Here are five initial comments on Wikileak's latest coup — the leak of some 90,000 US military files on the war in Afghanistan:

1. Going on the initial analysis of the information by the three newspapers given the material by Wikileaks (The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel), much of it seems pretty unremarkable.  Mostly, the files seem to confirm what we already knew, or strongly suspected: the success of the Taliban improvised explosive device strategy, the fact that the coalition was killing lots of civilians by an over-reliance on airpower, the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles, corruption in the Afghan government, Pakistan’s double-dealing in Afghanistan etc — all of this and more has been variously reported in the past.
2. A notable exception is the information on man portable missile (MANPADS) attacks on coalition aircraft.  This is evocative because it was the Afghan Mujahideen's use of such weapons in the 1980s that helped cripple the Soviet war effort in Afghanistan.  This is potentially very disturbing and certainly raises questions about where the weapons are coming from, but is it strategically significant?  Only if insurgent groups have lots of these missiles and if they did that would be pretty obvious already (i.e. lots of downed helicopters).
3. The most politically sensitive issue raised by the leak is also one of the least surprising.  Most observers of the war in Afghanistan will not be shocked to learn that Islamabad, or elements within the Pakistan military and/or intelligence services, have their own agenda in Afghanistan that is at odds with that of ISAF.   The problem is what do you do about it?  Cut off aid completely, invade Pakistan, wag your finger at Islamabad forcefully?  Even assuming everything in these files is correct, the reality is that the United States and its allies would still be seeking to engage Pakistan on the basis that a fitfully cooperative Pakistan is better than a totally non-cooperative one.  When it comes to Pakistan there are no good policy options, only less-worse ones.
4. We have to be careful using the information in these reports in debates about what is happening in Afghanistan today. The information runs to about December of last year and may well have informed decisions taken by the Obama Administration to change strategy and increase resources in Afghanistan.  Some things will have changed (more troops, changes in tactics and less use of airpower and a consequent decrease in civilian casualties), some things won't have changed (corruption in the Afghan government, use of unmanned aerial vehicles), and some things may have partly changed (some improvement in Pakistan's cooperation).
5. What these leaked files may do, however, is reinforce negative public perceptions of the war.  In that sense, while they are less significant in terms of what they tell us about current coalition strategy in Afghanistan, they could have a big impact on how much time that strategy has left to demonstrate some successes.

Photo by Flickr user BWJones, used under a Creative Commons licence. 

No doubt the Gaza flotilla fracas will get a good chewing over in the weeks and months ahead. Here are five initial observations:

1. The aim of the flotilla was to draw attention to Israel's long-running blockade of the Gaza Strip. In this regard, the goal of the organisers was to provoke an Israeli response rather than to avoid one, hoping at the very least that Israel would block the flotilla from arriving in Gaza. But while the precise order of events remains unclear, footage taken on board the flotilla suggests that at least one element on board one of the vessels was prepared to go beyond this and violently obstruct any Israeli effort to board their vessel.
2. Israel's inability to anticipate this possibility is a significant intelligence failure. The inability of what are supposed to be highly trained military commandos to manage such a situation represents a major military failure. But there is also a political failure in the sense that the current Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, is hardly a novice when it comes to military matters, having been both the IDF Chief of Staff and head of Israel's elite special forces unit, the Sayaret Matkal.
3. Coming weeks will see a variety of inquiries, claims and counterclaims. But even if an independent inquiry were to eventually fully confirm Israel's version of events, the reality is that Israel will have to deal with the fall-out here and now, chiefly the return of Gaza to the top of the Middle East agenda. Not just Israel, but also the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the US and Egypt were all were content for Gaza to be sidelined, hoping that the blockade would steadily erode Hamas' authority. But this has always been a stalemate in search of a policy. The blockade was never going to be a sustainable in the long term, not least because the humanitarian situation in Gaza has been steadily getting worse, as this recent UN report makes clear.
4. Jerusalem, Ramallah, Washington and Cairo now have a major policy headache. None of them want to do anything to recognise or reinforce Hamas' control in Gaza. Israel is already dealing with a rocket threat from Hizballah on its northern border and justifiably fears that Hamas control in Gaza is replicating this threat on its southern border. As a short-term measure to relieve what will be major international pressure over this issue, Israel will probably further increase the flow of humanitarian goods into Gaza, but this will survive only until the next Hamas rocket attack or military incident which again forces renewed restrictions.
5. The fall-out will not be limited to Gaza: US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks are now in peril; Israel's once strong and pragmatic relationship with Turkey (from where some of the flotilla came) is now at breaking point; and as one Israeli observer has already noted, if reports are true that a leader of Israel's Islamic movement, Raed Salah, was among the injured, this may result in protests and unrest among Israeli-Arab communities in the country's north.

