Tag: America

U.S.-India relations hit plateau

Mustafa Malik November 16, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

What was my take on “our growing relations with America?” asked Birendra Nath Basu. I met him on a passenger car to Karimganj town in the northeast Indian state of Assam. Basu had a master’s degree in business administration and was returning from a job interview in Guwahati, the state capital.

I asked his take on his question.

The multifaceted relationship, he said, had “greatly helped some sectors of our economy, but we have to pull up our nation, not just certain classes.”

We parted company as I headed for the home of the late professor and historian Sujit Chowdhury. An old friend, Chowdhury died after I had met him in 2007 at his home in Karimganj, an unhurried town of 52,000 people, which evokes fond memories of my boyhood visits with relatives. I wanted to pay a courtesy call to my friend’s widow.

Chowdhury was a lot more upbeat than Basu about U.S.-India relationship. He expected it to create “a brave new world of progress and prosperity.”

Washington and New Delhi began their “strategic partnership” as the Bush administration wanted to enlist India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist government in its “war on terror,” tap the huge Indian market and help build India as a counterweight to China. America became India’s largest trading partner, biggest investor and biggest provider of advanced technology.

Prodded by the American nuclear-commercial-lobby, America signed a civil nuclear agreement with India to launch lucrative nuclear trade with it. Nuclear trade would have been prohibited under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. New Delhi hadn’t joined the treaty but would need to buy nuclear technology form countries in a nuclear suppliers’ cartel, called the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. That cartel required compliance with the NPT guidelines for the purchase of its technology. At U.S. insistence, the 45-member grouping granted India a waiver from NPT rules.

Most Indians were euphoric and expected nationwide prosperity from their partnership with the wealthiest nation.

The relationship promises to continue to stimulate the Indian economy, but has been showing considerable strains. Washington had allowed India to build trade, economic and strategic relations with Afghanistan. That infuriated Pakistan, which saw itself being encircled by its archenemy, India. For all their feuds with Pakistan, Americans need Pakistani help to strike a deal with the Taliban. So the United States put a break on India’s Afghan projects, angering Indians.

New Delhi, for its part, defied U.S. sanctions against Iran. Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told Americans bluntly that relations with Iran were “a fundamental component” of Indian foreign policy.

Most troubling to Indians has been what Indian columnist Anil Kakodkar called America’s “double-cross of India.” As mentioned, nuclear technology suppliers’ group had waived their restrictions on India. But this past June, the group tightened its rules, virtually nullifying that waiver. To Indians’ dismay, the United States abstained on the cartel’s vote, instead of voicing its opposition.

To infuriate the Indians further, Washington insisted that the stricter suppliers’ rules “in no way detract from the exception granted to India.” Indians knew that wasn’t true.

Meanwhile, India’s center-left Congress party government, which has replaced that of the rightists, has mostly reversed the Hindu nationalist tilt toward Israel on its confrontation with the Palestinians. Ignoring U.S. pleas, New Delhi recently voted for the Palestinian membership of UNESCO.

America has learned, too, that while its China policy may in cases converge with India’s, it can’t “use” India against China. Robert Blackwill, the Bush administration ambassador to India, envisioned Indian collaboration in containing China. Recently he said ruefully that “there is no better way to clear a room of Indian strategists than to advocate containing China.”

Indians’ excitement about the burgeoning U.S. ties that I observed in the early 2000s has evaporated a great deal. Besides the above irritants, the kind of economic boom that many Indians had expected from their partnership with America just hasn’t happened, at least not yet. Many are disappointed to see the bonanza from these ties being scooped up by the high-tech and business communities, that it eludes the nearly 600 million poverty-stricken Indians. As disturbing, India’s growth rate has dropped from 8.5 percent last year to 7.7 percent. Direct foreign investment plunged 32 percent last year to $24 billion, making it Asia’s only large economy to suffer a decline.

Yet both India and the United States know they can’t let these setbacks derail their ambitious economic and strategic partnerships. New Delhi has been downplaying its differences with the United States, while Washington has launched a campaign to reassure Indians of its commitment to long-term, productive relationships.

On Oct. 20 President Obama sent his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, to New Delhi via Beijing to convey the message that his administration had moved past the G-2 (Group of Two) power structure with China, and embraced India in G-3 formation. The following week the U.S. consul general to Calcutta, Dean R. Thompson, assured Indians that America “has been trying with all sincerity to further improve its relations with India.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other American U.S. diplomats have also been hammering on this message.

I would have told Basu in Karimganj that U.S.-India relations seemed to me to have glided out of its initial peak on to a plateau. But I wanted to hear his views, instead.

