. . . define the enemy, clearly and strategically. For the changes in definitions over the past seven years have left the public in quest for a definitive knowledge about who are we fighting and why. The last year of the Presidency must help the next White House to engage in successful a war of ideas instead of a continuous search for the identity of the enemy. See here. The civilized world ought to recognize the immense danger that Salafi Islam poses; it must become informed, courageous and united if it is to protect both a generation of young Muslims and the rest of humanity from the disastrous consequences of this militant ideology. Tawfiq Hamid (emphasis mine) HH: . . . [I]s it possible to turn the Salafist edge back on itself? Is it possible to win that war of ideas? Or just do we have to wait and watch it run its very destructive and horrible course? Update: Dr. Sanity posted the other day about "The Conclusions We Dare Not Face." It asks, what are the ramifications if we conclude that Islam is incompatible with freedom and democracy. And, clearly, the ramification is, at its logical conclusion, an existential war of genocide. As she says: It may eventually be the case that the West becomes convinced that Islam is unable to change and is completely incompatible with freedom. We are well on our way to that eventuality, sadly. Time and again there have been opportunities for the moderates in the religion to pull it back from its suicidal historical course. This goes to the heart of what I have attempted to articulate in my post above. There are certain sects of Islam that are, as they exist today, completely incompatible. Salafism and Khomeinist Shia'ism. At any rate, I wrote a response to her post and responded to additional comments which I reproduce here, as they are a detailed explanation of why it is an absolute necessity that our government identify the source of radical Islam immediately.
Western governments are failing in their duty to define "radical Islam." Defining "radical Islam" is the key to designing a strategy to address the problem and to protecting those Muslims who would fight against "radicalization." Failure to do so is at least problematic if not existential.
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It is a truism that the key to solving any problem - or defeating any threat - is knowledge. And one of the major threats we face is the specter of Islamic terrorism, or Islamofacism, Islamic radicalism, Jihadism - pick your favorite descriptive term. They have all been bandied about by our government. They are all only partially true. And if we are ever going to actually address "radical Islam," our political leaders need to define it. This has long been one of the critical themes I hammer upon in this blog. And now one of the world's preeminent experts in radical Islam and their terror tactics, author and Professor Walid Phares, has issued a public call for precisely that. This from Prof. Phares writing in the CounterTerrorism Blog, who called on the President to:
The reason our government has been loathe to define "radical Islam" is that such definition would begin and almost end with our "ally," Saudi Arabia. It is Saudi Arabia's poisonous Wahhabi / Salafi Islam that defines "radical Islam." Whatever excuse there may have been in 2001 not to understand the nature of threat from Salafi Islam, none exists today. Unfortunately, our government to this date continues to speak of this problem in euphanisms.
Without identifying the source of "radical Islam" and shining a light on all of the relevant aspects of the source, we are incapable of developing a coheren national and international strategy to that will meet and defeat this cancer. Identifying the source of radical Islam and explaining about it to America is a fundamental duty of our government. And on this, our government has failed.
This failure has other significant ramifications. It leaves our populace without the knowledge to distinguish between a particularly dangerous ideology and a benign one - both of them being interspersed among us and throughout the world. This will lead to a a tendency to lump all Muslims under one banner. Most critically, it will marginalize and cut off from support those Muslims who would fight against the Salifization of their religion. And indeed, as this is in large measure an ideological struggle, it it the fight they will wage that will determine the future of Islam. We need to insure they win over Salafi Islam.
And there is yet another critical aspect to the the governments use of euphanisms to describe "radical Islam." It falsely implies that radical Islam is merely an anamoly. By doing that, our government provides cover for Wahhabi / Salafi Islamists to continue to spread their ideology free of criticism and publicity. This only allows the problems created by that Salafi Islam to fester and metasticize. It will only compounds the costs that we will eventually have to pay if and when things get to a point where some action must be taken against these purveyors of hatred, death and triumphalism.
