War is not the answer, Marvin Gaye once observed, and only love can conquer hate. Now Citizens for Global Solutions is trying to translate this into policy by asking everyone to sign an electronic Valentine’s Day card to the Syrian people.  

I was going to write more, but I’ve decided to let the image speak for itself.

If people in the Middle East could democratically choose what country they lived in, would they choose the one they are in now?

Amidst all the talk of an Arab Spring, the fragility of the Arab state is often forgotten.

Whereas developed countries are almost always the product of an organic, internally driven process, in the Middle East’s case, the countries are mostly the product of a British-French agreement made in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) that paid little attention to local sociopolitical realities. As a result, few possess the historical roots, social cohesion, and legitimacy necessary to nurture the complex institutions that are a prerequisite for development and democracy. On the contrary, most suffer from both sectarian divisions and weak government—the causes of state fragility. (more…)

Tuesday should be a dramatic day in the UN Security Council.  Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alan Juppé are all jetting in for a debate on Syria and the Europeans are set to table a resolution calling for a political transition in Damascus that Russia is determined to veto.  China will probably do so too.  Smash, bang, wallop.

What are the Europeans up to here?  Last week, I published a commentary for the EU Institute for Security Studies summarizing the European strategy towards Syria:

European policymakers have recognised that they are not best-placed to mediate a final political settlement to the crisis. Instead, they have ceded political responsibility to the Arab League, which has gradually hardened its stance against Assad and has even called for him to stand aside (although the League has not been firm enough for some of members, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia). Meanwhile the EU’s policies have included (i) backing UN and League attempts to monitor the situation in Syria in an effort to restrain the Assad government; (ii) putting pressure on Damascus through sanctions; and (iii) using debates at the Security Council and the wider UN system to reinforce the case for pressure. 

Even though the Security Council debates have rendered almost nothing concrete (except for a mildly worded presidential statement cooked up by the IBSA countries last August) the Europeans have arguably utilized the UN route quite cleverly:

Although frustrated by Sino-Russian obstructionism, European diplomats have chosen to use the Security Council as a platform to publicise the case against Assad. In October, having tried to find compromise language on sanctions, they tabled a mildly-worded resolution in the knowledge that China and Russia would veto it. This ostensibly self-defeating strategy (which the U.S. had doubts about) has at least pushed Moscow and Beijing to try and legitimise their defense of Damascus. Russia has served up a series of resolutions of its own, calling for an end to violence but making no reference to sanctions. 

In the meantime, resolutions condemning Syria’s actions have been passed by large majorities in both the Human Right Council and UN General Assembly – forums that are usually hostile to Western positions. In the final quarter of 2011, the Arab League used the threat of pushing for Security Council action (as it did very effectively over Libya) to persuade Assad to accept its observer mission. 

So even if Russia and China use their veto again this week, the Europeans will keep coming back to the Council for public relations reasons.  I think this is a cunning strategy, although it will fuel talk about the decline of the Council as a serious decision-making body.  It’s remarkable to think that it’s only ten months since the Council was being praised for OK-ing the Libyan campaign.

European ministers are meeting today to discuss an oil embargo on Iran.  The run-up to the meeting has been dogged by reports that some impoverished EU members – notably Italy and Greece – have questioned the initiative.  The Iranians may think that the EU won’t do them real damage, as I point out in a new column for E!Sharp:

There is a general impression that the EU would not hurt a fly.  Instead, it might launch a strategic partnership with the fly, hold annual meetings with the little creature, and possibly fund a Brussels-based think-tank to produce a report entitled “Achieving a Sustainable EU-Fly Relationship by 2025”.

That is the image that many EU officials want to project.  “The strength of the EU lies, paradoxically, in its inability to throw its weight around,” Catherine Ashton declared in February last year. “In short, the EU has soft power with a hard edge – more than the power to set a good example and promote our values. But less than the power to impose its will.”  Yet the EU was throwing its weight around just then.

