• Scary but oh so good: the 'Arab spring' for Europe  - Ferry Biedermann
The name of the one big plus is "change".

• The view from Pakistan  - Irfan Husain
Thus far, Saudi Arabia is the elephant in the room.

• New Delhi's potential profit and loss account  - Jasjit Singh
In a worst-case scenario, there would be significant coterminous interests of the elites of the GCC countries and New Delhi.

• A new clarity for Washington  - Chris Toensing
If US strategists are sensible, they will be of good cheer.

Scary but oh so good: the 'Arab spring' for Europe
 Ferry Biedermann

It would be easy to focus on a couple of downsides of the "Arab spring" for Europe but frankly, it is ridiculous to do so because the benefits so hugely outweigh real or imagined disadvantages. The name of that one big plus is "change". Anything is better than the ticking time bomb of pent-up anger and frustration that was sitting on Europe's southern flank, even if the process of change itself may be tumultuous and sometimes even scary.

The Middle East and North Africa area, so important to Europe for its oil supply, its shipping routes, its vicinity and its migrants, has posed a lumbering and growing problem to Europe ever since Britain and France lost their hold on the region after the 1956 Suez crisis (or since the time of Hannibal, depending on one's historical viewpoint).

The region has periodically been riven by violence, but worse, it has in turn or all at once been characterized by oppression, stagnation, underdevelopment, religious and social conservatism and extremism, unemployment, relative socio-economic decline and a host of other problems over recent decades. It was one part of the world that was clearly broken and where no solutions had been in sight for a long, long time. Sure, countries such as Egypt boasted of impressive economic gains in the bubble years of the mid-nineties but were these achievements real, and if so, what impact did they have? The consecutive Arab Human Development reports gave much better--and more dire--indications of a region in persistent crisis.

Europe is so used to thinking of the Arab world in terms of problems and challenges that it has continued using this vocabulary when talking about the Arab spring. Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy supremo, in a major speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington in July, said: "There are two fundamentally big challenges in all of those countries and they are very familiar challenges for all of us." She went on to talk about democracy-building and getting the economy right and, to be fair, she seemed to mean well. But words like "chance", "opportunity", "excitement" and "partnership" in the context of the Arab spring did not figure in the speech.

Yet, it seems clear to me that this is exciting, a chance for something new and better, a huge opportunity for Europe and others to build genuine partnerships with the region. Ashton was not totally unaware of that and she succinctly described the European interest: "If we have a good neighborhood that is sustainable and secure, that is democratic and economically growing, then that is to our advantage because we are able to trade with them, to work with them, to support them and to see them as our neighbors into the future."

Of course, poor Baroness Ashton has to carry out a non-existent common European foreign policy. And that with very few means and even fewer powers at her disposal. The EU has been widely depicted as being slow off the mark in reacting to the wave of popular unrest in the Arab world. It is fearful of upsetting the established order, in case it survives (as it does in important countries such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan and even Syria for now). It seems at times more focused on keeping migrants from the Arab spring countries out, than on dealing on an equal level with their new governments. And it shudders at the specter of an Islamist takeover, anywhere.

Yet, Europe caught a huge break with the Arab spring. It lucked out extraordinarily with the initially largely peaceful, pro-democracy and rather sophisticated nature of many of the uprisings. Much can still happen, but the level of gruesomeness on the part of the long-oppressed populations has been remarkably low, even in more violent confrontations such as in Libya, Yemen and Syria. This makes it easier for Europe to stay a bit on the sidelines until a clear winner emerges and gradual contacts begin with the new rulers. Europe also got lucky with the one conflict in which it was actively involved: Libya. There, the Americans, for their own reasons, allowed the Europeans to project a much more powerful role than they actually played.

For Europe, dealing with the Arab world is always full of pitfalls: of a brief though significant colonial past, of religious sentiment, of migration and of economic interests, to mention but a few. But the people of the region have embarked on the process of addressing their own woes. This is not done for the benefit of Europe or others, but if progress is made, it will be good for all. As long as no second Iran or something similar arises off Europe's southern shore--rather unlikely for now--Europe should count its blessings.-Published 1/12/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Ferry Biedermann is a freelance correspondent based in the Netherlands.

I am often asked by British and American friends when the "Arab spring" will reach Pakistan. These questions ignore the political and geographic distance between the Middle East and the subcontinent. The fact is that for all its many failings, Pakistan is in many ways a flourishing democracy where opposition parties thrive and there is a free, vibrant media.

If anything, there is perhaps too much democracy in Pakistan: main streets are blocked regularly by protestors, and politicians are abused and accused of everything from corruption to sedition in TV studios across the country. Unfortunately, much of this freedom of expression has been largely misused to spread extremist ideas and anti-West sentiments.

So from Pakistan, the Arab spring is viewed as a mostly positive development. This is not to say that many Pakistanis were happy with the fall of Muammar Gaddafi: for decades, the Libyan leader had positioned himself as a Muslim champion standing up to America and Israel. By his erratic espousal of national struggles across the world, he had endeared himself to Islamists and leftists alike. And of course, the manner of his death revolted Pakistanis of all stripes, much as it did people the world over. The fact that Libya had hired thousands of Pakistani engineers, doctors, teachers and workers had also raised Gaddafi's image among the families of those who benefited. Most of these people are now back in Pakistan, exacerbating unemployment there.

