Three Is the Loneliest Number
Jun 3, 2010 Uncategorized
FP
BY BRUCE RIEDEL | JUNE 2, 2010
What does the killing of al Qaeda’s No. 3, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, mean for Osama bin Laden?
The death of Mustafa Ahmed Mohammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid, also known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, al Qaeda’s operational commander in Afghanistan, in a drone attack in Pakistan last month is a significant but not fatal setback for the group — and another sign that the Obama administration’s stepped-up pressure is having a real impact and disrupting the group’s activities. Al Qaeda announced his death in a message released on May 31 — and though the terrorist group is hurting, it is likely far from being on the ropes.
A bit of background: Yazid was an Egyptian close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s “No. 2.” He was involved, like Zawahiri, in the plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat in 1981 and, following their release from prison in the mid-1980s, the two created the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. That group merged with al Qaeda in 1998, and since then Yazid has worked as a fundraiser and has appeared often as a spokesman and commentator. He was actively involved in planning the September 11, 2001, attacks.
According to some reports, he was also al Qaeda’s third-highest ranking officer. If so, then he is (by my count) the seventh individual identified by U.S. intelligence as al Qaeda’s “No. 3″ since 2001 who has been killed or captured. Being No. 3 is clearly a dangerous job. For its part, al Qaeda itself has never identified anyone as the third man in its chain of command, and most likely there is more than one individual, at any one time, who reports to Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden directly.
Whether or not he was No. 3, Yazid was a key al Qaeda operative. Yazid was likely involved in al Qaeda’s plot last year to attack the New York City metro system with three suicide bombers at rush hour on the Monday after the 9/11 anniversary. Two Afghan-Americans have pleaded guilty to that plot and have said they were being directed by al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.
And, in his role as chief of operations in Afghanistan, Yazid would have been directly involved in the planning of the Dec. 30 suicide-bomber attack on the CIA’s forward operating base in Khost, which killed six officers and a senior Jordanian intelligence officer. In terms of loss of life, it was the second-worst day in CIA history, but as far as operational readiness was affected, it clearly did not interrupt drone strikes significantly.
But drones, like the one that killed Yazid, are only one part of Barack Obama’s strategy to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al Qaeda — and the U.S. president is far from achieving that goal. At best, the new pressure is impacting the terrorists’ operational tempo, but has not stopped them from planning and staging attacks on U.S. targets.
One example is Zawahiri himself. Since December, he has appeared only once in al Qaeda’s propaganda output, a brief message last month eulogizing the death of two senior al Qaeda commanders in Iraq. Before this year, Zawahiri was a frequent commentator on al Qaeda audio and video messages, often appearing every other week. His absence is probably related to the Khost attack: He was the bait that al Qaeda dangled before the CIA operatives — a prize so tempting that routine procedures were overlooked, allowing a suicide bomber fatal access to the base. Zawahiri’s absence from the airwaves has been noted in the jihadi underworld, but his ability to direct attacks on U.S. and Western targets has likely been diminished only slightly.
As for bin Laden, the most wanted man in history and the target of the largest manhunt ever conducted, CIA drones have not yet been able to get close to him, either. The last time U.S. intelligence had eyes on al Qaeda’s No. 1 was in 2001. For almost nine years since then, he has been off the radar — avoiding telephones, using trusted couriers to send messages, and receiving protection from powerful interests. But he has appeared in four audio messages so far this year, so reports of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Thus, though Yazid’s death is a significant scalp, both bin Laden and Zawahiri are still very much active. The drones will not defeat al Qaeda by themselves. Nor are they intended to; Obama’s strategy uses them as one tool in a broader diplomatic and military offensive. But this campaign, which is showing signs of progress, has a long way to go yet.
Tags: afghanistan, al Qaeda's, AlQaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden, cia, FBI, Mustafa Ahmed Mohammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, USA, war, war on terror
The real terrorist was me : US Soldier
Apr 28, 2010 war on terror
Tags: Iraq, Nato Forces, real terrorist was me, US, US Army, US Soldier, war, war on terror
VIDEO: “Nuclear Terrorism”: Al Qaeda is an Upcoming Nuclear Power according to president Obama
Apr 28, 2010 World News, war on terror
Obama is masking the real issues over nuclear weapons by presenting the idea that nuclear terrorism is a major threat, shared Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization.