●Mustafa Malik, a columnist in Washington, is visiting his native Indian subcontinent. He hosts the blog site: ‘Islam and the West’– https://islam-and-west.com

Taliban fight for freedom, justice

Mustafa Malik October 25, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

SYLHET, Bangladesh — Aunt Salima Khatun, my mother’s sister, barged in to see me here in the Bangladeshi town of Sylhet. I spend part of my Bangladesh vacations in Sylhet, known for its tea gardens, cane furniture and the shrine of the famed Muslim saint Hazrat Shah Jalal.

Behind Aunt Salima was her grandson, a college student, carrying a big bowl. It had several dozen homemade sweets, wrapped in banana leaves under plastic covering. They were made of flour, meshed with the delicious juice of a local fruit known as “tal” and other ingredients, before being rolled into round cakes and cooked.

“When you were a little boy, you loved ‘tal sandesh’ (tal sweets),” said my aunt, 81. “See if you like them.”

As the conversation progressed, she asked if I could bring the student over to the United States for further education. He had been “pulling out my hair,” meaning badgering her, to make me the request, she added. I apologized for my inability to help him get a U.S. visa.

The young man was, however, a member of an Islamic student group, which campaigns against U.S. and Israeli occupation of Muslim lands. Why was President Obama “so viciously opposed” to Palestinians’ U.N. membership? he asked. He was elated, however, that Muslim guerrillas were “throwing out the [Western] invaders” from Iraq and Afghanistan. Would Americans “dare to occupy a Muslim country again?”

His admiration for anti-American guerrillas is widely shared by most Muslims in South Asia, as I have learned during trips through the region. Noor M. Khan, a family friend in the northeast Indian town of Haflong, told me during a visit there last year that “our mujahedeen [Islamic guerrillas] are our only hope against American imperialism.” The Afghan mujahedeen drove back Russian invaders from Afghanistan in the 1980s, he continued. Now thanks to the Taliban, American occupation forces would be fleeing Afghanistan, “peeing in their pants.”

Many South Asian Muslims, as many Muslims elsewhere, usually get to like Americans with whom they come in contact. Many try to migrate to the United States for a better life. If young, some of aspire to have an American education, as my aunt’s grandson does. Yet the same Muslims would be denouncing Americans vehemently for America’s “war on Islam.”

It’s a déjà vu of the last decades (1910s-1940s) of British colonial rule in what was then “British India.” Those days many Indians had British friends. Many were educated in British schools or British-style secular schools in India. Yet some of them joined the struggle to liberate their country from British colonialism. British-sponsored education had taught them Western concepts of liberty and freedom and inspired them into anti-colonial struggle.

Justice is Islam’s core principle. Muslims, secular or religious, innately resist foreign hegemony because they consider it fundamentally unjust. Today most of the leaders and many activists of Muslim movements against U.S. invasions and domination zest for freedom among Muslims, firing them up against American hegemony. In earlier times, onset of modernity stoked their struggles for freedom against European colonialism..

Modernity, it seems, has become the West’s Frankenstein’s monster!

But many of South Asia’s anti-American Muslim guerrillas are educated in madrassahs, or Islamic schools. They’re inspired by their innate antipathy for foreign military presence — which they share with many secularist activists — and pride in Islamic civilization, which madrassahs have inculcated in them. In October 2007 a madrassah-educated Taliban supporter in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal agency town of Ghalanai (whose name I promised not to publish) said to me that Muslims had built “the glorious Spanish civilization and taught Europeans the sciences and philosophy for more than 700 years.” How many years, he asked, could “American Crusaders” stick around in Afghanistan?

The Taliban and other Pakistani and Afghan militants with only a madrassah education are also fighting for freedom from foreign occupation and domination. Most of them just don’t know that freedom is a core American value that Americans once fought wrest from British colonialists.

Muslims youths are struggling to snatch that American ideal from the jaws of the American hegemon, which they consider unjust.

● Mustafa Malik is the host of the blog site Beyond Freedom.

Muslim democracies confuse US

Mustafa Malik September 14, 2011

(Published in the Daily Star, Lebanon, September 14, 2011; Dawn, Pakistan, September 13, 2011)

By Mustafa Malik

POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – Since September 11, 2001, I visited my mother four other times here in the village of Polashpur in northeastern Bangladesh. She is 92 and lives in my ancestral home, surrounded by three fish ponds and shaded by sprawling mango and jackfruit trees. Bangladeshis are nearly 90% Muslim, and on each of those four trips, neighbors peppered me with critical questions about America. Could the United States hold on to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Why did Americans hate Islam? How badly were American Muslims being treated by them?

This time, though, their America-bashing has been less intense. One of them, alluding to Egyptian protesters’ attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, wanted to know if the United States could still help preserve the “Israeli domination” over Arabs. When would U.S. troops would be leaving Afghanistan? asked another. Is the United States or China is “the stronger country now”? inquired yet another.

