For centuries it has been a central tenet of political philosophy that no state can yield legitimate authority without at least the tacit consent of those over whom it seeks to govern. Current events are showing this is as true in Iran as it is anywhere else.
Since the revolution of 1979, Iran’s leaders seem to have believed that their mandate to govern was established through the popular, bottom-up protests that overthrew the shah and installed the current regime. Yet the recent protests, as big as anything seen since the revolution, seem to suggest that 30 years on, that mandate is starting to expire. Contrary to much popular opinion, Iranians are a people of sophistication and learning, with a long and distinguished lineage of poets, historians and others capable of seeing beyond the kind of zero-sum politics that characterises the incumbent regime.
Ironically, perhaps, the fact that Iran is a democracy of sorts, in which people are given the chance to express whether or not they consent to the continuation of an incumbent’s mandate to govern, has only made matters worse for the ruling regime. Once you let a man taste a good thing, he will usually want more. The Iranian regime has made a catastrophic and potentially fatal mistake in believing that it could placate the masses with a cosmetic democracy, but continue on as though such a democracy did not actually exist.
Even if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did defeat his main rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, it seems exceedingly unlikely that he would have triumphed in quite such the comprehensive fashion official statistics claimed that he did, polling 62.6 per cent of the vote, given the contentiousness that has characterised so many of his policies. Reports in the international media, citing Iranian bloggers, claim that an unofficial leaks showed Mr Ahmadinejad polling just 13.6 per cent of the vote, behind not only Mr Mousavi, but also the liberal reformist Mehdi Karroubi. The BBC tonight broadcast allegations that Mr Mousavi had in fact been informed of his victory by the supreme council (the religious body ruled by Ayatollah Khamenei, which holds the real power in Iran) before later being informed that he was to remain silent.
Whether there is any truth to these claims is highly uncertain. What is certain is that the Iranian regime is attempting what may well turn out to be the impossible task of closing Pandora’s box. In the run-up to the election the regime belatedly attempted to impose some sort of control over the internet, clamping down on popular networking sites such as Facebook, widely seen as the preserve of liberal, anti-establishment youths who oppose the current regime. Following the announcement of Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory, protests in support of Mr Mousavi were announced to be illegal, though the sheer size of protests appears to have rendered the security response impotent for the time being.
As is the case almost everywhere in the world, the internet revolution in Iran is empowering people to circumnavigate the traditional top-down sources of information to obtain alternative points of view. It is also enabling them to better co-ordinate opposition to the ruling regime. No longer can governments simply impose their doctrines on peoples safe in the knowledge that no other view can realistically prevail, and if the Iranian regime is found to have perverted the outcome of this election, then it may yet pay the price.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has begun his campaign for June’s presidential elections in typical style, calling Iran’s enemies “dogs” and exhorting his countrymen to stay the aggressive, isolationist course he has taken them down insisting “if you retreat, they attack. If you attack, they retreat.” The best possible attack the Iranian people could stage in June and the one that would be most likely to force the retreat of Iran’s “enemies”, would be to exercise the democratic rights Iranians still have and eject Mr Ahmadinejad from power. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or rather, a self-fulfilling nightmare. He and others in the ultra conservative Iranian regime live in a perpetual siege mentality, convinced that all those around them seek nothing but their destruction. The policy and the oratory that this in turn perpetuates, mainly the relentless pursuit of nuclear capabilities, active support for Hezbollah and Hamas amongst others, and repeated calls for Israel’s destruction does nothing but add external pressure on Iran, in turn further convincing the regime that all the world is out to get them, and on it goes.
The possibility of successful external engagement with this regime is next to none. Only if the moderates and reformists in Iran can defy the Ayatollahs and vote in a president receptive to co-operation with the outside world can they hope to see the kind of foreign retreat that Mr Ahmadinejad and doubtless they themselves are looking for. This is by no means a wholly implausable possibility. Contrary to the images usually shown on Western televisions, of swarms of Iranians chanting death to America and death to Israel after Friday prayers, the majority of Iranians seek reconciliation with the West and others in the Middle East, as opposed to further confrontation. From reformers to conservatives, one of the latest reports on Iranian public opinion shows that more Iranians favour cooperation with other Middle Eastern countries than any other course, including seeing Iran the dominant power in the region. Likewise, over 60 per cent believe that it is possible to find common cultural ground with the West. Perhaps most revealing, however, is that more than 90 per cent of all Iranians wish to forego nuclear weapons. All of this is in very stark contrast with the public ravings of Ahmadinejad and it is also at odds with much popular Western opinion about ordinary Iranians.
