Syria’s DAESH and the Emir of Peshawar

Balakot after the October 2005 earthquake (top).  Below is a DAESH poster

This is the weekly think piece penned in Arabic by Saudi mass media celebrity Jamal Khashoggi for pan-Arab daily al-Hayat

Balakot is a strange Pakistani town and the gateway to the Kaghan Valley.

The river Kunhar runs through the town, which is still a famous dwindling tourist destination in the region.

Balakot also falls within the Pakistani Taliban region where inhabitants have yet to reconcile with the Pakistani army. When they don’t attack a Pakistani army convoy, they suffice to torch a few pirated video movies in a shop.

The people of Balakot cherish Saudi Arabia, which helped rebuild their town when it was completely destroyed in the massive earthquake of October 8, 2005.

Syed Ahmad Shaheed (1786-1831), a Muslim activist from India against the Sikhs in the Punjab, is buried in the town.

He set up an Islamic state there in the 1830s that British Intelligence described at the time as being “Wahhabi.”

Syed Ahmad Shaheed was influenced by the teachings of Shah Waliullah (1703-1762), an Islamic reformer and founder of modern Islamic thought in India. He was credited with propagating the Madrassa (religious school) of Hadith (account of the Prophet’s deeds and sayings) and Tawhid (oneness of God).

Waliullah arrived in the Hijaz on a pilgrimage in 1724 and stayed there for eight years studying Hadith and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).

In Medina, he became a schoolmate of Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab. The pair studied under Sheikh Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi, a prominent Muslim scholar, chancellor of al-Masjid al-Nabawi and Chief Justice of Medina, who instilled in them the principles of Tawhid (oneness of God), shunning fads, following the Salaf (first generation of Muslims, including the Prophet’s companions) and the establishment of God’s Sharia on earth through Da’wah (preaching of Islam) and Jihad.

Each returned to his country to change the course of history.

Waliullah’s disciples did not only spread the concept of monotheism in Islam, but they turned out to be a thorn in the side of the British for decades by preaching Jihad.

It seems British Intelligence officers in Basra and Bombay compared their respective reports and ended labeling followers of Waliullah and his disciple Syed Ahmad “Wahhabis” because they shared the adherence of their counterparts in the Arabian Peninsula to the purity of Islam and their passion for Jihad.

But great ideas are often trashed by overzealous followers lacking experience and wisdom.

After Syed Ahmad succeeded in turning the Pashtun tribes into Mujahideen, he endeared to them an Islam, which is unadulterated by fads and myths. He had them uphold Sharia instead of Pashtuwali, which the non-written ethical code and traditional lifestyle that the indigenous Pashtun people follow.

At the same time, he set up in that remote part of India an Islamic state after defeating the Sikhs and their army there. He thus entered Peshawar victorious in 1830 amid a warm welcome from its people and tribal elders.

Syed Ahmad did not stay there long.

After spending a few celebratory weeks, he appointed a deputy leader, Mullah Mazhar Ali, and retreated to his mountain stronghold among the Pashtun tribes. Inside two months, Mazhar Ali squandered all what Syed Ahmad achieved over a decade by antagonizing the Peshawar region’s population.

For several months in 1830, Syed Ahmad tried to conciliate established power hierarchies, but before the end of 1830 an organized uprising occurred and his close aides in Peshawar and plain villages were murdered and his Islamic movement retreated to the hills.

Syed Ahmad was killed in Balakot by the Sikh army in 1831.

Thus a genuine liberation and religious reform movement was defeated because of a few follies.

History always repeats itself.

Why this long story?

The reason is none other than the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” organization, better known by its Arabic acronym DAESH, and what it is doing to the Syrian revolution now passing through its darkest moments since its outbreak two-and-a-half years ago.

As soon as it joined the fray, DAESH looked down at all the other rebel organizations. It haughtily asked all of them to obey its Emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who insists on remaining incognito and never received a pledge of allegiance in a public place.

Let no one believe that DAESH’s use of the word “state” in the organization’s name or the designation of its leader as “Emir al-Mu’minin” (leader of the faithful) express a whim or a lust for power.

In effect, it is an abbreviation contrived by DAESH to win recognition of its juridical rule. In other words, a “victorious sect” is demanding the loyalty of every Muslim who is aware of its existence and is mindful of the designation of its Emir by its faithful.

Accordingly, the group’s argument goes, the Muslim should pay allegiance or obedience to DAESH or be sentenced to death as an alien breaking away from the congregation.

From Egypt to Syria, it is the season of Fatwas (or legal judgments) concerning Takfir (the practice of one Muslim declaring another an unbeliever) and murder.

While rebel commanders have been forced to accommodate DAESH on the ground, having been starved of cash and weapons, and now that people realize the alternative to DAESH is the Syrian regime, voices criticizing the group are growing louder by the day.

One preacher called DAESH fighters “outsiders” who needed to be eradicated before retractin, saying his words were taken out of context.

