11. May 2010 by admin.

Pakistan: Faisal Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban

May 10, 2010 

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said May 9 that the United States has evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the man who confessed to the failed bombing attempt at Times Square in New York City on May 1. Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen who demonstrated a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, his status as a U.S. citizen would have been problematic for the Pakistani Taliban, who must remain wary of potential infiltration from U.S. intelligence. Furthermore, the attempted bombing showed little to no signs that Shahzad had help from an outside group.

The Case of Faisal Shahzad U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced May 9 that the United States had uncovered evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent who confessed to the botched May 1 attempt to bomb Times Square in New York City. Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, made essentially the opposite contention May 7, arguing that Shahzad acted alone. Any link between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban is not as meaningful as it appears, but it does draw attention to the need for a more sophisticated discussion of the Pakistani Taliban phenomenon and the way in which Shahzad approached the organization.

In the wake of the attack, Shahzad allegedly has been linked not only to the Pakistani Taliban but also to Anwar al-Awlaki, the former U.S.-born radical imam of a mosque in a Virginian suburb of Washington, D.C., who is now thought to be in hiding in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was also linked to two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers and U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 at Fort Hood in November 2009.

But even Hasan, who appears to have had closer ties to al-Awlaki, acted as a lone wolf and did not inform anyone of his intentions. In other words, despite some loose ideological affinity, the connection played no operational role in the attack, as the old apex leadership of al Qaeda prime did in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. What made Hasan an effective lone wolf was not his ideological connections, but his insider knowledge of a good location for an attack at Fort Hood, his professional and personal proficiency with small arms and an appropriate target selection commensurate with his skill.

Shahzad was more of a “Kramer” jihadist in the tradition of Richard Reid — an ultimately inept radicalized individual with no operational understanding of basic tradecraft, no self-awareness of that lack of skill and ambition to carry out an attack utterly beyond his capabilities. Shahzad’s skill set is strikingly similar to that of Najibullah Zazi or the Glasgow group — they were all failed bomb makers.

The ‘Walk-In’ Jihadist

About the only thing Shahzad brought to the table was the passport of a naturalized U.S. citizen and a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, that entails more problems than opportunities.

A militant group that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence are actively targeting has to be inherently skeptical of outsiders — especially if one shows up on their doorstep (as Shahzad did) with an offer that appears to be too good to be true. Any entity must balance operational security with the active pursuit of its goals and objectives. But the lack of tradecraft that Shahzad exhibited is only further evidence that if Shahzad interacted with the Pakistani Taliban meaningfully — and there is not yet much evidence either way about how far he made it up the chain of command during his visit – they did not help him attain any meaningful skills. Although subsequent events might have shown that the group — if it was behind the plot — missed a chance to strike at the U.S. homeland, the ensuing investigations and focus of both U.S. and Pakistani intelligence efforts will only make operational security all the more important and any Shahzad-like offers all the more difficult to trust.

Shahzad’s childhood in Pakistan afforded him both cultural and filial connections in the country. There are even reports that a childhood friend was behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Childhood has little bearing on adult operational capability, though it did make it easier for Shahzad to travel outside Peshawar, where he once lived, and make contacts with innumerable individuals — some invariably with some degree of connection to the shadowy, amorphous world of the Pakistani Taliban and their local and transnational allies.

However, a naturalized U.S. citizen who had spent more than a decade in the United States — even one with some historical acquaintance among militants — is problematic. It is next to impossible for a jihadist group to have any confidence in the trustworthiness of an individual who walks in and volunteers in a scenario such as this. The potential for that individual to be a double agent is simply too high to meaningfully compromise operational security — especially as the United States and others are trying very hard to enhance their intelligence for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes in the region. The lack of tradecraft in Shahzad’s device is compelling evidence that whatever “contacts” or “training” he might have received in northern Pakistan was largely confined to physical training and weapons handling, not the far more sophisticated skill set of fashioning improvised explosive devices.

So whoever he did talk to in Pakistan — and the list of potentials is virtually endless for someone who grew up in the area — reveals almost nothing. More information may become available about whom he spoke with and what was discussed but there is no meaningful context for these conversations. Basic tradecraft and Shahzad’s Times Square device that make it clear that at most, the Pakistani Taliban sent a low-level representative to speak with him. It is unclear who provided the training, but it is reasonable to assume that he underwent basic guerilla training courses, but not advanced bomb-making courses. (Zazi received the bomb-making training but still failed in his attempt to attack New York’s subways because training without experience is insufficient.) However, the May 3 video of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud claiming he had not been killed in a 2009 U.S. UAV strike probably gave the group an almost irresistible opportunity to claim credit for the May 1 attempted attack in the United States — even if it was an inept one — in order to bolster the larger movement’s standing (although the Pakistani Taliban is so fractious and diffuse, it can hardly be said that the claim was from “the group”).