In an effort to contribute to The Interpreter's debate on Afghanistan, I want to draw attention to this article by Steve Coll. It does the best job I have seen of setting out the arguments in favour of continued US effort in Afghanistan, while recognising the difficulties and risks involved. Indeed, I would argue it is one of the best things written in the current debate, full stop. It also provides good answers to those who argue that US interests in Afghanistan and the broader region are limited.

Coll, who heads the New America Foundation, has long experience in South Asia as a foreign correspondent and is the author of Ghost Wars, the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of al Qaeda's rise in Afghanistan (which I would also heartily recommend).

Photo by Flickr user RugNug, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lydia Khalil, a non-resident fellow in the West Asia program and international affairs fellow in residence at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting take on the unrest in Iran in the Christian Science Monitor. 

Lydia makes an important point, namely that we should not view the current unrest as isolated from what has been happening in Iran since the revolution. Nor indeed should we view what has happened as the end of any prospect of reform or even of more dramatic change, even if the reformers have probably lost this round. 

As I said in my post a couple of days ago, even the more conservative members of the regime will be uncomfortable with the growing power of the Revolutionary Guard. More or less since the revolution, a key job of the Supreme Leader has been to balance the various ideological currents and interest groups within the regime. Khamenei now seems to have decided that this doesn’t matter, and the balance may now have shifted more decisively in a more hardline direction. The big question is whether, in doing so, Khamenei has now sown the seeds of the regime’s own unravelling.

Photo by Flickr user yish, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sixteen days of turmoil after Iran’s presidential election, senior regime figure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has finally spoken publicly about the poll and its aftermath. His long silence gave credence to rumours that he was working behind the scenes in opposition to regime hardliners, including Supreme Leader Khamenei. But the fact that he has now, grudgingly, endorsed regime measures for resolving disputes over the election suggests that internal regime dissent has been quashed – for now.

On the streets, too, the security forces seem to be on top of protests, though according to this account they are still occurring sporadically. 

So where does this leave Iran?

First, it leaves Iran with a regime that is much more intertwined with the Revolutionary Guard than it once was. The election result and its aftermath reflect the consummation of a process over recent years where members of the guards have been, largely through Ahmadinejad’s patronage, seeded strategically throughout different levels of government and society. This process has also seen the Guards become a major player in Iran’s economy.

Second, it leaves Iran with a regime that will also need the Guards, and its paramilitary adjunct, the Basij, a lot more. The protests were never just a middle class, educated elite, ‘North Tehran’ phenomenon, but the fact that even the twittering classes were prepared to risk life and limb (and their relatively comfortable economic status) means that the state will have to be on greater guard. Iran will look a lot more like North Korea than it once did.

Supreme Leader Khamenei’s no-compromise address at Friday prayers in Tehran seems to have had some effect. By most accounts, Saturday’s demonstrations were smaller (though by how much we don’t know) and the response by the security forces was fiercer.

We have still not heard publicly from former president and key regime figure Rafsanjani since the election. As Gary Sick has argued, it was highly significant that Rafsanjani was nowhere to be seen as the Supreme Leader read the riot act to both the demonstrators and regime dissenters on Friday.

It was noteworthy, however, that the man some have dubbed the accidental revolutionary, Mir Hussein Musavi, still refuses to back down. In a statement released following Khamenei’s Friday address, he upped the ante, saying that the stolen election reflected an even deeper malaise within the regime.

Musavi clearly feels a responsibility to the demonstrators and to the lives already lost. But directly or indirectly he is also channelling Rafsanjani, who backed him strongly in the election. 