“What is disturbing about this summit in Washington is the fact that the real threat to global security is nuclear war between countries. It is not Al-Qaeda which in any event is an intelligence asset of the CIA, which is the threat, ”Chossudovsky acknowledged. “It is an elusive network of organizations. The real threat is the threat of nuclear war and particularly the threat of a nuclear attack by the United States and Israel directed against Iran.”
In addition, the summit was useful for the US to establish dialogue with China and Russia regarding the nuclear program of Iran, thinks Chossudovsky. Both China and Russia are strictly against military actions against Iran and do not support economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic, while Obama recently issued a new military nuclear doctrine that admits using nuclear weapons against “rogue states” – implying Iran to be one of them.
“All the NATO countries, headed by the US and including Israel, they have nuclear weapons targeted at Iran,”noted Chossudovsky.
He stated that “The nuclear summit is in fact a smokescreen, a camouflage of the real dangers of nuclear war.”
America’s demand to transfer nuclear materials to some safe place in the US is an absurd operation, believes Chossudovsky.
Michel Chossudovsky told RT that: “As far as it goes, in the present context, the US is the most dangerous threat to global security and what this conference aims at achieving is to diffuse this understanding. It’s a PR campaign which seeks to present the nuclear threat in some distorted way, so that people who listen to the media report will believe that Al-Qaeda, Bin Laden and global terrorism is the issue, rather than the strategic objectives of the US which include now the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.”
“At this stage the US administration is not interested in negotiating, it is interested in creating an environment which will justify a possible nuclear attack on Iran,” concluded Chossudovsky.
Tags: afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, iran, Iraq, nukes, obama, USA, war, war on terror
Saudis may allow Israel’s use of air space in Iran attack
Mar 18, 2010 World News
Western security sources believe Saudi Arabia will readily let Israel use the country’s airspace to strike neighboring Iran if a war breaks out between the archenemies.
Prominent German news magazine SPIEGEL claimed in a Tuesday article that there exists a strong unity between Israel and Persian Gulf’s Arab states against Iran.
The periodical noted that Riyadh has gone so far with the idea as to speak openly to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the potential need for a military option against the Islamic Republic.
SPIEGEl also cited Western intelligence agencies who believe that the Saudis would even open up their air space to Israeli jets for an attack on Iran.
This is while the United States has been reported intent on not allowing Israeli warplanes to fly over Iraq, it added.
The report also referred to an Arab League ministerial summit where they unanimously called on the Palestinians to start a new round of US-sponsored “proximity talks” with Israel.
Observers reiterate that SPIEGEl is greatly influenced by the Israeli regime and has previously published reports that were meant to serve as an Israeli propaganda campaign ore psychological warfare against the Islamic Republic.
U.S – NATO Offensive Unravels in Afghanistan: The Longest Foreign War in U.S. History
Mar 11, 2010 afghan war
Global Research, March 8, 2010
The Pentagon offensive against the Afghan city of Marjah was public-relations media hype from the very first day. The sole purpose of the offensive in Marjah was to convince the U.S. population and increasingly tepid NATO allies that this imperialist war is winnable.
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now the longest foreign war in U.S. history, on both the air and the ground. The Pentagon described the Marjah offensive as the biggest military operation in more than eight years of occupation, but now calls it a prelude to a larger assault on the city of Kandahar.
In U.S. counterinsurgency warfare, such an offensive means dropping heavily armed troops in an area seeking to draw enemy fire. The troops then call in air support, long-range artillery fire, machine-gun fire, rockets, white phosphorous bombs and anti-personnel bombs. The latter cover the ground with bomblets that emit thousands of razor-sharp fragments.
Tens of thousands of civilians were driven from the villages of Helmand Province, and the town of Marjah was partially evacuated. But thousands of Afghans were unwilling to leave their homes and animals in the cold of winter for the hunger, instability and flimsy shelter of refugee camps. Many are too poor to leave. They ended up as targets of Pentagon weapons.
The Marjah offensive’s stated goal was to introduce a ready-made, U.S.-created local regime, staffed by an Afghan puppet administration totally dependent on U.S. power. With cynical and racist arrogance, NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “We got a government in a box ready to roll in.” (New York Times, Feb. 12)
Afghan casualties unrecorded
Throughout this war, the Pentagon and corporate media have never counted and scarcely mentioned Afghan civilian deaths, injuries and trauma from bombings, fires and destruction. Tens of thousands more die of starvation, cold and infections in crowded refugees camps, swollen cities and isolated villages.