The changes in Egypt have drawn more widespread support, given the perception that President Hosni Mubarak was Washington's creature. His role in supporting the Israeli siege of Gaza was widely condemned in Pakistan, much as it was across the Islamic world. So no tears were shed for the Egyptian dictator when he was finally toppled.

And given Pakistan's long and bitter experience with military rule, the ongoing struggle being waged in Tahrir square to force the army to relinquish power is widely admired and supported. As images of the pro-democracy demonstrations shaking Cairo are beamed into millions of homes, respect for the courage of young Egyptians increases by the day. When Egypt finally wins its freedom, it will be a formidable player in the Muslim world because of the credibility its new democratic government will have won after the long and bloody campaign it has waged.

Both Bahrain and Yemen present, in many Pakistani eyes, examples of American double standards. Here are autocratic rulers being allowed to oppress and slaughter their citizens because they are useful to Washington. Bahrain houses a major American naval base, while Yemen cooperates actively in the US-led war against al-Qaeda. The recent resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, has been widely welcomed, but many are sceptical about the promised elections early next year.

And despite Saudi support for the royal family in Bahrain, most Pakistanis have been appalled by the violence unleashed by the rulers against protestors. There is an indirect Pakistani role in the government's tough measures: many security personnel in Bahrain are retired Pakistani soldiers recruited to prop up the ruling family. Cases have been reported where these imported security staff--widely seen as mercenaries by Bahrainis--were attacked by groups of protestors.

The Shiite-Sunni aspect of the Arab spring has not been lost on the religious parties in Pakistan. The fact that an Alawite elite is ruling over a Sunni majority in Syria has been played up in Pakistan. So despite his anti-US rhetoric, there is little sympathy for Bashar Assad. His merciless attempts to suppress opposition to his dynastic rule have angered and revolted many across the Muslim world.

NATO's refusal thus far to intervene in Syria despite the bloodletting there is seen as a sign of western hypocrisy by many Pakistanis. They point to the decision to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to assist the anti-Gaddafi fighters while refusing to lift a finger in the face of a far bloodier crackdown in Syria. Most Pakistanis conveniently overlook the fact that Russia and China have consistently blocked a more robust international response.

Thus far, Saudi Arabia is the elephant in the room. Despite stirrings in the eastern, Shiite provinces, the kingdom has largely not shown much appetite for democracy. Given the royal family's self-appointed role as the guardian of Islam's most sacred sites and its support for Pakistan, few Pakistanis express the hope that the Arab spring will put down roots in the kingdom. But should democratic governments emerge in Yemen, Syria and Egypt, it is hard to see how and for how long Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will remain immune.

Should such movements emerge, they will test Pakistani loyalties. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani professionals and workers are employed in these states, and their return in the wake of mass protests would be disastrous in terms of disrupted lives as well as for the Pakistani exchequer.

So while there have already been winners and losers in the Arab Spring, more will follow.-Published 1/12/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Irfan Husain writes two columns a week for Dawn, Pakistan's widest circulating and most influential daily. After a career in the civil service spanning 30 years, he was president of a university in Pakistan for five years.

New Delhi has obviously watched the "Arab spring" with great interest and with even greater sensitivity than many other countries. This is due not only to historical trade and cultural relations with the Arabs going back a thousand years, but also to more pragmatic reasons.

One is the issue of energy security and the effect of changes in hydrocarbon-producing Arab states affected by the revolutions. This would acquire much greater importance if (or when) the Arab uprising spreads to the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf region that have been the major supplier of oil and gas for India--providing around 75 percent of its oil needs (and nearly the same in terms of gas). New Delhi has diversified sources of supply across the globe from Venezuela to Sudan and on to Siberia, besides building closer ties for assured supplies nearer to home. But in the short term, disruption could cause volatility in the price of energy in India and hence have a negative impact on otherwise high economic growth registered even during the past three years of near-global economic meltdown and deepening debt crises in the Euro-Atlantic region.

In the longer term, of course, alternate sources of energy will be found. In fact, that search has been going on for more than a decade through the acquisition of exploration rights in many countries. At the same time, two factors have to be kept in mind. One is that the Arab oil-producing countries have to sell their products and cannot simply shut down their oil production. In most cases, their own economies depend heavily and in some cases excessively on oil exports, regardless of the regime in power and the effect on production and export in the short run if there is a power struggle.

The second issue is that there are nearly five million expatriate Indian citizens employed in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, from Kuwait to Oman and Qatar. Any political upheaval would seriously affect their security and safety. India would have to be ready to take adequate measures to protect them and in due course transport them home if things really get bad.