In his Friday address, Khamenei extended a rather thorn-covered olive branch to Rafsanjani, his erstwhile ally and now rival, effectively telling him there was still time to fall back into line. Musavi’s response may well have been Rafsanjani’s initial retort. If Rafsanjani is going to be able to mobilise regime elements against Khamenei he needs to demonstrate that the Supreme Leader, or at least his actions, have put the whole regime at risk. In this regard, Musavi not caving in is as critical as what happens on the street in coming days.

Still, Rafsanjani is nothing if not mercurial. If he comes out and publicly backs the Supreme Leader – or if he is arrested — then any challenge from within the regime will be over. This, in turn, would probably demoralise the demonstrators, at least in the short term, and would reduce the other major threat to the regime – the risk that the security forces might split.

Photo by Flickr user siavush, used under a Creative Commons license.

So far, the Obama Administration has reacted cautiously to the Iranian election result. In this statement, Obama shows the imperatives he is trying to balance: not intervening too directly in what is happening, which would allow regime hardliners to condemn protestors and dissenters as stooges of the West; not ruling out ‘hard headed’ negotiations with the Iranian leadership; but also condemning violence against the protestors and signaling to them ‘that the world is watching’. 

For the US, low key is probably the only key at the moment. In part, because it is still unclear how things will play out.

Overnight, Supreme Leader Khamenei announced an investigation into charges of election fraud (but also publicly reaffirmed the result). The Guardian Council said it had received two official complaints from defeated candidates (Musavi and Rezai) which it would review, announcing its decision in ten days. Through these measures the Supreme Leader may be hoping to take the heat out of public protests and bring regime dissenters, including Musavi, back into line.

In my previous post I presented circumstantial evidence suggesting that something much more irregular than usual occurred in Iran’s weekend presidential election. We may never know for sure what happened, though what transpires over coming days and weeks, especially what occurs to key figures like former Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani as well as the candidates from this election, will give greater or lesser credence to the theory of a coup.

Since the revolution, the regime has relied on imperfect, unfair but reasonably competitive elections to demonstrate its popular legitimacy. If hardliners have carried out a coup, then someone has decided they no longer need legitimacy and can rely on coercion. They may well be right, at least in the short term.

As has been widely reported, there have been outbreaks of mass protest in Tehran, with a few reports of demonstration elsewhere as well. Some of these protests seem quite large, as shown in this YouTube footage, though on its own this is probably not going to trouble the regime security forces much. 

More interesting is what happens inside the regime. To understand this we need to understand who has undertaken the coup (again, if that is what has occurred). To my mind there are two possibilities, with some variations between them:

My colleague Rodger Shanahan argues that the election result shows that observers outside Iran, and Iranians who parse the country for the outside world (few of whom would have been Ahmadinejad voters), underestimated Ahmadinejad’s support and were engaged in wishful thinking.

He points to what is often called the 'north Tehran syndrome', where Western observers extrapolate their view of the country as a whole from interviews with middle class, English-speaking inhabitants of the capital’s up-scale neighbourhoods. This was true in the 2005 election, but as this blog post from Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation makes clear, at least one Western journalist did leave north Tehran this time around, and found far from uniform support for the incumbent.

Flynt Leverett argues that the margin of victory, while surprising, makes it unlikely that the usual forms of vote tampering that often take place in Iranian elections, and which might swing at best a few million votes, had been used to rig the election result. 

True. But it does not rule out that hardliners in the regime did not so much rig the election result as ignore it altogether, announcing their own results, which were then confirmed (rather more speedily than usual) by Supreme Leader Khamenei. Gary Sick and Juan Cole have already posted circumstantial evidence for this thesis, arguing that there has been, in effect, an internal coup. Three streams of evidence are to my mind compelling in favour of this thesis:

As we enter the final week of Iran’s presidential election campaign, I want to draw your attention to a new Lowy Institute Analysis, Between defiance and détente: Iran’s 2009 presidential election and its impact on foreign policy. In the paper, Iranian researcher Mahmoud Alinejad looks ahead to the election on 12 June, assesses the four candidates’ prospects and analyses the potential impact of the election on Iran’s foreign relations.

