Aslı Ü. Bâli
The twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks offered a searing reminder that they resulted in a “double tragedy”[1]—the loss of life caused directly by the attacks and the resulting U.S. wars and interventions that engulfed in violence so much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, broadly construed here to include territories from Afghanistan to Morocco. An avalanche of commentary on the anniversary and the “global war on terror” (or GWoT) converged around a narrative of despair. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both effectively lost by the United States while the GWoT spread from South Asia into the MENA region to little effect in terms of addressing the long-term challenge of terrorism.[2] Instead, these wars laid waste to the human capital and physical infrastructure of country after country across a large swath of the Muslim world.[3] Groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State proliferated in this same expanse, often as a direct consequence of the attempts to destroy them, as wars weakened the states in the region and errant drone strikes motivated new generations to coalesce around jihadi resistance.[4] Amid the chaos and violence of two decades of counterterrorism and war—and the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan—a human rights agenda that at the close of the twentieth century had gained ground globally was dramatically set back, nowhere more definitively than in the Muslim world and the MENA region.
While the lasting impact of the violence visited on—and spawned within—the region as a consequence of the “war on terror” cannot be overstated, it would also be wrong to overlook another critical anniversary. In the long term, the MENA region may come to be more profoundly transformed as a consequence of internal dynamics set in relief by the Arab uprisings a decade ago (and similar grassroots mobilizations in the Iranian Green Movement and the Turkish Gezi Park protests) than by the churning brutality of the GWoT.[5] The mass mobilizations in the streets of almost all major Arab capitals was an important turning point that marked the end of what had appeared to be a relatively stable postcolonial social and political status quo. Unable to sustain their end of an authoritarian social contract—one that traded socioeconomic development for public quiescence—autocratic republics and despotic monarchies suddenly faced the real possibility of overthrow by largely nonviolent, popular uprisings.[6] The old repertoire of painting opponents as terrorists and repression as counterterrorism faltered as the middle classes joined protests that grew large enough to overwhelm security forces.
Of course, some regimes doubled down on coercion, committing massacres in full public view.[7] In those cases, unarmed protests were gradually transformed into armed insurgencies and eventually civil conflicts that a decade later continue to rage in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. But elsewhere, the uprisings demonstrated for the first time just how fragile the sclerotic authoritarian regimes of the region had become. Where the military and security forces defected from the regime or at least became willing to dispense with the figureheads who were the focal points of protests—as in Tunisia and Egypt—barriers of fear and habits of acquiescence were broken seemingly overnight. The overthrow of long-ruling authoritarian presidents like Zinedine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak precipitated some immediate changes, but it will only be in the long run that the true measure of the events that unfolded in 2011 can be assessed.[8]
The Arab uprisings were significant in part because indigenous actors seized control of the narrative and defied the stultifying repression of the counterterrorism frame. These popular mobilizations occurred spontaneously, transcended borders and diffused a set of demands across the region that were formulated bottom-up rather than through borrowed Western framings and donor tutelage.[9] They were also significant because they exposed in a stark way the ebbing U.S. commitment to the region and the increasingly hollow rhetoric of human rights and democracy emanating from the West more generally. Rather than supporting prodemocratic popular uprisings, the United States and the European Union (EU) took a selective approach, supporting the overthrow of anti-Western regimes but looking to shore up authoritarian allies, especially in the Gulf.[10] The French response to the Tunisian uprising, like the U.S. response to events in Egypt, was overtaken by the momentum of protesters, but the consternation at the ouster of reliable allies was unmistakable and bore little resemblance to the decades-long purported advocacy of democratization by Western actors.[11] None of this was lost on public opinion in the region, any more than the subsequent disavowal of human rights obligations when refugees fleeing conflicts in Libya and Syria threatened to arrive on European shores.
The Human Rights and Humanitarian Situation
Ten Years after the Uprisings
The decade since 2011 has seen a decline in the human security landscape across the region.[12] Water scarcity and climate change have affected the region deeply, with Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, projected to become the first major city to run dry.[13] The rise of authoritarian surveillance tools in an age of social media and the proliferation of drone technologies and cyber weaponry across the region have been other factors in closing political space and making civilian populations more vulnerable—as Thompson Chengeta describes in chapter 9.[14] Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic and the inadequacy of the region’s health infrastructure—from shortages of basic personal protective equipment for medical workers to an inability to obtain vaccines—has underscored the fundamental failure of MENA states to provide for the well-being of their peoples.[15] Taken together, war, drought, deprivation, and inequality have produced a large-scale migration crisis, with millions displaced and seeking to flee the region. Moreover, regional stability has continued to deteriorate owing to the metastasizing GWoT violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and the civil conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Following the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Libya, not only North Africa but also the Sahel region came to be awash in weapons, besieged by warring factions and Islamist militias and fundamentally destabilized by the collapse of the Libyan state and economy.[16] In Syria, the civil conflict was exacerbated by spillover effects from Iraq and was quickly transformed into a proxy war with arms and funds pouring in from the Gulf and the West, the rise of the Islamic State group, and an aerial counterterrorism campaign that produced devastation from Mosul in Iraq to Raqqa in Syria.[17] Finally, in Yemen, Saudi-United Arab Emirates (UAE) intervention, with the support of the United States and the United Kingdom, has produced one of the most severe humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century.[18]
While humanitarian crises and violence in the region have been exacerbated by ongoing direct and indirect Western intervention, successive U.S. administrations and their allies have signaled waning interest in the region as geopolitical competition shifts to East Asia.[19] The low probability that any other global powers—whether the EU, Russia, or China—will seek to fully replace the United States in propping up a failing regional order means that on the geopolitical front far-reaching changes in the MENA region are inevitable.[20] Notwithstanding the wars, authoritarian retrenchment, and dystopian inequality now characterizing the region, a reduced Western presence, especially if it means declining American support for pro-Western autocrats, may provide a precarious window of opportunity for bottom-up transformation.
Acting on that opportunity will prove challenging, to say the least. The Tunisian case illustrates well the perilous circumstances of postauthoritarian transitions.[21] Even a successful democratic uprising cannot reverse overnight long-accumulated human rights deficits and inequalities. The risk of authoritarian reversion remains ever-present.[22] In particular, the failure to address socioeconomic grievances—that is, the immense shortfall in meeting the economic and social rights of the region’s growing population—endangers any project that pursues political liberalization but does not tackle yawning inequalities. At the same time the decade of democratic developments in Tunisia is at least suggestive of the possibility of alternative, postauthoritarian trajectories as well, particularly if these developments could be paired with a social agenda that enjoys international support and economic assistance.[23] If the domestic movements that have emerged across the region in the last decade demanding rights, dignity, and freedom find a way to translate nascent opportunities into the energetic action that will create a tipping point, the conditions for new configurations of political authority and social rights may yet emerge.
