Don't leave everything to America

Monday - Obama & Afghanistan


Thousands have been marching in London over the weekend for "jobs, justice and climate." The protests are aimed at the Group of 20 Summit which takes place April 2, bringing together countries that control 85 percent of the world's economy.

Equally fateful are two other gatherings on the continent this week. Tomorrow, a one-day UN-sponsored conference at The Hague grapples with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and delegates from more than 80 countries - Iran included - will attend.

Then, on April 3-4, President Barack Obama travels from the G-20 to NATO meetings in France and Germany, where he will gently cajole the alliance into doing more in Afghanistan.

It's unlikely the Iranians will start behaving responsibly as an outcome of The Hague conference. They help arm and train the Taliban - not because the Shi'ite mullahs want to see Afghanistan solidify as a bastion of Sunni fanaticism, but because, as Robert D. Kaplan argues in the current Atlantic magazine, "they want to keep Afghanistan weak, and to bleed the Americans as much as they can."

Plainly, the West must not allow Iran to leverage its bad behavior in Afghanistan in order to gain concessions for even more troubling behavior on the nuclear weapons issue. But Iran's attendance is a sideshow.

The more urgent issue is whether NATO is prepared to devote the resources necessary to make Afghanistan inhospitable as a base for international terrorism, or whether it will continue to leave most of the fighting burden to an over-stretched Washington.

ON FRIDAY, the president unveiled a new, integrated strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to address both counter-insurgency and societal development. "The situation is increasingly perilous," Obama told the American people. "It has been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan."

He reminded Americans that "al-Qaida and its allies - the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks - are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al-Qaida is actively planning attacks on the US homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan." America's goal is "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan..."

The administration is sending 17,000 more troops to the Afghan theater, starting with 4,000 trainers. Thousands more US service personnel may follow. In addition, Congress is being asked to appropriate $1.5 billion per year for five years in development aid to Afghanistan-Pakistan.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, a fractious polity if ever there was one, is integral to solving the Afghanistan conundrum. Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency helped establish the Taliban, and continues to abet them.

Pakistan's own Taliban are divided into three factions. Now, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Afghan Taliban chief who first gave Osama bin Laden refuge prior to 9/11, has urged his ethnic Pashtun compatriots across the border to stop fighting each other, ease up on their battle against the nominally pro-Western central government in Islamabad, and focus instead on defeating America in Afghanistan.

For their part, the Americans want to drive a wedge, using jobs and other incentives, between the more implacable, fanatic Taliban and those whose goals are comparatively limited and whose grievances are addressable.

Most Taliban supporters, counter-insurgency experts surmise, are not Omar's natural allies. Politics aside, all factions, including those aligned with the pro-Western president, Hamid Karzai, live off the lucrative heroin and opium trade. Competing with the seductive allure of religious fanaticism, violence and drugs won't be easy.

THOUSANDS of soldiers from NATO and allied countries are now stationed in Afghanistan. But only a tiny fraction of them are in fighting units. Most operate under national guidelines which make it impossible for them to take the offensive (though, tragically, many have lost their lives to roadside bombs and ambushes). They are deployed mostly in training and support roles; some almost never leave their bases. Germany, for instance, has heavily invested in the - so far fruitless - training of Afghanistan's ineffectual police.

The time has come for the multinational, anti-Islamist alliance to carry a full share of the combat burden necessary to defeat - finally - Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. America shouldn't have to bear the brunt.

Fork in the road

Friday - The Wonks' way

If you follow the trail of arms from Iran - through Somalia, Sudan and Egypt to the Gaza Strip - you come to a fork in the road. One direction leads to the conclusion that Teheran's smuggling of weapons to Hamas for its fight against Israel is but a facet of the greater Islamist confrontation with Western civilization; the other to the determination that there is no war of civilizations, and that Iran and Hamas are ripe for inclusion in the international community.

YESTERDAY, CBS News reported that in January, Israeli aircraft bombed an Iranian arms convoy in Sudan bound for Hamas during Operation Cast Lead. The attack took place northwest of Port Sudan. All the casualties were Sudanese, Eritreans and Ethiopians and all the trucks were destroyed. They were presumably thought to be carrying rockets that would extend Hamas's range to Tel Aviv, making the mission worth the risk.