The election is going to be really interesting, particularly since the chances of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad losing seem to be growing.

Predicting Iranian elections is notoriously difficult. Iranian opinion polls are unreliable and most elections involve some degree of voter manipulation. Both Ahmadinejad and his predecessor, former President Mohammed Khatami, were surprise victors in their first elections.

Of course, incumbency provides Ahmadinejad with considerable advantages. He has a solid base of support among Iran’s rural and urban lower classes and perhaps most importantly, he has the backing of the Revolutionary Guards, its paramilitary adjunct the Basij and, in all likelihood, Supreme Leader Khamenei.

But Ahmadinejad has faced strong and growing criticism, not least from within his own conservative camp in the regime, over his profligate economic policies at home and unnecessarily provocative approach to foreign relations. That criticism has even seen more pragmatic conservatives field their own candidate, the former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai.

Rezai is not expected to win. But the fact that he is even running is highly significant and his candidacy might well force the election to a second round, which would count against Ahmadinejad.

So far the most incisive analysis of Obama’s Cairo address to the Muslim world was this one from Pakistan, reported in The Guardian:

"I don't know much," said Muhammad Irshad, a young cobbler. "But at least he's better than Bush."

The second best analysis was contained in the same story, but only because it rhymed:

"Osama, Obama – what's the difference?" he said, reaching for his cigarettes. "It's all a big drama."

Young Muhammad wins, however, because he recognises an important point. Obama’s speech is undoubtedly winning both a lot more kudos and lot more condemnation than it deserves simply because Obama is not Bush. 

That said, some things stood out for me:

• Addressing the Palestinians, Obama said, ‘Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed’. I have never heard an American President use the term that the Palestinians use for describing violence against Israel – ‘resistance’. In the same breath, he endorsed the Palestinian narrative, while condemning its violent manifestations, on both moral and practical grounds.
• The line ‘The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlements’ wedges Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu between those of his coalition partners that have strong ties to the settlement movement and the broader Israeli public who will be uncomfortable with tensions in Israel’s key strategic relationship. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Obama is heading for Buchenwald (as he noted in his speech), rather than Jerusalem after he leaves Egypt.
• On democracy, it is still not clear that Obama isn’t going to throw the democracy promotion baby out with the Bush policy bathwater. His line that America would ‘welcome all elected, peaceful governments’, combined with a warning that ‘there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power’, was spookily reminiscent of this famous speech, which presaged yet another decade of American do-nothing on democracy in the Middle East.
• As Dan Levy observes, Obama declined to follow Bush’s lead and lump all 31 flavours of Islamist movement into one big extremist sundae. The Muslim Brotherhood (some of whose members of parliament were invited to the speech) seemed cautiously grateful.

Finally, as everyone is already saying, people are now looking for the policy that will flow from the polished rhetoric. It really is anyone’s guess how this is playing in different parts of the Muslim world or how long any honeymoon might last. It is true that Obama has raised expectation that would be dangerous to disappoint, but you figure he understands that. 

Moreover, I would not underestimate how positive an impact it has had or how long that impact might continue to be felt. I remember watching the film Malcolm X at the Cairo film festival and the crowd breaking into spontaneous and rowdy applause when, in one part of the movie, Denzel Washington recited a verse of the Quran. People like it when you say nice things about them or show some respect. Go figure.

This week’s meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama has generated more than usual interest and commentary. The meeting is expected to be difficult because Bibi and Barack are seen to be ideologically incompatible, with the two being lined up to clash, in particular, on Israeli-Palestinian issues and on Iran.

I think the first assumption is correct, but not because of the second assumption. Israeli-US relations over coming months will be more difficult, but not because Bibi is a Likudnik and Barack is a Democrat. The difficulty lies in the subtle but significant divergence in the way that Israel – more or less across the political spectrum – and the US – more or less across the political spectrum – view the Iranian challenge and more importantly, what to do about it.

Israel sees Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. This perception is not the sudden product of Bibi’s election as Prime Minister and the political ascendancy of the Israeli right; the Iranian threat preoccupied the previous centrist Olmert/Livni government as well. Indeed, if this story is true, Olmert sought US agreement to an Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities late last year and the US said 'no'. More...

