Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from There Will Be War.

We in the West really really want the tide to be turning against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Especially, it seems, The Economist, who headlined this piece in November 2011 “The tide turns against Bashar Assad” and this one about nine months later “The tide begins to turn.” But they’re not the only media outlet or organization that never misses a chance to suggest the imminent downfall of the villainous Assad.

Most recently, the defection of a former top member of the military and one-time buddy of Bashar, Manaf Tlass, has caused a stir. The “Good Sign” subhead, referring to the high-level defection in this BBC piece was at least put in quotes, but still calls out the optimism expressed by the Friends of Syria in Paris.

Mr Laurent Fabius [French foreign minister] described it as a “hard blow for the regime” that showed Mr Assad’s entourage was beginning to realise the regime was unsustainable.

Further analysis in the piece from Mohamed Yehia of BBC Arabia

This would also be damaging and embarrassing for the Damascus government, as it would be explained as an indication that cracks are appearing at the top of the ruling establishment and could encourage other Sunni defections.

Finally, near the end, this little tidbit is acknowledged

Brigadier General Tlass has been under a form of home arrest since May 2011 because he opposed the security solution that the regime has been implementing, sources say.

So if ex-General Tlass hasn’t been an active part of the military for over a year, how is this a huge damaging blow? Basically, as the Syrian government spokesman claimed, Tlass had escaped. It’s only a “hard blow” in minds around the world that want to see it as such, not a practical “hard blow” for the regime. It’s bad PR but changes no calculations for Damascus and only shows the brutal efficiency with which even trusted dissenters were corralled and rendered impotent.

Granted this could encourage other Sunni defections, but one could imagine that those who haven’t defected after a year won’t be inspired by one high-ranker who is cushioned by a wealthy family in Europe. Usually toward the end of these stories it’s revealed that there have been no mid-to-upper level Alawite defections. Alawites comprise the vast majority of military command and government officials.

No doubt the latest rash of defections is not good for Assad and doesn’t bolster the regime’s image. Yet I don’t think Assad has cared about the Western world’s perception of his government for a while now.

A much more accurate bellwether about the turning of tides in Syria—the glowing neon sign of imminent regime change—will be when Russia decides to change its view of the Syrian situation. This will reflect the moment when Assad starts thinking about making a plea, and is willing to negotiate. But according to reports on a meeting between top Syrian National Council members and Russia, this is not yet the case

Russia refuses to shift its controversial position on the crisis in Syria, the exiled opposition Syria National Council (SNC) said after talks in Moscow with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov…. Underlining the gulf between the SNC and Moscow, Lavrov said Russia wanted to understand in the talks if there were “prospects” of the opposition groups uniting and joining a platform for dialogue with the Syrian government.

In my opinion, Russia is the only outside participant looking for a real solution to the massive blood-letting in Syria. This is because no one else seems to consider the Syrian opposition as part of the solution. True the opposition is dispersed and the SNC cannot speak for factions of the Free Syrian Army or others on the ground, which is the insurgency’s greatest weakness.

But do the West, the Arabs in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the Turks, the U.N. and the Friends of Syria expect Bashar al-Assad to knock off all the killing because Kofi Annan says so, while the rebels keep ambushing security checkpoints and taking over Syrian towns? If the opposition is not ready to negotiate under terms that include Assad still in power—and they may never be—then outside negotiations are pointless. The international community and the SNC can try to pressure Russia to pressure the Syrian regime, but it’s clear that Russia is backing negotiations between the regime and the opposition for as long as Assad feels he can stay in (now relative) power.

The missing player in the various peace-plan scenarios in Turkey—the country with the most leverage over the opposition and the one that can most readily protect them. I’ve written more here about how Turkey must be at the forefront of any peace talks and is the only nation or organization (aside from the opposition itself) in the position to achieve a working ceasefire.

Michael Quiñones' latest project, a fizzy look at foreign policy predictions, was launched in July 2012 at There Will Be War.  

On June 29^th, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. The bill had already passed the House. The Act, which was introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. James McGovern, will impose visa bans and asset freezes on Russian human rights offenders. Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, threatened to ban U.S. officials from visiting Russia if the act became law.