Some of these inquires and comments echoed sentiments I had recently encountered in the Middle East. On Aug. 21, Salim Kanoo, a schoolteacher in Manama, Bahrain, said to me that the Arab democratic movements would eventually target “U.S. bases and troops” near that city and in other Persian Gulf countries. Could America handle Arab democracy, which might bring anti-American forces to power? he asked.

America’s impending retreat from Afghanistan and Iraq, serious economic downturn and the Arab Spring have convinced many Muslims that the Muslim world is wiggling out of American hegemony. I can see, too, that war fatigue has set in much of America. Asked recently why Britain and France, rather than the United States, were leading the war effort in Libya, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said, “The fact is, we cannot afford more wars.”

The lesson of Vietnam, dismissed by neoconservative and other hawks, has begun to sink in among Americans. Vietnam’s main lesson, former defense secretary Robert McNamara said in 1995, was that “we failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting highly motivated people’s movements.”

Contemporary Muslim “people’s movements” have been fueled mainly by modernization and the strengthened bond of the global Muslim community, the umma. Twenty-five years ago few people in Polashpur would have wanted to discuss foreign invasion of a far-away Muslim country. The countryside village had then no electricity, no telephones, no newspaper readers, one college graduate and one or two radio sets. Today my home and a host of others are electrified. Just about every family has one or more mobile phones. College graduates and students abound. So do radio sets and news consumers, many of whom flock to the nearby Ratanganj bazaar to read newspapers. Dozens of Polashpuris live and work in towns and cities in Bangladesh and abroad.

The heightened awareness of the world and of the spread of the ideas of the rights and democracy have plunged a number of Muslim societies into struggles for freedom – against domestic tyranny on the one hand and foreign occupation and hegemony on the other. The Arab Spring belongs to the former category of struggle. The struggle against the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq belong to the other.

The Information Age has helped bring Muslims everywhere in wider and closer mutual interaction, bolstering their umma bond. A Pew Research Center survey found last year that Muslims in most countries consider themselves Muslims first and citizens of their countries secondarily. A research project I conducted in the late 1990s revealed that a key source of Muslims’ deepened affinity with their global community is their disenchantment with post-colonial-era nation-states and state institutions. Most of today’s Muslim states were carved out often capriciously by European colonial powers. These states are run through legal systems that are often alien to local social norms by badly corrupt and uncaring bureaucracies and governments. No wonder citizens of these states feel stronger pull of their faith and global community than of the corrupt institutions of their artificial states.

So when the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan or waged its anti-terror campaign killing, maiming and harassing Muslims, anti-American sentiments ratcheted up around the Muslim world, including in Polashpur, as I had observed during my earlier visits.

The impotence of the American military power – shown in the “war on terror” and in Iraq and Afghanistan — has helped rejuvenate Muslim movements against U.S. and Israeli hegemony as much as domestic political repression. Muslim societies that are evolving from the two-pronged struggle are likely to go through a period of turmoil, which accompanied the democratization process in almost every Western country. Eventually, they are expected to settle down as stable democracies. Muslim democracies would, however, be underpinned by Islamic social and cultural values, as we see in Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan. Egypt, Libya, Yemen and most of the other Muslim societies struggling to democratize are expected follow the same path. In fact the new Libyan leader, Abdul Jalil, has announced that “Shari’a [Islamic law] will be the mail source of law” in a democratic Libya.

Post-9/11 United States, where paranoia about “political Islam” has stalked large swaths of society and much of the foreign policy establishment, would be facing the challenge of handling democracies with Islam spanning much of the public sphere. But America has been a pragmatic society. Americans appear to have begun to take stock of the futility of their campaign to defeat “terror” and stem the tide of Islamic politics. Eventually, they are likely to appreciate the need to do business with resurgent Islam. As I told the Bahraini schoolteacher, Americans will come around to adapting to Muslim democracies as they did to the Communist Soviet Union and China.

• Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington and host of the blog site Islam and the West: https://islam-and-west.com.

POLASHPUR, Bangladesh – After 9/11 I had visited my mother four other times here in the village of Polashpur in northeastern Bangladesh. She is 92 and lives in my ancestral home, surrounded by three fish ponds and shaded by sprawling mango and jackfruit trees. Bangladeshis are nearly 90% Muslim, and on each of those four trips, neighbors peppered me with critical questions about America. Could the United States hold on to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Why did Americans hate Islam? How badly were American Muslims being treated by them?

• Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington.

U.S. policy threatens Pakistan’s stability

Mustafa Malik September 2, 2011

Book Review: Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; Fall 2011

By Mustafa Malik

THE QUESTION once again: Is Pakistan a ‘failed state’ that’s going to bite the dust?