Graeme Dobell’s post on last week’s ANU Afghanistan conference prompts me to make a small, but I think important, point. Many journalists and commentators are calling the increase in US troops in Afghanistan a 'surge', primarily because of the superficial similarities between it and the US troop surge that took place in Iraq in 2007.

In Iraq, the US temporarily bolstered troop numbers to short-circuit escalating sectarian violence and buy time for the political process to work. By that definition, what the US is now doing in Afghanistan is not a surge. As the Commander, US Forces Afghanistan and NATO's International Security Assistance Force, Gen. David McKiernan said in a press briefing on 18 February:

Q. General, can I just ask a follow-up? How long are these additional troops going to be needed? Or how much do -- will that -- how long will that elevated force level be required? You've avoided using the term "surge" before because you've talked about the long-term nature of this. Should we presume that the extra forces announced yesterday will have to be replaced in time?

GEN. MCKIERNAN: I think -- and I would reinforce what I said -- that this is not a temporary force uplift, that it's going to need to be sustained for some period of time. I can't give you an exact number of -- the year that it would be. But I've said I'm trying to look out for the next three to four or five years.

Q (So it'd?) be several years of that kind of force level.

GEN. MCKIERNAN: It could be as much as that.

This is not just semantics. As the Obama Administration is itself making clear, it sees this as a long-term commitment, something which policymakers here are presumably factoring into their decision-making about any increase in Australia’s commitment.

Unlike the previous four Middle East/West Asia crises dealt with in this series, the fifth is a wild card. As I noted at the outset of this series, the Obama Administration will have to respond to ripening crises on the Arab-Israeli, Iraqi, Afghanistan/Pakistani and Iranian fronts pretty much all at the same time. 

But it might also be forced to deal with an unexpected event over the next year-and-a-half, and the one I would point to is a major internal crisis or unrest in any one of a number of states in West Asia – including some key allied ones. 

Few observers of the region get points for predicting domestic crises. Most states seem perennially on the verge of a nervous breakdown — afflicted by variations of aged rulers, stagnating bureacracies, unproductive or underproductive economies, poor education systems and endemic corruption — though most seem creak along without ever quite collapsing. More...

Parts one (Arab-Israel conflict), two (Iraq) and three (Afghanistan-Pakistan) in this series. 

The fourth crisis confronting the Obama Administration in ‘West Asia’ rivals the third (Afghanistan/Pakistan) in difficulty, but is of greater long-term significance – Iran. Since Iran’s revolution in 1979, US-Iran relations have been marked by unremitting mutual suspicion punctuated by occasional bouts of open hostility or abortive rapprochement. 

From Washington’s perspective, Iran has been central to a revisionist and rejectionist axis in the Middle East that threatens US interests and allies and has repeatedly challenged US policies, including through violence and terrorism. For Tehran, the US is a direct threat to the survival of the regime and a check on Iranian efforts to find what it sees as its rightful place as a major regional and even global player.

Iran’s efforts to master the nuclear fuel cycle, equipping it with the means to build a nuclear weapon, has the potential to bring this conflictual relationship to a destructive head. Of course, the Iranian nuclear effort is not new. But as this report underlines, the nuclear program is approaching a point where few technical and industrial hurdles now lie between Iran and a nuclear weapon.

Against this background, and with sanctions seen as, at best, a slow-working option, the Obama Administration has argued that it will try to engage Iran directly. The ground for such an approach was prepared by the Bush Administration when it turned away from a military option and softened its opposition to engaging Iran in mid-2006. (It remains moot whether the Bush Administration ever seriously considered a military option, though if this report is correct, it may have vetoed an Israeli strike.)

Already both Washington and Tehran have softened their rhetoric toward each other. Should the reformist former President Mohammed Khatami win this year’s presidential election, the atmosphere will improve still further, though the actual policy settings on the nuclear and other issues will remain firmly in the hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei. More...

The third in the series of challenges confronting the Obama Administration in ‘West Asia’  (here are the first and second) is perhaps the greatest: Afghanistan-Pakistan.

In the last year, the realisation has set in that the US and its partners are losing in Afghanistan by most measures. Losing has been the result of a combination of failures since the US first overthrew the Taliban in 2001 — though not all the failures have been the coalition's. For a succinct explanation of what has gone wrong, read this excellent piece by Thomas Barfield.

