Southwest Asia

On Thursday, April 2, EWI’s Preventive Diplomacy Initiatives launched a new series of expert dialogues on water security in Afghanistan and the region. The series, Alternative Futures for Afghanistan and the Stability of Southwest Asia: Improving Regional Cooperation on Water, follows a decision by the EastWest Institute’s Parliamentarians Network on Conflict Prevention and Human Security to focus on water security as a critical component of conflict prevention.

The opening session of the series, held in Brussels, brought together leaders and experts from Afghanistan and the region to forge collective action on water – the most critical of natural resources.

The key issues identified at the meeting were:

• The political sensitivity of the water issue;
• The potential of collaborative water management as a means to build trust and confidence in the region;
• The importance of sharing information;
• The need for better management of water as a precondition for social and economic development; and
• The connections between water and energy (hydropower).

This was the first in a series of five policy dialogues. Each of the next four sessions will focus on a specific water resource shared between Afghanistan and one or more of its neighbors. The series will produce an action-oriented policy paper and build towards an international conference on regional cooperation over water in December 2009.

Following are the remaining sessions in the series:

• Thursday, 30 April, 2009: Management of the Amu Darya river and Afghanistan’s relations with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan;
• Thursday, 28 May, 2009: Management of the Helmand river and Afghanistan’s relations with Iran;
• Thursday, 25 June, 2009: Management of the Kabul river and Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan;
• July, 2009 (date to be confirmed): Management of the Harirud and Murghab rivers and Afghanistan’s relations with Iran and Turkmenistan.

February 26, 2009 – Parliamentarians, government officials, and leading civil society organizations came together at EastWest Institute’s Brussels center and called for stronger international efforts to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity. At a policy dialogue organized by EWI’s Preventive Diplomacy Program, leaders emphasized the need to:

• dedicate greater resources to prevent genocide, not just respond to genocide once it has begun;
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• better equip the international community to prevent genocide;
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• improve institutional structures for genocide and conflict prevention;
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• enhance information sharing; and
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• establish a trigger mechanism for the international community to respond to threats of genocide.

The dialogue, organized under the aegis of EWI’s Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention, followed the recent release of Preventing Genocide, a landmark report from U.S. Institute of Peace’s Genocide Prevention Task Force. The dialogue is in line with the Parliamentarians Network’s guiding principles, which urge its members “to ensure that governments are legally bound to report promptly to their respective parliaments in case of pending conflict, in particular genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

“We must not look at the prevention of genocide in too much of a restrictive way,” said Hilde Vautmans, chair of the Belgian Federal Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and a member of the Parliamentarians Network. “We should look at what development can do. Building up a country’s military apparatus, the education infrastructure, the police force; that is also the prevention of genocide.”

Lawrence Woocher, a key drafter of Preventing Genocide, echoed Vautman’s statements, stressing the need to shift the debate from military intervention to a broader set of tools and resources focused on prevention efforts.

Many participants applauded the success of current genocide prevention efforts. Olivia Swaak-Goldman of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, pointed to the proactive role the ICC has recently played in Darfur and the court’s arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan.

“All past genocides, in World War II in Europe, in Rwanda, and in the Former Yugoslavia, have been carefully planned,” she said. “Now the planners know that they can be prosecuted.”

Hamdi Osman of the Sudanese Embassy in Brussels disagreed with Swaak-Goldman, urging the international community to recognize the Darfur conflict not as genocide but as a long-standing tribal conflict exacerbated by climate change and water shortages.

Swaak-Goldman suggested that the final decision to issue a warrant lies with ICC judges. If they did, she said, it would be the end of impunity for Bashir and an opportunity to prevent future crimes. (The ICC has since issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest.)

Participants also stressed the need for greater international coordination on genocide, especially between Europe and the U.S. Belgium’s Vautmans called on European states to convince the U.S. to join genocide prevention efforts.

“There needs to be a spotlight on genocide prevention as a national priority in the U.S., from the president to the public,” added USIP’s Woocher.

Other participants acknowledged the need for greater international cooperation, but reminded the group that such cooperation is still rhetoric rather than reality, as is the commitment of resources for genocide prevention and preventive action.

“Genocide is the single most cruel crime against humanity,” said Vautmans. “We can prevent it, but not alone. We should reach a state where never again we need to say ‘never again.’ ”

Ortwin Hennig, EastWest Institute vice-president and head of the Conflict Prevention Program, chaired the meeting.

At an EastWest Institute consultation on Afghanistan, leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the EU, and the U.S. agreed that the world can and must reverse the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and the region.

“There have been some positive developments, but things have in certain ways changed for the worst in the last three years,” said Hekmat Karzai, Director of Conflict and Peace Studies in Afghanistan. “We have not had a political strategy to solve the problem.”

David Kilcullen, senior fellow at the EastWest Institute and former advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, added: “The situation in Afghanistan is extremely serious, but it is possible to turn it around provided we make some changes now.”

According to the meeting participants, the most significant change required to improve conditions in Afghanistan is the active participation of the Afghan people.

“It’s all about empowering the Afghan people,” said EastWest Institute Distinguished Fellow Hank Crumpton. “Get the Afghans to protect themselves, build their roads, and grow their food. They want to do it.”

Karzai added: “Many donors do not fund projects that are demand driven – they are desire driven. Rather than you, the outsiders, doing it perfectly, let the locals do it imperfectly.”

“It is no catastrophe today,” said General Philippe Morillon, a member of the European Parliament from France. “But the problem is that our soldiers are more and more seen as occupiers. We have to go faster towards Afghanization.”

Participants agreed that global perceptions can change, and ground realities change with them. Two years ago, Iraq was widely considered a lost cause, while Afghanistan was thought to be a winnable war against extremism. Now, many predict relative stability in Iraq and near disaster in Afghanistan. The international community can transform Afghanistan as it has begun to transform Iraq, but it needs significant political will to do so.

