It is fashionable today (if you are a member of the chattering classes) to proclaim that Islam and Muslims are not the enemy. Proponents of this position assert that Islam is really the "Religion of Peace" and those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Allah are despoilers of a vast and good religious tradition.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who maintain, invoking the Quran and other scriptural material, that Islam is the enemy. The proponents of this position point to both the essential doctrine of Islam and the behavior of Islamic regimes throughout history. From these twin pillars, the view of the Islamist/jihadist actions today are organic productions of the religion itself.
This "debate" of perspectives is important only because of its implications for policy. Defeating those who employ terror to pursue political ends requires understanding both what those ends might be and the depth of motivation in seeking them.
Two major schools of thought in recent years have focused either upon the specific demands contained in Osama bin Ladin's original "declaration of war" against the US or on the scriptural requirement that Muslims must fight on until the entire human race submits to Allah and the one true prophet, Mohammad.
To characterise the arrow-shooting and spear-chucking that has occurred between partisans of these two interpretations of Islamist/jihadist goals and motives as puerile is almost too kind. It is flatly irrelevant since it is the intellectual equivalent of parsing between the brown cookies and the white goop in the center to determine why Oreo cookies taste the way they do.
Obviously, both the immediate, real world goals and the injunctions of True Belief Islam are at work. Osama and Company as well as others of the policy-oriented jihadist group have narrow, definable political goals. Typically, and as unsurprising as a sunrise, these goals always demand the American withdrawal from the Mideast and Northwest Asia.
It is one more version of the hoary Yankee-go-home demand that has gurgled up time after time for more than a half-century now. The Osama and Company version is simply more extensive in its geographic coverage and bloody in its framing.
Supporting the jihad now! message of the politics oriented group is the very nature of Islam. At least a significant portion of the writings which have defined both the religion and the duties of its adherents since the prophetic giddy-up in the deserts of Arabia nearly a millennium and a half ago are easily invoked to assist in the motivation of jihadists.
The core documents of Islam, like those of Christianity and Judaism, are ambiguous, internally contradictory and wide open to interpretation by those having both religious authority and a temporal agenda. The Quran, the Hidith, the life of Mohammad all provide rich and fertile pickings for anyone with a set of political objectives here in the real world of flesh, blood, fear, hatred and death.
It is a historical commonplace that authoritarian rulers love religion. As long as those in authority can control the interpretation of the scriptures doled out to those who occupy the position best known as under-the-thumb, religion is a powerful tool for maintaining the governmental status quo.
The countries which comprise the historic heartland of Islam are all authoritarian. Saudi Arabia nearly defines the term "authoritarian" today. Spreading out from the rocky deserts of the Muslim "fatherland" and looking at other Muslim dominated states, what does one see?
That's right, bucko. Authoritarian states. While some Muslim dominated states may flirt with and even engage with democracy from time to time, the leitmotif is authoritarian.
Despots--and get a grip on it, most Muslim states are closer to the despotate than the democratic end of the political spectrum--fear and oppose change. They fear change because it may not be controllable. It may change the status quo.
Ferment, debate, disagreement bring change first in thinking and then in acting. This must not be allowed to happen. Invoking religion in support of community solidarity, intellectual sterility and in opposition to an external enemy is the finest prop despotates can have.
The absence of ferment, debate and disagreement history has demonstrated time after time leads to an equal absence of progress. It doesn't matter what the area might be, economics, technology, science, politics, social complexity--no tolerance, no openness to debate means no progress, no change, no flux.
A perfect condition if one is a retarded despot.
This is why the Geek is of the view that the current war is not a "clash of civilizations." Nor is it one which is religious per se, a battle between Jews and Christians on one side and Muslims on the other.
If anything the war between the West and the Islamist/jihadist movement is one between flux and stasis. It is one between democracy in all its several permutations and despotism in its different garbs. It is, in a real sense, yet one more version of the centuries old struggle between the distribution of power to the many and the garnering of power to the (very) few.
More fundamentally the current war is between people who can accept and even be comfortable with the risks and uncertainties of constant change, of unending flux, of endless gavottes of power transfer and those for whom risk is unacceptable and unsettling in the extreme, those who seek certainty in an eternal stasis and for whom the grave is an agreeable anodyne for fear.
Islam is a religion which--far more than the Judaism which emerged from the diaspora or the Christianity which evolved from the wars of the Reformation and its follow-on, the Enlightenment--lends itself to the needs of the fearful and those who keep power by feeding fear and its antidote, religion: the despots.
The time has come for a change. It is necessary to get a grip on the nature of our enemy. It shouldn't be hard. The enemy today is the same one which we in the West--and increasingly in the East--have faced before.
The enemy is the despot. The ruler who seeks to stop all change to the greatest extent possible. The ruler who invokes those parts of Islam which stoke fear and celebrate the submission of the individual to authority. The ruler who counsels that death with certainty is infinitely preferable to life with risk.