Against this background, first the Bush and now Obama Administrations have been reorienting America’s approach. The problem for the US and its coalition partners is that it has taken them seven years to fail in Afghanistan, but they have much less time – perhaps no more than 18 months — to demonstrate that things are being turned around.  

The Obama Administration is now in the midst of a strategic review that will likely see as many as 20-30,000 additional US troops sent to Afghanistan (indeed it may even despatch them before the review is complete). This will improve – though to what extent, is not clear – the ability of coalition forces to actually hold the territory they almost always win in battles with insurgents, but then give away as troops return to their bases. 

What is even less clear is how the Administration will address the civil component of the civil-military equation in Afghanistan — specifically, delivering basic but rapid improvements in infrastructure, economic opportunities, basic welfare services, and rule of law. Security and governance are central to ensuring that Afghans are not forced into the embrace of the Taliban out of solemn resignation at the continuing failures of both their own central government (which faces but may not hold elections this year) and its Western allies. More...

As I found when I was posted there, Israel is heaven for political junkies. I was fortunate enough to watch two elections, but it is usually only after the election, when the horse-trading to form a coalition begins, that things get really interesting.

Despite Kadima narrowly collecting the most seats in parliament, Benjamin Netanyahu has the best chance to form a government, given the overall success of right-wing parties. Once Israel’s President asks someone to form a government (probably in a week), they will have 42 days to do the job. Even if it is Netanyahu, as is most likely, he will need a lot of that time to complete the task.

His likely right-wing coalition partners agree on security and foreign policy issues, but they are diametrically opposed on some key domestic issues. (In the election campaign, the spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas party said a vote for Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Shas’s prospective coalition partner, Yisrael Beitenu, ‘gives strength to Satan’). In fact, on secular-religious issues, Yisrael Beitenu, with its large Russian émigré constituency mostly hostile to the ultra-orthodox, are a lot closer to Kadima. For much of the election campaign, Kadima head Tzipi Livni was flirting, politically, with Lieberman, and they have already met to discuss coalition options.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu will likely be able to keep Livni and Lieberman apart, and reconcile the ultra-religious and ultra-secular parts of a potential right wing coalition. The trouble is that he would actually prefer a broader, more centrist coalition for a range of reasons, not least to make his relations with the new Obama Administration a bit smoother. Ultimately, most Israeli Prime Ministers prefer to have the political room to manoeuvre that comes with having lots of coalition partners to play off against each other. More...

Following on from my earlier post, the second of the Middle East’s five crises/issues confronting a new US Administration is Iraq. A year ago it would have been the top of any US Administration’s agenda. But such has been the positive — if still uncertain — improvement on the ground that in some respects it seems the least difficult of the challenges the new President faces in the Middle East. Or so it might seem. 

Levels of violence are down and according to recent reports Iraq’s provincial elections have gone off reasonably well, even if turnout (51 per cent) was a bit lower than might have been hoped.

Importantly, there seems to have been a turn against parties with an Islamist and, more significantly, sectarian agenda, towards those parties with a more nationalist or centralising goals, specifically the Da’wa party of current Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, though the full import of the final results will not be known for some weeks.

Of course everything is relative More...

Let me respectfully disagree with my two colleagues Rodger and Hugh on Israeli deterrence after Gaza — kind of.

Like Hugh, I do not think Rodger’s characterisation of Hamas and Hizbullah as non-state actors is exactly accurate. For all intents and purposes both control territory and have a significant voice in the running of the country/territory in which they live and both have a popular constituency they must consider (to some degree at least) in making decisions.

In this respect their decisions are decidedly rational and against that background Israel in Lebanon in 2006 and more recently in Gaza achieved a (different) degree of deterrence against both.

The irony is More...

The following is the first in a series of posts that will look at the five crises of the broader Middle East (or West Asia, as we call it here at the Lowy Institute): the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan and, as a wild card, the potential for a major domestic crisis in any one of a number of regional countries.