During the U.S. offensive in Marjah, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached the milestone of 1,000. This total confirms that youth are paying the price of the lack of education and job opportunities in the U.S. In addition, suicides among returning soldiers now exceed combat deaths and injuries are about four times the deaths.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point warned of sharp increases in U.S. troop casualties in the months ahead. “What I want to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect.” (Army Times, Jan. 7)
As the two-week offensive officially ended in Marjah, bombs exploded in one of the most secure areas of Kabul. Some reporters described it as a sophisticated and well-coordinated operation in the heavily guarded capital. A car bomb targeted housing of employees from countries connected to the occupation, apparently with the aim of undermining international support for the Afghan war.
During the offensive came the announcement on Feb. 21 that the Netherlands coalition government had fallen apart, due to heated opposition of a coalition party to keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. This sealed the planned withdrawal of 2,000 Dutch troops from NATO forces in Afghanistan, as of next August.
The Netherlands was the first NATO member to announce that it is quitting. The announcement was a big setback for the U.S. and NATO, and has prompted wide media speculation of other possible NATO withdrawals from the deeply unpopular war.
A Los Angeles Times editorial on Feb. 24 stated that the Dutch “withdrawal is likely to raise concerns about a fracturing of the international commitment to Afghanistan, and about the Afghan government’s ability to provide security in the long term . … The Dutch decision should serve as a warning to the Obama administration.”
The majority of the people in almost all the NATO countries opposes the war and wants their troops out. This has become a major issue in domestic politics and elections in many countries. Canada has announced the withdrawal of its forces by the summer of 2011.
Anti-war mood undermines NATO militarism
Following the Dutch announcement, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech at the National Defense University told NATO officers and officials that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader goals. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment. … Right now the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.” (New York Times, Feb. 24)
Gates also reminded NATO officials that, not counting U.S. forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were scheduled to increase to 50,000 this year — from 30,000 last year.
The total 43-country International Security Assistance Force, including U.S. soldiers, is presently at 140,000 troops in Afghanistan.
As journalist Rick Rozoff summed up a year ago: “The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the 60 years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and 12 other European and Caucasus nations linked to NATO. …
“The 12 European NATO partners who have sent troops in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent’s five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The European NATO and partnership deployments count among their number troops from six former Soviet Republics — with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic states … including airbases and troop and naval deployments in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean (where the Japanese navy has been assisting).” (rickrozoff.wordpress.com, March 25, 2009)
Military units from Australia, New Zealand, Jordan, Colombia and South Korea are also stationed in Afghanistan.
Afghans have a right to resist
Despite all these occupation forces, Afghanistan has become an imperialist quagmire with no stability, no security and no end in sight.
The resistance in Afghanistan has gained ground and broad support as it becomes clear to the whole population that U.S./NATO forces have brought only racist arrogance, corruption, repression and greater poverty. While occupation forces label all resistance as terrorism and Taliban-inspired, increasingly Afghans see resistance as a right and a patriotic or religious duty. It is essential in the period ahead that the anti-war movement supports the right of the Afghan people to resist this criminal occupation and increases the effort to bring all troops home now.
Tags: afghan war, afghanistan, cia, Marjah, U.S. History, war, war on terror
A U.S.-Trained Pakistani Is Said to Support the Taliban
Mar 4, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: March 4, 2010
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.
A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.
In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Despite Pakistan’s recent arrest of several high-level Taliban commanders, men like Colonel Imam sit at the center of the questions that linger around what Pakistan’s actual intentions are toward the Taliban.
American and NATO officials suspect that retired officers like Colonel Imam have served as a quasi-official bridge to Taliban leaders and their rank and file as well as other militant groups.
Now retired, Colonel Imam (his real name is Brig. Sultan Amir) lives in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, just yards from the Pakistani Army headquarters.
In the interviews, Colonel Imam denied any continued link to the Taliban. But he admitted that some “freelancers” — meaning former Pakistani military or intelligence officials — might still be assisting the insurgents.
If Colonel Imam personifies the double edge of Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban, he also embodies the deep connection Pakistan has to the Afghan insurgents, and possibly the key to controlling them.
Once a promising protégé for the United States, he underwent Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1974, learning in particular the use of explosives, and he went on to do a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division.
