the blog Beyond Freedom: https://beyond-freedom.com.

Women in the West’s blind spot

Mustafa Malik December 3, 2013

‘Why does the world ignore violence against Arab women?’ PovertyMatters blog, The Guardian, London (link below).

I DON’T THINK “the world,” which essentially means America and Europe, is ignoring the travails of Arab or Muslim women per se. After all, when the Taliban attacked the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai, the West made her an international celebrity and hero. The spectacle was focused, however, on the suppression of women by the Taliban and other forces that were hostile to America and its invasion of Muslim countries.

Muslim women in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries are among the worst victims of male repression and misogyny. Yet how much concern have American politicians, journalists, intellectuals – or feminists – shown about their tribulations?

And what about Hindu women in India? Misogyny has been endemic in the mostly Hindu Indian society. Women are being raped and persecuted with abandon in much of India. Indian politicians and law enforcement agencies never took their suffering and humiliation seriously until recent media publicity forced them to try to do something about it. Indian women’s ordeal, as that of women in the Middle East, has largely been ignored by “the world.”

The misfortunes of women in those societies are America’s and the West’s friendly ties to their governments. You wouldn’t see moral issues getting in the way of “the world’” coddling governments and other actors who serve Western interests. Moral concerns are pressed into the service of those interests when they’re threatened by the West’s enemies, albeit if those enemies also happen to be trampling women’s rights or human rights. And wittingly or unwittingly, Western intelligentsia – conservatives, liberals, feminists, and so forth – follow the flag.

Remember Laura Bush’s women rights campaign in Afghanistan after her hubby invaded and occupied that poor country? Indeed American feminists showed great concerns (mostly well-meaning, I believe) about the fate of those women if the United States had to transfer power to the misogynists who dominate the Afghan political class. I’m not hearing those concerns voiced (or I’m not reading the publications where they are) since the Obama administration announced its plans to end the occupation of Afghnistan.

Many Americans and Westerners would indeed like to help women under suppression in old and traditional societies – but only when Western interests don’t get in the way.

The Guardian blog post:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/dec/02/world-ignore-violence-against-arab-women

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He hosts the blog ‘What Freedom?’

Pakistan ties: Old wine in old bottle

Mustafa Malik October 20, 2013

SADLY, the Obama administration appears to be trying to revive its failing Cold War policy to refurbish the strained U.S. ties to Pakistan. Ever since its inception, what remains of Pakistan after the secession of Bangladesh has been under the rule of its self-serving feudal-military-bureaucratic class. Today’s Pakistani prime minister and president belong to that class.

U.S. relations with Pakistan have been based on courting that repressive and exploitative class – and the governments that belonged to it – with perks, bribes and mostly military government assistance. Only two Pakistani prime ministers – Khwaja Nazimuddin in the 1950s and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s – ventured to break out of U.S. hegemony. The former paid for it with his job, the latter with his life.

In return for the subservience to Washington, the Pakistani military, which has lost all of its three wars with India, has been serving tenaciously as America’s mercenaries to fight its enemies – the Soviets (in Afghanistan) during the Cold War and anti-U.S. Muslim militants since 9/11.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who will be visiting President Obama in the White House on Wednesday, is also persuaded by American president to rent out the Pakistani armed forces to continue to fight America’s wars. But I don’t think that would work in the long run. The times have changed dramatically.

Except for a small and thinning layer of Westernized social parasites, Pakistanis today are pulsating with fervor for freedom and dignity, expressed in their smoldering rage against foreign hegemony and tutelage. Prime Minister Sharif can’t go too far in kowtowing to America without risking a public backlash of the kind that swept the former Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf off power and into exile.

Syria: Needed US-Islamist detente

Mustafa Malik May 21, 2013

THE UNITED STATES has taken a welcome step to tackle the Syrian crisis. It has joined Russia in arranging a peace conference in Geneva next month, which, unfortunately, would also expose America’s diminished global standing.

The end of Syria’s murderous Bashar al-Assad regime will come, however, from its eventual attrition from the uprising. A main reason the United States has so far failed to offer meaningful material support to the rebellion is that it’s being spearheaded by Islamist militants, America’s ideological nemeses. American officials are trying to keep Syrian Islamists from participating in the Geneva forum. Yet I welcome the proposed conference in the hope that it would, among other things, find a way to stop the slaughter of Syrian men, women and children. More than 80,000 of them have so far perished in the two-year-old mostly Sunni rebellion to overthrow the minority Alawite dictatorship.