Anatol Lieven is among the latest authors to try an answer. His book Pakistan: A Hard Country is a broad and detailed survey of the security, economic, social, political and ecological challenges facing Pakistan. But he argues that a greater threat to Pakistan’s security is posed by the United States and India.

India has been Pakistan’s archenemy, with which it has fought three wars, two of them over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, or Kashmir for short. Muslim Pakistan (including what is now Bangladesh) was carved out of British India in 1947 on the principle – agreed to by its Hindu and Muslim leaders and the departing British colonial power – that the subcontinent’s Muslim-majority territories should become the independent state of Pakistan. The rest of British India would be the independent Hindu-majority India. Pakistanis believe that India, which occupies two-thirds of the Muslim-majority Kashmir, is violating the foundational principles of the partition of the subcontinent.

Lieven analyzes, extensively, Pakistan’s serious economic crises, never-ending ethnic and sectarian strife, and growing water shortages. He considers the problem potentially the gravest threat to Pakistan’s survival. He demonstrates his best insights on the question of Pakistan’s stability, especially whether terrorism is going to undo the problem-ridden state.

A professor at King’s College in London, Lieven examines four kinds of terrorism roiling Pakistan. First, the Pakistani Taliban and allied groups are crossing over to Afghanistan and fighting the U.S. and NATO forces there. Secondly, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa wage campaigns of violence in India to vent their rage at the Indian occupation of Kashmir, and most Pakistanis approve of their action. Thirdly, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, which belong to the majority Sunni Muslim sect, are striking Shia Muslim targets in Pakistan. Finally, the Taliban, Jaish-e-Muhammad and other militant groups are also attacking Pakistan’s military forces and civilian institutions because they have branded the Pakistani military and civilian government America’s “slaves” for joining the U.S. “war on terror” against militant Muslim groups in Pakistan.

Embarrassed by this kind of criticism, which is also widespread among the Pakistani public, the Pakistani government and army brass, as well as the United States, are arguing that Pakistani military forces are actually defending Pakistan against these militants. They cite militant attacks on Pakistani installations. Americans add that these militant assaults, together with economic and other problems, threaten to make Pakistan a “failed state.”

The author agrees that militant violence has been a major part of the bloody mayhem Pakistan is going through in the anti-terror campaign. “By February 2010,” he points out, “according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan as a result of terrorist attacks, Taliban executions, military action or drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.”

But Pakistanis view America as the source of the whole phenomenon of terrorism and social turmoil in their country. The Taliban didn’t begin to organize and Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Pakistan before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. “Before 9/11,” Lieven quotes a Pakistani activist as saying, “there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan, our society will sort itself out.”

In reality, despite their violence, the Anti-American and anti-Indian militant groups enjoy wide support among military ranks and the public. And the Pakistan army, the author says, “has been forced into alliance with the US which a majority of Pakistani society – including soldiers’ own families – detest.”

Most Pakistanis have been anti-American because of America’s support for Israel, perceived hostility to Islam and invasion of Iraq and, especially the neighboring Afghanistan. Afghanistan provides Pakistan its “strategic depth” again India, and Pakistanis are always leery about foreign hegemony over Afghanistan. Also, Pakistan is the home of twice as many Pashtun as live in Afghanistan, who are fighting to expel NATO forces from that country.

Many Pakistanis recall the massive American aid and arms supplies to Afghan Mujahedeen in their struggle to roll back the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and they “see Afghan Taliban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against [the U.S. and NATO] occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.”

The Taliban’s violence against Pakistani military and other institutions are, however, resented by many Pakistanis. Educated Pakistanis become outraged when they see the Taliban forcing their puritanical form of Islamic religious and moral code on Pakistanis, meting out brutal punishment to villagers for violations of that code. Yet most Pakistanis don’t consider them or their violence a threat to the stability of the state.

The author argues that terrorists can’t destabilize the Pakistani state “unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand.” By indirect U.S. action, he apparently means U.S. drone attacks on militant targets and other American anti-terror operations within Pakistan. He quotes a 2009 cable from then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to the State Department, warning that U.S. drone and other attacks on Pakistani targets “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governing crisis in Pakistan.”

Significantly, the author also mentions the possibility of Pakistan being destabilized by direct U.S. invasion, maybe in collaboration with India. He doesn’t explain how and why America may invade Pakistan, but warns of its dire consequences. No conceivable gains “could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s collapse, and for the disasters that would result for Pakistan’s own peoples.”

