StrategyPage summary of affairs in Pakistan

The Strategy Page for today [in a strangely mis-titled article], after reporting on the attempts of Pakistani police to find Taliban in Swat, and on one more suicide attack in Pakistan, summarizes some notable events in the country in recent days.  The report reveals something of how wrought the country is by organized armed groups within the country.  

Most of the reporting on Pakistan omits mention that most Pakistani Muslims subscribe to the Barelvi style of Islamic practice, which is an eminently non-violent tradition.  Of course the news media covers the most noteworthy affairs, and the frequent attacks of violence, mainly in the northwestern part of the country, draws lots of media attention.  Deservedly so, I would say, because affairs in Pakistan matter to the world more generally than most observers admit.  If the most violent bands in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- united for the time being in their opposition to the Americans -- can establish secure bases in the region, some of them would be ready to take their war further.  Even so, these events actually touch relatively few Pakistanis directly.  RLC  [click on the title for a direct link to the source.]

THE BLAME GAME February 27, 2010: 

In Pakistan's Swat valley, police and troops continue to hunt down Taliban. The terrorists have few places to escape to, given the nationwide crackdown. There are still places in the valley that Taliban can find refuge. The Taliban got control (brief as it was) of the valley because of the endemic corruption, and the inability of the government to do anything about it. The locals soon discovered that the Taliban were a cure worse than the disease, but not everyone agreed. So the Taliban continue to find some people willing to help hide them. But the Taliban made a lot of enemies, and as cell phone service is restored, the police get more tips, and more of the Taliban leadership are caught.

Although the Pakistani tribal territories are largely governed by tribal leaders, the urban areas have plenty of Pakistani government officials. These ineffectiveness and corruption of these guys has not encouraged the tribesmen to seek greater government control. Thus government promises of aid and services are not greeted with great enthusiasm.

In northwest Pakistan, a suicide car bomber rammed into a police station, killing four and wounding 23. Most of the casualties were police.

India is increasing its defense spending four percent in the coming year, to over $32 billion.  That comes after a 34 percent rise last year. The Indian budget is more than four times what Pakistan spends.

February 25, 2010:  In North Waziristan, Pakistan, a U.S. UAV killed 14 Taliban leaders and their bodyguards. Among the dead was Mohammed Qari Zafar, who had planned a 2006 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, that left an American diplomat, and three Pakistanis, dead.

The first peace talks between India and Pakistan, since the November, 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, quickly ended. India accused Pakistan of not shutting down the terror groups that attack India, while Pakistan demanded that Kashmir be pushed to the top of the agenda, and accused India of supporting terrorism in Pakistan. The big problem here is that Pakistan is a mess, and the Pakistani leadership, who are largely responsible for the problems, are reluctant to take responsibility. Blaming India, the United States (in the media, less so officially, lest American aid be cut) and the West in general, is a more popular approach to massive internal problems. But it was the Pakistani government that officially backed Islamic radicalism in the 1970s, as a cure for corruption and similar ills. It was the Pakistani government that supported Islamic terror attacks on India in the 1980s, in an attempt to get control of Kashmir. It was the Pakistani government that created the Taliban in the 1990s, in order to halt the chaos in neighboring Afghanistan. Evidence that India ever supported terrorism in Pakistan has been scant. Why bother, with so many local terrorists already operating there, and attacking each other, as well as the government. But now the major problem is the inability of the government to admit what the main problem (corruption) is, and do something about it, something besides speeches and new laws that aren't enforced. Many of the current leaders in Pakistan have been convicted of, or investigated for, corrupt acts. Pakistan's ruling class (and it's not very large) have long talked about fixing things, but the only things that are carefully attended to are their bank accounts.

Responding to repeated requests from Afghanistan, Pakistan has agreed to turn over the recently captured (in Karachi) Afghan Taliban second-in-command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Pakistan would like to try Baradar first, but mainly Pakistan would prefer to not have Baradar talk about how much support the Taliban has received from the Pakistani government in the last decade. Over a dozen senior Taliban operatives have been arrested in Pakistan this month, in a major turnaround in Pakistani policy towards Afghan Taliban leaders hiding (often in plain sight) in Pakistan. It's not known what sort of deal was made with the Pakistani government to make these arrests happen.

February 24, 2010: In Indian Kashmir, a two day running gun battle ended with three Islamic terrorists, and three of the pursuing soldiers, dead. There are still 50-100 Islamic terrorism casualties a month in Kashmir, and the Pakistani government continues to tolerate terrorist camps just across the border, and use Pakistani troops to help the terrorists get across the frontier.

In North Waziristan, Pakistan, U.S. UAVs fired three missiles and killed at least nine Taliban and destroyed a vehicle. Elsewhere in the area, the Taliban beheaded three men suspected of supplying targeting information for the American UAV missile attacks. The Islamic terrorists are uncertain how the Americans are finding their targets (many resources are used), and tend to round up some of the usual suspects from time to time, and murder them publicly. But the American missiles keep finding the terrorist leaders.

February 23, 2010: In Indian Kashmir, a tip from civilians led police to a terrorist safe house. There, five senior terrorists, from three different terrorist organizations, blew up the house they were in, rather than surrender. Three soldiers died in the battle.

February 22, 2010: In Pakistan's Swat valley, a suicide car bomber hit a military convoy, leaving nine dead and over 30 wounded.

Indian Maoists asked for a 72 day ceasefire, and possible peace talks. After looking into it, the government decided that this was merely a ploy to reduce the damage the anti-Maoist campaign was suffering from the current government anti-Maoist offensive, and turned down the Maoist offer.

February 21, 2010:  In Pakistan's tribal territories, three Skihs were beheaded, for refusing to convert to Islam. Non-Moslems (there are over six million of them, but only about 20,000 Sikhs) have long been persecuted in Pakistan, despite government efforts to halt the religious violence. There is also a lot of fighting between Islamic groups that don't get on well. Not just Sunni versus Shia, but many different Sunni terrorist groups.

February 20, 2010: In Indian Kashmir, a terrorist leader was cornered, but refused to surrender and died in a gun battle. Such incidents are the exception these days, with most of the anti-Indian activity being demonstrations by Moslems demanding an end to martial law conditions, and restoration of the prosperity the region had before the Islamic terrorists showed up two decades ago.

In South Waziristan, an air strike hit a Taliban hideout in the mountains, leaving at least 30 terrorists dead. Hundreds of hard core Taliban fled to remote hideouts, after the army moved into South Waziristan last August. The U.S. has been helping the Pakistanis locate these hideouts, by providing electronic eavesdropping and satellite/UAV mapping of remote areas. Elsewhere in the region, two police stations were attacked. In one case, two armed men tried to get in, but one was shot dead and the other fled. In the other attack, a suicide bomber killed one and

On Scholarly Writing Style: Modest suggestions for students

I have come to realize that some of my students are uncertain how to write a scholarly paper.  I produced this for my students and merely post it here, in case it will influence the practice of some.  This what we aspire to.  For what it's worth.  RLC [modified 2/19/10]

Notes on writing, for my classes.

1.  As you write – and this is especially a problem when we are writing longer pieces [a dissertation, an honors thesis] -- don’t let yourself suppose that you are writing about something.  Never write about something.  Say something.  That is, put forth your affirmation, your claims, and then, make use of whatever evidentiary material you can muster to explain why you hold that view.  Tell the reader what you are saying, not what your text is about.

2.  When you make an assertion back it up with precise evidentiary material.  Look at the following statement, the opening paragraph by Ervand Abrahamian in the London Review of Books [Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009][‘I am not a speck of dirt, I am a retired teacher’]

Iran has a healthy respect for crowds – and for good reason. *Crowds brought about the 1906 constitutional revolution. *Crowds prevented the Iranian parliament from submitting to a tsarist ultimatum in 1911. *Crowds scuttled the 1919 Anglo-Iranian Agreement, which would have in effect incorporated the country into the British Empire. *Crowds prevented General Reza Khan from imitating Ataturk and establishing a republic in 1924 – as a compromise he kept the monarchy but named himself shah. *Crowds gave the communist Tudeh Party political clout in the brief period of political pluralism between 1941 and 1953. *Crowds in 1951-53 gave Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s national hero, the power both to take over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and to challenge the shah’s unconstitutional control of the armed forces. Crowds – aided by clerics – provided a backdrop to the 1953 military coup organised by the CIA and MI5. *Crowds in 1963 began what soon became known as Khomeini’s Islamic Movement. *And, of course, crowds played the central role in the drama of the 1979 Islamic Revolution – with the result that the new constitution enshrined the right of citizens to hold peaceful street demonstrations.

Notice the topic sentence of this paragraph [underlined].  Then notice how many times and in what specific ways Abrahamian demonstrates his opening claim.  I have placed an asterisk at the beginning of each sentence that he produces to support his claim.  Each of those sentences could in theory be supported with further citations if he were saying something relatively unknown or contested or critical to his point in this work [which he brings up later], but for his purposes in an opening paragraph there is no need for citations – what he is referring to here is all historically documented elsewhere.

