Thanassis Cambanis

[Published in War on the Rocks.]

Ever since Russia reneged on an ill-conceived ceasefire plan for Syria in September and participated in a barbarous military campaign in Aleppo, the crescendo of American voices calling for some action in Syria has risen a notch, apparently reaching the White House this week.

Throughout the Syria crisis, the U.S. government bureaucracy and key power centers in the foreign policy elite have espoused Obama’s version of restraint and resignation, toeing a position along the lines of “Syria is a mess, but there’s little we can do.” Lately, though, an escalatory mindset has taken hold, with analysts and politicians floating proposals to defend Syrian civilians and confront an expansionist Russia.

“I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones,” Hillary Clinton said in the most recent debate, taking a position starkly more interventionist than the president she served as secretary of state. She continued: “We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them.”

Does this kind of talk represent a sea change in decision-making circles? After years of decrying missteps in the ill-begotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and debating America’s shrinking footprint, is there now a convergence to once again embrace interventionism among politicians, public opinion and the foreign policy elite that some in the White House derided as “the blob”?

I think there is, and those of us who have espoused a more vigorous intervention in Syria and a more activist response to the Arab uprisings need now to take extra care in the policies we propose. As the pendulum swings back toward a bolder, more assertive American foreign policy, we must eschew simplistic triumphalism and an unfounded assumption that America can determine world events. Otherwise we risk repeating the mistakes of America’s last, disastrous wave of moralism and interventionism after 9/11.

It’s important not to overstate the backlash to Obama’s calls for humility and restraint, and not too ignore the activist and moralistic strains that connect Obama’s foreign policy to that of his predecessors. With those caveats, it seems like we’re on the cusp of a return to a more activist foreign policy.

That doesn’t make us all interventionists yet, but it does expose the United States to renewed risk, making it all the more important to restore some honesty and clarity to the debate. Any discussion about America’s global footprint has to acknowledge that it’s still huge. America has not retrenched or turned its back on the world. Any discussion about Syria has to acknowledge from the get-go that America already is running a billion-dollar military intervention there. So when we talk about escalating or de-escalating, we need to be clear where we’re starting. The United States is heavily implicated in all the Arab world’s wars, with few of its strategic aims yet secured. This unrealized promise has fueled frustration about America’s role.

Even Trump’s isolationist calls to tank the international order and make America great by impoverishing the rest of the world echo, in part, a desire for strength and moral clarity. The likely next president, Hillary Clinton, has steadily stood in the American tradition of liberal internationalism which has been the dominant school of foreign policy thought since World War II. That history embraces an international order dominated by the United States and trending toward market economies, free trade, liberal rights, and a rhetorical commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights, which even in its inconsistent and opportunistic pursuit, has been considered anything from an irritant to a major threat to the world’s autocracies. This ideological package has underwritten America’s best foreign policy, like Cold War containment, and its worst, like the invasion of Iraq and the post-9/11 savaging of the rule of law.

Syria’s war has been the graveyard of the comforting, but vague, idea that America could lead from behind and serve as a global ballast while somehow keeping its paws to itself. Other destabilizing realities helped upend this dream, among them Europe’s financial crisis, the rise of the extreme right, the Arab uprisings, the collapse of the Arab state system and a new wave of wars, unprecedented refugee flows, and the expansionist moves of a belligerent, resurgent Russia.

Pointedly, however, Syria has embodied the failure of the hands-off approach. Its complexity also serves as a warning to anyone eager to oversimplify. Just as it was foolish to pretend that the meltdown of Iraq and Syria, and the rise of the Islamic State, were some kind of local, containable imbroglio, it is also foolish to pretend that a robust, interventionist America can resolve the world’s problems. Neither notion is true.

America is the preeminent world power. It can use its resources to manage conflicts like Syria’s in order to pursue its interests. Success flows from clearly defining those interests and intervening sagely, in a coordinated fashion across the globe. America has played a disproportionate role in designing the international institutions that created a new world order after World War II. For a a time after the end of the Cold War, it enjoyed being alone at the top of the global power pyramid. American influence swelled for many reasons, highest among them American wealth, comprehensible policy goals, and appealing values. But dominance is not the same thing as total control, and a newly assertive U.S. foreign policy still can achieve only limited aims.

The next president will have to recalibrate America’s approach to power projection – how to deter powerful bullies like Russia, how to manage toxic partnerships with allies like Saudi Arabia, how to contain the strategic fallout of wars and state failure in Iraq, Syria, and the world’s ungoverned zones. The most visible test right now is Syria. Syria is important – not least because of the 10 million displaced, the 5-plus million refugees, the half million dead. It is also important as the catalyst of widespread regional collapse in the Arab world, the source of an unprecedented refugee crisis, a hothouse for jihadi groups, and as a test of American resolve.

It’s harder and harder to find foreign policy experts willing, like Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson recently did inThe New York Times, to argue that any American effort to steer the course of Syria’s war will only make things worse. (British journalist Jonathan Steele made a similar argument this week in The Guardian that any Western effort to contain war crimes in Aleppo “threatens to engulf us all.”)

Figures from both major U.S. parties have increasingly shifted to arguing that the United States will have to experiment with some form of escalation, because the existing approach just hasn’t worked. Hillary Clinton’s team is apparently considering a range of options including no-fly zones or strikes on Syrian government targets. The ongoing shift is less the result of a revelation about Syria’s meltdown and more a reflection of American domestic politics and a consensus that it’s time to recalibrate America’s geostrategic great power projection.

As this debate gets underway in earnest, it is crucial to force all sides to draw on the same facts, and be honest about the elements of their policy proposals that are guesses. For example: It is a fact that Syria is in free fall and Iraq barely functions as a unitary state, with fragmenting civilian and military authority on all sides of the related conflicts. It is a guess that Russia has escalation dominance and is willing to pursue all options, including nuclear conflict, if the United States intervenes more forcefully in Syria. It is a fact that tensions between the United States and Russia are at a post-Cold War high. It is a guess that they will clash directly over Syria rather than Kaliningrad or Ukraine or some other matter. It is a fact that the rise of the Islamic State and the flow of millions of displaced Syrians has destabilized the entire Middle East and reshaped politics in Europe. It is a guess that if the United States shoots down some of Bashar al-Assad’s helicopters it will lead to more fruitful political negotiations among Syrian factions and their foreign sponsors.

Many of the competing poles of the American debate begin with assumptions that are shaky or downright false, and ignore the lion’s share of facts on the ground in Syria. Any honest assessment of the crisis demands humility. Any serious analyst taking a position on Syria has to acknowledge that there is no possibility of a neat solution, and no outcome that precludes civilian suffering, regional instability, and strategic blowback — whether one argues for increasing America’s intervention, as I have, or for further restraint, in keeping with President Obama’s position (or, for that matter, for an admission of rebel defeat and an acceptance of Bashar al-Assad’s enduring role).

Unfortunately, many interventionists ignore the low likelihood of success and the danger of escalating the war, while many restrainers downplay the major ongoing strategic risks posed by Syria’s meltdown. Marc Lynch, himself of the school of restraint, neatly dissected the incoherent underpinnings of the American debate in a recent War on the Rockspiece.

America cannot direct the course of events in Syria because the war is too complex and Russia too committed to Assad, Lynch argues. But with the regime’s war crimes accelerating, for political reasons America can no longer afford to be perceived as not trying harder, even if any extra effort is destined to fail. Lynch predicts that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency and pursue an escalation in Syria, which will fail for all the same reasons as America’s existing intervention. In a year’s time, Lynch argues, Syria will be worse off, and America will either back down or sink deeper into yet another doomed Middle Eastern war.

Sadly, Lynch might be right. But – and the tone of certainty in all the polemics and analysis makes it easy to forget – he might also be wrong. Happily, for the prospects of the debate over Syria, Lynch offers an example of striking the right tone. He is confident in his analysis but not sloppy with the facts. Now that escalation is more seriously on the table, we need a more honest debate.

While Lynch contributes a welcome measure of sobriety to the debate, even he sidesteps the initial fact that Obama’s policy has been to pursue a military intervention, leaving the implication that the status quo doesn’t somehow involve a major U.S. role in the Syrian war. That gets to the heart of the problem: Anti-interventionists won the internal debate in the Obama administration, swatting down proposals from cabinet members to expand the U.S. role, strike Assad when he used chemical weapons, and push harder for regime change.  Instead, a Goldilocks notion of the “just-right” intervention governed U.S. policy in Syria since 2011 — enough to say we did something, not enough to be determinative. Yet this policy’s authors often present themselves as an embattled minority facing down the interventionist blob — a foreign policy establishment caricatured as prone to groupthink and which never met an intervention it didn’t like. The actual debate is between limited interventionists like Obama and expanded interventionists like Clinton. On the far ends are those who want a full withdrawal from the Levant and the mad hawks who’d like to see U.S. troops foment regime change in Damascus.

No serious position on Syria can ignore America’s existing, major and ongoing military intervention, or the frustrating reality that the United States and its allies tried and failed to steer the conflict in another direction. No serious position on Syria can ignore the war crimes, sectarianism, and intractability of Assad and his supporters. No serious position on Syria can ignore the very real risks of a direct conflict between the United States and Russia.

The big picture in Syria is daunting indeed. It encompasses a region in the grips of state failure. A coherent Syria policy cannot be divorced from the volatile region of which it is a lynchpin; nor can it be divorced from grand strategy and geopolitics. What happens in Syria affects American relations with much of the world.

America’s strategic depth and deterrent power are tangible assets that have taken a beating as a result of Washington’s contradictory, halting, and passive response to the Arab uprisings. The United States postponed a rethink of its relationship with Saudi Arabia, corroding the most productive aspects of the partnership while remaining wedded to the most toxic. America’s Saudi plight is most bitterly apparent in Washington’s almost casual, and fantastically wrong-headed, decision to support Saudi Arabia’s criminally executed war in Yemen — as if in apology for America’s pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal over Saudi objections.

British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson reflected the growing understanding that Western inaction has persisted long past the breaking point when he told a U.K. parliamentary committee yesterday that the siege of Aleppo had dramatically changed public opinion. “We cannot let this go on forever,” Johnson said. “We cannot just see Aleppo pulverized in this way. We have to do something.” Reportedly, British defense officials are considering how to enforce a no-fly zone without getting into a shooting war with Russia and are also considering attacks on the Syrian military.

It might be true, as analysts and former Obama administration officials keep pointing out, that the existing policy has been driven by good intentions and that any shifts or tweaks are unlikely to save Syria from ruination. It might be true that there are no pat solutions to the Syria crisis.

But that’s misleading, only part of the story. When America changes course, so will other players, including Russia, Iran, and the government of Syria. A different style of intervention from the one America is pursuing now could save some lives, which is no small accomplishment. And finally, while it’s not only about America, (or about Syria), an escalation in Syria that is designed to send messages to American rivals and contain the strategic fallout could, if well executed, produce yields in surprising places, as America’s deterrent stock rises and a renewed belief in American activism and engagement restores the U.S. role as global ballast.

We are not all interventionists yet, no matter how shrill the protests from the camp that has tried to defend every twist and turn of Obama’s Middle East policy and now finds itself suddenly on the losing side of the debate. But it is not foolish to hope that somewhere between the destructive overreach of George W. Bush’s militaristic foreign policy and Barack Obama’s pursuit of balance and restraint, there exists a happier medium where America’s never-ending engagement with the most troubled parts of the world yields better results.

Boys make their way through the rubble of damaged buildings in the rebel held area of al-Kalaseh neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, September 29, 2016. Reuters/Abdalrhman Ismail

[Published in The Atlantic.]

BEIRUT—For at least a year before the summer of 2016, civilians and fighters in rebel-held East Aleppo prepared for a siege they believed was both avoidable and inevitable. Correctly, it turns out, they calculated that the opposition’s bankrollers and arms suppliers—the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other “friends of Syria”—cared little for the well-being of civilians in rebel-held areas. Through the spring, contacts inside Aleppo prepared for the siege, expending minimal effort on appeals to the international community, which they assumed would be futile.

For all the world-weary resignation of the opposition fighters and other residents of rebel Aleppo, they have a well-earned pride in what they’ve done. They’ve maintained their hold on half of the jewel of Syria, and under withering assault, have cobbled together an alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s rule. “From the beginning of the revolution, we held Aleppo as the role model of the liberated city, that holds free elections, has an elected city council, and elected local committees that truly represent the people,” Osama Taljo, a member of the rebel city council in East Aleppo, explained over the phone after the siege began in earnest. “We insisted to make out of Aleppo an exemplar of the free Syria that we aspire to.”
Unfortunately, Aleppo has become an exemplar of something else: Western indifference to human suffering and, perhaps more surprisingly, fecklessness in the face of a swelling strategic threat that transcends one catastrophic war.

The last few weeks have piled humiliation upon misfortune for Aleppo, one of the world’s great cities, and already a longtime hostage of Syria’s never-ending conflict. Aided by the Russian military and foreign sectarian mercenaries, Syrian forces encircled East Aleppo over the summer. Rebels briefly broke the siege, but Assad’s forces fully isolated them just as Russia and the United States put the finishing touches on a dead-on-arrival ceasefire agreement that, contrary to its stated purpose, ushered in one of the war’s most violent phases yet. Instead of a cessation of hostilities, Syria witnessed an acceleration of the war against civilians, with East Aleppo as the showcase of the worst war-criminal tactics Assad has refined through more than five years of war.

Sieges violate international law, as well as specific United Nations resolutions, that, on paper, guarantee access to humanitarian aid to all Syrians but which in practice the government has disregarded. Aleppo—the biggest prize yet for Assad—has also been subjected to his most destructive assault. Throughout East Aleppo, Syrian or Russian aircraft have ruthlessly bombed civilians, singling out all healthcare facilities and first-responder bases. Bombs have ravaged well-known hospitals supported by international aid groups, along with the facilities of the White Helmets, the civil defense volunteers famous for digging casualties from rubble.

As if to test the proposition that the international community has just as little concern for its own reputation as it does for the lives of Syrian civilians—nearly half of whom have been displaced from their homes nationwide—Russia apparently chose, on September 19, the seventh day of the ceasefire, to bomb the first aid convoy en route to rebel-held Aleppo. That decision will be remembered as a fateful one.

Russia and Syria were following a timeworn blueprint: Use force to kill and starve civilians, then lie brazenly to avoid responsibility. In this case, the evidence is too clear and the trespass too toxic to let pass. So far, we’ve seen a sharp turn in rhetoric from the UN and Washington. Sooner or later, whether in the twilight of the Obama administration or in the dawn of his successor’s, we will see a much harder “reset” in Western relations with Russia.

For years, voices from Syria have raised the alarm. After years of dithering, even some members of the international community had the decency to follow suit, like Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The country is already a gigantic, devastated graveyard,” al Hussein said this summer, warning Syria’s belligerents that sieges and intentional starvation campaigns amount to war crimes. “Even if they have become so brutalized [that] they do not care about the innocent women, children, and men whose lives are in their hands, they should bear in mind that one day there will be a reckoning for all these crimes.”

Belatedly, Western leaders are joining the chorus. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who avoided taking a stand during years of violence against humanitarian organizations by the Assad regime, now publicly accuses Syria and Russia of war crimes. On September 30, the one-year anniversary of Russia’s direct entry into the war, Gareth Bayley, Britain’s Special Representative to Syria, issued a broadside. “From Russia’s first airstrikes in Syria, it has hit civilian areas and increasingly used indiscriminate weapons, including cluster and incendiary munitions. Its campaign has dramatically increased violence and prolonged the suffering of hundreds of thousands of civilians,” he said, blaming Russia for at least 2,700 civilian deaths. “Russia has proved to be either unwilling or unable to influence Assad and must bear its responsibility for the Assad regime’s atrocities.

America’s top diplomats, too, rail against Russia futilely. In a recently leaked recording of a meeting between a ham-handed but apparently sincere U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and members of the Syrian opposition, Kerry admitted that he lost the internal debate in the administration for greater intervention, more protection of civilians, and a stiffer stand against Russia’s triumphalist expansionism. But like a good soldier, he has continued to flog a bad policy, pushing perhaps much too hard on the small constituency of opposition Syrians who remain committed to a pluralistic, unified, democratic Syria.

Perhaps Russia has been searching for the West’s actual red lines all along, exploring how far it could go in Syria without provoking any push back from the United States and its allies. Maybe it finally found them after it bombed the UN aid convoy in September. Only time will tell if the recent pitched rhetoric translates into action.

One of the few consistent goals of U.S. policy in Syria over the last year was to shift the burden of responsibility for the crisis, or even guilt, to Russia. Throughout long negotiations, Washington has bent over backwards to act in good faith, trusting against all evidence that Russia was willing to act in concert to push Syria toward a political settlement. America’s leaders today appear shocked that Russia was acting as a spoiler, a fact clear to most observers long ago.

With the latest agreement in ashes—literally—and an ebullient Russia convinced it will encounter no blowback for its war crimes, America has a political chit in its hands. For now, Russia thinks it can achieve its strategic goals by relentlessly destabilizing the international order and lying as gleefully and willfully as the Assad regime. The United States helped underwrite that international order when the UN came into being in 1945, laying down moral markers on atrocities like genocide and war crimes, and crafting a web of interlocking institutions that increased global security and prosperity. As its primary enforcer, the United States also has been its primary beneficiary.

Now that Russia, determined to reestablish its status after the humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, has pushed the United States into a humiliating corner and weakened that international order, it is raising the stakes. Either the United States will push back, or the disequilibrium will spread even further. In either case, many thousands more Syrians will perish. As Bassam Hajji Mustafa, a spokesman for the Nour al-Din al-Zinki Movement, one of the more effective, if violent, rebel militias influential around Aleppo, put it, “People have adapted to death, so scaring them with this siege is not going to work.” Those who remain in Aleppo echo this refrain again and again: The last holdouts have stayed out of conviction. It’s hard to imagine anything but death driving them out. “If Aleppo falls and the world stays silent, then that will be the end of the revolution,” Hajji Mustafa said.

In the end, Aleppo is not a story about the West; it is a cornerstone of Syria and an engine of wealth and culture for the entire Levant. Aleppo is the story of the willful destruction of a pivotal Arab state, a center of gravity in a tumultuous region in sore need of anchors. It’s a story of entirely avoidable human misery: the murder of babies, the destruction of homes, the dismantling of a powerful industrial and craft economy.

The institutions of global governance are under strain and international comity is frayed; as yet, however, none of the steps toward dissolution are irreversible. Such shifts take place over decades, not months. But the crisis in Syria presents the most acute test yet, and demands of the United States an active, robust, and strategic response that reinforces its commitment to the architecture of global governance—a system threatened by spoiler powers like Russia and ideological attacks from nativists, the right-wing fringe, and other domestic extremists in the West.

Ignoring its responsibilities in Syria—and opening the door for Russia to pound away at the foundations of the international order—hurts not only Syrians but the entire world. Perhaps, finally, Assad and his backers have gone far enough to provoke an American defense of that indispensable order that America helped construct.

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan spoke during a visit to the Turkish police special forces base, which was allegedly damaged by a coup attempt. Photo: KAYHAN OZER/COURTESY OF PRESIDENTIAL PALACE/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas section.]

THE “TURKISH MODEL” has been upheld as an exemplar of how democracy could come to the Middle East since 2002, when a once-banned Islamist party won free elections and took power under the wary eye of a military accustomed to calling the shots.

In the aftermath of a failed coup attempt on July 15, Turkey’s increasingly erratic and authoritarian strongman leader, President Recep Tayyep Erdogan, has been busily erasing some of the signatures of that democracy: jailing journalists, banning academics from travel, purging hundreds of thousands of civil servants from the state’s payroll.

Erdogan is at the same time under threat from dark antidemocratic forces and posing such a threat to his own nation. This conundrum, more than anything else, is the Turkish model’s contribution. In a region that hosts hardly any experiments with democracy or accountable governance at all, Turkey is still grappling with the messy, destabilizing process of transitioning from poor military dictatorship to modern, developing democracy.

Turkey’s path under Erdogan embodies far more than the megalomania of its neo-Ottoman president; it reflects a popular desire for economic prosperity as well as political rights, for security along with freedom. While fending off a military that has continually tried to reassert control over national politics, Erdogan has shifted the balance of Turkey’s republic away from secular nationalist pluralism toward majoritarian Islamism. The once-oppressed rural and religious have acquired new rights and in the process have taken away some rights from the secular and urban.

As elected Islamists gained authority, Turkey accommodated the aspirations of a socially conservative, religious, and Islamist plurality. As the country became more democratic in electoral terms, it became less so from the perspective of secular liberals and nationalists in the mold of modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk. Secularism had been zealously protected not by courts, rule of law, or accountable institutions, but by the heavy interventionist hand of the military, which until Erdogan’s rise had simply dismissed governments it did not like.

Clearly, Turkey offers an ambiguous blueprint for democracy. Sadly, in its neighborhood, it offers one of the only blueprints. What can the rest of the Middle East, laboring under monarchs and dictators and runaway generals, learn from Erdogan’s style of government and the shaky aftermath of the latest effort by the military to cancel Turkey’s experiment with democracy?

