Iran is back in the news again: bungled attempt to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US on American territory, IAEA’s upcoming report which is expected to detail how the Islamic Republic is working toward a nuclear weapon’s program, President Ahmadinejad’s growing feud with the Supreme Leader, and of course Iran’s support for the Bashir regime’s crackdown on it revolting citizens in Iran. David Sanger of the New York Times produced a nice synopsis of the Obama administration’s current strategy toward Iran, detailing American efforts to impede its progress toward going nuclear:

Iran may be the most challenging test of the Obama administration’s focus on new, cheap technologies that could avoid expensive boots on the ground; drones are the most obvious, cyberweapons the least discussed. It does not quite add up to a new Obama Doctrine, but the methods are defining a new era of nearly constant confrontation and containment. Drones are part of a tactic to keep America’s adversaries off balance and preoccupied with defending themselves. And in the past two and a half years, they have been used more aggressively than ever. There are now five or six secret American drone bases around the world. Some recently discovered new computer worms suggest that a new, improved Stuxnet 2.0 may be in the works for Iran.

Basically, anything that doesn’t involve an actual American (or Israeli) military strike or real sanctions on Iran’s oil industry. Sanger also quickly layouts what a parallel containment strategy for Iran might look like:

The early elements of it are obvious: the antimissile batteries that the United States has spent billions of dollars installing on the territory of Arab allies, and a new Pentagon plan to put more ships and antimissile batteries into the Persian Gulf, in cooperation with six Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.

It seems to have reached conventional wisdom that the Obama administration has ruled out any serious military action to halt an Iranian nuclear reality, but analyst David Rothkopf thinks that may be naive:

But in the end, as dangerous as an attack might be militarily and politically, if the President believes there is no other alternative to stopping Iran from gaining the ability to produce highly enriched uranium and thus manufacture nuclear weapons, he will seriously consider military action and it is hardly a certainty he won’t take it. From a domestic political perspective, right now Obama’s strong suit is his national security performance. For the first time in years, he has taken the issue away from the Republicans. Right now they simply cannot attack him as being weak or assert they understand defense better. That is why they are so silent on the issue. Obama has only four real areas of vulnerability on this front. First, if he pushes too hard for defense budget cuts before the election, the Republicans will go after him. He won’t. He will seek cuts but will be comparatively cautious. Next, if there were a terrorist attack of some sort and the administration seemed unprepared or responded weakly, that would create a problem. But that is a perennial wild card. Third, if he distances himself from Israel, the Republicans will seek to capitalize on the sense some supporters of that country have that Obama is not a committed friend. There is already plenty of activity in that area … and the Israelis are eager to take advantage of their perceived election year leverage. And finally, if Iran were to detonate a nuclear bomb, Obama would be blamed and fiercely attacked for a policy of engagement that ultimately proved to be toothless.

Walter Russell Mead has also made this argument, though more persuasively. I wouldn’t be so quick to think that Obama would make such a move. Yes, he has shown a willingness to use violent force to kill terrorist enemies and participated in the aerial bombing of Qadafhi’s regime in Libya, but an attack on Iran would be a whole other animal. I believe Obama is still a firm believer in international institutions and law and would loathe the idea of going it alone (albeit with Israel) as there is little chance a major attack would be approved in the Security Council. Attacking Iran would also open up a plethora of unknowns (oil prices, counter attacks, etc.) that I don’t think the President wants to bring to the 2012 election. It would also undermine the benefits Obama will receive from his base by getting all US troops out of Iraq. However, Rothkopf and Mead should be applauded for going against the conventional wisdom.

In any case, after becoming a nearly forgotten topic amongst all of our economic dull drums, the Iran question is back in the news and obviously worth watching.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published this fascinating piece on the rising, so far just cold, conflict between Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Shia-led Iran. Now these two regional powers have been in competition since the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979, but as the article by Bill Spindle and Margaret Coker describes, the Arab Spring, particularly with the fall of Saudi Arabia’s Sunni partner, Mubarak in Egypt, things have gotten more heated. The intriguing situation in Bahrain, where the Shia majority is in revolt against the minority Sunni leadership, is a flashpoint in this so-called new cold war. As some of you may have heard, Saudi Arabia sent in troops to put down the insurrection and just announced yesterday that those troops aren’t going anywhere. This will definitely be a story to follow.

Here is the lead in to Spindle and Coker’s worthwhile analysis:

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It’s being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968.

But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn’t been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.

“The cold war is a reality,” says one senior Saudi official. “Iran is looking to expand its influence. This instability over the last few months means that we don’t have the luxury of sitting back and watching events unfold.”

On March 14, the Saudis rolled tanks and troops across a causeway into the island kingdom of Bahrain. The ruling family there, long a close Saudi ally, appealed for assistance in dealing with increasingly large protests.

Rashid, a highly touted Pakistani journalist, begins the final chapter of his 2000 ‘Taliban’ by calling the country one of world’s ‘orphaned conflict’s’.  The country would quickly change from being orphaned to a month after 9/11 being the center of global politics, as the United States uprooted the Taliban government and sent them packing, unfortunately for only a short-term vacation.

Rashid’s valuable book walks its readers through a rather dense social, religious, military, and even psychological history of the group of radicalized Pashtuns, known as the Taliban.  He provides a solid regional historical overview and does not forget the many geopolitical actors involved in the fragmented country (Iran, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.).  A solid half of the book details the violent rise to power of the Taliban as they battled first fellow Pashtun groups, than the government in Kabul, and finally the Northern Alliance actors, which would never relinquish their autonomy to Taliban-ruled Kabul and Kandahar.  This book is worth reading just for those who don’t know just how fractious the Afghan society can be with many various ethnicities and sects, all with foreign partners, that have had to violently attempt to protect themselves and further their own people’s positions.  This book, just like Afghanistan today, is full of conflict and violence that shows no real sign of ebbing.

