Keep Your Countries
There is plenty of evidence that the world’s Muslims do not take the nation-state for granted. WorldPublicOpinion.org, supported by the University of Maryland, has run two sets of surveys in Muslim-majority countries to gauge public opinion of geopolitical affairs. The most recent poll, “Public Opinion in the Islamic World on Terrorism, al Qaeda, and U.S. Policies”, published in February 2009, produced much the same results as the first one two years earlier.
Both surveys showed majority support for a new Caliphate in some large Muslim countries. According to the latest survey, 70 percent of Egyptians believe Egypt should be erased in favour of a superstate. Sixty-nine percent of Pakistanis agreed that their country should be dissolved in a similar fashion while, according to the 2006 survey, 67 percent of Moroccans felt likewise. Indonesians, far-flung from the centre of Islamic geography and never a party to historical Caliphates, mostly rejected the idea (although 35 percent did not).
Respondents tended to view the system of nation-states as a foreign conspiracy designed to weaken and divide Muslims. Large majorities in every country polled (Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Palestine, Iran, and Azerbaijan) cited “weaken and divide” as the main policy goal of the United States in the Muslim world. There was even greater unanimity as to why the U.S. sought this weakness and division: control over oil. This belief was “so widespread as to be consensual,” according to the report’s authors.
Few respondents believed that the U.S. genuinely supports democracy. Large majorities concluded either that the U.S. actively opposes free elections in their countries (especially respondents in Jordan and Egypt), or that the U.S. seeks democracy only when it is likely to result in a cooperative government.
The Eastern Angle
The survey was not entirely comprehensive. It could not sample, for instance, the opinions of the Muslims who inhabit the vast steppes of Central Asia, including the Uighurs of western China. However, it is fair to assume support for a Caliphate would also be strong in those countries, for two reasons. First, the region is a central theatre of operations for Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), the world’s largest pro-Caliphate movement. Secondly, regional governments are sufficiently worried by HuT’s activities to have forged a multilateral response.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) unites Russia and China with the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The group was created to combat what it called the “Three Evils” of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. Put simply, the SCO enlists the vast military might of China and Russia to preserve Central Asia’s nation-states against any form of revolution or dissolution. Islamist groups are the main object of suspicion, followed by the U.S.
Four years ago the SCO faced its biggest threat. In early 2005 Kyrgyzstan overthrew its government in what became known as the “Tulip Revolution”. This was swiftly followed by an uprising in the Uzbekistani town of Andijan, which ended with the protesters being gunned down in their hundreds by security forces. Two months after that, the SCO demanded that the U.S. set a timetable for removing its military bases from Central Asia.
The thread linking these events was a belief in Moscow and Beijing that the U.S. had found common cause with the pan-Islamic movement. The “color revolutions” sweeping the world at the time were orchestrated by U.S.-based NGOs, and they tended to install pro-U.S. governments. In Central Asia, the theory went, these NGOs worked in harness with HuT in order to remove SCO-friendly governments and install U.S. proxies. These proxies would give the United States access to the region’s vast natural resources, as well as unfettered military access. The Uzbek government claimed that those killed at Andijan were HuT agitators.
Such suspicions were heightened by the fact that HuT is based not in Peshawar or Ramallah, but in London. The British government has refused to ban the organization which, although non-violent, espouses radical and anti-Jewish beliefs in dozens of countries around the globe. A conviction began to form in SCO capitals that the U.S. and its British allies were exploiting their military presence in Afghanistan, supported by U.S. bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, to sew the seeds of revolt across Central Asia. It was this belief that caused the SCO to demand a timetable exit for U.S. forces based in the region in July 2005.
Change in the Air
Afghanistan has long been Central Asia’s Achilles Heel. Under Taliban rule it became a safe-haven for numerous Central Asian militant groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which fights to liberate China’s Uighur Muslims and to forge a pan-regional Islamic superstate. Even now, after eight years of war, such groups continue to coexist with the Taliban forces based along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier.
In the first months of the Obama administration, it appears that the wedge of mutual suspicion dividing NATO in Afghanistan from the SCO in Central Asia is beginning to give way to a united defense of the nation-state in Central Asia. Two recent developments bore the hallmarks of a deal.
First, on 27 March 2009, the SCO convened in Moscow for a summit on Afghanistan. Its members agreed that the spread of terrorism and powerful narcotics from Afghanistan posed a threat to SCO members. The group offered to exchange counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics intelligence with NATO forces and to harden security along national borders.
Crucially, the SCO also offered to integrate Afghanistan into its counter-terrorism structure. This has a strong military component. If evidence were needed as to what preoccupies SCO military thinkers, in April 2009 SCO forces held joint military exercises in Tajikistan. The training scenario was that Islamic militants had entered from Afghanistan and captured a chemical factory.
The US response to these offers was extremely guarded. American relations with individual SCO members are variable, particularly in the case of Russia. U.S. relations with China are more reliable: two weeks after the summit Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Beijing for talks.
A few days after that, the U.S. gave in to a longstanding Chinese demand. It announced that the East Turkestan Islamic Party (ETIP), which China says is just a front for the terrorist ETIM, would be added to the U.S. list of organizations that support al-Qaeda. ETIP’s assets would be frozen, as would those of its leadership.
It should be noted that ETIP survived the Bush administration without such sanctions being applied, regardless of pressure from China. Instead, Bush tended to focus on China’s denial of religious rights to the Uighurs, and was a support of the exiled Uighur figurehead Rebiya Kadeer. China’s foreign ministry welcomed the change of approach, which it said was a step forward in the “international anti-terrorism struggle”. Such internationalism is consistent with the Obama administration’s stated foreign strategy.
It is also consistent with the HuT’s world view. Speaking to the Diplomatic Courier in London, Taji Mustafa, the media representative for Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, said the SCO’s rhetoric on terrorism “has become a cover for SCO member states to aggressively persecute their political opponents, independent Muslims and those opposed to their policies… SCO member states have also played up the fact that this is their part in the West’s so-called war on terror”.
He added: “The Obama administration—like other U.S. administrations—will always look out for America’s geopolitical interests first and foremost whatever lofty slogans are banded about regarding ‘human rights’ and ‘religious freedoms’. Proof of this includes U.S. re-engagement with the brutal Karimov regime [in Uzbekistan], engagement with other Central Asian regimes in a push to secure alternative supply routes to its forces in Afghanistan, and continued engagement with China, especially during the current global economic crisis, with hardly any criticism of China’s treatment of its religious minorities in western China.”
The HuT seems to be winning the argument where it matters most. A great many Muslims appear to view their cartographical boundaries not as the legal delimitations of free nations, but as an iron grid imposed by departing colonial powers and now enforced by the United States through unelected proxy governments. One upshot of this belief was that large majorities polled by WorldPublicOpinion.org voiced approval of terrorist attacks on U.S. forces based in Muslim lands—though not of attacks on civilians.
However, there is now very little sign that the world’s most powerful nations—those represented in the UN Security Council—are prepared to allow Muslims to experiment with their own sovereign identity. Rather, the Obama administration prefers the tactical advantages of a compliant China to resolve the impasse in Afghanistan. This “realist” approach does not take a view on the political and religious repression needed to maintain the current network of Muslim nation-states, or whether this repression will inevitably translate into extremist violence directed at U.S. soldiers and civilians.
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