Is human rights the right framework for attempts to turn the page on the MENA region’s decades of repression, violence, climate-related crises, and impoverishment? The question remains open. On the one hand, developments at the multilateral level and among key actors may mean that a more capacious framework of economic and social rights—one that encompasses robust international obligations to address global rights to health, a clean environment, adequate water, and sustainable development more generally—is now emerging.[24] The growing consensus about the magnitude of global challenges, and a generation of progressive activism, have reshaped the debates in the United Nations’ (UN’s) corridors in Geneva. On the other hand, this change may come too late to resuscitate the damaged credibility of human rights as a normative framework in the MENA, especially given inconsistent international commitment to supporting human rights in the region.[25] Moreover, without a massive injection of humanitarian assistance—perhaps as a form of reparative justice for decades of plunder and sponsorship of regional autocrats—new commitments to economic and social rights at the international level will mean little to the drought-stricken, conflict-ridden de-development that has put at risk the subsistence of populations across the region. The magnitude of these crises can make human rights frameworks seem toothless.
Perceptions of international human rights frameworks in the region are also tainted by the double standards with which they have been applied: some of the worst abusers have long been shielded from scrutiny by their Western sponsors while crippling sanctions have been imposed on anti-Western actors even during the pandemic.[26] The resistance to holding Saudi Arabia’s reckless Crown Prince to account for flagrant human rights violations while imposing sanctions on Iran—affecting access to medical supplies in the midst of the pandemic—neatly illustrates this dynamic. Still, human rights is also part of the vernacular of popular demands in the region. Whether protesting against impunity for domestic violence in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey or the failure of accountability following the immense explosion in the port of Beirut, or police brutality in Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt, the region’s protesters continue to frame their grievances in the language of human rights.[27] Events in Sudan and Algeria in 2019–2020, the collapse of the long-standing order in Lebanon, and continuing expressions of grassroots indignation in Iraq, all suggest the latent possibility of renewed uprisings.[28] Such mobilizations, in turn, harbor transformative potential for the better realization of human rights in the region.
The rest of this chapter offers a brief overview of the current human rights situation in the Middle East and North Africa and considers how the uprisings have affected understandings of human rights in the region. If the uprisings gave voice to popular demands for regime accountability, the absence of accountability a decade later attests to the failure of existing international human rights mechanisms to impose a meaningful framework of responsibility even in the most extreme cases, such as the atrocities in Syria, the plundering of Libya, or the proxy wars in Yemen. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the ways in which geopolitical factors have inhibited the realization of human rights progress in the region, using the example of the Afghanistan withdrawal to illustrate the perverse dynamics of Western intervention and advocacy for human rights. With the West now pivoting away from the MENA region, the question remains whether international actors will support the humanitarian assistance and multilateral conflict resolution that is a prerequisite for the pursuit of human rights in the region.
Internal Challenges to Human Rights
in the MENA Region
The Middle East and North Africa remain notoriously inhospitable to a binding regional human rights framework. Like Asia—and unlike Europe, the Americas, and Africa—the Middle East has no binding regional human rights law, though two regional human rights instruments have been drafted, one by the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and another by the League of Arab States.[29] In addition, some of the North African countries—including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, but not Morocco—are signatories of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and thus technically subject to the jurisdiction of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission) and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court), though they have been less engaged with the African human rights system than sub-Saharan African countries.[30] Most countries in the region are also parties to the core multilateral human rights treaties, including the International Bill of Rights comprising the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).[31] Additional international human rights instruments addressing protections for the rights of women and children and the prevention and prohibition of torture have also been widely ratified by the states of the region, albeit with significant packages of reservations concerning specific provisions.[32] Thus the core binding framework for human rights in the region is the multilateral human rights system centered on the United Nations Human Rights Council and the various treaty bodies associated with the international human rights instruments ratified by the countries of the region. Though the UN system, as well as major transnational human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, do extensive reporting on human rights in the Middle East, there is no regional or international enforcement mechanism empowered to adjudicate human rights claims that emerge from the region.[33]
The challenges to human rights in the Middle East are as formidable as the available enforcement mechanisms are weak. For two decades, the war on terror has provided a framework that strengthens the hands of authoritarian governments in the region at the expense of human rights.[34] And in the last decade, every country where protests occurred during the Arab uprisings has experienced a significant deterioration in its human rights record.[35] Peaceful protests in Syria gave way to an armed revolt met by brutal repression by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions.[36] The uprisings in Libya and Yemen, while very different in their initial trajectories, have degenerated into vicious civil wars that have devastated the population, brought on famine conditions, and eviscerated hopes for a democratic transition or the protection of human rights—all of which is further exacerbated by the global pandemic.[37] Elsewhere, for instance in Egypt and Bahrain, early achievements by protesters were followed by counterrevolutionary repression and the ratcheting up of the authoritarian police states ruling the countries.[38] The GWoT provided the pretext of counterterrorism as cover for escalating crackdowns on opposition groups.[39] The monarchies of the region—in the Gulf, Jordan, and Morocco—faced more muted protests that were met in each country by a mix of accommodation and repression.[40] Ultimately, protests have not resulted in political liberalization, nor have they reined in counterterrorism depredations or forced any of these governments to tackle the destabilizing levels of socioeconomic inequality in their countries. Today, alongside regime violence, the health and well-being of citizens across the region are threatened by high unemployment, lack of economic opportunity and growing immiseration, tied to climate change–driven water scarcity as well as state mismanagement of the agriculture sector, and wide-ranging corruption in public services.[41]
The crisis in economic and social rights is especially striking for a region that has considerable resources. Oil wealth continues to be a source of revenue for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and remittances for other parts of the region, though even the GCC states have struggled with the effects of climate change and the impact of a pandemic-related decline in oil demand.[42] Elsewhere in the region, a combination of population growth, privatization, and corruption has led to growing inequality and unsustainable levels of unemployment, as wealth is concentrated in fewer hands and a larger proportion of the society experiences declining standards of living from one generation to the next.[43] Thus, it is no surprise that citizens across the region describe economic deprivation as the leading human rights issue in their country and corruption as a major cause of political unrest and deteriorating rights.[44] Another long-standing problem that contributes to economic malaise is the failure to protect women’s rights, with little progress on reforms in family, labor, criminal, and nationality laws that entrench de jure discrimination against women.[45]
Underlying the dire state of human rights in the MENA region is the abiding reality of authoritarian rule. Far from addressing demands for reform, authoritarianism is resurgent in much of the region, with citizens experiencing a marked decline in political freedoms including freedom of speech, assembly, and expression.[46] Violence is endemic even in the countries not experiencing armed conflict: abductions, torture, killings of journalists and political opponents, police brutality, extrajudicial killing, summary executions, and violent crackdowns on peaceful protest all remain depressingly common across the region.[47] There is a widespread perception that Western actors are contributing to this dire picture with tacit or even explicit support for authoritarian actors and a willingness to turn a blind eye to depredations committed in the name of counterterrorism.[48] The situation is even more drastic in countries engulfed by war—Libya, Syria, and Yemen—where violations of international humanitarian law involve the daily targeting of civilians in mass attacks, producing casualties numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, and counterterrorism pretexts have transformed local conflicts into geopolitical proxy wars. Finally, the rare democracies of the region have also witnessed bouts of escalating state violence presented as counterterrorism—such as the Israeli strikes on Gaza in 2021 and Turkish military action against Kurdish groups in the country’s southeast in 2015—as well as democratic erosion or backsliding.[49] In short, few regions can compete with the MENA in terms of an overall deterioration in protection of human rights in the twenty-first century.