On his return to Pakistan, he taught insurgent tactics to the first Afghan students who fled the country’s Communist revolution in 1978, among them future resistance leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood. He then worked closely with the C.I.A. to train and support thousands of guerrilla fighters for the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Army throughout the 1980s.
Once the Soviets were pushed out, the Taliban emerged and Colonel Imam, then serving as a Pakistani consular official in Afghanistan, provided critical support to their bid to rule the country, Western officials said.
By his own account, he was so close to the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, that he visited him in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and left only when the American bombing campaign began later in 2001. He says he has not returned since. His parting advice to Mullah Omar, he said, was to fight on, but stick to guerrilla tactics.
Today, Colonel Imam speaks highly of the Americans he worked with. But he predicts failure for the United States in Afghanistan. While his views are clearly colored by his ardor for the Taliban cause, they also carry the weight of someone who knows his subject well.
The Taliban cannot be defeated, he said, and they will not be weakened by the recent capture of senior commanders, including the No.2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The Taliban movement is so devolved, he said, that commanders on the ground make most of their own decisions and can raise money and arrange for weapons supplies themselves.
“The Taliban cannot be forced out, you cannot subjugate them,” he said. “But they can tire the Americans. In another three to four years, the Americans will be tired.”
He criticized President Obama’s decision last year to send more American troops into Afghanistan. “They are doing what you should never do in military strategy, reinforcing the error,” he said.
“They will have more convoys, more planes, more supply convoys, and the insurgents will have a bigger target,” he added. “The insurgents are very happy.”
The plan by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, to win over the Afghan people while pressing the Taliban militarily could have worked in 2003 or 2004, when the Taliban were weak and had less support, but now the Taliban had a presence in virtually every province, he said.
He also said the idea of paying members of the Taliban to change sides would not work and only bogus figures would come forward. “It is shameful for a superpower to bribe,” he said.
Meanwhile, he has nothing but praise for Mullah Omar, who is suspected of hiding in Pakistan today. Of all the thousands of men he trained, he said, religious students like Mullah Omar were the most “formidable” opponents because of their commitment.
The Taliban had been tainted in recent years by bad characters joining the movement and committing crimes, and Mullah Omar was now cracking down on them, he said.
He pointedly criticized the Pakistani Taliban who turned to fight the Pakistani Army in Swat last year and unleashed a wave of bombings in Pakistan’s cities. They were “troublemakers” that should be “neutralized,” he said.
Yet for Afghanistan, the solution was to negotiate with the Taliban leadership, he said. Mullah Omar wants peace and is capable of compromise, he said.
He was also the only leader who could keep Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan or in abeyance, including Osama bin Laden, he said. Mullah Omar’s popular support was such that Mr. bin Laden would have to listen, he said.
Mullah Omar had refused to hand over Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 2001 because he calculated that if he did, it would be only the first of many demands placed on him, he said.
Tags: afghanistan, taliban, war, war on terror
‘Pak can damage India in N-war’ says Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan
Feb 21, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan, pakistan politics
The Asian Age
Islamabad, Feb. 20: Pakistan’s nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan has said that in the event of a nuclear war, Pakistan can inflict irreparable damage to India.
“Neither India can inflict any loss to Pakistan nor destroy Lahore. However, Pakistan can inflict irreparable loss on India (in case of a nuclear war),” Dr Khan said.
He however, said, “Neither we can conquer New Delhi and Agra, nor India can destroy Lahore and dare to inflict loss on Pakistan.”
Talking to this newspaper, he said, “We are Muslims and India is a Hindu state and an isolated country. But we (the Muslims) talk more and work very less.”
About giving civil nuclear technology to India by the US, he said the Americans do not like to extend such generosity to the Muslim countries. “The worries of the Western countries about falling of Pakistani nuclear arsenal into the hands of militants are unfounded. The US does not trust Pakistan but has confidence in India,” Dr Khan said.
The scientist rejected that he exported nuclear secrets to any country including Iran. “This was a drama created (former military ruler) Pervez Musharraf. He is a liar and tried to falsely implicate me,” Dr Khan said. “He (Mr Musharraf) should be tried under treason charges for levelling allegations on me,” the scientist said.
Tags: Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, N-war, war
A new understanding for the U.S. and Pakistan?
Feb 11, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By Imtiaz Gul, FP
During a briefing at his office in the garrison town of Rawalpindi earlier this month, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani staunchly defended Pakistan’s efforts to combat the militant groups operating on its territory, while pointing toward the still-prominent perceived threat from India as a reason for not taking the operations further.
