World update: October 15 2019

Stories from Syria, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and more

THESE DAYS IN HISTORY

October 14, 1066: William the Conqueror’s Norman army defeats the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson and his army at the Battle of Hastings. Godwinson’s death secured the Norman takeover of England.

October 14, 1322: A Scottish army under Robert the Bruce defeats the English army of King Edward II at the Battle of Old Byland, securing Scottish independence.

October 15, 1529: The Siege of Vienna ends

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Operation Peace Spring rolls ever onward, for truly there can be no peace without a spring of it, and sometimes that spring is actually war. Or something. I don’t know, it’s all a little metaphorical for me. Anyhoo, Turkey’s benevolent invasion of northeastern Syria has now displaced some 275,000 people according to Syrian Kurdish authorities (who may be shading that number a little high to maximize the impact, so take it with a grain of salt). The Syrian Democratic Forces militia says that it lost 23 of its fighters on Monday, while at least two people were killed by an SDF cross-border artillery attack in Turkey’s Mardin province on Tuesday.

Updated map showing Turkish gains around Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn and the movement of the Syrian army into Manbij (Ermanarich via Wikimedia Commons)

With the Syrian military deploying into northeastern Syria, the geographical scope of Turkey’s invasion seemed to narrow a bit on Tuesday, with a focus on the potential flashpoint town of Manbij and the border town of Ras al-Ayn. Regarding the latter, the SDF has apparently used its extensive tunnel network to retake a significant portion of the town from the Turks and their Syrian rebel proxies, and thereby push Turkey back off of a chunk of the important M4 highway that its forces had previously seized. Ras al-Ayn is, along with Tel Abyad, one of Turkey’s two initial main objectives in this offensive, and the highway is one of the key SDF arteries allowing it to move forces around the border region.

Manbij, meanwhile, is under an uneasy peace after being occupied by the Syrian military, which beat Turkish forces to the punch thanks to the deal the Syrian government cut with the SDF over the weekend. Turkey says that at least one of its soldiers was killed in an attack by Kurdish forces outside of Manbij on Tuesday, but if the Turks are looking to retaliate they’ll have to go through Russian forces that have deployed to Manbij to serve as a buffer. The Russians have taken over abandoned US military positions around Manbij and are now patrolling the front line between the Turks and their proxies and the Syrians and their proxies (among which seems to be a sizable contingent of Kurds, to give you a sense of how quickly allegiances are changing here). Nevertheless, the Turkish government is still talking as though it expects to take control of Manbij at some point.

The Turks are also reportedly attacking the border town of Kobane, after having allegedly promised Washington that they would not. Which doesn’t bode well for the possibility of a DC-brokered ceasefire, something that now seems to have become a priority for the Trump administration even though it was the Trump administration that allowed this invasion to get going in the first place.

A ceasefire seems unlikely, but either way the Pentagon is understandably now working to evacuate all US forces from northeastern Syria, where they no longer have any allies and are at risk of being surrounded by a hostile Syrian military. Which is easier said than done, considering it requires US soldiers to destroy their fixed military positions in Syria while providing their own protection since the SDF obviously has more pressing interests than protecting them at this point. The withdrawal has been so poorly organized that it may even require putting additional US forces in Syria in order to pull it off, though how they’ll get there is anybody’s guess since the US no longer has a partner on the ground to help with logistics. Assuming the evacuation does happen, some US forces will probably be airlifted out through Kobane, provided the Turks don’t destroy the airfield there, while others will head overland into Iraq.

Some, on the other hand, may actually not go at all. Al-Monitor’s Amberin Zaman is reporting that the US may leave a “residual” force in Syria, which would in fact be a residual of a residual since the 1000 or so US soldiers in northeastern Syria now are already the remainder of the 2000 or so who were there before Donald Trump’s Syria Withdrawal 1.0 announcement back in December. They’ll be staying to try to give the SDF some leverage in its political negotiations with Damascus, basically as a demonstration that the US hasn’t totally abandoned the Kurds even as it totally abandons the Kurds. There is very little about this decision that makes any sense, as it leaves a small number of US soldiers under heavy threat and adds another pile of tinder to an already very combustible situation in order to maybe provide the Kurds with a tiny fraction of the leverage they lost when the Trump decided to withdraw from the border and allow the Turks to begin their invasion. The one consistent argument Trump has offered for his decision to withdraw US forces has been ending the deployment of US forces inside Syria. Now that may not be the case.

I don’t think the English language has a word to describe what a mess this has become. “Incoherence” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Donald Trump made the decision to pull US forces back from the border two weekends ago and has spent every day since then either denying that he’s responsible for what he knew would follow or trying some half-brained scheme to minimize the effects of the thing he allowed to happen. Whether you agree with the decision to remove US forces from northeastern Syria or not, the manner in which it’s being done is completely disjointed and that’s making the situation there far more dangerous than it has to be.