The Afterlives of the Uprisings
Despite this bleak portrait, however, there is real ferment in the region around a human rights agenda. At least one analyst has argued that the Arab uprisings “can be viewed as the world’s first human rights revolution.”[50] The transnational wave of protest movements was galvanized by demands for human rights in a Middle Eastern vernacular. The specific demands that reverberated across the region—for dignity, bread, and justice—represent a grassroots articulation of a fundamental human rights framework, underscoring the indivisibility of civil, political, economic, and social rights.[51] Fed up with counterterrorism frameworks legitimizing state repression and the corruption and economic mismanagement that blight the prospects of ordinary people, the uprisings asserted popular demands in a rights-based register. Yet implicit in the uprisings was also a critique of Western human rights advocacy that cleaves civil and political rights—and the agenda of promoting good governance and democracy—from economic and social rights. The core, shared assessment of publics across the region from Tunis to Sana’a was that regimes that failed to deliver socioeconomic rights to their populations must fall. In the wake of the uprisings, the failure to meet popular demands for a decent standard of living remains a source of profound destabilization for the region’s autocracies.[52]
That the protests were neither led (nor in many cases even joined) by Islamists is also telling.[53] Demands to overthrow authoritarians like Ben Ali and Mubarak were not grounded in political Islam but in basic demands for human dignity. The reflexive habit of presenting domestic dissent as Islamist menace was, accordingly, unavailable to the autocratic regimes confronting uprisings. Though many resorted to repression to foreclose political change, the tired scripts of counterterrorism no longer provide the same mantle of authoritarian legitimacy they did before 2011.
The uprisings focused attention on the real sources of popular dissatisfaction in the MENA region. The pro-Western regimes were destabilized not out of anti-imperialism or an embrace of political Islam, but because they governed through coercion and were unable to deliver the prerequisites for realizing basic human rights. The Taliban, which took power in Afghanistan in the midst of the American withdrawal, would do well to heed this basic reality. The region’s corrupt, pro-Western regimes are brittle and unstable because of their brutal and incompetent record of governance. Opportunistic actors—from Sisi in Egypt and Kais Saied in Tunisia to the Taliban in Afghanistan—may be able to seize power in a context of destabilization and widespread public discontent with the status quo, but their own governments will be equally unstable, dependent on coercion, and unable to deliver socioeconomic growth unless they address the failings of the prior regime. Analysts across the spectrum caution that governing is more difficult than conquest in the case of Afghanistan, and the same is true across the MENA region.[54] Governing requires securing the basic human rights of the population, whatever the regime type and geopolitical orientation; the alternative is ongoing instability.
This basic insight was memorably given voice during the Arab uprisings by popular chants that spread across the region’s borders. The language of human rights was explicitly deployed by citizen-led movements for a range of reasons. First, universality as a characteristic of human rights has a resonance that captures the imagination of publics and enables them to convey the transcendent character of their demands. The basic idea that we are all entitled to certain rights regardless of where we live and who governs is intuitively appealing and facilitates the broad diffusion of human rights frameworks. Second, the transnational character of human rights claims enabled local movements to make demands that were globally legible. The conscious invocation of human rights and creative public campaigns using humor, graphic arts, and social media to project demands internationally enabled protesters both to convey the legitimacy of their anti-authoritarian uprisings and to seek the protection offered by global media coverage of their regimes’ responses. Finally, the embrace of human rights articulations by protesters enabled them to resist regime efforts to characterize their movements as terrorist or insurgent mobilizations, seizing the high ground in the battle over global public relations.
The result of the prodemocratic and prohuman rights character of the uprisings was that Western governments had a difficult time coming to the aid of their authoritarian clients as these sought to repress citizen revolts. From initial French efforts to support Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime to American ambivalence in response to the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak, Western governments repeatedly found themselves on the “wrong side of history” as decades of purported democracy promotion suddenly faltered in the face of an anti-authoritarian mass mobilization.[55] In the end, half-hearted efforts to steady Ben Ali’s regime gave way as the Tunisian military’s decision to stand aside ensured its fall, while Mubarak’s allies—led by the United States—secured a caretaker role for the Egyptian military once it became clear that the president had to go. Rather than invoking human rights, Western powers limited themselves to calls for an “orderly transition,” widely seen in the region as code for a tightly orchestrated transfer of power that would maintain the existing geopolitical balance of power.[56] The key priority conveyed by this framing was that the uprisings should not alter the pro-Western character of Arab regimes in transition. By contrast, where regimes that were not solidly in the Western camp became destabilized—such as in Syria or Libya—full-throated support for protesters and regime change was the order of the day among Western capitals.
