How MBS went from pariah to ‘comeback prince’, CNN.com

How MBS went from pariah to ‘comeback prince’
Peter Bergen

Updated 11:30 AM EST, Wed December 7, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

—
The timing could not have been sweeter for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Just hours before China’s President Xi Jinping was due to arrive in the Saudi kingdom for a state visit, a US judge essentially announced what much of the world has come to realize in 2022: the immunity of the comeback Crown Prince.

Just four years ago the Saudi Crown Prince, widely known by his initials MBS, was a pariah on the world stage after officials in his entourage dismembered the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a US intelligence assessment. (Bin Salman denies that he ordered the killing).

Indeed, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden publicly termed Saudi Arabia a “pariah” at the time.

Though not a pariah who will face a reckoning anytime soon, it seems. In September MBS was appointed Saudi prime minister, a move which seemed calculated to give him sovereign immunity from any possible US prosecution of his alleged role in Khashoggi’s murder.

On Tuesday, that calculation proved prescient. A US judge dismissed a case against MBS for conspiring to kill Khashoggi, saying he had head-of-state immunity. The judge also noted his “uneasiness” with the dismissal, adding that there were “credible allegations” that MBS played a role in Khashoggi’s assassination.

It was an important step on the road to international rehabilitation for MBS. And all as he now plays host to Xi and other leaders from across the Middle East and North Africa for a Chinese-Arab summit; the memory of Khashoggi receding further into the shadows.

Oil looms large

When the leader of the world’s most populous autocracy breaks bread with the de facto ruler of arguably the world’s most absolute monarchy, they won’t be communing to swap tips about how best to run a repressive regime; their top agenda item is simple. Oil.

Xi faces many problems at home; his zero-Covid policy has been relaxed after it provoked the most widespread protest movement in China in decades. But not before it damaged the Chinese economy, where youth unemployment hit almost 20%. And the Chinese property market, which makes up a quarter of the economy, is in trouble.

China is the world’s largest oil importer, and to help reboot its economy Xi needs oil — and a lot of it. The source of China’s largest oil imports is Saudi Arabia. Xi and MBS’s marriage of convenience is made over a barrel of oil.

An impetuous prince

Even before Khashoggi’s murder in 2018, Saudi Arabia was waging a disastrous war in Yemen that triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.

And in 2017 MBS effectively kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister for weeks when he was visiting the kingdom — an incident he later joked about.

A year later MBS imprisoned some 200 leading Saudi businessmen and other prominent citizens at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh on purported corruption charges, relieving them of more than $100 billion.

And he led several Arab states to impose an embargo on Saudi Arabia’s gas-rich neighbor Qatar, which is home to the largest US military base in the Middle East. Under his watch, perceived political opponents have been routinely imprisoned.

In from the cold

Yet today MBS is being courted by the world’s major leaders, and Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia this week will be the cherry on top of a very good 2022 for the crown prince.

“Pariah” no more, in July, Biden went to Saudi Arabia and gave MBS a cheerful fist bump when he met him, an image that was broadcast around the world.

A few months later, MBS hosted his annual “Davos in the Desert,” and pretty much every titan of Wall Street showed up.

The Crown Prince has also made common cause with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite Biden’s visit to the Saudi kingdom this summer, OPEC + — which is dominated by the Saudis and Russians — last month slashed oil production. A move designed to keep oil prices relatively high — contributing to high rates of inflation in the United States and Europe.

Finally, despite a past punishing blockade on neighboring Qatar, MBS even had a spot in the World Cup VIP section alongside Qatari monarch Tamim Al-Thani when the tournament kicked off last month.

Xi’s visit only continues MBS’s rehabilitation tour.

Next year will mark the fifth anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder. Meanwhile, the Crown Prince has gone from pariah to the go-to insider for the world’s leaders.

The Arc of a Covenant: The U.S., Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Walter Russell Mead online EVENT

[ONLINE] – The Arc of a Covenant: The U.S., Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
EVENT

In his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Walter Russell Mead examines the roots of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Mead tracks how Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and argues that Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state. He also spotlights the almost forgotten story of left-wing support for Zionism, and contends that Stalin’s influence was more decisive than Truman’s in Israel’s struggle for independence. Mead also tracks how Israel’s rise in the Middle East helped kindle both the modern evangelical movement and the Sunbelt coalition that carried Reagan into the White House.

To discuss his new book, New America welcomes Walter Russell Mead, James Clark Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, and the Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He is also a co-founder and board member emeritus of New America.