Many of these crises/issues are of long standing. What is significant, however, is that at least four and possibly five will reach a ripeness and criticality in the next 12-18 months. Any one would, on its own, be enough to tax the foreign policy energy of a US administration. But the Obama Administration will probably have to deal with most, if not all of them, simultaneously, leaving it with much less capacity to deal with other foreign policy issues, at least in the first half of its term.

The Arab-Israeli conflict

The recent Gaza war has, in typical Middle Eastern fashion, seen both combatants claim victory. Israel achieved both a measure of deterrence — insofar as Hamas misjudged the severity of Israel’s response to its rocket firing last year — and extracted a stronger commitment from Egypt and other countries to stop arms smuggling into Gaza.

Hamas, meanwhile, survived a devastating air and ground assault that strengthened its popular support, further diminished the standing of its main political rival, Fatah, and brought international attention to Gaza’s plight.

The reality is that both sides achieved short-term, tactical gains at the expense of any change in their strategic circumstances. More...

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked, a layman’s primer on the science behind ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon', which has profound implications for our understanding of everything from the internet and biology to sociology, economics and, I would argue, international politics.

Also, Olivier Roy's The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, a succinct and incisive critique of the ‘War on Terror’, with a twist. It damns both the neo-cons and the conventional left-wing riposte to their ideas in one deft movement.

Overnight, the Iraqi parliament officially ended, for all intents and purposes, America’s war in Iraq (though not necessarily Iraq’s war in Iraq) when it ratified Iraq’s security agreement with the US (full and final text here). 

It doesn’t mean the fighting will end, or that US troops will leave tomorrow, and apparently there is still some question about how the agreement is being interpreted by the two sides. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of US combat troops is now largely a technical matter rather than a political one. And all this has happened without much fanfare on the American side – certainly no carrier landings by erstwhile national guard pilots or ‘mission accomplished’ bunting (there is a separate question about the future of US bases in Iraq but I will leave that for someone else to muse over).

There will be a referendum on the agreement in the middle of next year. If the agreement is rejected it would bring forward the deadline for withdrawal by 18 months (under the provision that the Iraqi Government would need to give the US a year’s notice of any request to leave). But by that stage I am not sure it would matter. 

According to the agreement, US forces are required to leave Iraq by 31 December 2011. More significantly, however, US combat forces are required to withdraw from all Iraqi ‘cities, villages and localities’ by 30 June 2009, a bit over six months from now. I am no military expert but, presumably, a significant number of the troops hitherto needed to conduct patrols and so on will now no longer be required and can be gradually withdrawn, leaving a smaller (but still significant) core force to conduct training, provide rapid reaction and hunt remnants of al Qaeda, among other things.

It is true there are caveats to the agreement, and some may argue that events could still conspire keep the US in Iraq for longer. But I don’t think so. America’s adversaries in Iraq either have no interest in prolonging the US presence by ramping up the conflict again (eg. Iran, Syria, Muqtadr al-Sadr) or lack the means to do so (al Qaeda). 

Against this background, Obama’s campaign promise of a 16-month withdrawal of combat forces, give or take a few months, is looking less like wishful thinking and more like the emerging consensus. It is also built upon a significant shift in the Bush Administration’s approach to Iraq over the last year and a half, for which it will no doubt receive little credit, beyond perhaps the implicit acknowledgement contained in Obama’s apparent decision to retain Robert Gates as his Secretary of Defence.

Beyond this I can offer no more useful analysis than the words of Jim Morrison in his epic song, ‘The end’: More...

A couple of weeks ago Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, perhaps the world's most influential living Islamic scholar, accused Shi’a Muslims of being a threat to Sunni Muslim societes. The subsequent controversy is still being played out in the Arab media, where Qaradawi’s comments have been debated and condemned, including by some of his long-time friends and supporters.

Qaradawi has fuelled yet another round of ‘Are the Shi’a coming to get us?’ talk in the Sunni Muslim world. Personally, I think the final lines of this Guardian report on the subject, quoting al-Arabiyya commentator Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, sum it up rather nicely: ‘In reality, there is no Shi’a-Sunni problem; there are only differences between governments’. 

But if you want a really interesting and nuanced analysis of Shi’a-Sunni relations in the Gulf, see Non-resident Fellow Rodger Shanahan’s recent Lowy Institute Analysis, Bad Moon Not Rising: The Myth of the Shi’a crescent in the Gulf.