The legacy of these double standards has profoundly marked the MENA region. In particular, the decision by the UN Security Council, with U.S. leadership under the administration of President Barack Obama, to intervene in Libya, followed by the failure to authorize similar multilateral intervention in Syria, put paid to the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect,” and bred cynicism across the region about the human rights pieties of the West.[57] Indeed, the intervention in Libya vividly illustrated the destabilizing quality of the prevailing geopolitical order that defined the MENA region, and the way it undermined human rights. Pax Americana after September 11 came with a belligerent swagger that did more to destabilize the region than maintain order. With Libya, the Security Council became an instrument for an intervention that tarnished the image of multilateralism with the brush of NATO-led regime change.[58] A decade on, neither UN initiatives nor U.S. priorities enjoy the influence they once did in the region, opening the door to a geopolitical reordering with potentially far-reaching implications for human rights. These trends have been further cemented by the withdrawal from Afghanistan, seen as a full American retreat from the region and even as a capitulation to actors once reviled for their records of human rights abuse.[59]
Europe’s reputation has not fared much better over the decade since the uprisings. The European response to Syrian refugees, as one example, represented another nadir in Western human rights credibility. The massive flow of Syrian refugees into neighboring MENA countries from 2011 to 2015 was never recognized as a “crisis” by European actors, so long as migration could be limited to the eastern Mediterranean. After millions of displaced Syrians had been absorbed by countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey with little international assistance or European attention, the summer of 2015 suddenly witnessed a global panic when refugees reached European shores.[60] The result was an object lesson in the limits of Western humanitarianism. Lebanon, with a population of under four million, found itself hosting over a million Syrian refugees by 2014, at a time when Western countries systematically failed to meet their financial pledges to humanitarian relief efforts coordinated through the UN.[61] Yet when a similar number of refugees arrived in Europe—where the population is over one hundred times greater than Lebanon’s—the unraveling of refugee protocols and the stark refusal of wealthy capitals to absorb even small numbers of displaced people exposed the racial biases and shallow commitments of European countries accustomed to lecturing their neighbors on human rights.[62]
From the perspective of geopolitics and human rights, the Arab uprisings and their aftermath have left a dual legacy. The uprisings demonstrated that the human rights paradigm has substantial traction at the grassroots level among Middle Eastern publics. At the same time, faith in the formal international human rights machinery at the United Nations is at an all-time low, and human rights rhetoric from Western capitals retains little leverage. Whether considering the ransom paid by Europe to Turkey and the Libyan Coast Guard to deter migrants—by warehousing them at best and enslaving them at worst[63]—or the betrayal of Afghan allies literally cast off by Western evacuation efforts,[64] the region’s publics view normative claims from the West with a skepticism that may become fatal to international human rights frameworks and the organizations that promote them.
Geopolitical Obstacles to Progress on Human Rights
in the MENA Region
The above survey of the state of human rights in the MENA countries makes clear that the geopolitical significance of the region has had an adverse effect on the realization of rights for those who live there. A decade into the “war on terror,” even those countries not subject to invasion and occupation had been disfigured by counterterrorist violence. The authoritarian police states of the region eagerly repurposed counterterrorism to their own ends, targeting dissidents and opponents with the same treatment that the United States meted out to its adversaries. Regime circles grew richer and better equipped—corruption was fueled by ever-growing counterterrorism budgets[65]—while those outside those cliques confronted impoverishment as economies faltered. Out of this decade-long escalation of violence and inequality emerged the uprisings that swept the region. If the geopolitics of the GWoT contributed to these uprisings, a decade later it is the selective U.S. disengagement from the MENA region that will scramble the internal distribution of power there and its relation to the broader regions to which it remains connected, from Europe to the Indian Ocean to the Horn of Africa.
Twenty years after the United States and NATO invaded Afghanistan, the sudden withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan government has definitively undercut the perceived reliability of Western commitments to stability and the defense of human rights in the region. Allies and adversaries alike understand that U.S. foreign policy doctrine has shifted away from high-minded rhetorical support for human rights—including women’s rights—to a focus on the narrower “national security interests of the American people.”[66] The initial decision to withdraw from Afghanistan—and to negotiate with the Taliban to the exclusion of the government of then-Afghan president Ashraf Ghani—may have been taken by the Trump administration, but President Joe Biden chose to follow and engaged in little consultation with allies. In the Middle East, the message received is that the U.S. commitment to regional alliances has become more tenuous.[67] The Biden administration may not be using the “America First” label, but it has embraced a transactional approach to foreign policy.[68]
The Western pivot away from the MENA region creates a void that will be filled by new forms of geopolitical competition within and beyond it. On the one hand, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Qatar, and Turkey are immersed in intense intraregional competition that has exacerbated sectarian divisions and fueled the region’s proxy wars.[69] On the other hand, external powers—particularly Russia and China, but perhaps increasingly also India and Pakistan—may become more active in the region.[70] If Afghanistan serves as a testing ground for a new geopolitical framing of the MENA, for now it seems that the non-Western external powers are content to hedge their bets. On the one hand, China, Turkey, and Iran may engage to a limited extent with the new Afghan regime both to avoid a destabilizing collapse and to assert a potential role in shaping new trade routes and access to natural resources.[71] At the same time, none of these powers seems keen to assume principal responsibility for maintaining order or countering terrorism or narcotics trafficking in the country. Understanding the implications of this new geopolitical context for human rights requires contextualizing the significance of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
To the extent that this withdrawal marks a repudiation of the liberal internationalist model of intervention and nation-building, there has been much concern that it also sounds a death knell for human rights.[72] Yet it is worth remembering that from the neocon project of regime change to the neoliberal effort to rebuild so-called failed states, over a quarter century of interventions in the MENA countries have left most of their targets worse off as false promises have ended in bitter recriminations, from Somalia to Iraq to Afghanistan. Against this backdrop of failed intervention, the significance of the Afghan withdrawal for human rights in the region may not be as dire as feared. Put simply: if military interventions cost tens of thousands of civilian lives (based on conservative estimates) without producing stable or secure states, then abandoning such interventionism may have some counterintuitive benefits.
