Month: July 2011

Jason Ditz reported today on the contradictory claims simultaneously coming from the government about al Qaeda’s strength or weakness now and going forward. Chris Preble has a related post up at Cato:

A front-page story in today’s Washington Post reports that al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and finds that there is even talk among senior defense and intelligence officials of the organization’s imminent demise.

[…] It is unfortunate that this story is filed in the “news” category. Al Qaeda has been on the ropes for some time. It is, at best, “a fragmented and unmanageable movement.“ But if senior officials are willing to speak so publicly about our recent gains, it may signal something significant.

As many have noted, one of AQ’s goals (and the goal of many other terrorist organizations) is to induce a counterproductive and self-injurious overreaction on the part of its target audience or government. The best approach, though it is difficult to achieve in practice, is to avoid terrorizing ourselves. If, many years from now, historians conclude that AQ was never as threatening as we made it out to be, they may deem the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on homeland security post-9/11, and the trillions more spent on wars that were once believed connected to the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), to have been an enormous waste of resources. We will be seen as having played into Osama bin Laden’s “bleed and bankruptcy” strategy.

As for the contradiction in analysis vis-à-vis al Qaeda’s strength or weakness Preble speculates:

If Secretary of Defense Panetta is feeling confident, the folks in Foggy Bottom appear not to have received the memo. This policy disconnect–with some officials believing we are safer while others warn of impending danger–may be caused by bureaucratic inertia, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, or merely an elaborate scheme to deflect blame in the unlikely event that an attack occurs at some later date.

He is perhaps partially right. Bureaucratic inertia and the covering-your-ass game of politics may certainly be a part of why the State Department and various political figures inflate the threat level al Qaeda poses, despite intelligence officials’ estimation to the contrary. But I think there are more fundamental reasons. First of all, this terrorist threat remains a principal pretext for imperial foreign policy. Without it, difficulties arise in attempting to justify fantastical and unnecessary new military targets or invasive surveillance policies or even just the prolongation of our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secondly, there is a constituency for threat inflation throughout the electorate. Influential and active political lobbies regard a focus on Islamic terrorism to be a prerequisite of any politician’s favorability. The rest of the public simply falls for a politics based on fear and paternalistic military hawkishness.

If the intelligence community is correct about the relatively weakened state of al Qaeda and affiliated groups, as I suspect they are, this truly a miracle and speaks primarily to what a weak organization they were from the beginning. Virtually every step of the way, Washington has chosen and pursued exactly the policies which would exacerbate anti-American sentiment and influence potential extremists to engage in retaliatory attacks. If the threat is now weak, imagine how nonexistent it would be if America stopped supporting the systematic oppression of Palestinians, pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo and other torture prisons, stopped giving money, weapons, and diplomatic cover to the worst dictatorships of the Middle East, ended the drone program in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, ended harsh sanctions and aggressive threats towards Iran, stopped bombing Libya unnecessarily and illegally, and dismantled our elaborate military empire. That is the real policy of “disrupt, dismantle, and destroy.“

In yet another attempt at destabilizing Iran, Hillary Clinton will soon announce a decision by US State Department on whether or not to remove Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or “the people’s holy warriors,” from its terrorism registry. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), cautioned that doing so “would allow the Mujahedin to receive US funding and become a powerful force in support of war with Iran, just like the Iraqi exiles who deceived us into war with Iraq did.”

In an age where the word terrorism or bomb is enough to get you arrested and thrown out of the airport, why are American officials and policy wonks pressing for the removal of MEK from terror watch list? They, just like the Taliban and the Contras, are valuable pawns, or so they think,  in the quest for American dominance of the Middle East. MEK is so highly valued by the war-with-Iran crowd because they were the group that “revealed” the Natanz nuclear site and brought to light documents concerning the Iranian nuclear program in 2002. As Gareth Porter argued, the documents provided by MEK and their political extension, the National Council of Resistance in Iran, were fabricated:

The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very sceptical about their authenticity.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is “doubt over the provenance of the computer”.

A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, “I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt.”

Scott Ritter, the former U.S. military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.

The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.

Additionally, MEK’s “discovery” of the Natanz site was doubted by many keen observers of Iranian politics who noted the groups friendly relationship with Israel, as well as their lack of key posts in government positions that would have made any relevant information hard to come by.