On the question of possible U.S. invasion of Pakistan, Lieven echoes the fears of many Pakistanis, which some of them shared with me during research trips through Pakistan. Among them were a retired army colonel and a political activist. The retired army officer, whom I interviewed on condition of anonymity, said that “the hue and cry [in the United States] about terrorists stealing our so-called Islamic bomb” has been a “ruse to take out our nuclear weapons and facilities.” He recalled that in the mid-1980s Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the government of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to join Israel on an operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. He feared that if Mossad now revived its scheme, “it may have a partner” in New Delhi.

Muhammad Sirajul Islam, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) activist and resident of Karachi, voiced the same concern and added that the United States and Israel have never reconciled with “what they call our Islamic bomb.”

The roots of Pakistan’s belligerency and warfare with India lie in the dichotomy of self-image between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. In undivided British India, Hindus were three-fourths of the population, Muslims making up most of the other fourth. Hindus in general resented Muslims’ separate cultural niche and their demand for constitutional safeguards for their political representation and economic interests.

Without such safeguards, Muslims argued, “the brute majority” of Hindus in a majoritarian democracy would relegate them to permanent Hindu subordination. The Hindu leadership didn’t agree to the Muslim demands, and Muslims forced the partition of the old country to create a Muslim state. Most Hindus were furious at the partition, and some continue to nurture their hostility to the Muslim state.

Since partition, India has assumed a hegemonic posture on the subcontinent, to which Pakistanis isn’t reconciled. This historic Muslim-Hindu animus has been at the root of Pakistani-Indian hostility.

I’m more optimistic than the author about Pakistan’s future and its relations with the United States and Pakistan. I see Washington beginning to realize that its goal of eliminating Muslim anti-American militancy through military means is a pipe dream. Already, that realization has led to the Obama administration’s decision to begin pulling out American troops from Afghanistan, without being able to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taleban, which President Obama had vowed to do. The administration also has all but given up on getting the Pakistan army to root out Taliban and Al Qaeda groups within its borders. In frustration, Washington has suspended a third of its annual aid package ($800 million) to Pakistan.

The United States is likely to better appreciate Pakistan’s strategic importance once it no

longer has boots on the ground in Afghanistan and anti-American militancy continues to percolate in South Asia.

The belligerency between Pakistan and India has already begun to abate. For one thing, Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent as of itself has made a large-scale Indian invasion of Pakistan almost inconceivable. Secondly, the unrelenting secession movement in the Indian-held Kashmir and India’s cool relations with Muslim Bangladesh, which it helped create, would make New Delhi extremely wary of a cataclysmic military campaign against the hornet’s nest of Muslim Pakistan. In Kashmir, India has tried all tricks to suppress the 22-year-long Muslim uprising and has to come to terms with the Kashmiris’ aspiration for some kind of self-determination.

Thirdly, my research has revealed that the memories of wars and the partition of the subcontinent, which have bred much of the India-Pakistan hostility, are fading among both Pakistanis and Indians. The generations that were most traumatized by those hostilities have mostly departed from the political scene. The lingering tensions between the two states, albeit much diminished, are now fueled by the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the army and some militant Muslim groups in Pakistan. The new generations of Pakistanis and Indians are more interested in peace and business between the two countries.

Thus while official bilateral trade between Pakistan and India amounts to only about 1 per cent of their respective global trade, Pakistani towns and bazaars, especially near the Pakistan-India border, are flooded with Indian goods. Indians’ interest in Pakistani music and literature, and the popularity of Indian movies and music in Pakistan, among other things, signal an inexorable trend toward normalization of relations between the two countries.

During its five millennia of their recorded history, peoples of the subcontinent have alternated many times between periods of relative harmony and hostility. While the boundaries between their states are likely to endure, the dark period of their mutual hostility spawned by the 1947 partition appears to be yielding gradually to new era of relative political, trade and economic harmony.

•Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog site Islam and the West: http:/islam-and-west.com/

Aiding Arab freedom serves U.S.

Mustafa Malik April 21, 2011

(Published in the Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2011)

By Mustafa Malik

Democratization of Arab societies “would be a disaster” for the West, warns Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis. Yet he predicts that Islamic political parties are “very likely to win … genuinely fair and free elections” in the Arab world.

One of the West’s best-known historians of Islam, Lewis has echoed what many American intellectuals and politicians are saying in private. And sometimes in public. Democracy, they argue, brought Hamas “terrorists” to power in Palestine and has given Hezbollah “terrorists” a lock on the Lebanese government. Democracy has replaced Iraq’s staunchly secular and anti-Iranian — albeit autocratic — regime with a pro-Iranian pseudo-theocracy. And in Turkey, an anti-Israeli government rooted in Islam has replaced an ultra-secularist and pro-Israeli ruling establishment through free and fair elections.