• The arms start off in Iran, which sees itself at war with Israel on every continent, using all available means and proxies. Teheran orchestrated the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992, and the Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center in 1994. Iranian instructors taught Hizbullah the art of truck-bombing, which claimed hundreds of Israeli lives in Lebanon.

The mullahs began courting Hamas in 1990, once they had determined that destroying Israel trumped any theological differences with the Sunni jihadists.

Today, Iran is heavily invested in Hamas - financially, diplomatically, militarily and politically.

• The weapons move to Somalia, a failed state and humanitarian basket case controlled by warlords who seek to surmount clan differences with radical Islam. Youthful Shabab extremists are their shock troops. The goal is a world caliphate, but for now they'd settle for Wahhabi control of Somalia. A moderate Islamist president sitting in Mogadishu is too weak to exert power; Muslim pirates rule the coastal waters.

• The next port of call: Sudan. Once Osama bin Laden's headquarters, Sudan is notorious for its genocide against non-Arabs in Darfur. The country has close ties with Iran, whose Revolutionary Guards are training its reconstituted army.

On March 4, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Since then al-Bashir has been to Cairo - twice - to strategize with President Hosni Mubarak. And he means to attend next week's Arab League Summit in Qatar. Beyond the backing he has in the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the African Union, Bashir's support is being spearheaded by Iran, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Islamic Jihad. Iran's parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, called the arrest warrant an "insult directed at Muslims."

• Next port of call - Egypt. Every bullet shipped to Gaza by Iran traverses Egypt, either overland or via the Port of Damietta in a journey coordinated by Hamas in Damascus and Iran's Revolutionary Guard. By the time the shipments arrive at the smugglers' tunnels connecting the Sinai to Gaza, innumerable hands have facilitated them, and innumerable eyes looked the other way.

AMERICAN policy wonks who argue that Iran and Hamas are ripe for inclusion in the international community see taking that direction as "pragmatic." They've unearthed Hamas's "moderate" wing - and it's "open to compromise."

Not, granted, on the core issues of terrorism, honoring previous Palestinian commitments and Israel's right to exist. But Hamas would agree to a lengthy cease-fire. And it might allow Mahmoud Abbas to front for them. Further, say the wonks, with Hamas standing over his shoulder - who knows, Abbas might negotiate a peace deal! It would be brought to a Palestinian referendum, and Hamas would abide by the results.

But none of this will happen, the wonks warn, if the West remains hung up on what Hamas says it will do to Israel.

Similarly, when the US sits down Tuesday at The Hague, with Iran, to discuss Afghanistan, the wonks will likely argue that Teheran's attendance signals its underlying pragmatism - and that this pragmatism could be torpedoed by obsessing over Iranian threats to destroy Israel.

If the new Obama administration takes the easy road counseled by these wonks, willfully ignoring the implacable nature of Islamist extremism, it will have embarked on a journey of disastrous self-delusion.

Israel has a government, finally

Thursday - Thank you, Ehud Barak


If Israel's 2008 campaign had been waged on the basis of whose slogan was closest to the truth, Labor's Ehud Barak would easily have captured a plurality of the Knesset - and not a miserable 13 seats. For his campaign accurately presented him as not "nice" or "likable" or "trendy," but the leader you turn to "at the moment of truth."

On Tuesday, Barak delivered. He persuaded party activists - 680 to 507 - to endorse the deal he had initialed earlier with Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu to bring Labor into the government.

Now, with parliamentary backing from Israel Beiteinu (15 seats), Shas (11) and Labor (13), and the likelihood that United Torah Judaism (5) will eventually shore up the government, Netanyahu has more than enough support in the 120-member Knesset to present his government next week.

FOLLOWING Labor's dismal performance in the February 10 elections, party leaders, with Barak in the forefront, argued that Labor needed to stay out of the new government and focus on rehabilitating itself in opposition - though who's to say the party would not have dissolved there, its members melting into Kadima or Meretz?

Partly for demographic and sociological reasons, Labor, once the country's vanguard party, has steadily lost its identity, and its constituency. Repeatedly serving as a junior partner in someone else's government, its mission became blurred.

Barak may indeed have a Napoleon complex. And it is easy for a jaded public to be cynical about the zigzagging leader's motivations. What matters at this stage, however, is that his joining the government is good for Israel.

At home, thanks to the strong support of Histadrut Labor Federation Chairman Ofer Eini, Labor's participation gives voice, at least nominally, to working people at a time of unprecedented economic dislocation. Abroad, it dramatically improves how the country is perceived in Washington and Europe, and partially ameliorates Netanyahu's injudicious, if unavoidable, appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister.