The EU’s top target one year ago was Laurent Gbagbo, who was refusing to accept the UN’s decision that he had lost elections in Côte d’Ivoire in November 2010.  A brutal but wily operator, Gbagbo had unleashed thugs on his opponents, menaced UN peacekeepers and bamboozled African mediators.

But the UN had mandated sanctions against his regime and the EU took the lead in implementing them.  In a very un-European moment of nastiness, Ashton’s spokesperson told a reporter that the “priority is on the economic asphyxia of Gbagbo’s regime.”  When I read that menacing line, I wanted to cheer.

Things turned out pretty badly for Mr Gbagbo, who was undercut by the EU sanctions and is now at the ICC.  The Syrian regime is also struggling with Euro-sanctions:

The EU first imposed sanctions on individual Syrian officials as violence in the country escalated in May last year, but raised the stakes by deciding to stop importing Syrian oil in the autumn.  Although the Syrian regime has held on to power – and continued its vicious campaign against protestors – the EU’s sanctions have had an impact.  Companies like Shell have pulled out.  With its energy sector under siege, Damascus has struggled to supply its own population with fuel.  The Financial Times reports that the price of subsidized cooking gas for normal Syrians had now tripled.

Syria’s President Assad has accused the Europeans of persecuting innocent civilians.  Nobody should be proud that poor Syrians have been affected by the price hikes – even leaving ethical issues aside, it is arguable that some citizens feel greater solidarity with the regime in the face of EU pressure.   But Côte d’Ivoire and Syria both show that, at least when it comes to sanctions, the EU has more than “soft power with a hard edge”.  It has straightforward hard power – even if it is economic not military.

Iran is, of course, a rather tougher target.  But the EU may do it real damage.

As everyone starts to freak out about what it would mean for the UK – with its high gas import dependency on Qatar and low gas storage capacity – if Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, Chatham House’s Paul Stevens has a useful corrective in this morning’s FT. There are two key reasons why Iran is unlikely to try to block the Straits, he argues:

The first reason to believe Iran might stop short of closing the strait is simply because such a move would fail. Cutting off Gulf oil supplies represents an existential threat to the west that it would have to use force to counter. The response, if transit were seriously threatened, would rapidly degenerate into a shooting war between Iran and the US supported by many of its allies. While oil prices might reach unprecedented new levels, the US Navy would quickly restore access.

The second reason is that a serious threat to close Hormuz is arguably the principal Iranian deterrent against a military attack by the US or Israel on its nuclear facilities. So to use it in response to an EU oil embargo would be using that proverbial sledgehammer to crack a pistachio nut.

And in any case, he goes on, “Iran does have other options to retaliate. It could intensify pressure on oil prices by contributing to the instability in Iraq that has followed the US troop withdrawal as the Shia ruling clique has begun a de facto war of attrition against the Sunnis.”

All this said, Stevens is also heavily sceptical about whether the EU’s embargo on Iran will actually work:

History is littered with failed oil embargoes, ranging from Cuba, Rhodesia and South Africa to the embargo against Iraq after 1990.It is also worth highlighting that an EU oil embargo would greatly strengthen the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad at a time when it is under considerable pressure, especially with the parliamentary elections looming in March. Unemployment remains high, as does inflation, which has been greatly aggravated by the removal of many price subsidies in the past twelve months. Also in the past few weeks, the value of the Iranian rial against the dollar has fallen dramatically.

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the Arab League’s observer mission in Syria, and argued that it was likely to struggle.  And struggle it certainly has.  Last Friday, I wrote a short piece for Foreign Policy summarizing the mission’s numerous woes:

The Syrian opposition claims that the roughly 100 monitors, deployed to oversee the army’s withdrawal from urban areas, have been manipulated and fed disinformation by the government. There have been accusations that the military has used the observers’ presence as a cover for increased violence. Perhaps most notoriously, the League selected a Sudanese general associated with the war in Darfur to lead the mission. The observers, dressed in brightly-colored waistcoats and armed only with digital cameras, often look lost and ineffectual.