The economic and political consequences of Ahmadinejad’s wretched isolationism are clearly taking their toll. Yet in spite of the aspirations of most Iranians for a rapprochement with the outside world, many remain highly suspicious of it. The Iranian government still enjoys the support of most Iranians, and the truth is that just as Ahmadinejad is bringing about his own worst fears through the policies he pursues, so Western policy towards Iran can also be its own worst enemy.
For some reason, strategists, politicians and diplomats on both sides seem either unwilling or unable to put themselves in the other man’s shoes. Neither the West nor Israel seems to take sufficient account of why Iran pursues the policies that it does, instead focusing exclusively on how to stop those policies from being realised. This is nowhere more evident than in the West’s approach to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Clearly, the ambition for nuclear capability is not an end in itself but a means to an end. In the eyes of the Iranian regime, nuclear capability equals greater security and greater regional influence. But security from what and influence why? It is precisely because the regime believes that all the world is out to get them that they are so desperate to acquire a nuclear bomb. The harder the West pushes Iran, and the louder Israel rattles the sabre, the more convinced becomes the regime of the need for a bomb to silence them. The current regime is beyond redemption, and Ahmadinejad’s latest utterances show that. However, that is not to say that the Iranian people themselves cannot still be won round. Yet to do this, both the West and Israel may need to radically rethink their strategy towards Iran. It is here that Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind comes to mind: the harder you push another to do something they do not want to do, the harder they will resist, particularly if they feel threatened.
This is especially true of Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported yesterday that one in four Israelis would consider leaving the country if Iran got the bomb, reflecting growing concern that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may soon be realised. Israel has made it clear that it cannot and will not tolerate such a thing coming to pass, and has warned both Iran and the international community, in not quite so many words, that it will not hesitate to bomb Irananian nuclear facilities if the international community and the IAEA cannot convince the regime to give up its nuclear ambitions peacefully. With the election of Likud right-winger Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in March, the chance of a tempered Israeli policy towards Iran is smaller still. Yet the international community, and in particular the United States, cannot allow Israel to pursue this course, for if there is one thing that would unite Iranians behind Ahmadinejad and the need for nuclear capabilities, it would be military action against Iran. At present, most Iranians still believe that nuclear ambition is costing more than it’s worth. Nothing would change that view quicker than military strikes.
The campaign that the West needs to wage in Iran in the run up to the June elections, is one that convinces Iranians of the horrendous counterproductivity of the current regime’s actions. Iranians must be made to believe that the very things Ahmadinjad’s programme hopes to achieve - military and economic security and regional respect and influence - can only be achieved through working with, as opposed to against the international community. Unfortunately, an insufficient number of Iranians still believe this, partly because the United States and Israel have threatened Iran with too much stick, with very few real carrots in sight. The reason so many Iranians burn the American flag each Friday after prayers is because they see the United States as implaccably opposed to themselves and everything they stand for. Labelled part of the “Axis of Evil” by George W. Bush, there may have been truth in this under the previous administration. Obama needs to show Iranian’s that this is no longer so, and that means a huge PR campaign that reaches ordinary Iranians to convince them of this. There are signs that Obama is already working in this direction. Haaretz also reported yesterday that “Israel’s military option against Iran has died”, thanks to pressure from the Obama administration forbidding any such action. Whether this is actually so remains to be seen.
Either way, the first rule in politics is always that perception is as, if not more important than reality. In actually convincing Iranians that the West is not out to get them, the US and others need to make a much bigger effort.
“The two-state solution is very near death”, said Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general to the US back in February. In reality, the two-state solution never really lived as a viable solution to the decades old Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place. From before Israel’s inception, the idea has always faced vigorous opposition from one or other of the two sides and usually both. The original partition plan was unanimously opposed by the six Arab countries represented at the UN when it went before the General Assembly on 29 November 1947. When the plan was agreed upon by the UN in spite of this, fatal violence instantly followed. By 16 February 1948, the UN’s Palestine Commission reported that but for British security forces “the two communities [Jews and Arabs] would by now have been fully engaged in internecine slaughter.”
David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israeli independence on 14 May 1948 prompted an invasion by no fewer than seven Arab armies, four of them rolling into Israel the very next day. Their publicly declared intention was “the creation of a United State of Palestine” in place of the two-state plan. The Arab defeat did not, however, herald an acceptance of a two-state solution by either side. The 1949 armistice agreements ceded the West Bank to Jordan, which had never gone into the war to destroy Israel so much as to annex as much Palestinian territory as possible, whilst he Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.
