From Periphery to Centre Stage: Regime Cynicism and Civil War in the Muslim World

Politically engaged Muslims often lament the lack of governments with independence, justice, strength, functional institutions, and attention to Islamic principles. This problem owes much to foreign interference, subversion, and attempts to exert control over Muslim-majority countries as part of the general neocolonial pattern of a “Western”-constructed global order. Yet to some extent, the problems of the Muslim world have been self-inflicted by governments and political actors. This article will take a look at how twenty years ago, three separate governments of basically functional Muslim states – Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen – instigated, through cynicism and attempted manipulation, deadly civil wars whose shadow still looms large today.

Many accusations could be made about these three countries at the turn of the millennium, but foreign subservience of the type so often seen in the Gulf or totalitarian brutality of the type seen in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt were not among them. Each was ruled by military dictators – Ali Saleh of Yemen, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, and Omar Bashir of Sudan – yet each featured large, generally enthusiastic Muslim-majority populaces and assertive civil societies whose governments at least partly incorporated aspects of Islam on paper. Both Sudan and Pakistan had “Islamists” in high places, including civilian political parties and the military, while in Yemen the Sunni Islamists of Islah were a coalition partner to Saleh’s largely conservative regime. Each regime paid at least lip service to the paramount importance of Islam, and in the Sudanese case, Bashir’s civilian partner Hassan Turabi espoused a particularly ambitious idea of Islamic revolution. Though none could be said to have followed such principles to the letter, they were among the more independent Muslim states and were portrayed, largely disingenuously, by American-friendly neighbours – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, and Uganda in the case of Sudan; India in the case of Pakistan; and the Gulf monarchies in the case of Yemen – as hotbeds of regional disruption to an American-headed order.

In a unipolar age, Washington’s opinions translated easily to a party-line for most international institutions, so each state in question was under some level of isolation and sought to reestablish ties with the United States. Yet the pursuit of American favour for the preservation of their power drove each of these dictators to pursue blatantly cynical policies, running roughshod over any pretence of principle. The turning point was 2003-04, when the regimes of Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen incited civil wars in their peripheries whose impact continues to be felt today.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s powerful military establishment had consciously legitimised itself with a top-down “Islamization” policy in the 1980s that, despite major limitations, did support various Muslim causes from Indian-occupied Kashmir to as far afield as Bosnia in the 1990s. Having approved it against the Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan, Washington thereafter balked at any notion of jihad, steadily increasing pressure on Pakistan through the 1990s while pivoting towards a larger, wealthier India whose shift to the rabidly far-right Hindutva trend it viewed with far more indulgence.

Pakistan angered Washington in 1998 by responding in kind to India’s nuclear test – in the process becoming the first Muslim nuclear power – and in 1999 by invading Indian-occupied Kashmir only to withdraw under heavy American pressure. Coupled with Islamabad’s support for Afghanistan’s isolated Taliban regime and the subsequent coup, led almost exclusively by Islamist officers, that brought army commander Musharraf to the throne, this led to painful sanctions from Washington that Musharraf tried to have removed with increasing desperation.

It wasn’t until the September 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan that Musharraf was able to go from pariah to prized partner. He reversed years of state policy by supporting the American invasion of Afghanistan, purging his Islamist lieutenants, and banning several of the most militant Pakistani Islamist groups. At the time this was largely excused in Pakistan since such measures were seen as necessary to prevent the United States from adding Pakistan to its list of targets – something for which India, with whom Pakistan had a major stand-off, especially agitated.

Rather than ride the storm out, however, Musharraf opted to use ingratiation with Washington as a survival strategy: whenever the United States pressured him, he would yield more at the expense of his internal legitimacy. He had ridden to power by portraying himself as a champion of the Kashmiri cause, yet on American insistence essentially yielded to India’s framing of the occupation as a terrorism issue and began an entente on disadvantageous terms. This earned him the hostility of Pakistani Islamists, who began to scheme with the Qaida fugitives in the borderlands to assassinate him.

In the winter of 2003-04 Musharraf was hit with a particularly Libyan headache: firstly, the Libyan Qaida commander Mustafa Faraj planned several hits on him. Secondly, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddhafi, seeking to reverse his own isolation from the United States, tipped Washington off that Pakistan’s most famous nuclear scientist Abdul-Qadeer Khan had offered assistance for nuclear armament to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Desperate to avoid American wrath of the type that had befallen Iraq already, Musharraf decided to kill two birds – both Qaida-linked assassins and American misgivings – with one stone, ordering a major attack on Pakistan’s historically autonomous Waziristan region where a small but influential Qaida leadership was based.