Join the conversation online using #ArcofCovenant and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Walter Russell Mead, @wrmead
Author, The Arc of a Covenant
Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities, Bard College
Ravenel B. Curry II Distinguished Fellow, Hudson Institute
Co-Founder, New America

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU

America is great again, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

—
The United States is riven by polarization, its democracy is threatened, inflation is raging, and the Dow is down sharply this year. Yet, despite all these problems, if you zoom out and look at the world overall, the US is still doing quite well compared to its key enemies and closest allies.

Russia and China – the two nations with which the United States strives most regularly for global influence – have suffered recent dramatic declines in their standing.

By invading Ukraine and failing to achieve its war aims, Russia is demonstrating that it is no longer a great power. After Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” for the war in Ukraine last month, around 200,000 Russians voted with their feet and fled their country – including two who sailed to Alaska.

In the early days of the war, Russia failed to take Kyiv, and in recent weeks it has lost some 3,000 square miles of territory, according to Ukrainian officials. Even generally reliable cheerleaders for Putin, such as the Chinese, have distanced themselves from Putin’s failures in Ukraine.

Led by the US, NATO is now stronger than ever, supplying Ukraine with significant amounts of weaponry and bulking up its collective defense spending. NATO is also adding the formerly non-aligned countries of Finland and Sweden to the alliance. While former President Donald Trump kept threatening to pull the US out of NATO, today the alliance has new relevance.

Russia also failed to stop European countries from filling their gas stocks to more than 90% for the coming winter, which reduces President Vladimir Putin’s leverage to weaken NATO’s support for the Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, American weaponry, such as anti-tank Javelin missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) that are GPS-guided precision rockets, and US technologies, such as the Starlink satellite-based broadband Internet communication system supplied by Elon Musk, have helped to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine.

By contrast, Soviet-style, Russian “dumb” artillery rounds continue to land in Ukrainian cities, killing civilians, but to no strategic end because these attacks have scant military utility. Iran has also supplied drones for Russia’s use in Ukraine, but such developments have only hardened the resolve of Ukrainians to expel the Russians, according to Gallup polling last month that found 70% of Ukrainians want to continue fighting until they win against Russia.

Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping may be taking a victory lap as he is expected to be anointed the leader of the Chinese Communist Party for the third time at the ruling party’s national congress this week, ensuring that he will become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao.

Yet, Xi’s zero-Covid policy has spurred repeated massive lockdowns of China’s cities, which have damaged the nation’s economy and are becoming increasingly unpopular.

The zero-Covid policy, combined with what the Wall Street Journal terms a “full-blown property downturn,” are dramatically slowing the Chinese economy. As of June, youth unemployment was almost 20%.

At the same time, China’s imprisonment of up to two million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, according to US State Department estimates, and its costly loans for its “Belt and Road” policies have not endeared it to much of the planet. Earlier this year, Pew polling found “negative views of China remain at or near historic highs in many of the 19 countries” where the organization polled.

Despite Xi’s bellicose rhetoric about China’s right to use force to reclaim Taiwan during the Communist Party Congress this week, China must surely have taken notes watching Russia’s failures in Ukraine, which included the sinking of the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, the Moskva in April. Any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would involve crossing a maritime border and launching a naval armada across some 100 miles of water to reach the island.

Another American rival, Iran, is riven by countrywide street protests that are threatening the regime arguably as much as any protests have done since 1979.

In the western hemisphere, Venezuela is also in free fall under its socialist government; almost seven million people have left the country since 2014, a quarter of the population.

China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela share a common feature; they are autocracies – not exactly a form of government known for serving the interests of the people.

Even America’s closest democratic allies are also facing profound problems. The UK is turning itself into a third-rank power following its disastrous decision in 2016 to vote for Brexit and pull out of the free trade zone of the European Union, which quickly lopped more than 16% of the pound’s value against the dollar that year.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ran a campaign in 2019 to “Get Brexit Done,” completing the withdrawal from the EU in January 2020. This was supposed to unleash the British from all the onerous obligations of the European Union.

Instead, it has proven to be an economic debacle. Many jobs in the UK that would have been filled by Europeans who were formerly free to move to Britain for work are going unfilled in sectors such as construction, farming, nursing homes, and restaurants. Since the Brexit vote six years ago, the UK’s per capita income has grown by only 3.8% in real terms, while the EU’s has grown by 8.5%, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Then came UK Prime Minister Liz Truss who compounded the harm of Brexit by proposing unfunded tax cuts for the rich in September. After heightened political outcry and financial turmoil, Truss reversed the tax cut decision, but the damage was done, and the pound fell to historic lows. She announced her resignation under pressure Thursday, becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.