Ironically, Lewis had personally lobbied former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and democratize it and other Arab societies. Many Americans supported that campaign. The new drive to sit out Arab democratic upheavals is also shared by many Americans, especially politicians and pundits. Among them Nicholas Goldberg, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times.

“It would not be beneficial to the United States for the Middle East to be democratic,” Goldberg wrote. Democracy would replace the current pro-Western Arab governments, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with anti-Western Islamic regimes. That would force the West “to pay a fair price for petroleum, which would shake the foundation of the [Western] economic system.”

Both the Arab democratization campaign of the last decade and today’s opposition to Arab democracy have a common goal: resisting Islamic forces from seizing the reins of government. Both are based on a dire misperception, i.e. that Islam-oriented regimes would necessarily endanger U.S. or Western interests.

It’s a tribute to the West that most of the Muslim and non-Muslim societies that once fought hard to throw off Western colonial yoke have adopted or are pursuing Western political institutions – political parties, elections, parliaments, press freedom, and so forth. Yet these societies remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and heritage. In fact the post-colonial Muslim and non-Muslim generations in the East are showing greater appreciation of their indigenous traditions than did their forebears who were brought up under Western colonial rule.

Thus in Muslim countries such as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan, Westernized ruling elites have given or are giving way to political forces rooted in Islam. In others such as Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, India and Indonesia, political parties anchored to native traditions are on the rise and forcing the adaptation of their Western-oriented state laws to native traditions.

Islam is the bedrock of Muslim social and cultural traditions. Indigenization of a Muslim society’s political process means its adjustment to Islamic values and lifestyle. Decades of Western cultural and military campaigns have failed to stem this trend. Western antipathy or indifference toward Arab pro-democracy movements wouldn’t do it, either.

But the very concern that Islamic political activism would threaten Western interests is also unfounded. Sure, anti-Americanism is agitating many Muslim minds, and it sometimes triggers terrorism. But contemporary Muslim anti-Americanism has been spawned by the American invasion, occupation and domination of a host of Muslim societies, not by Islam.

At all events, if mighty imperial armies couldn’t suppress anti-colonial movements in earlier times, today’s feckless and tottering Arab autocracies can’t ride out the greatest Arab populist upheaval in a millennium. (The Arab nationalist movement of the early twentieth century was confined mostly to military and political elites.)

The Arab spring has given America and the West an opportunity to protect their interests in that region by cultivating the revolutionary forces that are going to shape the policies and agenda of tomorrow’s Arab states.

The Obama administration needs to drop its policy of supporting some Arab pro-democracy movements and ignoring others. It should adopt a bold and principled policy of defending and aiding all populist Arab struggles. Democratic or populist governments in the Persian Gulf may ask the West to “pay a fair price for petroleum.” A fair price would be cheaper than the high price that could be demanded by governments alienated by American apathy or indifference toward the struggles that would have brought them to power.

♦ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs columnist in Washington. He conducted field research in a host of Middle Eastern and South Asian countries as a senior associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

U.S. liberals callous to Libyan uprising

Mustafa Malik March 30, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

President Obama always makes good speeches, and he gave an excellent one defending his administration’s participation in NATO’s military intervention in Libya.

The coalition bombing has averted, as the president pointed out, a “brutal repression and looming humanitarian crisis” brought on by Muammar Qadhafi’s forces. Even though the Qadhafi forces have halted the rebels’ advance toward his eastern strongholds, the United States and its allies aren’t going to let the dictator prevail.

I’m concerned about the resistance to the mission that the administration is facing from America’s political and intellectual establishments. Republican and Tea Party opposition to the operation was predictable. I’m disappointed, though not surprised, by the Democratic and, especially, liberal resistance to it. It’s hard to imagine more liberal Americans than Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington Post columnist Mark Shields and Rep. Denis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio. They’re leading a range of American liberals and progressives who oppose the U.S. role in the U.N.-sponsored military action. I’m not surprised by their stance because I have known conservative and liberal Americans who profess support for “universal” human rights and freedoms, but view their “universe” to be the West. (The neocons’ “democratization” propaganda about the Iraq war meant to camouflage a clumsy imperial project.)

I was a member of an “International Congress” that was pushing for military intervention to stop the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. At our August 1995 conference in Bonn, Germany, my fellow U.S. delegates and I were elated to hear American liberals being hailed as “the bastion” of support for such a campaign. Coincidentally, the NATO bombing of Serbian aggressors began while we were heading back home. I didn’t hear Kucinich, Gelb, Shields or any other well-known American liberals denouncing the Clinton administration for leading that operation. Four years later when the United States led the NATO air raids to stop the Serbian army assaults on dissidents in Kosovo, American liberals applauded it. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are part of the West. Libya isn’t. Neither was Rwanda or Congo.