The bill is named for Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in 2009. Magnitsky was a middle-aged attorney and accountant who worked for the largest Western private equity fund in Russia, representing the foreign investor Bill Browder. Browder had invested in Russian stocks since the late 1990s, “the era of the great thefts of state assets masquerading as privatizations.” But by 2005, Browder had learned of widespread corruption, denounced it, and become an activist against it. Browder was soon exiled from Russia, so he sold his holdings to get himself to the West and made a $230-million tax payment to the Russian treasury. Magnitsky discovered that Russian tax officials had subsequently conspired to embezzle the payment. When he made these allegations publicly, Magnitsky was imprisoned and beaten. His death was widely condemned.

The Magnitsky Act will deny entry to the 60 or so officials that Bowder says were responsible for Magnitsky’s persecution. The bill aims to reduce such corruption and its spread across international borders.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meanwhile working to improve U.S. trade relations with Russia, promoting the repeal of the outdated 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a Cold War-era provision restricting trade relations with Soviet states deemed to have violated human rights. But on June 29^th, Clinton met in St. Petersburg with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who warned Clinton that passing the Magnitsky Act would result in damage to U.S.-Russian relations. President Obama had a similarly chilly meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Mexico.

For its part, the Obama administration has lobbied against the bill because it already tracks and denies visas to the Russians involved in Magnitsky’s death. The administration also pressured the Senate to include a provision for a secret annex in its version of the bill, which would render the bill useless because the names of human rights violators would not be made public. The New Yorker adds that the United States needs Russia’s support for progress on Syria’s civil war, Iran’s nuclear program, and U.S. supply lines to Afghanistan.

But widespread approval in Washington may make the administration’s attempts to bury the bill futile. Major proponents include Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Roger Wicker, John Thune, and John Kerry, alongside Freedom House President David Kramer. If the bill does not become law soon, proponents say the United States will be unable to employ it for Russia’s upcoming WTO accession. 

Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that the Magnitsky bill should not be linked to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment because the Russians “will not see the Magnitsky bill as an expression of outrage over how the Russian legal system was shabbily and corruptly manipulated to kill one of its fellow citizens. They will instead see the bill as reflecting what they believe to be a deep-seated anti-Russia sentiment on the Hill.” On the other hand, Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow, writes that “Putin’s Kremlin has used the West – eager for engagement and a policy ‘reset’ with Russia – to legitimize its authoritarian rule and to provide opportunities for its venal cronies’ integration into Western society.” She says this has discredited liberal democracy in Russia.

Pifer and Shevtsova are both correct. One the one hand, the bill would enable the United States to uphold its commitments to international human rights and the spread of democracy. On the other hand, as Pifer says, the United States cannot afford to lose Russia as a trading partner. Additionally, the two countries are currently dealing with several issues that could exacerbate one another, including missile defense, the future of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, and U.S. supply lines to Afghanistan.

The Magnitsky Act will, unfortunately, fuel these already tense situations and throw Obama’s “reset” policies off course. As Putin said in July, “The replacement of the Jackson-Vanik amendment by an anti-Russian law and a course towards creating a missile defense system cannot but upset the existing strategic parity and be a source of concern for us.”

Cross-posted from the Arabist.

The New York Times reports that the CIA has been on the ground in Turkey vetting armed opposition groups in Syria. The anonymous sources cited by the Times say that the US itself is not providing weapons to the rebels, in keeping with its earlier declarations to not directly arm them, but is apparently tracking weapons going into Syria and “advising” allies in the region as to which groups should get what weapons. Reports on alleged Western intelligence-gathering operations along Syria’s borders several months ago were denied then, but the Times asserts that the CIA presence has been on the ground “for several weeks” at least.

The promise of weapons sales to the rebels has been advanced as a cost-effective way for the US and its allies to direct the course of the Syrian uprising’s armed resistance to the Assad regime. With arms comes influence -- or so Washington, Doha and Riyadh hope -- and the armed opposition has been hard-pressed to provision itself.

Even with these promises, armed groups in Syria, who are frequently at odds with one another, have relied and continue to rely on materials produced by Syrian expatriates, captured battlefield detritus or purchased from black marketeers. With the exception of equipment seized from a battlefield or brought over by defecting soldiers, the regime can still bring much greater firepower to bear, which manifests itself in the form of besieging and shelling neighborhoods concealing (or thought to be concealing) insurgents fighting the Syrian Army. As such, some factions of the anti-Assad movement continue to call for direct foreign military intervention, notably from the Turkish Army.