The enemy is not simply the retard despots who ramrod al-Qaeda, Taliban or Lashkar e-Tayyabe. The enemy is also the retard despots who rule Iran, Saudi Arabia, even those despots who hide behind a thin scrim of pseudo-democracy such as exists in Egypt and Algeria, Kuwait and Yemen. There are others, you can name them for yourself.
Defining the nature of the enemy, understanding his forms and guises, are as important as knowing his name and address. Without definition and understanding as well as having the moral and intellectual courage to act upon these, it is impossible to formulate and execute realistic policy which seeks to preserve, protect, and advance the national and strategic interests of the United States.
Isn't it about time we did that?
Showing posts with label Lashkar e-Tayyabe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lashkar e-Tayyabe. Show all posts
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Jihadists Change The Rules Of The Game--Again
The purpose of terrorism, Lenin once observed, is to terrorise. To terrorise, the terrorist must attract attention--a lot of attention. This means staging spectacular operations that shift the paradigm.
Al-Qaeda shifted the defining paradigm on 9/11. This group pushed the envelop of suicide bombing attacks later in both London and Madrid.
These successes were such because each attack fell outside the limits of previous experience. Put simply, the security and intelligence structures of the US, the UK, and Spain had not foreseen terrorist acts of this nature and quality. Nothing in the recent institutional memory of any of these target countries had sensitised the defenders toward new forms of attack.
In the case of the US there had been a dearth of foreign sponsored attacks delivered against domestic targets. With the exception of the truck bomb attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma, all of the American experience with terrorism had been limited to low casualty bombings in which only the first attempt on the World Trade Center had generated much national attention.
Attenuating the lessons which might have been learned from the first WTC attack was the speed with which the men responsible were identified, arrested, and convicted. It was a counter-terror slam dunk. When the high-fiving was done, no one bothered to take a closer, harder look at what the bad guys might do next time--or even if there would be a domestic next time.
Admittedly, al-Qaeda helped reinforce the lack of American thinking. The next efforts by the group were off-shore. They were successful, but in a real sense, stereotyped: Surface based attacks using suicide vehicle-borne, improvised explosive devices.
The possibility of an air delivered attack was not considered probable. Neither, the available evidence suggests strongly, was the possibility of a high body-count attack on a CONUS target.
The UK had much experience with terrorism thanks to the lengthy and occasionally creative campaign by Irish organisations. In a real sense, the presence of terror had become part of the urban scene not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the UK. Terror could be and was marginalised because the Irish version had been low in its body count yield, and rarely escalated beyond the small IED variety.
The coordinated attacks on the London subway system on 7 July 2002 marked a genuine paradigm shift in recent British experience. The unsuccessful attempt to emulate the initial set of strikes two weeks later demonstrates that the 7/7 operation was not an anomaly.
The situation in Spain was virtually identical to that in the UK. The Spanish security agencies and public had undergone a long acquaintanceship with terror thanks to ETA. While some of the Basque separatist operations were both high visibility and bloody, most had been ho-hum and relatively lacking in bombs resulting in body parts strewn across the landscape.
The Madrid attacks were something else again. They were sophisticated in timing and very deadly in their consequences. For the Spanish as for the Brits and the Yankees, the rules of the game had been changed.
Over the past six years, particularly in the past two, al-Qaeda has experienced a steady decline from the high point of its fortunes following the shocks of the three paradigm shifting bombings. The largest combat capable component of the al-Qaeda franchise, al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been destroyed as an effective paramilitary formation--ironically in large measure at the hands of Sunni tribesmen whom al-Qaeda had alienated.
Other than in the FATA and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers such as Taliban have enjoyed little success in capturing either the attention of the world or greater support within the Mideast. (OK. To err on the side of accuracy, the emergence of al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa has been a bothersome uptick in the jihadist success quotient.)
Comes now Lshkar e-Tayyeba. If initial indicators which point to this group having been behind the Mumbai are reinforced in coming days, credit can be given to this long standing armed group hailing from Pakistan for shifting the paradigm of terrorism.
The wave of the future may well be more commando type operations involving a small number of well trained, well equipped individuals with excellent reconnaissance, good command, control and communications and, while being willing to die, are not expected to become "martyrs." If this proves to be the case, we will have to spend a lot less time gnashing our teeth over terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
It also means we will have to get a grip on two very unpleasant but historically undeniable facts. The jihadists have the initiative, and small commando units as well as their indigenous "pilot teams" are even harder to detect and defeat in the pre-mission phase than other forms of terror producing activities.
Terrorists, like guerrilla insurgents, enjoy the initiative in comparison with their opponents. As war after war has demonstrated, the asymmetrical contest is decided by the capacity to seize and maintain the initiative. This, in turn, is based on the political wills of the two contestants.