The history of the succeeding decades up to the present day has been one in which neither Israelis nor Palestinians accepted the other’s right to exist, or as has been the case more recently, neither side has been willing to concede enough so as to make a two-state solution workable. At the same time, and further complicating matters, major elements on both sides still do not accept the other’s right to exist.
One of the most fundamental problems is that the physical space being fought over just isn’t big enough to accomodate the wants and needs of both sides. Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between them comprise barely 26,000 sq km, fully half of which is made up of the inhospitable Negev desert in the south. In that space are expected to live peacefully and prosperously 11 million of some of the most acrimonious people on earth. As Israel’s former National Security Council chief Giora Eiland put it, the “pie” is just too small. “In terms of political survival, the maximum that any government in Israel can agree to offer the Palestinians is less than the minimum that any Palestinian government can agree to accept. The conventional two-state paradigm has become a zero-sum game, providing insufficient incentive for both sides to take the necessary risks and move forward.”
The failure of the 1993 Oslo accords - the first direct, face-to-face agreement between Israelis and Palestinians - failed because they deliberately left to a later date agreement on the fundamental issues, namely the question of Israeli settlements, the final status of Jerusalem, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, borders and security. When attempts were subsequently made to address those issues, the result was predictable enough: failure. The first serious attempt to address these issues, at Camp David in 2000, fell down because neither side was willing or able to make the necessary levels of compromise. The closest both sides have come to an agreement was undoubtedly at Taba in January 2001, yet set against the onset of the Al-Aqsa intifada that followed the collapse of the Camp David summit, the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister in February saw the accords thrown out and the violence escalate.
Yet even if, by an almost unfathomable miracle, these issues could all be resolved, few people seem to have considered the actual viability of a Palestinian state. From where has the assumption come that if and when a Palestinian state is finally created, it will be able to live peacefully and prosperously alongside Israel? The truth is that the animosity between Israelis and Palestinians runs too deep, and the violence has become too personal for any deal to be adhered to for long. No better evidence of this exists than the spectacular fallout following the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in September 2005. Instead of electing a government that could or would work with Israel, the Gaza Palestinians elected Hamas, an organisation whose founding charter states “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it”. In part, the election of Hamas was borne of an abiding resentment amongst Palestinians over perceived corruption in the Fatah party, but it was also borne of a conviction that Hamas was the better group to represenent Palestinian interests. The result has been a devastating blockade of the entire strip by Israel, culminating most recently in the Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza from 27 December 2008-18 January 2009, during which time some 5,000 people were killed.
There is precisely nothing to say that a fully fledged Palestinian state would not likewise elect a government overtly hostile to Israel, nor that Israel would tolerate such hostility. Aside from the enormous political and economic cost of shifting the 350,000-odd religious fundamentalists that are the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers, one of the main things stopping Israel from pulling out of the West Bank is a very real concern that if it does so, the region will quickly be taken over by Hamas. This is an outcome that Israel simply will not allow. In addition to the group’s commitment to the destruction of Israel and its militant Islamist ideology, Hamas also enjoys Iranian sponsorship. Allowing Iran, which is establishing itself as one of the Middle East’s strongest powers, still further influence on Israel’s border would be absolutely unacceptable to the Israeli government. A potentially volatile and Hamas-led Palestine would also be highly objectionable to both Jordan and Egypt, the two other countries with which Palestine would share a border. Neither country wishes to see a militant, Iranian-backed state on their borders any more than Israel does.
In addition to this, one has to look at the geographic and economic reality of any future state of Palestine and ask whether such a state would be truly viable in those terms. The answer once again is no. Neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip have any natural resources to speak of, and the country would be dependent upon Israel for its economic survival. The geographical separation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip also poses a serious issue for the integrity of any future Palestinian state. The agreed solution at present would be one or two land corridors connecting the territories running through the heart of Israel. Should the Palestinians elect an overtly hostile government, or as is even more likely, should any Palestinian government find itself unable to control the militant elements that would undoubtedly still exist within the country, then Israel could and very likely would strangle Palestine.
The truth is, however, that even this unhappy scenario is still a pipe-dream at present, still more so following the recent election of Binyamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister, a man who has described the entire peace-process as “a waste of time”. The pie is too small, the disagreements too severe and the stakes too high for a workable agreement on any of the major obstacles to be forthcoming in the near future. What then, is the solution?