Erdogan consciously evokes Ataturk’s creation myth with his grand sense of historical purpose. A popular mayor of Istanbul and a charismatic Islamist, he was banned from politics in 1998 for reciting a militant religious poem. He went on to cofound the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in 2001 and led it to victory the next year.

He and his party have been in power ever since, at first governing as pragmatists with a religious background, but over the years adopting Islamist policies and dispensing with liberal niceties that got in the way of power. Erdogan even jettisoned founding figures of the AKP when he feared they could challenge his primacy.

What was most surprising about Erdogan’s rise was the absence of violence. To be sure, many have died in the conflict between the government and the Kurdish minority, and there has been some apparently government-orchestrated rioting against opposition political parties. Then there are the proven and alleged coup attempts. But until this July, there hadn’t been anything approaching widespread civil strife, and, even in this case, the coup plotters appear to have been swiftly routed.

Since the rise of a Turkish model touted as simultaneously democratic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern, its checkered history has defied easy categorization. Turkey is a lonely republic in a region ruled by dictators, kings, and ayatollahs. (The only other republic is tiny Tunisia, which exerts far less influence.) It is a country of ethnic Turks and Kurds facing a mostly Arab hinterland. Its imperial Ottoman history remains fresh in the minds of its neighbors.

Erdogan neutered the military and demonstrated that it was possible to have relations with powers like the United States and Israel without being their toady. But his methods have shown a contempt for rule of law and for Turkey’s democratic institutions. Turkey’s president has eroded the same traditions that brought him to power — Erdogan’s secular rivals in politics and the press have opposed military rule and defended electoral politics even when Erdogan has persecuted them for criticizing him.

Worried observers have been describing Erdogan as a dictator and a thug for some time, all the more vociferously since 2008, when he outflanked the military with a dazzling indictment. The ensuing Ergenekon trials defanged the military and allegedly stopped a pervasive conspiracy to overthrow the state, even if some of the evidence appeared to have been manufactured.

As with so much about Erdogan and his Turkish model, during the Ergenekon trials and the ensuing purge (which foreshadowed today’s ongoing and broader one), good and bad were both in evidence: A coup genuinely appeared to have been averted while at the same time strongman norms trumped institution-building. The republic was preserved, the republic was weakened.

This kind of yin-yang push-pull has repeated itself over and over in Turkey’s recent history, culminating with this summer’s chilling events. The military made its move late on a Friday night, attacking parliament and police stations, closing a bridge between Europe and Asia, and firing on civilians. Erdogan and his allies rallied support through the same independent news media that it has relentlessly undermined and, more crucially perhaps, through mosque loudspeakers.

Public opinion ran strongly against the coup, evinced in the great number of Erdogan supporters and detractors alike who took to the street against the military plotters. Crucially, so did official weight; the military hierarchy and rank and file did not support the coup plotters. Nor did any opposition political party or faction of the state bureaucracy.

A coup would have set back Turkey’s democratic trajectory. In a different way, some argue, so is Erdogan, with his encouragement of vigilantism against political rivals (predating the coup attempt) and his massive purge under the cover of a state of emergency since the failed putsch.

Amnesty International estimates that 45,000 government employees had been fired or suspended from their jobs, and more than 15,000 people had been detained. According to the government, 8,651 military personnel participated in the mutiny. The purges have so far affected about 1.3 percent of the entire civil service. And 131 media outlets and publishing houses have been shut down.

Surely there are criminals and coup plotters among the hundreds of thousands arrested, fired, beaten, harassed, or investigated since July 15. But just as surely, the disproportionate size of the dragnet and the speed with which it was rolled out suggest that its purpose is not merely to ferret out lawbreakers but also to stifle dissent once and for all.

It is hard to imagine how the Turkish military today, reeling from the purges (whether deserved or unjustified) will be able to effectively curtail attacks by the Islamic State or the Kurdish PKK, both of which have targeted civilians.

It’s also hard to imagine that Turkey’s overall progress and growth can continue in the wake of a government-led war against itself.

In a move that clearly went beyond the hunt for coup accomplices and metastasized into a war on any independent institution or patch of civil society, the government savaged education. It fired 1,577 university deans and rectors, revoked licenses for 21,000 teachers, and banned all academics from foreign travel. It closed more than 1,000 private schools.

“More than a decade after getting a formal invitation to begin EU membership negotiations, Turkey looks less like a liberal European democracy than a one-man autocracy that you’d find, you know, in the Middle East,” said Steven A. Cook, a Turkey expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The other way of looking at it is from the vantage point of Turkey’s neighbors to the south, the heartland of the former Ottoman Empire. Istanbul’s historical hinterland stretches to Egypt and the Arabian peninsula. European Union members probably aren’t taking notes on how Erdogan squares his constituents conflicting desires for economic growth, religious freedom, and civil liberties — but many people in places like Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are.

Erdogan has taken some bold stances that have had major ripple effects around the region. He has continued a lukewarm alliance with Israel marked by occasional confrontations over episodes like Israel’s catastrophic war on Gaza and its attack on a ship full of unarmed peace activists. He has supported Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and given it a welcoming exile base after the 2013 military coup ousted elected president Mohammed Morsi. He has been a partner to the United States but not a patsy — Washington still remembers with irritation his refusal to let US troops invade Iraq in 2003 from Turkish territory. Such independence is noticed in a region where despotic rulers tend to do anything to please their most important foreign backers.

On Syria, Erdogan has taken a hard-line position against Bashar Assad and Russia, costing Turkey extensively, especially after Turkey shot down a Russian jet last year and Russia retaliated with cuts to trade and the lucrative flow of Russian tourists.

Unlike any other government in the region (and virtually alone in the world), Turkey has welcome Syrian refugees — 3 million of them — and given them a clear path to citizenship.

Perhaps that is the most unique contribution of the Turkish model. For all the strains between Kurds and Turks, Islamists and secularists, and the troublesome identity politics and laws that reinforce denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide, Turkey boasts a national identity and an idea of citizenship that is flexible, open to multiple faiths and ethnicities, and has proven able to adapt and evolve far more than any of its peers in the neighborhoods.

Turkey is not an ethnocracy, or a theocracy.

And its elected leaders have bested would-be military dictators multiple times since 2002, in a region and historical period where authoritarianism in the norm and almost every state has regressed in terms of rights and freedoms.

Loss of some rights has also been the norm in Erdogan’s Turkey but not loss of all rights, or for all citizens. It’s hardly a Platonic ideal, but given the alternatives, it’s hardly a model to scoff at. Turkey’s approach, at least, offers a starting point toward two concepts in painfully short supply in the Middle East: elected civilian rule and a flexible concept of citizenship.

The one silver lining in Turkey’s attempted coup is that military dictatorship — for a change — didn’t win the day. In an era of authoritarian relapse, that’s no small matter. Even American and European politics today contain frightening doses of chauvinism, fear-mongering, and incitement to violence, reminding us that no one is immune to dangerous trends that have eroded freedom and security in places like the Middle East and former Soviet republics.

Turkey has offered a counterexample in the age of awful. Despite Erdogan’s increasingly tight grip, Turkey’s course since its last successful military coup in 1997 (dubbed the “postmodern coup” because the military managed to force a change in government without suspending the constitution or parliament) has offered an alternative to civil war, military, or sectarian dictatorship, royal or clan kleptocracy. It isn’t free or fair, but it also isn’t awful — or as bloody — as the rest of the neighborhood.

President Obama reflects during a meeting at the White House, March 15, 2009. The White House/Wikicommons

[Published in The Cairo Review.]

A generational war has engulfed the Levant. The ruination of Iraq and Syria is akin to a core meltdown within the Arab state system, with consequences that already have rocked the world: new wars flaring across the Middle East, political ferment in Turkey, a global refugee crisis, and the rise of the Islamic State group, to name just a few.

Today we can begin the sad work of taking inventory of an American presidency that aspired to a humane and humble foreign policy. President Barack Obama didn’t start the Levantine conflagration—that ignoble credit belongs to his predecessor—but he has kept America fighting in Iraq and deployed forces in Syria to support a vast, billion-dollar covert proxy effort. All to little effect.

The long, horrific war that President George W. Bush launched in March 2003, with his illegal invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, has shattered the cradle of civilization beyond all recognition. During the subsequent occupation, U.S. officials dismantled the pillars of the Iraqi state, including its military and bureaucracy, and then stood by as newly empowered sectarian warlords and mob bosses tore apart the country. Many wars flared simultaneously in Iraq, some of which spread to neighboring Syria after the popular uprising sparked there in 2011.

President Obama’s signal intellectual and policy contribution was his minimalist response towards the chaos left behind by Bush. American policy at turns sought to contain the implosion of Syria and the ongoing fighting in Iraq, and at others accelerated or tried to steer the conflict, often by trying to balance ethnic or sectarian militias in a manner that, perhaps inadvertently, deepened the hold of sectarian warlords.

The president’s lackluster attitude has poisoned much of the serious policy conversation in Washington. His policies have spread the spurious conviction that whatever happens in the Middle East is not a core U.S. or international interest, but rather a sad and regional affair. Days before Mosul fell to ISIS, an expert with the White House’s ear insisted to me that the jihadi movement was a containable local problem.

The folly of the Obama doctrine is reinforced by the conviction that violence in Mesopotamia and the Levant is neither of America’s making nor America’s responsibility to manage. Yet state failure in the wealthy, oil-rich, politically interconnected Arab heartland has fundamentally diminished global security—unfortunately just as some Middle East experts predicted.

What happens in Iraq doesn’t stay in Iraq. Politics and war are dynamic processes. There is mirroring, learning, exporting, and knowledge sharing among all manner of actors, including authoritarian rulers, local warlords, non-state militias, and terrorist movements. The experience gained by fighters of many stripes in Iraq’s first stage of civil war and anti-American resistance, from 2003 to 2006, has fed conflicts and militancy far afield in the Arab World. Today, the wars in Iraq, Syria, and surrounding the Islamic State cannot meaningfully be considered separate conflicts, as U.S. policymakers still vainly try to do.

American policy in a fragmenting wider Middle East has systematically failed to bridge the gap between its rhetoric and realities on the ground. In principle, the Middle East has been “right-sized” on the foreign policy agenda as a midlevel interest behind global warming, trade, and China, among others. In practice, Obama’s national security and foreign policy teams have focused the plurality of their energy on the Middle East.

Yet through all this dislocating turbulence, characterized by levels of murder, death and displacement not seen since the Second World War, President Obama has demurred that there isn’t anything more that the United States could do to cushion or even shape the partial disintegration of the Arab state system. Obama, reasonably, wanted to repair the toxic legacy of his predecessor. He was driven by negative aspirations—a desire not invade more Muslim countries, not to waste lives and colossal resources in military folly, not to behave as if the military were America’s only foreign policy tool. But that does not justify his belief that the Middle East is less important than claimed by foreign policy experts, whom the president’s close adviser Ben Rhodes collectively dismisses as “the blob.” The president appears to believe that the United States cannot direct events in places like Iraq and Syria, or anywhere else, and when it does try to steer events through military intervention, the result is usually a tragic parade of errors, like in Iraq.

It’s understandable that President Obama harbored a fantasy of washing his hands of the whole mess. The United States failed to achieve its goals in Iraq and Afghanistan despite killing many people and committing a great deal of resources. The results in Libya are more equivocal and America’s responsibility more broadly shared, but hardly make a case for successful U.S. intervention.

But the alternative to reckless interventionism cannot realistically be disengagement. The region’s conflicts implicate the United States and plenty of other foreign powers, along with the whole ethnic, sectarian and ideological panoply of a region that, despite generations of ethnic cleansing, hosts a staggering amount of diversity. America bears heavy responsibility as Israel’s guarantor power, which inextricably ties Washington to Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and other regional players.

Far too late in the game, Obama has learned that saying that something doesn’t matter doesn’t necessarily make it so. Efforts to cauterize the Middle East and keep it at arm’s length have proved even more destabilizing (and attention-sucking) than a full-fledged policy commitment from the get-go. On what subjects do Obama and his national security advisers spend their time? Grudgingly, the Levant and its neighborhood. Obama’s agenda since 2011 has been hogged by, to a name few, Israel’s expansionism and its conflicts with Palestinians and others; the Arab revolts; Iran, the nuclear deal and its regional contest with Saudi Arabia; and the Yemen war. Grinding all along at the heart of the unending crisis is the Levant war, which America launched by choice with the invasion of Iraq.

The fantasy of American disengagement in the Middle East is just that: a fantasy.

Civilians inspected a burnt car after an airstrike in the rebel-controlled city of Idlib on Wednesday. Photo: AMMAR ABDULLAH/REUTERS

[Originally published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

SYRIA HAS BROKEN down much worse than anyone expected. For more than five years, a wide and mostly unsavory cast of Syrians and foreigners has been going for broke fighting over the pivotal Levantine state — settling for massive amounts of human suffering and breakdown of order in the short term while gambling on total victory in the long term.

A quick inventory beggars the mind: hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, the rise of the nihilistic jihadi Islamic State, a refugee crisis that has fractured the European Union, violence and instability across most of the Middle East, a superpower standoff between Russia and the United States, and finally, the teetering of the entire Arab state system.

That’s just the major items on the list.

The Arab state system’s collapse today threatens basic order and livelihood in many areas, including war-torn Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. It also has corroded the European Union, with an immigration crisis that has strained Turkey’s relations with the bloc and fueled a climate so toxic that it has spurred British voters to quit the European project.

The war’s consequences and scope appeared dramatically different from a few short years ago. Previously, Washington thought that Syria’s crisis would have limited consequences, no matter how terrible for the country’s citizens. President Obama staked his position on a well-intentioned read of recent history. After America’s failed Iraqi policy and ineffective regional intervention, the president reasoned that the United States could at least do less harm, for if Syria was going to be ripped apart, let others be to blame.

In the early years of Syria’s war, analysts and politicians who claimed the Levant was more important than the White House realized were dismissed as credulous rebel partisans or knee-jerk interventionists. Today the consequences of Syria’s meltdown have proven even more far-reaching than almost anyone predicted in 2011.

MILITARY ESCALATION IN Syria today is the best of a set of bad options. Even dissidents in the US Department of State have gone public with their desire for it. The United States is already deeply involved in the Syrian conflict and has declared its desire to use force and humanitarian aid to promote a political solution to the conflict. The idea is sound but requires a greater commitment — a final chance to do better, with some of Syria’s infrastructure and institutions still intact, Turkey undergoing a regional realignment, and with interventionists in Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah reassessing their own goals with Syrian President Bashar Assad. The only intransigent parties, in fact, are Assad and the Islamic State — neither of whom is likely to be part of any political solution in Syria.

For the United States, the question is profoundly unsettling — how is it possible to do the right thing in a conflict this messy? Indeed, it might already be too late to save Syria. But if no one tries, more catastrophic outcomes are all but guaranteed: the full collapse of Iraq and Syria, the long-term enshrinement of the Islamic State, an acceleration of the regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and a wave of state implosions around the entire Arab world that will resonate for generations.

In Washington, the debate has tended to break along two lines — extreme isolationists, who think the United States can only do harm by getting more involved, and extreme interventionists, who’d like to see the Pentagon invade. White House policy has actually straddled the divide, dedicating considerable resources to managing the conflict but claiming that it can’t do more. The United States has deemed Syria’s survival important but not so important as to be classified a core national interest.

The time has come, however, to admit that the policy hasn’t achieved its aims. At this stage, probably, no course correction will be able to restore Syria to its pre-war level of development and unity. But the fallout from Syria has proven that the integrity of the Arab state system, as flawed as it is, is a vital interest for the United States as well as for the denizens of the Middle East and their neighbors.

So, help Syria’s neighbors staunch the bleeding or intervene more actively in the conflict? It’s a painful question, especially in light of the historical destruction that the United States wrought with its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the cavalierly mismanaged military occupation.

Escalation appears to be plagued by a range of dangerous and risky options. (A study I recently conducted for The Century Foundation explores America’s choices in detail.) The United States has the power to end the Assad government’s indiscriminate use of air power to drop barrel bombs on civilians and make life impossible in rebel-held areas. With occasional retribution against government air assets and targets, it can raise the cost of tactics that are also war crimes. It can also use military assets to directly protect its vetted armed proxies, so they can more effectively fight the Syrian government and the Islamic State, and gain stature within the non-jihadi armed opposition.

After years of eyeing the United States, America’s rivals have assessed that Obama would stay out of Syria. They probably think the same today, given that the president has only a few more months in office. As a result, Syria has become a wild playground for the militaristic excesses of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the pivotal supporters of Assad’s government. These powers have opportunistically taken advantage of a void left by the United States, which has continued to intervene in the Syrian conflict but at a low ebb.

But a reinvigorated American role in the conflict would, paradoxically, make a political solution more likely once it became clear that Assad could never win outright. The greater chance of a political solution would not only save lives but also reestablish American stewardship of a world order that punishes war crimes, values civilians lives, and promotes rights, good governance, and open societies.

Unfortunately, a more robust American intervention would also bring the United States face to face with an expansionist Russia and Iran. Washington would have to use its military force with considerable skill and restraint in order to check these belligerent powers without being drawn into direct conflict. Fortunately, the US military has the technical capacity and experience to tilt the balance in Syria’s war without become a central party in the fight, and the last five years of conflict show that for all its bluster, the pro-Assad alliance has always carefully watched the United States and calibrated its war crimes and expansionist campaigns in line with its perception of what Washington will tolerate.

Left unchecked, Syria’s war will continue for another five to 10 years at least, with a full breakdown of the remaining national order. Syria will become a patchwork of villages ruled by competing warlords, without national institutions to govern and provide services. It will continue to export human suffering, refugees, and virulent ideologies like sectarianism and the Islamic State’s version of takfiri jihad.

The alternative — a US military intervention in Syria — is neither clean nor neat. With its local and regional partners, the United States would save some civilian lives and force some restraint onto the government side, perhaps reducing its worst war crimes. It would raise from zero to maybe 30 percent the chance of a negotiated settlement. It would also raise tensions between the United States and Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.

Perhaps most importantly, however, military intervention would show allies and rivals in the region that the United States still takes seriously its responsibilities as the single most dominant world power. By escalating in Syria, the United States would lay down a marker that Washington sees an interest in the Middle East and in a global order that stops rogue governments like Assad’s. Unless it wants to be seen as a force for entropy, state breakup, and fragmentation, Washington needs to put is muscle behind the goal of national coexistence, starting in Syria, where it should do what it can at this late stage to preserve a unitary state that grants equal rights to citizens of different sects and ethnicities.

President Obama tried to steer a middle course, backing away from direct intervention, despite initially drawing a red line if Assad used chemical weapons. While seemingly every country with a finger in the Middle East has funneled weapons, trainers, or fighters into Syria, the United States has spent billions of dollars on humanitarian aid and has provided just enough military assistance to the armed opposition to prevent it from being wiped out. But it has studiously avoided any action that would topple Assad.

Nearly a year ago, in September, Russia stepped into the void with a major military campaign to help Assad reclaim territory he had lost. Even Russia’s massive aid has failed to restore the regime’s position from a few years earlier, despite indiscriminate bombing of civilians in rebel-held areas and a systematic campaign to destroy hospitals, clinics, and other key infrastructure.

Furthermore, the United Nations has strained under the pressure of the Syria conflict, which officials describe as the greatest challenge in the UN’s history. UN officials have chosen to partner with Assad’s government, allowing it to block access to areas inhabited by rebel supporters. As a result, the supposedly impartial UN has become party to starvation and siege tactics employed by the government to force rebel communities to surrender.

Even with a history of failure and seemingly endless complications of future engagement, America can still positively shape the situation. It’s time for more action — humanitarian, military, and political — in order to reduce the catastrophic human toll, contain the strategic fallout, and reduce the chance of Syria becoming a fully failed state.

If we stay on the same course, Syria is guaranteed to collapse with even more of the toxic consequences we’re already suffering — the Islamic State, refugee flows, violence spreading into neighboring countries that are allies. It might already be too late to prevent a full meltdown, but if the United States doesn’t try to stave off the collapse, a vacuum is guaranteed.

[Policy brief for The Century Foundation]

The United States can do more to achieve a political settlement—invasion and containment aren’t the only options.

• In its sixth year of war, Syria has reached a breaking point. Soon its remaining institutions will collapse and Syria will be a failed state. The United States has pushed hard for a diplomatic solution and intervened militarily on the side of rebel groups, but stopped short of action that could shift the conflict’s momentum. Meanwhile, Russia has intervened decisively on the Syrian government’s side.

• The human toll of the war has been catastrophic. Nearly half a million people have been killed and half the country’s population displaced, including 5 million refugees. War crimes are endemic. Civilians routinely suffer starvation, sieges, torture, extrajudicial detention and indiscriminate bombardment.