This leads directly to the second core implication of the Afghanistan withdrawal: while the United States long touted its commitments to human rights—and notably women’s rights—in Afghanistan, the sidelining of this agenda in favor of other geopolitical imperatives has been a constant. The speed of the withdrawal and the prioritization of securing Western citizens without putting in place a plan to protect local Afghan allies was only the most recent reminder of underlying U.S. priorities.[73] The West’s half-hearted commitment to human rights in Afghanistan raised and then dashed expectations in ways that may have left local communities worse off in the short run and deeply skeptical about the international human rights agenda in the long run. In the end, the withdrawal has left Afghans to their own resources to find ways to protect human rights on the ground without Western support.[74] While the scenes of chaos, desperation, and panic at the end of August bode ill for the immediate protection of human rights in the country, in the medium term the withdrawal of Western militaries and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may create the space for indigenous civil society to develop local priorities and resources with respect to protecting rights, however they may be framed. After all, human rights require, at a minimum, the very basics of security and stability that have been denied to most Afghans in over four decades of externally driven war on their territory. The rapid rise of a new government with local sources of support in the midst of the American withdrawal may paradoxically be a hopeful sign in the longer term for securing a prerequisite for realizing human rights: an end to war. While few expect the Taliban to establish a rights-respecting government, reducing armed conflict would constitute an improvement for the human rights of civilians in many parts of the country outside the capital, despite the painful backsliding on women’s rights.[75] Moreover, it has been widely reported that the Taliban consolidated control over the territory through local political bargains, which may result in forms of accountability to the rural and provincial parts of Afghanistan that were long absent from the Kabul-centered governance of the past twenty years.[76]
On the other hand, whatever the course of events on the ground in Afghanistan, the country will remain trapped in a set of geopolitical framings that will have a significant impact on its human rights trajectory. Alongside the shallow Western commitment to human rights in the region, geopolitical obstacles to realizing those rights are also exemplified by the experience in Afghanistan. First, there is a real risk that the United States will respond to military defeat by inflicting economic punishment on its former adversary, the Taliban.[77] Going beyond an asset freeze by, for example, designating the Taliban, now the de facto government of Afghanistan, as a foreign terrorist organization would be a form of economic warfare, strangling the country, cutting aid delivery, blocking trade, and impeding the ability of ordinary Afghans to access essential imported goods. Steps along these lines would arguably be an even greater enduring betrayal of the Afghan people than the chaotic withdrawal itself, impairing economic recovery and accelerating a mass exodus of refugees. Afghanistan is a poor country; much of its GDP over the past twenty years has depended on donors,[78] half the population faces food shortages—including over three million children experiencing severe malnutrition—and millions have been internally displaced. As Adam Tooze has argued, what Afghanistan needs is an “amply funded multilateral humanitarian effort to ensure life can continue as far as possible and millions of people are preserved from disaster.”[79]
Beyond the threat of punitive sanctions, all the factors that undermine human rights across the whole region are also in play in Afghanistan. These include the possibility of new nonstate actors challenging Taliban control, continued counterterrorism airstrikes by Western forces, geopolitical competition resulting in proxy wars, the ravages of climate change, the unequal global response to the pandemic, and the rush to stave off a migration crisis by placing physical obstacles in the way of desperate people seeking to flee. With the Taliban government cut off from Afghan sovereign assets and facing sanctions, the escalating humanitarian crisis in the country is just the most recent example of the risk of man-made famine in the region.[80] That these starvation conditions have been externally imposed in countries such as Yemen and Afghanistan in the midst of a global pandemic only underscores the degree to which the epidemic of human rights abuse in the Middle East is tied to geopolitical factors.[81]
Over the past decade, the return of great-power proxy wars—notably in Syria and Yemen—has disproportionately affected the MENA region. The withdrawal from Afghanistan may accelerate this trend, with the decrease of the U.S. appetite for extended deployments and the intensification of strategic competition. As China expresses interest in Afghan trade routes and rare earth minerals,[82] the Biden administration’s avowed commitment to “over the horizon” defense strategies may mean a doubling down on drone strikes and cyber intervention, arming local proxies to counter Chinese influence without offering alternative sources of Western investment.[83] Indeed, even in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal, there remained the risk that leaving Afghanistan might mark the beginning of a new chapter of the “forever war.”[84] The rise of private military security contractors, the impact of digital technologies, unmanned weaponry and cyber warfare, and competition with China are all aggravating factors that portend continued war-making through technological surrogates and proxy forces.
Against this stark reality, prospects for human rights remain more imperiled by geopolitics than by actions and decisions by local powers in the MENA region. From a human rights perspective, it is worth remembering what is actually owed to Afghanistan by international actors instead of a future of proxy wars, sanctions, and continued carnage. What human rights would require in that country—and across much of the MENA, for that matter—is, at a minimum, accountability for two decades of devastation under the guise of the war on terror, and related proxy wars, which have extinguished millions of lives and crippled the future of generations. Yet instead of massive humanitarian assistance and acknowledgment of these terrible costs, the region is increasingly walled off from its neighbors, seen as an incubator of threat or a transit site for migration. In this context, for the people of the MENA region, claims about Western—and especially American—commitments to democracy or the pursuit of human rights is understood simply as so much geopolitical propaganda and apologia for empire. Changing this basic reality and rehabilitating human rights frameworks requires fundamentally rethinking the geopolitical approach to the region in a way that centers on the human security of the region’s people rather than prioritizing authoritarian clients, weapons sales, counterterrorism, and continued investment in a global economy fueled by the region’s carbon resources, trade routes, and rare earth minerals.
Conclusions and Recommendations
In some ways the COVID-19 pandemic, as much as the Afghanistan withdrawal, has brought the September 11 era to an end. Global priorities have shifted away from the war on terror, and the pandemic has underscored a logic of rivalry with China. Two decades of misdirected resources, bookended by a forced reckoning with the official incompetence and mendacity of American war planners in Afghanistan,[85] have left behind a destabilized and immiserated MENA region.
The parting U.S. drone strike in Kabul, initially described as a successful attack on Islamic State affiliates but later shown to have massacred ten civilians from a single family, including seven children, serves as a synecdoche of the war on terror.[86] Like the tens of thousands of Afghan civilian deaths that preceded them, these children’s deaths might never have been acknowledged but for enterprising reporting; and even now they will be little more than a footnote to the geopolitical imperatives that shaped both the war and the evacuation. Both literally and figuratively, Afghan civilian lives barely register in a geopolitical order that imposes at best limited accountability on Western war planners. For all the pious invocation of human rights during the decades-long military engagement in Afghanistan, the actual rights of Afghans—including those left to reckon with the devastating fallout of the U.S. withdrawal—remain little more than a rounding error in the avalanche of bitter retrospectives published since the last U.S. soldier was evacuated. Meanwhile, the EU began quietly funding a Turkish effort to build a 330-mile wall along its eastern border with Iran to prevent Afghan migrants from entering the country and transiting to Europe.[87]
Afghanistan is now seen primarily as a migration and terrorism risk to be mitigated, rather than as a country to which humanitarian protection and human rights support are owed.[88] The lightning speed with which the country was abandoned will remain a powerful indictment of the West for those in the MENA region and beyond. Western publics, too, should recognize that benevolent intentions delivered through aerial bombardment have neither improved human rights nor persuaded populations on the ground of the virtues of a global hegemon often indifferent to the death and dislocation it produces.
What then are the prospects for human rights in the region for the next decade, as the West pivots away? The post-9/11 war on terror facilitated a metastasizing global approach to counterterrorism that enabled, legitimized, and accepted massive human rights abuses. Perhaps now space may become available for the peoples of the MENA region to pursue indigenous solutions to endemic challenges as the GWoT winds to a close. If there is to be international support for human rights in the region going forward, it must heed the lessons of the harms wrought by external actors so far this century, as well as the voices of civil society actors on the ground.
This would mean, first, prioritizing economic and social rights in a region where the inequality and impoverishment that fueled uprisings a decade ago have only been exacerbated. International humanitarian assistance to address the ravages of war, pandemic, water scarcity, and climate change—all of which imperil the subsistence of millions from Libya to Afghanistan—would be the right starting point. A human rights–informed approach to migration management cannot depend on building higher walls around Europe or at the borders of countries such as Australia and the United States. Instead, it requires substantial transfers of resources to, and investments in, territories where populations are at risk of famine and epidemics of preventable diseases. The legacy of withdrawal from Afghanistan might yet include improvements in human rights in the region if accountability for the damage inflicted in the past two decades took the form of long-term and sustainable investment rather than sanctions that will further immiserate the civilian population.