Perhaps the two-state solution needs to be ditched altogether. The idea that the two-state solution might seriously need to be dropped will not come easily to large swathes of the international community, and global publics generally, who have come to see it as the only acceptable and indeed thinkable solution to the region’s problems. Yet maybe it is time to take a step back and realise that “justice for the Palestinians” might not necessarily be the same thing as a state called Palestine. Some have put forward the idea of a single, unified Israeli state encompassing the entire area, in which both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights and opportunities. This notion is antithetical to the notion of Israel as a culturally Jewish state, not least because, with higher birth-rates, the number of Arabs in the area (5.2 million) is soon set to surpass the number of Jews (6.2 million). Netanyahu’s Likud government is already working on ways to counter this “threat” and there is little chance that the two communities would live either peacefully or equally side-by-side in a unified Israel.
The most viable and workable solution would in fact seem to be the so-called “three-state solution”, which would see the Gaza Strip annexed to Egypt, and the West Bank annexed to Jordan. Neither Egypt, whose border with Gaza has remained predominantly closed since the Hamas takeover in 2006, nor Jordan have given any sign that they would give this idea serious consideration at present. However, the very real possibility of a militant, Hamas-led Palestine may well make this idea of greater appeal to the Egyptians and Jordanians than it has been in the past. Without question, this solution would have to come with massive levels of international aid to help rebuild infrastructure and compensate Egypt and Jordan for the cost of taking in almost 4 million of among the world’s most impoverished people. However, the short and long-term security benefits for both countries, as well as Israel, are evident. Not only would this sollution nullify the potential of further Iranian influence in the area, it would also go a long way towards dealing with the wider issue of Middle Eastern terrorism generally, which is in large part the result of the very real and perceived injustices endured by the Palestinians. There is no guarantee that an independent Palestinian state would be an end to these injustices, because of the weakness of such a state and its utter dependence upon Israel. Poverty, resentment and terrorism all go hand in hand.
The three-state solution would also be to the benefit of the large numbers of Palestinians who simply wish to live a peaceful and prosperous life, free from Israeli occupation. The exact form of the solution will not matter so much so long as it delivers upon these objectives. The potential for peace and prosperity, free from Israeli interference, would be considerably higher under the three-state solution than in a weak and politically vulnerable Palestine. Moderate Palestinians would rather live under Egyptian and Jordanian rule than under a militant and Islamist Hamas. Furthermore, even in a politically stable Palestine, the aformentioned weakness of the economy and the geographic limitations mean that Palestinians would be afforded far fewer economic opportunities than they would under an Egyptian or Jordanian aegis, replete with the full economic and political backing of those respective governments. The main losers in such a scenario would of course be the Palestinian leaderships, which is possibly why more of this idea has not been heard already. For them of course, the only acceptable solution is a fully independent Palestine, but the point needs no ellaboration that what is in the best interests of a people and what is in the best interests of their leaders are very often not the same thing.
If a solution to the Palestinian problem were simple, then it would have been arrived at long ago, with many thousand fewer lives lost. Yet one of the principle reasons that the conflict has continued to drag on for as long as it has, with so little progress towards a solution, is because the solution being pursued is quite simply unworkable. Neither side is willing to give enough to make it workable; indeed, neither side has enough it can realistically give, and the prospects for peace and stability even if they did are very small for the reasons already outlined. If peace is ever to be achieved in Palestine, then there is going to need to be a radical rethink of what the right way forward actually is. The three-state solution might just be it.
Almost ten years to the day after his defining speech to the Chicago Economic Club at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Tony Blair has been in Chicago once again, this time to give a speech on how best to tackle Islamic “extremism”. Blair’s apparent lack of comprehension of the huge complexities of the enemy he embarked upon fighting whilst British Prime Minister would not be such a cause for concern but for the fact that as the Quartet’s official envoy, he is supposedly our man to bring peace to the Middle East. Not only that, but a number of other world leaders appear to hold to his point of view.