And what about that bilateral US-UK trade deal that Conservative leaders said would supposedly wave a magic wand over the UK’s economic mess? Truss told reporters in September, “There (aren’t) currently any negotiations taking place with the US, and I don’t have an expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term.” This is government-speak acknowledging that the Americans have told the British: “How about never– is never good for you?” to quote the great New Yorker cartoon.

European countries are generally faring better than the UK but still face their own problems. The dollar, which is at a two-decade high against the Euro, remains strong as the Fed raises interest rates and the American economy continues to be the most dynamic in the world. Indeed, the US has the lowest unemployment rate in five decades. And the US is now the world’s largest producer of both gas and oil.

American vaccine technology used by Pfizer and Moderna helped to turn the tide against Covid-19 in the United States and other countries that used these vaccines. By contrast, the Chinese and Russian vaccines have been far less effective against Covid-19.

To be sure, the United States has problems aplenty, including deep political polarization, raging inflation, high inequality, a horrific Covid-19 death toll, shrinking life expectancy, frequent mass shootings, unaffordable housing in many places, and intense battles over abortion. The widespread denial of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory among Republicans raises serious questions about the health of the nation’s democracy. Still, in many respects, the US looks much better than much of the rest of the world.

Immigration, which is often treated as a problem by Americans, underlines the continuing attraction of the United States. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their homeland since Putin announced a partial mobilization in the war against Ukraine, and tens of thousands have left Hong Kong after the Chinese takeover of the formerly autonomous city.

To paraphrase Warren Buffett, betting against America has never been a smart move.

PAID CONTENT

Putin’s dream is headed toward an inglorious end, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a plan to seize Ukraine quickly. Those plans dissolved from the first days of the Russians’ invasion with their failure to capture Kyiv.

Putin’s problems have only deepened in recent days with the surging Ukrainian counteroffensive that has seized key pockets of Russian-controlled territory, such as the transportation hub city of Lyman.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Putin lost Lyman just as he was publicly declaring that the Donetsk region – in which Lyman sits – was now annexed by Russia.

At home, Putin is also facing growing criticism from Russians on both the left and the right, who are taking considerable risks given the draconian penalties they can face for speaking out against his “special military operation” in Ukraine.

With even his allies expressing concern, and hundreds of thousands of citizens fleeing partial mobilization, an increasingly isolated Putin has once again taken to making rambling speeches offering his distorted view of history.

(Indeed, his revisionist account defines his rationale for the war in Ukraine, which he asserts has historically always been part of Russia – even though Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.)

But Putin – a zealous student of Russian history – is surely aware that defeat in a foreign war has brought down some of his predecessors.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they planned to install a puppet government and get out of the country as soon as it was feasible, as explained in a recent, authoritative book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, “Afghan Crucible” by historian Elisabeth Leake.

Leake writes that the Soviets’ “intention was a quick regime change,” which was “not meant to be a drawn-out military encounter.”

That playbook didn’t work for the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s any more than it is working for Putin in Ukraine today.

Beyond the battlefield
During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was initially reluctant to escalate its support for the Afghan resistance, fearing a wider conflict with the Soviet Union. It took until 1986 for the CIA to arm the Afghans with highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, eventually forcing them to withdraw from Afghanistan three years later.

In 2022, American weapons are again playing a decisive role in Russian fortunes on the battlefield. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the US was also initially leery of deeper involvement, fearing a wider conflict with the Russians.

But the US put those fears to rest relatively quickly, and American-supplied anti-tank Javelin missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), GPS-guided missiles, have helped the Ukrainians to push back against the Russians.

Putin is also surely aware that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was hastened by the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier.

Looking further back into the history books, he must also know that the Russian loss in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 weakened the Romanov monarchy. Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War then precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. Subsequently, much of the Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

Putin, understandably, doesn’t want to go the way of either the Soviets or the Romanovs. Which might explain his recent desperate moves: the mobilization of 300,000 additional troops – a measure that he had long sought to avoid – and his nuclear weapons saber-rattling.

The ‘genius’ myth unravels

On February 22 – just two days before Russia’s invasion – former US President Donald Trump, who has always fawned over Putin, publicly said that the Russian autocrat was “genius” and “savvy” for declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine independent and moving his troops there in a prelude to full-blown invasion.

Putin saw the war in Ukraine as a key to his dream to Make Russia Great Again. Instead, Russia can now no longer pretend to be a great power as it is unable to defeat an enemy on its own borders.

More than seven months into the war, the “genius” myth has unraveled. During the past two weeks, at least 200,000 Russian men have voted with their feet to flee Putin’s partial mobilization order. They understand – despite the Herculean efforts of Putin’s propagandists – that this war is a bloodbath Russia is losing.