3.  A paper should develop logically so that the reader can follow your point as you go along.  Each paragraph should make a point that helps you develop your main point, each sub-point of the argument being not only affirmed but also demonstrated and illustrated, as indicated above.  That is, as indicated above, Abrahamian could have developed each of those supporting statements with a body of more detailed evidentiary material; in that case, each of those sentences would constitute a sub-point that helps him make his main point.  The result should be a work in which the main point is clear and the evidentiary supporting material [illustrations, data, etc.] would collectively demonstrate his main point.  The project is to make the point persuasive.  The impact should come from the precise and explicit details that make the point.

4.  As you develop your ideas you want to remind the reader of the point: 

• “The first reason that I believe the Americans should put a man on the moon [your point] is … [your supporting evidence].” . . .  
• The second reason that the Americans should put a man on the moon is [another body of evidence]. 

The phrases such as those above, which iterate and reiterate your main point, are useful repetitions that remind the reader of what you are saying.  Readers easily get lost in the verbiage so they need to hear what you are saying, as you lead them through the thicket of details that help you make your point.


5.  Represent the views of other authors fairly and accurately.  A key task in demonstrating that you understand a text is to identify the key formulations in the text.  If you jump on marginal comments you demonstrate that you don’t get the point.  If you criticize an author make sure you quote from the key formulations, those that best capture his/her point.  Not long quotes; key quotes.  And make sure you have fully and fairly described his/her position on a particular matter before you take issue with it.  Part of that includes appreciating the time of writing and the social and political context.  Don’t flatten the opinions of anyone; that’s cheating. 

6.  Be sparing with long words:  Anglo-Saxon words are always best because they are shorter and have more punch; Latin based words [-tion words] are bookish and boring.  There is a way to evaluate the “readability” of a text based on the ratio of one and two-syllable words in the text.  Note the quotation by Abrahamian above:  Lots of one syllable words, few three syllable words.  There’s no pretense here, and no filler.  Note the verbs:  they are short and some have a distinct impact [NB “scuttled”]; no fancy verbiage.  By all means avoid the jargon of some writers [and journals] who effect an appearance of scholarly sophistication in awkward words [“problematize”, etc.]. 

7.  A few long sentences are OK but short sentences are good, and sometimes abruptly short sentences help break up the pattern  [E.g. “Enough.”  “Forget it.”].  But don’t overdo any particular pattern.  Keep it mixed up. 

8.  Eschew the passive voice.

9.  There is no substitute for authenticity.  You can write in the first person [“I” or the editorial “we”] but you want to mute yourself as much as possible unless you are writing an essentially personal piece.  Seek simplicity, authenticity, clarity, precision.

10.  If you are called upon to summarize or digest a book, make sure you get the formulations that best characterize the message of the book.  You can usually find those statements in the places where the author pauses to remind the reader of what he/she has said and where the argument is going.  Normally an author will pause at the beginning and ending of major passages to remind the reader of what he/she is saying.  Those are the places where you will find the most useful formulations.  Always watch for points he/she repeats; the repetition is meant to keep you aware of what he/she thinks is crucial as the narrative develops.

Sarah Kendzior suggests three more rules:

11.  Omit the adverbs. They are really, truly, indisputably, absolutely a drag on any sentence. 

12.  "Leave the boring parts out."  This is advice from the crime writer Elmore Leonard. It doesn't always work in academic writing, but most of the time, it does. Someone asked Leonard the secret to his success and he said "I just leave the boring parts out" -- what he meant was that he leaves out any information that is obvious or extraneous; if his work made sense without this information, then he cut it.

13.  When you're done delete 10% of your text because everything is better 10% shorter. 

Cell phones in Afghanistan: How will they transform the country?

Christopher Beam of Slate has an article about phones in Afghanistan that gives us some interesting numbers.  Owing to the recent introduction of cell phone telephony the number of mobile phones users is now about 10 million, 32 percent of the total population -- in a country that had only a few dozen phone lines a generation ago.  The price of a cell phone has fallen from $300 to $11 and the price of a call has fallen to 10 cents a minute.  All this has taken place since 2001, most of it probably in the last three years. 

The social implications of such changes in interpersonal access are so large as to challenge our ability to grasp how the country is changing, or what the country will be like in a mere decade.  Obviously, the pace of other changes in aspects of the society has leaped also.  The new intensity of social contact enables many things to take place so much quicker.  For one thing, as someone said to me when I was in Kabul in 2008, the postal service is now moribund. 

It's true that Afghanistan has been isolated from the world for millennia.  Not so now.   In many ways Afghanistan cannot be the country that it was.  What will that mean for the future? 

Conference on corruption: Can the problem be even worse than we think?

The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University is having a conference, Feb 25, 26, on Global corruption Criminal Networks, Smuggling and WMD. The issues they are going to address seem eminently vital for our times:

"Pakistan: Lessons from AQ Khan Nuclear Proliferation Practices" ; “Crime-Terror Nexus: Concrete Examples from the Field” ; “Analysis of WMD Cases in Turkey: Police Seizure of WMD Materials” ; “Illicit Networks and Threats: A Latin American Perspective”; “Asymmetrical Warfare in the Digital Age: The Supreme Challenge”; “Is Radiological Trafficking Organized Crime? The Case of Georgia” ; "Federal Priorities for Protection Against Nuclear Smuggling and WMD" ; “The Crime-Terror Nexus: Connecting the Dots”.

But I wonder if something is missing in this list of scholarly-sounding topics. The Center is on to something, but the problem goes further than weapons of mass destruction, radiological trafficking, nuclear smuggling, and “terrorism”, etc. The issues we need to address may be even more extensive and more serious than we know. For we are just now beginning to internalize what we have learned about our own country in the last 6 months: that our elected representatives were unable to develop a health care system for all Americans, a project that is supported by most Americans and has been in place in many other industrial countries around the world, because they were beholden to the health insurance companies who would have been put out of business if a genuine public health system were established. Furthermore, we are learning that bank executives and Wall Street companies, who of course also have a close link to the insurance industry, are being paid millions of dollars in bonuses every year even though they were bailed out by our ordinary citizens after they had irresponsibly bet on the market – and not just once, b ut have been doing it for years [and pocketing the gains].

So we may find that criminal behavior is not “out there” but is inherently entailed in our whole business and legislative process.  If not criminal behavior, then at least is it not unethical and immoral behavior?

Indeed, the masthead of the Center sponsoring the conference on corruption justifies its existence in ominous terms:

"Transnational crime will be a defining issue of the 21st century for policymakers - as defining as the Cold War was for the 20th century and colonialism was for the 19th. Terrorists and transnational crime groups will proliferate because these crime groups are major beneficiaries of globalization. They take advantage of increased travel, trade, rapid money movements, telecommunications and computer links, and are well positioned for growth."

This statement strikes a chord with some of us who are wondering what is to become of the world as we know it, dominated as it now is by global corporations whose primary loyalties are to stockholders. Or at least they are supposed to be loyal to stockholders: it is turning out that corporate executives are taking extravagant salaries for themselves at the cost of even paying stockholder fair returns. Managing other peoples’ money has never been a better deal.

So now I’m wondering if the conference at the Terrorism Transnational Crime and Corruption Center is missing something, for there is no mention here of large corporate influences on the governing processes of states, and of the rising clout of the super-rich around  the world, who continue to enrich themselves while millions of people are starving.

And yet, if the Center tries to expose the abuses of wealth and influence by the corporate sector, what will happen to their funding?  I can ask such questions since I have no part in a corporately funded Center.  I'm only supported by a private university -- which is, of course, also corporately funded. 

Hmm.  Is there any escape?

The Taliban are really interested in negotiating, we hope

McClatchy now has another interesting report: According to the former head of the ISI the leadership -- or at least certain of the leadership -- are willing to talk about a peace deal. Interesting news, if it is true. But it looks like a lot of people on the American side are wishing it were true. The truth may be otherwise. RLC



Pakistan's former spymaster: Taliban leader is ready to talk
By Saeed Shah And Jonathan S. Landay, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Mon Jan 25,
7:16 pm ET
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — The U.S. must negotiate a political settlement to the
Afghanistan war directly with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar
because any bid to split the insurgency through defections will fail, said
the Pakistani former intelligence officer who trained the insurgent chief.

Omar is open to such talks, asserted retired Brigadier Sultan Amir Tarar , a
former operative of Pakistan's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate . He is popularly known as Colonel Imam, whose
exploits have gained him near-legendary status in central Asia .

"If a sincere message comes from the Americans, these people (the Taliban )
are very big-hearted. They will listen. But if you try to divide the Taliban
, you'll fail. Anyone who leaves Mullah Omar is no more Taliban . Such
people are just trying to deceive," said Tarar, a tall, imposing man with a
long gray beard and white turban, in an interview with McClatchy .

