Complexities to our west

West Asia At War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games 

Author: Talmiz Ahmad

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 544

Price: Rs 799

During his career as a diplomat Talmiz Ahmad stood out as the most prominent Indian “Arabist” of his generation. The experience gained from his years spent in West Asia and the Gulf were combined with a deep scholarly interest in the countries to which he was posted or dealt with while in the Ministry of External Affairs. Since his retirement that reputation has been burnished. In his avatar as an academic and a writer, Mr Ahmad’s books and shorter works in both scholarly and media platforms have regularly appeared in the public sphere. At a time when interest in that region has slackened, partly on account of the more topical themes such as the Indo Pacific, Mr Ahmad’s contribution to the development of a uniquely Indian perspective on West Asia and North Africa has been immense. The current volume is both representative of that trend and also in many ways a summation of his views.

West Asia At War is a concentrate of a lifetime of experience and knowledge-gathering about this region — which Mr Ahmad describes as extending from Iran and Afghanistan on our west, and covering the entire Arab world including North Africa. This is a vast and varied territory but he ably provides the reader with a coherent narrative thread to steer through a complex maze of often conflicting historical trajectories. The basic pattern Mr Ahmad identifies is of “the interplay of four regional peoples — the Arab, the Persian, the Jew and the Turk”. Their interface over the millennia is also “frequently interrupted by military interventions from the West — by the Greeks and Romans in ancient times, by the British and French more recently and by the Americans over the past fifty years”.

Modern colonialism, French and British, left an imprint that is self-evident — from the creation of states with national boundaries that are both cherished and contested; to the establishment of a Jewish diasporic state; and, finally, the creation of a political economy around hydrocarbons. The early chapters of the book delve deeply into this history which provides the platform for the region’s subsequent history up to the present. Mr Ahmad presents this story consciously within what he calls “a framework of resistance”. The elements of this range from resistance to Western imperialism; to the creation of Israel and to its occupation of Palestinian territories; to Western cultural and political influences and the consequent rise of political Islam; and, finally, to US military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. A parallel thread that assumes greater prominence in this century —most prominently through “Arab Spring” — is that of “resistance to authoritarian rule’ and a clamour for better governance and socio-economic change.

This is a study that takes us through all the complexities of Israel’s changing interface with its Arab neighbours through multiple conflicts down to the “Abrahamic Accords”; the Persian Arab dynamic or its more potent symptom of Saudi Iran contestations; the Gulf Kingdoms’ changing interface with the United States and the interplay of the “Global War on Terror” with radical Islam. While each of its chapters can be read by profit both by the general reader and the specialist alike, it is the final two chapters that were the most engrossing.

In the penultimate chapter, Mr Ahmad looks closely at India’s interactions with the region and this has much new information as also an analytical and policy perspective of great value. He is appreciative of the strides that the NDA II government has made in West Asia in general and in particular in cementing ties with the Gulf Kingdoms and imparting to them a stronger strategic content. But he is impatient with initiatives such as, what the media had termed “Quad II” (a meeting of foreign ministers of India, Israel, UAE and the US in October 2021). To him, this was simply “theatre as an end in itself and served no real Indian interest”.

What he attaches importance to instead would be a regional initiative in which India must also take the lead. This would focus on smoothening the Iran-Saudi interface and thereby provide the basis for addressing conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Mr Ahmed realistically notes that the major impediment to such an idea is the “comfort that the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] states had derived from the US security umbrella” but he feels the situation is changing with the US no longer viewed as a credible security provider. One would have liked Mr Ahmad to have engaged with this further. How would such an initiative work with our bourgeoning relationship with Israel or, indeed, whether the domestic appetite for such a venture exists? But the subtext of his thesis is entirely valid: West Asia as a region is too vital to take a narrow or transactional view based on individual bilateral relations, and a deeper regional engagement must always remain on the cards.

In the final chapter Mr Ahmad identifies three principal vectors that shape the regional arena: “The persistent weakness of most regional states, the absence of a region-wide, consensually accepted regional security arrangement and the robust activism of external powers — primarily the US — since the 1970s in dividing the regional states into allies and enemies”. His prognosis is bleak: “The prospect of successful change across West Asia and North Africa remains very remote”. That is why this book should be a must read for anyone interested in India’s external policies and postures.

The reviewer is a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan and Singapore