Putin saw the war in Ukraine as key to his dream to Make Russia Great Again.

Peter Bergen

Lawrence Freedman, the emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London explains in his just-published book “Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine” how Putin plunged his countrymen into the Ukrainian morass.

Freedman writes that Putin is “a tragic example of how the delusions and illusions of one individual can be allowed to shape events without any critical challenge. Autocrats who put their cronies into key positions, control the media to crowd out discordant voices … are able to command their subordinates to follow the most foolish orders.”

Putin’s gamble may lead to a third dissolution of the Russian empire, which happened first in 1917 as the First World War wound down, and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It could unfold once more as Putin’s dream of seizing Ukraine seems to be coming to an inglorious end.

Making Russia weak, again.

Big Tech: Content Moderation, Terrorism, and Disinformation, New America online

[ONLINE] – Big Tech: Content Moderation, Terrorism, and Disinformation
EVENT

In recent years, technology and social media companies have taken on a growing role in moderating content on their platforms. That growing role has brought criticism from a number of vectors, and some states have moved to restrict moderation via legislation. Although much of the political debate around moderation policies is occurring elsewhere, the debates and legislation could shape companies’ efforts against terrorism on their platforms, an issue that has itself seen debate.

To discuss the intersection of content moderation, disinformation, and terrorism, New America welcomes Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, CEO of Valens Global and author of a recent report “Redrawing the Lines” examining how legislation regarding content moderation could affect counterterrorism efforts, and Karen J. Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s International Security program.

Join the conversation online using #TechandTerrorism and following @NewAmericaISP.

Participants:

Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, @DaveedGR
CEO, Valens Global

Dr. Karen J. Greenberg, @KarenGreenberg3
Director Center on National Security at Fordham Law,
Fellow, International Security Program, New America

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU

Spies & Storytellers, Spyscape Museum, NYC

Spies & Storytellers
With Osama bin Laden’s interviewer and other top pros!
From recruiting sources and building trust to turning secret information into digestible narratives, spy skills and technologies have led to journalistic breakthroughs.

Peter Bergen (CNN National Security Analyst, journalist, author), Liza Mundy (NY Times Best-selling author, journalist), and Dan Hoffman (three-time CIA station chief, FOX News commentator) will compare the two professions in this fascinating discussion.

928 8TH AVE
NEW YORK, NY 10019, USA 8p

https://spyscape.com/festival

Bhutto dynasty has shaped Pakistan’s history while enduring tragedy, CNN.com

Opinion By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Published 4:10 PM EDT, Sun October 2, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” He has made more than a dozen reporting trips to Pakistan since 1983. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

In a world that at times seems obsessed with the Windsor dynasty that occupies the British throne, a political dynasty with a history deeply entwined with one of the world’s most politically sensitive countries gets far less attention.

Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons that neighbors Afghanistan, China, Iran and India, has been long dominated by its powerful military, which in recent years has put increasing pressure on independent media and dissenting voices.

Pakistan’s Bhutto family dynasty, in recent decades, championed a more liberal democratic approach to politics and has provided two of the country’s most important leaders – and today, its youngest foreign minister ever.

I met last week with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who was visiting Washington. He told me that the assassination of his mother, two-time Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was a turning point for him at 19 that pushed him into public service: “I didn’t choose this life. It chose me. The circumstances of her assassination and the events that followed led me down this path where I am today.”

Bhutto Zardari is also the chairman of the left-of-center Pakistan People’s Party, which was founded by his grandfather and is one of the largest political parties in the country.

During the Cold War, Pakistan became a key American ally after the Soviet Union invaded Pakistan’s neighbor Afghanistan in 1979. That invasion precipitated a tight alliance between the United States and the military regime of Pakistan’s President, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. The CIA acted as the quartermaster to the Afghan rebels, funneling billions of dollars of weapons to the Pakistani military intelligence service, which in turn supported several of the Afghan groups fighting the Soviets.

In 1989, after being defeated in Afghanistan, the Soviets pulled out – a move that hastened the collapse of the Soviet regime. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the United States closed its embassy in Kabul and washed its hands of the country.

That move would turn out to be a large blunder because Afghanistan then descended into a civil war, out of which emerged a shadowy group, the Taliban, which by 1996 had taken over almost the entire country. The Taliban also gave refuge to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group, which planned the 9/11 attacks.

In the years before 9/11, Pakistan was one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan, seeing in them a force on its western border that would not ally with its main enemy, India.