The preacher in question can’t be blamed. DAESH’s reach is long and rough. It also has links to hardliners living in our midst who often justify its actions and intimidate its critics.

Time is bound change all that. A few months ago the media was describing Jabhat al-Nusra as a prototype of extremism and an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Politicians were warning against it and the Americans were using it as a scarecrow not to arm the rebels.

Today, Jabhat al-Nusra looks like a guardian angel compared to DAESH.

Jabhat al-Nusa has even consolidated its relations with moderate Islamist rebel groups such as the Tawheed and Ahrar al-Sham brigades, which since their inception opposed suicide operations and the targeting of minorities.

It is only a matter of time before DAESH takes on these moderate Islamist organizations.

DAESH is akin to the Emir of Peshawar, who squandered years of hard work with his follies and Fatwas.

DAESH is the group that will bring nothing but ruin to Syria’s people and neighbors. It will bring nothing but ruin wherever it roosts, including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, the sub-Saharan desert, Yemen and Somalia.

Could an apolitical religious summit bring together the Islamic nation’s God-fearing scholars to blackball DAESH and its Khawarij (outsiders) and rebuild the true moral code and religious law of Islam?

I doubt!

Syria: “When doing nothing is a policy”

Of all the transcripts, news and views on Syria I could assess this morning – and they were many – I fancied this opinion by the brilliant Richard Cohen, who writes a weekly political column for the Washington Post that appears on Tuesdays. This week’s is titled “When doing nothing is a policy”.

By Richard Cohen

In the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” the attempt to unite the Arabs comes apart in Damascus. Lawrence bangs on his desk with the butt of his gun to bring the assembly to order, but to no avail. Chaos erupts. Now something similar is happening in Syria. A mountain of dead (70,000 or so), not to mention an approaching regional bloodbath, suggests that once again things are coming apart. Still, life does not exactly imitate art. Lawrence of Arabia at least tried to do something. Barack of D.C. just sat on his hands.

Actually, he sat on his polling numbers. The president’s refusal to do anything material to end the Syrian civil war is a policy long suspected of having two elements — fear of blowback and fear of the nightly news. Now comes a book from a one-time administration insider who bluntly and altogether convincingly outlines the role domestic political considerations played in the White House’s approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal of policymakers was “not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion.” Syria, it seems, has been no exception.

The former insider is the resplendently credentialed Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and, most pertinently, former senior adviser to the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that capacity, Nasr says he saw the almost daily humbling of Holbrooke, a volcano of a diplomat who was forever erupting ideas, plans and strategies — almost always to no avail. In his telling, the White House was some sort of high school cafeteria where Holbrooke was always being shunned and given the silent treatment. He blames “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics” for this. Mean Girls, not the Wise Men, made American policy.

Nasr set down his views in a book called “The Dispensable Nation.” It will be published in April, but samizdat copies of it are already being circulated. In a sense, the book only confirms the general impression that Obama is a man without a foreign policy. He had naive aspirations — a world to be changed by the transformative power of a good speech — but no clear path to achieve anything. Nasr describes his dismay when the surge in Afghanistan was announced in tandem with a pullout date. In his head, Secretary of State John Kerry, the new implementer of Obama’s contradictory policy, must now hear a reprise of the question he once asked about his own war: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”

Nasr’s regional specialty was Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the thrust of what he says supports the view that Obama shied from intervening in Syria out of domestic political considerations. A president who was campaigning as the peace candidate — out of Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, too — could not risk anything bold in Syria. The country fell into the margin of error. “It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations,” Nasr writes.

Boldness is what the situation in Syria demanded. A civil war that could have been contained has instead become a sprawling, regionwide bar fight. Arms could have been shipped to the insurgents; a no-fly zone could have been imposed. Much could have been done. Instead, Obama merely called for Bashar al-Assad to go and, for some reason he, like Rep. Eric Cantor or somebody, remains immovable.

The stakes here are enormous. Lebanon teeters, swamped with refugees. Jordan, too, is overwhelmed. The Kurds in Syria’s north may, as they have in nearby Iraq, establish an autonomous zone — and Turkey will not be pleased. The jihadists are on the move, hungry for Syria’s vast store of chemical weapons. Israel watches, nervously. What if Hezbollah gets its hands on chemical weapons? An Obama administration, afraid of blowback, may well have allowed the Middle East to blow apart.

The battle for Damascus is now engaged. The war next month enters its third year, a humanitarian crisis that has been permitted to fester under the rubric of foreign policy realism. But another realism is now apparent: Inaction has bred the manufacture of orphans — a carnage, a horror, a reprimand to inaction. Life imitates art. Damascus is where it all came apart in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Damascus is where it is coming apart in reality.

Is Turkey-Syria on Pakistan-Afghanistan path?

Syria's Assad and Turkey's Erdogan in the good old days

Can Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in tandem with Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, turn the tables on Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

And does Ankara’s support of the protracted Syrian revolution risk wrecking Turkey the same way the Afghan war trashed Pakistan?

