Courcy's Intelligence Brief

Syria is the key

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Syria is the key battleground in the Middle East, and if President Bashar al-Assad manages to stabilize his regime it will be a major setback for the Western powers. It will be a huge plus for Iran, and it will have the potential to undermine any good to have come from the popular revolutions elsewhere in the region. The Middle East is becoming accustomed to dictators making too few concessions, too late, and being ousted from power. It happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and it is happening in Libya and Yemen. But there are reasonable grounds for supposing that Assad will be able to stabilize his position in Syria.

Most people now know the basics about Syria: that it is ruled by a minority Alawite regime that has a history of brutal repression. The pessimists argue that, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the officer corps will stay loyal to Assad and do whatever is necessary to repress the popular dissent. For the regime and its supporters, the dangers in allowing the majority Sunnis to gain power are too great. On the other hand, the optimists say, in today’s international climate Assad cannot repeat the response of 1982, when his father slaughtered up to 30,000 Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers in Hama, and that without that option he is unlikely to survive.

Our own experts veer towards the pessimistic view, but for more complex reasons. They say that Assad has much more going for him than just a loyal security establishment and a track record that frightens dissenters (although that is undoubtedly important, and in this regard there have been alarming reports of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah militants helping with the suppression of protests). Assad’s other advantages include the following:

First, there is the position of the Kurds, who make up 10% of the population. There have been intense contacts between the regime and the Kurds to try to secure their neutrality, with the authorities playing on Kurdish fears of an Islamist takeover in Syria.

Second, the regime has been courting the Sunni merchant class in Damascus offering them an expanded role in the economy and playing on their fears of unrest. There is some evidence that this approach has been paying off and that the merchants have been opposing protests in Damascus.

Third, it would seem that the Syrian Sunni Arab youth is not of the same mould as its equivalent in Egypt. So far, for instance, there has been very little unrest emerging from Damascus University with its 140,000 students.

Finally, there is the ambivalent position of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) itself. Contacts between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime are veiled in the utmost secrecy, but there have been suggestions that both Turkey and Hamas (the Palestinian group) have been interceding on behalf of Assad. This has the ring of truth. In recent years, Turkey has conducted a significant rapprochement with Assad, while Assad’s support for Hamas in the Palestinian territories and for Hamas/MB in Jordan will count in his favour.

Assad’s chances
So, as things stand today, the odds favour Assad surviving, and the significance of such an outcome can hardly be overstated. There is a strong possibility that the Arab revolutions could end up with Yemen and Libya as failed states, with Egypt under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and with pro-Iranian Shia influence increased in the Gulf States. If Assad survives, Iran’s influence in Syria and Lebanon will remain undiminished, with all that means for the power of Hezbollah.

Furthermore, Assad will need to repay his debt to Hamas by increasing Syria’s support both in the Palestinian territories and in Jordan, where the moderate Bedouin-supported regime of King Abdullah remains under pressure.

To all these negatives can be added the fact that the Assad regime maintains an illicit nuclear programme, has a large stockpile of chemical weapons (which has been upgraded since the transfer of chemical weapons from Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003), and has a huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and advanced artillery. Any positives to emerge from the Arab revolts are likely to be nullified if Assad survives. Iran knows this and is doing all it can to shore up Assad; it is not certain that the Western powers are yet making an equal and opposite effort. JdeC.

Russia hints at talks with Taleban

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While the rest of the world’s attention has been focused on the Middle East and Japan, Russia has been making some interesting noises about Afghanistan.

Russia understands that the Obama administration made a major strategic error in December 2009 when it announced that US forces would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. From that moment onwards, the Taleban knew that it was only a matter of a relatively short time before it could reassert its influence in the country. The Taleban’s confidence on this point was boosted by the knowledge that its supporters in the Pakistani military had drawn the same conclusions.

This confidence within the Taleban (and Pakistan) that they would prove to have more staying power than the United States can only have been boosted by current events in the Middle East, where the challenges to the US can hardly be overestimated. They will be calculating that faced by potential strategic disaster in the Arabian Peninsula, continuing uncertainty about the futures of Egypt and Jordan, and possibly renewed difficulties in Iraq, the US is bound to have its attention diverted from Afghanistan.