• Preserving Syria is a vital national security interest for the United States. If it doesn’t do more now, America and its allies will suffer even more of the consequences of an imploded state in the heart of the Middle East: jihadi attacks from the Islamic State and its ilk, a global refugee crisis, and violent militancy seeping deeper into every country on Syria’s borders.

• A robust U.S. intervention would expand Washington’s existing approach, which integrates humanitarian aid, diplomacy and military force, but needs much more of each to succeed. Washington should use military force to protect vetted opposition groups and curtail war crimes committed by the government in Damascus.

• Now might present a final opportunity. Russia and the United States have a rare overlap of interests. Syria’s war won’t have any neat outcomes; this conflict can only be managed, not won. A robust intervention will not bring an immediate end to the war, but could set the stage for an eventual political settlement. 

• A forceful U.S. escalation now can preserve American interests and credibility and curb the worst excesses of the current violence, giving Syria a fighting chance of emerging from its civil war with intact institutions and a government that can represent every major group.

Read or download the full report.

MOHAMED AZAKIR/REUTERS

Lebanese actress and director Nadine Labaki, a Beirut Madinati candidate, showed her ink-stained finger after casting her ballot at a polling station during Beirut’s municipal elections in Lebanon last May.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas section.]

BEIRUT – THE UTOPIAN GROUP of professors, architects, artists, and white-collar professionals was supposed to be too naïve and elitist to make any headway against the entrenched warlords and clan bosses who have controlled Lebanese politics for as long as most voters here have been alive.

Instead, the upstart campaign called Beirut Madinati — “Beirut Is My City” — nearly scored an upset in May’s city council elections. With barely any money, a few hundred volunteers, and just three months of lead time, Beirut Madinati ran a lively campaign against the corrupt establishment that has literally mired a nation’s lovely, cosmopolitan capital in garbage.

Now, even though the insurgent movement failed to obtain a single seat because of a winner-takes-all municipal election system, Beirut Madinati has set its sights on national politics. Its founders believe that with a passionate, technocratic assault on a status quo that peddles stability at the expense of quality of life, they are belatedly delivering on the promise of the popular revolts that swept the Arab world five years ago.

“Even the word ‘politics’ has negative connotations in Lebanon,” said Jad Chaaban, an economist at the American University of Beirut, and one of the founders of Beirut Madinati. “People are thirsty for a good political dialogue that will change their lives. People are sick of the same old politics, the same old discourse.”

Although it eschews political and ideological labels, the movement is pointed in its attack on the current regime. Its platform enumerated specific proposals to improve public transportation, garbage collection, housing, parks, and more — each plank explicitly countering a government steeped in corruption, controlled by a few ultra-wealthy families, and incapable of delivering even the most basic essentials of daily life. Beirut Madinati’s structure is a radical rebuke to Lebanon’s powers that be as well: Its candidate list was divided evenly by sect and gender, its finances published online, and positions of responsibility are rotated so that no personalities can dominate.

This is the kind of political movement that many activists expected would flourish across the Middle East after the Arab Spring uprisings. But until now, most efforts to create methodical and viable alternatives have been swallowed by violence and repression, usually orchestrated by the very same authoritarian regimes that would be threatened by a credible opposition.

Rubbish trucks drive between a built up pile of waste on a street in Beirut’s northern suburb of Jdeideh in February. AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Savvy civic politics is exactly what the Arab uprisings of 2011 promised. Back then, millions took to the streets all over the region, decrying the rotten governance of dictators and corrupt status quo elites. It was not to be, at least not as easily and quickly as the surge of people power first suggested. The old ruling class fought back and, in most cases, was able to thwart popular demands.

Five years later, however, Beirut Madinati is proving the exception — or perhaps, it’s the long-term fruition of a seed planted years ago. In its electoral campaign, the movement cannily avoided the label “political party” and sought to distance itself from Lebanon’s tainted political class. It even spurned alliances with independent politicians who had broken with established political parties and shared Beirut Madinati’s vision of incremental reform focused on tangible improvements to daily life in the city. The idea, according to Beirut Madinati candidates, was to make clear that this movement represented a clean break from business as usual.

HALF A CENTURY ago, the Arab world witnessed a flowering of political parties and ideologies. Communism and Arab nationalism fueled movements that attracted millions of followers and shaped powerful, modernizing governments. Ba’athist ideology took root in Iraq and Syria. The charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser sold much of the region on a brand of Arab nationalism that was so persuasive that he convinced Syria and Egypt — two large, important Arab countries with long histories and no common border — to briefly merge under a single unity government. In the 1970s, in response to the failures of the increasingly despotic and erratic secular rulers in the region, Islamist ideas gained political currency.

Since then, for the most part, few new ideas or political parties have emerged and gained traction. In part, the period of quiescence reflected a worldwide ideology fatigue toward the end of the Cold War. But in the Arab world, repressive governments have expended a great deal of energy policing the public sphere to keep out politics of any stripe. Nearly every Arab government invoked a variation on the same formula: It’s either our version of autocracy — or religious radicals.

Fed-up citizens challenged that false binary. The uprisings that began with Tunisia’s 2010 revolt put the first crack in the dictatorial establishment’s stale monopoly on politics. Demonstrations swept the region, frightening rulers everywhere: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, even the Palestinian Authority. For a moment, no Arab government seemed immune to people power.

But it turned out that the popular movements, with their lack of structure and their modest demands for rule of law and a more fair distribution of wealth, were little match for unscrupulous regimes, and in some cases, zealots and gunmen. Citizen movements in Syria were largely displaced by armed groups once the peaceful uprising deteriorated into a violent conflict. Yemen and Libya followed similar arcs from civil disobedience to civil war. Elsewhere, the old authorities waited out a period of upheaval and then struck back to regain their authority, as in Egypt, where military rulers lurked in the background until they reestablished power through a coup.

Some countries, such as Lebanon and the Arab monarchies of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, sat out the entire first wave of uprisings. In some cases, like Saudi Arabia, wealthy rulers dispensed generous subsidies and were able to rely on a substantial degree of public legitimacy. Yet, in nearly every case, status quo regimes relied on fear as well, promoting the risk of chaos and violence if existing authorities, no matter how profoundly disliked, were displaced.

In Lebanon, a cabal of hereditary political bosses — many of them former warlords — controls the country, dividing government positions, jobs for their supporters, and profits from graft according to a formula that sets aside a fixed share for each.

Each boss and political party has a power base in one sect: Sunni or Shia Muslims, Maronite Christians, Druze, and so forth. As Lebanon has lurched in recent years from crisis to crisis — it hosts one Syrian refugee for every three Lebanese, has been without a president for two years, and, for a year, didn’t have anywhere to put its garbage — the country’s leaders have engaged in a form of blackmail: Support the existing leaders, or face the prospect of civil war.

It was this threat that Beirut Madinati was most determined to contest. Lebanon’s leaders have spent the years since the civil war ended in 1991 telling voters that their boss-based sectarian balancing act is the only alternative to mass slaughter. Many believe it; memories of the war are still vivid even for people as young as 30.

For good and ill, Lebanon has long served as a model and testing ground for political currents in the Arab world.

Historically — as the supporters of Beirut Madinati are quick to note — Lebanon set toxic trends. Iraq borrowed Lebanon’s dysfunctional model of sectarian power-sharing in 2003, with unhappy results. Some combatants in Syria say their state is so damaged that its only hope for a negotiated settlement is Lebanon’s brand of enshrined paralysis.

But Beirut Madinati is selling a new, most hopeful kind of change. Supporters of the upstart campaign say the results show that Lebanon is finally ready for competitive politics and that at last their country can contribute a constructive example to the region’s political experiments since the Arab Spring uprisings.

“We are not garbage!” said Naheda Khalil, a landscape architect who worked as a volunteer for the campaign. Citizens are smart enough to see through threats from their irresponsible leaders, and she hopes they are now willing to settle in for the years of work it will take to build political alternatives. “We have a long fight ahead. They won’t give up easily.”

THE CAMPAIGN FOR Beirut’s city hall grew out of the summer of 2015’s “You Stink” protests, which flared in response to the Lebanese government’s deadlock over a national waste disposal contract, which, like most public business, is rife with corruption and nepotism. Saad Hariri, a billionaire former prime minister and the dominant Sunni politician, is believed to reap the profits from the country’s garbage collection, the details of which are a closely guarded secret.

Unable to agree on a new landfill when the old one reached capacity, authorities simply stopped collecting the trash. It filled the country’s streets and eventually found its way, by the ton, into rivers, ravines, and poor neighborhoods.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets to decry the government’s failure. But the “You Stink” movement quickly faltered. Some of its supporters wanted only to talk about the trash, avoiding any mention of the political dysfunction that caused it to pile up. And others were unnerved at the prospect that a civil movement could topple the government and lead to chaos — a message hammered home daily by ministers and party leaders on the most widely viewed television networks.

Dozens of veteran activists diligently formed task forces to respond to the garbage crisis, crafting technocratic proposals for recycling, waste sorting, and new ways to devolve garbage handling from the national government to municipalities.

Beirut Madinati candidates and delegates cheered while monitoring ballot counts for the municipality elections after closing the polling stations during Beirut’s municipal elections in May. MOHAMED AZAKIR/REUTERS

When the news cycle moved on from the garbage crisis, the core group of activists kept talking. The country’s warped political system was the real problem, they agreed; if they wanted to improve governance, they’d have a better chance if they obtained actual power rather than relying on protests and white papers. With municipal elections coming up, the activists decided to test-drive their idea. If they did well, they could potentially go national, running for seats in parliament on an anticorruption reform platform.

Lebanon’s bosses were unnerved. Hariri, the Sunni billionaire, controls the Beirut municipality and saw his prestige on the line. Normally bitter rivals, the other sectarian bosses circled the wagons with Hariri, forming a single unified coalition that confused voters by adopting a similar name, “Beirutis.”

Hariri ran his campaign out of an ornate family mansion in the historic city center, which stands as a symbol of Lebanon’s mafia-style corruption. Beirut’s downtown was rebuilt after the war by a Hariri family corporation and remains nearly entirely under the family’s control. In campaign speeches, Hariri suggested that dark forces wanted to destabilize the country.

Although it suffered from accusations of elitism, Beirut Madinati’s campaign depended on unpaid volunteers who congregated in makeshift headquarters at a small rented apartment upstairs from an Armenian restaurant. Hariri is famous for the lavish lunches he serves visitors at his mansion. Beirut Madinati’s members didn’t even have equipment to make their own refreshments and had to dash up the street to buy tea at Lina’s Café.

Its candidates included the locally famous film director Nadine Labaki and a bevy of earnest if little known engineers, professors, architects, and other professionals who seemed genuinely captivated by discussions about subjects like the city’s water infrastructure.

The campaign revived the egalitarian and populist ethos of the region’s uprisings five years ago. Candidates sat in plastic chairs and listened to voter complaints at open forums they organized in the city’s few public spaces.

Symbolically, one such meeting took place on the fringes of the city’s only major public park, a pine forest called Horsh Beirut, which freely admits foreigners but is open to Beirutis only a few days a month.

“We can talk all we like, but nothing will ever change,” observed a teenage pastry chef named Ali, who lives in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city. He wore a pendant with the logo of the Amal Party, a Shia group notorious for corruption even by Lebanon’s low standards.

“I don’t trust them either,” Ali said when asked about the pendant. “We only see them every six years, before elections. They visit our house, promise to pave our street, and never come back.”

BEIRUT MADINATI’S MOST radical innovation has been to face discontent like Ali’s head on, with detailed proposals and an invitation to any interested citizen to join their efforts.

Hariri and his allies pulled out all stops to defeat Beirut Madinati, deploying dozens of paid advocates to every polling station on election day and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and, according to independent monitors, illegal bribes to voters. Hariri even summoned some of the group’s candidates to his mansion and offered them slots in his coalition if they would abandon Beirut Madinati, several of the candidates said. They refused.

Supporters of the fledgling movement say they were just as emboldened by the fear Beirut Madinati inspired in the ruling parties as they were by the 40 percent share of the vote that the movement won in Beirut.

In the long game to shift attitudes and power in Lebanon, with its famously stubborn and unscrupulous ruling class, process and persistence will probably matter as much as inspiration.

Over the summer, nearly a hundred members of Beirut Madinati are holding weekend retreats to decide how to proceed. The group is debating whether to register as a national political party and take on Lebanon’s distorted elections laws or focus primarily on the problems facing Beirut. By September, group members said, they will announce a decision and begin the next phase of their campaign to hold the rulers of Beirut, and all of Lebanon, accountable.

“We grew really fast,” said Mona Fawaz, a professor of urban planning at AUB and a founding member of Beirut Madinati. She’s now part of the team sifting through the proposals for the movement’s future. The election campaign raised public expectations very high, she said, and the group needs to be careful to plot a course that allows it to deliver.

“The elections sent a major message, and it’s a very important one: The status quo will no longer be tolerated, and the political parties have one year to redeem themselves before next year’s [parliamentary] elections,” said Ramez Dagher, who writes the popular and critical political blog Moulahazat, which translates to “Observations.”

According to Dagher, in order to grow, Beirut Madinati will have to overcome formidable obstacles, including widespread loyalty to a pernicious but familiar sectarian political order, and voter fatigue. Elections in Lebanon have been known to be postponed sometimes for years at a stretch, which Dagher said could sap the secular antiestablishment movement’s momentum.

Perhaps the biggest taboo the movement has broken is the fear of politics. Until now, most critics of the power brokers in the entire region have treated “politics” as a dirty word, calling themselves activists, reformers, civil society, even revolutionaries — anything but politicians.

“People hate politics now, they think it’s all about dirty deals,” Fawaz said. “We want to reclaim the political, not only to dream about it but to act on it.”

In a region where incompetent and dictatorial rule is the norm, and unaccountable political bosses have grown accustomed to passing power to their cronies or relatives, any reform at all can seem like an impossible prospect. If Beirut Madinati persists, and builds on its unlikely success, it could prove a rare bright spot in the Middle East during a time of authoritarian resurgence and widespread civil strife.

Interviewer extraordinaire Terry Gross had Anne and me on Fresh Air, where she asked us about covering Syria and our marriage. You can listen at the link or read the transcript here.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. My guests are reporting on the war in Syria in spite of the fact that they can no longer enter the country. Anne Barnard is the Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times. Thanassis Cambanis is a journalist and Middle East expert who writes a column for The Boston Globe and is a fellow at The Century Foundation.

He’s written two books on the region, one on Hezbollah and a recent one about the Egyptian revolution. Barnard and Cambanis fell in love and got married while they were reporting on the war in Iraq. They ran The Boston Globe’s bureau in Baghdad. They’re now living in Beirut with their two children and managing to write about the war in Syria from a distance with the help of a network of contacts they’ve developed over the years.

They went to a studio in Beirut to record this interview, and as you’ll hear, the studio wasn’t soundproof.

Anne Barnard, Thanassis Cambanis, welcome to FRESH AIR. I’d like to talk with you about how difficult it is to cover the war in Syria. When was the last time you were actually able to get in, each of you?

THANASSIS CAMBANIS: The last time I went to Syria was in October of 2015, right after the Russian intervention got underway.

ANNE BARNARD: And me, I was last there about two years ago. That was the last time I was able to enter because since then, the government hasn’t provided visas, to my knowledge, to any reporter who’s going on an American passport.

GROSS: So you’ve both reported from war zones. What makes Syria different? Why is it too dangerous to go to in addition to the fact that you can’t legitimately get in ’cause they’re not giving you visas?

CAMBANIS: Well, it’s only too dangerous to get into on one end of the conflict. That’s the rebel side. In Northern Syria, people don’t want to report because of the things that we’ve seen, the things that set off the U.S. intervention – the beheading of Western reporters and the tendency of groups like the Nusra Front to take any Westerners they get their hands on hostage.

On the government side, it’s not actually all that dangerous. But it’s the government of Bashar al-Assad that’s incredibly restrictive about when it lets reporters in. And that’s why there’s been such a narrow and sporadic view of the conflict from that side.

BARNARD: Another important factor is the intensity of bombardment in the insurgent-held areas. There’s massive bombardment in rebel-held areas mostly by the government and their Russian allies. And in that case, it’s so intense that it’s difficult for news organizations to send their reporters in. And many Syrian citizen journalists have been killed.

There is bombardment in government-held areas as well from rebel mortars, but it’s not nearly – it’s sort of much more sporadic. And they don’t have airplanes.

GROSS: Anne, you’ve been reporting on the war in Syria for The New York Times. So how do you report on the war if you can’t actually go there and see for yourself?

BARNARD: Well, we’ve worked really hard over the last five years to develop an extensive network of contacts. Many of them begin with people that we knew in, so to speak, physical real life and then spread out from there through friends of friends and sources of sources. And eventually, we have a pretty good network that gives us access to information from many different parts of Syria and from many parts of the political spectrum.

It’s also helpful that both myself and the other people on The New York Times team that are covering Syria have spent time in the country before the war and also in the years when we were still able to go there. So we used to have teams going into the North covering a situation in the rebel-held areas.

And I used to go quite regularly on the government side with a visa. So we were able to meet more people and continue being in touch with them as well.

GROSS: So do you stay in touch through, like, cell phone or social media?

BARNARD: Yes, so first of all, this is a war where activists and civilians and other random people have really made a mark by putting information online. It started mostly as something that opponents of the government were doing to try to document their efforts and initially peaceful protests and the often violent response of the government against them.

And by now, there’s a huge amount of information out there produced still largely by that side but increasingly also by pro-government people, loyalist militias, fans of those militias. And you can find a lot of information online that’s being produced in Arabic that – and also citizen journalism materials like videos and audio recordings.

CAMBANIS: Terry, one thing that people forget when they think about Syria as a black box that we can’t get into is that no matter how dangerous it is, Syrians come in and out of Syria. They cross the lines inside Syria, and they cross the international borders and go back and forth. So there’s numbers – dozens, hundreds of people who come out from both sides of the conflict.

And they come to Beirut, they come to Turkey, they meet with friends and family. They meet with journalists. And then they stay in touch when they get inside. And even the worst-hit towns, the most besieged, heavily-bombed places where people are starving to death tend to have internet a couple of hours a day. People can send voice messages by WhatsApp.

They can chat on Facebook. Sometimes they can call on the phone, regular cell phone or satellite phone. And these are often people that reporters outside get to know in person and then maintain contact with over many, many years. And Anne in her reporting has had the opportunity to really learn who’s trustworthy by seeing what they tell her during one battle or one crisis or one event or another and seeing how that checks out over the years.

And so by the time we’re trying to piece together what’s happening today, we have an array of people we can hear from whose credibility has been established over a long period of time.

GROSS: Because there are so many refugees, like, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing, and so many of them coming to Europe and many of them who want to come to the United States, help us understand why it’s become so impossible to live in Syria and why so many people have left at great risk to their lives. Thousands of people have drowned. So tell us what you know about why life in Syria is so dangerous now.

BARNARD: Well, there’s many reasons. I think many people would tell you the number one reason is air strikes and heavy bombardment on their areas. That has been driving people from Aleppo, from Idlib, from all kinds of areas that have been out of government control for years and years.

And I think you – then once the Islamic State arose and they started treating people in their area very badly, most of their atrocities are actually committed against local Sunni populations and against minorities. So Syrians are also fleeing them. And in areas held by other insurgent groups, in addition to the attacks from the government, you’ll also have an increasing amount of warlordism that is driving people to leave because they feel that their world has become full of criminality and violence.

You also have areas where that’s less the case, but overall, life has become really difficult. And in the government-held areas, you have an increasing economic pressure, you have attacks by the Islamic State. You’ll have occasional mortar attacks. But mostly, you’ll have the fear of inscription into the military.

Increasingly, people can just be picked up – men even as old as 50 in some areas are being picked up at checkpoints and are going into the army. So there’s all kinds of reasons to leave. But that said, even though there is 5 million refugees who’ve crossed international borders to leave Syria, there’s even more people who are displaced from – have been driven from their homes inside Syria.

So altogether, half the population of the country is displaced. And more would leave Syria if they could. But most of the borders are now effectively closed.

GROSS: Anne, you’ve been reporting about how hospitals are being bombed and appears to be intentional. So is that Syrian forces doing the bombing, like, Assad’s forces?

BARNARD: Well, there have been cases of hospitals hit on the government side as well. But by far, the majority and the ones that international organizations have said appear to be being hit systematically are those in rebel-held areas that are being hit either by Syrian government warplanes or by the warplanes of their powerful ally Russia.

And those governments insist that they are not hitting hospitals systematically. But when you look at the numbers, it’s hard not to suspect that. And there seems to be attacks on all kinds of civilian infrastructure – schools, hospitals, roads, all kinds of areas – and marketplaces is a big one.

So in other words, there does seem to be a strategy that aims to prevent normal life and life-saving services from taking place in areas outside government control.

GROSS: Do you feel that you’re both witnessing the rules of war being rewritten, or maybe I should say unwritten, that there are no more laws of war in places like Syria, that there’s just a total disregard for hospitals and schools, for children, for humanity?