Instead of embracing a new over-the-horizon strategy, the United States would do well to internalize the lesson that its military interventions have neither stabilized the MENA region nor achieved durable counterterrorism objectives. As the Afghanistan debacle illustrates, the most that can be achieved militarily is temporary threat management at a staggering cost to civilian populations. To improve the prospects of human rights in the coming decade, a reversal of priorities is required, beginning with reinvestment in multilateral efforts at conflict resolution and an end to proxy wars through incentives to the Gulf countries and Turkey to desist from their current strategies, and the inclusion of adversaries such as Russia and Iran in planned negotiations about theaters of conflict where these states are present. Should such efforts succeed, moreover, a postconflict context will require massive reconstruction. Rather than treating this as an opportunity to impose heavy-handed conditions on aid, the United States might lead international efforts to facilitate rebuilding while insisting on narrowly framed, specific, and achievable human rights priorities such as humanitarian access to all regions.
What is needed more broadly in the region has been well articulated by Fionnuala Ní Aolaín, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. She argued that the twentieth anniversary of September 11 required nothing less than a “genuine reckoning on the use and abuse of counterterrorism measures and institutions.”[89] The future of human rights in the Middle East depends not only on a formal end to direct U.S. and Western intervention, but also a fundamental rethinking of the geopolitical logics and counterterrorism framings that have enabled lawless violence and repression. Yet neither Western actors nor their Chinese and Russian competitors have shown interest in such a reckoning.
International peace and stability, and improvements in human rights in the MENA countries, cannot be realized through the region’s authoritarian status quo, nor can these goals be delivered through military intervention. Calls for “restraint” in the halls of power in Washington should be heeded not through increased reliance on air power and partnerships with regional autocrats, but by reimagining stability in the MENA region in terms of the welfare of its citizens.[90] In the meantime, achieving human rights goals requires a return to first principles—those that were articulated by broad publics across the region during the 2011 uprisings. Bread, dignity, and justice—that is, providing a minimum core of economic and social rights, ending authoritarian repression, and achieving a measure of accountability for past harms—were the shared aspirations articulated by mobilized citizens a decade ago. Counterterrorism and intervention have undermined these objectives. The possibility of pursuing a locally determined human rights trajectory depends on an end to the wasted human and financial capital of the war on terror, its many proxy conflicts, and the Western war profiteering it enabled.[91] Given the adverse consequences of direct and indirect interventions in the region over the last two decades, perhaps the best news for human rights in the MENA is that geopolitical interest in the region may be waning.
Geopolitics have long been at cross-purposes with human rights in the MENA region. An agenda to reverse this equation would entail humanitarian reparations, divestment from alliances with autocrats, and investment in grassroots partnerships with civil society actors articulating their own locally inflected agenda for human rights. For now, such a reversal may remain beyond reach. Instead, in the space left following an American pivot to other geopolitical priorities, a more attainable hope is that the MENA states might define a stable order among themselves.[92] If they do, perhaps, such stability will enable the region’s peoples to pursue tangible, local solutions that will incrementally address their own human rights demands with less direct geopolitical interference.
Notes
1. David Leonhardt, “A Missing Legacy,” New York Times, September 10, 2021 (describing the “double tragedy” of September 11).
2. Jared Keller, “American Lost the Iraq War—These Cables Show How,” The New Republic, November 25, 2019; Anthony Cordesman, “America’s Failed Strategy in the Middle East: Losing Iraq and the Gulf,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 2, 2020.
3. Murtaza Hussain, “Over Two Decades, U.S.’ Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion,” The Intercept, September 1, 2021.
4. Itamar Rabinovich, “Reflections on the Long-Term Repercussions of September 11 for US Policy in the Middle East,” Brookings, September 7, 2021.
5. Mohamed Ali Adraoui, “How the Arab Spring Changed the Middle East and North Africa Forever,” The Conversation, May 26, 2021.
6. Omar Dahi, “Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Revolts,” MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), Summer 2011.
7. See, for example, Heiko Wimmen, “Syria’s Path from Civil Uprising to Civil War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 22, 2016.
8. Jillian Schwedler, “Taking Time Seriously: Temporality and the Arab Uprisings,” Project on Middle East Political Science, May 2016.
9. Merouan Mekouar, “No Political Agents, No Diffusion: Evidence from North Africa,” International Studies Review 16, 2 (2014), pp. 206–16.
10. Alexander Marquardt, “Obama Mideast Speech Faces Disappointed and Disillusioned Arab World,” ABC News, May 19, 2011; Marina Ottaway, “Bahrain and the Conundrum of Democracy Promotion,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, June 14, 2021.
11. Robert Marquand, “An Embarrassed France Backpedals from Its Support of Tunisia’s Ben Ali,” Christian Science Monitor, January 20, 2011; John Nichols, “The Nation: Biden Is on the Wrong Side of History,” NPR, January 31, 2011 (noting then-vice president Biden’s support for maintaining Mubarak in office despite a popular uprising).
12. Johan Schaar, “A Confluence of Crises: On Water, Climate and Security in the Middle East and North Africa,” SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security, July 2019.
13. Hadil Al-Mowafak, “Yemen’s Water Crisis: A New Urgency to an Old Problem,” Peace Lab, April 6, 2021.
14. Marie Lamensch, “Authoritarianism Has Been Reinvented for the Digital Age,” Center for International Governance Innovation, July 9, 2021; Federico Borsari, “The Middle East’s Game of Drones: The Race to Lethal UAVs and Its Implications for the Region’s Security Landscape,” Italian Institute for Political Studies, January 15, 2021.
15. “MENA: COVID-19 Amplified Inequalities and Was Used to Further Ramp Up Repression,” Amnesty International, April 7, 2021. The oil-rich Gulf states fared better because of their prior investment in health infrastructure, though the pandemic has had adverse long-term impacts on their economies. “COVID-19, Subdued Oil Price to Leave Much of the Gulf in the Red This Year—Fitch,” Reuters, April 27, 2021.
16. “UN’s Guterres Warns of ‘Impact’ on Sahel Region from Libya War,” Al Jazeera English, January 23, 2020.
17. Azmat Khan, “The Uncounted,” New York Times, November 16, 2017 (on civilian toll of U.S. air campaign in Iraq against Islamic State); and “All Feasible Precautions? Civilian Casualties in Anti-ISIS Coalition Airstrikes in Syria,” Human Rights Watch, September 24, 2017.