In any plausible scenario, the monitors were never going to have a decisive impact on Syria. Although the Syrian government promised that it would halt military operations against civilians in December, few analysts took this promise seriously. A handful of observers were not going to change political calculations in Damascus, especially as they have neither their own guards nor secure communications equipment — leaving them excessively reliant on Syrian assistance to monitor and report anything at all.

But one week ago, it still seemed too early to write off the mission.  Since then, however, the operation has given a very good impression of imploding.  One observer has publicly condemned the mission:

An Arab League official has launched a scathing attack on the regional body’s mission to Syria, claiming it has been powerless to prevent “multiple crimes against humanity” from being committed by troops loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  Anwar Malek, an Algerian member of the team, said the observer mission was becoming a farce. He said it was not acting independently and was serving the regime’s interests.

And even the Arab League’s top man sounds defeatist:

The Arab League chief has cast further doubt on the delegation his organisation has sent to monitor the crisis in Syria, describing ongoing violence as “very worrisome” and saying the mission was not going to plan.

Even the Syrian government hates the damn thing:

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has also condemned the delegation, describing it as ineffective and a key element of a broad international conspiracy against his embattled country.

So the mission, which is meant to produce a full report by 19 January, may struggle to keep going until then.   But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  As I argued in my Foreign Policy piece, the mission’s true role may not to be oversee a (now entirely discredited) peace agreement, but to concentrate international attention on just how awful things are in Syria:

While the observers may be failing in their stated goal — to help ensure that the Syrian army halts attacks on civilians — they have already played a significant role in underlining the brutality and untrustworthiness of the Syrian regime. There was previously copious evidence of the regime’s violence from refugees, human rights activists, undercover journalists, and U.N. reports. But the observer mission’s presence has magnified outside awareness of these abuses, especially because the media have tracked the observers’ every move. Although the mission’s leadership has mishandled relations with the press, individual observers have been frank with journalists about abuses they have witnessed and the limitations they are under — effectively circumnavigating the constraints on their formal reporting lines.

The fact that atrocities appear to be ongoing while the observers are in place also raises the diplomatic stakes. Arab politicians and commentators have already demanded that the mission should withdraw in protest at Syria’s behavior, and the monitors’ public difficulties will surely increase tensions between Damascus and the rest of the League. It is a sad truth of international politics that governments and international organizations are often far more concerned about attacks on their own credibility than human rights abuses. The Arab League, having won a new degree of credibility by taking a tough stance on Libya nearly a year ago, now finds its reputation tied to its observers’ performance in Syria.

If the Arab League wants to maintain some respect, it should now make a point of stating quite clearly that the Syrian government has made the observers’ work impossible – and call on the UN to take action as a consequence.  The League’s mission has been a mess, but I still believe it may have an important role in triggering a real response to this grim crisis.

Is Egypt running out of money?

Financial woes add an extra layer of drama to one of the most important stories to watch in 2012. (more…)

To find out how world peace was coming along I rose early this morning (not easy after a New Year’s Eve engaged in one of the marathon rakı and cards sessions of which middle-aged Turks are so fond) to attend mass at the local Armenian church.

That it is possible to write such a sentence is a small miracle. A century ago, the port town of Iskenderun in southern Turkey had a thriving population of Armenians. Today there are just one hundred left – ten of them joined me, bleary-eyed, at mass. Their church, founded in the late nineteenth century, reopened in 2011 having been closed for decades due to the absence of a priest. It owes its resurrection to an earnest young member of the community who, fearful that without a focal point the old traditions would die out, decided to fill the gap, and went to Lebanon and Jerusalem to be trained as a priest. He now ministers to the small church of Iskenderun and the even smaller chapel of a nearby village, the last Armenian settlement in Turkey.