CAMBANIS: I mean, I think the Syria conflict marks complete rupture in the direction that we’ve seen for decades now, more and more disregard for the Geneva Conventions. And the U.S. has been a party to that as well with moves like Guantanamo Bay. But in Syria, there’s really an innovation, a really distressing innovation.

And it is the direct and primary targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially hospitals but also civil defense – the people who come in and the volunteers who pull people out of the rubble of freshly bombed structures. The Syrian government has made a point since the beginning of the war of making this the first target of their assaults.

And when we talk to people who are fleeing these areas, including, by the way, most of the doctors who lived in places like Aleppo, which is the biggest city in Syria – used to be the biggest city in Syria and today has maybe a few hundred doctors left out of more than 5,000 at the beginning of the war.

What they say is when the war began, Assad’s security forces came in and started doing things like murdering medical students who were delivering bandages and medical supplies to civilians in rebel areas. Now the message of that politically was to punish people who were supporting rebels.

CAMBANIS: But in practice, it’s also a war strategy that makes it very hard to live in any of these rebel towns. If your school is subject to bombing and if you don’t even have a clinic you can go to get basic antibiotic for your sick kid, you’re much more likely to get up and leave and cross the border or go to an internally displaced camp. And that, according to a lot of Syrians in rebel-held areas, seems to be the point of this government strategy. And it really has changed people’s understanding of what is permissible.

One implication of this is that when we in the West are really horrified by what we see ISIS doing, the atrocities that ISIS commits against civilians. And often, when I’m talking to Syrians, they’ll agree. But they’ll say – I hope you understand that from our perspective, what the government of Bashar al-Assad has been doing since the beginning of the war is no less atrocious and criminal and murderous. And from their perspective, there’s no party that’s powerful that respects these very basic norms of human conduct and conduct of war.

GROSS: I think we should take a short break here. My guests are foreign correspondent Anne Barnard and Thanassis Cambanis. She’s The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief. He’s a Middle East expert who’s a columnist for The Boston Globe and a fellow at The Century Foundation. They’ve both been covering the war in Syria from there now-home base in Beirut. They’re also married. They got married while they were covering the war in Iraq. We’re going to take a short break here, then we’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you’re just joining us, I have two guests who are joining us from Beirut. Foreign correspondents Anne Barnard and Thanassis Cambanis. Anne is The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief and former Baghdad bureau chief for The Boston Globe. And Thanassis reported from Iraq for The Globe and now writes a column for The Globe called “The Internationalist.” He is also a fellow for The Century Foundation and author of the recent book “Once Upon A Revolution,” which is about the Egyptian revolution and what happened after.

Thanassis, in a recent article, you described Syria as having become a mosaic of tiny fiefs. The government has ceded control of stretches of land to Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. Lots of territory is controlled by feuding warlords. So it sounds like it hardly even exists anymore as a country, per se.

CAMBANIS: Yeah, it’s terrifying to look at the future and ask – is it possible for Syria to function someday in the future as a normal state, just as a place, the way it did for a century or more? And this is, in fact, the sense of hopelessness that has led a lot of middle-class Syrians to abandon even relatively safe places like Damascus and the Syrian coast because they feel very, very little optimism that tomorrow will get any better.

Now, in practice, what this looks like is, on the government side, when you drive from the border – the Lebanese border to Damascus and then to the coast, you – instead of feeling like you’re in one country controlled by a police state, my impression was that I was crossing through a patchwork quilt of tiny, little authoritarian fiefdoms – some controlled by Hezbollah, some controlled by different intelligence forces of the regime, some of them by Alawite warlords who have been empowered by the regime. And they’ve been given local autonomy in exchange for fighting for the regime.

And what that means in practice is the gangland, mafia-style criminality that’s always characterized Assad Syria has really spiraled out of control. I mean, you know, some of the small things I saw in a coastal resort on the beach area between Latakia and Tartous, a place where a lot of inner-circle regime people have their summer houses – one of the regime cronies had built an enormous, illegal cement gazebo on the beach. And some of the local warlords had gotten so upset and complained to Bashar al-Assad, that he had someone come and blow it up.

And so now, this pristine beach that is, again, frequented even today by members of the regime elite, is littered with the shattered concrete, not of a war bombing, but of an internal power struggle between two different Alawite bosses. There have been shootouts in city centers between rival Alawite intelligence and military chiefs. And there’s a sense of unraveling, even in the regime areas. And that – the further you get from the power center, the more the sense that something is spiraling out of control and might never be able to be put together again.

GROSS: The Obama administration has taken the stand that a military solution is unlikely to work in Syria. But on the other hand, if you look at negotiated settlement, you have so many different warring parties here. I mean, you’ve got the Syrian government. You’ve got all of the different local warlords. You’ve got ISIS. You’ve got Russia. You’ve got the U.S. Saudi Arabia’s involved. Iran’s involved. I mean, it just seems incredibly complicated. Who would even be at the table for a final negotiated settlement? Thanassis, can I ask you what your hopes are that that would actually be a possibility?

CAMBANIS: The grim reality is that wars like this are incredibly messy and murderous. And eventually, they do end. When they end, history tells us, it comes as a result of a combination of military and political work. Everything I understand about the conflict in Syria tells me that it will only end when there is enough of the stalemate that none of the sides believe they can win outright and when they’re drained and exhausted enough and, sadly, when enough people have died that it’s in the combatants’ interest to throw in the towel and accept an imperfect solution rather than keep on fighting to the bitter end.

Now, this is where what America does makes a big difference in the horizon of possibility. If things continue the way they are today, the trajectory of the Syrian war is very clear. It’s going to – essentially, it’s going to fight itself out. It might take five more years. It might take 15. And what we’ll get at the end is something like Iraq today or like Lebanon today – sort of effective partition, a theoretical central government that exists but doesn’t really control most of its territory and mafia-like bosses who control – or sectarian bosses who control the area that they’re based in.

So that’s one solution. And sadly, I think it’s the most likely one. The other solution is one where one of the side manages to either – win the war or achieve a parity and negotiate a settlement in the context of a terrible war. And that’s the dynamic we’re in the middle of right now. Russia has accelerated its intervention. The U.S., despite Obama’s protestations that he’s not going to get involved in Syria, the U.S. is already very deeply involved in Syria militarily as well as politically. So – and it has accelerated that intervention considerably over the last year.

And that is why the last round of negotiations was actually somewhat serious for the first time since the beginning of the war. The two sides – I mean, if you can boil it down to two sides – but – that’s a little simplistic. But the two sides only talk seriously when they feel like they can’t win. And that’s what happened this fall. America and its allies backed a major offensive last spring.

CAMBANIS: The rebels took over Idlib province and made advances around Aleppo. It terrified the government. The government turned to Russia and asked for more help. The government then went on a major offensive supported by Russia and Iran, won back some of the territory it had lost. And lo and behold, in December, for the first time in five years, a negotiation got underway that ultimately failed. But it was actually real talks. And I’m not – don’t get me wrong. I’m not highly optimistic that these kinds of talks will work. But they’ve gone from having zero chance of success to 30 percent chance of success.

And when you’re trying to stop a civil war that’s displaced 13 million people, killed half a million to 1 million and has imploded one of the most important states in the Arab world, causing untold strategic problems for the entire world, including the United States, then raising your chances of a negotiated settlement from zero to 30 is something meaningful, if not something that can give us a whole lot of hope.

GROSS: My guests are Anne Barnard, The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief, and journalist Thanassis Cambanis, the author of a recent book about the Egyptian revolution called “Once Upon A Revolution.” After we take a short break, we’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross back with two journalists who are covering the war in Syria from a distance because they’re unable to get into the country. Anne Barnard is The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief. Thanassis Cambanis is a Middle East expert who writes a column for The Boston Globe and is a fellow at The Century Foundation. He’s also the author of a recent book about the Egyptian revolution.

They fell in love and got married while covering the war in Iraq. They ran The Boston Globe’s bureau in Baghdad. They’re now living with their two children in Beirut. They went to a studio in Beirut to record our interview.

Back when you were both based in Iraq, you used to go to Syria for a kind of, like, respite and for little vacations, right? You’d go to Damascus.

BARNARD: Absolutely. And Damascus, in spite of all of its hardships, remains perhaps my favorite place in the whole region. It’s an amazing, magical city, especially the old city, which, unlike so many places that are quaint and beautiful and thousands of years old, some of their buildings, it’s still lived in. You pass amazing mosques and churches and former bits of Roman temples. And at the same time, you’ll see a window stocked with toothpaste or a man selling little tiny whittled dollhouse benches for kids or pots and pans or you name it. It’s just an amazing place.

CAMBANIS: Terry, one of our last getaway vacations before we had kids was a couple of days where we met up in Damascus. I came from Lebanon, which, at the time, was in the middle of its war with Israel in 2006. Anne flew in from Baghdad via Amman.

And we had this great long weekend where we went to Palmyra. And we tooled around the old city of Damascus and spent late nights in these restaurants and these old stone palaces. And we sort of thought that this would be – always be a place, a little oasis, in a region where places like Lebanon and Iraq seemed like they were locked in perpetual war. And we imagined that Damascus – this, you know, eternal city would always be a place we could go to take a break from everything.

BARNARD: I mean, that said, it was already true and still true that, at the time, it was an authoritarian system. Dissent was suppressed. But it was a place where people could walk safely at night and where definitely foreigners did not feel threatened. And, in general, it had at least the surface veneer of calm. I don’t think that means that all was well. But in some ways, its isolation had protected it from becoming a tourist theater.

GROSS: So you’re both covering the war in Syria from your base in Beirut. What do you think Damascus is like now?

BARNARD: Well, our colleagues have been there quite recently. And on the surface, a lot of it looks the same. But it – people are increasingly stressed and tired from the pressures of war. And at the same time, you’ll still see people going and partying and going shopping. It’s not a deserted city by any means. But certainly, it’s much harder to live in.

CAMBANIS: When I was in Damascus in the fall, I was pretty shocked. I hadn’t been since the beginning of the war. And a few things struck me. One was that it really felt like a city without men. The only men I saw were the ones at checkpoints in uniform.

The other thing that really surprised me was how many people were leaving, even from the comfortable upper middle class – in the great teaching hospitals of Damascus, in the well-paid workplaces like the telecoms companies or the U.N. agencies. Something like half of the people in their 20s were getting themselves passports and getting to Turkey and smuggling themselves into Europe.

And when I asked – they told me they see no future for themselves in Syria. And, you know, they said they could always come back (laughter) if things don’t work out. But it just seems like a bad bet to try and build a future, get married, have kids in Syria. And that was a real shock because, you know, Damascus is this huge, vibrant city. And it really felt like a place that is slowly bleeding to death.

GROSS: You both met when you were working for The Boston Globe. And then you fell in love when you were each stationed in Baghdad during the Iraq War. You were covering the war. So when you became a couple, did you feel like you needed to tell your editor right away? That’s – you know, in an office, if you’re having a relationship with someone, it’s always awkward. Like, do you tell your office mates? Do you tell your boss? Will you – one of you be fired if that’s going on? So when you’re in a combat zone and you’re covering war, like, what did you feel you should tell your editor? And what did you feel – and when did you feel the time was right to do it, if you don’t mind my asking?

BARNARD: Well, now is where we play the role of the married couple who either interrupts each other’s story or tells two totally different versions or something. But who should go first, Thanassis?

CAMBANIS: Well, I mean – it’s an easy account if you tell the truth, which is that I asked you to do the dirty work.

BARNARD: That’s true. We were actually – we had been together just very – for a short while while covering Baghdad. But we were still based in Boston, and we came back. And as we were getting more serious, we thought – well, maybe we should find a way to be foreign correspondents and go overseas together. But The Boston Globe had a very small foreign desk – doesn’t have any foreign desk anymore, given what’s going on in the media world. But at the time, it had a very small foreign desk and there weren’t likely to be two posts. But that said, we decided we would propose opening a permanent Baghdad bureau together as co-bureau chiefs.

And I was the one who had to go into the office of Marty Baron. Previously, this wouldn’t have meant anything to the listening public. But people now may know Marty Baron’s famously dour, deadpan manner from the movie “Spotlight.” He’s the editor of The Boston Globe who oversaw the famous investigation into pedophilia in the Catholic Church. And he was played very realistically by Liev Schreiber. So I had to go in and say to this very button-down guy who never reveals anything about his personal life in the office that, by the way, Thanassis and I were now a couple. And we would be interested in going to Baghdad together where they could save money on accommodations since we could live together.

GROSS: (Laughter) An upside for The Globe, yeah.

BARNARD: Marty’s (ph) response was to tell us about all the couples he knew who had shared bureaus together as journalists and had ended up getting divorced.

GROSS: Oh, really? Did that…

BARNARD: Yes, he asked us if we could still do the job if we broke up.

GROSS: Well, that’s an interesting question. How did you answer that?

BARNARD: We said, OK.

CAMBANIS: How can you know (laughter)?

BARNARD: We’ll do our best.

CAMBANIS: We said we thought we could. And I actually found this method worked really well for me. So having asked Anne to fall on her sword and tell all our bosses that we were dating, about a year later, I think, when the U.S. invaded Falluja, I said that she was also welcome to go cover the frontline of that invasion for, you know, representing our family and that I would take the next one.

And as it happened, there wasn’t a next one. So she got to do the hardest-core combat reporting of the two of us.

GROSS: And how did you feel going into the battle in Falluja? And you wrote about this a little bit. You were in an armored vehicle imbedded with the U.S. military heading into the Battle of Falluja, which was, like, one of the worst battles for the U.S. in the war in Iraq. And I think at the time, you had just gotten engaged. You and Thanassis had just gotten engaged.

Your mother was ordering the wedding dress you’d picked out, and you were going into battle.

BARNARD: Yeah, well, this is one of those things when I became a journalist, I didn’t necessarily picture that I would take such risks. And gradually, you find out that you can do things even when you’re scared. And you can do them well. And maybe it’s logical and healthy to recognize the danger around you and to function anyway. You feel – you become dedicated to the story.

And you feel that it’s worth it. And you’re bearing witness. And especially in such a case where the United States was so deeply implicated and where its policies were so questionable and needed a lot of scrutiny, we felt it was our job to cover it. At the same time, once you’re locked in in a vehicle and you have no control, it’s quite terrifying.

And I did picture, you know, what if this is the end of me? Or what if I, you know, end up severely injured? Or – I don’t know. I just, at the same time, you know, in a way, it’s nothing compared to what the people in the places that we cover who are part of the societies at war are going through. So we as journalists are – as foreign journalists – are able to leave.

So it’s never as intense as it could be. And I just – I felt that, you know, when I look back on it, I say, well, of course it was worth it. And I’ve also had many friends die in combat or in other conflict situations. And you never end up saying, well, that was worth their life. So it’s a bit of a paradox.

GROSS: My guests are Anne Barnard, The New York Times Beirut bureau chief, and journalist Thanassis Cambanis, who’s the author of a recent book about the Egyptian revolution. They’re speaking to us from Beirut where they live with their two children. We’ll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. My guests are Anne Barnard, The New York Times Beirut bureau chief and journalist Thanassis Cambanis who writes a column for The Boston Globe and is the author of a recent book about the Egyptian revolution. They fell in love and got married while they were covering the war in Iraq. They ran the Boston Globe’s bureau in Baghdad.

I could see how being a couple reporting in a war zone can increase the drama of the relationship, like the drama of falling in love, but – and how it can diminish some of the stress because you have a partner in the war zone. But it could also add to the stress because you’re always worried about your partner who’s in a war zone.

So can you talk about that a little bit, the ways in which it’s helpful and more stressful to be in a relationship when you’re both covering the same war?

CAMBANIS: I think in general we’ve been lucky. We’ve been lucky to have each other, especially in Iraq where people, certainly the foreigners there did not have normal lives. It was a huge boon to be able to have a home that we shared and a domestic life where we could take a break from the story and cook each other dinner and sit for an hour across the table and have just a regular couple life. I think that kept us sane in an environment that really was stressful.

Now, I mean, I don’t think you can look at it the same way. We don’t live in a war zone. We live in Beirut which is a, you know – for all the tensions that come with life in Beirut, Beirut is not a war zone. Lebanon is not at war. We live near a war, and we cover a war. We write about it.

But I actually think that, you know, one of the things that’s shaped us both individually and as a couple and as a family is spending a lot of our time channeling the stories of people’s loss, whether its loss of their communities or loss of their children or their parents or their loved ones. And it’s 13 years now we’ve been writing a lot about death. And since having children, we’ve written – especially Anne has – about children who die. And that is much harder. I mean, I have interviewed a lot of people – parents of dead children – in my life sadly. And before I had kids, it was a different experience. It was hard and emotional, but it was something I could do as part of my job.

Now every time I do that, I start to cry and often I can’t really position myself as a chronic – you know, objective is the wrong word. But I can’t position myself as a sort of person who’s just taking testimony and bearing witness. I view myself as – I mean, I sense that loss, the loss of a parent whose kid is dead. And it’s almost unbearable. As a writer, as a reporter, you know, that world becomes secondary. My first role becomes as a human being sitting with someone who’s suffering.

And that has really changed my relationship to the people I interview and the stories I tell because ultimately this is – this era in this region is a story of major epochal loss. And it’s catastrophic in scale and huge, but it’s ultimately human – individual human losses each of one of which is too much to bear. And now in the 13th year of this stage of it, it’s in the millions this loss. And it’s – sometimes it’s really staggering and emotionally impossible to process.

BARNARD: This brings us back in a way to your first question about covering a war not always but often at a remove. A lot of my days when I’m in Beirut are spent partly at least talking to people on the phone or on Skype and also watching videos.

And I can’t tell you too many times these videos involve children who are blown into pieces or parents holding the bodies of their dead children or children being pulled out of the rubble sometimes dead sometimes alive. And their little bodies – their arms and legs and, you know, their toys are often the same size as those of my own children.

And these are things I never thought I’d see ever and now I see them routinely. And when I see those pictures, I think about the way my children’s bodies feel in my arms. And when I – the way our life works sometimes as foreign correspondents in another time zone from our editors, you might be working before and after the moment when you go and cuddle your child to sleep. And sometimes I am literally watching something like that, and then I’m going and snuggling up to one of my kids in bed. And then coming back to work.

And it’s not just the surrealness of that, it’s also, you know, how would I explain this to my child as they’re starting to ask about the things that are going on around? You know, how is my child safe in bed here where literally less than two hours drive from here a parent could be worried that an airstrike or a sniper or a car bomb could end their life or their child’s life at any moment?

GROSS: You’re speaking to us from Beirut where you’re living now. And what kind of aftereffects of the war in Syria are you seeing in Beirut? Are there a lot of refugees there? What do you directly feel concerning the war living in Beirut?

CAMBANIS: In the first war, that you feel the aftereffects of here in Beirut, is the Lebanese civil war which ended in 1991, but in some ways never ended. So this is a little country that 25 years after the end of its civil war still doesn’t have 24-hour electricity, still doesn’t have any sort of halfway representative election system, doesn’t have any kind of basic services like, you know, to get your passport or to get your water hook up or to just get the basic, basic decencies of life – health care, education – still don’t exist.

So this place for an average Lebanese, Lebanon is a catastrophe, and there’s no excuse for it 25 years after the war. So that is the first layer of infuriating and humiliating daily reality in Lebanon. Now add onto that since the war in Syria started, something like 1 in 3 human beings inside Lebanon’s borders is a Syrian refugee.

So imagine this wrecked infrastructure that couldn’t even support the people who lived here before, and now you’ve got half a million kids – extra kids needing to go to school, people needing to get food, people needing to flush their sewage.

The country is crowded to a breaking point. Even in our neighborhood, we walk by dozens of street kids from Syria who are begging around the hospitals and universities around our home. And the further you get closer to the border, the more you can – you feel like you’re in a post-apocalyptic world of displaced people who are living suspended lives.

GROSS: I wish we had more time to talk, but our time is up. I thank you both so much for talking with us, and I wish you well. I wish your family well. Thank you for doing this.

CAMBANIS: Thanks, Terry.

BARNARD: Thank you so much.

GROSS: Anne Barnard is The New York Times Beirut bureau chief. Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at the Century Foundation. They spoke to us from Beirut where they live with their two children.

A Beirut polling station on Sunday, May 8. Photo: Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

[Published in The New York Times.]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A group of Lebanese professors, architects and filmmakers have fashioned an unlikely alternative to the bickering feudal political bosses who for decades have kept their country mired in stalemate. Their bid for power seemed quixotic at first.

But it touched a nerve in Beirut’s municipal elections this week, gaining unexpected traction with voters and fueling the upstarts’ conviction that it is possible to buck the Arab world’s trend toward authoritarianism.

“You can’t just demonstrate and get tear-gassed,” said Jad Chaaban, an economics professor at the American University of Beirut who helped hatch the technocratic political movement, called Beirut, My City. “We need people like us in power.”

The party’s members took on Lebanon’s political bosses in an election with high symbolic value but with little actual power at stake. The city government has a modest budget and limited influence over planning in the city, the country’s capital, but most authority rests with the national government, still securely under the control of the feudal establishment.