18. “After Years of Conflict, Yemen Remains the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis,” United Nations Population Fund, December 7, 2020.
19. Tyler Page and Natasha Bertrand, “White House Shifts from Middle East Quagmires to a Showdown with China,” Politico, January 29, 2021.
20. Jon Hoffman, “Neither Russia nor China Could Fill a U.S. Void in the Middle East—Nor Would They Desire to,” Foreign Policy, September 15, 2021.
21. Bouazza Ben Bouazza, “Tunisia’s Saied Strengthens Presidential Powers in Decrees,” Washington Post, September 23, 2021.
22. “Stemming Tunisia’s Authoritarian Drift,” International Crisis Group, January 11, 2018.
23. Kersten Knipp and Khaled Salameh, “Tunisia: A Political Crisis Fueled by Economic Woes,” Deutsche Welle, July 27, 2021.
24. Rajesh Mirchandani, “Five Global Issues to Watch in 2021,” United Nations Foundation, December 23, 2020.
25. Michele Dunne, “Support for Human Rights in the Arab World: A Shifting and Inconsistent Picture,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 28, 2018.
26. Even the defenders of current priorities acknowledge the apparent double standard. See, for example, Eric Mandel, “Why the Double Standard on Human Rights with Saudi Arabia and Iran?,” The Hill, January 28, 2021.
27. See, for example, Esra Yalcinalp, “Women Rise Up over Withdrawal from Istanbul Convention,” BBC News, March 26, 2021; Leela Jacinto, “Beirut Blast Propels Activist from Street Protests to Political Action,” France 24, February 8, 2021; and Declan Walsh, “Rare Protests against Egypt’s Leader Erupt in Cairo and Elsewhere,” New York Times, September 20, 2019.
28. See, for example, Peter Bartu, “The New Arab Uprisings: How the 2019 Trajectory Differs from the 2011 Legacy,” Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, January 13, 2020, https://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2020/01/arab-uprisings-2019-trajectory-differs-2011-legacy-part-1-200105102004189.html.
29. Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (OIC, 1990); Arab Charter on Human Rights (Arab League, 2004). In addition, Turkey is the sole state in the region that is a member of the Council of Europe and therefore bound by the European Convention of Human Rights and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. This situates Turkey somewhat differently from other countries in the region and for the purposes of this chapter, the focus will be on the countries of the region that are not party to the Council of Europe.
30. Libya under the Qaddafi regime was the North African country that was the most engaged with the African human rights system, but since 2011 its participation has waned dramatically. Of the other countries, Egypt is currently behind by two reports in its reporting obligations to the African Commission, and Algeria and Tunisia are behind by three or more reports. Only Tunisia has ever had a contentious case brought against it before the African Court—that case was brought in 2021 and is currently pending. In 2011, the Court was asked to issue an advisory opinion on the situation in Libya, but the request was denied.
31. The following countries have ratified the ICCPR: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. All of these countries have also ratified the ICESCR, together with Oman, which has only joined the ICESCR. The governments of OmanSaudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have neither signed nor ratified the ICCPR.
32. The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has been ratified by all the countries of the region save Iran. As of 2020, when Qatar and Oman both acceded, the Convention against Torture was also ratified by all of the countries in the region with the exception of Iran. The Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by every country of the region.
33. Again, the North African countries subject to the jurisdiction of the African Court and Turkey’s participation in the Council of Europe remain outliers in this respect. Moreover, of these countries, only Turkey has ever faced enforcement action under the contentious jurisdiction of a regional human rights court.
34. Shadi Hamid, “Sound and Fury in the Post-9/11 Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, September 8, 2021; Chris Rogers and Jordan Street, “If the US Wants to Push Back on Authoritarian Agendas at the UN, Get Counterterrorism Rights,” Just Security, February 1, 2021.
35. Michael Safi, “Life Has Got Worse since Arab Spring, Say People across Middle East,” The Guardian, December 17, 2020.
36. “Factbox: The Cost of Ten Years of Devastating War in Syria,” Reuters, May 26, 2021 (detailing documentation of the deaths of over 227,000 civilians and the displacement of over half of Syria’s population of 23 million).
37. “In Libya and Yemen War Zones, COVID-19 Adds a Second Front,” PBS News, May 6, 2020.
38. Jonathan Fenton-Harvey, “Regional Uprisings Confront Gulf-Backed Counterrevolution,” MERIP, Fall/Winter 2019.
39. Mirjam Edel and Maria Josua, “How Authoritarian Rulers Seek to Legitimize Repression: Framing Mass Killings in Egypt and Ukbekistan,” Democratization 25, 5 (2018), pp. 882–900.
40. Yasmina Abouzzohour, “Heavy Lies the Crown: The Survival of Arab Monarchies, 10 Years after the Arab Spring,” Brookings, March 8, 2021.
41. Michael Robbins and Amaney Jamal, “The State of Social Justice in the Arab World: The Arab Uprisings of 2011 and Beyond,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 8, 1 (2016), pp. 127–57, at p. 130.
42. Gawdat Bahgat, “Socio-Economic and Political Impact of COVID-19 on GCC States,” in The Politics of Pandemics: Evolving Regime-Opposition Dynamics in the MENA Region, edited by Karim Mesran and Annalisa Perteghella (Washington: Atlantic Council, 2020).
43. Lydia Assouad, “Inequality and Its Discontents in the Middle East,” Carnegie Middle East Center, March 12, 2020.
44. Robbins and Jamal, “The State of Social Justice in the Arab World,” pp. 139–42.
45. See generally, United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports—Gender Inequality Index (2020).
46. “Human Rights in Middle East and North Africa—Review in 2020,” Amnesty International, 2021.
47. A survey of documented human rights conditions reflected in Human Rights Watch’s 2021 World Report corroborates this description for the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE, and Yemen. Similar patterns can be gleaned from Amnesty International’s “Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa—Review in 2020.”
48. Rafiah Al Talei, “The Dilemma of US Democracy and Human Rights Promotion in the Middle East,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 27, 2021.
49. Ceylan Yeginsu, “Turkey’s Campaign against Kurdish Militants Takes Toll on Civilians,” New York Times, December 30, 2015; “Gaza: Apparent War Crimes during May Fighting,” Human Rights Watch, July 27. 2021.
50. Rosa Brooks, “Lessons for International Law from the Arab Spring,” American University International Law Review 28, 3 (2013), pp. 713–32, at pp. 714–15.
51. Jordan Paust, “International Law, Dignity, Democracy and the Arab Spring,” Cornell International Law Journal 46, 1 (2013), pp. 1–19, at p. 1.