“During our counterterror campaign we have lost 2,273 army and paramilitary soldiers including three generals, five brigadiers, as many as 73 senior intelligence operatives, and also faced the blowback from Islamist militants,” Kayani told us, citing internal instability, a violent spate of suicide bombings — 87 in 2009 alone — and an adverse impact on Pakistan’s economy.
The Pakistani Army has been conducting counterinsurgency campaigns in 11 tribal areas plus Swat since 2007, including some 209 major military operations, and has committed almost 150,000 of its 550,000-troop army to this effort in the northwestern border regions, the general told us. Kayani noted that Pakistan remains concerned about India’s Pakistan-specific military capability, as six of India’s 13 strike corps are currently deployed along the border, and India’s involvement in Afghanistan is ongoing.
Kayani also pointed to the “Cold Start doctrine” propounded by archrival India and the talk of “limited war” under a “nuclear overhang,” suggested by the outgoing Indian army chief in November, saying that this policy and rhetoric do alarm Pakistan’s security apparatus. “You plan on an adversary’s capability and not intentions,” Kayani explained. While the capability takes years to build, intentions may change overnight and Pakistan simply cannot depend on other’s intentions, he reasoned.
“I explained to NATO leaders in Brussels [during a recent security conference there] that understanding Pakistan’s strategic framework would help them understand the situation in a much better way,” Kayani said. Before his late January presentation in Brussels, Kayani had made a similar forceful case before the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. “If you care about India getting upset, care about us as well. You have to balance the concern for India with concern for our interests,” was the blunt message he described.
Kayani reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to a “peaceful, stable, and friendly Afghanistan.” As he said earlier this month, “We cannot wish for Afghanistan anything that we don’t wish for Pakistan.” In this context he brushed aside the allegations of Pakistan pursuing “a strategic depth policy” in Afghanistan. “This does not imply controlling Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is peaceful, stable, and friendly we have our strategic depth because our western border is secure… You’re not looking both ways — as simple as that.”
Kayani again insisted that Pakistan must “consolidate our gains and fully stabilize the areas secured, lest they fall back to terrorists,” in response to the oft-repeated demand from the U.S. that Pakistan move against militants based in North Waziristan. “Constraints of our capability to absorb and operate, limited cutting edge counterintelligence and counterterrorism capability, and limited budgetary space should be factored in,” he said, referring to last fall’s Pakistani military operations in South Waziristan, which had served as a of terrorism for Pakistani, Arab, and Uzbek Islamist militants. Kayani explained that the Army had managed to hamper militant logistics and restrict operating space in North Waziristan.
From that, it’s straightforward to discern that Kayani’s army would far prefer to choose the scale and timing of any military operations into North Waziristan, rather than be dictated to by the United States. The Army says that any “military adventures into the tribal regions require extreme caution and consideration for the future.” International troops will not be in Afghanistan forever, the Pakistani argument runs, so in several years Pakistan will be on its own to co-exist with the very tribes that would be hurt when or if the Pakistani Army moves against the militants nestled among them. Thus, Kayani has been explaining to the U.S. and NATO that Pakistan must balance the West’s comparatively short-term interests in containing and eliminating the insurgencies with its own long-term objectives, namely securing its western border without offending the tribes that live in that region.
And when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in December that he “couldn’t give the Pakistani Army anything but an ‘A’ for how they’ve conducted their battle so far,” it was after Mullen had spent several hours flying over the mountains and gorges of Pakistan’s Swat Valley with Kayani. Mullen was apparently so impressed that he asked Kayani to take the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal on a similar tour so he could “get a sense of how and what you need to fight in such a difficult terrain,” according to the general.
McChrystal flew over from Kabul shortly thereafter for the detailed aerial view of Swat’s hilly and forested topography that had served as a natural sanctuary for the terrorists of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and left with an appreciation for Pakistan’s counterinsurgency campaign, according to Kayani. For Kayani, who took charge of Pakistan’s army in November 2007, this was hard-earned praise.
And recently, President Obama asked Congress for an additional $500 million to support Pakistan. If approved, the ‘Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund’ would jump to $1.2 billion in the fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2010, and the money under the fund would be used to train and equip the Pakistan military to fight militants more effectively along the Afghan border.