Beirut residents voted on Sunday, but officials did not release results until Tuesday. Beirut, My City won about 40 percent of the vote, just a few points behind the establishment slate. Because there is no proportional representation, the winner takes all 24 seats on the council.

Beirut, My City successfully framed its shoestring campaign as part of a broader struggle to rid Lebanon of its corrupt leaders and show the Arab world how to change an established order without toppling into violence and chaos.

Lebanon’s warlords ended a 15-year civil war in 1990 with a sectarian power-sharing agreement. Any faction can veto government decisions, and no single group can dominate the state.

Despite their differences, groups as diverse as the Shiite group Hezbollah, the Sunni Future Movement and Christian warlords once allied with Israel support a system that allows them to divide the spoils of patronage without any oversight. Gerrymandering and rigid election laws make it almost impossible for independent political parties to challenge the sectarian factions at the national level. But municipal elections are, at least in theory, supposed to be nonsectarian, giving an opening to Beirut, My City.

Establishment leaders followed an old formula to fend off the challenge, contending that without them and their power-sharing deals, everything could fall apart, plunging Lebanon back into civil war.

This year’s municipal campaign starkly challenged that orthodoxy. Beirut, My City published a detailed platform focused on quality-of-life issues like traffic, garbage pickup and access to parks. The group refused help from any veteran politicians, and ran a slate of candidates evenly divided between men and women, Muslims and Christians.

Saad Hariri, a former prime minister and a dominant Sunni politician, led an establishment campaign that warned ominously that unknown forces wanted to “harm Beirut and break the parity” among the city’s sects. In a sign that the dominant leaders took the threat seriously, traditional rivals set aside their differences to run in a coalition against the upstarts called the Beirutis.

Many Lebanese, even those angry about endemic corruption, fear that change could be destabilizing, and feel compelled to vote for their sect’s traditional leaders.

“We don’t trust anyone, but we’ll vote for Hariri in order to show that we exist,” said Ahmed Shara’i, a store owner in the Sunni stronghold of Tarik Jadida, who said he moonlighted as a local militia chief.

His poor and marginalized neighborhood has suffered decades of institutional neglect, Mr. Shara’i said. “With the leaders we know, we’re still losing,” he said. “Imagine how much more we lose if they’re gone.”

His rationale neatly summed up how a system survives even though few profess to like it.

Since 2011, Lebanon has emerged relatively unscathed from the types of crises that have led to war or dictatorship in nearby countries. The country’s bosses managed to keep their followers quiet during a series of bombings and assassinations, sectarian clashes and the arrival of more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in a country with a population of about four million.

But it is also clear that Lebanon’s recipe is not working. The country has been without a president for two years, and Parliament has unconstitutionally extended its term; the local elections this year are the only polls of any sort since 2010.

Public anger reached a boiling point last summer, when the government failed to renew the nation’s waste collection contract amid allegations that Mr. Hariri was benefiting from a secret deal.

As the garbage piled up, a movement called “You Stink” organized the biggest protests in Lebanon in a decade. Technocrats including Mr. Chaaban, the economics professor, grew frustrated when their detailed proposals to address the garbage crisis were ignored, and decided to go one step further and form a political party.

Nine months later, rotting piles of uncollected waste spew clouds of gas that smells like vomit over the city’s fanciest neighborhoods, while the politicians responsible for the debacle remain in office. But supporters of Beirut, My City believe they have begun something new and lasting.

“They’re afraid of us!” Elie Haddad, an engineer who helped the campaign, said with a laugh. Outside a polling place in West Beirut, he and other volunteers in white T-shirts distributed lists of the candidates for Beirut, My City. They were outnumbered almost 10 to 1 by volunteers for the well-funded Beirutis coalition, in red shirts and baseball caps, who displayed noticeably less zeal.

“There’s no such thing as a volunteer — we’re all paid to be here,” said one of them, Abdelrahman Harb, 34, who was sitting in the shade of a rubber tree with his wife and some friends rather than canvassing voters for the establishment list.

“They can pay for us, but they can’t make us vote for them,” Mr. Harb said, slyly pulling a copy of the Beirut, My City list from his pocket. “We’re ready for a change.”

The civil campaign’s goals are notably modest, and are very much a product of Lebanon’s unusual political environment. The establishment that has run Beirut for the last 10 years faces newly energized scrutiny. “We’ve opened a Pandora’s box,” said Ibrahim Mneimneh, an engineer and the head candidate for Beirut, My City. “We gave people a space to talk. People want to give a slap in the face to their sectarian leaders without taking a huge risk for the country.”

The campaign featured a rarely seen shift from protest to hardball politics. The new party fleshed out detailed policies, and then tried, albeit it with limited success, to build an electoral machine that reached the street and neighborhood level.

Candidates directly attacked corrupt deals, many linked to Mr. Hariri, that have in recent years cut off public access to waterfront land and degraded the quality of water, power and other services in the capital. The civil campaign held forums in Beirut’s few public spaces to call attention to their neglect and to a lack of green space.

Parliamentary elections are expected within the next year, and many supporters of Beirut, My City want to expand the party nationwide.

“They are well organized, and they have content,” said Ziad Baroud, an influential critic of government policy who served as Lebanon’s interior minister from 2008 to 2011. The group delivered a clear message to the establishment, he said: “You failed; you didn’t do much. We have policies, we have a program.”

“They are into politics,” he said of Beirut, My City. “That’s why they made it.”

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

ONE OF THE Islamic State’s first gestures after conquering a vast portion of the Syrian and Iraqi deserts was to bulldoze the sand berm delineating the official border between the two states. In one of its first propaganda videos from the summer of 2014, “The end of Sykes-Picot,” a bearded fighter walks solemnly through an abandoned checkpoint in the former no-man’s land. “Inshallah this is not the first border we shall break,” the fighter declares in English.

Many Westerners taking their first notice of the toxic Al Qaeda offshoot were mystified: Wait, the end of what?

But the historical reference was not obscure in the Middle East, which for exactly a century has suffered the consequences of borders drawn by two diplomats who had orders from the top but weren’t considered the best informed Middle East experts in their respective governments — Sir Mark Sykes, an Englishman, and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot.

Since then, the Middle East has suffered a profound cognitive dissonance between the official state, often demarcated by unnaturally straight borders, and the human geography of how people live and who wields power in the lands stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the Sykes-Picot agreement has been blamed for many long-running catastrophes, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the violently thwarted national aspirations of many Kurds, Arabs, and other groups.

Yet for all the rancor, the Sykes-Picot borders are already crumbling. The orderly national borders they drew — mostly to please the interests not of the people who lived on the land but of colonial masters Britain and France — have been superseded, though not necessarily in the manner that anti-colonial critics would like.

SYKES AND PICOT’S era was roiled by the Great War, the deadliest conflict the globe had known until that time, and defined by American President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic notion of self-determination. People across the world were supposedly going to be free to choose their own borders and shape their own nations.

That might have been the case in parts of Europe but not in the Middle East. More interested in destroying what remained of the Ottoman Empire and thwarting each other’s imperial aims, France and Britain agreed in secret on May 17, 1916, to carve up the region heedless of the human and political realities on the ground.

The Sykes-Picot agreement was leaked a few years after it was brokered. It enraged not only the people in the Middle East who had been promised self-determination but even experts in the British foreign office who had warned exactly against this sort of expedient and destabilizing imperialist border-drawing.

“All borders in the world are, in their own way, artificial,” says Joost Hiltermann, who runs the Middle East program for International Crisis Group and has written a book about the Kurds. He believes the instability in the Middle East today reflects pressure from groups like the Kurds and the Islamic State who feel the current state order doesn’t accommodate them. “Over time, sometimes a long time, the internal contradictions will explode the prevailing order,” Hiltermann said. “What the new order, or series of orders, will look like is anyone’s guess.”

Sykes-Picot has had a doubly poisonous legacy. First are the borders themselves, which have continually been contested by groups convinced they didn’t get a fair shake, from the Kurds and Palestinians to Shi’ite and Sunni desert tribes. Second is that they were dictated in secret by outsiders, forever enshrining the suspicion that schemers in Western capitals fiddle with the region’s maps, which of course, they did.

Kurds, who call themselves the world’s largest nation without a state, are planning an independence referendum this year. Some originally hoped to hold a vote on May 17, the Sykes-Picot centennial, to drive home the symbolic point that the old colonial order is dead.

It’s high time to take stock of the de facto new states operating in the Middle East and stop pretending that the Sykes-Picot borders are even in operation.

The Middle East is full of borders that don’t appear on official maps.

AGAINST THE ADVICE of many of their better informed colleagues, Sykes and Picot fashioned a new Middle East, literally drawing new nations out of whole cloth and truncating millennial aspirations for nationhood with a clumsy stroke through a map. Their map created the made-up new Kingdom of Jordan, which ended up displaced by the house of a twice-displaced monarch, the Sherif of Mecca, who had supported the British during the Great War and had originally been promised the throne of Syria. Wags of the day called the British approach to the state-building in the Middle East “everybody move over one.”

Lebanon was carved out of Syria. Mosul and Baghdad were cobbled into Iraq. Palestine was given to the British, who already had promised the territory to the Zionists. The biggest losers were the Kurds, a distinct ethnic and linguistic group who weren’t given a state at all. Today the Kurdish heartland stretches into corners of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

British historian James Barr wrote a lively chronicle of the diplomacy of the Sykes-Picot era called “A Line in the Sand,” which is still wildly popular in Beirut bookshops five years after its publication. Barr unearthed secret British foreign office memos that correctly anticipated most of the terrible spillover from the Sykes-Picot agreement, including prescient predictions of the violence and instability that would follow the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

It is because of this history that even today random maps scribbled on napkins or published on blogs drive Middle East conspiracy theorists into a tizzy. After the United States occupied Iraq, many experts in the region were convinced that there was an official plan to divide Iraq into separate Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish states. Comments in support of partition by long-retired US diplomat Peter Galbraith were cited as proof that a conspiracy was afoot. Similarly, after the Egyptian popular uprising in 2011, supporters of the deposed dictator believed they were actually the victim of an American-Israeli plot to cut up Egypt’s territory into smaller, more easily cowed mini-states.

It’s common to hear cosmopolitan analysts in the Middle East speak matter-of-factly about unknown, but in the common view, utterly plausible, secret plots to divide the region in the service of someone’s agenda: Iran, the United States, the Zionists, or some other culprit.

“The Sykes-Picot agreement was only revealed in 1917 after the Communists took power in Russia,” wrote Jamal Sanad Al Suwaidi, head of a think tank, the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research. “So the fact that there are no current plans that have been publicly announced by certain powers to divide the region does not mean that such plans do not exist — perhaps the details will become evident at a later time.”

It’s a version of that old saw: “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” There’s no arguing with the dirty facts of the secret map a century ago. It doesn’t help that Western powers have never stopped meddling even after the colonial era. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq are fresh in the region’s mind, as is the ongoing war in Syria with all its foreign sponsors and military advisers.

As a result, any chitchat about drawing new borders can instantly become a sensation. A map published by the Armed Forces Journal in the United States imagined what new borders would look like if they were redrawn by ethnic and sectarian group; it remains one of the publication’s top viewed articles even a decade later.

FOR ALL THE unwarranted conspiracy-mongering, however, a new Middle East is, in fact, taking shape — and it’s not the product of a map scribbled on a napkin by jolly Western agents (at least, not so far as we know!).

“This region, and Kurdistan in particular, was divided without regard to the will of its indigenous people, which in turn led to a hundred years of troubles, war, denial, and instability,” the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Masoud Barzani, said earlier this spring. Barzani has promised an independence referendum this year during the Sykes-Picot centennial. He presides over the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, which has functioned in most ways as an independent nation since the United States established a protectorate there in 1991 to shield Kurds from retribution by Saddam Hussein. Kurdistan has its own military and gas fields, but it still depends on the central government in Baghdad for revenue and trade.

Travelers who fly into Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, don’t need visas from the central government in Baghdad. Kids growing up there are often educated in Kurdish and might learn English as a second language before studying any Arabic. While Kurdish officials are still organizing their referendum, a few weeks before the Sykes-Picot anniversary they announced the next best sign of sovereignty in the digital age: an Internet domain, “.krd,” which went online the first week of April.

“The same way that Scotland, Catalonia, and Quebec, and other places have the right to express their opinions about their destiny, Kurdistan, too, has the right, and it’s non-negotiable,” Barzani said.

His statelet is one of many Middle Eastern de facto nations you can find in the world but not yet on an official map or the list of member states at the United Nations.

Palestine was accorded “nonmember observer state” status at the United Nations in 2012, and its flag now flies over the UN headquarters in New York. On the ground, however, geography is even more complicated. Parts of the West Bank are supposedly under control of the Palestinian authority, but the land crossings are all controlled by Israel. Gaza has functioned as an effective state since 2005, when Israel withdrew its settlements. Access to the Gaza Strip is controlled entirely by outsiders — by Israel in the north and Egypt to the south — but inside, Hamas holds sway over a de facto city-state.

Rojava, a Kurdish-controlled statelet in northern Syria, declared official autonomy last month. Because of its precarious location on a strip of land bordering Turkey, which resolutely opposes its existence, Rojava might seem unsustainable. But the Kurdish party that controls it has managed to woo support from both the United States and Russia, for complicated reasons having to do with the war in Syria.

The Sinai peninsula, popular with sunbathing and scuba-diving tourists, was briefly occupied by Israel after its 1967 war with Egypt. It returned to Egyptian sovereignty in 1982 but arguably never to its full control. Today, the Sinai is an unruly place, with powerful tribal leaders and vibrant Al Qaeda and Islamic State franchises.

Hezbollah, the Party of God, is the single most powerful movement in Lebanon. It has its independent military, ministers, and members of Parliament in the Lebanese government, and wide swaths of territory that everyone in Lebanon recognizes are under Hezbollah control. Hezbollah polices sensitive areas, like borders and military training areas, sometimes in tandem with national authorities, sometimes on its own. The movement sees no interest in making the arrangement more formal; power on the ground serves it better than any official designation.

One shorthand for figuring out the real borders is to ask who could protect you effectively if you were traveling in a certain area. If the answer is “no one,” you could be talking about an area of failed governance like Sinai, or a contested border zone like the front lines between the Islamic State, the Free Syrian Army, and the Syrian government.

If, on the other hand, the answer is some entity that’s not the official government, then you’re probably looking at one of the post-modern, post-Sykes-Picot regions that has emerged heedless of the rule-making of cartographers and international bureaucrats — like Hezbollah, the Islamic State, or Hamas in Gaza.

In fact, one of the most interesting developments a hundred years after Sykes-Picot is that many of the most dynamic, independent groups in the Middle East are accommodating their thirst for autonomy without any redrawing of official borders. The Kurds in Rojava are careful to describe their regional government as part of a federated Syria, and even the vociferous Barzani, in Iraqi Kurdistan, has made clear that even after a referendum he wouldn’t formally declare independence unless neighboring countries supported the move, which they are unlikely to do.

Hiltermann, who has followed the twists and turns in the Middle East for more than three decades, says it’s unwise to make predictions: “All we know is that what used to be will not return in exactly the same form. It might even look radically different: a brave new world.”

The maneuvering of groups who don’t fit neatly into the existing nation-states suggests that the map of the Middle East is already been redrawn. This is how sovereignty changes today: through human geography — or bulldozers — which changes not maps, but facts on the ground.

Kobani, Syria. Wednesday, October 28, 2015. Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

[Published in The New York Times Sunday Review.]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — NOOR, who is a commander in a pro-government militia near Damascus, thinks that President Bashar al-Assad will prevail in Syria’s civil war. But even so, he thinks it will take his country a generation to recover. “After we finish this war, we’ll spend another 10 years cleaning up the thugs and warlords on our own side,” he told me when I met him in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, in an apartment overlooking a highway where rebels and government forces clash nightly.

That was last fall, shortly after Russia began bombing in support of the government. This infusion of firepower changed the course of the conflict. After years of stalemate, Syria’s civil war became unstuck. But that hasn’t made it ready for settlement.

Negotiations over Syria’s future restarted in Geneva last week amid cautious optimism that the regime and the opposition may finally be ready to discuss a deal. Russian and American diplomats are talking about shared goals, and both countries finally seem willing to strong-arm their clients to the table. Opposition groups and their sponsors say they have achieved levels of unity that will enable them to force concessions from the government, and for the first time they have admitted in public that they’re willing to work with some regime figures.

But all of this misses the central point: Syria, one of the most important states in the Arab world, has cracked up, and no peace settlement can put it back together.

Despite talk of a “regime” and “opposition,” Syria today is a mosaic of tiny fiefs. The government has ceded control of stretches of land to Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. Its opponents range from the apocalyptic Islamic State to a coterie of tiny insurgent groups led by local warlords reliant on foreign donors. On all sides of the conflict, warlords mark territory with armed checkpoints. These low-level bosses have tasted power; it’s hard to imagine they will readily submit to any national government.

The collapse of Syria poses a huge threat to Middle Eastern stability. For good and for ill, Syria has been a major player in the Arab world since World War II. It often acted as spoiler, string-puller or savior in the conflicts that ravaged its neighbors. It was a major player among the dizzying cast of foreign powers that intervened in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, and brought that conflict to an end with an outright occupation blessed by the United States.

Without Damascus, a rogue’s gallery of militant movements might never have survived. Hezbollah grew into a powerful regional actor with sustained aid from Syria. Hamas’s leaders weathered lean years in exile in Damascus. Many groups labeled terrorists by Western governments found refuge in Syria. The Assad government’s patronage of Iraqi rebels helped fuel the uprising against the American occupation, and provided crucial early support to radicals who today lead the Islamic State.

And yet, for all these destabilizing moves, Syria was a coherent focal point in a region short on leaders who could deal and deliver. On occasion, even the United States and Israel enjoyed close collaboration with Damascus.

Now, Syria seems destined to influence the region not as a puppet-master but as a black hole. Syria’s war already has spawned chaos, from the millions of refugees seeking safety beyond the country’s borders to the rise of the Islamic State and the tremendous traffic in weapons and cash to militants.

The next chapter could be even worse. Even if some fraction of the opposition can reach an accord with the government, the area they could try to rule would amount to a rump state. The nation’s industrial heartland and most populous city, Aleppo, has been almost completely destroyed. Before the war, Syria’s manufacturing economy, education and health systems all functioned well by regional standards; they are unlikely to recover. The postwar landscape will probably play host to extremists, entrepreneurs of violence and widespread graft.

So why does anyone have hope for the talks in Geneva?

One reason is superpower politics. Russia and the United States are looking for ways to calm tensions, and diplomats from both countries believe an accord could lead to progress on issues they consider more important, like Ukraine. Another critical factor is exhaustion: Iran and Hezbollah backed the regime for years but, without Russia’s assistance, were unable to help it hold ground, much less win. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United States, the main sponsors of the opposition, have pulled back support whenever their proxies have surged, perhaps unsure that they’ll behave responsibly if they win power.

Syria’s civilians are desperate. The ranks of fighters are dwindling, especially on the government side. None of the parties have given up hope of outright victory, but an increasing number of rebels and midlevel government supporters acknowledge that they will either have to settle for a divided country or join forces with their sworn enemies. Some of the rebel commanders I interviewed in March said they believed the war had entered an endgame, but that it would take at least a few more years of fighting before serious negotiating would begin. Until now, none of the players have taken peace talks seriously.

Russia and America’s renewed engagement has drawn the notice of negotiators, but that means only that they believe they might be embarking on a real process — not that they expect a result soon. That rivals like Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia and the United States, will see eye to eye on a brokered deal to end the war is a long shot. But the idea that they would work together to prevent Syria’s continued decay into a zone of violence is an even longer one.

For now, Mr. Assad’s negotiators still consider the rebels “terrorists,” while the opposition insists that Mr. Assad, “the disease that struck Syria,” must step aside immediately. The state over whose fate they’re haggling, however, appears beyond salvaging.

[Originally published in Foreign Policy.]

ISKENDERUN, Turkey — The militia commander, a barrel-bodied man who hulks over his soldiers and playfully hurls epithets, was beaming. It was as if getting run out of his home base by al Qaeda was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Col. Ahmed Saoud, head of the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) Division 13, knelt in the antechamber of an underground infirmary in the Turkish port city of Iskenderun. But his mind was very much still back home as he calmly dictated orders to a deputy in Syria.

“My sheikh, you will make sure that tomorrow’s demonstration was bigger than today’s. Each day we will make them bigger,” Saoud instructed Sheikh Khaled, who had just been released after three days of detention by the Nusra Front, Syria’s powerful al Qaeda affiliate.

“God willing we’ll be back in a week and those animals, those donkeys from al Qaeda, will never return,” he declared.

For the past two weeks, the small rebel-controlled town in Idlib province has become the central battleground in a pitched power struggle between al Qaeda and the Free Syrian Army, a confederation of nationalist militias that draws support from Western governments. It all began when Nusra Front fighters shut down a nationalist protest on March 11 – an act that escalated into full-blown clashes with Division 13, which al Qaeda eventually forced out of the town.

