The “Qatar” crisis of recent vintage is vastly interesting from several perspectives: its still shrouded origins; the divisive headache it represents within the U.S. policymaking apparatus, where, to all appearances, State Department and White House views contradict one another; and the mystery of how it will all play out in the end. But one aspect of the crisis has gone nearly unnoticed: It highlights the continuing “second coming” of the “friendly tyrants” dilemma.
Qatar is a U.S. ally, which hosts the most important U.S. air base in the region at al-Odeid, but one that has made consistent and deliberate trouble for other local U.S. allies, and, worse, that has given aid and comfort to a range of radical Islamist organizations—some of them decidedly violent—that threatens friendly countries and the United States itself. It has been doing these things for years, and yet has remained an ally.
Qatari behavior has represented neither a unique nor a new dilemma for U.S. policymakers. During the Cold War the U.S. government maintained useful relations with a range of authoritarian regimes as lesser evils in the face of the struggle to contain Soviet communism. That policy did not go uncriticized at the time, and the criticisms did not go unrefuted.1 Since the Cold War, a similarly pragmatic attitude toward authoritarian allies has prevailed for other reasons, and this attitude as well has attracted criticism. Each case is different, but as a set the “friendly tyrants” dilemma persists in altered form in the post-Cold War period. To understand at a deeper level how the Qatar crisis engages U.S. policy interests, a review of its “friendly tyrants” precursors—particularly as focused on 911 and its aftermath—may prove useful.
Just ten days after the terror attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the nation and said, at the least, two notable things. First, having concluded that the attacks, although conducted by a non-state actor, were aided and abetted by state regimes, he said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” (This was a bipartisan sentiment, for just a week before then-Senator Hillary Clinton had said: “Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”) Second, President Bush pleaded for “moral clarity” in the face of a national crisis.
This was music to ears of the Manichean-minded American public, who prefer their international conflicts drawn on the template of a passion play in a nation, wrote G.K. Chesterton, “with the soul of a church.” But there was an obvious problem with the “moral clarity” imperative: The three regimes that had played by far the most critical roles over the years in nurturing the kind of religion-inflected political radicalism that led to 911—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan—were allies of the United States. Were the governments of these three countries likely to be with us or against us—or would they be, somehow, some of both? How was the Bush Administration going to coax “moral clarity” out of that?2 The old saw—“With friends like these, who needs enemies?”—seemed to say it all.
Of course, most Americans knew very little at the time about the role these three countries played in the backdrop to 911. The war against Iraq, begun in March 2003, further distracted and confused undereducated Americans into thinking that Iraq had more to do with 911 than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt. But to one extent or another, responsible U.S. officials knew the gist, and this created a strange dynamic. The governments of all three allied countries feared an aroused, wrathful America in the days and weeks after 911, and so tried to make it seem that they were with us, not against us. And the Bush Administration, realizing that it needed each government of the three countries to be part of the solution to a new and acute problem, became self-interestedly reluctant to recite their past sins in public. The result was a drama played out as a mutual pantomime of acceptable duplicity. If this qualified as moral clarity, it was moral clarity with three huge twists.
Each of the three cases was different. It was easiest for the Egyptian government to make the case that it was on the American side because its role in 911 was the least direct and the most remote and inadvertent. The Mubarak regime and its post-revolutionary predecessors under Nasser and Sadat were resolutely anti-salafi, for they saw radical, politicized Islam as a threat to themselves. They tried to suborn al-Azhar into doing their bidding, and as much of the Egyptian Sunni clerical leadership spread throughout the country as well. But combined with their governance frailties, their heavy authoritarian hand backfired, helping not only the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to thrive, but also more radical and violent groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad—one of whose leaders was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Zawahiri and his associates plagued Egypt with outbreaks of political violence, which led the state to crack down harder. From the late 1970s into the 1990s a deepening downward spiral of “dawa” and “muhabarat led to a series of increasingly harsh government crackdowns and subsequent relaxations. Mass arrests of suspected Islamists, on a few major occasions under Sadat and again after his assassination in October 1981, did not succeed in capturing all potential militants, however. The result was that a filtering process ensued over many years, which left the most radical individuals still at large comprising a much higher percentage of the anti-government movement as a whole. (Some fear that President al-Sisi’s current course could produce a similar, unwanted result.)
Ultimately, “muhabarat” prevailed in Egypt and al-Zawahiri, having spent three years in an Egyptian prison after the Sadat murder and having met Osama bin-Laden in Peshawar in 1987, fled the country. He ultimately brought the now mostly exiled Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization together with bin-Laden’s group to form al-Qaeda, which set up shop first in Sudan, then moved during 1996 into Afghanistan at the invitation of the Taliban regime. So, therefore, on to the Pakistani case.