Kucinich and other liberals are criticizing Obama’s failure to obtain prior congressional approval of the Libya operation. More revealing, however, has been their silence about the morality of the campaign. Shields and others have offered a moral argument, which is equally telling. The administration, they say, didn’t prove how defending the Libyan uprising would serve America’s “vital interests.”

Suppose tomorrow troops loyal to a neo-Nazi dictator begin mowing down protesters in the streets of Berlin or Vienna. Would we hear them denounce U.S. involvement in a NATO military assault to stop it? I believe that Americans, including Shields, would then find it in America’s “vital interest” to support such intervention, just as they did in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

I see defending the pro-democracy upheavals in Libya and other Arab countries serving an over-arching U.S. interest. Most Muslims and Arabs in west Asia and North Africa have been deeply anguished by the United States’ long-standing support for their repressive autocracies. Their resentment is the biggest challenge to U.S. security and economic interests in the Arab world. Embracing the “Arab spring” would help Washington douse the toxic anti-Americanism and court tomorrow’s rulers, generals and diplomats in that region.

U.S. policy, not Islam, breeding terrorists

Mustafa Malik March 21, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

(Published in the Austin-American Statesman, March 20; Columbus Dispatch, March 16, 2011)

WASHINGTON – Rep. Peter T. King had said his congressional hearing on Muslim radicalization would investigate the causes of the problem. It didn’t.

I have long been calling, in my newspaper columns and at public forums, for a serious investigation of the causes of Muslim anti-Americanism and terrorism. Some researchers have made in-depth inquiries about it, but U.S. administrations, Congress and news media have brushed them aside.

Muslim radicalization in America and the West is a recent trend. It’s the outcome mainly of Western Muslim’ identification with their fellow Muslims overseas who are fighting U.S. and Israeli forces occupying their lands or deployed on them. As we know, 15 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudis. They apparently had been pissed off by the deployment of American troops in Saudi Arabia.

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Barhain atop democratic ‘volcano’

Mustafa Malik March 5, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

For the United States, the Bahraini uprising is more worrisome than most others now swirling in the Middle East and North Africa.

America’s stakes in Bahrain was underscored to me this past Jan. 13 by a researcher in Manama, the Bahraini capital. “The Al Khalifa rulers are sitting on a volcano,” said Numan Saleh, who was affiliated with the Bahrain Center for Studies and Research. “When the volcano erupts, would the [U.S. Navy’s] Fifth Fleet remain anchored in Juffairare [near Manama]? Would America and the West take their [Persian Gulf] oil supply for granted?” Little did I know that many of us in America would be asking on these same questions in four short weeks.

The recent Cabinet reshuffle by Bahraini regime and its gift of $2, 650 per family have been pooh-poohed by protesters; they left the monarchy with absolute power. A dialogue with the opposition, called for by Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, either. Yet the Obama administration is having a hard time recognizing the reality that Al Khalifa despotism is fast becoming history. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently she hoped that “a national dialogue can produce meaningful measures that respond to the legitimate aspirations of all the people of Bahrain.”

Holy cow! How would American revolutionaries have felt if Friedrich-Wilhelm III, then king of the Prussian Empire, had told them that a dialogue with the British King George III would satisfy their “legitimate aspirations”?

More ominously for the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Shiites are about 15 percent of the Saudi population, living mostly in the kingdom’s eastern Al Hasa region. Al Hasa is soaked with the world’s largest oil fields and used to be part of historic Bahrain. The Shiites in Al Hasa, as elsewhere in Saudi Arabia, are systematically discriminated against by their Sunni government, and many of them nurture fellowship with the repressed Bahrain Shiites at the other end of a 15-mile causeway.

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as all other west Asian states except Iran, were created artificially by British, French and local rulers less than a century ago. The citizens of these states are more deeply rooted in their old sectarian and ethnic communities than in state institutions foisted on them overnight from above. Hence the Shiites in Bahrain and the whole Arabian Peninsula feel affinity with the Shiite Iran, forming the so-called “Shiite Crescent.”

Abdul Karim al-Iryani, then Yemeni foreign minister, anticipated today’s Arab upheaval and the American dilemma two decades ago. In October 1991 al-Iryani, a Ph.D. from Yale, told me in the Yemeni capital of Saana that “when the tide of freedom and democracy comes, the current American [Gulf] security structure will become untenable.” The autocrats that were pillars of that structure would be “gone or have their wings clipped.” I asked him what the United States could do then to ensure continued supply of Gulf oil and its strategic ties to the region.

“Flow with the tide,” he replied.