His comments came as the U.S. and its NATO allies appear increasingly
anxious to find a path toward a political resolution to the more than
eight-year-old war whose escalating human and financial costs are fueling
growing popular opposition.

In Washington , U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones was asked by
McClatchy if the Obama administration ruled out having the ISI act as a
conduit between Omar and the U.S., as Pakistani officials are advocating.

"We are pursuing a general strategy of engagement," replied Jones, a former
four-star Marine general. "We'll see where this takes us."

Senior U.S. and European officials have in recent days been heavily
promoting a "re-integration" plan under which low-level Taliban fighters are
to be offered jobs, education and protection in return for renouncing al
Qaida and defecting to the Afghan government. Afghan President Hamid Karzai
is expected to unveil the initiative at an international conference on
Afghanistan in London on Thursday.

Karzai also is being encouraged to reach out to senior Taliban leaders, who
U.S. commanders think may be induced to switch sides under the pressure of a
stepped up military campaign by the 116,000-strong U.S.-led international
force bolstered by 30,000 more American soldiers, most of who are due to
arrive this summer.

"The U.S. remains committed to continued engagement by the Afghan government
to politically reconcile any Afghan citizen willing to renounce al Qaida and
violence and to accept the Afghan Constitution," said an administration
official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss
the issue publicly.

Some U.S. officials and experts, however, see little chance for progress on
a political resolution.

Omar, who has led the Taliban since its inception in 1992 and is thought to
be directing the insurgency from a sanctuary in the western Pakistani city
of Quetta, has repeatedly rejected negotiations until all foreign forces
leave Afghanistan , they pointed out.

"I don't think anything is happening here," said a U.S. defense official,
who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue
with a journalist.

Furthermore, the insurgents have expanded to 34 of Afghanistan's 36
provinces, and they think they're winning and that they only have to
out-wait the Obama administration, which set July 2011 as the start of a
U.S. troop withdrawal.

"If I were sitting on the side of those trying to be brought into some kind
of reconciliation process, I'd be saying time is on my side," said a former
senior U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Afghanistan and
Pakistan who requested anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.

Tarar, 65, a key player in Afghanistan from the 1979-89 Soviet occupation
until 2001, said he trained Omar after he graduated from an Islamic seminary
in 1985 to fight as a guerrilla against the Soviet forces. At the time, the
ISI was running secret camps for "mujahedin" fighters along the Afghan
border with U.S. funding.

Tarar, who worked closely with the CIA and was schooled in guerrilla warfare
at Fort Bragg, N.C. , arranged for Omar's medical treatment after he was
injured. They met again in 1994 after the Pakistani official was posted in
the western Afghan city of Herat and "got closer to each other," Tarar said.


The ISI saw the potential of Omar's movement of Islamic purists in the
mid-1990s and heavily backed them against the government formed by the
victorious anti-Soviet mujahedin. When the Taliban swept into Kabul in 1996,
they gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden .

The Pakistani security establishment thinks that Omar's ambitions are
limited to Afghanistan , and that the Taliban can now be persuaded to share
power with other Afghan factions.

"Mullah Omar is highly respected, very faithful to his country. He's the
only answer. He's a very reasonable man," said Tarar, who insisted he was
speaking in a personal capacity. "He's a very effective man, no other man is
effective. He's for peace, not war. The Americans don't realize this. He
wants his country to be peaceful. He doesn't want to destroy his country."

Tarar said that Omar would be willing to cut a deal, if it would lead to the
departure of foreign troops and included funds to rebuild Afghanistan . "I
can help," he said. "But can I trust the Americans?"

Pakistan admitted last weekend that it is talking to "all levels" of the
Taliban .

Western diplomats think the ISI must be involved in any negotiations or it
would act as a spoiler, continuing to provide aid to the Taliban and allied
insurgent groups as part of a goal to install in Kabul a pro- Pakistan
regime that would sever close ties with India .

Tarar said that without talks, the war would grind on with U.S. forces
ignoring the counterinsurgency textbooks that call for the use of minimal
force and winning the support of the people.

"The time is on the Taliban's side. The longer the Americans stay, the more
complete will be their defeat. They will not be routed but they will be worn
out, psychologically and physically," he said.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent. Landay reported from Washington
.)

Ahmed Rashid's new review of the Taliban situation

The new article by Ahmed Rashid on the Taliban is very important. To me the most valuable part of it is his review of the book by the former foreign ambassador of the Taliban, who is now out of Guantanamo. He reveals much about the attitude and understanding of the Taliban. The book also pains Mullah M. Omar in more favorable light than we have had from other sources. Whatever Ahmed Rashid has to say we need to pay attention to, as he is a keen observer of the region and seems to have access to critical sources of information.

Sirajuddin Haqqani: A profile by the Wall Street Journal

This is a valuable personal profile of a resistance leader. RLC


New Wave of Warlords Bedevils U.S.
Wall Street Journal By MATTHEW ROSENBERG JANUARY 19, 2010

In his teen years, Sirajuddin Haqqani was known among friends as a dandy. He
cared more about the look of his thick black hair than the battles his
father, a mujahideen warlord in the 1980s, was waging with Russia for
control of Afghanistan.

The younger Mr. Haqqani is still a stylish sort, say those who know him. But
now, approaching middle age and ensconced as the battlefield leader of his
father's militant army, he has become ruthless in his own pursuit of an
Afghanistan free from foreign influence. This time the enemy is the U.S. and
its allies.

>From outposts along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, his Haqqani
network is waging a campaign that has made the Afghan insurgency deadlier.
He has widened the use of suicide attacks, which became a Taliban mainstay
only in the past few years. U.S. officials believe his forces carried out
the dramatic Monday gun, grenade and suicide-bomb attack in Kabul on Afghan
government ministries and a luxury hotel. The assault claimed five victims
plus seven attackers.

Mr. Haqqani also aided the Dec. 30 attack by an al Qaeda operative that
killed seven Central Intelligence Agency agents and contractors at a U.S.
base in eastern Afghanistan, say militant commanders. And he orchestrated
last year's assault on a United Nations guesthouse that killed five U.N.
staffers, along with other attacks in the capital.

In a rare interview with The Wall Street Journal conducted by email and
telephone last month, Mr. Haqqani declared, "We have managed to besiege the
Afghan government. We sustain very few causalities; we can inflict heavy
casualties to the enemy's side."

That message is problematic for a key plank of the U.S. military's Afghan
"surge" which is based on a strategy of applying sufficient pressure on some
Taliban leaders that they will negotiate for terms acceptable to Washington.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration lent cautious support to the Afghan
government's new outreach effort to the Taliban-a show of optimism that
lower-level militants would reconcile with Kabul even if senior leaders
continued fighting.

The rise of Mr. Haqqani, who is in his late 30s or early 40s, is part of a
broader changing of the guard in the Afghan militant movement. A younger
generation of commanders have helped transform the Taliban from a peasant
army that harbored al Qaeda and was routed by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001
into a formidable guerrilla force that killed a record 520 Western troops
last year.

Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and his inner circle-believed to be
based in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta-still provide overall
leadership of the Taliban movement. Osama bin Laden still rallies the al
Qaeda faithful. But more than either man, Mr. Haqqani is at the fulcrum of
the Afghan rebellion and its twin uprising in Pakistan's northwestern
mountains. His base in North Waziristan, on the Pakistani side of the
border, has become arguably the most important Islamist militant haven in
the region, say U.S. and Pakistani officials. It attracts aspiring jihadis
from around the globe, such as the five young Americans arrested last month
in Pakistan who were allegedly on their way there.

Mr. Haqqani has emerged as a powerbroker on both sides of the border. He has
ties to almost every major faction in the confederation of groups operating
under the Taliban umbrella. He has the strongest links to al Qaeda of any
major Taliban faction, say U.S. officials and Pakistani experts. While
pledging allegiance to Mullah Omar, he operates independently, choosing his
own targets and only loosely coordinating with the Taliban's supreme
leadership.

Mr. Haqqani showed his sway when the Pakistani Taliban, an offshoot of
Afghanistan's Taliban, were on the verge of a bloody struggle following the
death of its leader in a U.S. airstrike this summer. He called the major
factions to North Waziristan to settle the dispute, telling them they must
"follow the path of a great leader....You should save your bullets for your
true enemies," said a tribal elder who attended the meeting.

Within days, the Pakistan Taliban's leadership was settled. The group has
since repeatedly set off bombs in major cities and sent teams of gunmen to
attack symbolic targets, including the headquarters of Pakistan's military.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani's men have kept up the heat on the government of
President Hamid Karzai and U.S and allied forces with ever-more brazen
attacks, including this week's assault on Kabul.

The attack was trademark Haqqani. Teams of gunmen and suicide bombers struck Kabul in broad daylight. It's a strategy the Haqqani network has used
repeatedly in the past 12 months to sow fear and chaos in the seat of
Afghanistan's weak central government.