During a break in the three hour-long service, the elderly man sitting next to me introduces himself and asks my business. Within a minute or two, unprompted, he remarks that ‘this country has done terrible things to Christians.’ In 1916, he tells me, his parents had been forced to flee to Iskenderun from the interior. Turkish soldiers were killing Armenians in the surrounding region, and in anticipation of the troops’ arrival the people of his village had begun to join in. This was the beginning of a series of events described by Armenians and most of the world as genocide and by Turks, unconvincingly, as war. At least a million people are thought to have died in the ensuing months. Iskenderun itself was not immune to the killings, the old man says, but because it was a French protectorate at the time it provided a safer haven than much of the rest of the country.

Today the town continues to be a welcoming home to its small Armenian population. The priest tells me that he and his congregants have no problems with their fellow townspeople, nearly all of whom are Turks, and that Iskenderun is a fine place for Armenians to live. In recent months the oafish political posturing of Sarkozy has dominated the Armenia-Turkey debate, but as we enter what is likely to be a turbulent new year the resilience and endurance of Iskenderun’s Armenian community tells a more positive, constructive story. A Happy New Year to all.

Observers from the Arab League are now in Syria to check whether the Assad regime fulfills its promise to pull the army out of urban areas.  Fifty observers have arrived, and there may eventually be up to 200.  This is not the first time the League has deployed a peace operation (it sent troops into Lebanon in the 1970s, as I noted in a piece for the National earlier this year) but it’s still a pretty unusual initiative.  The exact make-up of the observer mission is a bit of a mystery: it’s being led by a Sudanese general, but it’s been reported that it will include human rights experts and members of NGOs as well as security personnel.  The Syrians will take care of the observers’ security, or so they say.

Can this type of mission, which is only able to observe and report rather than directly protect civilians, make a difference?  Just before Christmas, the U.S. Institute of Peace published a paper by me entitled Political Missions and Preventive Diplomacy, which looks at what international missions can do to avert potential conflicts in periods of latent and escalating tension.  In Syria, the situation has shifted from “escalation” to the verge of civil war.  What can observers achieve at a moment like this?  In the paper, I highlight one precedent: the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1998. The mission observed but could not stop the violence that led to NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign:

In October 1998, the OSCE was mandated to deploy the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) to oversee a cease-fire and supervise elections in the then Yugoslav province after a year of mounting violence. The request followed negotiations between Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke, but American-led talks were still ongoing. Both the Yugoslav security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas continued to operate, and Yugoslav atrocities eventually made it impossible to continue talks. In these unpromising circumstances, the KVM was expected to deploy “2,000 unarmed verifiers.”

The operation stumbled along unhappily…

The KVM initially had a high level of access to Yugoslav military facilities, but its presence proved insufficient to halt continuing violence. The head of mission, U.S. diplomat William Walker, tried to involve the mission in human rights and political affairs. But its personnel tended to focus more narrowly on military matters, and less than a tenth of the verifiers were assigned to human rights duties. This is unsurprising given the instability of the situation. Concerns for the mission’s safety also resulted in the deployment of a NATO extraction force in neighboring FYROM. The mission’s detachment from the faltering diplomatic process meant that it never developed a clear sense of purpose [and it was] withdrawn from Kosovo in January 1999 prior to NATO’s air campaign against Yugoslavia. The KVM did, however, continue to assist refugees from Kosovo in FYROM for some months, both advising humanitarian agencies and compiling a record of human rights abuses that had taken place during the crisis. The KVM experience suggests that once a crisis has reached its peak, the presence of external monitors alone is unlikely to affect decision makers’ choices.

This precedent doesn’t exactly suggest that the Arab League observers can make a great impact on Syria – not least because they will have far fewer personnel to cover a significantly greater area, and there is no extraction force to help in a crisis.  Looking at the lessons from the KVM and other missions in my USIP report, I’d have three bits of advice to the League:

(1) Ensure that observers’ reports are full, clear and detailed – and get to the top levels of the League fast.  It’s all too easy to let reporting standards drop under pressure or for officials in the field to succumb to “happy reporting” (emphasizing positive aspects of cooperating with the authorities in an effort to sustain access).