Since 2002, new information has emerged indicating that the MEK did not obtain the 2002 data on Natanz itself but received it from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Yossi Melman and Meier Javadanfar, who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear programme last year, write that they were told by “very senior Israeli Intelligence officials” in late 2006 that Israeli intelligence had known about Natanz for a full year before the Iranian group’s press conference. They explained that they had chosen not to reveal it to the public “because of safety concerns for the sources that provided the information”.

…

Israel has maintained a relationship with the MEK since the late 1990s, according to Bruck, including assistance to the organisation in beaming broadcasts by the NCRI from Paris into Iran. An Israeli diplomat confirmed that Israel had found the MEK “useful”, Bruck reported, but the official declined to elaborate.

Not only can MEK not be trusted as an objective source of information, but the violence carried out against Americans in the past by this terrorist group should give great pause to anyone, especially members of government, considering supporting this group. Additionally, the bipolar nature of American-MEK relations, from the worst of enemies to best of friends and back again, gives absolutely zero assurance that this group would be conducive to American interests even in the near future.

While the War Party is hoping that MEK will be a valuable propaganda tool in initiating an attack on Iran, they ought not fool themselves into thinking that MEK will bring about regime change internally. Universally hated in Iran for siding with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, Iranians have little tolerance for this troublemaking group.

It’s best the US just stayed out of the whole brouhaha.

Last week I reported on an “audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction [which] concluded that lack of oversight or control of where money is disbursed has left vast sums of U.S. aid “vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents.” Today there is a story that “part of a $2.16 billion transportation contract was diverted through a murky network of subcontractors and into the hands of a group of Afghan power-brokers, criminals and Taliban insurgents.”

Roughly $600 million of the contract had been spent before authorities were alerted to the scandal, the source said, citing an internal report.

Only part of that money, however, is believed to have been diverted to “nefarious elements,” the source added.

A Pentagon official told CNN the full $2.16 billion contract covered the movement and transportation of 70% of the material needed for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Officials were first alerted to the possibility of a scandal in June 2010, after a Congressional inquiry prompted the creation of a joint task force to investigate potential criminal dealings surrounding U.S. contracts.

“There were indications dollars were flowing to criminals or to the enemy,” sad the Pentagon official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record but who has direct knowledge of the U.S. assessment.

As I tried to make clear in my article last week, this kind of thing is common in Afghanistan. Our military efforts there alone are troubling enough, but rampant waste, fraud, and funding of Taliban insurgents surely highlights the futility of the war.

Arguments both for and against, say the war in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, tend to get clouded by whatever tangential political vocabulary is popular in any given week or month (surgical determinations of troops levels, robustness of U.S.-trained security forces, corruption in the governments we’ve set up, etc.). Nothing like a sworn enemy of the United States to clarify what it’s really all about.

I recently stumbled across a secret government document from 1998 (declassified in 2008) via the National Security Archive at George Washington University. This documents the only known direct negotiations between the spiritual leader of the Taliban Mullah Omar and a U.S. official. These occurred shortly after the U.S. cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan ostensibly in retaliation for al Qaeda’s (then stationed in Afghanistan) attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I can’t say the cable summarizing the conversation was revealing, as anyone who has even briefly looked anti-American Islamic terrorism will find the commentary mundane, but it is a reminder of the underlying essentials regarding U.S. military engagement in the Middle East and South Asia. Excerpts:

Omar warned that the U.S. strikes would prove counter-productive and arouse anti-American feelings in the Islamic world. While he was in no way threatening, he claimed that the strikes could spark more terrorist attacks.

[…] Omar said that the U.S. should remove its forces from the Gulf and he warned that the U.S. was seen as a threat to Islam’s holiest sites, including the Kabbah. He said that eventually the people of Saudi Arabia would force the Saudi government to expel the Americans.

Back to basics. Does anybody hear anything coming from the Obama administration that even vaguely references these central issues to the “War on Terror?” How about anybody at all with any influence in Washington? Any mention of Muslim resentment of U.S. militarism in these regions? Any at all? What we do hear is half-truths and distractions about nation building and safe havens. To directly address the most salient issue would mean self-ruin, pronouncing the one thing simultaneously out of the question to those in Washington and enthusiastically supported by both American and Muslim populations.