After September 11, under intense US pressure, the Pakistanis switched allegiance and, at least initially, supported the US-led war against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Deeply enmeshed in all this complex history is the Bhutto family, which, even more than the Kennedys in the United States, is a political dynasty that has shaped the history of their country while also enduring considerable personal tragedy.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bhutto Zardari’s grandfather, was the first democratically elected Prime Minister in Pakistan, but he was later deposed and then hanged by the regime of the Pakistani military dictator Zia in 1979.

A little under a decade later, Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto, then only 35, became the first female Prime Minister in Pakistan’s history and, indeed, the first female Prime Minister of any Muslim-majority country.

She was a graduate of Harvard and Oxford and orientated to the West, but nonetheless, during her prime ministership, Pakistan’s powerful military began supporting the Taliban as they rose to power in Afghanistan.

In February 1993, a militant from Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef, masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center, killing six people. Yousef then went back to Pakistan and began plotting to kill Benazir Bhutto, who was then serving as Prime Minister for the second time. The plan failed when the bomb Yousef was building malfunctioned.

In 2000, I met with Benazir Bhutto, who explained to me that “the international Islamist movement saw Pakistan as its base. They saw my party as a liberal threat.” She became a fervent public critic of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the fact that she was the first woman to lead Pakistan made her an even bigger target for Islamist militants.

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan in 2007 when she was campaigning to become Prime Minister for the third time. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for her murder.

All this tangled history was going through my mind when I met with her son at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. Bhutto Zardari was visiting the US capital as his country faces what is arguably the worst crisis since its founding in 1947; by late August, floods of biblical proportions had submerged a third of the country.

Bhutto Zardari told me, “One in seven people, 33 million, are affected. The World Health Organization has warned of a second catastrophe in the form of a health crisis with waterborne diseases. There will also be food insecurity because of the millions of acres of crops destroyed.”

The flooding over the summer has caused an estimated $30 billion in damage.

In addition to the immediate crisis, Bhutto Zardari said now was the time to implement a longer-term solution – “a Green Marshall Plan” for climate-stressed developing countries such as Pakistan that have only a small impact on global warming but are disproportionately suffering its costs.

Bhutto Zardari pointed out that while Pakistan contributes less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming gases, it is one of the countries most affected by climate change. A “Green Marshall Plan” would allow countries such as Pakistan to build infrastructure more resilient to its effects.

Asked about the Taliban, which now control Afghanistan, Bhutto Zardari surprised me when he advocated for greater engagement with them, even though the Afghan Taliban shelters elements of the Pakistani Taliban, the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for his mother’s murder. “They are our neighbors,” he said. “Our neighbors aren’t going away, and we need a peaceful, stable Afghanistan, so we don’t see an exodus of Afghan refugees into Pakistan, and we don’t see an exponential increase in terrorism.”

Bhutto Zardari explained that the dire economic situation in Afghanistan made dealing with the Taliban more important since predictions indicate that more than 90% of the Afghan population may soon fall below the poverty line. “History has shown us that theocratic, autocratic regimes, when faced with tough economic times, tend to contract rights rather than expand rights,” said Bhutto Zardari, who studied history at Oxford.

At the end of our interview, we returned to the subject of his mother, Benazir, whom I had met many times over the years, including the first time that she was Prime Minister during the late 1980s and had only recently given birth to him.

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated almost two decades later at age 54 when she was a politician at the height of her powers. She was very much an ally of the United States, an enemy of Islamist terrorists such as al Qaeda and the Taliban, and also an advocate for liberal democracy in Pakistan.

I asked her son, “Would Pakistan have had a very different trajectory if she had become Prime Minister for the third time”? The foreign minister replied, “Yes. I think that’s pretty safe to say.”

The British Empire: A legacy of violence? CNN.com

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, an author and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Raised in London, Bergen has a degree in modern history from Oxford University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest last week at Windsor Castle, home to monarchs for the past thousand years. What was not laid to rest with the Queen’s internment was an important question: What does the future look like for countries of the Commonwealth, where the British monarch remains the head of state?

Charles III is the King today of 14 “realms” outside of the British Isles. In some of those realms, such as Australia, Canada and Jamaica, there are now calls to jettison the monarchy and instead install a republic, just as Barbados did last year.

A related question is also surfacing now: What is the legacy of the British Empire writ large? British schoolchildren have long been taught comforting fairy tales about the beneficence of the largest empire in history, but recent historical scholarship is painting a quite different picture.
Leading that charge is Harvard University historian Caroline Elkins, whose 2005 book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” found that the British detained some 1.5 million Kenyans in detention camps or in barbed-wire villages during the Mau Mau uprising in that country in the 1950s, thousands of whom died and some of whom were tortured. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2006.