Several Pakistani generals, including Kayani, believe the praise by Mullen and the subsequent request by Obama for additional counterinsurgency funding for their anti-militant reflects a new understanding among the coalition of Pakistani concerns and constraints. The language and vocabulary emanating from Washington and London toward Islamabad has changed in recent months, a prerequisite for creating greater trust among the coalition partners, according to Pakistani generals. Let us see what wonders the changed vocabulary can work in the coming months.
Tags: cia, Gen Kiyani, obama, Pak Army, Pakistan, US, war, war on terror
The Timeless Face of Terror
Feb 1, 2010 war on terror
terrorists are no more representatives of their religion than Nazis or Communists were of Christianity. Kati Marton on calling a spade a spade.
I have spent the last two years studying the face of Terror. No, not the bearded, turbaned image of an Al Qaeda cave dweller, but another version, one that unspooled as I translated my family’s secret police file in the archives of the Hungarian Communist Party. The two faces are really not that different.
The communists, like Al Qaeda, started with a utopian dream of righting wrongs and empowering the powerless. Even the Nazis saw themselves in such a light: They would restore jobs and honor to their humbled countrymen. For all these movements, a more perfect world beckoned at the end of the rainbow. This is how they attracted their fanatical followers even as they used terror and fear to gain power.
It is Muslims who are the primary victims of Al Qaeda’s terror in the name of their religion.
I first saw the true face of fear when, as a six-year old whose parents had just been arrested, I was taken by uniformed agents of the state to the house of my mother’s best friend for shelter. But when that lady saw those agents of terror, she refused to open her front door, and my sister and I were left homeless.
Such regimes succeed because most people are not killers, and because most of us simply cannot imagine the unimaginable—the extreme brutality of these movements. Most of us cannot wrap our minds around factories whose sole product is death, or planes carrying men, women, and children suddenly turned into missiles.
Our mistake is not to see these dangers from the outset. We have to do a better job of calling terrorists what they are: enraged killers who are winning the propaganda war. For much too long, we have allowed cold-blooded murderers to label themselves and what they stand for.
But Al Qaeda is no more a descendent of the great Abrahamic religions than the communists who arrested, imprisoned, and tortured my parents were committed to creating a peoples’ paradise in Eastern Europe. If the Vatican was less than forceful in separating Christianity from the horrors of the fascists, so, too, are Islamic leaders too timid in stating that their religion does not condone or reward the killing of the innocent.
In newly opened communist secret police files, I learned for the first time that my father, Communist Hungary’s last independent journalist, was forced to stand facing a wall while two agents shouted obscenities at him for endless hours. Thus was he broken and forced to “confess” that he was a CIA agent. In desperation he tried to commit suicide. But first he tried to smuggle a letter to my mother instructing her to divorce him, marry a westerner, and make sure his children forgot him. This was the result of one of the twentieth century’s bold experiments on humans—and all in the name of the great utopian vision of a workers’ state, conjured up by a pair of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Marx and Engels.
The Nazis, too, had their grandiose labels and their promises. My grandparents did not survive that wave of insanity. For their crime of being less than 100 percent pure Hungarians (whatever that is), they were shoved into airless trains that took them to the gas chambers.
I wait for the great religious humanists of our day to say loudly and clearly that the underwear bomber has as little to do with Islam as the secret police officer who browbeat my father into a confession did with Marx’s utopia. It is true that when the Nazis were using the cover of Christianity in their persecution of Jews, the Vatican’s reaction was much too restrained. Today, it is Muslims who are the primary victims of Al Qaeda’s terror in the name of their religion. I cannot forget Mohammed Atta’s final instruction before he launched the 9/11 massacre: No pregnant woman, the killer prescribed, should be allowed near his grave, as that would “defile” his final resting place. Can any religion claim such a man as its own?
Arthur Koestler, a countryman of mine, himself seduced by the false god of communism, once noted, “a dispassionate observer from a more advanced planet, who could take in human history from Cro-Magnon to Auschwitz would come to the conclusion that our race is a very sick biological product.”
Our challenge is to prove Koestler wrong. We can start by not allowing cold-blooded killers to deceive us about who they are: murderers wearing different uniforms.
Kati Marton’s latest book, Enemies of the People – My Family’s Journey to America, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
Tags: afghanistan, Alqaeda, taliban, US, war
Five Sisters
Jan 28, 2010 Videos
A terrific song and compilation. In memory of Palestinian children murdered
Tags: Five Sisters, Gazza, Palestinian, war