Pakistan’s dilemma was, and remains, very different. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance relationship has been on balance difficult and disappointing for both sides. The two countries have in a way been inevitable but terrible allies, and the reason is not hard to understand: They did not and still do not share the same putative enemy. U.S. Cold War policy, always aimed ultimately toward containing the Soviet Union and frustrating its ambitions, latched onto Pakistan because it could not have the larger South Asian prize: India. For Pakistan, the Soviets were never the main problem: India was.
Before 2001, this asymmetry polluted a whole range of bilateral issues, from counter-proliferation policy to development aid levels and back again. After the end of the USSR in December 1991 and the subsequent gradual improvement in U.S.-Indian relations, things changed for the worse in U.S.-Pakistani relations. But after September 11, 2001, everything changed again, threatening to get much worse. The potential for abject deterioration was punctuated sharply by the 2004 A.Q. Khan affair, which linked in U.S. eyes Pakistan’s proliferation sins to its complicity with terrorism in Afghanistan.
Very soon after 911, the Bush Administration sent Deputy Secretary to State Richard Armitage to Pakistan to read the riot act to then Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf got the message, and Pakistani policy became War-on-Terror friendly—at least rhetorically and in some non-trivial respects actually. But the Pakistani military and intelligence service—which were and remain the parts of the Pakistani government that matter in this policy domain—never went “all in” with American interests. There were two reasons for their hedging at the time, one of which still remains today.
The first reason concerned genuine sympathy for radical Islamist thinking within the Pakistani establishment, a trend that had been strengthened during the period of Mohammed Zia al-Haq’s tenure. That reason no longer prevails because indulgence for radical thinking backfired in a big way, between 2008 and 2011 bringing terrorism and general mayhem deep into Pakistan itself.
The second reason, however, is more important. Afghanistan is Pakistan’s defense-in-depth against India, and so must be politically contained from Islamabad insofar as possible. But it is at the same time a permanent source of irredentist danger, a fact of life based on ethno-linguistic realities. Pashtuns are a plurality in Afghanistan, and only a small minority amid Pakistan’s much larger population. But there are still significantly more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, which is one reason why the border—the Durand Line drawn by the British during the time of the Raj—in mountainous Waziristan has never been agreed between the two countries. Afghanistan and Pakistan nearly went to war in 1954 over such matters, when Kabul tried to woo Pakistan’s Pashtuns and the Pakistanis viewed that effort as an existential threat to the country’s territorial integrity.
Especially since the Zia era, most Pakistani strategists have reasoned that the best way to defang or dilute the attraction of Pashtun nationalism emanating from Kabul—and hence protect Pakistan against dismemberment and defenselessness against India regarding Kashmir—is to emphasize an Islamic basis for rule in Afghanistan. That is what led Pakistan, through the ISI, to support a range of Islamist-oriented but still mainly tribally organized Pashtuns, including the infamous Haqqani network. It is what led it ultimately to support the establishment in 1996 of the Taliban regime, and with it the Taliban’s hospitality for al-Qaeda leaders and training camps.
Senior American policymakers underestimated the dangers of the Taliban-Qaeda connection before 911. But after 911, alas, most could not seem to bring themselves to understand the odd ethno-linguistic geometry described just above, and so thought that Pakistani policy could be flipped on a dime and made to stay that way given enough U.S. pressure and aid entreaties.
Some years later, in 2003-04, I offered my view to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage that the Pakistanis would say whatever we wanted to hear, and probably engage in a fair bit of self-interested cooperation with us, but that their perception of core national interests would prevent them from burning bridges with those we now considered dangerously important “bad guys.” The Pakistanis knew that we would eventually leave the region, but Afghanistan and India would always be there; the Pakistanis, therefore, could not be persuaded to do things that abraded against their long-term sense of survival. They would continue to hedge their bets and just hope we wouldn’t notice, or that our ire would remain below the threshold of bold rebuke.
In retrospect, however, they trusted Musharraf, seeing in him not just an ally of the moment but someone who genuinely shared their detestation of Islamist extremism—and that was true. What was also true, however, was that Musharraf could not snap his fingers and change the mindset of the entire Pakistani military/intelligence complex, and of course he would not be in power forever in any case. The fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, and that Pakistani authorities very implausibly denied knowing about it after the U.S. Special Forces raid that killed him there on May 2, 2011, seems—to me, anyway—to have vindicated my analysis.
This problem is still not over, because it cannot be over, the confluence of geography and demography being what it is. And now we see the problem crop up again in the decision of the Trump Administration to double down, to some still-unclear extent, in Afghanistan to prevent a recurrence of Taliban rule. By now people like Generals Mattis, McMaster, and Dunford realize that with a sanctuary in Pakistan, it will prove impossible for any government in Kabul—even a competent and incorruptible one—to decisively prevail over the insurgency, which remains largely a Pashtun tribal affair. Predictably, the recent decision to “hold the fort” in Afghanistan has shone a troubling light on Pakistan and the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Yet what is predictable to those who grasp the underlying motivational realities is not predictable to those who don’t, or, for some unknown reason, just won’t.