52. Rami G. Khouri, “How Poverty and Inequality Are Devastating the Middle East,” Carnegie New York, September 12, 2019.
53. Fait Muedini, “The Role of Religion in the ‘Arab Spring’: Comparing the Actions and Strategies of Islamist Parties,” Oxford Handbooks Online, July 2014.
54. Carter Malkasian, “How Will the Taliban Rule? Governing Afghanistan Is More Difficult Than Conquering It,” Foreign Affairs, August 23, 2021.
55. Shadi Hamid, “The Struggle for Middle East Democracy,” Brookings, April 26, 2011.
56. Dan Robinson, “Obama: Egypt Needs Orderly Transition,” VOA News, January 29, 2011.
57. For an early discussion of the likely long-term implications of the Libya intervention for the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, see David Rieff, “R2P, R.I.P.,” New York Times, November 7, 2011.
58. Philippe Bolopion, “After Libya, the Question: To Protect or Depose?,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2011.
59. David Zucchino, “Kabul’s Sudden Fall to Taliban Ends U.S. Era in Afghanistan,” New York Times, August 15, 2021.
60. Kenneth Roth, “The Refugee Crisis That Isn’t,” Huffington Post, September 3, 2015; and Kelly Greenhill, “Open Arms behind Barred Doors: Fear, Hypocrisy and Policy Schizophrenia in the European Migration Crisis,” European Law Journal 22, 3 (2016), pp. 317–32.
61. “Syrian Refugees in Lebanon Surpass One Million,” UNHCR/WFP, April 3, 2014 (quoting then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres stating that international support for Lebanon “is totally out of proportion with what is needed.”).
62. Shada Islam, “Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’ Isn’t about Numbers. It’s about Prejudice,” The Guardian, October 8, 2020.
63. Kyilah Terry, “The EU–Turkey Deal, Five Years On: A Frayed and Controversial but Enduring Blueprint,” Migration Policy Institute, April 8, 2021; and Joey Ayoub, “How the EU Is Responsible for Slavery in Libya,” Al Jazeera English, November 29, 2017.
64. Phil McCausland, “U.S. Withdrawal Leaves Afghan Allies Grappling with Fear, Anger and Panic,” NBC News, August 31, 2021.
65. Zoltan Barany, “Arms Procurement and Corruption in the Gulf Monarchies,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 11, 2020.
66. Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, stated that the president viewed the withdrawal decision as serving the “national security interests of the American people.” Jake Sullivan, White House Press Briefing, August 17, 2021.
67. Broader worries about the credibility of U.S. deterrent capabilities after the Afghan withdrawal, by contrast, seem overblown. The United States has made clear for nearly a decade its intention to pivot to Asia, and while some Islamist nonstate groups may be emboldened by the American withdrawal, for many states the redeployment of resources to countering China may actually enhance U.S. credibility in East Asia. The agreement concluded in 2021 to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines is an early indicator of how aggressive U.S. foreign policy may now become in the Asia-Pacific region. Ishaan Tharoor, “A Landmark Submarine Deal May Be Aimed at China, but It Has Upset France,” Washington Post, September 17, 2021.
68. In his first major address, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the administration’s foreign policy would prioritize “the needs and aspirations of the American people.” Antony J. Blinken, “A Foreign Policy for the American People,” March 3, 2021.
69. Joost Hiltermann, “Tackling Intersecting Conflicts in the MENA Region,” International Crisis Group, February 13, 2018.
70. Ali Wyne and Colin P. Clarke, “Assessing China and Russia’s Moves in the Middle East,” Lawfare, September 17, 2021.
71. “Adapting to a New Reality in Afghanistan,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, August 20, 2021.
72. Zack Beauchamp, “The War on Terror and the Long Death of Liberal Interventionism,” Vox, September 8, 2021.
73. Nicole Narea, “Biden Had a Chance to Save US Allies in Afghanistan. He Wasted It,” Vox, August 17, 2021.
74. Thomas Meaney, “Like Ordering Pizza,” London Review of Books 43, 7 (September 9, 2021).
75. For example, the UN reported that more women and children were killed in the first half of 2021 than in the first six months of any year since the UN began systematically keeping count more than a decade ago. “As US Withdraws, Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan Reach Record High,” NPR, July 26, 2021.
76. Malkasian, “How Will the Taliban Rule?”
77. Adam Smith, “The Humanitarian and Policy Challenges of U.S. Sanctions on the Taliban,” Just Security, August 23, 2021.
78. “Biden Administration Freezes Billions of Dollars in Afghan Reserves, Depriving Taliban of Cash,” Washington Post, August 17, 2021.
79. Adam Tooze, “Don’t Abandon Afghanistan’s Economy Too,” Foreign Policy, August 27, 2021.
80. Marc Santora, Nick Cummings-Bruce, and Christina Goldbaum, “A Million Afghan Children Could Die in ‘Most Perilous Hour,’ U.N. Warns,” New York Times, September 13, 2021.
81. “Deadly Consequences: Obstruction of Aid in Yemen During COVID-19,” Human Rights Watch, September 14, 2020.
82. Iain Marlow and Enda Curran, “As US Exits Afghanistan, China Eyes $1 Trillion in Minerals,” Al Jazeera English, August 24, 2021.
83. James Webb, “US Over-the-Horizon Capabilities Robust, but Use Requires ‘Strategic Refinement,’ Experts Say,” Military Times, September 7, 2021.
84. Asma Khalid, “Biden Pledged to End the Forever Wars, but He Might Just Be Shrinking Them,” NPR, September 8, 2021.
85. Craig Whitlock, “At War with the Truth: The Afghanistan Papers,” Washington Post, December 9, 2019.
86. Matthieu Aikins, “Times Investigation: In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb,” New York Times, September 10, 2021.
87. Ayla Jean Yackley, “The Turkish Wall Built to Keep Out Refugees from Afghanistan,” Financial Times, September 15, 2021; Nektaria Stamouli, “Turkey Puts Its Migrant Security System on Display for Europe,” Politico, January 3, 2022.
88. Lauren Cerulus, “Europe Needs Security ‘Screening’ of Afghan Refugees, Top Official Says,” Politico, August 26, 2021.
89. Fionnuala Ní Aolaín, “Human Rights Advocacy and the Institutionalization of U.S. ‘Counterterrorism’ Policies Since 9/11,” Just Security, September 9, 2021.
90. Emma Ashford, “Strategies of Restraint: Remaking America’s Broken Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021.
91. “Human and Budgetary Costs to Date of the U.S. War in Afghanistan,” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute at Brown University, August 2021.
92. Trita Parsi, “Middle East Cooperation Appears to Be Breaking Out—the Untold Story,” Responsible Statecraft, September 20, 2021.