The Yemeni statesman was a decade off on his prediction for the arrival of the democratic tide, but his caveat to America seems to be on target and timely for today’s U.S. policy makers. It’s perilous for the United States to be known by tomorrow’s democratic or populist Arab governments as the nation that tried to save the skin of their repressive autocrats. The administration should embrace the democratic “tide.” It should call on the Bahraini king, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, to retire; unless a democratically elected government wishes to keep him as a constitutional monarch.

The United States, too, needs to reassess its pointless confrontation with Iran. It’s clear that America (or Israel) can’t stop Iran’s nuclear program through military strikes, which, on the contrary, would trigger an anti-American conflagration throughout the Middle East. That would perhaps mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. domination of the region and send oil prices through the roof, plunging industrialized societies into deeper recession. Instead, the Obama administration should engage Tehran in a meaningful strategic dialogue with Iran, which would have the best chance of preserving much of American security and economic interests in west Asia.

■ Mustafa Malik, host of the blog Beyond Freedom, is a columnist in Washington. He covered the Middle-East as a journalist and conducted field research on U.S.-Arab relations as a senior associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

Can Jordan monarchy survive?

Mustafa Malik February 27, 2011

By Mustafa Malik

(Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 2011)

Admiral Mike Mullen recently visited Jordan. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff assured King Abdullah II of America’s commitment to the security of his kingdom. As Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel, it doesn’t really have an external security threat. A growing internal threat looms, however, to the Hashemite monarchy. The Arab revolutionary movement snowballing from Tunisia and Egypt has exacerbated that threat.

What’s likely to fuel a large-scale uprising against the Jordanian monarchy? And if that occurs, can the Pentagon help the king ride out of it?

As in other Arab states, Jordan is afflicted with a high unemployment rate (officially 13% but actually much higher), low living standards (per capita GNI $3,300) and widespread official corruption. But the biggest challenge to the throne comes from it not having local roots. The Hashemite family’s ethnic roots lie in the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The British Empire planted the scion of that family, Abdullah bin al-Hussein, in 1923 as the king of what was called Transjordan. The state was carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire, which had been defeated and dismembered by the Allied Powers in World War I.

About 60 percent of Jordan’s population of 6.5 million is Palestinians. They’re mostly well-educated, urban and enjoy much higher income levels than the remaining 40 percent or so, made up largely of rural Bedouin tribes. The Palestinians and Bedouins have been estranged from each other since the inception of the state.

The Bedouin tribes have been the monarchy’s main support base, especially since 1970 when then King Hussein brutally suppressed a revolt by Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered or expelled from Jordan. That was the beginning of the monarchy’s secret outreach to Israel, the nemesis of the Palestinians and other Arabs. In 1973, for example, Hussein, Abdullah’s deceased father, had a clandestine meeting with then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during which he warned her of Egyptian preparations for war against Israel. Egypt would later attack Israel in what would be known as the Yom Kippur war. Hussein also began working secretly with then Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to conclude a peace agreement with Israel. The treaty was finally wrapped up and signed in 1994.

While the Palestinians resent the monarchy’s courtship of Israel, the Bedouins are being alienated by the current king, Abdullah, especially because of his efforts to placate the Palestinians. The outreach to the Palestinians is led by the king’s Palestinian wife, Rania. She is instrumental in providing Jordanian citizenship to a large number of Palestinian refugees, and helping Palestinians with jobs, business opportunities, and so forth.

On Feb. 7 the Bedouins staged a demonstration against the Abdullah government, a first in the history of the Hashemite-Bedouin relationship. They criticized Queen Rania’s meddling in government affairs and voiced other complaints against the regime. “The situation,” said their spokesman “has become unbearable. Corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy (sic) are widespread and the rich are becoming richer, while the poor – like many Bedouins – are becoming poorer.”

Meanwhile, the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings have triggered several mainstream opposition rallies in Jordan. The protesters demanded democratic reforms, curbing nepotism and official corruption. The Jordanians haven’t called for an end to the monarchy yet, but they could do so if the public discontent escalates into a full-scale uprising.

So what could the Obama administration do to help the Jordanian royalty stave off an Egyptian-style revolution? Whatever else it can do, sending the head of the U.S. armed forces to Amman was a mistake. Many Jordanians saw it as America’s threat to use its military might to defend one of its Arab cops against the repressed people of the state. Moreover, a U.S. military intervention in Jordan’s political crisis would be counterproductive. Could American soldiers be shooting Arabs in one country without provoking Arab protests against the U.S. military presence and other vital interests in others?

Americans can’t really beat the brewing pan-Arab revolution in Jordan and most other countries. They should join the revolution now to preserve their vital interests in the Middle East.

▪ Mustafa Malik, host of the blog Beyond Freedom, is a columnist in Washington. He conducted field research on U.S.-Arab relations in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as a senior associate for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

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.