(2) Maintain political pressure while the observers are at work.  It’s important that the Syrian authorities don’t exploit the presence of observers on their territory to slow down negotiations towards a lasting political settlement.  It would be very easy for Damascus to drag out negotiations by arguing over details of the observers’ mandate (by repeatedly blocking access to sensitive sites for example).  Arab diplomats must keep up political pressure for a lasting deal between the government and opposition, rather than hoping that the presence of the observers will restore calm.

(3) Have a credible exit strategy.  League officials must make it clear to Damascus that they will withdraw the observers if their freedom of movement is curtailed or their ability to report objectively is compromised.  The Syrian leaders should be aware that there will be strong penalties for failing to meet their commitments, and that the observers are only a temporary mechanism for confirming that they do so.   Having the observers in Syria is not an end in itself, and should never become one.

And it’s tidings of comfort and joy… but not for the Security Council.  On Thursday, Russia proposed an investigation into the casualties of NATO’s Libyan campaign:

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said a council-mandated investigation was essential “given the fact that initially we were led to believe by Nato leaders there are zero civilian casualties of their bombing campaign”.

US ambassador Susan Rice, who stepped to the microphone after Mr Churkin, responded: “Oh, the bombast and bogus claims. Is everyone sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?  I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is something of a cheap stunt to divert attention from other issues and to obscure the success of Nato and its partners – and indeed the security council – in protecting the people of Libya.”

And just in case anyone had missed that episode, Russia enlivened matters on Friday by tabling the latest draft of a cunning resolution on Syria that expresses concern about the situation without imposing any penalties on Damascus.

Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow had limits on how much it would accommodate the demands of the European and U.S. delegations, which would like the 15-nation council to threaten sanctions on Damascus over its nine-month-old crackdown on protesters.

“If the requirement is that we drop all reference to violence coming from extreme opposition, that’s not going to happen,” Churkin told reporters.  “If they expect us to have arms embargo, that’s not going to happen.  We know what arms embargo means these days. It means that – we saw it in Libya – that you cannot supply weapons to the government but everybody else can supply weapons to various opposition groups.”

This is like a family Christmas from hell.  If you want to understand why it’s so nasty, turn to a short paper I published with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung this week entitled The Security Council’s Credibility Problem.  It explains how the Libyan and Syrian crises left the Council divided, with everyone having something to be cross about:

(1) Western officials believe that China and Russia’s refusal to countenance serious Council action against Syria has made the Council look impotent. They also complain that Brazil, South Africa and India have avoided tough decisions at the UN, abstaining in important votes on Libya and Syria. They conclude that these five BRICS countries are more concerned with constraining the West than resolving crises through the Council, and that giving them more power in the UN would be risky.

(2) Non-Western officials counter that the U.S. and its NATO allies did greater damage this year by converting the Council’s mandate for a humanitarian intervention in Libya as a pretext for regime change. They claim that their refusal to support even mild UN sanctions against Syria stems from the Libyan experience, and that the West cannot be trusted to implement UN mandates faithfully.

(3) For those who value the Council as a mechanism for ensuring international peace and security, the last year has been depressing for more fundamental reasons. Its limitations as a crisis management tool have been obvious. In recent years, there has been much talk in Council debates of shifting from “reaction” to “prevention”. Yet in the Libya case, its efforts to prevent the conflict escalating failed miserably and the Council’s only option was to mandate an ad hoc military campaign. It is unclear that the Council would have performed any better over Syria, even if there had been a consensus on how to act. The crises of 2011 have revealed major gaps in the Council’s capabilities.

This soap opera will, I suspect, continue to throw up surprises in 2012.

What do you look for in good political commentary?