TURKEY

The Turkish government has arrested the mayors of Hakkâri, Yüksekova, Erciş, and Nusaybin, all Kurds and all members of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), because the party has criticized Operation Peace Spring. It’s all perfectly normal stuff in any free and democratic country, like Turkey definitely is.

In addition to sending Mike Pence to Ankara to try to convince the Turks to call a ceasefire in Syria—hey, if Mike Pence visited me I’d probably do just about anything as long as it got him to leave—the Trump administration is dangling the threat of additional sanctions if Turkey refuses to halt its offensive. Donald Trump threatened to “obliterate” Turkey’s economy last week if it did anything he didn’t like in Syria, but the penalties he’s imposed so far—levying extra tariffs on Turkish steel imports, canceling a US-Turkey trade deal that may never have existed in the first place, and imposing some sanctions targeting a few Turkish government ministries—have been underwhelming. Congress is also considering its own package of sanctions that looks like it would be harsher and would crucially cut off US military support for Turkey, but it’s remains to be seen how much support that measure will get.

The Turkish government wants the rest of the world to finance its invasion/ethnic cleansing project to the tune of more than $53 billion, much of which would probably go to Turkish firms. This seems…unlikely, especially if it violates international law as it seems obvious it will. Turkey could repurpose the refugee aid it already gets from the European Union, and Qatar will likely pitch in seeing as how the Qataris need to keep buying Turkey’s friendship, but that’s about it. And even that EU aid is no sure thing if European leaders see it’s going toward refugee resettlement projects in Syria.

QATAR

A new study from the International Labour Organization finds that Qatar’s migrant workers are still being subject to inhumane working conditions:

The research found that a third of workers in the study experienced hyperthermia at some time during their shift; a serious health hazard where the body’s core temperature rises above 38C (100F).

Nicholas McGeehan, a director of Fair/Square Projects, an organisation that conducts research on Gulf migrant workers, said the report was “a damning indictment of Qatar’s failure to protect outdoor workers”.

McGeehan said that despite the report’s conclusions the ILO had played down the findings and had failed to demand urgent reforms from the Qatari authorities.

“The Qatari authorities must act on the findings of their own report. Any attempt to spin this report as evidence of good practice risks delaying government action, thereby putting more lives at risk,” he said.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Russian President Vladimir Putin is touring the Persian Gulf this week. On Tuesday, he visited Abu Dhabi and signed a number of investment deals worth a combined $1.3 billion. So that’s nice for him.

SAUDI ARABIA

Putin had arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, where he was royally feted and also signed multiple investment deals as well as an agreement to improve Russia’s cooperation with OPEC on global oil issues. Putin, King Salman, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman also talked about cultural exchanges and, potentially, arms sales—something that could be an extremely sensitive issue for the kingdom’s main arms supplier, the US.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

The Financial Action Task Force meets on Wednesday and there’s a non-trivial chance it’s going to blacklist Pakistan. The international money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog has had Islamabad on its “gray list”—which signifies countries that have serious concerns but haven’t yet been subject to penalties—for several years now, and a new FATF report issued this month finds that the Pakistanis have only progressed on one item on a list of 40 areas where the task force has found room for improvement. Only two countries are on the FATF blacklist now—Iran and North Korea. Being put on the blacklist puts every financial transaction a country makes under a microscope, which among other things drastically raises the cost of doing business in that country. The effect would likely be to cut Pakistan off from international financing, even from close allies like China. The FATF will probably decide just to keep Pakistan on the “gray list,” but it’s already made that decision several times over the past couple of years and presumably at some point it’s going to stop giving the Pakistanis more time to fix the problem.

KASHMIR

Two suspected Kashmiri militants shot and killed a truck driver on Monday who was trying to pick up a shipment of apples. According to Indian authorities, militants are targeting Kashmir’s apple harvest in an effort to disrupt the region’s economy. Meanwhile, those same Indian authorities are busily rounding up anybody who dares express any opposition to the Indian government’s decision to strip Kashmir of its constitutional autonomy—it arrested 12 women protesters on Tuesday, for example—which is definitely not disruptive and is just another example of a normal thing that free, democratic countries do to handle political dissent.

OCEANIA

NEW ZEALAND

New polling shows that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s governing coalition is losing support. One survey by broadcaster 1News has the government’s approval rating at 40 percent, just one point off the lowest rating it’s had since Ardern took over (and that was in her first couple of months in office). New Zealand is expected to hold an election late next year.

AFRICA

MOZAMBIQUE

Votes are being counted in Mozambique’s general election on Tuesday. President Filipe Nyusi is expected to win reelection and his FRELIMO party is expected to retain control of parliament. The real question is whether the opposition RENAMO party—the other combatant in the country’s 1977-1992 civil war and lately a threat to resume a full-scale rebellion—will see any gains and, more importantly, whether it will accept the results, whatever they are. Sporadic violence between the government and RENAMO resumed back in 2013 and this election is viewed as an important step toward hopefully easing those tensions.