While the military confrontation is over for now, Saoud’s supporters in Maarat al-Nu’man are harnessing their public support in defiance of the dominant Nusra Front. FSA supporters have organized escalating protests of the town’s men and women against al Qaeda, sparking such anger at the jihadist group’s abuses that Nusra was forced to withdraw, at least temporarily. A religious court is deciding when and if either side can return. The fight is less about territory and military strength, where the Nusra Front still has a clear upper hand, than it is about legitimacy, popularity, and propaganda.

The FSA is gambling that it can leverage the popular backlash against the Nusra Front that followed the clash in Maarat al-Nu’man to argue that a popular nationalist revolution survives. For supporters of Syria’s original non-violent nationalist uprising, the entire project of fixing Syria is at stake. If the ragged coalition of activists and nationalist rebels who cooperate under the brand of the Free Syrian Army collapses, they say, Syria will be left with a bitter choice between two murderous and sectarian alternatives: Bashar al-Assad’s regime or Islamic fundamentalists.

Jihadists may have fared better on the battlefield because of their bigger budgets and unscrupulous tactics, FSA commanders claim, but they have failed to win the hearts and minds of liberated Syria’s civilians.

“How can they build their emirate if the people don’t want them?” Saoud asked.“When they see people waving our flag, it makes them crazy. Now Nusra is revealing itself, and its popularity is collapsing.”

In interviews at rebel safe houses and command posts in southern Turkey, FSA commanders and activists from across northern Syria said they believe that the current lull in fighting might represent the nationalist opposition’s last solid chance to take back momentum from the jihadists, who for several years have been the dominant force in the armed struggle against the Syrian government. Jihadist groups are better financed, better armed, and have been consolidating their command structures for years, while the fragmented patchwork of FSA factions has lost ground.

Russia has scaled back its military operations after a six-month campaign, and most of the non-jihadist rebel groups have stuck to a cease-fire with the government, allowing both sides to regroup while half-hearted negotiations take place in Geneva. The Nusra Front is not party to the cease-fire.

The partial cease-fire has also allowed for the resurgence of non-violent protest in rebel-held areas in northern Syria. Free from the constant threat of barrel bombs, artillery shells, and airstrikes, Syrians returned to the street to chant against Assad. In several towns they also hoisted the banner of the nationalist revolution, a tricolor Syrian flag with three stars. The Nusra Front had banned the revolutionary flag in areas under its control, and its cadres in Maraat al-Nu’man appeared incensed on March 11 when a crowd of thousands, emboldened by the cease-fire, renewed anti-government protests in the town center with nationalist poetry, chants for unity, and the nationalist revolutionary standard.

Al Qaeda fighters on motorcycles drove into the center of the demonstration and seized the microphone from a notable local poet. The demonstrators fought back and recaptured the microphone. On March 12, the Nusra Front set up checkpoints around Maraat al-Nu’man and arrested members of Division 13, the most popular FSA group in the town. Nusra surrounded Division 13 bases and demanded they surrender their weapons cache, which included anti-tank weapons supplied as part of the CIA’s covert train-and-equip mission.

So far, nothing about the confrontation was unusual. Hard-core Islamists in the Nusra Front have long outgunned the more secular, nationalist, Western-supported rebels. According to FSA officers, Nusra routinely harvests up to half the weapons supplied by the Friends of Syria, a collection of countries opposed to Assad, and has regularly smashed FSA factions that were corrupt and inefficient — or that Nusra thought were getting too strong or too popular.

What was different this time was the FSA’s reaction.

“We will fight and die rather than surrender our weapons,” a Division 13 officer told the Nusra Front, according to an activist who was in the barracks during the fight and subsequently fled to Turkey.

Seven fighters from Division 13 died and at least a dozen were wounded, Saoud said, in a fight that lasted all night. At least a dozen more men from Division 13 were taken prisoner. Nusra eventually won — in large measure because none of the other FSA factions in the town were willing to help their allies. Most prominent among the nearby FSA divisions that sat on their hands was another U.S.-backed faction, Fursan al-Haq, led by another Syrian Army defector, Col. Fares Bayyoush.

“I guess they were afraid that if they helped us, they’d be next on Nusra’s list,” Saoud scoffed.

With their weapons gone and survivors detained by Nusra, the rest of Division 13 fled. Another al Qaeda rout of the so-called moderate opposition was apparently complete.

But on March 13, the day after Division 13 was ejected from Maarat al-Nu’man, hundreds of residents took the town’s streets waving the nationalist flag of the original Syrian republic. Women and children drove Nusra out of the posts it had occupied and set them on fire. Rather than shoot civilians, Nusra fighters left town. The next day, an even bigger demonstration swept Maraat al-Nu’man. Men can be seen on videos climbing on walls and tearing down Nusra flags.

In official statements posted on Facebook, as well as in tweets by supporters, the Nusra Front derided the FSA for agreeing to a cease-fire, which it calls a “distraction from the real target” — the fight against the Syrian government. Nusra also tried to blame Division 13 for starting the firefight, but quickly backed away from that claim when evidence to the contrary surfaced. The al Qaeda affiliate quickly agreed to submit to arbitration by an ad hoc sharia court, which has ordered Nusra to release prisoners and return the weapons it took, although weeks later negotiations over the implementation of the ruling are still underway.

Three days after it conquered Maraat al-Nu’man, the Nusra Front had withdrawn its main fighting force from the town under pressure from the sharia court, and began releasing its prisoners from Division 13.

 “Jabhat al-Nusra asks of all its members to hold their breath and maintain the highest degrees of patience,” said a Nusra Front statement, which urged calm and tried to point out that Assad and his allies were the biggest beneficiaries of internecine strife among the rebels.

The struggle over this remote Syrian city will reverberate as far away as Geneva. The non-jihadist factions negotiating in Switzerland hope to form the nucleus of a post-Assad Syria. But in order to credibly represent the opposition, they’ll have to shift the balance of power on the ground, where the far stronger Nusra Front often dictates the course of events in rebel-held areas.

Civilian activists in Idlib province also said that they wanted to reclaim the initiative after being sidelined during years of grinding fighting.

“The larger the number of protesters, the more pressure it puts on the armed factions,” said Ammar Sabbouh, a member of the Maraat al-Nu’man local council, speaking by telephone from the town.

About 150 people have joined the daily protests since the clashes — enough, he said, to rattle Nusra because it shows locals no longer fear them.

“Before the truce, people were afraid of barrel bombs, shells, bombs,” Sabbouh said. “Demonstrations lasted 15 minutes. Since the truce, the peaceful side of the revolution has gained strength.”

But Sabbouh is well aware that driving the Nusra Front from rebel-held areas is not so simple as returning power to the people. He cautioned that all the armed factions, including Nusra, had popular followings. Maraat al-Nu’man is one of a handful of towns famous for its nationalist, sometimes even secular, revolutionaries — but even there, some powerful clans are evenly divided between al Qaeda and the FSA. Meanwhile, many other towns in Idlib province passionately support the Nusra Front or other jihadi factions.

There had been little public objection when the Nusra Front had wiped out other U.S.-backed FSA factions in Idlib, as the groups had engaged in widespread corruption. Division 13, however, has a reputation for being fair and relatively uncorrupt. Its leader, Saoud, is a defector from the Syrian Army who was detained by the Islamic State in 2014. He is popular with his fighters, which he claims number 1,700 men.

But seasoned observers of the Syrian war caution that even if public opinion runs against Nusra — which might not even be the case — the al Qaeda affiliate’s unified command and compelling ideology suggest it will continue to play a dominant role.

“Nusra commands deep support,” said one Western official who meets regularly with emissaries of Syrian rebel factions, and who believes that Islamists from less extreme factions will eventually shift allegiance to Nusra. “They’re not going away anytime soon.”

It’s notable that Ahrar al-Sham, a powerful, nationalist-leaning jihadi group, has taken the FSA’s side in the latest dispute with Nusra. After the Nusra Front clashed with protesters, Ahrar al-Sham leaders tweeted that Syrians had the right to protest and carry flags of their choice. Many view Ahrar al-Sham, which supported the cease-fire, as a kingmaker group, with jihadist credibility but aspirations for national Syrian leadership.

Critics inside northern Syria say that the Nusra Front initially masked its intentions, but that over the last year and a half, residents in Idlib province have realized that al Qaeda is just as repressive as the Islamic State or the Syrian government.

The Jabhat al-Nusra Violations group sprung up in Idlib a year ago to track the Nusra Front’s use of kidnapping, torture, and child soldiers. Its founder, who lives in Turkey because he said he is wanted by Nusra, believes that the jihadists will ultimately alienate even conservative and religious Syrians.

“The more people learn about Nusra, the more they will reject them,” he said.

That’s the FSA’s hope as well.

“I have a strategy to set all Syria on fire against the extremists in Nusra, ISIS, and the regime,” Saoud said. “The demonstrations will teach other leaders how to break the fear of al Qaeda. The checkpoint of fear is being shattered.”

[Originally published at TCF.org.]

REYHANLI, Turkey—Peace in Syria might appear less remote today than it has in recent years, but rebel commanders on the ground—like Colonel Hassan Rajoub, commander of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Division 16—aren’t betting on it.

Col. Rajoub is taking advantage of the current lull to do what he thinks is wisest: stockpile weapons and plead with American and other foreign officers to provide enough support to resist a triple threat facing the FSA.

“We are at a very dangerous crossroads,” Rajoub said in an interview in Rehanli, the Turkish border town that serves as rear area for most of the rebel groups that openly take military support from the “Friends of Syria,” an alliance that includes the United States, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Since a Feb­ruary 27 cessation of hostilities, Russia has suspended its major air offensive, although it could quickly resume if it chose. Talks are underway in Geneva between the Syrian government and an opposition delegation backed a number of rebel groups, but not all. Increasingly, it appears that the United States and Russia share a desire for a political transition that allows a more effective military campaign against ISIS.

According to rebels in the Turkish border zone, weapons have flowed steadily into Syria since the ceasefire began. Even those who hope for a political settlement aren’t betting on one any time soon. Instead they’re stockpiling for the next round, which they expect will be as desperate as the last. Although U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov say they want a transition by the summer, none of the rebel commanders in northern Syria expect a political settlement before 2017.

Up close, however, to commanders like Rajoub interviewed in mid-March during an extension of the ceasefire, the patchwork of diplomatic developments looks less like momentum toward a settlement and more like a timeout.

Aleppo’s state of play underscores just how difficult it would be to work out the details of a lasting settlement. It has proven impossible, even with massive Russian support, for the Syrian government to fully encircle the rebels in Western Aleppo. It isn’t known whether Russia made a tactical decision not to allow a full government takeover of Aleppo, in order to prevent government overreach, or whether it wasn’t able to. Moreover, despite indications that the Syrian civil war might be tilting toward a punishing stalemate, the factions around Aleppo—once the economic and industrial hub of Syria—have plenty of fight still left in them. During the ceasefire, skirmishes have continued over city’s strategic choke points. Militias have shifted their forces in anticipation of major battles they expect as soon as the ceasefire breaks down. And commanders with access to foreign arms, like Rajoub and his FSA colleagues, are shopping across the border in Turkey.

“We ask the Friends of Syria and they give us,” Rajoub said with a smile. “They have just now given us new supplies of everything. But we want some special weapons to give us a little bit of leverage.”

In the past, FSA commanders ritualistically complain that the United States won’t let them have high-tech missiles (man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS) that would enable them to shoot down government bombers and helicopters. But during interviews this with nearly a dozen FSA commanders, none of them lingered on the issue of MANPADS.

Instead, several FSA commanders said the United States had been forthcoming during the ceasefire period, replenishing arms stocks and leaving open the possibility that some anti-aircraft missiles might be released into northern Syria.

“We expect a surprise,” said one satisfied commander.

Another commander, who runs the operations room in Aleppo that coordinates among all the factions, nationalist and Islamist, fighting in the city, said that the February bombardment had driven many insurgent militias into retreat, but they had re-infiltrated most of their important positions since the ceasefire.

“We still are counting on the supporting nations, and we emphasize the United States because it is the ‘indispensable nation,’” said the commander, who goes by the sobriquet Abu Ahmed al Amaliat (which loosely translated means “Ahmed’s father, the operations guy”).

A complex web of combatants with very divergent agendas is competing for Aleppo. The FSA battalions, nationalist in orientation and allied with the Friends of Syria, wants Bashar al Assad gone but strongly favors a unified post-war Syria that preserves the institutions of state.

Hard line jihadists, including the Al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front and ISIS, are not party to the ceasefire and are trying to establish their extreme version of Islamist governance in areas under their control. They can be distinguished from all other rebel groups because of their practice of takfiri jihad, through which they declare other groups apostate and then believe they are justified under religious law in using any tactic against them, no matter how nihilistic.

Kurdish forces have fought effectively against ISIS, and have at times collaborated with the United States, Russia, and the Syrian government, but they hope for an autonomous Kurdish region—a position anathema to all the other factions, which oppose federalism and support a unitary state.

The government wants to reconquer the entire city, and has employed its own forces, and has drawn as well on support from Iran and Russia, along with militia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are also wild cards, such as the powerful Islamist rebel faction Ahrar el Sham, which has nationalist and jihadi constituents but hasn’t yet decided whether to break decisively in favor of an alliance with the FSA or with Nusra.

The government side of Aleppo is still home to an estimated 1.5 million people. The population on the rebel side has dwindled to about 300,000 living under horrific conditions: near constant bombardment, and shortages of everything. Rebel Aleppo can only be reached by one route, the Castello road, which is sandwiched between government forces on one side and jihadists on the other. Rebel-held Aleppo has lived in fear of a total siege for more than a year. Aleppo residents have watched the regime employ a siege-and-surrender tactic against places such as Eastern Ghouta and Madaya, where starvation has become common.

Opposition administrators are stockpiling food, fuel, and medicine, and working feverishly to unify their political and military leadership, but opposition leaders say that the decisive development won’t occur in Geneva but on the battlefields of Syria.

Rajoub said he planned to request fifty tons of explosives that night at meeting with with foreign officers at the Military Operations Center, or MOC. He said that fifteen nations have officers stationed in the MOC; they ask detailed questions about planned operations and demand thorough accounting for the weapons distributed. Rajoub had prepared satellite photographs of his area of operations with overlays showing his positions, enemy positions, and planned operations, which he displayed on his smartphone. His division is fighting around Aleppo, and if the government of Bashar al-Assad managed to reunite the divided city, it would mark a decisive turning point.

“The U.S. military commanders are always with us,” Rajoub said. “We ask. They are very cooperative. They understand our needs.”

He said he still fantasizes about MANPADS, but figured that the FSA could turn back its opponents without them.

In the midst of a continuing meltdown, it striking that plenty of actors, as angry as they are about a perception of American indifference, still welcome American help: activists, humanitarians, and military commanders arrayed against Bashar al Assad’s cynical dictatorship—which we ought to remember, played the most pivotal role in abetting ISIS and continues to devote resources to smashing nationalists while leaving ISIS, for the most part, untouched.

A close look at the Battle for Aleppo suggests it is far from won, and that progress on the ground, or stalemate, is ultimately what will determine the stance of the delegations in Geneva. Russia and the United States are trying to shape a military balance on the ground that will encourage their local allies and proxies to accede to a Moscow-Washington deal. But contested battlegrounds with so many factions are notoriously hard to shape, especially when many of the militias are fighting for their own neighborhoods and villages, or for what they view as a matter of ethnic or sectarian survival.

The budding superpower diplomacy, and even the tentative talks at Geneva, give cause for hope. But the military machinations around Aleppo should temper any unbridled optimism. In a destructive round-robin, where so many sides have lost so much, it’s a surprise how many still think they can win outright.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

BEIRUT

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY of Beirut used to tally its influence by the number of its alumni among the region’s monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. Today, AUB’s boosters have stopped counting heads of state but remain as obsessed as ever with reclaiming the luster of an institution that remains the best-reputed and most independent university in the Arab world.

That’s no mean feat in an era when authoritarian rulers in most Arab states are using the tools of surveillance, torture, and state harassment to curtail freedom of inquiry.

Yet today, in the heart of this region’s historical turbulence, AUB has begun an ambitious effort to make — or remake — itself as a great Arab university. For the first time in its 150-year history, AUB inaugurated a Lebanese president this January, a biologist and medical doctor named Fadlo R. Khuri. He has begun quietly but steadily breaking taboos in a systematic effort to emerge from four decades of hibernation and reconstruction, hoping to restore AUB’s ambitions and connect unapologetically to Lebanon and the Arab world.

“We can’t sit there and say we’re going to wait for the country and the Arab world to get its act together,” Khuri said in an interview in his corner office at College Hall, a stone building with a New England clock tower built in 1871. “We are committed to being excellent without the asterisk — not excellent ‘for Lebanon’ or excellent ‘for the Arab world.’ ”

Khuri’s bold talk about shedding mediocrity, fighting corruption, and competing directly with top universities around the world marks a vivid departure for AUB, which until recently was still a deeply scarred institution. In 1984, gunmen murdered AUB president Malcom Kerr — an American famous for his magisterial study of Arab politics — inside College Hall as he was entering his office. In 1991, the last year of the civil war, a bomb blew the building and iconic clock tower to smithereens. Reconstruction began immediately, and College Hall reopened in 1999.

It took 14 years from Kerr’s assassination for AUB’s president to risk living in Beirut at all — during the interim, the university was run remotely from an office in New York. Today, the campus gleams like any well-funded small liberal arts college with a gifted landscaper.

But in many important ways, AUB has not yet begun to recover from the hiatus violently imposed by the civil war. Tenure was scrapped during the war years and only now, in Khuri’s first year, has AUB decided to reinstate it — a necessary precursor for the university to compete with top-tier research institutions. AUB’s leadership is so afraid of sectarian politics and student activism that it bans the mention of political party names on campus and so heavily regulates debate at a Hyde Park-style speaker’s corner that students stopped showing up even at the peak of the Arab uprisings.

And in a country beset with multiple crises and a crippling political divide, its preeminent university seems often strangely genteel and detached, with only glancing mention at public events of pressing realities like the next-door war in Syria, the 1.5 million refugees in Lebanon, and the often violent struggle between Lebanese sectarian warlords underwritten by expansionist regional powers.

The stakes are high in a region where scholarship is severely restricted; for example, researchers are almost entirely unable to work in Egypt today because of restrictions on academics and the routine detention of scholars. Last month, an Italian graduate student was allegedly murdered by Egyptian security officials. The greater the limits, the more independent scholarship is sorely needed. Institutions of state are in shambles, and political discourse, even five years after a wave of mostly failed popular uprisings, remains in a state of suspended animation.

Lebanon is better off than many of its neighbors in the Arab world, and that’s saying something when the most basic essentials of life and government barely function: For nearly two years, Lebanon has been unable to elect a president, and for nearly one, it hasn’t been able to dispose of the nation’s garbage.

Khuri’s predecessor was more likely to chide faculty members for failing to go through proper channels when reporting litter on campus than for failing to take a public stand on the issues of the day. Reams of leaked documents published in the Lebanese press detail allegations of kickbacks, nepotism, and corruption in the university’s procurement and finances — especially significant considering that AUB is the largest employer in the entire country of Lebanon after the government.

In a refreshing change of tone, Khuri has dispensed with the notion that civility, or even pure scholarship, is more important than relevance. He wants his deans to define the criteria for tenure and promotion to value service to Lebanon.

“Yes, we want to have international impact. But we were put here to have an impact locally and regionally,” Khuri said. “I would rather have my engineer who designs a retractable school for Syrian refugee kids spend a lot of time and get that right than necessarily publish 20 articles and get cited.”

AMHERST COLLEGE GRADUATE Daniel Bliss founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, with high hopes to spread Christianity in the Levant. Instruction was in Arabic, and Bliss planned to quickly turn it over to local leadership. Within decades, however, Bliss had clashed with a faculty member who wanted to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and shut down a student protest movement. English replaced Arabic, and “native instructors” were relegated to secondary status. Eventually, the institution gave up on its failed missionary aims and in 1920 adopted it modern name, the American University of Beirut.

It became a cornerstone of an era of ferment in Arab political life. Liberals, nationalists, revolutionaries, communists, and others were agitating throughout the Levant and the Arab region. In the half century that followed — through World War II and decolonization, the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, and a long cycle of regional wars — it was an epicenter of political activism and research in and about the Arab world.

Until the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, AUB hosted some of the most influential and prolific figures of Arab political and intellectual life. Arab nationalists, Lebanese chauvinists, leftists, Palestinian revolutionaries, and countless others sharpened their arguments in AUB’s lecture halls and the nearby cafés on Bliss Street.