I’m in favor of a mix of moral clarity and realistic judgment, topped off with an  incisive turn of phrase that sticks in the memory.  So I find it hard to top this observation on the recent attack on the UK embassy in Iran, culled from today’s Financial Times:

“I do not like Britain and I know it is evil, but a savage attack on their embassy not only makes us look uncivilised but means we have to pay for its consequences, which will be more sanctions and maybe a war,” says Saeed, a 42-year-old government employee.

100% crystal clear analysis.  Love it.

Many Western leaders have called for regime change in Syria. As Barack Obama said in August:

We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

Both the United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions. Turkey and the Arab League are likely to follow.

Many, including Richard Gowan of GD, bemoan the inability of the United Nations to act more resolutely.

But what exactly are all the leaders, analysts, and pundits promoting change in Syria actually expecting to happen? The Assad regime to simply hand over power and walk away after four decades?

This is highly unlikely. No other group has willingly given up power during the Arab Spring so far. In Libya, it took an eight-month civil war to topple the government. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh continues to hang on, if precariously.

Moreover, the Assads have much more going for them then any of these other rulers. Despite some desertions, Syria’s military and internal security apparatus remains a cohesive force unlikely to disintegrate anytime soon. The economic and political elites are more cohesive, and supportive then those elsewhere—and more fearful of what change might bring. Despite growing hardship, few in Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s two largest cities, have defected. Iran is providing support for its closest ally. Western powers are unlikely to intervene, at least in any way similar to what happened in Libya.

Therefore, the regime is likely to hang on much longer then anyone now forecasts. And if it begins to buckle or actually falls, what follows is unlikely to be pretty. This is especially true given that the Syrian opposition is badly divided:

Seven months into the uprisings, the Syrian opposition has yet to develop a united voice and platform. Unless these disparate groups unite and present a credible and viable alternative to the Assad regime, both Syria’s fearful majority and the international community will find it difficult to effectively push for meaningful change in Damascus.

There are two particularly bad yet highly plausible scenarios for the country’s future if the pressure on the regime continues long enough.

In one, the government grows increasingly anxious about its hold on power, and unleashes an even more brutal crackdown
then what is now occurring, possibly on the scale of what it perpetrated in 1982 in Hama, when over 25,000 people were murdered.

In the second scenario, the government loses control over at least some of its territory, unleashing a sectarian civil war with ugly parallels to what occurred in Iraq in 2006-08 and Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. As Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign
Relations, one of the few people in the West repeatedly warning against the perils of pushing for regime change, wrote a few months ago:

The numbers being killed now will wither in comparison with a possible future civil war, if an increasingly sectarian Syria splinters between the ruling Alawites, the elite and urban Christians, the majority Sunnis, the Kurds, Druze and others. There is no civil society to engineer a peaceful transition, while Syria could plausibly become another Lebanon, acting as a proxy battleground for regional powers.

Unfortunately, there is some evidence that this is beginning to happen in Homs, Syria’s third largest city. As the New York Times reported over the weekend:

As it descends into sectarian hatred, Homs has emerged as a chilling window on what civil war in Syria could look like, just as some of Syria’s closest allies say the country appears to be heading in that direction. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition last week called the killings and kidnappings on both sides “a perilous threat to the revolution.” An American official called the strife in Homs “reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia,” where the very term “ethnic cleansing” originated in the 1990s. . . .

Here it is not so much a fight between armed defectors and government security forces, or protesters defying a crackdown. Rather, the struggle in Homs has dragged the communities themselves into a battle that residents fear, even as they accuse the government of trying to incite it as a way to divide and rule the diverse country.

The risks involved at least partly explain why Turkey, the country with perhaps the most leverage over Syria, has been so reluctant to act more forcefully. They are also a perfectly legitimate reason for Russia and China and some developing countries to oppose a UN resolution (there may be other self-interested reasons involved too of course). As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week, “This is all looking very much like a civil war.”

Given this context, it is worth reminding ourselves of a John Maynard Keynes dictum:

We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear…. We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking… It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the
transition…

Syria is slipping further into chaos.  It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect.  Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:

It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.

Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.

Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.

For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.