It’s a shame that Russia and Iran have been defending the atrocious Assad regime. But morally indefensible policies are not new in international politics and diplomacy. Haven’t America and the West been underwriting the brutal Israeli regimes? Israel not only has ethnically cleansed itself of most of its Palestinian population, but also has kept Palestinians under its colonial subjugation. Nothing justifies the Russians’ or Iranians’ abetment to Assad’s wanton butchery, but their apologists often point to the many precedents that America and the West have created by installing and supporting monstrous tyrants in Asia, Africa and Latin America through the decades and centuries.

All the same, I commend the convening of the Syria conference also because it offers the Obama administration a chance to defuse the pressure from American hawks for U.S. military involvement in Syria. Given America’s dismal military performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can’t conceive of a different outcome from an intervention in Syria. Creating no-fly zones, disabling the Syrian air force, giving arms to rebels, etc., which are being proposed would drag America into another Middle Eastern quagmire. And until Washington finds a way to reconcile with Syria’s Islamists, the mainstay of the rebellion, American intervention there is sure to become messy and self-defeating.

Islamist resistance was a main cause of the United States’ debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has undercut its international clout. The spoken and unspoken Russian terms under which Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to co-sponsor the forum reflect that reality. Kerry apparently has dropped the persistent U.S. demand for Assad’s removal from power as a precondition for any multi-national talks on the Syrian imbroglio, a key Russian demand. Besides the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos, America’s or the rebels’ inability to dislodge Assad has all but forced the Obama administration to accept the tyrant as a negotiating partner.

A second concession awaiting the United States is the accommodation of Iran’s role or interests in a Syrian settlement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has demanded that Iran formally participate in the Geneva talks. The United States and Arab monarchies will resist that demand tooth and nail. But whether Iran shows up at the table, its interests can’t be ignored while Assad holds on to power in Damascus. Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Shia Islamist group from Lebanon, has joined Assad’s forces against the rebels inside Syria. It will remain as an additional lever of Iranian power in the region.

The larger issue here is not so much the future of the Assad regime, or Iran’s role in Syria. It’s Israel’s future and America’s role in the region. American and Israeli policy makers wanted the Assad regime overthrown mainly because that could undermine Iran’s influence in the Levant and, consequently, the Hezbollah threat to Israel. Assad’s survival, at least for now, would infuse fresh adrenaline to Hezbollah Islamists. And Iran’s clout in Syria and Lebanon would continue to bolster the Islamist Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups fighting to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

In the long run, the United States or Israel would have little to celebrate from the demise of the Assad regime. That would turn up other Islamist forces, fueling anti-Israeli and anti-American militancy in the region. If – or rather when – Assad goes, the Sunni Islamist groups in Syria are likely to dominate Syrian politics. And they, too, would support the Sunni Palestinians’ struggle against Israel and perk up the simmering Arab Spring in the Arabian Peninsula, which inevitably would have an anti-Israeli an anti-American edge.

Sunni militancy in Syria would, especially, energize the Islamists-led opposition to the pro-American monarchy in neighboring Jordan. Since January, Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, an ideological ally of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, has stepped up its campaign against the King Abdullah II. The IAF hates the monarchy because of its peace treaty with Israel and subservience to the United States. Palestinian anger over the treaty has been a source of the Islamist organization’s steadily increasing support among Jordanians of Palestinian descent, who make up nearly 60% of the country’s population.

Anti-Americanism in the Muslim Middle East has reached its highest levels ever – 90% and more – under the Obama administration. The only way the United States can dampen the ominous development is through a conceptual policy breakthrough. It has to recognize the legitimacy of the Islamist struggle against Israeli colonialism. It needs to accept the reality of the Muslim rage at its blind support for Israel, and its own hegemony over many Muslim societies. A detente with the Islamists would be the best safeguard for U.S. interests in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. But that has to await another American administration.

Meanwhile, the proposed Geneva parleys offer the the United States an opportunity to defuse its hostility to the Islamists, besides helping to alleviate the agony of Syria.

◆ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He hosts the blog Islam and the West.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.