Pakistani Taliban

The Pakistani Taliban is an outgrowth of the Afghan Taliban that Islamabad nurtured in the 1990s. The radical Islamist ideology and militant training that Pakistan (along with the United States and Saudi Arabia) had cultivated in Afghanistan during the 1980s war against the Soviets in order to consolidate control over the country eventually spilled back across the border. With a recent rise in attacks against Pakistani government targets, Islamabad began to grasp the implications and consequences of its existing policies. Consequently, in April 2009, it initiated an unprecedented counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the leading group in the amorphous and diffuse phenomenon that is the Pakistani Taliban (even though the TTP itself is fractious), certainly has had ambitions to attack the continental United States, a supporter of the regime in Islamabad that it opposes.

However, it is important to note that at its strongest, the TTP demonstrated the ability to strike at urban targets in Pakistan. It has never demonstrated the capability to strike far afield, much less on the opposite side of the world. Others, such as splinter factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Jihad al-Islami, have demonstrated that capability recently, but not the TTP. So while it has the intent, it has never had the capability to carry out an attack at that distance. The closest it has come to an international attack is the suicide bombing on the CIA facility in eastern Afghanistan across the border from the FATA, which for all intents and purposes should be considered a local operation given the close proximity and porous nature of the border. In that instance, the group got lucky in that the bomber had independent access to agency officials. And the ongoing campaign in FATA is only further pressuring the Pakistani Taliban. Facing both the Pakistani military and American UAV strikes, the group has seen its operational reach within Pakistan severely constrained. The idea that the group has sufficient capacity to plot and support a strike on the continental United States is increasingly far-fetched, despite its desire to do so. In any event, Shahzad’s actions were not only carried out ineptly by an untrained individual, but have no evidence of meaningful outside support.

So while there are links that should not be underestimated, the botched Times Square bombing is merely the latest in a now well-established trend of “grassroots” and “Kramer” jihadists. They absolutely pose a danger — and an ongoing one at that — but they must not be mistaken for the coherent, transnational phenomenon of al Qaeda 2.0.

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3. May 2010 by admin.

The Failed Times Square Attack

May 2, 2010 

A New York City police officer in Times Square 

on May 2, near the scene where a crude explosive device was found

It appears that the failed bombing attempt in Times Square on May 1 was the work of an unskilled attacker or group of attackers who had intended to cause mass casualties, but lacked the skills to conduct an effective attack.

This incident bears several similarities to the attacks in London on June 29, 2007, when two failed vehicle bombs were placed in central London entertainment districts during the evening in an attempt to cause mass casualties. Like the Times Square device, the London devices also contained propane tanks and cans of gasoline with a low explosive initiator charge — though the New York device reportedly used a timer instead of a cell phone to activate the device.

Although the authorities have released no information about potential suspects, the similarity in the method of attack and target set lead us believe that the Times Square device could also have been connected to a small grassroots cell (like London) or even a lone wolf jihadist attacker, and whoever conducted the attempted bombing appears to have closely followed the London attack blueprint.

Someone purporting to represent the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the failed attack in a statement posted to the Internet, but the TTP are a highly professional organization and have a long history of building functional and effective improvised explosive devices. The person who constructed the Times Square device was clearly not a professional, and therefore was not likely dispatched by the TTP to conduct the attack. Additionally, the TTP have taken credit for other attacks in the past that they clearly did not conduct, such as the April 3, 2009, shooting at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York, which was conducted by a mentally disturbed Vietnamese immigrant. If the TTP were involved in any way with the failed Times Square attack, the involvement was likely tangential — such as providing training to a grassroots jihadist who then returned to the United States and attempted the attack, or perhaps even just communicating with the attacker over the Internet.

If this failed attack was conducted by grassroots jihadists or a lone wolf, it is likely that the attackers will attempt a follow-on attack unless they are found and apprehended. With the attackers being inexperienced, they probably left a lot of physical evidence in the vehicle recovered by police on May 1, and could be tracked quickly. Because of this, any follow-on attacks could come rapidly, like the June 30, 2007, attack against the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, conducted by the men responsible for the failed June 29 London attacks.

Therefore, we need to be watching the open source information flow and talking to our contacts for signs of a pending arrest or indications of a possible follow-on attack. Such an attack could involve another bombing attempt, or could be a simple attack using firearms or other readily available weapons. Also, like the Glasgow attack, a follow-on attack could be a suicide mission.

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26. April 2010 by admin.