Ankara, for its part, denies it is helping arm the rebels, and even the recent shootdown of a Turkish fighter jet in Syrian airspace is unlikely to result in directly military action by NATO. Indeed, Turkey’s reluctance to “get involved” more proactively remains a major stumbling block for interventionists. (Ed. note from the Arabist: is it Turkey that is holding back NATO, or the reverse?)

The Times report paints a picture of a more engaged American intelligence effort in Syria, one that critics of both intervention and non-intervention say has been lacking since 2011. The perception of expanded US handling has been buttressed by recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and Time that the US is assisting activists on the ground report on atrocities ascribed to the Syrian Army and pro-regime militias accused of committing civilian massacres in the conflict.¹

As has been the case with reports on US efforts in Yemen, it is not clear whether the government sources speaking for these reports are engaging in unsanctioned leaks, or are going to the press with the White House’s acknowledgment. Despite years of talk about regime change in Syria and past US support for Syrian dissent groups in Istanbul and London, the Syrian uprising -- like those in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia and Bahrain -- clearly caught the Obama Administration (and Syria’s neighbors) by surprise. The White House has been scrambling to implement something like it’s “leading from behind” model for Libya in building an international consensus to take more decisive action, though denies Russian claims that through NATO, it intends to directly intervene in Syria.

Recently, there have been several spats between Washington and Moscow, which is Assad’s main arms supplier. The UK Foreign Office managed to fire a warning shot across Moscow’s bow over the Syrian crisis when the Standard Club withdrew insurance for the MV Alaed, a Russian freighter carrying repaired Syrian attack helicopters and “air defense systems” to Syria. This act of “lawfare” forced the Alaed to turn back to port. Shortly before this incident, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton raised Cain over the use of Russian-made helicopter gunships by the Syrian military. One of the outcomes of this diplomatic protest, though, has been some embarrassing revelations about US-Russia defense sector links.

These moves were plainly aimed at signaling to Russia that it needs to exercise more influence on Assad in ways favorable to the West’s demands, or to back away from the dictator. A CNN report that the US military has revised/prepared contingency war plans for Syria is also part of this messaging -- as is the Iranian media pushback in the form of announcing war games to be conducted in Syria by the Russians (these reports have been denied by Russia and do not seem credible).

More concretely, Russia has dispatched three amphibious landing craft to its naval base in the Port of Tartus, increasing their security presence there. Significantly, this force is thought to include heavy weapons and advanced anti-air systems. Russia’s mistrust of Washington’s efforts to address the conflict stems from fears that Syria will turn into Libya again, where the Russians and Chinese essentially allowed the UN Security Council and NATO to invoke a “responsibility to protect” that turned into a coordinated effort to oust the late Colonel Qadhafi from power. Russia’s stated principles are closely linked to its national interests. Arms, allies and naval basing rights matter too, analyst Dmitri Trenin notes, but “Moscow is concerned that allowing the United States to use force at will and without any external constraints might lead to foreign interventions close to Russian borders, or even within those borders.” So even absent the Libyan card, for Russia, there are few prices short of war the Kremlin will not pay to avoid the humiliation of “losing Syria,” its sole remaining Arab ally in the region.

So while the arming of rebel groups under US auspices is ostensibly aimed at redressing this imbalance of firepower, so far, no policy has been articulated in public as to whether this aid is supposed to help take down Assad with extreme prejudice, or compel him to broker a ceasefire and exeunt, even though members of the Syrian opposition have now repeatedly rejected a “Yemeni solution.” Assad, for his part, shows no signs of backing down despite combat fatigue, desertions and attacks within the heart of Damascus itself.

The US is still not willing to take that bet for Syria, though, at least not yet. Moscow shows no signs of backing down. Syrian activist Haytham Manna recently told the Guardian that “foreign influence and arms have split Syria’s civil movement.” The continued failure of Kofi Annan’s ceasefire plan, and the efforts of the Syrian Army or the rebels to maintain secure zones for civilians, show that this split may be irreconcilable, even if foreign powers press harder on Assad by all means short of open war.

