Lucien Zeigler | arabianomics.com commentary | 8/26/10

Given that the Economic Cities are such massive undertakings, it is no surprise that Andrew Hammond in Reuters wrote last week that the Economic Cities are “under pressure to deliver.” That’s because the four cities are massive reinvestments in the Kingdom’s own modernization and possibly the greatest single planned governmental effort at economic diversification in history.

The Economic Cities, which the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority (SAGIA) describes as “an exciting metropolis, designed to maximize investment potential and deliver huge advantage to businesses located there,” carry a $60 billion price tag and should be completed by 2020.

But what is not known about the cities is what life will be like there. Building a city from scratch is a massive physical undertaking, but the social undertaking of creating a culture and identity for a completely new city will not be easy either. And in a conservative country like Saudi Arabia, where change happens slowly, the creation of a new city from scratch will force its new inhabitants to forge social norms that might not match the rest of the Kingdom’s.

And indeed life will be different in the cities – as well as in Saudi Arabia’s existing cities that may be losing many of its younger technocratic generation to the new “bubbles of freedom, as Hammond writes.

Hammond:

“Allowing women to drive cars and possibly permitting cinema houses, they may also add to the few bubbles of freedom in Saudi Arabia — where suffocating gender restrictions have been eased in recent years, to the ire of many religious conservatives.”

The investment by the Saudi government of $60 billion is a massive one, and SAGIA expects a handsome return on its investment both financially and in terms of the Kingdom’s overall economic standing in the world. But as Hammond writes, “adding to concerns is a sense that the future of the cities is tied up with the fate of social and political reforms. Many liberals fear the king’s successors will be less concerned with openness and relaxing clerical control.”

If these cities are intended to be cosmopolitan “bubbles” in the Kingdom where Saudis and foreigners are happy to live and work, then the success of these cities will last for generations only if there is a real, unique culture and society in these cities. As important as economic success is for a city, the society and culture of city is what makes people happy to live there. This should be considered by planners and future leaders of Saudi Arabia’s Economic Cities.

Lucien Zeigler | Arabianomics.com | 8/24/10

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) discusses the new US-Saudi arms deal in the context of US strategic realities in the Middle East in the coming years and decades. As the US leaves Iraq, which is many years off from having a respectable national military, Saudi Arabia stands alone as America’s most stalwart ally in the Gulf.

The US-Saudi Arms deal “will help secure the flow of energy exports to the global economy and help limit oil prices; they reinforce deterrence rather than threaten it; and they all reduce the size of the force the US must deploy or be ready to project into the region,” Cordesman writes. “They will also help ensure the US strategic position in the region at time when other powers like China are becoming key players in global energy, and when recycling “petrodollars” is even more important than in the past.”

Cordesman’s piece is a must read on the US-Saudi arms deal.  Read it here.

BlackBerry Reveals Desire for Long Term Presence in the Middle East

Lucien Zeigler | Arabianomics.com | 8/18/10

Saudi Arabia is the biggest BlackBerry market in the Gulf with 700,000 users, so it is easy to see how executives at Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes the devices, have had a few stressful weeks. The Saudi government was willing to shut down BlackBerry’s Messenger Service if it did not receive authorization from RIM to access the server on which those messages are sent.

BlackBerry’s messenger service, commonly referred to as “BBM,” is a service that allows all BlackBerry users to communicate with text to any other user without having to send an SMS, or text message. It’s free to use if you have a BlackBerry and you can stay in touch with anyone in the world through the service. The message connects from your phone to a server provided by RIM, and then it is sent along to another BlackBerry. Users of BBM can see when their BBM contacts are typing a message to them, and the sender of messages can see when the message has arrived at its destination and if the receiver has read it.

The governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia wanted access to this server because, presumably, extremists could use the network to communicate with each other across the world without fear of eavesdropping by governments.

Had Saudi Arabia and RIM not agreed to a compromise last week, BlackBerry users in the Kingdom – many who are Western expats who use the service to stay in touch with family and friends from abroad – would be unable to access BBM. This may have served as a deterrent for future businesspeople and indeed the businesses themselves from setting up shop in the Kingdom. The ban would have been seen has unfriendly to the business community.

For their part, Oman and Bahrain want no part in the ban or monitoring of BlackBerry’s servers, a clear indication that those two nations wish to bump their “business-friendly” stock in the region a little higher at the expense of their Saudi and Emirati neighbors.

But a compromise was struck between Saudi Arabia and RIM, and it is indeed the compromise itself that was impressive, as it showed that Saudi Arabia’s mostly technocrat-led government could negotiate and strike a deal with an international corporation as the world watched. Both parties had a reason not to let the ban on BBM happen – the Saudis did not want to be perceived as unfriendly to business, and RIM did not want to see its largest base of BlackBerry users in the Middle East disappear.

While there are legitimate concerns from privacy advocates and peaceful political dissidents both in and outside of Saudi Arabia, the need for the Saudi government to monitor this server in Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly to better secure the Kingdom and its allies from attack. Writing in the New York Times, Richard A. Falkenrath argues that “Monitoring electronic communications in real time and retrieving stored electronic data are the most important counterterrorism techniques available to governments today. Electronic surveillance is particularly vital in combating global terrorism, where the stakes are highest, but it is a part of virtually all investigations of serious transnational threats.”

He notes that “just as professionals depend on mobile devices to do their jobs, law enforcement and intelligence officers depend on electronic surveillance to do theirs.”

The debate about the legality of counter-terrorism practices by governments is a different exercise for each country, because each country has its own set of laws and rights systems to shape and limit those efforts, some more relaxed than others. While Saudi Arabia has a more closed, authoritarian style of government, it is easy to forget that Saudi shares its number one enemy with the United States: al-Qaeda and its affiliates. If there is a place where a more watchful eye exists over extremist activity, the Arabian Peninsula – home to a majority of the 9/11 attackers – is a place where increased vigilance at the expense of some privacy rights should be welcomed at least by outside observers, if not the Kingdom’s citizens who may be made safer as a result of the compromise.

Even if the move by the government is used to gain tighter control of political dissidents and to monitor all messages sent on the BBM server – a result one cannot reasonably rule out – those dissidents and others who want the privacy previously afforded to them by BBM will now have to do what the extremists who are being targeted will do – find another way.

UPDATE: ABC provides an interesting list of other countries considering a BlackBerry ban.

I am pleased to share a link to an interview of colleague and friend Pat Ryan, editor of SUSRIS, done by blogger American Bedu (Carol Fleming). Mr. Ryan, in return, interviewed Carol, and both are worth reading.