Another interesting bit from the Archives regarding these airstrikes on Afghanistan in the late 1990s was the revelation that the strikes not only failed to produce any constructive results for the U.S., but may have been hugely counter-productive in solidifying the Taliban relationship to bin Laden and al Qaeda:

Washington D.C., August 20, 2008 – On the tenth anniversary of U.S. cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda in response to deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, newly-declassified government documents posted today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) suggest the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically.

A 400-page Sandia National Laboratories report on bin Laden, compiled in 1999, includes a warning about political damage for the U.S. from bombing two impoverished states without regard for international agreement, since such action “mirror imag[ed] aspects of al-Qaeda’s own attacks” [see pp. 18-22]. A State Department cable argues that although the August missile strikes were designed to provide the Taliban with overwhelming reason to surrender bin Laden, the military action may have sharpened Afghan animosity towards Washington and even strengthened the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance.

Following the August 20 U.S. air attacks, Taliban spokesman Wakil Ahmed told U.S. Department of State officials “If Kandahar could have retaliated with similar strikes against Washington, it would have.” Such an attack, although unfeasible at the time, was at least in part actualized by al-Qaeda on 9/11.

…in retrospect, the August 20 retaliatory cruise missile strikes may have caused long-term political harm to U.S. national security and counterterrorism interests [see pp. 18-22].

So on the one hand, the continued harboring and supposed non-cooperation* of the Taliban post-9/11 may have been our own doing and potentially could have gone down much differently if we had chosen less aggressive approaches. On the other hand, these revelations unfortunately had no influence on policymakers who ended up choosing (and are still choosing) the same violent, counter-productive approach.

*As this Chomsky piece shows, the oft-cited non-cooperation was much less obvious than what people generally characterize it as.

Update: I’ve been reminded by the great Scott Horton of this related Gareth Porter piece from earlier this month. Do read it!

Der Spiegel has an account of the ideological roots and political networks from which Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivek was influenced:

Such blogs provide a window into a strange scene: pro-Western, exceedingly pro-American and friendly to Israel — but extremely anti-Muslim, aggressively Christian and openly hostile to everything which is liberal, leftist, multi-cultural or internationalist. It is a “patriotic-nationalist” scene which detests the Nazis but is sympathetic — to the point of maintaining informal contacts — to the Tea Party Movement in the US, to the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria, to the right-wing football fan group known as the Casuals and to the stridently anti-Muslim English Defence League.

It is a scene which is considered to be militant and ultra-right wing, but which has in the past cooperated with the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a group which has been branded a terrorist organization in the US. Such a connection would be unthinkable for neo-Nazi groups. Indeed, the JDL has even joined demonstrations held by the English Defence League — a surprising alliance perhaps, but the crossover is clear: Islam is the enemy.

A central tenant of the writings coming out of this scene is that Muslims are currently in the process of taking over Europe with a “demographic Jihad.” They use statistics, historical references and precarious prognostications in an effort to feed the extreme right with an intellectual-sounding foundation for their hatred of foreigners. The scene is extremely well networked and growing rapidly.

There is also this NYT’s piece on the small group of American bloggers and writers, including Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, who spew this kind of rhetoric and were also read frequently by Breivek. I won’t go as far as to say that the right-wing, nativist, pro-war nationalism of these blogs and groups are what caused Breivek to commit these acts. Clearly, there is much more that goes into what drives such a maniac to that point. Still, throughout the American political spectrum this kind of ideological make-up is among the most hardline, perverse, and immune to penetrating criticism (or more precisely, more immune than most). It requires an understanding of these issues that is based on fear and an active effort to ignore basic facts like Islamist terrorism’s fundamental motivations, the relatively low and actually declining threat of Islamic terrorism, or the significant economic benefits more open immigration policies elicit. It is the opposite of sober analysis and to a certain extent justifies horrible policies of the state and perpetuates ignorant perceptions of Muslims and war policy. This is a long way of saying that I don’t think it should be considered out of line, as some have put forth (see Times link), to address the apparently real influence this kind of ideology and rhetoric had on Breivek, and has on many others who will never act out violently.

Update: via Jesse Walker, this from Washington Post blog:

Most of Geller and Spencer’s blogging consists of attempts to tar all Muslims with the responsibility for terrorism. At CPAC last year, Geller and Spencer drew a large crowd for their documentary referring to the proposed community center near Ground Zero as “the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.” Yet they’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing — assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association. What’s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it’s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.