It seems that Russia has been reading the same tea leaves. At the moment Moscow has no direct contacts with the Taleban, but on 28 March Russia’s special presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said that Moscow was “open for discussion with them”. Kabulov went on to say that Moscow’s concerns are “terrorist, extremist, and narcotics threats” coming from Afghanistan, and he added: “We would like them [the Taleban] to know that a government that will seek ways to solve those issues would be acceptable to us.”

Earlier this month during a meeting in Jeddah, Kabulov had told Marc Grossman, the US president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that Russia opposes a continuing foreign military presence on Afghan territory.

Kabulov’s remarks were followed up on 28 March by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who responded to questions about a continuing US military presence by saying that the Afghans themselves should decide how they will live. He aded: “I think they will take a serious look at the advantages of neutral status”. That judgement would, of course, be more certain of fulfilment under a Taleban regime.

Interestingly, what Lavrov sees as “neutral status” does not exclude joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which links the former Soviet republics of Central Asia with Russia and China. In an interview with Interfax on 27 March, Kabulov said that Russia “fully supports” Afghanistan joining the SCO.

Behind this desire to pull Afghanistan into Russia’s sphere of influence is a belief in Russian policymaking circles that Russia is under growing strategic threat. General Makhmud Gareyev, president of the Military Sciences Academy, suggested last week that Russia’s geopolitical position is as bad as it has ever been in its history. He noted that US military forces “are present in any strategic direction – west, south, east, and north”. He is equally concerned by the rise of China.

Russia’s strategic angst has only been increased by preliminary findings of the latest census. The full report is not due to be published until the end of 2012, but initial data suggests that in the last eight years Russia’s population has decreased by 2.2m, the equivalent of a third of the residents of the Moscow region. Some analysts think the position could be even worse as some local statistics bodies are suspected of exaggerating the size of local populations.

Apart from the strategic issues driving a possible rapprochement between Russia and the Taleban, the drug question is a key motivator. In Moscow’s view, the US is not doing anything like enough to prevent the flow of Afghan heroin to Russia. According to Kabulov: “For the United States...Afghan heroin poses no direct threat: they have enough not only of Colombian cocaine but also synthetic drugs. That’s it. Perhaps because of this they have no direct interest.”

The Taleban is another matter. Before the Taleban was ousted from power and came to rely upon the heroin trade to finance its insurgency, it ran an effective, if brutal, anti-heroin campaign. During the 1990s, Afghanistan was the main source of the world’s illicit heroin supply, but from July 2000 until the Taleban’s downfall over a year later, the Taleban’s ban on cultivating opium poppy resulted in the near cessation of poppy growing in Taleban-controlled areas and a fall in the global heroin supply by 65%.

A return to such a policy would suit Moscow very well, particularly if linked to the considerable side benefit of an American withdrawal. The catch would be the Taleban’s support for militant Islam, but even here there is a template that Russia could adopt. Iran has largely refrained from supporting militancy in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia in return for Moscow’s support against the US. It is likely that Moscow believes there would be no good reason why the Taleban could not reach a similar accommodation. If Kabulov does move to “open discussions” with the Taleban that will be the second item (after drugs) on the agenda.

NOTE: According to sources in Karachi, the Taleban has created a unit based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan called Lashkar-e-Khorasan (LeKh) whose sole purpose is to identify, capture, and execute people acting as spies for the US – particularly those helping the US in its drone campaign.

Egypt's new orientation

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The first foreign policy move by the new Egyptian regime has been a swift rapprochement with Sudan. The fact that this has been praised in pan-Arab circles as a counter to Israel’s incursions into Africa would indicate that the world still rotates on its old axis. The Arab spring appears not to have changed the essentials.

The view of informed observers is that the constitutional referendum of 19 March, sponsored by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, has boosted the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of the Tahrir Square youthful secularists. The remnants of the Mubarak regime are now likely to reach an accommodation with the Muslim Brotherhood that will curtail genuine secular-democratic progress. It is still too early to say for certain, but that does seem to be the direction in which Egyptian domestic affairs are heading.

On the external front, we have already seen an improvement in relations between Cairo and Hamas. For instance, Egypt allowed a Gaza delegation led by the senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Zahar to travel from Gaza on a trip to Khartoum, Damascus, and Ankara. This would not have been allowed by the Mubarak regime.