Some initially criticized Elkins’ findings as exaggerated, but they were vindicated years later after Kenyan torture victims sued the British government for damages. Senior British officials eventually conceded publicly in 2013 that British forces had indeed tortured Kenyans, and the UK government paid out a nearly 20 million-pound settlement to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyan victims.

In recent years, Elkins has broadened the scope of her inquiries beyond Kenya, publishing a new book in March called “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.” I spoke to Elkins last week about her work. Our conversation was edited for clarity.

Peter Bergen: When Queen Elizabeth died, what was running through your mind?

Caroline Elkins: First, what an extraordinary life. Seventy years as monarch. As a person, as an historian, how can one not marvel at that? Second, the differences in public reactions in Britain and in the former empire. Incredible national mourning and outpouring of grief in Britain, yet in the former empire and now current Commonwealth there were different reactions — that the Queen oversaw what was a violent and exploitative empire.

Bergen: King Charles III doesn’t elicit quite the same feelings as his mother did: How will this affect the Commonwealth?

Elkins: There are 56 nations in the Commonwealth, most of whom were former British colonies, and of those former British colonies, 14 are what we would call “Commonwealth realms.” That is, they’re not republics, and they still recognize the British monarch as their head of state. So, Charles III is also King of Canada and King of Australia, and it’s in these countries where there is a real push for referendums to change and to become republics.

And then there’s the question of, what is the purpose of the broader 56 nations in this Commonwealth? The Queen obsessed over the Commonwealth; it was the coda to empire. She oversaw in her reign the dissolution of much of the empire and the creation, with a kind of monarchical mythmaking, of the Commonwealth as being a force of good, a force of peace, a force of democracy in the contemporary modern world of which she remained the head.

So, King Charles III is in a tricky situation because, in some ways, the Commonwealth is a confidence trick. How much do these nations today believe that they are part of something that’s greater than themselves? When these nations joined the Commonwealth in the ’50s and ’60s, one could make that claim. But I suspect there are now a lot of Commonwealth nations looking at this and asking themselves, “What’s the point?” Britain’s economy is in bad shape; going it alone with Brexit was a mistake, and geopolitically it’s on the wane.

Bergen: Queen Elizabeth found out that she was the new monarch in Kenya in 1952 when she was on a safari there. Tell us about your research in Kenya and reflect on the fact that the newly minted Queen Elizabeth was in the country around the time that the anti-British Mau Mau rebellion was starting to get serious.

Elkins: There’s the famous story that Elizabeth, staying at Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park in Kenya, went up a tree as a princess and came down a queen. At the same time, just beyond where Queen Elizabeth was viewing game, the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, were taking mass oaths to join a movement called Mau Mau, whose stated purpose was, to kick all Whites out of the country, which were the British settlers and the British colonial administration.

Almost from the get-go in 1952, there were whistleblowers in Kenya. Missionaries were saying that torture by the British was going on. Eventually, the Church Missionary Society published a pamphlet called “Kenya — Time for Action!” describing the kind of horrible things that were happening.
When I started researching the history of the Mau Mau uprising, there were difficulties in writing the book because at the time of decolonialization, Britain went through a very systematic process of destroying documentation about the empire. In the case of Kenya, I estimate that about 3 1/2 tons of documents were destroyed, and some other documents were repatriated back to Britain and kept under lock and key. So, what it meant for an historian like me is I had to try to piece this story back together again, and it took about 10 years to do that.

In my 2005 book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” I concluded that while the British government said that they had detained 70,000 to 80,000 Kenyans, in fact my research revealed that 1.5 million Kenyans were detained either in detention camps or in barbed-wire villages. These detention camps and villages were not the sites of “hearts and minds” campaigns but instead sites of systematized violence condoned from the very top of the British government and executed in a routinized way, and that every effort was made to cover this up.

The book came out to “critical acclaim.” There was probably more emphasis on the “critical” and less on the “acclaim” in part because it was one of the first books that really challenged this narrative of British exceptionalism in the empire. At that time, in 2005, I was a young academic historian. It was a rather crushing reception.

And then I was asked to be an expert witness for a case involving Kenyans suing the British government for torture endured while they were detained during the Mau Mau uprising. During the discovery process for this case, the British government said for the first time, “We’ve just discovered boxes of previously undisclosed files that we found at Hanslope Park.” Hanslope Park is where all the very highly sensitive British government documents are kept. And alongside those boxes from Kenya, there were also 8,800 files from 36 other British colonies similarly packed up and spirited away at the end of empire.