I posted below a long article by Tawfiq Hamid, a former terrorist in an al Qaeda type organization, who details how he was seduced by Salafi Islam into becoming a terrorist. If you have not read it, do so. At any rate, his concluding paragraph is an appropriate warning on this issue of identifying the cause of terrorism:
Update: This exchange from an interview of Walid Phares by Hugh Hewitt:
WP: No, absolutely, we can begin the war or ideas. At this…we have not. And then we can, with time, turn the tide and win it. But we have not even began the real steps such as discussing it openly in Congress, have the right legislation for it, and have huge funding that is going in all directions, but not in the right directions, that is to fund the NGO’s, women’s movements, students movements, and all the intellectuals who in the Arab and Muslim world, including in the Diaspora, are completely anti-Salafist, pro-democracy. We have not begun to talk to them.
Personally, I am not convinced that Islam can change, but I hope it can, given time.
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Response to Dr. Sanity's Post:
I think this misses the point in a critical way. All of the things by which we name terrorism - radical Islam, political Islam, Islamofacism, - they all come back to Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi / Salafi Islam. That is the heart and soul of terrorism. If you have not read it, I would recommend Tawfiq Hamid's story [posted here] of how he became a Salafi terrorist and his own thoughts of Saudi Arabia's Salafism as the root and branch of "radical Islam"
Unfortunately, while we have ignored it over the past century, Salafism has slipped the hinterlands of Saudi Arabia and is ever increasing its influenced over most other sects. Salafism now defines the majority of Pakistani's Deobandis and its interpretations even crossed over into Khomeini's brand of triumphalist Shia Islam and the politics of velyat-e faqh. Salafism is what defines Hamas and every other Sunni terrorist organization you will find. And it defines the Muslim Brotherhood.
You can be a devout Muslim and, if you have not been infected with Salafism, there is a very strong chance that you will not be a "radical" unable to live peacefully and gainfully in a democracy and with respect for the rights of others.
The tremendous disservice we do to all of Islam is to hide the source of terrorism behind euphanisms. Most Muslims look in horror at what is happening in their ranks - all of which can be traced to Salafi / Wahhabi Islam. Trace the money from Saudi Arabia and every cent you will see spent is either going to export Salafi Islam or to buy freedom from criticism. It has been incredibly effective at both. Every foreign country in which a madrassa is built by Saudi Arabia, they are preparing to turn out a generation of Salafitsts - often completely counter to the much more peaceful brand of Islam historically extant in that country.
Visit the Center For Islamic Pluralism [here] and you will see that they are far more vocirerous about the Wahhabi / Salafis than any Western politician.
At any rate, unless and until we acknowledge this fact, the problem will just get worse and Salafism, funded by Saudi Arabia's petrodollars, will continue to displace the other sects of Islam and ever more threaten the West. This problem can be solved - messily - now. It can be solved - bloodily - later. One of the two will happen. The first step is for our government to start telling the nation precisely who it is that wants to kill us and enforce their will by the sword. It will piss off the Saudi's to no end. But to not do so is going to lead to much greater problems down the road.
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In response, one individual wrote that he accepted my analysis of the problem, but not my proposed actions. He posited that the onus was not on non-Muslims in the West to define radical Islam and fight the ideological battle for the soul of Islam, but rather it was the responsibility of Muslims themselve. The following was my response to that argument:
For Muslims to stand up to Salafi Islam is to risk threat of death. That is actually a part of Salafi dogma - death for apostacy, a crime which includes questioning Salafi interpretations of the Koran. There are a few people doing it - Tawfiq Hamid, Zhudi Jasser, David Suleyman Schwartz, and Mansoor Moghal being the most prominent. They are shouting it to the mountaintops. It will make no difference until our government does its job of defining the threat for we, the people. We have every bit as much stake in defeating the scourge of Salafi Islam as do non-Salafi Muslims.
Right now, our government is treating the symptoms with billions of dollars spent in added security and the costs of war, plus, far more importantly, the blood of our soldiers. We have to do that. I support that and more, in fact.
But beyond the symptoms, the disease itself grows ever stronger world wide and will continue to do so until our government defines it and starts shining a light on it.
All that said, the Islamic reformists stand no chance whatsoever of succeeding if they do not have the backing of the West. And they cannot get that backing if the West is collectively clueless as to what these men - and we - face in Salafi Islam.