“This is about rebuilding an international consensus on Afghanistan,” said John Mroz, President and CEO of the EastWest Institute. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Consultation participants also included Saleh Mohammed Saljoqi, General Khodaidad, and Houmayoun Tandar from Afghanistan, General Ehsan Ul Haq from Pakistan, Lt. General Satish Nambiar from India, and representatives from the EU, Russia, and the United States.

This event was part of the EastWest Institute's larger efforts to determine alternative futures for Afghanistan and Southwest Asia.

Leading figures from Afghanistan, including Dr. Zia Nezam, Afghan ambassador to the EU and NATO, General Atiqullah Baryalai, former Deputy Defense Minister for the Northern Alliance, and Mr. Hekmat Karzai, director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies, suggested next steps to be taken to ensure more coordinated international and local operations and sustainable security in Afghanistan and the region.

 Key points discussed at this EWI Study Group were:

• goals and tactics of military operations (the need for a unified counter-insurgency strategy)
• command and control arrangements for ISAF military operations (the system is very weak)
• intelligence training of Afghan forces (almost non-existent)
• honest evaluations of the waste and low efficiency in development funding
• the serious imbalance between funding for development assistance and much higher levels of funding for military operations
• the serious imbalance between attention to Kabul and the poorer conflict-prone provinces.

A detailed, private report with recommendations will be presented to the study group, and security and stability in Afghanistan will be a key topic of a high level event (by invitation only) to be held in Brussels on 17 February.

On the  invitation of Israeli and Palestinian members of EWI’s International Task Force on Preventive Diplomacy, the core group of the task force held meetings in Jerusalem and Ramallah from November 9 to 11, 2008.

Task force members agreed their program of work for 2009 and 2010, which will culminate in the Global Summit on Conflict and Security on October 10, 2010, and start reframing traditional security and development policy to include conflict prevention.

The Global Summit on Conflict and Security will provide the first ever forum that brings together traditional security elites, including military elites, and development policy decision-makers in the peace-building community. The summit will arrive at a global action program and operationalize early and effective diplomatic actions to prevent violent conflict. It will also mandate an International Panel on Conflict Prevention and Human Security, which was called for in December 2007 in the Task Force Declaration, Making Conflict Prevention Real.

In Jerusalem, the task force met with members of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum, a network representing more than 100 Palestinian and Israeli organizations that cooperate across boundaries, nationalities and religions and help build peace from the ground up.

In Ramallah, task force members met with high-ranking Palestinian leaders, including former prime minister and current chief negotiator with Israel, Mr. Ahmed Qurei (a.k.a. Abu Ala). Fatah Foreign Relations Commissioner Abdallah Frangi, hosted a dinner. The group also met with members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, three of whom agreed to join the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security.

The EastWest Institute will create a policy study group on “Alternative Futures for Afghanistan and the Stability of South West Asia”. The group will include specialists and officials with strong knowledge of the region, especially the current situation and the detail of the political power structures at local, regional and national levels.

The first activity will comprise from a series of three policy seminars Brussels based, from September to November 2008, with a view to issuing a strategy paper. The strategy paper will be presented to a high level seminar in Washington DC and be published in early 2009 based on subsequent consultations. 

Themes

• Political Power and Control: Local Politics in 2009/2010
• Selected Province Case Studies: State of the Insurgency in 2010
• Religious and Secular Society in Afghanistan
• Pakistan’s Border with Afghanistan in 2010? (Afghanistan’s neighborhood policy)
• After Karzai? Religious Conservatives in Power?
• Roles for China and Russia (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization), India and Iran

This discussion is the third installment of our Building a Platform for Moderates series is part of the EastWest Institute’s Countering Violent Extremism Initiative, which is being supported by Donald Kendall, Chairman Emeritus of the EastWest Institute and a former Chairman of Pepsi Co. This event will be held in Partnership with the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Atlanta.

The Countering Violent Extremism Initiative is examining how religious identity plays a role in public life, and we are working towards developing a truly global perspective. Violent extremism takes many forms, but some well-known examples use religion as a key marker to enhance and further their agendas. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the global phenomenon of violent extremism and how it relates to religious leadership.

A few discussion topics have been chosen to explore how this particular community views these issues and have been used in prior sessions. This process, if successful will be duplicated at a variety of locals in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia in order to draw upon the lessons, guidance, and experience of different communities. Feedback from these communities is being logged and synthesized for reporting at years end. The discussion is by invitation only.

EWI recently convened a small and select group of influential opinion leaders, decision makers, and media for a briefing of the new publication, “Countering Violent Extremism.” The report is the result of EWI’s work on violent extremism and radicalization, which aims to provide new understandings of this reality, and new techniques for prevention and counter-extremist work. The meeting, held on October 19, 2007, in New York, provided a briefing on the highlights of the publication to EWI senior staff members, project leaders and special guests followed by an open discussion and Q&A on the findings.

Participants included but were not limited to: Amb. Abdul Wahab of the Organization of the Islamic Conference mission to the UN, Brandon Declet of the U.S. House of Representatives, Michael German, Policy Counsel at the ACLU, George Schwab, President of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, Amb. S. Azmat Hassan of Seton Hall University, Samantha Job, First Secretary of the UK mission to the UN, and Msgr. Bernadito Auza, First Counsellor of the mission of the Holy See to the UN. Mr. Roger Parkinson, Chairman of the University of Toronto Press, chaired the event. The event was also attended by members of the press (Financial Times, Reuters, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies).

EWI conveened a meeting in Alabama that went extraordinary largely due to the excellent work of the participants. The participants consisted of 8 Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian faith and community leaders in the city of Birmingham.