The assailants struck on the day that members of the new Afghan cabinet were
to be sworn in. They picked a spot that would allow them to hit a number of
high-profile targets at once: Pashtunistan Square, which is ringed by the
central bank, the entrance to the presidential palace, as well as several
ministries, a shopping center and a luxury hotel.

U.S. and Afghan officials believe Mr. Haqqani has cultivated high-level
double agents inside the Afghan government-including senior military and
police officers, some of whom are suspected of having aided an assassination
attempt on President Karzai at a parade in April 2008 in Kabul.

"There is no doubt that some of our countrymen in the army and police are
helping us in our fight against the occupiers," Mr. Haqqani said when asked
about the parade attack.

The U.S. takes such boasts seriously. "The Haqqanis are the most dangerous,"
said a senior U.S. military commander in Afghanistan. "They're going all the
way to Kabul to carry out major attacks. They've got connections on both

way to Kabul to carry out major attacks. They've got connections on both
sides of the border in a way no one else does. They're dangerous for us and
they're dangerous for the Pakistanis."

Pakistan has until now taken a hands-off approach to Mr. Haqqani, arguing he
spends most of his time in Afghanistan and is ultimately America's problem.
U.S. officials have long alleged that Pakistan tolerates and even aids Mr.
Haqqani, so he can be used to maintain its influence in Afghanistan after an
eventual American withdrawal.

Pakistani officials deny that charge. Mr. Haqqani's central role in the
insurgencies and his clear embrace of al Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban have
now prompted Pakistan's military and its spy service to consider taking
action against his North Waziristan sanctuary, say Pakistani officials. Some
U.S. officials, too, believe Pakistan is reconsidering its relationship with
the Haqqanis.

The tone surrounding discussions about Mr. Haqqani has changed markedly in
the past year. Officials in Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, have
gone from calling him a potential "force for peace" in Afghanistan to
telling journalists that they lost nearly three dozen agents and informers
in North Waziristan last year. Most were caught spying and killed by Mr.
Haqqani's fighters and their Pakistan Taliban allies, the officials say.

"It's clear to all that the Haqqanis' interests and our interests, over the
long term, they're not the same," said a senior Pakistani civilian official.

Any move by the Pakistanis against Mr. Haqqani appears to be months away, at
the soonest. It would mark a reversal of Pakistani policy that U.S.
officials say could greatly increase the chances of stabilizing the region.

Others in the younger generation of Taliban commanders include Abdullah
Ghulam Rasoul, known as Mullah Zakir, who is in his mid-30s and one of the
main Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan. His five-year stint as a
prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has given him "rock-star status" in the
Taliban, said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the former top American commander
in southern Afghanistan. (Mr. Rasoul was released in 2007 into Afghan
custody.)

In Pakistan, the most powerful Taliban faction leader is Hakimullah Mehsud,
31, who is considered brutal even by other militants, say tribal elders and
militants.

After three decades of almost continuous conflict in Afghanistan and more
than a decade of upheaval in Pakistan's tribal areas, all these young men
have little memory of life without war, said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former
Pakistani official.

But while an older generation of Afghan warlords, including Mr. Haqqani's
father, had a deep pragmatic streak, the younger commanders may be much more resistant to a settlement.

"Peace talks are about bringing people into the political power structure,"
said Mr. Mohmand, who served as Islamabad's envoy in Afghanistan from 2001
to 2005. "I don't think this younger generation has any idea of politics or
any desire to take part in them....All they've grown up around is war and
fighting."

Sirajuddin Haqqani grew up amid the struggle for Afghanistan. His father,
Jalaluddin, rose to prominence in the early 1980s battling the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. He was a favorite of the U.S., which was pouring
millions of dollars into the insurgency. He also was courted by Pakistan,
where he established his base and developed close ties to the country's spy
agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

But "the child didn't take to war," said Brig. Amir Sultan Tarar, a retired
ISI officer known as Col. Imam, of the young Mr. Haqqani. It wasn't until
his early 20s-sometime around 1990-that the younger Mr. Haqqani "became an
active participant in our struggles," said Brig. Tarar.

Friends who grew up with Mr. Haqqani say a religious awakening spurred his
transformation.

"He saw the Arabs and their devotion and admired it," said Gul Khan, a
businessman in North Waziristan who went to school with Mr. Haqqani. Some of the Arabs then fighting the Soviets, including Osama bin Laden, would go on
to form the core of al Qaeda.

Those who know Sirajuddin Haqqani say he shares his father's battlefield
acumen, which propelled him ahead of other siblings to assume day-to-day
leadership of the militant faction in the past two or three years. His
father remains titular chief.

Under Sirajuddin Haqqani, the faction has strengthened its dominance over
the territory carved out by his father in the 1980s-Khost, Paktika and
Paktia provinces of eastern Afghanistan. His men also have moved deeper into
Afghanistan, according to U.S. military assessments.

As his stature has risen, he has begun to see himself in grandiose religious
terms, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials and tribesmen in the border
region. He now styles himself "Khalifa"-a title for a leader who rules
Muslims in accordance with Islamic law.

In his public rhetoric, he distances himself from his father's past ties to
the U.S. while claiming the same mantle of Islamic resistance to occupiers.

"My father was fighting the Russians....I am following his footprints," he
said in the Journal interview. "Like today, during the Soviet era the
mujahideen were fighting an occupying force and believed that foreign forces
are the only obstacle which prevents peace and stability in Afghanistan."

But, he added, "My father didn't have a personal relationship with the
Americans," who along with Saudi Arabia provided most of the financing for
the mujahideen.

Financial aid to the mujahideen also came from wealthy Muslim donors. Those
connections remain, and have provided the Haqqanis with much of the cash
needed to bankroll their fight, say U.S. officials and experts.

As for Pakistan, once his father's staunchest supporter, the relationship
with the son appears increasingly strained.

Pakistan has been pursuing a military campaign in South Waziristan, a tribal
region bordering North Waziristan that was also a safe haven for al Qaeda
and the Pakistani Taliban. Already, Mr. Haqqani is beginning to feel the
pressure in his rear flank in North Waziristan, say tribal elders and
militants in the region.

Residents of Miran Shah, the main city in North Waziristan, say that a
number of Islamic seminaries used by the Haqqanis have been largely
abandoned in the past two weeks, except for a skeleton staff of guards. The
Haqqani loyalists moved out partly because they feared retaliatory U.S.
strikes following the CIA attack, said Gul Khan, the tribal elder.

But "they see that there are soldiers in South Waziristan and everywhere
else," he said, referring to the most recent offensive against the Pakistan
Taliban, which is taking place on Mr. Haqqani's doorstep. "They're all
underground now. It's a very dangerous time." -Anand Gopal in Kabul and
Yochi J. Dreazen in Kandahar, Afghanistan, contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Rosenberg at matthew.rosenberg@wsj.com

Al-Qaeda wants to instigate a war in South Asia: BBC

The recent report by BBC that Al Qaeda wants to instigate a war between Pakistan and India is not surprising but it is worth noting. Al Qaeda seems to assume that the more dismay and confusion it can create the more secure it will be. What profoundly dismays me is how vulnerable the Pakistani leadership seems to be to this kind of threat.

Al-Qaeda wants South Asia war, says US secretary Gates
January 20, 2010 BBC News

Al-Qaeda is trying to destabilize the whole of South Asia hoping to provokewar between India and Pakistan, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says.
"It's important to recognize the magnitude of the threat," Mr Gates said,after meeting his Indian counterpart AK Antony in Delhi.
Mr Gates said India might not show restraint if it suffered another attacklike the one in 2008 on Mumbai.
Blamed on Pakistan-based militants, the attack killed more than 160 people.
The two countries' peace process is still on hold.
The US defence secretary said militant groups in South Asia - the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba -were seeking to spark conflict between India and Pakistan, or to provoke instability in Pakistan.
He said: "It's dangerous to single out any one of these groups and say, 'If we can beat that group, that will solve the problem,' because they are in effect a syndicate of terrorist operators intended to destabilize this entire region."
When one group succeeded in carrying out an attack, all of them gained incapability and reputation, he said.
"A victory for one is a victory for all. "Mr Gates praised his hosts for the restraint shown by India in the after mathof the attack on Mumbai (Bombay) in November 2008, for which Lashkar-e-Taiba militants operating out of Pakistan have been blamed.
But he warned: "It is not unreasonable to assume Indian patience would be limited were there another attack."
After militants attacked parliament in Delhi in 2001, India massed troops on the border with Pakistan, but the country made no such move following the2008 attack.
The two countries have fought three wars since independence from Britain.
The BBC's Chris Morris, in Delhi, says the US would like to see India and Pakistan working together against the militant threat - but Mr Gates said co-operation would be a tough sell.
Mr Gates is to hold talks in Islamabad on Thursday.
He said any conflict between India and Pakistan would only further the militants' agenda - as well as throwing American policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan into disarray.
The defence secretary also praised the "extraordinary" financial aid India had given Afghanistan, but acknowledged this had created tension with Pakistan.
"There are real suspicions both in India and Pakistan about what the other is doing in Afghanistan," he said.
"So I think each country focusing its efforts on development, on humanitarian assistance, perhaps in some limited areas of training, but with full transparency for each other, would help allay these suspicions and frankly create opportunities."
Reports in recent days have suggested the US would like India to help train Afghan police.