Even then, it has to be noted that Salafism has so infested so many of the other sects on the backs of Saudi petrodollars that is far from identifiable only with Saudi Arabia now. To get a feel for the scope of what is involved:
"According to official Saudi information, Saudi funds have been used to build and maintain over 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges, 210 Islamic Centers wholly or partly financed by Saudi Arabia, and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children in non-Islamic countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia."
[See here]
The North American Islamic Trust - a Wahhabi Salafi organization owns between 50% and 80% of all mosques in North America. [See here]
And Salafists are, in many cases, taking over existing Mosques throughout the world. Some very informative expamples include:
Belgium [See here]
Somalia [See here]
Indonesia [See here]
Further, I would invite you to read this post [see here] on the incredible degree to which our education system - university and even K-12, has been infiltrated with Salafi Islam
My question to you, what would happen if 300 million Americans demanded that this Salafi infiltration stop - that universities give back the Salafi funds, and that the poeple who support Salafi Islam be challenged at every turn. That is, as I see it, step one to ending the scourge of Salafi Islam and all the evil it has brought to the world.
One of two things is going to happen. We either fight Salafism on two fronts now - i.e., on middle eastern battlefields to stop their advances now AND on the larger battlefield of ideas, or we go to war with Islam as a whole eventually. I have also written a fairly long post on this issue here if you are interested: [See here]
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I also received another response, this one asking: "If it's just about salafi/wahabism, then someone please explain the shia brutality in Iran and Basra area of Iraq?"
My response was:
I stated this in my earlier post but did not elaborate.
If you look at Khomeinist Shia'ism, what your going to find is a lot of Salafi dogma creeped in. The Shia religion has, since its inception, been called the "quietist" school becasue it stayed out of day to day politics. Khomeini relied on what previously had been only Salafi interpretations to justify his new "political" and triumphal Shia'ism.
This is a quote from Fukiyama, though I am having trouble finding the original column on WSJ:
"Though developed among Sunnis, this virulent ideological mix reached the Shiite world as well, most notably through its influence on Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Indeed, the Iranian revolution of 1979 conferred on Islamism a degree of religious respectability that it had never before possessed."
That is where you get the increasing radicalization of the Shia. As I said earlier, Salafi Islam has poisoned everthing its touched, and it has touched a lot.
Two things are going on in Southern Iraq. One is simply a power struggle between armed gangs with religion as its cover. The second is Iranian meddling in the South. Have no doubts, Iran would like to see another Hezbollah under its control in Iraq just as it has in Lebanon. There is a reason 300,000 Shiites in Southern Iraq signed a petition a month ago condemning Iran for its deadly meddling in their region.
"The Iranians, in fact, have taken over all of south Iraq," said a senior tribal leader from the south who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life. "Their influence is everywhere." [See here]
Thursday, January 31, 2008
What You Don't Know Could Kill You (Updated, Argued & Bumped)
The Next Generation of Taliban Warlords Arise In Pakistan
[Baitullah Mehsud is]the Taliban's new strongman, all of 34 years old. . . And yet hardly anyone has ever seen the Islamist commander. There are no known photos of the Taliban leader from the village of Landidog, who has sealed himself off against unwanted visitors in a region that is largely cut off from civilization. The area is controlled by the Broomikhels, a subgroup of the Mehsud clan, feared and referred to as "wolves" during the British colonial era for their warlike habits.
A new generation of Taliban fighters allied with al Qaeda has taken over in Pakistan's tribal regions near the Afghan border. Their new leaders are the incredibly ruthless Baitullah Mehsud and Siraj Haqqani. Mehsud was responsible for the assassination of Bhutto and is threatening Pakistan througout the NWFP.
This today from Der Spiegel:
Read the article.
And yet the mysterious Baitullah Mehsud is as famous as a cricket star in Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf has declared him the country's public enemy number one.
As a close ally of al-Qaida, Mehsud has spent the last few years developing the remote valleys of South Waziristan into a safe haven for the terrorists. His fighters are believed to be responsible for a large share of recent suicide bombings in Afghanistan. According to Musharraf, Mehsud's supporters were behind the kidnappings of hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and almost all attacks on the Pakistani security forces in the last three months.
. . . CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden claims that Mehsud was also involved in the deadly attack on Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. "We have no reason to doubt this," says Hayden. . .
. . . Toward the end of last year, a council of high-ranking Taliban leaders appointed Baitullah Mehsud the leader of the newly formed "Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan" (Taliban Movement of Pakistan). At first glance, there are many similarities between Mehsud, a young leader of Koran students, and the founder of the Taliban movement, Mullah Omar, a former village cleric from southern Afghanistan. But the freshly anointed Taliban chief embodies a new, considerably more aggressive generation of religious fanatics. He knows nothing but war, is 14 years younger than Mullah Omar and has had no religious training.
The old mujaheddin who fought in the war against the Soviets and the Taliban who were driven from Afghanistan in 2001, however, still respected the tribal hierarchies and the Pashtuns' rudimentary code of honor. Although it includes blood feuds, it also stringently requires that the innocent -- especially women and children -- be protected. Nowadays, on the other hand, anything done in the name of jihad seems permissible. The cooperative arrangement between al-Qaida and the Taliban has broken ranks with the ultraconservative but ordered world of the tribes living in the regions along the Afghan border. This has led to new tensions, so much so that most traditional tribal leaders are now refusing to cooperate with bin Laden's terrorist network. But members of the young neo-Taliban have used every means available to protect their foreign "guests." In the ensuing power struggle, the new Taliban commanders have already killed more than 250 tribal leaders.
The rise of these ruthless sons of the Taliban began more than six years ago. When the Taliban regime was ousted in Afghanistan, the ensuing American bombing campaign drove thousands of fighters into the Pakistani tribal regions and to Baluchistan. The refugees also included al-Qaida fighters, including young Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs.
The first war minister of the second Taliban generation, Mullah Dadullah Akhund, was long considered the most savage of the new leaders. The one-legged military leader launched his regime of terror with suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. Last May, Mullah Dadullah, 38 at the time, was shot and killed by Western troops in southern Afghanistan.
. . . Next to Baitullah Mehsud, however, the most influential rising young star in the terrorist network in the Hindu Kush region is Siraj Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a renowned Afghan mujahedeen leader. The father had occasionally fought on the side of the Taliban, primarily to safeguard the region he controlled in southeastern Afghanistan. When he died in the summer of 2007, his son Siraj assumed control.
Major Chris Belcher, the spokesman of the US armed forces in Afghanistan, accuses the new Taliban of unparalleled viciousness: "The younger generation is simply pushing aside the old leaders and dictating a new brutality, which includes arbitrary killing as much as it does the beheading of women." The Americans have set a bounty of $200,000 (€135,000) for the capture of Siraj Haqqani.
In the meantime, the upstart leader has even challenged the authority of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who has criticized the high civilian death toll during recent suicide bombings.
At first, President Musharraf still attempted to negotiate with the unscrupulous young fighters. Under a February 2005 peace treaty, Musharraf agreed to withdraw his troops from the tribal region in South Waziristan, provided the insurgents relinquished their support for al-Qaida fighters. Baitullah Mehsud, the presumed mastermind of the Bhutto murder, signed the treaty on behalf of the Taliban.
But the outcome was disastrous. It provided the extremists with the best possible safe haven in which they could rearm undisturbed.
Today, confrontation has returned to the region. Over the past two weeks, the Pakistani army has been waging an offensive against Mehsud in South Waziristan. Mehsud's troops have systematically attempted to bring guard posts and even military forts under control. Dozens are killed on both sides on an almost daily basis. Hoping to eliminate the extremists, Musharraf has ordered his forces to bomb Taliban positions -- but Mehsud has consistently managed to escape.
The Americans are now openly considering running their own covert operations in the tribal region, . . .
NATO's Future in Deutschland's Hände
A day after NATO formerly requested that Germany send combat troops to Afghanistan and two days after Canada warned it would leave if more help didn't come south, Germans are debating whether sending more troops means more danger.
The U.S. has asked Germany to honor its NATO committments and provide a battalion of combat soldiers to Afghanistan. Whether Germany agrees to honor its NATO responsibilities will likely have far reaching implications for the future of NATO. An article today in Der Spiegel examines the debate in Germany - and its tenor is shocking.