The side with the greater political will ultimately will prevail over the side with the weaker. This has been true in every insurgency over the past four hundred years. It is equally true in a war between non-state actors using terror as their preferred tactic and the states which oppose them.
The Mumbai model has powerful appeals for the terrorist.
First, the men pulling the triggers need be no more eager or ready ot die than any well-trained, well-motivated special forces trooper. This enlarges the recruitment pool. It also conserves expensively developed assets.
Then, consider contemporary technology. Cell phones and social networking sites such as Twitter provide an excellent means of command, control and communication. These and other features of virtual life assure that the impact of the operation will be transmitted instantly and effortlessly around the world without any real chance of target government intervention.
Of course, the results of a meticulously researched and planned operation that is pushed home with vigor and resolve will provide benefits to the attacker--including off-stage sponsors--that greatly exceeds the costs involved.
Check it out. Low risk. Low investment. High payoff. Now, that's a deal.
The greatest part of the investment is time. It takes time to recruit, select, and train the operational personnel. It takes time to properly research the target. It takes time to put the pilot teams in place with appropriate cover. It takes time to infiltrate the trigger pullers.
It takes time to pull off an operation such as that in Mumbai that was more logistically complex than even the 9/11 attacks. Given the initial impact, however, it was time very well used.
Time. To Americans in particular, time is a commodity to be spent efficiently. We hate spending a lot of time on things--particularly unpleasant activities. Like war. War is a very unpleasant matter on which to expend time.
But, history proves beyond a reasonable doubt that in asymmetrical conflict, the side which is more willing to spend time pursuing its goals is the side which will win. Again, it is a matter of political will.
The expenditure of months, even years, on the run up to a major spectacular such as the Mumbai attacks is well worth it from the perspective of the attacker. Making the costs of time and lives even more worthwhile is the high probability that some of the attackers have escaped with an invaluable cargo of lessons-learned.
While the actual number of individuals involved either directly or in support roles is not yet known and probably never will be, it is safe to assert that the the Indian authorities are knowingly lying when it is asserted that only ten men were responsible for the deaths and damage resulting from nearly simultaneous attacks on ten targets.
Lashkar e-Tayyeba appears to have reinvigorated international terrorism as a tactic just as al-Qaeda is fading everywhere but the chaotic areas of FATA and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda's number two capo, al-Zawahiri, released a new (and uncharacteristically rambling) video which carried the same tired messages of his earlier efforts as the Mumbai attack was unfolding.
There might be a deliciously ironic symbolism here. In a way, the juxtaposition of the old jihadist's focus on the Mideast and the blood covered videos from Mumbai show the passing of the old and the coming of the new.
Most importantly, the combination of the old (al-Zawahiri) and the new (Lashkar e-Tayyeba) shows the incoming administration of Barack Obama that an old cliche obtains as he comes into office.
The cliche?
"The more things change, the more thay stay the same."
Al-Qaeda shifted the defining paradigm on 9/11. This group pushed the envelop of suicide bombing attacks later in both London and Madrid.
These successes were such because each attack fell outside the limits of previous experience. Put simply, the security and intelligence structures of the US, the UK, and Spain had not foreseen terrorist acts of this nature and quality. Nothing in the recent institutional memory of any of these target countries had sensitised the defenders toward new forms of attack.
In the case of the US there had been a dearth of foreign sponsored attacks delivered against domestic targets. With the exception of the truck bomb attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma, all of the American experience with terrorism had been limited to low casualty bombings in which only the first attempt on the World Trade Center had generated much national attention.
Attenuating the lessons which might have been learned from the first WTC attack was the speed with which the men responsible were identified, arrested, and convicted. It was a counter-terror slam dunk. When the high-fiving was done, no one bothered to take a closer, harder look at what the bad guys might do next time--or even if there would be a domestic next time.
Admittedly, al-Qaeda helped reinforce the lack of American thinking. The next efforts by the group were off-shore. They were successful, but in a real sense, stereotyped: Surface based attacks using suicide vehicle-borne, improvised explosive devices.
The possibility of an air delivered attack was not considered probable. Neither, the available evidence suggests strongly, was the possibility of a high body-count attack on a CONUS target.
The UK had much experience with terrorism thanks to the lengthy and occasionally creative campaign by Irish organisations. In a real sense, the presence of terror had become part of the urban scene not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the UK. Terror could be and was marginalised because the Irish version had been low in its body count yield, and rarely escalated beyond the small IED variety.
The coordinated attacks on the London subway system on 7 July 2002 marked a genuine paradigm shift in recent British experience. The unsuccessful attempt to emulate the initial set of strikes two weeks later demonstrates that the 7/7 operation was not an anomaly.