Tom Headland on The "Darkness in Eldorado" Affair

Because my main interest is Central Asia I have not been following the furor over Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomamo in Venezuela/ Brazil. I had thought the issue had died down but it came up again in the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia (December 2-6, 2009). The reason the issue interests me is that in my opinion the Association has several times behaved badly on contested issues.

It is easy for all of us to become self-righteous about what other people do, and sometimes, even before we have a full sense of the situation, we lash out. This, I think, has taken place in the history of the AAA. When the AAA has had an intense issue to handle they have done it poorly. Some notable examples:

One of the most egregious was when the AAA censured Derek Freeman for his critique of Margaret Mead’s famous “Coming of Age in Samoa.” By almost everyone’s admission, the Association took this formal action before scarcely any of its members had ever seen Freeman’s book, “Margaret Mead and Samoa.” In fact, the book was published virtually at the time of the meetings. This was a tragically unprofessional way to deal with a serious scholarly issue. In my opinion, anyone who reads Freeman’s book should be convinced of the validity of his critique. Freeman spoke Samoan with full fluency and lived in Samoa for many years; Mead waded ashore on Samoa at age 22 and lived in the fancy plantation-style house of a rich white person, and may never have slept a single night in a Samoan house, and was there just 8 months. Anyway, her last living informant said that they lied to her -- they were just pulling her leg. (Those of us who have done fieldwork know how that works; it was only many months later that I realized that some of what I had heard from my Hazara friends had been spoken in my presence essentially to tease – tongue in cheek.)

Another such event was when David Stoll in 1999 published his expose of Rigoberta Menchu. She had by that time been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but Stoll demonstrated that she and/or her ghost writer had made up her story! Stoll got it right but he got a serious drubbing by the Association. Again, it was less the established evidence and more a visceral revulsion against someone who would embarrass someone who had become an icon, at least for some.

And when Napoleon Chagnon and James Neal were accused by Patrick Tierney (*Darkness in Eldoado*) of contributing to the tragic 1968 outbreak of measles among the Yanomamo, a lot of AAA members openly attacked Chagnon. Before the November 2000 AAA meetings in which Tierney’s book would be discussed, Chagnon famously stated that the piranhas had been invited to a feast and he was the bait.

The Chagnon/Neel issue was, as I say, brought up in the recent AAA meeting, in a paper by Alice Dreger (Northwestern U Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago). And there is word that a documentary film on the “Darkness” scandal invented by Tierney will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival this month. It is produced by the prominent filmmaker Jose Padilha (Brazilian) and is titled “Secrets of the Tribe.” We expect the issue to flare up again.

One of the few people who stood up for Chagnon when he was attacked at the AAA meetings in 2000 was Thomas Headland, a friend of mine for many years and
a well known and respected anthropologist. I have been in touch with Tom over these issues and recently I asked him if he was not the first to speak up for Chagnon. Tom’s response was interesting enough to quote here [with his permission]:
======================================

Was I the first to stand up for Chagnon against Tierney's extreme accusations?

Well, maybe publicly, on September 27, 2000, when I sent my first public statement to *USA Today* (at the request of their reporter Dan Vergano), and Vergano's article citing me came out in that newspaper 5 days later on October 2, p.D7. The next day, September 28, I got calls from both AP and Reuters. By the end of that first week of October, four other media outlets contacted me asking for my statement, which I sent to them. Brief portions of my statement were quoted in numerous newspapers around the USA, Brazil, and England in the following days. (I can send you the list and what they quoted if you want.) I also posted my letter to the *USA Today* on my website that month, where it still remains today (at www.sil.org/~headlandt/measles5.htm#measles5).

However, there were three other people who were also finding documents about the same time I was in that fall of 2000 that contradicted the Tierney-Turner-Sponsel allegation regarding the measles epidemic. These were:
• 1. Mr. Robert Cox, then Curator of Manuscripts at the American Philosophical Society, who I understand posted his findings on the Internet a few days after my 4-minute public testimony at the AAA Open Forum in San Francisco on November 17, 2000. The documents he found were not the same as mine. I mention Cox by name and his role six times on my webpage titled " When Did the Measles Epidemic Begin?" that I posted on December 9, 2009.
• 2. Dr. Susan Lindee. Her findings in support of Neel and Chagnon were cited in the September 21, 2009, issue of TIME, p.78, and on the U Michigan website on September 27, 2000.
• 3. Dr. Samuel Katz found even more powerful testimony contradicting the Tierney-Turner-Sponsel thesis. I received copies of Katz's documents (as I Recall) from him on September 29, 2000.

So I think it may be safe enough to say that Cox, Lindee, Katz, and Headland were the first four to stand up, as you put it, for Chagnon.

=================================

Sources for Tom’s discussion can be found, as he says above, at
www.sil.org/~headlandt/measles5.htm#measles5. And at a site produced by David Hume:
www.google.com/search?sitesearch=www.nku.edu%2F%7Ehumed1&q=headland.

Watch for more fireworks in the near future.

A tribute to Abdurrahman Wahid

Paul Wolfowitz's celebration of the life and influence of Abdurrahman Wahid, former President of Indonesia, is so worthwhile, and so useful as an antidote to what is often surmised about Muslims in the West, that I reproduce it here. Thanks to Ray Scupin for bringing to my attention. RLC

Wahid and the Voice of Moderate Islam

By PAUL WOLFOWITZ

Abdurrahman Wahid, who died last week at the age of 69, was the first democratically elected president of Indonesia, the world's fourth largest country and third largest democracy. It has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. Although he was forced from office after less than two years, he nevertheless helped to set the
course of what has been a remarkably successful transition to democracy.

Even more important than his role as a politician, Wahid was the spiritual leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, and probably in the world, with 40 million members. He was a product of Indonesia's traditionally tolerant and humane practice of Islam, and he took that tradition to a higher level and shaped it in ways that will last long after his death.

Wahid recognized that the world's Muslim community is engaged in what he called in a 2005 op-ed for this newspaper "nothing less than a global
struggle for the soul of Islam" and he understood the danger for Indonesia, for Islam and for all of us from this "crisis of misunderstanding that threatens to engulf our entire world."

Wahid was one of the most impressive leaders I have known. Although his formal higher education was limited to Islamic studies in Cairo and Arabic literature in Baghdad, his breadth of knowledge was astounding. With a voracious appetite for knowledge and a remarkably retentive memory, he seemed to know all of the important Islamic religious and
philosophical texts. He also loved reading a wide range of Western literature (including most of William Faulkner's novels) as well as Arabic poetry. He enjoyed French movies, and cinema in general, and could identify the conductor of a Beethoven symphony simply by listening to a recording. He was an avid soccer fan and once compared the different styles of two German soccer teams to illustrate two alternative strategies for economic development. He loved jokes, particularly political ones. During Suharto's autocratic rule he
published a collection of Soviet political humor in Indonesian, with the obvious purpose of teaching his own people how to laugh at their rulers.

Despite all that learning, Wahid had a common touch that enabled him to express his thoughts in down-to- earth language. He thus gained broad
legitimacy for a moderate and tolerant vision. He could speak to young Indonesians, grappling with the relationship between religion and science by explaining to them the thoughts of a medieval Arab
philosopher like Ibn Rushd (known to Christian philosophers as Averroes). And he was all the more effective because he himself had grappled with controversial ideas.

Wahid had been somewhat attracted in his youth by the writings of Said Qutb and Hasan al Banna, the founders of the Muslim brotherhood, but his
deep humanism led him to reject them. When I visited him recently he told me of a long-ago visit to a mosque in Morocco where an Arabic translation of Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics" was on display. Seeing that book had brought tears to his eyes and Wahid explained: "If I hadn't read the 'Nichomachean Ethics' as a young man, I might have
joined the Muslim brotherhood."

No doubt, what had so impressed Wahid was that Aristotle could arrive at deep truths about matters of right and wrong without the aid of religion, based simply on the belief that "the human function is activity of the soul in accord with reason" (Nichomachean Ethics, Book I). But his tears must have reflected the thought of how close he had
come to accepting a cramped and intolerant view of life and humanity.

Throughout his public career, three ideas were central to Wahid's thinking. First was that true belief required religious freedom. "The essence of Islam," he once wrote, is "encapsulated" in the words of the Quran, "For you, your religion; for me, my religion." Indonesia, he believed, needs "to develop a full religious tolerance based on freedom
of faith." Second was his belief that the fundamental requirement for democracy-or any form of just government-is equal treatment for all
citizens before the law. Third, that respect for minorities is essential for social stability and national unity, particularly for Indonesia with
its extraordinary diversity.

