Middle East needs bold new ideas for tackling instability
Concern is growing once again that Daesh may be staging a comeback, this time not as a self-proclaimed Caliphate but in the form of a terrorist group. It was a sign of over-optimism anyway to believe that an army of nihilists could be rooted out from Iraq and Syria by the combined firepower of the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve and its Russian, Iranian and Syrian variants, without a thorough churning of the soil in which it germinated.
To add to the concerns, a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that the countries where Daesh and Al Qaeda are active — Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia — are in the bottom 10 per cent for “government effectiveness”, as ranked by the World Bank. In theory, improving “government effectiveness” alone in areas blighted by violent extremism should solve the problem. In practice, though, it’s complicated.
In the Middle East at least, insurgencies and terrorist groups are likely to prove resilient going forward, even where governing institutions could somehow be strengthened or made effective. The explanation is not rocket science: Entanglements of Iran, Turkey and Russia in the political and military affairs of fragile or failing multi-sectarian states are sure to drive a steady stream of recruits towards armed groups for at least a generation.
What makes the Middle East already a breeding ground for rebels is a toxic mix of sectarian and ethnic chauvinism, political dysfunction, social backwardness, corruption, economic stagnation and foreign meddling. Use of brute military force has sometimes been successful in keeping the symptoms in check, but it has yet to prove its efficacy as a tool for tackling the root causes of popular discontent and political unrest.
The US administration’s bid to pressure the Iranian deep state to withdraw its auxiliaries from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen gets to the crux of the matter regarding the proliferation of proxy wars. But until the exercise in coercive diplomacy shows results, beginning with a curtailment in Iran’s projection of power from the Golan to Yemen, there will be little to no progress in assuaging the sense of injustice and victimhood that groups such as Al Qaeda, Daesh and Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) feed off.
Then there is the presence of Russian troops on Syrian soil, propping up an unpopular regime in a way that must be an extreme provocation for the Middle East’s Sunni population. With its indiscriminate military assaults on rebels and civilians in successive battles and systematic shielding of President Bashar Al Assad from war crimes allegations, the Putin government may have helped widen the appeal of HTS and Daesh among Syrians who have lost relatives, friends and all their possessions in the civil war.
Vying closely with Tehran and Moscow to keep the Middle East in a state of perpetual tension and turmoil is Ankara. Although it continues to fancy itself as a Nato ally hosting thousands of American troops and US tactical nuclear weapons, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to quote a former State Department official, is an “ally in name only”. In Syria, the Turkish government has opted to ally itself with dodgy proxy fighters, and in both Syria and Iraq, it has sought to exploit the insecurities of local Turkmen communities.
From despatching his military to the predominantly Kurdish canton of Afrin in Syria and attacking suspected PKK bases along Turkey’s border with Iraq’s Kurdistan Region to intensifying threats to Syrian Kurdish groups battling Daesh in northern Syria, Erdogan’s approach has been regrettably true to form. It may be unfair to hold all Turks guilty by association, but there is little doubt that their leader’s legacy of bitterness is now strong enough to outlast the secular republic.
That being said, it would be disingenuous to claim that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the chaotic regime change in Baghdad played no role in producing the conditions that stoked sectarian extremism and, ultimately, redounded to the benefit of Iran, Turkey and Russia.
The mistakes of the occupation authority were compounded by the foreign-policy contradictions and domestic exigencies that prompted then US
Ankara vies closely with Tehran and Moscow to keep the Middle East in a state of perpetual tension and turmoil
president Barack Obama to accelerate Washington’s disengagement from Iraq, creating a power vacuum with devastating, if unintended, consequences for the neighbourhood.
For a long time, shockwaves from the strife in Iraq and Syria had been drowning out the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate on the Middle East’s political discourse. But since March 30, the Gaza Strip has been the scene of nonstop confrontations between Palestinians and the Israeli army, having reached the point of no return after a long-drawn-out blockade. The lopsided Israel-Palestine conflict’s potential for inflaming public feelings remains undiminished despite the passage of time.
Under the circumstances, there seems to be no easy escape for denizens of large expanses of the Middle East from a vicious circle of injustice and retaliation. But with doors slamming shut for refugees and migrants, the onus is on Western powers to show they have not given up on fragile, war-torn states. They could start with effective brainstorming to spark new ideas about tackling the challenge of chronic instability. If the spectre of a revival of the Caliphate does not concentrate minds, then surely nothing else will.