The campaign provoked a major revolt from Waziristan’s clans, binding them closer to Qaida. Musharraf in turn gave increasing concessions to Washington – including, in the first of a decade of airstrikes from Washington into northwest Pakistan that by the early 2010s would become a maelstrom. In several cases, Washington used these strikes to sabotage any attempt at negotiations between the government and insurgency: at last they discarded Musharraf outright, but the match had been lit. While war engulfed the northwest, a fragmented insurgency increasingly targeted the Pakistani “mainland” with a mixture of properly military raids and more brutal attacks on minorities and soft targets.

Washington inserted itself even more obtrusively into Pakistani affairs, seeking both to redirect Pakistan’s military attention inward rather than against India and to purge Islamists. In the first of several hybrid civil-military regimes it first backed the liberal civilian regime of the People’s Party against the military – though both had collaborated with American airstrikes in Pakistan, the military was seen as too hawkish towards the Americans’ prized Indian allies and scapegoated by Washington for not having destroyed their Taliban enemy in Afghanistan. A decade later, with a more pointedly independent civilian government in power and a rejuvenated military seeking to feather its nest, the Americans backed a thinly veiled military coup. A key figure in this transition was the notoriously opportunistic lobbyist Husain Haqqani, who had once called for American protection against his own army but a decade later would help the Americans corralcorrall a corrupted military against the government.

With this game of musical chairs in Islamabad and a number of other regional upheavals – including the emergence of Daesh, the outright Indian annexation of Kashmir, and the return to the Taliban emirate to Afghanistan – the insurgency in northwest Pakistan survives and thrives to this day.

Sudan

Sudan’s “revolutionary” regime rested on a symbiosis between Islamist ideologues led by charismatic speaker Turabi and an officer class led by Bashir. The major problem, inherited from their predecessors, was a long-running war against secularist, Christian, or secessionist southern insurgents, who were backed by not only many neighbouring states but by the United States and Israel, where evangelical and Zionist groups lobbied against an “Arab Islamic state”.

Both insurgency and regime were frequently brutal – the Sudanese state, both before and during Bashir’s regime, having relied heavily on unaccountable militias that Turabi’s civilian ideologues tried with little success to whip into a more disciplined ideological force. The insurgents were, meanwhile, a rabble of brutal, frequently squabbling ethnic militias, even by the admission of their primary leader John Garang, an incredibly devious but charismatic army defector who flirted with every manner of pretext and partner from secularism to Marxism to American imperialism in a twenty-year war on Khartoum. But the regime’s obsession with power as an end to itself – frequently coating power politics in superficially Islamic terms, which were also exploited to justify repression – had destructive consequences. Bashir and Turabi fell out spectacularly in the late 1990s, splitting the Islamists between loyalists and opposition. Turabi had been particularly vilified by the United States, who slowly began to respond to Bashir’s overtures to mend their relations.

There were several side effects of this purge. Turabi’s Islamist rhetoric, eschewing ethnic divisions, had won a strong following among ethnic minorities in such regions as Darfur. While Bashir maintained Islamist rhetoric, his obsession with keeping Turabi out cast a wave of suspicion over these minorities. The regime instead backed and gave a blank cheque to militias recruited from their Arab pastorialist rivals – nicknamed “Janjaweed”, or mounted fiends. Even as a veritable who’s who of its leaders publicly stressed that Islam did not privilege an Arab over a non-Arab – in practice, for political reasons, they indulged the Janjaweed, who systematically ravaged and dispossessed Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities in Darfur.

Garang, with whom Khartoum negotiated in large part to placate the United States, saw an opportunity in this ethnic rift in the northern half of Sudan: unlike many other southern insurgents, he did not want to split from Sudan but rather rule a single secularist state, and was thus better-placed to work with insurgents in Darfur such as Abdel-Wahid Nour, whom he incited into revolt. On the other hand, Turabi, eager to return to power, reached out to disaffected, mainly Zaghawa Islamists such as Khalil Ibrahim, who had followed him since the 1980s. In order to counter this threat by polar-opposite foes, the regime doubled down on its support of the Janjaweed – pitiless mercenaries led by the likes of Moussa Hilal and Hamidati Dogolo.

Though the brutal conflict that burst aflame in 2003-04 was not, strictly speaking, a genocide as described by often vested interests, it was an ethnic open season as regime-backed Janjaweed went on the rampage, while minoritarian militias also, if less devastatingly, targeted Arab communities. The mayhem crossed borders when the formerly friendly ruler of Chad, Idriss Deby, was pressured to support his ethnic kin among the Zaghawa insurgents – prompting Khartoum to back Chadien rebels in a devastating proxy war that lasted from 2005-10 and very nearly brought down both regimes.