Throughout his career Wahid spoke up forcefully for people with unpopular ideas-even ones he disagreed with-and for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. He was admired by the Christian and Chinese minorities for his willingness to do so. One of his first acts as president was to participate in prayers at a Hindu temple in Bali where he had earlier spent several months studying Hindu philosophy. Later he removed a number of restrictions on ethnic Chinese and made Chinese New
Year an optional national holiday.

Even after leaving office, Wahid's role as a defender of religious freedom was extremely important. Indonesian voters have rejected
extremist politics at the polls-and the leadership of the current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono deserves much credit for that. Nevertheless, extremist views and even violent extremism too often go unchallenged. A recent report from The Wahid Insitute (which he founded in 2004) notes that a minority with extremist views, now in control of the Indonesian Ulama Council, has issued religious rulings against "deviant" groups. An even smaller minority that espouses violence, particularly the Islamic Defender Front, has attacked Christian churches and the mosques of the small Muslim Ahmadiyah sect.

Wahid was one of the few prominent Indonesians to defend the rights of the Ahmadiyah or to speak out forcefully against the Islamic Defender Front. Doing so takes courage. But he was always courageous, whether in defying President Suharto at the height of his power or in his personal struggle against encroaching blindness and failing health.

Although optimistic that "true Islam" will prevail, as he wrote in his 2005 op-ed, Wahid did not underestimate the dangers facing the world from an "extreme . . . ideology in the minds of fanatics" who "pervert Islam into a dogma of intolerance, hatred and bloodshed" and who justify their brutality by declaring "Islam is above everything else." This fundamentalist ideology, he said, "has become a well-financed, multifaceted global movement that operates like a juggernaut in much of
the developing world." What begins as a misunderstanding "of Islam by Muslims themselves" becomes a "crisis of misunderstanding" that afflicts
"Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with tragic consequences."

No one who knew Abdurrahman Wahid can believe that those fanatics who preach hatred and violence speak for the world's Muslims. Even though the extremist ideology represents a distinct minority of Muslims, it is well-financed and well-organized. To confront it, Muslim leaders like himself need, as he wrote in 2005, "the understanding and support of like-minded individuals, organizations and governments throughout the world . . . to offer a compelling alternate vision of Islam, one that
banishes the fanatical ideology of hatred to the darkness from which it emerged."

That support includes material support, but it also includes the moral support that comes from international recognition and attention for Muslim leaders who speak out with the courage that Wahid did.

When Wahid was only 12 he was riding in a car with his father, Wahid Hasyim, himself a prominent Muslim leader at the time of Indonesian
independence, when the car slid off a mountain road and his father suffered fatal injuries. What Wahid most remembered from that tragic event was the sight of thousands of people lining the roads as his
father's casket traveled the 80 kilometers from Surabaya to his burial at Jombang. Overwhelmed by the affection people had for his father, he
wondered "What could one man do that the people would love him so?"

As the funeral procession for Wahid himself traveled the same route on the last day of 2009, thousands of mourners, deeply moved, again lined
the road. What had he done that Indonesians so loved him? Perhaps the question is answered by the words that he asked to have on his tomb: "Here lies a humanist." That he was and a great one as well. No one can replace him, but hopefully he has inspired others to follow in his path.

Mr. Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and assistant
secretary of state for East Asia, is a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A17

What al-Qaeda gives as its reasons

Social movements appeal to a body of individuals by having as their ideological basis a set of formulations that are broad enough, vague enough, to allow people in various contexts to read their own interests in the movement's definition of the extant social situation. People participate for reasons that can vary.

Many of us in this country are still asking "Why do they hate us.?," and once in a while someone sympathetic to the violent activities of some Muslim groups explains the problem in terms that can help us understand. Always, of course they formulate the problem in terms that are meaningful to themselves, but their formulations can vary a good deal without betraying the ideals of the movement.

In his latest Op-ed piece in the NYTimes Tom Friedman cites the Associated Press as the source of an interesting statement by Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man who tried to blow up an airliner on the way to Detroit on Christmas Day. He wrote his father to say that “he had found a new religion, the real Islam” and that he was never coming home again. On an Internet site attributed to him he wrote in February, 2005,

“I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win ... and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!”

His vision entailed looking back to a period of [imagined] Muslim dominance of the world, and forward to a recovery of that dominance by the re-institution of [I presume from the statement] the Muslim Caliphate, a theme promoted by Bin Laden. The period of Muslim dominance that Farouk Abdulmutallab looks back to -- presumably the time of the Abbasid Caliphs -- may not have been so glorious as he supposes, but his vision of it, in any case, informs his reading of the present need to revive the great Muslim empire of the past.

Since 2003 another animating force for Islamist insurgency seems to have gained salience: the American invasion of Iraq. Nasser al-Bahri, a Yemeni who would become a bodyguard for Bin Laden, was persuaded in in 1996 by bin Laden's critique of U.S. actions in the Persian Gulf War, namely, that Muslims need to be unified against the West and recover the Caliphate (WashingtonPost [1/6/2010]). He has recently said of Bin Laden:

NASSER AL-BAHRI (through translator): I have often said I love Osama bin Laden more than my father. We shared many experiences, and he defends the Islamic nation. He doesn't like killing.

Notice his use of the term Islamic Nation -- singular. The implication is that "Islam" is a single "nation." This has indeed long been an ancient ideal among Muslims but it has never actually been anything more than an concept. The concept informs the Bin Laden's critique of the current situation in the Middle East, and the salience of the appeal to some Muslims, especially unemployed young people, indicates how eager some of them are for a meaningful world, one that makes sense in "Islamic" terms.

When Nasser Al-Bahri was asked why anyone, such as Farouk Abdulmutallab, would want to blow up an airplane in the United States his response reveals his own understanding of why Muslims are justified in attacking the United States.

NASSER AL-BAHRI (through translator): I wish the question wasn't so naive. Britain and America are in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They intervene in the affairs of Islamic nations. There are a million people out there like the Nigerian [who are ready to attack the United States].

Al-Bahri's explanation for attacking the United States is that the US is "intervening" in the affairs of Islamic nations, specifically in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It's not the same as the hope of establishing a Muslim world power, but it seems to be an aspect of Bin Laden's more general critique.

In any case, the movement needs this kind of ambiguity in its conceptual appeal -- in it's "annunciation and promise" (Weber's term) -- if it is to capture the imagination of real human beings. That this kind of critique resonates among a few Muslims, especially those who are in quest of a just and equitable moral order within their own personal horizons, suggests how hungry some of them are for a cause worth giving themselves to.
[Source of the quotations: PBS, News Hour, Jan 6, 2010.]

Images of "heaven" for young suicide bombers

Below is a report by the Pakistan Times on the kind of training ("brainwashing"?) that the Taliban give to young men whom they want to become human bombs. It speaks for itself. RLC

Taliban create artificial 'jannat' to lure suicide bombers
PTI - Peshawar, December 12, 2009

Taliban fighters in Pakistan's lawless South Waziristan tribal region created an artificial "jannat" (heaven) that they used to brainwash teenagers into becoming suicide bombers, describing it as a depiction of the place they would go to after carrying out attacks.

The "jannat" was part of a sprawling militant-held compound in Nawazkot area that was recently captured by security forces after intense fighting.

A group of journalists were yesterday shown the facility where boys aged 12 to 18 years were turned into human suicide bombs under the supervision of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief Hakimullah Mehsud.

The "heaven" consisted of four rooms, each with crude paintings of "jannat" or paradise, which is depicted as a place with lush green fields and trees, flowing rivers of milk and honey, lofty mountains and homes with red roofs and blue walls.

The "jannat" also depicted other heavenly pleasures awaiting suicide bombers after their "martyrdom", army officials told the journalists.

Some paintings showed "hoors" (angels) who live in heaven.

The walls of the rooms had slogans saluting the Taliban and the names of would-be suicide bombers were written in blood on them.

Syed Saleem Shahzad on the unsettled life of Al Qaeda leaders

Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online has the fullest treatment of the location of major leaders of AlQaeda that I have seen in a long time. RLC

Osama can run, how long can he hide?
Asia Times By Syed Saleem Shahzad 12/11/2009

"I believe that al-Qaeda can be defeated overall but I believe it is an ideology and he [Osama bin Laden] is an iconic leader, so I think to complete the destruction of that organization, it does mean that he needs to be either captured or killed, or brought to justice."- General Stanley McChrystal, United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan

"We don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is, if we did, we'd go get him." Robert Gates, a former US Central Intelligence Agency director and the current defense secretary.

ISLAMABAD - General Stanley McChrystal, as in the testimony quoted above to United States congressional committees this week, is unequivocal on the need to first roll back Taliban gains in Afghanistan as a prerequisite for the capture or elimination of Osama bin Laden and then the "ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda".

