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22 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28, <strong>2016</strong> DT Opinion The Russian interference America needs to be assertive now more than ever ... but it won’t be Telling Putin to ‘cut it out’ won’t be enough REUTERS • Azeem Ibrahim So what will Obama do about reports of alleged Russian hacking attempts to interfere in the US elections? In short, the most likely answer is that he will do nothing. Of course, interference with the US election process would have been, at any other time in history, a cause for war. So any sitting US president must at least talk tough. But Obama does not have the time to mount anything like a measured response. And he is most likely to judge that it would serve nobody to lash out blindly. This “measured approach” has been Obama’s hallmark modus operandi in foreign affairs. And indeed, it was just the approach he promised he would take while he was campaigning for office. After the years of misguided military adventurism under President Bush, the American people welcomed this kind of approach enthusiastically. It is sad to say, however, that this approach has been as much a failure as the “bull in a china shop” approach of Bush. In the early years, the new language from the Leader of the Free World was welcomed everywhere. The promised reset of policy in the Middle East sounded like just what the world needed. It was enough to win him the Nobel Peace Prize. But vision is not enough. In the brutal and chaotic world of geopolitical struggles, one must be willing to put force behind one’s vision. Even, as it turns out, when that vision is a deeply humanitarian one whose primary aim is long-term stability and peace. The red line This truth was ultimately revealed during the early days of the Syrian civil war. The single-most notable error that Obama made during his entire administration was to draw a red line over the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, and then failing to intervene to enforce that red line when the regime finally crossed it. An American President had promised war over a humanitarian crisis where most of the rest of the world would have agreed intervention was needed, and then he failed to deliver. For the first time perhaps since World War II, America would no longer be able to wield the credible threat of force as a diplomatic weapon. This, combined with Obama’s ever-consuming concern about being drawn into the conflicts which undermined his Would it be worth it to retaliate against an issue such as hacking at this point? By now it would be too little too late for Obama. It would be the strop of someone who knows he has lost. A man of vision, ambition, and intelligence, yes predecessors, gave America’s rivals just the signal they were looking for: They could act with impunity in whatever they designated as their “spheres of interest.” America would not be drawn out. And the world has been a freefor-all ever since. Pax Americana crumbled. Would it be worth it to retaliate against an issue such as hacking at this point? By now it would be too little too late for Obama. It would be the strop of someone who knows he has lost. A man of vision, ambition, and intelligence, yes. But also a man who, for all his conviction that he is “on the right side of history,” has been repudiated by world events, and repudiated by American democracy. The incoming president is the opposite of everything he has stood for. Nevertheless, a retaliation is necessary. America needs to reassert itself on the world stage, and it needs, more than anything else, to signal that when it threatens reprisals it means business. It needs to overwhelm and cripple Russia’s hacker networks and get on the ground in Syria to effect a stable and lasting federalisation. Telling Putin to “cut it out” won’t do anything. Forcing Putin to back down will. Shame that America has just elected an ill-suited person for the job: A “tough-talking” reality TV star who, by all accounts, loves Putin more than he loves democracy and the institutions who put him in the chair of the most powerful man on Earth. • Azeem Ibrahim is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Policy, Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He tweets @AzeemIbrahim. This article was previously published in Al Arabiya News.
Opinion 23 We need to do something before the frustration festers To see the change that we want to see in Bangladesh, we need to facilitate it first DT WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28, <strong>2016</strong> Change won’t occur from the comfort of one’s home If the irksome reiterated statement of children being the ‘future of the nation’ is something we can bank on, we need to create a system that allows them to be the ‘backbone of our country’ • Luba Khalili If there’s one thing that Bangladesh does not lack in, it has got to be the amount of people pointing out what’s wrong with this country. Opinion sections of all newspapers, talk shows on local TV, casual banter between uncles, friends, the cha wala, what have you -- all conversations flock to the same topic of debate. This is wrong, that is wrong: The government, corruption, police, bribery, population, slums, NGOs, academics, reporters, the petty bourgeois, your neighbour. Add to the list our favorite nouns, and we have ourselves a fairly convincing -- and most likely justified -- debunking of development. Now, whether we are the way we are because we complain too much, or because of the structural violence we’ve endured from hundreds of years of colonisation and oppression of the masses in various forms, the concerns laid out aren’t all a pretense. In fact, most people are just too tired of being stuck in traffic for unnecessarily long hours, broken roads, unavailable and unfit public transits … the list goes on. And as much as I would like to harp on about how far we’ve come as a nation since independence -- which is another issue itself for possibly another day -- I can’t help but hop on the bandwagon of the pedantic, and point out the sad truth: The list keeps going on. So, if one were to think and play the blame game a little bit more, perhaps the folks who sit in the central secretariat in Ramna should be the ones to point our fingers at. I mean, if the one body of authority looming over this tiny country, squeezed in between a “frenemy,” responsible for carrying out the task of providing the basics to its (albeit deluged) population, can’t do a proper job -- then maybe it’s time to change the BIGSTOCK constituents, and maybe even the framework of polity itself. Maybe it is time for the older generations to finally step off of their thrones and we can have a body of governance not falling asleep during national assemblies. But none of this blaming and shifting around the puzzle pieces actually point to a problem rooted deeper in the Bangladeshi society. If the younger generation were to step up onto a platform where change could be brought, we would need the means to do so, and of course, incentives, to toil away for a vision of what Bangladesh could actually be. And while that could very well be arranged, there’s another issue that keeps us away from moving up: We lack a culture of moving out. While most people are expected to live with their parents until, at least, they get married -- and for women, there’s a chance of moving out after marriage -- that doesn’t happen until they’re at least, say, 25 years old? From even a glance at Dhaka, people do not live on their own until they’re well into their 30s. This creates a culture of being tethered to familial comfort, and frankly, a sense of comfort that began from childhood and lasts that long could transform, rather subtly and sinisterly, into a lack of accountability. Towards ourselves, our careers, and, perhaps, to our nation. Most of us lose a good eight to 10 years of our adult lives not paying rent -- and thus not experiencing the struggle of making ends meet, not worrying about how we’ll eat and so on. Our realisation of responsibility doesn’t really hit until much later, and by that time, the vigour and drive that a twentysomething would have, fizzles out. Then it becomes about coming home from the nine-to-five job, taking care of the parents, maybe looking for a new apartment with the spouse and kids? I understand the privileged lenses that I’ve got on when making the claims that moving out of ones parents’ house is not a custom we traditionally have, and that people don’t struggle to make ends meet -- and the peers that I’ve seen come to the capital to study are examples of that. But if it is indeed the privilege that I am speaking of, that opportunity needs to be taken advantage of. And there are methods available to facilitate this madness. From allowing young people to be able to find part-time jobs so they can pay rent, to making apartments affordable and landlords approachable -- this list, too, goes on. But the first step is to really believe that change is possible. Let’s face it, if the irksome reiterated statement of children being “the future of the nation” is something we can bank on, we need to create a system that allows them to be “the backbone of our country.” Mollycoddling sons and assuming that daughters only belong in their father’s house and then the husband’s, are customs which are lethal for the changes that we would like to see in Bangladesh, whether in 10 years or 200. • Luba Khalili is a Sub-Editor at the Dhaka Tribune.
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