When Kadima rejected joining forces with Likud because Netanyahu would not agree to a power-sharing rotation government, he was forced to cobble together a parliamentary coalition that was unpalatable, both in terms of internal cohesion and external appearance. It would have consisted of Shas, Israel Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi (which garnered less than three percent of the popular vote), the National Union (just over three percent) and United Torah Judaism (four percent).

Clearly, such a government could neither have represented the will of Israel's body politic within government nor, beyond our shores, the country's true ethos.

Barak is picking up Livni's slack. Whatever his impetus, he is right that Israelis have no "spare" country to play politics with while economic, diplomatic and security crises of immense proportions loom.

For all his quirks, Barak is known abroad as a tough man who knows how to compromise. When he says he won't be a "fig-leaf" for Israeli foot-dragging if the Palestinians start singing a different tune, world leaders will be inclined to believe him.

WE WERE struck by a particularly tendentious "question" posed to President Barack Obama in his Tuesday primetime news conference, primarily devoted to domestic issues. It offers insight into what Israel is up against.

Stefan Collison of Agence France-Presse: "Mr. President, you came to office pledging to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. How realistic do you think those hopes are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?"

Obama answered, reasonably, that "We don't yet know what the Israeli government is going to look like, and we don't yet know what the future shape of Palestinian leadership is going to be comprised of." But he would keep trying to bring the sides closer, he said.

Israel's adversaries want the focus to be on the "occupation" and, now, the new government's supposed rejection of a two-state solution.

It would have been far better to have Livni in the government telling the world about everything she and Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians, that they rejected. But Barak's joining is the next best thing.

Now, maybe, some of the spotlight will shift to where it belongs - on Palestinian intransigence.

EGYPT & ISRAEL

30 years at peace


There was something melancholy about our story this week that Egyptian Ambassador to Israel Yasser Reda would be marking the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between our countries by not boycotting a Jerusalem conference and reception today. This wasn't the way Israelis imagined peace would look three decades after president Anwar Sadat's historic journey to Jerusalem.\

Egypt's Foreign Ministry marked the lead-up to the anniversary with a
strong condemnation of Israel's refusal to allow the Palestinian Authority to conduct a "cultural festival" within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries - including a march on the Temple Mount, complete with PLO flags. The PA knows that Israeli law prohibits it from operating in Jerusalem, which is precisely why it organized the illegal demonstration - to hammer home its claims of sovereignty.

Regrettably Egypt used this PA provocation to denounce Israel's "continuous efforts to judaize Jerusalem," warning that Israel won't be able to "suppress" Palestinian demands for a capital in east Jerusalem. Curiously, Cairo did not reference Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's reported plan to hand over the Arab neighborhoods of the city to a future "Palestine," nor PA President Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of the offer as insufficient.

Israel's Foreign Ministry, in contrast, marked the anniversary by issuing a warm statement recalling Sadat's visit and his Knesset address. It highlighted the various spheres of Egyptian-Israeli cooperation and noted that bilateral trade climbed to $271 million in 2008.

CLEARLY, Israelis and Egyptians think differently about how the relationship should be anchored. Somewhat naively, perhaps, Israelis would have it grounded in how the two states relate to each other, while Egyptians - starting with Sadat - have made it abundantly clear that the depth and scope of ties are contingent on Israel's standing in the Arab world, and particularly on its relationship with the Palestinians.

And yet, paradoxically, Egypt has been ambivalent about Israel integrating too well into the region, according to Dr. Ehud Eilam of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Other observers note that Egypt has more often undermined than fostered Israel's quest for improved relations with the Palestinians, Jordanians and Gulf Arabs. Egyptian diplomats have also worked to isolate Israel in Europe.

The good news, says Eilam, is that the relationship has survived a series of crises - from Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights and the preemptive attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor, through several Lebanon conflicts, two intifadas and the latest Gaza fighting.

"The main achievement of the treaty," he says, "is the survival of the treaty itself - and that our rivalry does not play out on the battlefield."

Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir put it this way in his memoirs: "That which moved Sadat, which fired him and induced him to risk not only his life but also Egypt's standing in the Arab world, that promise of 'no more war,' the words he repeated so often in the brief remainder of his life - that has survived; and so his efforts were not in vain, not for Israel and certainly not for Egypt."