Apart from the difficulty of rolling back the Taliban, despite an additional 30,000 US troops surging into the country, US intelligence, as per admissions this month, are further away from catching bin Laden than they were eight years ago, when US forces notoriously let him slip through their grasp in the Tora Bora mountains.

There is little dispute that bin Laden and his close associates, including his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, move around in the vast and inhospitable mountainous territory that straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; the porous border exists only as a line on a map.

"Intelligence reports suggest that the al-Qaeda chief is somewhere inside North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border," US National Security Adviser James Jones said this week. The US has a US$50 million bounty for the "capture, killing or information leading to the capture or killing" of bin Laden. This had been doubled from $25 million in 2007. He remains on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's most wanted list.

Apart from one legal border crossing, 15 mountain passes are frequently used to travel between Pakistan and Afghanistan, by militants, traders, smugglers and innocent travelers. These paths originate in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and feed into the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Nuristan, Khost, Pakita and Paktika.

It is this area that will become the stage for the next chapter in the hunt for bin Laden, with US forces on the Afghan side and Pakistan troops on the other. The theory is that al-Qaeda and its allies will be caught in the middle.

Interaction with generally well-connected militant sources leads Asia Times Online to believe that bin Laden, 52, is alive and healthy, despite a history of kidney trouble. Since the construction of a US base in 2007 at the intersection of the Afghan province of Kunar and Bajaur Agency in Pakistan, bin Laden is confirmed to have flitted from place to place on either side of the border.

He is definitely known to have spent time in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, but all sources say that nowadays he is more often than not in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden has numerous safe houses and is protected by a strong network of diehards in the Pakistani tribal areas, in addition to an intelligence network on both sides of the border that has to date managed to stay a step ahead of both Western and Pakistani intelligence.

Top Taliban and other commanders adopt a similar pattern in avoiding the attention of unwelcome visitors. Even though a former Afghan premier, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is known to move around Kunar and Nuristan provinces in Afghanistan, he remains at large. Hekmatyar also makes brief trips into the adjacent Pakistani regions of Chitral and Dir.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, runs the largest and most effective Taliban network in Afghanistan. He moves in the provinces of Khost and Paktia, and also in North Waziristan, always one step ahead of his pursuers - including drones.

Similarly, Ilyas Kashmiri, now one of al-Qaeda's most wanted men as he is intimately involved in defining and directing al-Qaeda's and the Taliban's struggle, moves between bases of operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, never staying in one place for more than a night or two.

Not so fortunate was Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader killed in a drone attack earlier this year. He stayed only in the districts of Ladha and Makeen in South Waziristan and did not have other sanctuaries, making it easier to track him down.

The difficulty in trying to trace bin Laden is that he moves across such a broad area, and that, unlike even the Taliban, there is no defined target. Coalition forces have a broad idea of where the Taliban's command centers are and in which areas to expect resistance.

By comparison, bin Laden and his few dozen al-Qaeda deputies are shadows shifting across an endless landscape on which Taliban fighters, Pakistani tribal people and jihadi youths are more visible.

There is no recent credible first-hand information on when bin Laden was last seen. A few Taliban fighters who were arrested a few weeks ago could only share with their American interrogators what they had heard from their contacts - that bin Laden had moved between North Waziristan and South Waziristan.

It is safe to assume that he has not been in South Waziristan since the Pakistani military began major operations there about two months ago to take on the Pakistani Taliban. His most likely immediate destination would have been Khost, directly across the border.

Such speculation, though, has been around for years and bin Laden is nowhere nearer to being caught, let alone his chasers seeing his dust trail. Indeed, from the Pakistani perspective, their last verifiable sighting was in September 2003 near Bush Mountain in the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan. By the time the army arrived, he had long gone; all that was left were first-hand accounts of his having resided in the area.

All the same, the net might be getting tighter. Late on Thursday night, CBS News reported that a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone had killed a top al-Qaeda official in the Pakistani border area. Unnamed officials said the person killed was not bin Laden or Zawahiri, but that he was "one of the top five terrorists on the US wanted list", according to the report.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

An Anthropologist's insights on the Taliban and Al Qaeda

It's a joy to read an informed statement of the situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan by someone who has both a sense of the situation on the ground and a detailed grasp of the history that relates to that situation. Scott Atran is an anthropologist who has been helping the American military think about the situation they have to deal with in the South Asian war. I'm thankful that the New York Times would publish his perspectyive. RLC

To Beat Al Qaeda, Look to the East

By SCOTT ATRAN
Published: December 12, 2009

IN testimony last week before Congress, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, insisted that President Obama’s revised war strategy will “build support for the Afghan government,” while Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, vowed that it will “absolutely” succeed in disrupting and degrading the Taliban.

Confidence is important, but we also have to recognize that the decision to commit 30,000 more troops to a counterinsurgency effort against a good segment of the Afghan population, with the focus on converting a deeply unpopular and corrupt regime into a unified, centralized state for the first time in that country’s history, is far from a slam dunk. In the worst case, the surge may push General McChrystal’s “core goal of defeating Al Qaeda” further away.

Al Qaeda is already on the ropes globally, with ever-dwindling financial and popular support, and a drastically diminished ability to work with other extremists worldwide, much less command them in major operations. Its lethal agents are being systematically hunted down, while those Muslims whose souls it seeks to save are increasingly revolted by its methods.

Unfortunately, this weakening viral movement may have a new lease on life in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we are pushing the Taliban into its arms. By overestimating the threat from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, we are making it a greater threat to Pakistan and the world. Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan are unlike Iraq, the ancient birthplace of central government, or 1960s Vietnam, where a strong state was backing the Communist insurgents. Afghanistan and Pakistan must be dealt with on their own terms.

We’re winning against Al Qaeda and its kin in places where antiterrorism efforts are local and built on an understanding that the ties binding terrorist networks today are more cultural and familial than political. Consider recent events in Southeast Asia.

In September, Indonesian security forces killed Noordin Muhammad Top, then on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted terrorist list. Implicated in the region’s worst suicide bombings — including the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton bombings in Jakarta last July 17 — Noordin Top headed a splinter group of the extremist religious organization Jemaah Islamiyah (he called it Al Qaeda for the Malaysian Archipelago). Research by my colleagues and me, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, reveals three critical factors in such groups inspired by Al Qaeda, all of which local security forces implicitly grasp but American counterintelligence workers seem to underestimate.

What binds these groups together? First is friendship forged through fighting: the Indonesian volunteers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan styled themselves the Afghan Alumni, and many kept in contact when they returned home after the war. The second is school ties and discipleship: many leading operatives in Southeast Asia come from a handful of religious schools affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah. Out of some 30,000 religious schools in Indonesia, only about 50 have a deadly legacy of producing violent extremists. Third is family ties; as anyone who has watched the opening scene from “The Godfather” knows, weddings can be terrific opportunities for networking and plotting.

Understanding these three aspects of terrorist networking has given law enforcement a leg up on the jihadists. Gen. Tito Karnavian, the leader of the strike team that tracked down Noordin Top, told me that “knowledge of the interconnected networks of Afghan Alumni, kinship and marriage groups was very crucial to uncovering the inner circle of Noordin.”

Consider Noordin Top’s third marriage, which cemented ties to key suspects in the lead-up to the recent hotel bombings. His father-in-law, who founded a Jemaah Islamiyah-related boarding school, stashed explosives in his garden with the aid of another teacher at the school. Using electronic intercepts and tracing family, school and alumni ties, police officers found the cache in late June 2009. That discovery may have prompted Noordin Top to initiate the hotel attacks ahead of a planned simultaneous attack on the residence of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

In addition, an Afghan Alumnus and nephew of Noordin Top’s father-in-law was being pursued by the police for his role in a failed plot to blow up a tourist cafe on Sumatra. Unfortunately, Noordin Top struck the hotels before the Indonesian police could penetrate the entire network, in part because another family group was still operating under the police radar. This group included a florist who smuggled the bombs into the hotels and a man whose eventual arrest led to discovery of the plot against the president. Both terrorists were married to sisters of a Yemeni-trained imam who recruited the hotel suicide bombers, and of another brother who had infiltrated Indonesia’s national airline.

Had the police pulled harder on the pieces of social yarn they had in hand, they might have unraveled the hotel plot earlier. Still, their work thwarted attacks planned for the future, including that on the president.

Similarly, security officials in the Philippines have combined intelligence from American and Australian sources with similar tracking efforts to crack down on their terrorist networks, and as a result most extremist groups are either seeking reconciliation with the government — including the deadly Moro Islamic Liberation Front on the island of Mindanao — or have devolved into kidnapping-and-extortion gangs with no ideological focus. The separatist Abu Sayyaf Group, once the most feared force in the region, now has no overall spiritual or military leaders, few weapons and only a hundred or so fighters.