There were other aftershocks. Firstly the south, to great international fanfare, negotiated a secession in 2011 – only to squabble over the border with Sudan before its own rival leaders fell into civil war. In what was left of Sudan, the Janjaweed were rewarded for their abuses. Moussa Hilal, persecutor of Darfur’s minorities, reconciled with Chad’s regime by marrying his daughter to Deby. Meanwhile Bashir, fearing a coup from the regular army, promoted Dogolo to lead a paramilitary corps largely comprising Janjaweed. In 2019 this backfired when Dogolo, in league with the army, toppled Bashir to end a thirty-year rule whose length had come at the expense of the country’s unity and countless lives.

Under American and regional pressure, which prioritised the purge of the Islamists above everything else, the new regime scrambled to introduce secularism to Sudanese law and recognize Israel, rejection of which had long been a source of pride for Sudan and acceptance of which reflected an eagerness to ingratiate itself with Washington. But when the army tried to cement control with the support of Bashir’s toppled Islamists, Dogolo mutinied and allied with the internationally more palatable secularists. The brutal war that followed has since scorched Sudan in its entirety: both the Darfur periphery as well as such central cities as Khartoum and Omdurman. In the end, the relative independence of the Sudanese regime and the repeatedly abandoned principles of the Islamists faded against ruthless power politics.

Yemen

Unlike Pakistan and Sudan, Yemen’s military – a complicated network of personal networks rather than a centralised institution – was never a domineering factor, even if a military dictator in the form of Ali Saleh ruled. Though he unified North and South Yemen in 1990, routing a Gulf-backed southern secession attempt in 1994, Saleh was at least as cynical as the other dictators: he likened the rule of Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes”, playing off different factions in a historically centrifugal country. This strategy helped him play a leading role in Yemen’s affairs for the better part of forty years.

Given a distinctly step-brotherly treatment in 1990s Arabia, Saleh’s chance for a comeback came in the early 2000s after Qaida launched relatively minor but eye-catching attacks in the region against American interests. Like Musharraf, Saleh received American funds in return for collaboration against what was still a minor Qaida presence. He used them to feather the nest for his son and nephews, who led military and security units armed and trained by Washington. But as with Musharraf, Washington wanted Saleh to crack down harder. Among other things, they objected to his political partnership with Islah leader Abdul-Majeed Zindani, a controversial preacher who had once known Usama bin-Ladin.

Comprising a mixture of preachers like Zindani, officers such as cavalry corps commander Ali Muhsin, and clan leaders such as the veteran chieftain of the northern Hashidi confederation and parliamentary speaker Abdulla Ahmar, Islah was an important ruling partner for Saleh. But in order to increase his own share of power, the wily dictator decided to divert them to costlier pursuits, far from the capital. He moved not against Qaida’s minor fronts in the south but against the much larger Houthi movement in the north. Long political rivals to both Saleh and the Sunni Islah, the Houthis had agitated for a return to the Zaidi imamate and, more concerningly for Washington, espoused anti-American rhetoric. After they offended American ambassador Edmund Hull, in the summer of 2004 Saleh dispatched an Islah force against the Houthis, whose leader Husain was killed after a summer of bloody fighting.

What would follow over the next years was a cyclical round of war, negotiations, and side-switching. Not only did Saleh use the occasion to divert Islah, but he also played up the role of Iran as the Houthis’ sponsors in order to get Saudi and American support – in fact, this would become a self-fulfilling scenario as the Houthis turned increasingly to Iran. As in Pakistan, the Yemeni regime also purposely covered for American airstrikes in the south against Qaida suspects: rather than hurt it, these helped Qaida grow from its modest roots when, as in Pakistan’s Waziristan, irate clansmen rallied to the group.

As it happened, Saleh was not the only cynic competing for power: the 2010s proved the political version of a Mexican standoff. Increasingly wary of Saleh’s treacherous manipulation, Islah took advantage of the 2011 uprising to turn on him: while the Houthis took over much of the north, Muhsin and the Ahmars helped oust Saleh from Sanaa in a Gulf-brokered deal, even as Qaida surged in the south. More sideswitching followed: with Islah now the stronger party, Saleh and the Houthis secretly collaborated to expel it and seize Sanaa in 2014-15.

This provoked a major, brutal Gulf bombardment of Yemen spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, themselves at cross-purposes with Abu Dhabi backing southern secessionists against the same ousted “government” on whose behalf they had launched the war. And when in 2017 the Emiratis enticed Saleh to switch sides yet again, the Houthis pounced and killed him instead. Since then, they have in effect ruled much of Yemen even as the Gulf-backed opposition squabbles over the rest.

Conclusion

At the turn of the century, Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen were politically among the more independent but also isolated Muslim states in their region. Seeking to get into Washington’s good books and extend their own power, however, their dictators launched overly militarised responses to threats in the periphery, setting off extended civil wars that were eventually brought to the capitals. Twenty years from 2004, a key year in this process, and long after the ouster of the dictators, these Muslim countries and their societies are still paying the price.

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Photo by Yusuf Yassir on Unsplash

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