But the civil war undid the university. After Kerr’s murder, the university hunkered down, improvising in order to continue teaching students throughout the ebbs and flows of violence. AUB survived by insulating itself from its surroundings. Once a petri dish of politics, AUB tried to transform into a sterile politics-free zone. When Lebanon’s fratricidal war ended in 1991, AUB rebuilt a gleaming campus that now enrolls 9,000 students and employs 800 full-time faculty members. But the university never fully recovered its luster or reputation. Top scholars were deterred by the absence of tenure, and many would-be faculty avoid Lebanon, considering it unstable or dangerous.

“It’s always been a real crossroads,” said Betty S. Anderson, a historian at Boston University whose 2011 history of AUB remains the definitive study of the school.

But it is still a draw because none of its new competitor universities can match Beirut’s intellectual climate. “You still have academic freedom at AUB,” Anderson said. “There are red lines you can’t cross, but there is still an openness and freedom to maneuver here.”

The failure of lavishly state-funded universities in the Gulf suggests that money can’t buy excellence in research or education, and AUB, diminished as it is, remains the Arab world’s top university.

AUB is making an effort now to reverse decades of decline and reestablish a distinctly, and distinctly Arab, renaissance. Its challenges mirror those that face researchers across the Arab world: political pressure to avoid sensitive topics, corruption, and instability.

Research is dramatically underfunded in the Arab world ($10 per capita is expended for scientific research in the Arab world compared to $33 in Malaysia and $575 in Ireland) and subject to extreme political pressure, according to an ongoing multiyear study of research in the region by an AUB sociologist, Sari Hanafi, and Rigas Arvanitis, a sociologist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France.

This spring at an AUB symposium, they released their new book, “Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise,” about the dismal state of Arab research. Across the region, the sociologists found, Arab researchers suffer a double bind, discredited by religious authorities as well as by authoritarian states.

Lebanon had fared slightly better, Hanafi said, but only because of international funding. “When we talk about producing knowledge, we always should ask what is its purpose,” Hanafi said in an interview. “AUB’s international success comes at the expense of local relevance.”

Much of the research done in the Arab world is set by the agenda of foreign donors, Hanafi said, or is locally driven but of poor quality or published on platforms only read in one country.

“There will be no important research in the Arab countries without freedom to think, speak, and write,” Hanafi and Rigas wrote in their book. “Important research will be done elsewhere, and far from the actual needs and desires of the Arab population.”

KHURI IS CANDID about AUB’s fallen stature, and about the need to think beyond the university’s American identity to its Arab and Lebanese role and responsibilities. But striking a balance will be tricky. Until the civil war era, the US State Department was a major funder and considered AUB an arm of Cold War foreign policy. AUB steadfastly refused to cast itself as a Lebanese institution in part as a hangover from its imperial roots but also out of a desire to protect itself from the sectarianism, political violence, and graft that pervade Lebanon.

Born in Boston, Khuri finished high school in Beirut and then returned to the United States, where he studied at Yale and Columbia universities and finished his medical training at Boston City Hospital and Tufts. Khuri salts his conversation with references to the Red Sox and Celtics; as a teenager in Lebanon he listened to Sox games on Armed Forces radio. He carefully describes himself as card-carrying member of the ACLU with family roots in Beirut and AUB — someone who can navigate Lebanon’s local political culture without getting sucked into sectarian politics.

“I think it’s high time after 150 years that one of us was qualified enough to lead this institution,” Khuri said. “I get AUB, and I get Lebanon, and I get the US.”

Some of AUB’s problems are familiar: Students complain about unsustainably high tuition and the difficulty finding jobs. Faculty complain of low pay and tone-deaf administrators.

Others are of an entirely different nature. Faculty search committees lose compelling applicants who drop out when a bomb goes off in Beirut. Lebanese government officials approve work permits for some of the foreign faculty but illegally delay or withhold permission for faculty from Syria, the Palestinian territory, and some African countries. AUB developed its own electricity and water infrastructure during the war, but, like the rest of Lebanon, it struggles from chronic shortages and resource mismanagement.

Despite the official ban on politics, student clubs with tame names run for council elections as Trojan horses for Lebanon’s sectarian factions. The student newspaper publishes a handy guide explaining that the Cultural Club for the South fronts for the Shia organization Hezbollah, the Youth Club for the Sunni Future Movement, and so on.

Speaker’s Corner, a prominent feature of campus life until 1974, was brought back in 2010 but quickly faded away. Administrators, terrified that open debate about politics could quickly escalate into sectarian strife, carefully vetted topics and heavily coached student speakers. Like many public events on campus about polarizing contemporary topics, the result was so anodyne that students lost interest even at the peak of the Arab revolts that swept the region in 2011. Speaker’s Corner is once again on hiatus, and students said that faculty members tell them it’s better this way, since the young don’t yet have the “maturity” to discuss sensitive political matters.

Suspicion borders on paranoia as members of the AUB community track the relative number of supporters of each of Lebanon’s main political factions. Some whisper darkly that Hezbollah has taken over the faculty; others point to recent hires to argue that the rival Future movement now dominates AUB. Any perception that the university has sunk into the clutches of one faction or another could hurt the institution’s standing and expose it to pressure, threats, or even violence.

In order to eliminate the perception of sectarian bias, university admissions stripped out personal artifacts like essays or portfolios; Khuri wants to reverse that.

As Lebanon’s national crisis has reached a breaking point over the failure to dispose of garbage since July 2015, political activism among AUB faculty has quickened. So far, perhaps as part of his commitment to the Arab nahda, or renaissance, Khuri has let it flourish.

Dozens of enraged professors banded together in the fall to propose technocratic fixes to the Lebanese garbage crisis and have become a major force in an accountability movement that paints all Lebanon’s politicians as party to a colossal failure. The faculty proposals have emerged as the main alternatives to government policy.

An AUB economist named Jad Chaaban has spearheaded a group that’s running a slate of candidates for the Beirut city council elections this spring. If it does well, the group could emerge as a new, antisectarian political party in the next national parliamentary elections — a return with a bang of AUB’s legacy as a political player in its own right.

With several of Lebanon’s entrenched politicians on AUB’s board, Chaaban said that Khuri will need thick skin to resist encroachment on faculty autonomy. “They say they welcome dissenting voices,” Chaaban said. “So far they have left us alone.”

Photo: GEORGE OURFALIAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A member of the Syrian government forces waved as he sat on the road leading to Gaziantep on the outskirts of the village of Kiffin on Thursday.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

ONE OF THE BIGGEST developments in Syria’s five-year civil war came with the surprise announcement from Munich, that the warring factions had agreed a temporary cease-fire and to coordinate the delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged areas. If the agreement can hold, it would be a remarkable turn in a conflict that has seemed to defy all efforts at a peaceful resolution.

The ultimate breakthrough may have come not at the table but on the battlefield. A Russian blitzkrieg on Aleppo broke the stalemate around the most important contested city in Syria, threatening to cut off millions of rebel supporters and eliminate the last major bastion of the opposition not dominated by jihadis.

Diplomats accused Russia of stringing the United States along with negotiations; Syrian opposition fighters spoke of betrayal; and an American intelligence official told Congress that Russia had “changed the calculus completely.”

The move on Aleppo outraged and stunned American policy makers, but it shouldn’t have. Russia was treading on familiar territory when it forced new facts on the ground while simultaneously engaging in peace talks.

On the contrary, any policy maker interested in predicting what might work long-term in Syria can turn to the rich body of scholarship on civil wars, almost perfectly suited to align expectations with reality. “History can tell us a lot about this kind of situation and this kind of conflict,” said Christopher Paul, a senior social scientist who studies modern insurgencies at the RAND Corporation. “There’s always a danger in getting caught up with what’s unique about a case while it’s going on rather than with the clarity of hindsight.”

One of Paul’s recent projects analyzed 71 conflicts fought between 1944 and 2010; he identified a series of seven steps that led to negotiated settlements — necessary preconditions for a diplomatic solution to a civil war. The odds he tabulated should humble expectations: Only 13 of the 71 insurgencies he studied were resolved by a political negotiation.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 an increasing share of conflicts were fought within states rather than between them, prompting social scientists to delve into the study of civil war with particular intensity. The Pentagon funded academic examinations of every civil war and insurgency of the last century. There was an unusual confluence of theoretical and practical interest, with scholarly studies of civil war designed to help policy makers deal with the ongoing conflicts of our times. Researchers probed thorny questions of identity, sectarianism, and ideological grievance that often bedevil social scientists but play a crucial role in civil wars.

The research tells us how long civil wars tend to last and what factors prolong or resolve them; what steps tend to lead to a negotiated settlement and what presages a resolution established on the battlefield.

When Russia raced to Aleppo, the real mystery is why anyone was surprised.

FRATRICIDAL CONFLICTS are most effectively won, not negotiated. Sadly, in practice, the most enduring way to resolve a civil war is often the one with the most horrific human costs. Most other outcomes, including peace accords reached under international pressure, tend to be unstable and marred by continuing flare-ups of violence. Until last week, Syria has offered a painful illustration of this cold fact.

Incredulous Syrian rebels in interviews and private conversations before the announced truce said bitterly that the Damascus regime and its Russian and Iranian patrons would only negotiate after they’d already won as much as they could and destroyed what’s left of the original uprising. US officials complained in public that Russia was tanking any prospect of a fair or humanitarian end to the war, although they were more sanguine in private. Two senior officials said that as much as they decried the Russian approach, they expected Moscow to push for the best outcome it could get. They didn’t expect Russia or Syrian President Bashar Assad to sign away territory or make political concessions until they had seen what a year or more of vigorous Russian military intervention would yield.

Years of study have confirmed what’s intuitively obvious: No one wants to negotiate seriously until they’ve given up hope of winning on the ground. With Russian support, the Assad regime seemed to believe it could reconquer most of its territory — so why seek a deal before it was ready?

The war appeared deadlocked on the ground because the two international coalitions appeared balanced, said Stathis Kalyvas, the Yale political scientist who helped pioneer contemporary study of civil wars. “The question to ask is. . . what are the costs they pay to keep fighting?”

Overall, civil wars last about 10 years. If all sides get used to a stalemate, a war can go on far longer. The greater the number of factions and international sponsors involved, the longer a civil war tends to last. Syria’s civil war is now in its fifth year.

Some experts compare Syria’s war to the grinding, decades-long conflicts in Congo and Afghanistan, which also involved more than two factions and deeply implicated foreign sponsors of proxy armies. Other scholars, like MIT’s Fotini Christia, argue that Bosnia is a better parallel, because like Syria it had a high level of education and development before collapsing into strife, and its domestic factions relied on nearby foreign backers.

Breakthroughs historically occur when both sides finally acknowledge that they can’t win — or when one side finds that it actually can.

PAST CONFLICTS SHOW that a stable equilibrium doesn’t usually come with a victory for the good guys (or better guys if all sides are unsavory), the establishment of justice, or any of the moral outcomes that the international community tends to promote.

About 70 percent of civil wars end with outright victory, roughly 40 percent of the time for the government and 30 percent of the time for rebels, according to several data sets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, negotiated settlements, while still the exception, became more common, because international coalitions were willing to sponsor negotiations and then enforce the settlements with peacekeepers.

Unless one side wins outright, fighting factions only see an incentive to negotiate when they run short of fighters and their international patrons lose patience.

Political settlements usually involve a division of power that reflects the territorial disposition of the war, said Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. In Syria’s case that’s a long shot long-term — a settlement based on the current front lines would cede major areas to the Islamic State and Nusra Front and would require the Assad regime to share power with Sunni rebel groups, a prospect that all sides still categorically reject. Effective settlements also require international guarantors willing to enforce an agreement.

Three years ago, Walter judged the likelihood of a negotiated settlement in Syria as “close to zero despite the efforts of the Obama administration to convince us otherwise.”

Today, she says, “what’s changed is that the incentives to stop fighting and start seriously negotiating are becoming more prominent.”

Outside sponsors were tiring of spending money on the conflict, Walter said, while edging closer to the view that a compromise might benefit everyone.

Walter believes it’s possible for Syria’s warring sides to eventually agree on a power-sharing formula. But she said finding peacekeepers, the third precondition of successful peace accords, would be more elusive. “How do you enforce an agreement over time?” Walter asked. Iraq, for example, failed under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki because no neutral power was able to enforce the power-sharing agreement between Shia, Sunni, and Kurds.

For scholars steeped in dozens of civil war case studies, and who aren’t advocating for any particular policy course, the evidence in Syria points to a slow, messy resolution. “There is probably no long-run military solution to this war in the sense it is extremely hard to see how you could get back to Assad ruling the country as he did in, say, 2010 or 2005,” said James Fearon, a Stanford political scientist. “I can imagine a partial victory that implies a rough and messy de facto partition of the country, that would drag on with lots of skirmishing.”

Civil war research offers a sobering warning to those in Syria and the international community who seek a major shift in Syria. Similar conflicts in Afghanistan and Congo stretched on for decades. Neighboring Iraq has hosted an ongoing civil war-cum-insurgency for nearly 13 years, featuring many of the same players involved in the Syrian war.

“A major concern about the current policy debate is there is so much pressure to resolve this conflict quickly, and history suggests that it will take time,” said RAND’s Paul. “Push hard and aggressively, by all means, to encourage settlement, but don’t be surprised if it’s hard and things break down repeatedly. It takes time, and requires strategic patience.”

Social science isn’t always the answer, but when it comes to civil wars and insurgencies, it can be a helpful corrective. The fighting factions in a civil war and the states that back them are often unable, or unwilling, to make clear-headed assessments of their own prospects. They have little incentive to be realistic about their chances of victory or concerned about the humanitarian costs of their actions.

If the tentative cease-fire announced at Munich is implemented, the scholarship warns us to be patient and temper our hopes; it often requires several rounds before there’s enough trust among warring parties for the truce to last, and implementation can prove as tricky as the initial negotiation.

Political science doesn’t tell us everything, said Marc Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington University, but it outlines what’s possible and what’s impossible. In the case of Syria, long studies of civil wars that have become “internationalized,” with multiple outside powers reinforcing their proxies and blocking victory by their opponents, make clear that quick and easy victories are impossible. A decisive Russian intervention could have changed the war but couldn’t end it on its own; in a similar manner, Lynch says, a full-on US intervention wouldn’t have decisively resolved Syria’s civil war either.

Gamal, seated right, with his daughter on his lap, on Feb. 8, 2011.

Today, I cannot help but think of the shock and wonder I felt when I beheld the revolutionary Egyptians fighting their way into Tahrir Square five years ago—as if with each riot policemen they swept aside, they were casting away another piece of foundations of authoritarianism.

We still don’t know how Egypt’s story will turn out. It might not turn out well, but it is not yet over. The aspirations of the Egyptians who demanded a better state are still unmet, and the latest incarnation of military strongmen simply cannot deliver on any front: neither legitimacy nor livelihood nor dignity.

“My body is here but my mind is still in Tahrir,” one of the activists of 2011 messaged me today from exile. Sure, there is ample reason for despair, or even for the silence that has engulfed one of the revolution’s most creative and articulate thinkers, Alaa Abdel Fattah. But there is also reason for patience, even hope.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s dictatorship believes its own paranoid propaganda. In addition to the actual threat Egypt faces from Islamist insurgents, the security services imagine other, nonexistent threats around every corner. Sisi knows his initial popularity was broad but very shallow. That is why he is so insecure. The military could easily shift its support to some other figure. Sisi has not captured the loyalty of the government bureaucracy, or the wealthy. He doesn’t have a political party through which to manipulate politics. And his legitimacy is subject to challenge from every direction.

As a result of his weak position, Sisi has sadly but understandably felt the need to consolidate his power through maximal repression. In the 1990s, Hosni Mubarak put down a far more substantial and violent Islamist uprising with far less force and far fewer indiscriminate arrests. There aren’t credible challenges today from the secular, nationalist opposition, because Sisi has so thoroughly clamped down on freedom to talk and organize. Yet he’s still nervous, because he knows his thin legitimacy and failure to govern effectively will inevitably result in challenges to his authority, or even another coup or popular uprising.

A few days shy of five years ago, a minibus driver from Giza named Gamal sat on the ground in Tahrir Square, in front of a tank, with his young daughter on his lap. It was drizzling. He was wet and cold, but he didn’t care. His extended family told him he was foolish to risk prison joining a protest. He failed to change their minds, but he was invested in his three-year-old daughter. As he wiped her runny nose, Gamal told me cheerfully that he didn’t want his little girl to grow up to be like her parents or think like her parents.

“I want her to see and feel what it’s like to defy authority,” he said.

I don’t know where Gamal is today, or how he views the last five year’s rapid turns of the gyre. But I very much doubt he thinks the same way he did on January 24, 2011, or that he will ever have the same expectations or the same resignation that he did before the January revolution.

Whether that change of heart leads one day to a change of state for Egypt—a change for the better—no one can know. But we can be sure that today’s silence, imposed with a historically unprecedented level of repression by a state ruling from a historically narrow base, tells us nothing about Egypt’s future. It only reveals the fears of its military rulers.

Zakia and Ali. Photo: DIEGO IBARRA SANCHEZ

[Book review in The Boston Globe.]

When news reached Kabul that a pair of teenagers was breaking every manner of taboo, determined to marry for love or else die in rural Bamian province, New York Times reporter Rod Nordland jumped. He had been looking for just such a story to illustrate Afghanistan’s horrifying tradition of rape and “honor killings,” as well as the courage of young people ready to challenge the old system.

Zakia and Ali had met as children — their families farmed neighboring plots — and decided when they came of age to defy their parents and marry. By the time Nordland meets them, Zakia is hiding in a women’s shelter. Her family is threatening to kill her because she has tarnished their “honor.’’

Their story makes sensational headlines about “Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet,” and Nordland doggedly sticks with the protagonists. The result is “The Lovers,” a rich account of Zakia and Ali’s romance that doubles as an indictment of the Afghan patriarchy’s abuse of women and the failures of all those in power, inside and outside the country, to curtail it.

Nordland follows the couple’s escape into the mountains, their marriage and honeymoon on the run, and the hair-raising manhunt that pits Zakia’s relatives against the bride, groom, and his family. Along the way a circus of Afghan and US government officials and international gadflies try to shape the fate of Zakia and Ali.

Couples like Zakia and Ali usually pay for their daring with their lives. This exceptional pair, however, doubles down on their decision to marry by going public with their tale. Miraculously, they manage to avoid being killed, although their victory seems pyrrhic. Some young Afghans find solace in the couple’s crusade, although we only learn of their social resonance in glancing references to their celebrity status.

What support the couple wins from local power brokers has more to do with ethnic and tribal loyalty than any major change of heart among patriarchal elders. Zakia and Ali enjoy what pass for moments of serenity on the lam from vengeful relatives, discovering that the married life for which they fought so gallantly includes long stretches of monotony and bickering.

For Americans contemplating their longest war, in Afghanistan, the campaign for women’s rights was a potential bright spot. The 2001 invasion might have failed on most counts, mired in torture, warlordism, and corruption, but at least the appalling position of women was supposed to improve.
Nordland’s “The Lovers” fatally complicates that optimistic narrative. In the 1980s, when Nordland first covered the conflict in Afghanistan, the United States supported mujahedeen whose main motivation to fight was to reverse the Soviets’ emancipation of Afghan women. So it was rich with irony that after the United States staged its invasion, it pushed for a flurry of women’s rights laws that improved things mainly on paper — and were undermined by the same warlords who owed their rise to American patronage.

To contextualize Ali and Zakia’s romantic yarn, Nordland presents a tirade of stories of rape, murder, bribery, and cover-up. While this barrage of anecdotes enrages, it does not advance our understanding of the thinking of the men who run this brutal system. Nor does it explain how they secure the cooperation of their countrymen.

Ali and Zakia are simple characters, illiterate, uneducated, and young. Although they star in this account, we never fully understand why they took such a bold leap. The closest glimpse we get to their souls is through the poetic verses that Ali selects for his cellphone ringtone.

There’s another story here, which Nordland shares with admirable candor and unflinching honesty, and that is of the unsatisfying, at times distressing, encounter between Afghans and the foreigners who have come to save, subjugate, or chronicle their country.

Almost from the first, Nordland dispenses with sanctimony. Journalists are supposed to maintain objectivity and avoid becoming part of the story. But in war zones, lines get blurred, and Nordland refuses to ignore his responsibility to be humane and help his subjects.

He gives Zakia and Ali money, lobbies for them with government officials, arranges a getaway car, and choreographs one abortive flight abroad.

The couple proves maddening and headstrong. They routinely ignore advice, dodge phone calls, and surface only when they need help or money. They might frustrate their allies, but Nordland respects their agency and independence of thought. They might not make the wisest choices, but the point is they act empowered in a society where few do.

The American government offers little aid, seeming reluctant to grant asylum to persecuted Afghans because it would undermine the line that Afghan women are better off since the Americans came.

All the more reason to chronicle this bittersweet, ambiguous love story. Zakia and Ali haven’t changed the status of Afghan women, and Nordland’s relentless reporting hasn’t shifted US policy. But the very acts of successful resistance and honest storytelling provide much-needed seeds of hope.

