Saudi implosion?

How worried should we all be about the implosion of state authority in Saudi Arabia? Personally, I think we should all be very worried indeed:

• The Saudi authorities have been trying since last Saturday to locate kidnaped American helicopter technician Paul Johnson, without success. On Tuesday, his kidnappers issued that grisly video showing him quaking in fear while his captors spelled out their intention to murder him Friday if the Saudi authorities don’t release a list of Qaeda prisoners.
• This, coming in the wake of the past two months’ bombings against residential compounds housing foreign contractors, and other anti-foreigner actions in the Kingdom
• Not surprisingly, foreign contract workers have been leaving the Kingdom in droves. In an evident vicious-cycle effect, this exodus is itself impacting the Kingdom’s ability to provide/ensure basic public security, given the large role foreign contractors play in supervising essential elements of the internal-security system.

Regarding the role of foreign contractors in the Kingdom’s security system, the Global Security website has a November 2003 analysis of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), the component of the Saudi security system long headed by and loyal to the country’s effective ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz. This analysis spells out that:

A recently approved 10-year vision of the SANG includes dramatic modernization initiatives by OPM [the US military group charged with upgrading the SANG] and SANG under the leadership of the Crown Prince and his Assistant Deputy Commander for Military Affairs, HRH Prince Miteb. OPM-SANG personnel are directly involved with all aspects of SANG’s force expansion and in helping develop a total army. OPM priorities include forming 5 LAV-equipped brigades, improving SANG C2, modernizing training methodologies, expanding the definition of modernization to the light infantry brigades, and upgrading SANG artillery. 3 LAV Brigades are nearly complete, and our priority effort in the near-term is the completion of these three brigade combat teams. We [= presumably, the US military] are also assisting in the development of initiatives to enhance SANG Command and Control at the Strategic/National Level through the upgrade of their Underground Command Center, and at the Tactical Level through the establishment of an Intermediate Field Command in the Central Region. An advanced, turreted mortar system for the LAV is being fielded, and a LAV mounted assault gun system will be fielded within the next two years…

I believe it is still the case that the vast majority of the work done by the American OPM group is carried out by US contract workers. (Johnson himself was also a contract worker, working on a different portion of the Saudi military’s continuous projects of upgrading.)
In Iraq, we have already seen some of the terrible effects that widespread reliance on “contract employees” can have on the effectiveness of work in the security field. Evidently, after the revelations of the role of such workers at Abu Ghraib, the image throughout the Arab world of western contractors active in security work–let’s just call them “mercenaries”, for short–has become extremely suspect.
At the same time, we have seen that such people are not–unlike their service-member counterparts–actually forced to stick around when the going gets tough.
We’ve seen the problems in that latter regard in Iraq, in spades, with “contract” truck drivers refusing to haul strategically vital loads to various military camps around the country.
Now, we are probably already seeing the very deleterious effect that a similar reliance on “foreign contract labor” in the vital sphere of public security has started to have inside Saudi Arabia.
I hate to come across like some kind of a work-ethic freak, but there still is a lot to be said for a society finding ways of having all the work it needs for self-sustenance done by its own members, rather than relying so heavily on paid help from outside…
I really do believe that Saudi Arabia will be seeing enormous, and very unpredictable, upheavals over the months ahead. (Oh, did I mention that the Saudi National Guard plays a major role in ensuring the defense of the Kingdom’s massive eastern oilfields?)
… All of the above made it very bizarre indeed when I got the latest issue of the “Aramco Expats Highlights and Notices” in my mailbox yesterday. I can’t imagine why they send it to me. I have never worked a day for Aramco, the venerable Saudi oil company, in my life. But I have noticed these things dropping into my electronic mailbox recently.
Usually, I just delete this spam. Yesterday, when I saw what it was, I thought, “Oh maybe I can learn something about the ripples of fear that must be disturbing the serenity of that well-paid bunch of contract people.” But no, the newsletter was just a bunch of fluff about people’s weddings, and so on.
They do have their ownwebsite, however. If you go there you’ll find a short but moving piece by an American guy who spent 23 years working in the oil capital, Dhahran, who writes:

I know that real men don’t cry, but I find myself fighting to hold back tears as I think of dozens, no hundreds, of walks down Khalid and adjacent streets, sometimes purposefully, sometimes just strolling and window-shopping. The sights, the sounds, the smells come crashing upon me at all hours of the day and night as I ask myself, “Is it really true that I would now be frightened to go to al-Khobar to pick up the odd hardware item, browse the CD racks, look at the new cameras, watches, TVs or whatever? Is it really true that I would not dare to just stroll along the street and buy a shawarma? Would I be too afraid to sit on my car hood waiting for stores to open after prayer time? Would I have to look at each person on the street and ask myself ‘Is he my friend, or would he like for me to go away?’

But the website is eager to reassure folks, too, that life continues as “normal” for the people in the Aramco expats’ strangely apartheid-like compounds inside the Kingdom… It carries news, for example, of the early-June visit of a group of a dozen US educators “for a nine-day tour of the Kingdom which will include visits to Dhahran, Dammam, Al Khobar, Riyadh and Jeddah.”
And where did those lucky teachers come from? Houston, Texas. Duh. I just hope they had a good time and made it home safely.
—-
I don’t write about Saudi Arabia very often. You might want to check out this May 2003 post on JWN where I looked at some of the leadership issues there.