Amen.

WE HESITATE to speculate on where the Egypt-Israel relationship will be 30 years from now. Israelis will watch how President Hosni Mubarak prepares for a smooth transition in 2011, when he will presumably retire. Egypt's domestic stability is one of Israel's most important strategic concerns. Much also depends on institution-building and political development in Egypt and among the Palestinian Arabs.

Unfortunately, the Mubarak regime has been delinquent in socializing either the elites or masses to the idea that peace with Israel is anything more than a bitter necessity. Consequently, Egypt's political culture vilifies Israel. A sympathetic telling of our narrative (why we fought in Gaza, for instance) in the Egyptian media is practically unheard of. No wonder, then, that 92 percent of Egyptians say Israel is their enemy.

The cold peace calibrated by Mubarak has been tolerable, if disappointing. But the notion that a successor regime which "knew not Sadat" might one day field Egypt's colossal and lavishly modernized military against the Jewish state cannot be ruled out.

For an enduring peace, it is imperative, therefore, that Mubarak use the remaining years of his tenure to reconceptualize and rebrand Egypt's attitude toward Israel. A first state visit would be a good starting point.

Obama & Iran

Tuesday - Children of Adam


Does the name Muhammad Qalibaf ring a bell? He is the mayor of Teheran and may be tapped by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president.

Qalibaf's selection could signal that the ayatollah wants a change of tone in his country's foreign relations. If that happens, or if by some fluke Mehdi Karroubi or Mir Hosein Mousavi - both former high-ranking officials - wind up capturing the presidency following first-round elections scheduled for June 12, we will be witnessing Khamenei's considered response to President Barack Obama's March 20 overture for improved relations.

On the occasion of the Persian New Year, Obama told the people of Iran and its leaders: "The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right - but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms…."

The president proffered "a future with renewed exchanges among our people, and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It's a future where the old divisions are overcome…."

Before wishing Iranians Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak he said, "There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: 'The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.'"

Khamenei's instant retort before the multitudes in Mashad: "You change [and] our behavior will change. They say, 'We have extended a hand toward Iran.' What kind of hand is this? If the extended hand is covered with a velvet glove but underneath it the hand is made of cast-iron, this does not have a good meaning at all.

"They are talking of extending a hand to Iran on the occasion of the New Year... At the same time, they are accusing Iran of terrorism and manufacturing nuclear weapons. We ask: Have you lifted the unjust sanctions against the Iranian people and returned [Iranian] assets you hold? Have you ended your absolute support for the Zionist regime?"

Khamenei concluded on a conciliatory note: "We have no experience of this new president... We will wait and see. If you change your attitude, we will change, too. If you do not change, then our nation will build on its experience of the past 30 years."

The most likely "change," in a world in which Obama has emerged as a formidable rhetorical adversary, would be to replace the coarse, populist Ahmadinejad with the more personable Qalibaf.

IF THAT happens, Westerners of the "Walter Duranty School of International Relations," those who promote the notion that Iran's regime is essentially pragmatic and that it is "Israeli bellicosity" which needs reining in, will appear ever more convincing. Duranty was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who sought to convince Americans during the 1930s that Stalin's Soviet Union was essentially pragmatic and downplayed the regime's genocidal crimes.

Today's Durantyites argue that Obama's New Year speech contained warmed-over Bush administration accusations about Iran supporting terrorism and secretly working on nuclear weapons. They insist that Iran is no rogue state; that it treats its Jews with kid gloves; that its support for Hizbullah and Hamas is legitimate because, if presented with incentives, these "resistance groups" will quickly go mainstream; and that, finally, all the excited talk about the Iranian nuclear weapons is groundless.

But even Western "realists" who reject Durantyite appeasement talk paternalistically about coaxing Iran into behaving more responsibly. They intuit that Iran's "true interest" lies in improved relations with the civilized world. It's only the mullahs' "well-grounded mistrust" of the West makes them exceedingly cautious.

WERE THE stakes not so high, America's astute president, having inherited a calamitous economy, two wars and much else, could be forgiven for seeking to avoid confrontation with Iran - even if he rejects the apologists' line outright and thinks the realists are, well, unrealistic.

In his heart of hearts, Obama surely knows that Khamenei's "price" for good relations is America's total capitulation to Persian imperial designs.

To point this out is not to beat the drums of war, but to appeal for American clear-sightedness.