Rashid provides a telling description of the early members of the Taliban (around 1994) as Afghans born in Pakistan and raised mainly by madrassas as their parents, especially mothers, may have been lost in the years of fighting during and after the Soviet invasion and withdrawal.  These young men had ‘no memories of the past, no plans for the future’ and knew of nothing else but their Taliban leaders.  Like we have heard many times in reference to terrorist and gang groups, the Taliban offered these men, and boys, a meaning to their lives that they could embrace and fight for.

This type of camaraderie of course becomes dangerous when it is based on ignorant, stubborn, violent, yet a strong ideology and form of Islam, as they, the Taliban, surely had.  The Taliban, which by 1996 controlled large swaths of Afghan territory, including Kabul, ruled with a fundamental Islamic iron fist that showed no accommodation, not even towards UN aid providers.  The Taliban was controlling a large population and recruiting members with a version of Islam that ‘divested’ it of nearly all of its positive legacies, including Islamic philosophy, science, arts, civil society, etc.  It was the Taliban’s way or the knife.  One has never read about a more oppressive society.

The Taliban did not become the Taliban, or rule, in a vacuum.  They were of course incubated and constantly nourished by the Pakistani government and ISI.  When the Taliban needed more troops in their battles with Masud and what would become the Northern Alliance, Pakistan would just close some of their madrassas in FATA or the Northwest Provinces and send the men over the border.  Rashid, who also spends time on Osama bin Ladin’s terrorist network in Afghanistan, accurately predicted that the Pakistani state and military were creating their own nightmare with their support of the Taliban, instead of the ‘strategic depth’ they aimed for.  The author stated that the Islamic fundamentalism, drugs, weapons, and social breakdown that the Pakistani government was assisting the Taliban in performing or using, was making Islamabad ‘ripe for a Taliban-style Islamic revolution.’  While what is occurring today in Pakistan is so far, thankfully, not this extreme, it is too close for comfort.

Rashid’s ‘Taliban’ also details the human and women right’s abuses by the Taliban in great detail.  In addition, Rashid spends several chapters describing the ‘great game’ of pipeline politics in the Central Asia region and not surprisingly was correct in his assessment that Afghanistan, and the region as a whole, was just too unstable for Western groups to come in and build major gas and oil pipelines, no matter how much they wanted too.  Though these pipeline chapters were well researched, they can be passed over by most readers.

Rashid’s book provides much more than the history and make-up of a group that the powerful United States military is having a hell of a time defeating, it brings to life the challenging modern history of a people who have only known violence in their lives.  It is sad to think that one cannot imagine this changing in the near or even long-term future.  Though Rashid’s work is far from perfect, too many assumptions presented as facts (he is a journalist by trade), it brings light on a dangerous and important group, geopolitical actors and actions in a key region of the world, and on the suffering of millions.

I am reading Adeeb Khalid’s book ‘Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia.’ That’s it, I just thought you should know….Juuuuust kidding. Though I plan on summarizing and reviewing the book when I’m finished, I came across this interesting passage discussing Islam and the state that I would like to share. It’s a bit lengthy so bear with me (hey, I’m the one who has to type the darn thing!):

But even when states have sought to control Islam, they have don so to put it to work on their behalf. Having freed up large areas of public life from the authority of Islam and its carriers, they nevertheless have used Islam to bolster their legitimacy or to found systems of public morality based on a particular reading of Islam. The Egyptian state, for instance, derives a great deal of its legitimacy from the argument that it serves Islam. In Turkey, in an approved and properly nationalized form, Islam remains part of the moral education of all schoolchildren. In both these countries, religious higher education is under state supervision or control, but it remains uninterrupted, and the public presence of Islam is unmistakable. The Saudi state, of course, stakes all its legitimacy on Islam, but it keeps strict control over Islamic institutions. In Pakistan, in contrast, the state was never able to institutionalize control over Islam. Rather, the military, both in and out of power, has used Islamic groups for various purposes, from sponsoring the ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan, through instigating an insurgency in Kashmir, to fomenting sectarian violence within Pakistan itself.

Before this passage, Khalid emphasizes that Islam should be looked at like all other religions in the world and in history, in terms of its relations to the state. That is, that the state attempts to use it or suppress it for its own interests. This is Khalid’s main thesis of the book, that Islam is not monolithic and is strongly affected and changed by such other societal factors as governance and economics.

Back to the passage above, Khalid is accurate in that for the most part Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have ‘successfully’ controlled most aspects of Islam while at the same time using the religion and culture for legitimacy claims. The first two, Egypt and Turkey, are mostly secular states, with Turkey’s constitution guaranteeing this, while Saudi Arabia’s government is much more tied to its Wahhabi-Islamic roots. Interestingly, these three states are all key US allies. Saudi Arabia and Egypt both run oppressive societies, but the US sides with them anyways for geopolitical, resource, and stability reasons. The US government appears to accept these repressive regimes over possible Islamist party takeovers, which it fears my have a similiar world outlook to Iran. Come to think of it, did the hostile nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s towards the United States ruin forever possible US support for Islamist parties throughout the Middle East?

The fourth country and only outlier that Khalid mentions, is Pakistan, and it is a state that may be the most important US ally of them all at the moment. Khalid is correct, the Pakistan military, much less its government, has never had control over Islam in the country’s short history. What amount of the blame should the current domestic and regional problems facing Pakistan should be attributed to this lack of state control over Islam? Is there anything different about the culture and religion of Islam that makes it harder for governments to control? Or are geopolitical, economic, international, and other societal factors more responsible?