One of the major problems is the methodology used by Blair and others who share his position to draw a line between “true Muslims”, whose faith is tolerant and peaceful, and “extremist Muslims” who believe it is justifiable to pursue their objectives by violent means. “They [extremists] are better organised. But they don’t represent true Islam or true Muslims”, Blair said. Similar statements are constantly being made by global statesman to the point that in 2007 this assertion was turned into an operative clause of a UN General Assembley Resolution, which expresses its “deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” The need to make such statements is understandable. Yet the problem with this distinction between “true Muslims” and “extremists” is that it approaches the issue from completely the wrong angle, grading the legitimacy of faith according to how closely it conforms with Western values, wholly independent of what might actually constitute being faithful to Islam. In no way is this to take the position of Emperor Manuel II, whose famous dismissal of Islam as a religion of violence was recently quoted by Pope Benedict XVI, but it must be understood that the validity of a religious interpretation cannot be graded according to how closely it conforms with liberal-democratic ideals.
Those who argue that Islam does permit the use of violence often cite the law of abrogation, a concept unique to Islam that holds older teachings to be null and void when contradicted by later ones. Mohammed’s early statements whilst at Mecca are by-and-large more peaceful than the more warlike utterances pronounced once the fledgling Muslim community had consolidated itself at Medina.
Blair’s second major misunderstanding is the motivation of those Muslims who see violence as a legitimate means to an end. He dismisses as cynical manipulation the way extremists (for want of a better word) have “successfully inculcated a sense of victimhood in the Islamic world”. Yet these grievences are very real, and central to understanding and thus dealing with the problem. Furthermore, this mindset is not unique to Muslims. Down the centuries, extremism has always been a reaction to perceived injustice. It is also a common reaction of the weak to the strong. In Moorish Spain, instances of what could be termed Christian extremism were a reaction to Muslim ascendency. The terror tactics of the IRA in Northern Ireland were a consequence both of a perceived injustice and the fact that the IRA could not have hoped to beat the British Army in a straight fight. Much the same can said of militant activity in Palestine now. As Clausewitz said, “war is just politics by another means”. This is by no means to excuse such actions, merely to contextualise them.
So-called Islamic extremism is a direct response to Western ascendency and perceived encroachments upon the Islamic way of life. Blair is quite simply missing the point when he says “we have to understand we have not caused this phenomenon”. In his iconic work the “Clash of Civilisations” Samuel P. Huntington made the case very clearly: “Islam [is] a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” The gradual ascendency of the West over the Muslim world, beginning perhaps with the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and culminating with the final Ottoman capitulation in 1918, is a phenomenon very intimately tied up with Islamic extremism today, principally because - in the eyes of the “extremists” - those defeats have yet to be reversed.
The reason this has led to such violent confrontations with the West is because of the highly orthopraxic nature of Islam, that is, the impossibility of legitimately separating church and state. Whereas such a division is made possible in Christianity by Christ’s command to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things which are God’s”, no such provision exists in Islam. In Islam the success or failure of a human being to find favour with the Almighty very much depends on his or her actions and behaviour. Out of this has come a doctrine advocated in the Quran known as ‘Manifest Success’ which essentially links external success with the notion of being Gods people. In other words, the extent to which Muslims can know divine favour can be directly measured against the extent of their earthly success.
This idea is firmly grounded in the spectacular expansion of the Muslim geopolitical sphere under Mohammed and his immediate successors. The logic clearly follows that because Mohammed was supremely faithful to God’s commands, so he was granted unprecedented earthly success. Mohammed fought for what he believed in and did not capitulate to those who would follow their own laws as opposed to God’s laws. Muslims who wish for an uncompromising return to the laws and cultural standards of Mohammed’s 7th century world need look no further than the humiliation of the Ottoman Empire after it sought to incorporate Western practices in an effort to strenghten itself at the end of the 19th century as vindication of their position. “Extremist” Muslims look at their position today and conclude that only a radical rejection of Westernism and a return to the modus operandi as it existed under Mohammed can hope to see a revival of their fortunes.
Democracy and the nation state have two things in common. First is that they are, in their current form, fairly recent creations. Second is that they are very definitely man-made creations. Democracy rests on the idea that the people should make their own laws and determine their own future. The nation state rests on the idea that an individual’s first loyalty and duty is to his country. Neither was a tenable concept in 7th century Medina and both are anathema to a Muslim who believes in the absolute supremecy and rightness of God’s laws - which provide a clear template for the establishment of an earthly society - and whose first loyalty is to his brothers in faith, in whichever state on earth they may happen to live.