But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right?  I’m not so sure:

The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.

President Obama has announced that American troops will pull out of Iraq by the year’s end.  Why?

The United States had earlier agreed to exit Iraq by the end of the year and leave 3,000 to 5,000 troops in Iraq as trainers, with some members of Congress advocating the retention of a reduced fighting force as well. But Pentagon lawyers insisted that the Iraqi Parliament grant immunity from legal prosecution to the troops if they were to remain. In recent weeks American negotiators in Baghdad concluded that it would be impossible to obtain that immunity, essentially scuttling any chance of a substantial troop presence here next year.

I can understand the Pentagon’s position.  But what if a country’s troops enjoyed immunity from prosecution while operating on domestic soil?  That, as Sushant K. Singh points out in a WSJ op-ed today, is the case for Indian forces who operate in Kashmir under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Enacted by India’s parliament in 1958 to facilitate a counterinsurgency in northeastern India, the law allows the army greater scope to operate in those areas state governments declare to be “disturbed.” It gives armed forces the power to shoot to kill in law-enforcement situations, to arrest without warrant and to detain people without time limits. The act also forbids prosecution of soldiers without approval from the central government, which in practice is rarely granted. It was extended to Kashmir in 1990, after the Pakistan-backed insurgency overwhelmed local police.

Every national government needs legal cover to fight insurgencies, but the devil in AFSPA lies in its particular draconian details. Not surprisingly, the continued application of this law to Kashmir has been a massive political problem.

Meant to protect soldiers who may kill a civilian by mistake during an operation, the act has ended up blocking all state-level attempts to prosecute soldiers for alleged charges of rape and murder. Separatists point to the law as an example of Delhi’s “imperialist designs” to occupy Kashmir. India’s reputation abroad suffers for its use of a law which arguably violates its international human rights obligations. But for the army’s insistence that it can’t do counterinsurgency without AFSPA, the law would have certainly been repealed by now.

But now, as Sushant has emphasized before, things are looking up in Indian-controlled Kashmir.  The number of militants on the loose has dropped, and terrorist incidents have declined.  The protests that shook the region last year have not been repeated.   Now Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s admired Chief Minister, wants to end the application of AFSPA in the most stable districts of Kashmir.   There’s a good case for this:

Scaling back AFSPA’s application would bolster the standing of pro-India leaders in the state, allowing them to seize the political space in separatist strongholds. By taking away their strongest rallying cry, more separatists will be forced to seek negotiations with New Delhi, so that they can join the political mainstream.

This political change could have security implications. Many Kashmiris, egged on by separatists, resent the army and New Delhi as “occupying” forces. In the long term, insurgents can keep surviving in Kashmir only as long as some locals assist them. Here, a normal political situation can reassure locals and help the security forces. Encouraged by the security turnaround, New Delhi is already considering withdrawing 10,000 central security forces this year—that will reduce the sense of “siege” some Kashmiris feel.

President Obama has said that he wants “normal” relations with Iraq after U.S. forces depart.  It’s good to see that India is in a position to establish normal relations with some long-troubled parts of itself.

It turns out that my last post on the Security Council and Syria was wrong.

Exceptionally wrong, in fact.

Rather than acquiesce to a resolution condemning the Syrian government for repressing its people, China and Russia used their vetoes.  And rather than support the EU-drafted resolution (as had seemed increasingly likely) Brazil, India and South Africa abstained.

This is a big set-back for the EU and the Americans, who were firmly behind the European initiative.  It’s a big win for Russia, which would have been embarrassed if China had even abstained.  And it’s a grim moment for Brasilia, Delhi and Pretoria, who have missed the chance to carve out a distinctive position in the Council on Syria, and opted to avoid a confrontation.  This was a moment the “IBSA” countries  could have seized to show why they deserved more respect at the UN.  They missed it.

More analysis tomorrow.  For now, congratulations to Gabon and Nigeria for voting for the resolution, refuting the claim that all developing countries are anti-interventionist.