It may be recalled that during the Iraq-Kuwait conflict, about 300,000 Indians living in the two countries were directly affected. A large number managed to get out on their own well before Operation Desert Storm got under way in early 1991; nearly 60,000 persons opted to stay on and take their chances. India arranged for the transfer of nearly 200,000 by road from Iraq to Jordan from where over 113,000 were airlifted back to India. Next to the Berlin airlift, this was perhaps the second-largest strategic airlift in history in pursuit of humanitarian goals. More recently, in 2006, during the Israel-Hizballah War in Lebanon, about 2,000 Indians were evacuated from Lebanon by the Indian Navy to Cyprus and then by Indian Air Force aircraft from there to India.

Obviously, evacuating and/or ensuring the safety and security of five million Indians in the Arab states would be a totally different ballgame. It would present complex challenges to New Delhi where the use of force, hopefully under United Nations mandate, could not be ruled out.

On the other side of the coin, these millions of Indians are an integral part of the economy and its management in these countries. Fortunately, most of the regimes in this region are moderate and sensitive to the interests of their countries. Thus the risk of the Arab spring extending to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is extremely low. At the same time, the large presence of Indians and their engagement in local economic activities and interests have created a mutual interdependency. In a worst-case scenario, there would be substantive coterminous interests of the elites of these countries and New Delhi in case things actually start to go wrong.

Still, it is possible to visualise disturbances that could affect oil and gas transportation from the Persian Gulf area, rendering the Straits of Hormuz more critical than what they otherwise appear to be. Such a scenario is more likely in case of an inter-state war rather than an internal uprising or revolution of the type witnessed in the Arab states in North Africa during the past year. The current disturbances are likely to stretch over a long time into the future. The international community will have to take corrective steps to moderate them as early as possible before the Suez Canal starts to become a major obstacle to international trade.-Published 1/12/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Jasjit Singh is director general of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in New Delhi.

Conventional wisdom holds that Washington is one of the big losers in the 2011 upheavals across the Arab world. Two long-time allies, Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, have fallen, and in their place elections have empowered Islamists, precisely as the deposed dictators had warned for decades. Another important ally, Israel, is nervous about the rise of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the tumult in Syria. Perhaps worst of all from Washington's point of view, the Obama administration has appeared largely helpless as the revolts have spread, unable to engineer face-saving "orderly transitions" in Egypt or Yemen, and upstaged in diplomacy by regional players like Turkey and tiny Qatar. All of this transpires as American troops retreat from Iraq and double down in a doomed effort in Afghanistan. The 40-year hegemony of the United States in the Middle East is at low ebb.

And yet, if US strategists are sensible, they will be of good cheer. US hegemony, after all, has been one long, exhausting exercise in crisis management. Washington has balanced its twin prerogatives, securing the supply of Persian Gulf oil and protecting Israel, upon the beam of "stability" in Arab states, which became a third end in itself. But those states' embrace of Washington--whether the US-sponsored "peace processes" with Israel or the neoliberal economic recommendations--continuously undermined their own stability. The result was a series of brittle police states spending heavily on means of coercion and neglecting the imperative of popular consent. Radical, even nihilist, strains of political Islam grew in these environments.

In the spring, racing against the pace of events, the White House spun a tale of US interests aligning at last with American values of liberty and justice for all. The Libya intervention was to showcase this new commitment, but it is clear to Arabs and Americans alike that Col. Muammar Gaddafi was a target of opportunity and not an example to make other despots quail in fear. It could hardly have been coincidental that UN diplomats passed their resolution of de facto regime change in Libya on the same day that Saudi forces crossed the causeway to crush the pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain.

Rather than win the Obama administration credit, the Arab revolts have instead lent discomfiting clarity to American conversations about Middle East affairs. The Obama administration stood by Ben Ali and Mubarak, and then the Bahraini royal family, so it is plain that US support for democracy is a value honored in the breach. The extent of the US partnership with the most anti-democratic regime in the region, the Saudis, has rarely been more obvious and more clearly damaging. Obama's rebuff of the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN--symbolically, Palestine's right of self-determination, like Tunisia's and Egypt's--is likewise inexplicable in terms of values, except those of the Israel lobby.

And, though much remains to be decided, the revolts hold out the promise of a revised regional order, one in which successor Arab governments hew more closely to domestic opinion and more stoutly resist US priorities, particularly with regard to the question of Palestine. Such governments would be better friends to the US than the client states of the past.

More genuinely stable Arab states, coupled with more honest and searching discussion of the Middle East at home, could impose limits on the imperial ambitions of the US national security state. They could encourage the development of counterweights to the Israel, defense industry and oil lobbies, and allow more progressive (and, ultimately, more realistic) ideas about such concepts as "security" into the public domain. Awakened, more assertive Arab populations could be the demand that compels those in power to listen to real policy alternatives.

The 2011 uprisings in the Arab world, though their course is far from determined, have pushed forward new social forces and new possibilities. In a region where stasis spewed forth the likes of al-Qaeda, and where vassals have enabled Washington to embark upon financially and morally ruinous adventures, newness is to be welcomed. Arab revolutionaries may thus have dropped a lump of coal upon purblind promoters of endless US empire, but to all thinking members of the Washington policy apparatus and to ordinary Americans, they have given a very nice present.-Published 1/12/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Chris Toensing is editor of "Middle East Report", published by the Middle East Research and Information Project in Washington, DC.