Then on 29 March, following a meeting with Egypt’s Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi in Cairo, al-Zahar said: "We are going to witness an Egyptian revision on handling the Rafah border crossing [between Egypt and Gaza] and the Palestinian case over the next week or the upcoming days," al-Zahar said.

The Rafah border crossing was closed by Egypt in 2007 after Hamas took control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank.

Praising the new regime in Cairo over that of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, al-Zahar said: "The Palestinian people will never forget the position of the former Egyptian government regarding the Israeli violence against the Gaza Strip and the position of the current Egyptian government which warned the Israelis from trying to repeat their aggression against the Strip.”

In a statement posted on the Hamas Government website, Youssef Rizqa, political advisor to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, said: "For the first time in the history of the relationship, Palestinian and Egyptian ministers are communicating. This is a substantial development that did not take place in Mubarak's era." In a further sign of warming relations, Rizqa added that Hamas intended to re-open the Egyptian Consulate in Gaza, closed in 2007.

The fact that new Egyptian Prime Minister Issam Sharaf chose Khartoum as the first Arab capital to visit is also being seen as a significant change of direction. The Mubarak regime was noticeably hostile to Sudan, even supporting the rebel movement in the south. Practical reasons for a rapprochement with Sudan include Egypt’s need for an ally against the African Nile Basin countries’ attempt to amend treaties on the sharing of the Nile’s waters. They are seeking to reduce Egypt’s share of 54bn cubic metres. Sudan takes the second largest share with 18bn cubic metres.

It has been equally striking to see Arab praise for Egypt’s move on the grounds that it is a counter to Israeli influence in Africa. The pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi sees the new Sudanese-Egyptian cooperation as providing a strategic boost not only in the fight to prevent a cut in the Egyptian-Sudanese share of the Nile waters but also in opposing “Israeli infiltration into the African continent backed by the US and the West”. Accoding to the paper: “It is this infiltration that is inciting the Nile source states and is pursuing a scheme aimed at fragmenting both countries, especially Sudan.”

Risk pointers

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*** Iraqi Shias boycott Saudi Arabia. The director of media for the Basra Governate Council in southern Iraq announced on 29 March that the council “has unanimously endorsed a decision to boycott Saudi goods in an attempt to show the city of Basra’s rejection of all kinds of violence that is being exercised against the Bahraini people by the Bahraini or Saudi authorities”.

*** South Korea fears an attack “beyond our imagination”. South Korea’s Defence Minister Kim Kwan-jin warned on 25 March that North Korea will attack the South again. His warning came the day before the first anniversary of the sinking of the Cheonan in which 46 South Korean sailors were killed. There was a further attack last November, when North Korea shelled the border island of Yeonpyeong. Kim said: “North Korea is plotting a second, third provocation beyond our imagination like the attack on the Cheonan.”

*** Azerbaijan’s president snubs Iran over Armenia. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev declined an Iranian invitation to attend Nowruz celebrations in Tehran on 27 March on the grounds, it is assumed, that Tehran had also invited Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan.

Although of no major significance in itself, this development could be a sign of the times. Our sources in the region say that the flimsy truce that ended the 1992-94 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is now threatening to break down into a new armed conflict. There has been a significant deterioration over the past year, with regular military skirmishes threatening to spiral out of control at almost any time. Azerbaijan has been rapidly increasing its military capabilities, and its already substantial defence budget is set to increase by a further 45% this year to $3.1bn. This represents nearly 20% of state expenditure. Some intelligence sources in the region have been warning that, faced by this ratcheting up of Azerbaijan’s military capabilities, Armenia is contemplating a pre-emptive strike.

Armenia is being armed by Russia and could be supported by Moscow (albeit reluctantly) in a renewed war with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, is receiving help from Turkey and (it seems) Israel. Interestingly, although Azerbaijan is Muslim and Armenia is Christian, Iran has tended to favour Armenia because of the difficulties that Tehran has with its own Azeri minority.

*** China recalls Nepal envoy for ‘weak diplomacy’ over Tibetans. China has recalled its ambassador to Nepal, Qiu Guohong. Sources in Beijing say the reason is Qiu’s failure to counter sufficiently robustly the activities of the Free Tibet Movement in Nepal.

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