THE LOVERS: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing

By Rod Nordland

Ecco, 384 pp., $26.99

Thanassis Cambanis writes The Internationalist column for Globe Ideas and is a fellow at The Century Foundation in New York. His most recent book is “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story.’’

[Published at The Century Foundation blog.]

Monday evening Lebanon’s two most powerful Christian political bosses set aside decades of enmity – including many years when the two men’s militias were locked in a death match whose collateral damage included much of Lebanon itself – to join forces in the race for the country’s presidency.

The announcement was not altogether unexpected, and marked a powerful shift of alliances within the slate of warlord factions that runs Lebanon. For those familiar with the history of the civil war and the bitter rivalry between Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea, it’s a shock to the system to see the two men on the same side. It’s an important reminder that in politics, even Lebanese politics, all things are possible; personal and ideological feuds don’t preclude common ground and tactical alliances.

Geagea’s decision to support Aoun might be many things, but it is not a game changer.

“We must leave the past in order to build a future,” Aoun said in the press conference with his long-term rival and new friend. But he was only talking about the two men’s past disputes; he wasn’t talking about leaving behind a hidebound political system firmly trapped in the past. If anything, an Aoun presidency that reinvigorates the role of Lebanon’s Christian parties will take the old system off life support and inject it with new vigor – while stymieing any push for a more representative election system, which would privilege groups with the large and growing numbers of followers, most prominently Hezbollah.

Lebanon is still run by an anti-democratic cabal of hereditary warlords, and the major groupings for now remain intact. The March 14 and March 8 blocs are so loose, and so bereft of a shared ideology or political vision, that it’s hard to imagine them enduring much longer. Even their members are hard pressed to define either side by what it stands for rather than what it opposes.

In any event, even if the wider alliances fracture and regroup, there’s no reason to believe we’re witnessing anything more than a rearrangement of the supporting cast. The main event is the sectarian power struggle for primacy between Hezbollah, the Shia movement whose influence has been on the upswing for two decades, and Lebanon’s waning Sunni community (a contest that mirrors and reflects the regional battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia).

Saad Hariri, the Lebanese Sunnis’ first among equals, has been fighting what seems to be an inevitable consignation to the second-tier, a result of his own shrinking fortunes and political missteps, intra-Sunni fragmentation, the demographic shift of Lebanon’s population and wealth, and the regional feud between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Throughout the 20-month presidential vacuum, my guess has been that when the major brokers finally decide Lebanon needs a president, they will resort to a lowest-common denominator consensus candidate, someone who can get the job done without providing any faction with a notion of victory. In other words, no polarizing zaim like Aoun, Geagea or Suleiman Franjieh. Pushed to bet on a name, I’d pick the current head of the military, Jean Kahwaji, a safe choice to preserve security without tipping the political balance or posing a threat to the hereditary majors.

Monday’s announcement makes that outcome more unlikely, although still possible in the opaque, faction- and personality-driven layered negotiations that characterize Lebanese politics.

Geagea and Aoun have been growing closer since last summer, and as Lebanese commentator and Daily Star columnist Michael Young points out, both men see a great danger to the long-term viability of their status and their entire movements. If Muslim politicians get to select the Christian president, if Christian political parties act effectively as filler in political coalitions dominated by Sunni and Shia bosses, then what’s the future of the Lebanese Christian community, much less its political leaders? Power in Lebanon remains entirely rooted in sectarian quotas, patronage networks, and power-sharing agreements, not individual voting rights or secular law.

Does the Aoun deal really signify an alliance shift and a fracturing of the March 14 coalition? Or is it an organic reassertion of Christian dealmaking, reminding kingmakers like the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and actual kings like Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and the weaker but still “royal” Hariri, that the Christian lock on the presidency, in Lebanon’s weird system, does endow Christian parties with actual power should they opt to use it?

The last year’s evidence points to the latter theory. If that’s correct, then a reassertion of Christian political initiative should be understood as reactionary rather than radical shift. From a historian’s perspective, it’s a clear, conservative step back onto the solid ground of the 1943 National Accord and its descendants, sectarian power-sharing compromises that put national governance second to the preservation of sectarian fiefs. In many ways, it restores equilibrium to a rigid and fragile system, postponing any root-and-branch reform project, which would exacerbate every group’s communal fears and might destabilize the entire country. Since the Civil War broke out in 1975, warlords have never stopped making the decisions in Lebanon. Relative power has shifted within the cabal of warlords, but so far no one has posed a systemic challenge to the basis of their rule.

Some Lebanese politicians, especially those who oppose Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria, and Iran’s influence, might be tempted to see in the presidential deal a fruit of the Iran nuclear accords, a further tilt toward Iran in the Levant. It’s more likely that the Lebanese presidential pragmatism is a response to the same underlying conditions that made the nuclear deal possible: a hard-headed calculation about numbers, power and possibilities. Hezbollah and its allies are stronger than their opponents in Lebanon, so their side has had the leverage in the presidential standoff. As in Syria, relative strength doesn’t guarantee that the stronger party gets everything it wants, but it does make the opposite unlikely. Until now, in Lebanon, the March 14 side has held onto the vague hope that it can somehow drive the choice of president, or even anoint its own candidate. But March 8 holds more cards and will get the better end of whatever deal is reached, even one in which Saad Hariri gets to return as prime minister.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s demography marches onward, its Shia plurality bustling and its Sunni and Christian communities in decline (so long as Syrian refugees don’t enter the calculation). The preferences and identities of the country’s population are ever farther removed from the sectarian quotas that shape electoral results and the upper reaches of Lebanon’s government. Not a single major political party of warlord has atop their agenda any policies that advance rule of law, citizenship or fair elections, which would posit an alternate path to protecting pluralism and minority rights.

A full rapprochement between Geagea and Aoun changes the lineup; it does not, as some breathless reaction would suggest, in any way change the game.

[Published in The Boston Globe Ideas.]

I USED TO feel smug about Lebanon’s dysfunction when I moved here from New York three years ago. I knew the country well as a frequent long-term visitor. I had reported the 2006 war from the battlefields in Lebanon’s south and subsequently criss-crossed it while researching a book. However familiar and modern Lebanon seemed, I was convinced that it lay in the category of failed states, its problems of an entirely different nature than those facing the United States.

Then two critical things changed, evaporating my smugness and leaving in its place a sort of dread that I fear might never leave me. I began to really live here, raising my family and establishing a home. Soon after, I realized the paralysis and failures that mar Lebanon are not so far removed from the pathologies of the United States.

Lebanon isn’t an alternate universe. It’s a potential future, perhaps not the most likely for the United States but definitely a possible outcome. For a quarter century since its civil war ended, Lebanon has ambled along with an awkward power-sharing arrangement that prevents any single group from dominating. The same compromise also prevents any political faction from governing effectively — political stalemate. Corruption is rampant. Money can buy almost anything.

Successive crises have wracked this little country since sectarian warlords agreed to disarm their militias and turn to business in 1991. In the last decade alone, local experts predicted a complete breakdown multiple times — when former prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005 and half the country protested in the streets, when Israel bombed the entire country during the 2006 war, when Hezbollah and its allies briefly took over West Beirut in 2008, and then when a million or more Syrian refugees crossed the border from Syria after 2011. Every Rubicon crossed so far has led not to another civil war but rather to another unthinkable degradation in quality of life, which the population stoically endures because most Lebanese would prefer anything to another horrifying civil war. Meanwhile, for reasons entirely attributable to corruption, Lebanon suffers from a permanent shortage of water and electricity, and countless other ignominies inexplicable in a country so rich and so modern.

This year’s garbage crisis encapsulates the hopelessness of a system that successfully holds its citizens hostage. One of the ruling families, the aforementioned Hariris, benefits from a secret national trash collection contract. (Wrap your head around the fact that the national garbage contract is a state secret. No member of the public knows how much the government spends for waste disposal. Even members of parliament can’t pry the information out of the government.)

Years after the overstuffed landfill’s expiration date, local activists finally forced its shutdown last summer. Politicians figured something would work out. Nothing has. Since July, garbage has piled up in fetid mountains around the nation — beside villas, beneath underpasses, in the harbor, in the rivers. Rotting garbage fills Lebanon’s unused corners. Doctors blame its toxic effluence for an epidemic of infections.

As Lebanon’s problems go, the garbage morass is extra mind-boggling because the solutions are within reach. The government could open other landfills. It could agree to let local municipalities take care of their own garbage, as many Lebanese advocate. The government’s preferred solution is the most expensive (and really, the most absurd): to ship the garbage abroad, to countries not yet disclosed. Anti-corruption activists warned of an environmental disaster. They were proved right at the first winter rains, when trash floated down flooded streets and clogged the seacoast. The prime minister tried to claim that images of garbage floods had been faked. But in a country as small as Lebanon, such obfuscation didn’t work; almost everybody had seen the disaster firsthand. Today flotillas of garbage bags regularly cruise the waters along Beirut’s Corniche.

The politics of garbage are complicated and inseparable from the politics of everything else, from the thwarted selection of a new president (the office has been vacant since May 2014) to the system that ended the civil war with a web of sectarian quotas and set-asides. Two of the most deleterious factors that fueled Lebanon’s emblematic civil war were the insecurities of minority groups in a pluralistic society and the toxicity of foreign intervention. Ultimately, after 15 years of fighting and a quarter of a million killed, the dominant warlords in Lebanon couldn’t find a new modus vivendi. So they stuck with the old unstable system that collapsed in 1975. The same warlords, or their children, still run Lebanon, and they still have failed to resolve the underlying problems of communal fear and foreign intervention. Beginning with that signal failure, Lebanon’s leaders over the years have compounded their original sin by failing to solve easier and easier problems.

Stymied on the big questions of how to elect the government and how to separate citizenship rights from sectarian identity, Lebanon has gradually become incapable of resolving ever more prosaic questions — how to divvy up the ill-gotten proceeds of black market diesel crucial to running the nation’s generators, how to keep public schools staffed, how to register civil marriages, how to activate the existing fiber optic network so that Lebanon loses its stigma as one of the slowest zones of Internet access in the world, how to repair leaks in the water mains responsible for far more water loss than drought and groundwater overpumping, how to collect parking fines. Every one of these issues has reached a breaking a point in just the last three years. At each juncture the political system has essentially shrugged.

All this differs in degree rather than in kind from the American system. It’s only a few dystopian steps from today’s plutocratic-politics-for-sale and Washington gridlock to a great American variation on the Lebanese model.

It’s easy but misleading to see the Arab states as failing and the Western states as members of an entirely different, successful category.

Sure, the US and European systems function far better — so vote millions of emigrants with their feet. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the drawbacks of the Western systems, which have decidedly uneven foundations.

America is often seen as the most attractive destination because of its open and ever-growing economy, and as a model of assimilation that, despite deeply rooted racism, provides a surer path to belonging than Europe’s. America’s opportunity for earning and self-invention balance against its cultural roughness and weak social safety net.

The strengths and weaknesses of America’s fundamental compact are closely intertwined. As a system, the United States has been remarkably adaptive in some ways and remarkably brittle in others. Its grandeur and lack of rigid ideology — or fixed cultural identity — has allowed it to welcome a huge number of immigrants and create a great deal of national wealth. It has embraced stark inequality as integral to its brand of capitalism.

Europe more generously absorbs newcomers and provides its citizens with a beguiling array of social services. Governments provide comfortable benefits to workers and the unemployed alike. The system prioritizes social stability; there’s less inequality but taxes are high and economic growth limited.

But all is not perfect in Europe either. The concept of European identity only roughly veils a subterranean nativism flowing through many quarters of the continent, evoked in racist conceptions like Blut und Boden or francais francais and traditions like Santa’s slave helper in Holland, Black Piet, still played today by white people in blackface.

In Europe, the social protections are more humanist and mainstream politics long ago achieved consensus on matters that still bedevil Americans, like universal health care, gun control, the death penalty, and abortion. The system is more placid, but in many ways also more rigid and undemocratic. There is no direct electoral connection between the roughly 500 million European citizens and the executive European Commission that wields so much power over them. In Europe, it’s hard to get rich or move up the class ladder, and it’s much harder for an immigrant of color to gain full social acceptance.

Importantly, these Western systems can break. They’ve done so before, in recent times, and without careful stewardship will do so again. Before Europe’s system was so great, it was terrible. Many of its most impressive achievements came in the wake of World War II, when the continent was so thoroughly destroyed by decades of violence and fascism that its inhabitants were willing to take radical measures in order to protect against further war.

American history is littered with points of rupture. The constitutional system has enabled the United States to improvise in response to some modern developments. But the US system, at great risk to itself, continues to struggle with major issues of equality and human rights. Again and again in times of crisis, America has resorted to extrajudicial violence, including torture and assassination, in the name of national security and its foreign policy aspirations.

At home, the American system has been unable to accommodate reform on race and gun violence. The nation almost split twice during violent upheavals over systemic racism, first during the Civil War and then during the cataclysmic and constitutional crisis that we neatly call the civil rights movement. Generation after generation of gun massacres have failed to convince American society (or its politicians) that it’s time to reinterpret the Second Amendment like we have so many others.

A truly adaptive system has to evolve, even sometimes on matters of great significance like slavery, free speech, suffrage, and who is allowed into the ruling elite. America’s historical strength has been its ability to follow crises with genuine reinvention. But that history is no guarantee, and for two generations now American political life has been stalemated over fundamental issues including race, guns, and taxes.

The ambiguities in the American and European compacts remind us that there are drawbacks to the most attractive systems in the world, the systems to which people flock from failed or failing states like Lebanon. Resourceful people abandon the places that stop working — where violence makes life untenable, like in much of Syria, or where corruption and collapsed institutions erase the opportunity for education and progress from one generation to the next.

Many of the people most likely to succeed, who take risks and initiative, abandon these disrupted zones for alluring, safe boom countries.

The West’s global appeal today shouldn’t lull us into complacency. We don’t have garbage piling up in the suburbs, like Lebanon, but we have an alarming number of solvable national problems that our system has stubbornly refused to solve.

Lebanon’s garbage problem differs from America’s gun problem in degree. America is not Lebanon, of course, and for all its pathologies the United States is not a failed state. However, it is not immune to failure either. We would do well to look and learn from Lebanon, lest we repeat its mistakes.

Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr during a mass execution of 47 people has further ignited a regional rivalry between Iran and Riyadh. Photo: MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH/AFP/GETTY

[Published in Newsweek.]

The recent tit-for-tat clashes across the Middle East have made the first days of 2016 seem a lot like 1979. That was the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led Iran’s transformation from an autocratic state ruled by the Shah into the Islamic Republic. Violence wracked the region in the immediate aftermath of the changeover. Mobs overran embassies, and Sunni Arab governments swore to turn their backs on the new theocratic regime in Tehran. Oil-rich despots throughout the region poured money and weapons into proxy conflicts all over the Middle East, unleashing a wave of destabilizing, sectarian violence that eventually died down but never went away.

The event that turned back the clock and made an already roiling situation boil over took place on January 2, when Saudi Arabia killed a dissident Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, in a mass execution of 47 people. Iranian mobs attacked Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic missions in Tehran and Mashhad. A flurry of escalations followed: bombings in Yemen, diplomatic relations severed, promises of retaliation by both Riyadh and Tehran.

Although they’re an alarming throwback to 1979, these incidents are just the most recent round in a long, destructive struggle between two powers apparently set on pulling the entire region into a struggle between a Sunni bloc and a Shiite crescent. Both are seeking a winner-takes-all victory. “All the sectarian rhetoric is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for these regimes who love to play the sectarian card,” says Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “The Saudis feel betrayed, and now they feel like they must do something, even if it’s the wrong thing.”

The two oil-rich theocracies—one Shiite and one Sunni—are vying for regional dominance. The feud between Iran and Saudi Arabia has fueled sectarianism, resulted in an increase in the flow of weapons and funding to extremists, and spawned numerous militant movements.

Neither side shows any sign of backing down. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “divine justice” after al-Nimr was executed. Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, meanwhile, put out the word through allies that “enough is enough” and that it would no longer hesitate to stand up to Iran.

But even more of a threat to the region than this Iran vs. Saudi Arabia contest is the likelihood that the two countries are lashing out at each other not from positions of strength but of weakness—and in their efforts to dominate each other they could cause the entire region to fracture and spin out of control. The two autocracies appear set on ratcheting up their clash, consequences be damned. But it also seems clear that neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia can control the wars, proxy militias and ideological movements their conflict has unleashed. Even if Tehran and Riyadh calm down, the armed groups they have spawned could continue fighting throughout the region.

If there is a single event that sparked this flare-up, it was the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, which saw Iran agree to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The agreement was clearly good for global security, but it also dramatically changed the region. Saudi Arabia, which views itself as the Sunni world’s banker, oil baron and spiritual chief, felt abandoned by its most important ally, the United States, widening a rift that opened in 2011 when Washington supported popular uprisings against Arab tyrants during the Arab Spring.

When the Obama administration was pursuing its nuclear accord with Iran, Saudi Arabia felt betrayed, and now the U.S. was preparing to help the Saudis’ biggest regional rival by lifting sanctions. At almost the same time, oil from fracking and other sources has made the U.S. a major oil state, no longer directly dependent on Middle Eastern—particularly Saudi—oil.

King Salman, Saudi Arabia’s new monarch, took an uncharacteristically confrontational approach with the U.S. His inner circle lobbied against the Iran deal, and in March—over strenuous American objections—Saudi Arabia launched a massive assault on Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen. By the time the nuclear deal was inked in July, the Saudis were dangerously close to a rupture with Washington.

Some Western diplomats said the Saudis’ decision to execute al-Nimr—when they knew full well it would antagonize Iran (and the U.S., among others)—seemed specifically designed to thwart the major Syrian peace conference scheduled for January 25 in Geneva. Peace talks without Saudi Arabia and Iran, powerful backers of opposing sides in the war, would be a waste of time.

Iranian protesters chant slogans during a demonstration against the execution al-Nimr, January 4. Photo: RAHEB HOMAVANDI/TIMA/REUTERS

Saudi Arabia’s bellicose maneuvers have strained its relationship with Washington. U.S. diplomats and security officials say they are angry about citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries financially backing jihadis in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the region.

But the Saudi royal family, if it is to survive, must keep the country’s powerful extremist Sunni (or Wahhabite) clerical establishment on its side. That means that the monarchy wants to persuade Washington that Saudi Arabia is a firm counterterrorism ally while demonstrating to its subjects at home that it will protect the conservative religious core of the Wahhabi sect.

The execution of the Shiite cleric was “local politics,” says one Arab analyst who works closely with the Saudi government and spoke on condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to anger officials. “They don’t want to lose more support to ISIS, so they need to show they can be more hard-line than ISIS. That’s why they killed Sheikh Nimr.”

The execution was also a way for Saudi Arabia to block what it sees as Iranian ascendance. After almost five years of stalemate in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been winning back territory, thanks to significant military support from Tehran and Moscow. Iraq, a Shiite-majority neighbor, has also become an Iranian ally. In Lebanon, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah is stronger than ever, and the nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers will greatly boost Iran’s revenues and reintegrate the Islamic Republic into the global economy and the international community.

But a closer look suggests all is not so rosy for Iran. Abroad, it has lost much of the support and soft power it cultivated directly after its 1978-1979 revolution. In the mid-2000s, Iran’s so-called axis of resistance—an informal coalition of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Sunni-dominated group Hamas—enjoyed widespread popularity among Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Today, polls show that Iran’s popularity in an increasingly polarized region has evaporated. Like Saudi Arabia, with its backing of rebels in Syria and its military campaign to support the government in Yemen, Iran has overreached and become inextricably involved in wars that are unlikely to have an outright victor. Hezbollah openly took sides with the Assad regime and has lost its Pan-Arab luster.

And Iran, despite the considerable resources of its expeditionary Quds force and the fearsome reputation of its commander, General Qassem Soleimani, has been unable to guarantee the survival of the Syrian regime, in spite of the recent military successes of Assad’s forces and their allies. In Yemen, the side Iran supports, the Houthis, is steadily losing ground in the face of the Saudi-led assault.

“Iran and Saudi Arabia have managed to establish a mutually destructive cycle of conflict in which both sides are damaging their future regional position,” says Michael Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of a recent article titled “The Limits of Iranian Power” in the journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy.

“While most assume that Iran is much better positioned, it is much more isolated than is generally recognized,” says Hanna, who argues that Iran’s alliances are under extreme strain. “Its soft power in a majority Sunni Arab world has collapsed, and it is now limited to exercising hard power in sectarian conflicts.”

Whatever happens in this round of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, things promise to get worse, not better. “The policies of the Saudi regime will have a domino effect, and they will be buried under the avalanche they have created,” said Iranian Revolutionary Guards Brigadier General Hossein Salami on January 7, according to Iran’s state-run Press TV. “If the Al-Saud regime does not correct this path, it will collapse in the near future.”

Both sides frame their competition more and more in absolutist, sectarian terms, and both sides have proved less and less able to manage the endless crises in the region. Iran and Saudi Arabia are doubling down on a war neither can win.