¹While media activists have specific agendas and incentive to spin events, such activists have been politicized from the start in this conflict, with or without US dollars or cameras. Another complication is that the conflict has seen the deaths of Syrian media activists who were not associated with one particular armed camp or another, such as Bassel Shehadeh, who was killed by the Syrian Army in Homs this May. Ideally, third party sourcing to evaluate competing claims would be easier to come by. But even when such reports appear, the coverage quickly turns into a debate over the credibility of each outlet’s narratives.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has claimed that "there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria,” though the Russian government denies the accusation. If true, it would be highly disturbing, given the Syrian regime’s widespread use of such weapons against unarmed civilians.  Amnesty International and other human rights groups have called for an immediate end of arms transfers to the Syrian regime, particularly of weapons that have been used to target civilians.

However, the United States is hardly in a position to criticize arms transfers to governments which use them to attack innocent civilians, particularly helicopter gunships.

Thousands of Salvadoran civilians are believed to have been killed by U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships during the 1980s. Obama named Robert Gates, one the key architects of the Reagan administration’s Central American policy during that period, as Secretary of Defense.

The administration of Clinton’s husband provided helicopter gunships to the Turkish government despite their widespread use again civilians in Kurdish areas of the country. U.S. arms were responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in that country during the 1990s and over 3000 villages were burned.  

Similarly, both the Clinton and Bush administration provided helicopter gunships to the Colombian military, despite their use against civilian targets.

Amnesty International called on the United States to cease such arms transfers to both Turkey and Colombia, but both the Clinton and Bush administrations rejected the plea.

In early October of 2000, immediately following the killing of a dozen Palestinian civilians by U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships killed a dozen Palestinians—including attacks on apartment complexes in Netzarim—the Clinton administration announced a new shipment of advanced Apache attack helicopters. The Pentagon acknowledged that, "U.S. weapons sales do not carry a stipulation that the weapons can’t be used against civilians. We cannot second-guess an Israeli commander who calls in helicopter gunships." Amnesty International called for a cessation of all attack helicopter transfers to Israel, but Clinton administration rejected this call as well.

Similarly, the widespread use of helicopter gunships by Israeli forces against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009 led Amnesty to again call for an end to the U.S. providing such materiel to the Israeli government, but the incoming Obama administration—like the Bush, Clinton and Reagan administrations before it—rejected the call to consider human rights in the transfers of such deadly technologies.

The Obama administration, like its predecessors, has tried to justify such transfers on the grounds that these governments were faced with armed insurgencies, including groups which had engaged in acts of terrorism. This is the exact same rationalization currently being used by the Syrian regime and its apologists. Yes, there is indeed an armed insurgency underway, and some elements are indeed terrorists, but that still does not give a government the right to target civilians. This is true regardless of the offending governments’ relations with the United States.

The very idea that the Obama administration even cares the slightest about civilians killed by helicopter gunships is debunked by the incident involving the release of audio and video footage of U.S. helicopter pilots in Iraq killing two unarmed Reuters journalists and several would-be rescuers. Not only did the Obama administration refuse to indict the pilots responsible, they chose to prosecute the private who exposed the illegal killings for “aiding the enemy.”

It appears, then, that the Obama administration’s opposition to the alleged Russian arms sale is not out of any concern for civilians, but out of a desire to weaken the Syrian government’s ability to combat rebel fighters armed by such U.S. allies as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Hypocrisy aside, it is still imperative for anyone concerned about human rights to categorically oppose Russian military assistance to Syria, such as helicopter gunships, which could be used against civilians, as it is imperative to oppose arms shipments by any country to governments which would likely target innocent civilians. 

Unfortunately, the United States is in no position to preach to the Russians about the sanctity of arms.

In a 2010 overview of the laws of Russia's extractive sector, the Europe-Asia Studies journal argued that "the players tend to favour solutions that, in principle, are defective but advantage insiders (themselves) over outsiders (foreigners). … While enabling increased influence of the state and state-controlled companies over subsoil use," the report concluded, it "does not add to the transparency of the investment regime in Russia’s mineral resources sectors." Past experience suggests that the Bazhenov shale extraction development will see this pattern holding, but despite this, the prospects are just too good for Exxon (or Statoil) to pass up. 

That's the risk of doing business under Putin. 

The Russian government's recent solicitation of ExxonMobil (US) and Statoil (Norway) to help state-owned firm Rosneft develop a huge field of oil shale in Siberia at a site called Bazhenov follows a plan -- such as it is -- laid down by Putin early on in his career. Putin wrote -- or according to critics, plagiarized -- his thesis on Russian energy policy with special emphasis on subsoil laws and returning concessions made by the Yeltsin government to foreign oil majors (BP) and private firms (Yukos) to the state. He regards Russia's energy reserves as strategic instruments, just as his Soviet predecessors did, yet found his hand constrained by the fact that "around 92% of oil and 83% of gas" (according to the Europe-Asia Studies journal) were in private hands during the Yeltsin era. 