The situation in Spain was virtually identical to that in the UK. The Spanish security agencies and public had undergone a long acquaintanceship with terror thanks to ETA. While some of the Basque separatist operations were both high visibility and bloody, most had been ho-hum and relatively lacking in bombs resulting in body parts strewn across the landscape.
The Madrid attacks were something else again. They were sophisticated in timing and very deadly in their consequences. For the Spanish as for the Brits and the Yankees, the rules of the game had been changed.
Over the past six years, particularly in the past two, al-Qaeda has experienced a steady decline from the high point of its fortunes following the shocks of the three paradigm shifting bombings. The largest combat capable component of the al-Qaeda franchise, al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been destroyed as an effective paramilitary formation--ironically in large measure at the hands of Sunni tribesmen whom al-Qaeda had alienated.
Other than in the FATA and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers such as Taliban have enjoyed little success in capturing either the attention of the world or greater support within the Mideast. (OK. To err on the side of accuracy, the emergence of al-Qaeda affiliates in North Africa has been a bothersome uptick in the jihadist success quotient.)
Comes now Lshkar e-Tayyeba. If initial indicators which point to this group having been behind the Mumbai are reinforced in coming days, credit can be given to this long standing armed group hailing from Pakistan for shifting the paradigm of terrorism.
The wave of the future may well be more commando type operations involving a small number of well trained, well equipped individuals with excellent reconnaissance, good command, control and communications and, while being willing to die, are not expected to become "martyrs." If this proves to be the case, we will have to spend a lot less time gnashing our teeth over terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
It also means we will have to get a grip on two very unpleasant but historically undeniable facts. The jihadists have the initiative, and small commando units as well as their indigenous "pilot teams" are even harder to detect and defeat in the pre-mission phase than other forms of terror producing activities.
Terrorists, like guerrilla insurgents, enjoy the initiative in comparison with their opponents. As war after war has demonstrated, the asymmetrical contest is decided by the capacity to seize and maintain the initiative. This, in turn, is based on the political wills of the two contestants.
The side with the greater political will ultimately will prevail over the side with the weaker. This has been true in every insurgency over the past four hundred years. It is equally true in a war between non-state actors using terror as their preferred tactic and the states which oppose them.
The Mumbai model has powerful appeals for the terrorist.
First, the men pulling the triggers need be no more eager or ready ot die than any well-trained, well-motivated special forces trooper. This enlarges the recruitment pool. It also conserves expensively developed assets.
Then, consider contemporary technology. Cell phones and social networking sites such as Twitter provide an excellent means of command, control and communication. These and other features of virtual life assure that the impact of the operation will be transmitted instantly and effortlessly around the world without any real chance of target government intervention.
Of course, the results of a meticulously researched and planned operation that is pushed home with vigor and resolve will provide benefits to the attacker--including off-stage sponsors--that greatly exceeds the costs involved.
Check it out. Low risk. Low investment. High payoff. Now, that's a deal.
The greatest part of the investment is time. It takes time to recruit, select, and train the operational personnel. It takes time to properly research the target. It takes time to put the pilot teams in place with appropriate cover. It takes time to infiltrate the trigger pullers.
It takes time to pull off an operation such as that in Mumbai that was more logistically complex than even the 9/11 attacks. Given the initial impact, however, it was time very well used.
Time. To Americans in particular, time is a commodity to be spent efficiently. We hate spending a lot of time on things--particularly unpleasant activities. Like war. War is a very unpleasant matter on which to expend time.
But, history proves beyond a reasonable doubt that in asymmetrical conflict, the side which is more willing to spend time pursuing its goals is the side which will win. Again, it is a matter of political will.
The expenditure of months, even years, on the run up to a major spectacular such as the Mumbai attacks is well worth it from the perspective of the attacker. Making the costs of time and lives even more worthwhile is the high probability that some of the attackers have escaped with an invaluable cargo of lessons-learned.
While the actual number of individuals involved either directly or in support roles is not yet known and probably never will be, it is safe to assert that the the Indian authorities are knowingly lying when it is asserted that only ten men were responsible for the deaths and damage resulting from nearly simultaneous attacks on ten targets.
Lashkar e-Tayyeba appears to have reinvigorated international terrorism as a tactic just as al-Qaeda is fading everywhere but the chaotic areas of FATA and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda's number two capo, al-Zawahiri, released a new (and uncharacteristically rambling) video which carried the same tired messages of his earlier efforts as the Mumbai attack was unfolding.
There might be a deliciously ironic symbolism here. In a way, the juxtaposition of the old jihadist's focus on the Mideast and the blood covered videos from Mumbai show the passing of the old and the coming of the new.
Most importantly, the combination of the old (al-Zawahiri) and the new (Lashkar e-Tayyeba) shows the incoming administration of Barack Obama that an old cliche obtains as he comes into office.
The cliche?
"The more things change, the more thay stay the same."
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