Having this documentation was crucial to the case. I pulled together a group of Harvard students, and we worked 24/7 going through these documents, and what became clear is that we had thousands of pages of additional evidence supporting my research and claims about what had happened in Kenya, and at the end of the day, the British government settled the case that had been brought by the Kenyan victims.

Bergen: Was Kenya exceptional in the British Empire?

Elkins: That took me about 15 years to answer and over 800 pages in my new book, “Legacy of Violence.” Not only is Kenya not exceptional, it’s one moment in a longer period of time that shows how the British created systems and practices to enforce colonial control, such as forced labor, torture and murder throughout the British Empire.

During the Boer War from 1899 to 1902 was the first time in history where extensive concentration camps were used to confine one ethnic population, in this case, the white Afrikaners, who the British considered uncivilized, although Africans were also detained.

Britain undertook similar confinement policies for criminals, as well as plague and famine victims, in India beginning around 1857. One of the things I spent a lot of time doing was tracing how these policies evolved — these practices of concentrating populations as well as forcibly moving them.

Bergen: This reassessment of British Empire: You are leading the charge. And also, William Dalrymple’s “The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire,” his history of the British East India Company is also part of this reassessment?

Elkins: There are many historians working on this. When you think about the kind of work that must take place for each colony, you have a lot of people who are real specialists in particular areas who might specialize in Cyprus or might specialize in India. Some of what I’m doing in this recent book, “Legacy of Violence,” is really drawing off this huge movement towards revisionism.

Bergen: Is all history revisionist history?

Elkins: Always. History is always being revised by folks like myself. I think in this case, it’s really a massive revision insofar as it really questions what continues to be a strongly held belief about British exceptionalism when it comes to empire.

Bergen: So, are the British in high school as they learn about British history being told a bunch of fairy tales?

Elkins: I think they’re being told a very particular official narrative that has been carefully cultivated, both by the British government and the monarchy. History is always used for national identity to galvanize a population, to imagine itself as something greater than any individual. And it’s important to remember that beginning in the 19th century, quite intentionally under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, there was an entwinement of nation, monarchy and empire that was the bedrock of British national identity, a kind of British imperial national identity of which the monarchy is a part. And that continues down to the present day.

Should British school history textbooks be revised? There’s a struggle over this in Britain now. It will be a big moment when we start to see revisions within the textbooks of schoolchildren in Britain that reflect the kind of larger conversations that are happening now between historians and the broader public.

Bergen: “The Crown” on Netflix was a very well-executed TV drama. How does that contribute to the way Britain and the world in general sees all this history?

Elkins: I have to say, full disclosure, I watched all of “The Crown.” It’s very compelling, and I was writing this book, “Legacy of Violence,” while watching it. One of the few times that the Queen Elizabeth weighed in with her authority is around the issue of apartheid in South Africa.

Bergen: To say what?

Elkins: To basically disagree with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to say that apartheid cannot continue, that Britain cannot be on the wrong side of history, and she used the Commonwealth as a vehicle to make that known.

The second of which that struck me was the death of her cousin Louis Mountbatten. Mountbatten was the last viceroy of India. He oversaw the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 in which somewhere between 200,000 to 2 million people died from brutal sectarian violence, according to estimates.
The Irish Republican Army, or IRA, which was a paramilitary organization, formed in 1919 to end British rule in Ireland and create a republic, engaged in a long struggle to end Britain’s continued rule in Northern Ireland after 1922. There were many terrorist attacks, including the IRA planting a bomb on Mountbatten’s boat off the coast of Northern Ireland in 1979, killing him and three people on the boat. And that scene is in “The Crown.” Mountbatten was probably the closest confidant and mentor to Prince Charles, now King Charles III.

There is kind of a coda to this story when the Queen became the first British monarch in 100 years to go to Ireland in 2011 and (later) extended her hand to one of the former leaders in the IRA.
Four years later Prince Charles met with former IRA leader Gerry Adams and did a similar kind of thing. They had a private conversation. This shows you what the British monarchy can accomplish, the kind of moral authority that it does have, and instances of reaching out their hands to make reconciliation.

Bergen: Do the British pat themselves on the back because they were relatively early to abolish slavery, and that has colored their own self-conception as empire builders?
Elkins: Yes, I think it’s an important point. I think it’s often held up that Britain led the charge on the abolition movement in the trade of enslaved people (in 1807) and decades later in the use of enslaved labor (in 1833).

At the same time, I think it’s important to bear in mind that this is the same country that amassed the largest empire history has ever known, with a quarter of the world’s land mass and 700 million people at its height.