So, how does this relate to a strategy against Al Qaeda in the West and in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Al Qaeda’s main focus is harming the United States and Europe, but there hasn’t been a successful attack in these places directly commanded by Osama bin Laden and company since 9/11. The American invasion of Afghanistan devastated Al Qaeda’s core of top personnel and its training camps. In a recent briefing to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. case officer, said that recent history “refutes claims by some heads of the intelligence community that all Islamist plots in the West can be traced back to the Afghan-Pakistani border.” The real threat is homegrown youths who gain inspiration from Osama bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq encouraged many of these local plots, including the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. In their aftermaths, European law and security forces stopped plots from coming to fruition by stepping up coordination and tracking links among local extremists, their friends and friends of friends, while also improving relations with young Muslim immigrants through community outreach. Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have taken similar steps.

Now we need to bring this perspective to Afghanistan and Pakistan — one that is smart about cultures, customs and connections. The present policy of focusing on troop strength and drones, and trying to win over people by improving their lives with Western-style aid programs, only continues a long history of foreign involvement and failure. Reading a thousand years of Arab and Muslim history would show little in the way of patterns that would have helped to predict 9/11, but our predicament in Afghanistan rhymes with the past like a limerick.

A key factor helping the Taliban is the moral outrage of the Pashtun tribes against those who deny them autonomy, including a right to bear arms to defend their tribal code, known as Pashtunwali. Its sacred tenets include protecting women’s purity (namus), the right to personal revenge (badal), the sanctity of the guest (melmastia) and sanctuary (nanawateh). Among all Pashtun tribes, inheritance, wealth, social prestige and political status accrue through the father’s line.

This social structure means that there can be no suspicion that the male pedigree (often traceable in lineages spanning centuries) is “corrupted” by doubtful paternity. Thus, revenge for sexual misbehavior (rape, adultery, abduction) warrants killing seven members of the offending group and often the “offending” woman. Yet hospitality trumps vengeance: if a group accepts a guest, all must honor him, even if prior grounds justify revenge. That’s one reason American offers of millions for betraying Osama bin Laden fail.

Afghan hill societies have withstood centuries of would-be conquests by keeping order with Pashtunwali in the absence of central authority. When seemingly intractable conflicts arise, rival parties convene councils, or jirgas, of elders and third parties to seek solutions through consensus.

After 9/11, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, assembled a council of clerics to judge his claim that Mr. bin Laden was the country’s guest and could not be surrendered. The clerics countered that because a guest should not cause his host problems, Mr. bin Laden should leave. But instead of keeping pressure on the Taliban to resolve the issue in ways they could live with, the United States ridiculed their deliberation and bombed them into a closer alliance with Al Qaeda. Pakistani Pashtuns then offered to help out their Afghan brethren.

American-sponsored “reconciliation” efforts between the Afghan government and the Taliban may be fatally flawed if they include demands that Pashtun hill tribes give up their arms and support a Constitution that values Western-inspired rights and judicial institutions over traditions that have sustained the tribes against all enemies.

THE secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, suggest that victory in Afghanistan is possible if the Taliban who pursue self-interest rather than ideology can be co-opted with material incentives. But as the veteran war reporter Jason Burke of The Observer of London told me: “Today, the logical thing for the Pashtun conservatives is to stop fighting and get rich through narcotics or Western aid, the latter being much lower risk. But many won’t sell out.”

Why? In part because outsiders who ignore local group dynamics tend to ride roughshod over values they don’t grasp. My research with colleagues on group conflict in India, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories found that helping to improve lives materially does little to reduce support for violence, and can even increase it if people feel such help compromises their most cherished values.

The original alliance between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was largely one of convenience between a poverty-stricken national movement and a transnational cause that brought it material help. American pressure on Pakistan to attack the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their sanctuary gave birth to the Pakistani Taliban, who forged their own ties to Al Qaeda to fight the Pakistani state.

While some Taliban groups use the rhetoric of global jihad to inspire ranks or enlist foreign fighters, the Pakistani Taliban show no inclination to go after Western interests abroad. Their attacks, which have included at least three assaults near nuclear facilities, warrant concerted action — but in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan. As Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer, puts it: “There’s no Qaeda in Afghanistan and no Afghans in Qaeda.”

Pakistan has long preferred a policy of “respect for the independence and sentiment of the tribes” that was advised in 1908 by Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India who established the North-West Frontier Province as a buffer zone to “conciliate and contain” the Pashtun hill tribes. In 1948, Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, removed all troops from brigade level up in Waziristan and other tribal areas in a plan aptly called Operation Curzon.

The problem today is that Al Qaeda is prodding the Pakistani Taliban to hit state institutions in the hopes of provoking a full-scale invasion of the tribal areas by the Pakistani Army; the idea is that such an assault would rally the tribes to Al Qaeda’s cause and threaten the state. The United States has been pushing for exactly that sort of potentially disastrous action by Islamabad. But holding to Curzon’s line may still be Pakistan’s best bet. The key in the Afghan-Pakistani area, as in Southeast Asia, is to use local customs and networks to our advantage. Of course, counterterrorism measures are only as effective as local governments that execute them. Afghanistan’s government is corrupt, unpopular and inept.

Besides, there’s really no Taliban central authority to talk to. To be Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life are threatened. Although most Taliban claim loyalty to Afghanistan’s Mullah Omar, this allegiance varies greatly. Many Pakistani Taliban leaders — including Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by an American drone in August, and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud — rejected Mullah Omar’s call to forgo suicide bombings against Pakistani civilians.

In fact, it is the United States that holds today’s Taliban together. Without us, their deeply divided coalition could well fragment. Taliban resurgence depends on support from those notoriously unruly hill tribes in Pakistan’s border regions, who are unsympathetic to the original Taliban program of homogenizing tribal custom and politics under one rule.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the Taliban were to sever ties to Mr. bin Laden if he became a bigger headache to them than America. Al Qaeda may have close relations to the network of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader living in Pakistan, and the Shabi Khel branch of the Mehsud tribe in Waziristan, but it isn’t wildly popular with many other Taliban factions and forces.

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are interested in their homeland, not ours. Things are different now than before 9/11. The Taliban know how costly Osama bin Laden’s friendship can be. There’s a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained using the lessons learned in Indonesia and elsewhere. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.

To defeat violent extremism in Afghanistan, less may be more — just as it has been elsewhere in Asia.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming “Listen to the Devil.”

A deadliine? Ahmed Rashid

A Deadline We Can Believe In?: Advantage: Taliban
NY Times By AHMED RASHID Op-Ed Contributor December 11, 2009
Lahore, Pakistan - WHILE President Obama deliberated three months before
releasing his new Afghan surge strategy, his decision actually muddied the
waters as far as American credibility in Afghanistan and Pakistan is
concerned, and created misapprehensions in Europe.

Many NATO allies were thunderstruck at the deadline announcement. The
British, who have the second-largest contingent in Afghanistan, have said
their 10,000-troop presence in Helmand Province will not be affected by any
timeline. Senior administration officials have spent the last week in Europe
and in Afghanistan and Pakistan rowing back on what the president said,
insisting that the plan is flexible.

In the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, most people are of two minds. They would
like the Americans to leave soon, but don't want to lose their front-line
status in the war on terrorism, which brings vast amounts of American aid.
Despite widespread anti-Americanism on the streets, the ruling elites are
nervous about being dumped by America, as they were in 1989 after the
Soviets withdrew.

Much of the confusion was the fault of President Obama himself. He should
have devoted far more time in his West Point speech to thoroughly explaining
the 18-month timeline. It seems almost as though his speechwriters got no
input from the Afghan experts working for Richard Holbrooke, the American
envoy here, who could have told them how poorly it would play in the region.


On the battlefield, there is no doubt that extra troops deployed in the east
and south of Afghanistan will help in retaking areas now held by the
Taliban. But the fear is that the Taliban will melt into the north and west
of the country, where NATO troops operate under caveats that limit their
ability to go on the offensive. Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai has
contradicted the Obama plan by saying that the Afghan Army and police will
not be ready for five years.

Nor has President Obama outlined exactly what the civilian surge hopes to
achieve. He has ruled out nation-building, but that is precisely what
Afghanistan needs. Most important is building a functional Afghan economy
with permanent jobs in place of the temporary positions provided by the
present donor-driven development projects.

Pakistan remains the biggest problem. While President Asif Ali Zardari has
said all the things Washington wants to hear, there is no agreement as yet
from the Pakistan military to go after the Afghan Taliban strongholds in
Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Provinces. The Pakistan military is
unlikely to act unless there is a parallel movement by the Americans to
defuse Indo-Pakistani tensions over Kashmir, and unless India is more
willing to reduce its forces on Pakistan's eastern border.

We can understand the president's serious domestic constraints — the
economy, health care and Congressional elections next year. But this is all
the more reason to make sure that the United States and NATO can deliver
success in the next 18 months and get all the nations in this region to back
their efforts. All this could have been done without an arbitrary timeline.

Ahmed Rashid is the author of “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central
Asia” and “Descent Into Chaos.”
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