And then, behind door number three, there is Saudi Arabia. Like the Pakistanis, the Saudi regime rode the salafi tiger. The Pakistanis lost their grip first and nearly become the tiger’s dinner. Then, with the rise of ISIS in particular, it was the Saudis’ turn to fall off. But this took a very long time, during which the well-funded propagation of Wahhabi Islam far and wide—especially after the events of 1979 supplied both the funds and the catalyst of competition with revolutionary Shi’a Iran—upset a traditional balance within the Sunni world that went back nearly to Abbasid times. The Saudis thought they were planting the seeds of fruit trees and beautiful flowers; what turned up instead, or at least in addition, were noxious weeds of the “little shop of horrors” sort—in other words, giant Venus fly traps that ungratefully devoured their owners and tenders.
We have since debated endlessly whether this seeding of the Sunni Islamist terror menace was the work of the Saudi government, or merely of private wealthy Saudi citizens….and assorted princes. This matters to lawyers hired either to sue or defend governments, but for most practical purposes it makes no difference. If an authoritarian government like the one in Riyadh did not want such proselytizing efforts to continue, they would have stopped.
But they were not stopped because the fact of the matter is that Saudi Arabia is more or less stuck in a policy orientation just as Pakistan is stuck, only not for the same reason. In the Saudi case it is not geopolitics admixed with volatile ethnic realities that constitutes the problem, it is the very constituency of the Saudi state. The state, and the late-18th century fundamentalist movement that preceded it, has always been an inseparable conjunction of the Al-Saud and the Al-Wahhab. It is a nation with the soul of a mosque, to slightly twist Chesterton’s remark about America. For outsiders to ask that this conjunction be cut asunder in favor of the former is roughly comparable to asking Americans to junk the U.S. Constitution.
There has been positive change in recent years in Saudi Arabia, and more is likely to follow. With respect to state policy, the orders handed out to security and intelligence personnel make clear that over at least the past two or so years the Saudi leadership considers radical violent Islamism to be a mortal threat to the Kingdom. It now reads its interests as maintaining the recent policy change, but this does not mean that Saudi leaders have suddenly stopped being who they are. So as is the case with Pakistan, there are limits here. If we expect the Saudis to blow up the compact that defines the only political culture the country has ever known, and that defines Saudi relations with the rest of the Muslim world it aspires to lead, we are bound to be disappointed.
So we should therefore want regime change in Saudi Arabia, right? Absolutely not! The stupidities of Saudi bashing are obvious to those who understand that the only available alternatives to the Al-Saud as it exists today are all worse from a U.S. interests perspective.
What does this mean for U.S. policy going forward? Obviously the problem of having allies who sometimes act in ways inimical to U.S. interests persists and is not limited to the three “911” countries discussed above, but also includes Qatar—and Turkey as well. The former is enmeshed in a range of military activities with the United States and the latter is a NATO treaty ally. Both have supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Qatar makes it all too easy for its wealthy citizens to fund al-Qaeda as a more “moderate” form of radicalism than ISIS, all in the guise of “charity.” There is evidence that for a time Turkey quietly supported ISIS against the Assad regime through its intelligence apparatus before it, too, fell off the tiger and got mauled when ISIS started recruiting Turkish nationals and setting off bombs in Turkish cities.
Seen from the perspective of American government officials, the behavior of the governments described here is in one sense seen in the context of a single theory of the case—they all are or have been “friends” who have acted otherwise—and in another sense all are different. Officials who know more about the Muslim world tend to recognize significant distinctions among the countries, while those in positions of authority with broader and usually more political orientations tend to conflate them. Knowledgeable officials, for example, can certainly distinguish between the incendiary content of Al-Jazeera and the anti-radical content of al-Arabiya. Similarly, knowledgeable officials understand that, at the present time, the Pakistani security and intelligence services compose a problem—mainly as concerns Afghanistan—in a way that Saudi security and intelligence services do not. As a general rule, the typical American fears Islamist terrorism a great deal more than does any serious expert, which is why the orientation to the problem of politically reared and oriented officials differs from that of issue-dedicated foreign and civil service personnel.
The best way to sum up what it all means is to recall Wallace Stevens’s beautiful and wise observation that, “Our paradise is the imperfect.” Compared to small and vulnerable polities, great powers have many more choices, but those choices do not include being able to pick perfect friends or, for that matter, perfectly horrid enemies. The world is all mixed up, and all germane political relationships are themselves mixed. This is a fact of life that serious people learn to live and deal with, while unserious people seem to have nothing better to do than to make trouble for them.