The possibilities are tenable, according to Jihad el-Zein, an old hand Lebanese political analyst.

According to his line of reasoning, penned in two installments (one last Tuesday and the second yesterday) for Beirut’s independent daily an-Nahar, criticism of Erdogan and his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) by the opposition and media has been joined by big business, which is now calling for much greater transparency by the state.

Zein notes that Umit Boyner, chairwoman of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD) and the leading Turkish business lobbyist, warned recently, “We are moving away from the rule of law day by day… We are watching the power struggle within the Turkish state with horror and an increased sense of insecurity.” Last week, she said polarization, hatred and enmity on the home front risked wasting Turkey’s “social, political and economic achievements.”

Meantime, says Zein, Ankara’s backing of regime change in Syria is circuitously exasperating Turkey’s problems with its Kurds and Alevis.

Of a total Turkish population of about 75 million, an estimated 15 million are Kurds and about another 15 million are Alevis. And the two sizable minorities are concentrated in Turkey’s southeast, next door to Syria.

Turkish Alevis and Syria's Alawites are distinctive communities and represent different strains of Islam (see Are Syrian Alawites and Turkish Alevis the same?). But a sectarian Sunnite-versus-Alawite conflict in Syria could potentially spill over into Turkey, causing tensions between its Alevis, who express sympathy for the Alawite-dominated Assad regime, and the government in Ankara.

Mired in its own conflict with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the southeast, Ankara cannot afford another major security problem there with the Alevis.

Turkey has an 882-km border with Syria, a second 499-km one with Iran and a third 352-km border with Iraq.

Inflamed by Syria, in concert with Iran and Iraq, Turkey's long-simmering war with the PKK has escalated in recent months, reaching death tolls unseen in more than a decade.

"Turkey's Kurdish conflict is becoming more violent, with more than 700 dead in 14 months, the highest casualties in 13 years," according to an International Crisis Group report.

Listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the EU and the U.S., the PKK has been carrying out a bloody separatist war in Turkey's southeast since 1984. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict so far.

More importantly, Zein notes, a video released by Doğan news agency in late August showed nine Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) lawmakers, including BDP co-chair Gültan Kişanak, hugging and chatting with PKK militants along a highway in the eastern province of Hakkari.

The lawmakers told reporters the meeting was a chance encounter and not planned in advance.

And this week, Istanbul’s pro-BDP legislator Sebahat Tuncel was sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison for being a member of the PKK.

To borrow from USIAD’s Umit Boyner, says Zein, how does all this affect the future of Turkey’s achievements?

“There is no doubt,” he writes, “Turkey is today in Pakistan’s previous and current circumstances vis-à-vis Afghanistan since its occupation by the Soviet Union.

“The Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan at the hands of the Mujahedeen. But Pakistan has not been the same since. Its instability became entwined with its role in the Afghan war that has yet to come to a close.”

True, Pakistan was intended to be the Indian Muslims’ nation-state. It was far from being fundamentalist; its elites were secular-minded; and its army was aligned with the West.

“What led to Pakistan’s ruin is the leading role it played over the past three decades in the Afghanistan quagmire, according to Zein. “What disintegrated first and foremost was Pakistani society. The hundreds of thousands of fundamentalists – initially funded by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and backed by Iran – who crossed Pakistan on the way to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, destabilized Pakistani cities, provinces and society -- from Peshawar to Punjab to Sindh.

“This happened while the Pakistani army kept consolidating ties with the Taliban, notwithstanding its alliance with Washington.

“In short, the Mujahedeen won in Afghanistan but Pakistan seriously undermined its elites, institutions and economy in the process. The result is the spectacular metamorphosis of a declared nuclear weapons state to a quasi-rogue nation.”

Though always more successful economically than Pakistan, even in the era of its military coups, Turkey was fated in the 21st century to become the principal springboard for supporting the Syrian revolution, which evokes memories of Pakistan’s role against the Soviets.

Today, says Zein, “Turkey – but not Jordan or North Lebanon – is the main launching pad for action against the Assad regime.” This means Ankara should – and in fact started to – adapt to a new ballgame. It should attune to the influx of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, insurgents and defectors as well as Arab and non-Arab fighters.

“But what if the Syrian war dragged on?” Zein wonders. “What if the long Kurdish furrows along Syria’s northeastern border persisted for years as ‘Pakistan-ization’ turned Gaziantep into a new Peshawar and the road between Urfa and Azaz into a new Khyber Pass?

“There is no turning back in Syria, where regime change is inevitable. But what if the transition period proved drawn-out and impaired Turkey’s national fabric in the process of winning change in Syria?

“Turkey joined the Arab Spring fray from the Syrian door, which turned out to be the most dangerous, without being prepared.

“Erdogan gambled on inheriting Iran after a quick Syrian regime exit.

“He underestimated the enmity of the Russian Bear in the vicinity and overlooked the aptitude of the Saudi Camel to be Tehran’s inheritor in Syria instead of Ankara…”