On the heels of the abolition of the trade in enslaved people and the use of enslaved labor, the British launched what is known as their “civilizing mission.” This idea was that, in fact, empire is not about national benefit and exploitation, but it’s really our duty, our “white man’s burden” to go and uplift and bring into the modern world the “backward populations.”

The interesting part to me is how is it that Britons in general can continue to work and rework their understanding of what the empire meant. What was the civilizing mission? How are they able to accommodate all this into this broader narrative of what is ultimately British imperial exceptionalism, that somehow or another — and it’s a narrative that endures to this present day — that Britain got empire right, particularly when compared to all the other European nations.
And so, to me that’s also wrapped up into how the Queen is being remembered today. By some, she’s being remembered as the matriarch of empire, an empire that was a force of good in the world, that really extended the notions of rule of law and free trade — all those things that we hold dear in liberal democracies — while others who say, no, that’s actually not what happened.

Look at all this violence in the empire. I think we’re in a particular moment because formerly colonized populations are demanding that there should be a reckoning, not just in terms of acknowledgement that certain things happened, but also how we write about and remember the past.

Bergen: The 1619 Project has reframed the history of the United States around the history of slavery in the country. Are there similarities between the 1619 Project and what you and other colleagues are doing in your reassessment of the British Empire?

Elkins: Yes, I do think so. If we look at the ways in which the struggle to understand who we are in the present day and what the future holds is also a struggle about the past. What gives us legitimacy? How did we come to be who we are today? In the United States, it’s often thought that the original sin is the period of enslavement, and we must contend with that if we’re going to move forward as a nation.

Now, the suggestion being made by many in the former empire is that the “original sin” on a global scale was empire. They’re asking: How do we contend with this, and how do you, Britain, address this in such a way that we can all move forward, both from a societal standpoint and an economic one? And it’s not just about reparations. It’s about looking at structural inequities on a global scale and how and why the world is the way it is today.

Look at Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world today. In the mid-18th century, Eastern Bengal was one of the wealthiest parts of the world. What happens in between? A very long period of wealth extraction and decimation engendered by British colonial rule.

Look at Jamaica and imagine the fact that this nation was populated because its citizens were literally chained and shackled beneath ships and brought over. At first, this wasn’t even a self-reproducing population because it was more economical to work people to death than it was to allow them to self-reproduce.

And so these nations are born out of a similar kind of cauldron of violence that has dramatic societal and economic consequences, and I think this is coming to a head, just as the 1619 Project is really raising all these issues about the kind of structural inequities that we have in the United States today. We must understand the past and really have a comprehensive accounting of it. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in different kinds of ways with the history of the British Empire.

The Fall of Osama bin Laden, National Geographic

Peter Bergen was the correspondent and a producer.

“Bringing Americans Home 2022” Online New America/Foley Foundation

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[ONLINE] – Bringing Americans Home 2022
Assessing Hostage and Detainee Policy Reforms
Event

Having a son or daughter, husband or mother taken hostage or detained in a foreign land is one of the most frightening experiences imaginable. Recent years have brought a growing challenge of states wrongfully detaining Americans while the situation facing Americans held hostage by non-state groups has evolved.

To discuss the results of the Foley Foundation’s annual research report, “Bringing Americans Home” in this virtual event, New America in partnership with the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation welcomes a range of experts to discuss the current state of U.S. efforts to bring Americans held hostage abroad home.

Panel 1: The Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Landscape

Chris Costa
Executive Director, International Spy Museum
Former Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council

Brian Jenkins, @BrianMJenkins
Senior Adviser to the President, RAND Corporation

Ali Soufan, @Ali_H_Soufan
Chairman and CEO, The Soufan Group
Former FBI Supervisory Agent

Cynthia Loertscher, @CindyLoertscher
Director of Research, Hostage Advocacy, and Legislative Affairs, James W. Foley Legacy Foundation

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn (moderator)
Vice President, New America

Panel 2: Recovering U.S. Hostages and Wrongful Detainees: Challenges and Urgency

Michael Bergman, @MickeyBergman
Vice President and Executive Director, The Richardson Center

Jared Genser, @JaredGenser
Managing Director of Perseus Strategies

Nizar Zakka, @ZakkaNA
President, Hostage Aid Worldwide

Diane Foley, @JamesFoleyFund
President and Founder, James W. Foley Legacy Foundation

Neda Sharghi, @NedaSharghi
Sister of Emad Shargi, a U.S. citizen wrongfully detained in Iran since 2018

Amna Nawaz, @IAmAmnaNawaz (moderator)
Chief Correspondent, PBS NewsHour