Plagiarized or not, Putin's thesis served as an ideological blueprint for him as he and his associates made halting progress to bring those energy reserves more firmly in the Kremlin's orbit (since many of those privately owned concessions belonged to oligarchs close to Yeltsin's family or former Soviet enterprise directors, they were not by any stretch of the imagination truly privately-owned). 

While the nationalization efforts made by Putin during his first two terms as President may have worsened ratings of Russia's investment climate and driven plans for Western-financed independent pipelines, they consolidated control of major reserves under state-owned enterprises such as Gazprom, where Kremlin insiders, including once-and-future President and PM Dmitri Medvedev, helped Putin consolidate state control, or, rather, control by men he felt he could trust, such as Dmitri but also a number of other top officials like Alexi Miller, one of his St. Petersburgers and current head of Gazprom, and former Yeltsin insider Vikotr Chernomyrdin, who founded Gazprom. Foreign investment in the firm Chernomyrdin founded -- as of 2006, now Russia's sole legal natural gas exporter -- was permitted only after the state-owned firm Rosneft purchased enough of a stake in Gazprom to give the Kremlin majority ownership.  

The approach to Gazprom -- and the consolidation of firms like Rosneft and TNK, which had partnered (but ultimately broke) with BP, along with the assault on Yukos -- mirrors Putin's overall approach to the Russian political system. Mazen Labban has written:

Under Putin, however, foreign financial capital returned to consolidate the Russian oil industry under the control of the state. What in effect took place is a process of amalgamation of the Russian state, domestic productive capital and foreign financial capital into hybrid corporations.

Foreign investors entered the Russian oil industry through the state to help it close space further against transnational oil companies and protect the industry from the predation of the domestic oligarchs.

In other words, he has his favored men -- former Yeltsin insiders he still needs to varying degrees and the extremely loyal security professionals who came to Moscow with him from St. Petersburg -- who he plays off of each other and against those oligarchs whom he regards as political rivals. Yukos is the most infamous example of this, as it ended in the arrest of its CEO and the secretive manner in which its assets were auctioned off. More recently, the partnership BP has made with the Russian TNK firm, which has faced a rocky road under Putin, has been "profitable" for the British oil major, The Scotsman notes, and "accounts for 29 per cent of BP's [total global] production." Now, perhaps feeling BP's usefulness has expired, the Kremlin may be looking to purchase BP's stake through Rosneft -- the same Rosneft working with Exxon (and headed by another of Putin's favorites, Igor Sechin) -- to the chagrin of a consortium of Russian banking oligarchs. 

With this approach comes a willingness to overlook his own people's possible skimming off of the top so long as they recognize their place in his court and adhere to his driving vision to enhance Russia's international influence, even though Russia's politicking with its gas suppliers in Central Asia, notably in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and European transit countries (Ukraine and Belarus) has harmed its image, according to the Pipeline & Gas Journal.

Of course, there are limits to how far Russia's extractive emphasis can go. Not because there is only so much oil and gold and nickel to draw out from Siberia, but because for decades Russia has lagged behind other industrialized countries in being able to exploit its natural resources. For oil and natural gas, this is the legacy of mismanaged Soviet energy planning that split up exploration, technical development and investment -- both in the energy sector and in the economy with energy sector revenues -- among different agencies (Russia's limited access to newer Western technologies and credit due to embargoes did not help either, but it became apparent by the 1980s than planning failures in the Brezhnev Era were causing massive waste and shortfalls). Putin was galled by the ways in which production-sharing agreements had been signed under Yeltsin's rule, but despite his nationalist ardor recognized that Russia required foreign cooperation to maintain its extractive competitiveness and export revenue reliance (60% of Russia's export revenues derive from extractive exports). 

The Wall Street Journal has noted the technical problems involved -- more so than several other business news outlets reporting on the Bazhenov field -- but unsurprisingly, it and other outlets have said little of the potential environmental costs, since hydraulic fracking would be involved. 

With Russia's lax environmental laws and permissible public debate on the environment being what it is, the only thing really standing in the way of this development, besides potentially prohibitive costs, are the Kremlin's own court politics.