David Ignatius is always good on the Middle East; he's obviously a man who spends time thinking about the issues there. He is quite right to say that military and intelligence operations against Al-Qaeda are not enough. No matter how many insurgents we shoot and training camps we blow up, there are always more. The Middle East seems to generate more violent malcontents as it there were a factory somewhere producing them.
But I don't think Ignatius quite gets how unimportant the Arab-Israeli issue is in most of the Middle East. It's important, all right, but most Yemenis have concerns closer to home than Gaza or Hebron. Yemen has a lousy government which has never really integrated North Yemen and South Yemen into a coherent administration. Yemen is poor, very poor, in a region of oil-rich countries. Yemen's educational system may be worse than others in the Arab countries. So there is a continual flow of the undereducated, the overeducated but unemployed, the poorly educated and rootless, and those educated in all the wrong things by madrassahs and imams.
So, in addition to George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton spending some time working the Middle East, and beyond the arm-twisting President Obama needs to administer to Bibi Netanyahu and Abu Mazen, we need to be undertaking a broader effort to improve education, governance, civil society, and economic conditions in the countries of the Arab Middle East.
For a really good starting place for a discussion of these issues, try Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. I read it last year, and now I have my own copy ($18.00 in trade paperback from Random House). In particular, read Part Two: The Problems of the Modern Middle East.) It consist of two powerful chapters on what is wrong in the Middle East. These are the problems that underly the issues we in the U.S. have been trying to deal with. In Pollack's view, we need to dig deeper, stay longer, and take a broader view. Sounds like work, doesn't it?
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Showing posts with label Kenneth M. Pollack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenneth M. Pollack. Show all posts
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A Path Out of the Desert - Some Comments
I recently posted a few words about Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert on my Facebook page.
A Path out of the Desert. Terrific book on grand strategy for the U.S. in the Middle East. The author is Kenneth Pollack. This is one of the few books I've read that suggest to me that I really need my own copy. Pollack is way beyond military solutions for the problems of the Arab Muslim world, and, based on my experience, he's right on about the need to reform education.
Bibliographical note: Pollack, Kenneth M. A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. New York: Random House, 2008. xlvii + 539 pages.
One of the strengths of this book is that it delivers most of what it promises. When most people, like the retired colonels and generals on various TV networks, talk about "strategy," they don't really mean strategy. Sometimes they're addressing tactical questions, sometimes they're addressing theater problems, but those aren't matters of strategic scope. A real strategic principle, like the "Anaconda" strategy of the American Civil War, or containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, takes into account the broad political and economic features of the situation, and the interaction of initiatives and challenges on various fronts.
For example, it makes no sense to speak of a "strategy" for Afghanistan. For our efforts in Afghanistan to succeed, we need a strategy for dealing with Islamic extremism throughout the Muslim world. We need principles to work in Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizia, Pakistan, and India, as well as in Afghanistan itself. We need to integrate our Afghanistan policy into our general strategy. The problem at the moment is that we don't seem to have a grand strategy.
Although Pollack confines himself to the Arab Middle East, with some references to Turkey and Iran, the general principles he enunciates, as well as his prescriptions for action, are applicable from Morocco to Indonesia, from Somalia to Bosnia, wherever the Islamist ideology is opposed to American interests.
Read this book! Then we can discuss it.
More later,
Glenn A. Knight
A Path out of the Desert. Terrific book on grand strategy for the U.S. in the Middle East. The author is Kenneth Pollack. This is one of the few books I've read that suggest to me that I really need my own copy. Pollack is way beyond military solutions for the problems of the Arab Muslim world, and, based on my experience, he's right on about the need to reform education.
Bibliographical note: Pollack, Kenneth M. A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. New York: Random House, 2008. xlvii + 539 pages.
One of the strengths of this book is that it delivers most of what it promises. When most people, like the retired colonels and generals on various TV networks, talk about "strategy," they don't really mean strategy. Sometimes they're addressing tactical questions, sometimes they're addressing theater problems, but those aren't matters of strategic scope. A real strategic principle, like the "Anaconda" strategy of the American Civil War, or containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, takes into account the broad political and economic features of the situation, and the interaction of initiatives and challenges on various fronts.
For example, it makes no sense to speak of a "strategy" for Afghanistan. For our efforts in Afghanistan to succeed, we need a strategy for dealing with Islamic extremism throughout the Muslim world. We need principles to work in Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizia, Pakistan, and India, as well as in Afghanistan itself. We need to integrate our Afghanistan policy into our general strategy. The problem at the moment is that we don't seem to have a grand strategy.
Although Pollack confines himself to the Arab Middle East, with some references to Turkey and Iran, the general principles he enunciates, as well as his prescriptions for action, are applicable from Morocco to Indonesia, from Somalia to Bosnia, wherever the Islamist ideology is opposed to American interests.
Read this book! Then we can discuss it.
More later,
Glenn A. Knight
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