Alas, Americans do not particularly like ambiguity, nor do they have much patience for it on those rare occasions that they recognize it for what it is. Lyndon Johnson had it exactly right when he said at a November 1967 press conference, “Our American people, when we get in a contest of any kind—whether it is a war, an election, a football game, or whatever it is—want it decided and decided quickly; get in or get out.” So there will always be complaints about the shortcomings of American allies, and in some cases it will lead among the aforementioned unserious people to a desire either to have no allies or to insist that the U.S. government treat the allies it has like scum. This was true throughout the Cold War when, as noted, successive U.S. administrations sought and tried to maintain useful relations with a range of authoritarian regimes—Somoza’s Nicaragua, the Shah’s Iran, Marcos’s Philippines, Franco’s Spain, and many others—as lesser evils compared to the Soviet Union and its bloc of captive nations. Lesser evils are still evils, of course, and so it follows that maintaining these relationships bore a price in both reputation and sometimes behavior inimical to U.S. interests, at least at the margins. A good example of the latter is how our ally, the Shah of Iran, used the October 1973 Middle East War to maneuver via OPEC to create the first price-quadrupling oil shock, which hurt not just Western economies but the Western alliance’s capacity to resist Soviet expansion. Some, mostly left-of-center idealists, exaggerated these costs as against their prophylactic benefits, protesting this pragmatism as unbecoming of American values and, in their view, ultimately American interests, too. Thus, as suggested above, did this expression of realism within an overriding idealist framework produce what became known as the “friendly tyrants” dilemma.
With the Cold War over, the logic for enduring lesser evils weakened but, alas, other practical considerations, plus the inertia of habit, led another succession of administrations to maintain relations with “friendly” authoritarian states such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—to name but a few. Whereas during the Cold War the U.S. policy rationale for doing so was the same in all cases, after the Cold War the monolithic anti-Soviet rationale fractionated into rationales, one each fitting the case to hand. Egypt mattered because its March 1979 peace treaty with Israel constituted a strategic bulwark for regional stability and was believed to serve as a platform from which Arab-Israeli peace could be expanded—as indeed it was with Jordan in October 1984. Pakistan mattered because of concern for stability in South Asia, and due to troubling nuclear weapons proliferation issues. Saudi Arabia mattered largely because of its central role in the global energy economy.
Then came 911, and some people who seemed serious suddenly began acting otherwise. President Bush said, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated (in a June 20, 2005 speech in Cairo) that, “for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” This was bad history and a sign of worse policy.
The fact is that the United States did achieve enough stability in the Middle East to prevail in the Cold War; on balance, the policy was a noteworthy success from the perspective of U.S. interests. But far worse, the statement implied that had it not been for U.S. policy those sixty years, democracy would have prevailed in the region—that, in point of fact, the condition of the region’s political cultures was somehow America’s fault. For even if democracy had not broken out all over the region on its own, the U.S. government supposedly had the power to bring it about but didn’t use that power—as the new policy, the “forward strategy for freedom,” proposed exactly to do.
This argument, now suddenly being made by self-avowed conservatives instead of leftists as in the earlier “friendly tyrants” debate, was not wrong in any simple way: It verged on the mystically insane. The urge to be transformational on a whole-regional or even global scale that arises from time to time in official American thinking resembles a secularized version of Christian messianic longing, so that many Muslims were not wrong to see this policy through the religious prism that comes naturally to most. To the originators and supporters of the “forward strategy for freedom” policy, who were unaware of the real origins of their own enthusiasm, the expression of this perception from within the region only proved to them that Muslim political cultures truly needed to be transformed, the sooner the better.
Alas, things have not worked out so well. As the failure of several quixotic ventures in “nation-building” (a misnomer for state-building) have shown, the U.S. government lacks the ability to transform other political cultures in its own image, especially non-Western ones that for historical reasons remain organized along mostly patrimonial lines instead of the Weberian ones common to modern Western polities.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for all his sins, was once pilloried unfairly for saying that, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” But this is true. Just as true is that at any given forced decision point the U.S. government has to make its way in the world with the allies and associates it has, not the ones it might want or wish to have. Yes, we had and still have some allies who, through various sins of commission and omission, have in effect, whether deliberately or not, helped incubate the menace of terrorism. A wise policymaker does not waggle his figure at them to score political points or, worse, try to turn them into enemies by one means or another.
Nor does a wise policymaker do nothing. Rather, he (or she) endeavors insofar as interests require to moderate or more decisively change their behavior. That requires forging and maintaining bureaucratic consensus within the U.S. government and, subsequently, demonstrating tenacity, patience, respect for others’ circumstances, and hence an awareness of the limits of the possible. Serious people only need apply.