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NATO is at a crossroads, with only a handful of nations meeting their committments in Afghanistan. For extensive background on this issue, see here here, here and here. One nation that has limited its involvement in Afghanistan is Germany. Although Germany has committed soldiers, they have done so on the proviso that the troops remain in the North of Afghanistan where there is little or no combat.
Germany's decision to limit its involvment in NATO's mission in Afghanistan was sharply criticized by German General and former NATO Commander Klauss Naumann. He recently "delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance . . . 'The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner.' By insisting on 'special rules' for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin [is] contributing to 'the dissolution of Nato'".
Secretary of Defense Gates has formally called upon Germany to live up to its NATO committments and provide a combat battalion that could be deployed as needed into combat in the south of Afghanistan. At least one nation, Canada, has threated to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan if Germany refuses to meet its committment. The ball is now in Germany's hands and it is far from clear what they will do. Should they refuse to provide these soldiers, it will have significant ramifications for the future of the NATO alliance.
The matter is currently under debate in Germany. This today from Der Spiegel:
Germany announced on Tuesday that NATO had made a formal request . . . that it provide combat troops to replace the Norwegian Quick Reaction Force currently stationed in northern Afghanistan and due to end its mission there at the beginning of the summer.
The announcement came one day after Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned that his country would only extend its own mission in Afghanistan if other NATO countries deploy more troops to the more violent south.
Germany will make a final decision in the coming weeks as to whether it will deploy up to 250 combat troops to the country to supplement the 3,500 German soldiers already serving there, primarily in the more peaceful north.
. . . Bernhard Gertz, head of the German army federation -- a kind of union for the armed forces -- warned this weekend that the Bundeswehr had to be prepared to "see comrades coming back in wooden boxes after this type of fighting." On Wednesday, responding to the NATO request, Gertz voiced doubts about whether Germany has the correct weapons and communications devices to equip a rapid reaction force in Afghanistan. Speaking to the Passauer Neue Presse, he said that Jung had to address these issues: "That has to change quickly: the defense minister has to invest here."
Meanwhile, Germany's Green Party warned on Wednesday that the deployment of combat troops to northern Afghanistan could lead to the spread of the German mission to the volatile south of the country. Party defense spokesman Winfried Nachtwei told the Leipziger Volkszeitung that the Quick Reaction Force should not "open the door for the Bundeswehr in the south," and that the government should "guarantee that the limits of the mandate up to now are maintained." Nachtwei insisted that the combat troops should only be allowed to support troops in the north and not be sent to fight the insurgency.
The German media on Wednesday looked at the implications of the NATO request, which could see Germany further embroiled in Afghanistan.
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"The defense minister is once again having a hard time explaining the decision, which had been made quite a while ago, to a predominantly critical public. Once again he has to hold out as a rationale the fiction of 'NATO's request,' which one can't turn down. This time even a letter from NATO headquarters was ordered. And that it just happened to arrive on the day that Minister Jung visited Kabul can be no coincidence. This unnecessarily defensive tactic for reinforcing your own troops serves neither the substance nor the debate about the deployment in Afghanistan. The Canadians, who have already lost 83 soldiers in the south, are threatening -- and not without due cause -- that they don't intend to stay there much longer, if soldiers from other members of the coalition don't get involved there."
The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:
"There's no reason to panic, but there surely is reason to worry. ...The arguments of the critics who are warning of the dangers of the new Afghanistan deployment are justified. The politicians should stop playing them down and allaying them. It is right to not change the German army's basic strategy in Afghanistan and to not go on the offensive against the Taliban. But it is also right that the mission of a 'fire brigade' deployment is differentiated from those of the combat troops working with the regional reconstruction teams, the so called PRTs. 'QRF is not PRT,' said Inspector General Wolfgang Schneiderhan (referring to the Quick Reaction Force), which is exactly the issue."
"The German army is providing the Quick Reaction Force, because no other NATO partner is ready to assume the task. In doing so, Germany is not immune to additional demands by its allies."
The conservative Die Welt writes:
"Germany cannot turn down the request