This has very far reaching implications for the way Blair and others need to understand the threat posed by “extremist” Islam. There are very firm grounds within Islam to contend that Western encroachments on perceived Muslim spheres on influence, far from helping solve the problem, are in fact the problem. Highly unfashionable though it may be to say so, the West cannot offer Muslims any kind of system that is compatible with their faith. Liberal democracy and Islam are not compatible systems. That is not to say that Muslims cannot live peacefully in Western societies, nor in fact that, as Turkey has demonstrated so successfully, a majority-Muslim state cannot rest on secular principles and largely Western inspired notions of the rule of law. What it is to say is that such systems are highly imperfect implementations of what the God of the Quran intended, if not outright rejections. Like it or not, there is much more method to “extremist” Muslims’ madness than Mr Blair and others like him appear to comprehend.
The controversial decision of the Pakistani government to agree to a “permanent ceasefire” with the Taleban insurgency in the Swat valley of north-western Pakistan at the end of February caused considerable concern throughout the international community, not least in neighbouring India.
However, media reports at the time indicated that the inhabitants of what was once one of Pakistan’s most popular holiday destinations tentatively welcomed an end to the 15-month conflict in return for Sharia law.
Yet the price of peace is already proving to be severe. The recent release of a video showing the public flogging of a teenage girl, held down by her brother, accused of illicit relations with a man, serves as a worrying paradigm of the new modus vivandi.
The mafia-style execution of a man accused of burglary at the end of March only reinforces the perception that under the Taleban, the rule of law is being replaced by corporal punishment in the absence of a fair, or indeed any trial.
Prime Minister Yusuf Raza has condemned the latest incident as “shameful” and a court hearing into the incident has been called by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Though these words and actions are to be lauded, it is hard to see exactly what practical purpose they will serve, other than to reassure the wider Pakistani population and the international community that the Pakistani government does not condone this kind of behaviour.
Yet in agreeing to the Taleban’s demands for Sharia law in the first place, the Pakistani authorities have effectively brought this situation upon themselves. As Javed Iqbal, a retired judge, said at the time: ”It means that there is not one law in the country. It will disintegrate this way. If you concede to this, you will go on conceding.”
Yesterday, India’s South Asia Intelligence Review quoted Taliban insurgents as vowing to carry out two suicide attacks a week in Pakistan, in spite of the recent deal.
There is no denying the strength of the Taleban in the region, nor of the relative weakness of the Pakistani authorities and the United States across the border in Afghanistan. Yet in conceding to their demands, there is a real danger that the government will only embolden the insurgency. As the Taleban’s recent actions demonstrate, in choosing to dance with the devil, President Zadari is already getting more than he bargained for.
NATO heads of state and government yesterday agreed to a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan in the run up to the Afghan general election in August.
The decision followed strong words from outgoing Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and a
n appeal from US President Barack Obama for Europeans to do more on the eve of the 60th Anniversary of NATO’s inception.
Germany and France have agreed to each send an additional 600 troops, the UK a further 900, whilst the US will send 21,000 extra troops to bolster the existing 58,000 strong force. Additional support is also expected to come from Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Poland, Turkey and Croatia.
However, these forces cannot and should not be used to bolster and support a government that implements retrograde repressive policies in its push (ironically) to secure the democratic vote of the conservative leaders of the country’s Shia minority.
On 2 April 2009, Afghan President Hamad Karzai signed into law draconian legislation banning women from leaving the home without permission, legalising child marriage and sanctioning marital rape.
NATO forces have been vital to improving the security situation in Afghanistan, not least through their training of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and countering the insurgency in the country. Without this support, the Afghan government could not have negotiated better relations with the Pakistani Government, which has led to improved military co-ordination along the border, nor to have improved the country’s infrastructure in the way that it has been able to do.
Though the ANSF has now taken full control for security in Kabul and has grown in strength and capability generally, President Karzai is fully aware of the need for continued international assistance if his government is to succeed. Consequently, the international community must use this position of influence to insist that President Karzai does not abuse his position by passing legislation reminicent of the policies of the Taleban that his government replaced.
The increased NATO presence in the run-up to the general election in August is to be welcomed, but only so long as these forces are not used to prop up a government that decreases as opposed to improves the state of Afghan civil liberties.
THE LAWS
Article 27 The age of maturity (and thus marriage) is 15 for boys; for girls it is when they have their first period
Article 132 The couple should not commit acts that create hatred and bitterness. The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires. The husband, except when travelling or ill, is bound to have intercourse with his wife every four nights. The wife is bound to give a positive response
Article 133 The husband can stop the wife from any unnecessary, un-Islamic act. The wife cannot leave the house without the permission of the husband
Article 177 The wife does not have the right to the provision of maintenance by the husband unless she agrees to have intercourse with him and he gets an opportunity for doing so