EUROPE

ROMANIA

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis tapped Liberal Party leader Ludovic Orban as the country’s new prime minister on Tuesday, five days after former PM Viorica Dăncilă’s government lost a no confidence vote in parliament. Orban’s cabinet will likely get parliamentary approval but will probably not have much legislative support. Which is fine, really, because all he’s expected to do is shepherd the country into a parliamentary election sometime next year.

FRANCE

French police deployed water cannons and tear gas against thousands of firefighters who protested against low pay in Paris on Tuesday. France’s firefighters union has been on strike since June, but feel they’ve gotten little attention. Their march on Tuesday apparently strayed out of its designated route, leading to the clashes with police.

SPAIN

Violent demonstrations also gripped Barcelona for the second straight day, as Catalan separatists expressed their opposition to the sentences handed down to several separatist leaders on Monday. Protesters set fires in the streets while riot police responded with clubs to try to disperse them.

UNITED KINGDOM

The UK may be back on track to reach a Brexit agreement with the European Union, but only because Prime Minister Boris “No Deal” Johnson has reportedly made a concession so massive that alleged Brexit squish Theresa May wouldn’t even consider it:

It is understood that the negotiating teams have agreed in principle that there will be a customs border down the Irish Sea. A similar arrangement was rejected by Theresa May as a deal that no British prime minister could accept.

Johnson will still have to win over parliament – including the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and the hardline Tory Brexiters of the European Research Group (ERG) – on the basis that, under the deal, Northern Ireland will still legally be within the UK’s customs territory.

One Eurosceptic source close to both camps indicated that such an arrangement would be “extremely difficult for the DUP to swallow”, but neither the DUP nor ERG publicly made any criticism of Johnson’s efforts.

Johnson’s proposal relies on a lie, basically, in that it technically brings Northern Ireland out of the EU customs union along with the rest of the UK, but the practical effect is that Northern Ireland will remain in the EU customs union. The two sides were negotiating under a tight deadline, as some kind of agreement needs to be proposed at Thursday’s European Council meeting if it’s to have any chance of being implemented by the October 31 Brexit deadline.

So Johnson apparently blinked. But there are still serious questions about whether he can deliver a final deal. For one thing, Johnson’s plan to technically take Northern Ireland out of the EU while leaving it in alignment with the EU on regulatory and customs matters hasn’t yet been translated into formal legal verbiage, so the EU could still object once that’s done. It’s also up in the air whether Johnson can actually get his plan through the Commons, given that it’s a much bigger surrender than May ever made and she couldn’t get her plan past resistance from both the Democratic Unionist Party and her own Tory hardliners. House of Commons floor leader Jacob Rees-Mogg says Johnson has the votes to pass his plan, and he might given the sheer fatigue that has set in over this whole process. But it remains to be seen.

AMERICAS

GUATEMALA

The Trump administration is threatening to withhold development aid to Guatemala unless the incoming government of President-elect Alejandro Giammattei agrees to accept a “safe third country” agreement to allow the US to deposit asylum seekers there while their cases go through the US immigration system. The administration has a development program called “America Grows,” to help bolster the economies of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which is the focus of this particular blackmail scheme.

MEXICO

Mexican soldiers and armed civilians engaged in a shootout in Guerrero state on Tuesday that left one solder and 14 civilians dead. It’s the second mass casualty event in Mexico in as many days, after suspected gang members killed 13 police officers in Michoacan state on Monday. and may cause some people to question President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s efforts to tamp down violence nationally. It’s unclear what caused Tuesday’s battle.

UNITED STATES

US arms makers sold a scant $55.4 billion in weapons abroad in FY2019, down from $55.6 billion in FY2018. I hope they’ll be OK.

Finally, at LobeLog, Paul Pillar argues that a lack of strategic thinking and prioritization is allowing the military tail to wag the proverbial dog:

Among the roles that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plays is that of “global force integrator,” which entails setting priorities in addressing threats around the world and recommending where to deploy U.S. military forces to meet those threats. General Joseph Dunford, who completed his term as chairman last month, sought this role, which Congress conferred on the him in legislation three years ago. A major drawback of having the Joint Chiefs, or any part of the military, take the lead in prioritizing threats and the disposition of resources to meet them is that there naturally will be a bias toward tending to the military’s own institutional needs in preference to other national interests. An article by Paul D. Shinkman at U.S. News and World Report discussing the “global force integrator” role begins by describing how a planned surge earlier this year of an additional 1,500 U.S. troops to the Middle East elicited concern among civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) about the escalatory optics of such a move. But the military defended the move as necessary “to protect U.S. forces in the Middle East.”

This type of circular reasoning has become typical in discussions of U.S. force deployments, especially in the Middle East. The main dangers from state or nonstate adversaries of the United States are attacks on the U.S. military itself. U.S. forces get deployed to a region to protect U.S. forces already in the region. The situation is an excellent example of a self-licking ice cream cone.