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Faisal al Yafai “A promise is a cloud,” runs the old Arab saying, “fulfillment is rain.” The clouds of promise that surrounded the U.S. president Barack Obama’s far-reaching overture to the Muslim world in Cairo last June have so far conspicuously failed to fall as rain.
Indeed, in a week which marks once year since he was elected to office amid widespread triumph and excitement, Obama’s Cairene promises have never seemed so unobtainable.
" This week, the United Nations withdrew half its foreign staff from Kabul after so many years in the city, the U.N. could not even defend its own employees " In Afghanistan, a run-off for the disputed national election was due to be held today, but was cancelled after the main challenger withdrew over concerns about fraud, leaving the incumbent president as the sole contender.
Far from creating a functional democracy, it increasingly looks as if the past eight years in Afghanistan have achieved only a dictator’s referendum.
In North Africa, Obama’s secretary of state appeared to implicitly capitulate on the president’s previously categorical call for Israel to end its settlements in the West Bank, even praising Israel’s right-wing prime minister for making “unprecedented” concessions. Arab foreign ministers gathered in Marrakech, as well as left-wingers in Israel, were shocked and disappointed.
The secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, warned: “I am really afraid we are about to see a failure.”
Hillary Clinton backtracked on Monday, but U.S. credibility was already lost. Three days later, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signaled that he would step down as leader. Hamas called his departure “a message of reproach to his friends the Americans”. The clear vision Obama offered in those hopeful days in June is blurring and with it his authority. Things look bad.
On the two central planks of his foreign policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Middle East peace process, the situation is worse than it was five months ago.
In Afghanistan, the situation is especially dire. This week, the United Nations withdrew half its foreign staff from Kabul after so many years in the city, the U.N. could not even defend its own employees. A spokesman admitted there were “questions marks” over the strength of the international commitment to Afghanistan.
The Obama administration cannot decide whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan and escalate the conflict (as the U.S. commander Gen Stanley McChrystal wants), almost certainly leading to more U.S. casualties at a time when American public opinion is decidedly skeptical about the war’s aims, or whether to pull back, focus on counter-terrorism, leaving much of the country to the Taliban which would hand al-Qaeda an enormous propaganda coup. |
" The Americans may have signaled their willingness to talk to the Taliban, in the hope of splitting moderate elements from possible al-Qaeda supporters, but it is the suggestion that parts of the country may be abandoned to their leadership that worries ordinary Afghans " A U.S. pull-out would not affect Afghanistan alone.
In March, the U.S. announced a new strategy, combining Afghanistan and Pakistan and grouping together military, civil and diplomatic approaches.
Leaving Afghanistan would have a potentially catastrophic effect on its nuclear-armed neighbor. Already parts of neighboring Pakistan are under Taliban control and that country is teetering close to the brink
The Pakistanis are nervous of an all-out assault against the Taliban with minimum U.S. commitment they don’t want to attack their former allies, only to find them back in power in Afghanistan once U.S. troops go home.
The Americans may have signaled their willingness to talk to the Taliban, in the hope of splitting moderate elements from possible al-Qaeda supporters, but it is the suggestion that parts of the country may be abandoned to their leadership that worries ordinary Afghans. Far from creating a brave new world, a quickly bandaged exit strategy which would ensure more suffering on the Afghan people is reminiscent of the chaotic final years of the British Empire the legacy of which, in Asia and elsewhere, is still with us.
But it is in the Middle East that the hopes raised in Cairo have been most comprehensively dashed. Obama vowed he would “say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians”.
For a time he looked serious, facing down the Israeli right over settlements. The message was clear.
As Hillary Clinton said: “Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions. We think it is in the best interest of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease.”
And yet the reality of the world has a way of blunting the sharpest of suggestions.
Israel’s prime minister prevaricated, seeking a way out. Talks, he said, could start without a settlement freeze.
The Palestinians said no but then Abbas agreed to meet Binyamin Netanyahu in New York.
When a damning U.N. report into the Gaza war came out, Abbas, under U.S. pressure, first withdrew Palestinian support from a U.N. resolution supporting it, and then changed his mind. Palestinians protested. Israel kept building. Even before the U.S. U-turn, it looked like the old way of doing politics was back. Looking back, perhaps Obama should not have had such lofty ambitions.
Consensus building only works if other people agree to it. There were touches of naïveté from the new president: the open sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has defied political solutions for decades he should not have hoped to solve it with a rhetorical flourish. Nor would Afghanistan, ever the graveyard of imperial powers, be easy to subdue. Nations have a habit of working to their own timetables. |
" Looking at the players in the region can sometimes read like a playbill for a tired production that has gone on too long: Netanyahu, Abbas and Zardari, all names that would have been familiar to political insiders in the 1990s " The Bush administration’s attempts to reshape the Middle East were a failure: eight years on, they have hardly reshaped one country.
But naïveté can be a useful quality, enabling vision without baggage. Obama’s speech in Cairo was important, not as a statement of policy but as a statement of intent. In rhetoric, he went further than any previous American president.
That was the right thing to do. In trying to do things differently, he struck a contrast with previous presidents, who preferred backstage horse-trading.
True, that vision has hit roadblocks, some severe, and needs to course-correct, but the original destination is still worth aiming for.
In his speech last year accepting the Democratic nomination, Obama told an excited crowd, “The greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.” Looking at the players in the region can sometimes read like a playbill for a tired production that has gone on too long: Netanyahu, Abbas and Zardari, all names that would have been familiar to political insiders in the 1990s. What is needed is not more of the same, but something different.
Far from compromising, Obama and the Democrats need to be even more radical.
If Obama had the audacity to hope, he needs to rediscover the audacity to govern, to ask for serious change from the Israelis and the Palestinians, to push for serious reform in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Five months may be a long time in politics, but it is a short time in history. If Obama really wants change we can believe in, he has first to reaffirm his belief in change.
*Published in the UAE's THE NATIONAL on Nov. 7, 2009. Faisal al Yafai was named Journalist of the Year at the 2009 Muslim Writers Awards. He is a Churchill Fellow for 2009/2010. |
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