There's an interesting new film about to do the rounds called Son of a Lion. It tells the fictional story of a young Pashtun boy from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas struggling with his father’s expectation that he will go into the family gun repair business. Having seen a preview of the film I can say it is an interesting and humanising account of a part of the world and a people usually in the news for all the wrong reasons. Remarkably, all the actors in the film are locals without previous acting experience. 

Preview screenings of the film are on at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington on Wednesday 6 August at 6.00pm and Reading Cinema in Auburn on the 7th at 7.00pm. Screening details for other Australian cities and towns are listed on the movie's webpage — click on the 'News' tab.

Today, two striking and entirely separate trends are emerging on the Islamist landscape:  on the one hand, growing criticism of al-Qaeda by other Islamists and one-time partisans; and on the other hand, a conservative ascendancy within and among mainstream Islamist movements in the Middle East. 

Taken together these two trends (combined with some other developments) could culminate in a return of jihadism to the Middle East. More...

For months now an intense debate has taken place amongst jihadists over the future strategy and tactics of international jihad. Now that debate has an important Western echo in a heated disagreement between two leading terrorism scholars, Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman. It was sparked by a scathing review of Sageman’s new book by Hoffman in Foreign Affairs. Sageman shoots back (and Hoffman returns fire) in the forthcoming issue. 

The dispute was summarized recently in the New York Times. It boils down to the question of whether al-Qaeda central still matters. Hoffman thinks it does, and that bin Laden and his merry band have been busy re-building their capacity to launch terror attacks against the West. Sageman argues that the threat has shifted to leaderless jihadists – self-organising ‘bunches of guys’ emerging spontaneously, inspired by the al-Qaeda message (or their interpretation of it) but without links to its leadership.

So given the great mass of disputation and polemic that has surrounded the terrorism issue since 9/11, does this particular debate matter? More...

Andrew Bolt’s description of Hugh White as defeatist on Afghanistan is a glib and unhelpful retort to Hugh’s proposition that the coalition’s effort in Afghanistan is likely to fail. Neither ‘avoiding defeatism’ nor ‘staying the course’ are sound bases for policy decisions that put Australian lives and treasure at considerable risk. 

I think Hugh is wrong, though, for other reasons. More...

We wake to the news this morning that one of the world’s leading terrorists, Imad Mughniyah, was killed by a car bomb not far from his house in Damascus. A key figure in the Lebanese Hizballah, he led what was effectively the movement’s covert operations wing.  He was a shadowy figure, rarely photographed and reputedly a keen patron of plastic surgery in an effort to keep his many pursuers at bay. Mughniyah came from pre al-Qaeda terrorist old school and hence, outside of the Middle East, his death might not be considered big news.  But it is actually huge, for a few reasons.

Firstly, he was held responsible for some of Hizballah’s most spectacular and lethal terrorist attacks. He was indicted for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aries that killed 85; he was seen as responsible for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliners in which a US sailor was murdered; he was believed to be behind the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that killed 63; and he may have had a hand in the attacks on US and French Marines and kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s. More...

If anyone is still interested in Iraq they should read Ali Allawi’s The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace; everybody cops a spray, which is as it should be. Also, Waleed Aly’s People Like Us, an incredibly thoughtful dissection of the inanities surrounding public discussion of Muslims in Australia. The only reading I will be doing over the holidays will be the instruction booklets for my children’s Christmas presents.

Annapolis has lived up to lowered expectations of it being little more than a photo op. Of course, it was important who was in the photo. The presence of the Saudi Foreign Minister and Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister was something of a success for American Middle-East diplomacy and harks back to the careful regional coalition-building of President Bush’s father. 

Syria’s presence was particularly important given what many consider to be the real goal of the summit — isolating Iran. It hardly signals a major breech in the long strategic relationship between Damascus and Tehran, but it still would have caused considerable consternation in Tehran. It might even strengthen those in the regime that have become more openly critical of President Ahmedinejad’s unique approach to winning friends and influencing neighbours. 

So what can we expect on the Israeli-Palestinian front? More...