Border insecurity is a shared threat as it affects all the region

The concept of borders governed by a single state in the Middle East, especially if it is en route to failure, may need revision, says Ahmed Al Attar.

So much of the bloodshed in the Middle East can be attributed to a lack of border security, which is more often than not explained by a failure of states to govern their own borders and to regulate inflows and outflows.

The ease of smuggling weapons, militants or goods between states has fomented instability and created or helped to strengthen non-state actors that engage in illegal activities.

The scale of the problem makes it hard to deal with. The Arab world has more than 40,000 kilometres of internal and external land borders. Putting this number into perspective, it effectively means that Arab states have to police and guard borders that are longer than the circumference of the Earth. The world’s longest land border is that of China, 22,000 kilometres.

Borders should be managed by individual states. But in a climate where states in the Arab world are failing and resources are diverted to more pressing issues such as regime security, as well as borders being captured outright by non-state actors, the task must be shared as the current situation leads to growing insecurity and violence.

Violence spreads from state to state and eviscerates the control of borders. This trend can be conceivably reversed by addressing the roots of violence as well as by dedicating greater resources to the securing of borders.

Another issue is that borders in the Arab world do not really mean anything other than the confines of political sovereignty that was once imposed by colonialism. Borders in the Arab world do not delineate cultural, ethnic, religious or even linguistic differences and therefore themselves present a great problem to constructing a shared national identity. Because of that, rather than making Arab countries safer, borders in fact make Arab countries less secure.

Border security in the Arab world, therefore, requires more urgent attention and greater resources.

Also, efforts must not be focused only on physical security and resilience of borders. Regardless of the physical means and technology deployed, securing state borders over the long term is untenable through physical means alone, which are more of a suppression of symptoms. This is a soft-power effort that requires people to construct identities that will reinforce their safety.

That being said, the development of physical border security should be a priority in countries that are struggling with terrorism such as Egypt, Iraq and Libya. But these countries will need material support to be able to do so.

Arab borders and their securing should be the responsibility of all the Arab world, particularly of states that have an interest in the region’s stability. It is in Oman’s interest, for example, that Libyan borders are secure, and in Morocco’s interest that Al Qaeda does not control Syrian borders.

In the age of transnational terrorism, where terrorism can cut through borders like a hot knife through butter, nothing is more important than confining terrorism to as limited a geographic area as possible. If the disease cannot be effectively eradicated, then at least it might be quarantined.

That is especially in the interest of the Gulf states. If the “highway of terrorism” developing between Syria and Iraq continues to grow, the Gulf states will not escape unscathed.

The growing power of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) is at least in part if not mostly attributable to the fact that it has gained greater strategic depth between Iraq and Syria. Conversely, an effective step towards fighting Isil would be to cut off these developing ground lines of communication by strengthening Iraqi border security. A failure to do so may result in Iraq itself potentially forming a conduit for terrorism and affecting its neighbours Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Saudi Arabia could in turn affect the rest of the Gulf states. The same rings true in Yemen, where violence might eventually spread to Saudi Arabia.

In the current Middle East paradigm, the concept of borders governed by a single state, especially if it is en route to failure may need revision. It may become a necessity to go beyond the single-state model to a more multilateral framework, or perhaps one that relies more on international institutions and resources.

Ahmed Al Attar is a defence and security commentator based in Abu Dhabi