Media coverage of the threat posed by dirty bombs runs in a perceptible cycle with distinct spikes and lulls. We are currently in one of the periods of heightened awareness and media coverage. A number of factors appear to have sparked the current interest, including the recently concluded Nuclear Security Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. Other factors include the resurfacing rumors that al Qaeda militant Adnan El Shukrijumah may have returned to the United States and is planning to conduct an attack, as well as recent statements by members of the Obama administration regarding the threat of jihadist militants using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A recent incident in India in which a number of people were sickened by radioactive metal at a scrap yard in a New Delhi slum also has received a great deal of media coverage.

In spite of the fact that dirty bombs have been discussed widely in the press for many years now — especially since the highly publicized arrest of Jose Padilla in May 2002 — much misinformation and disinformation continues to circulate regarding dirty bombs. The misinformation stems from long-held misconceptions and ignorance, while the disinformation comes from scaremongers hyping the threat for financial or political reasons. Frankly, many people have made a lot of money by promoting fear since 9/11.

Just last week, we read a newspaper article in which a purported expert interviewed by the reporter discussed how a dirty bomb would “immediately cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths.” This is simply not true. A number of radiological accidents have demonstrated that a dirty bomb will not cause this type of death toll. Indeed, the panic generated by a dirty bomb attack could very well result in more immediate deaths than the detonation of the device itself. Unfortunately, media stories hyping the threat of these devices may foster such panic, thus increasing the death toll. To counter this irrational fear, we feel it is time once again to discuss dirty bombs in detail and provide our readers with a realistic assessment of the threat they pose.

Dirty Bombs Defined

A dirty bomb is a type of radiological dispersal device (RDD), and RDDs are, as the name implies, devices that disperse a radiological isotope. Depending on the motives of those planning the attack, an RDD could be a low-key weapon that surreptitiously releases aerosolized radioactive material, dumps out a finely powdered radioactive material or dissolves a radioactive material in water. Such surreptitious dispersal methods would be intended to slowly expose as many people as possible to the radiation and to prolong their exposure. Unless large amounts of a very strong radioactive material are used, however, the effects of such an exposure will be limited. People are commonly exposed to heightened levels of radiation during activities such as air travel and mountain climbing. To cause adverse effects, radiation exposure must occur either in a very high dose over a short period or in smaller doses sustained over a longer period. This is not to say that radiation is not dangerous, but rather the idea that the slightest amount of exposure to radiation causes measurable harm is not accurate.

By its very nature, the RDD is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area. Additionally, the use of an explosion to disperse the radioisotope alerts the intended victims, who can then evacuate the affected area and be decontaminated. These factors make it very difficult for an attacker to administer a deadly dose of radiation via a dirty bomb.

It is important to note that a dirty bomb is not a nuclear device, and no nuclear reaction occurs. A dirty bomb will not produce an effect like the nuclear devices dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A dirty bomb is quite simply an RDD that uses explosives as the means to disperse a radioactive isotope, and the only blast effect will be from the explosives used to disperse the radioisotope. In a dirty bomb attack, radioactive material not only is dispersed, but the dispersal is accomplished in an obvious manner, and the explosion immediately alerts the victims and authorities that an attack has taken place. The attackers hope that notice of their attack will cause mass panic — in other words, the RDD is a weapon of fear and terror.

The radioisotopes that can be used to construct an RDD are fairly common. Even those materials considered by many to be the most likely to be used in an RDD, such as cobalt-60 and cesium-137, have legitimate medical, commercial and industrial uses. Organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that such radioisotopes are readily available to virtually any country in the world, and they are almost certainly not beyond the reach of even moderately capable non-state actors. Indeed, given the ease of obtaining radiological isotopes and the ease with which a dirty bomb can be constructed, we are surprised that we have not seen one successfully used in a terror attack. We continue to believe that it is only a matter of time before a dirty bomb is effectively employed somewhere. Because of this, let’s examine what effectively employing a dirty bomb means.

Dirty Bomb Effectiveness

Like a nonexplosive RDD, unless a dirty bomb contains a large amount of very strong radioactive material, the effects of the device are not likely to be immediate and dramatic. In fact, the explosive effect of the RDD is likely to kill more people than the device’s radiological effect. This need for a large quantity of a radioisotope not only creates the challenge of obtaining that much radioactive material, it also means that such a device would be large and unwieldy — and therefore difficult to smuggle into a target such as a subway or stadium.

In practical terms, a dirty bomb can produce a wide range of effects depending on the size of the improvised explosive device (IED) and the amount and type of radioactive material involved. (Powdered radioisotopes are easier to disperse than materials in solid form.) Environmental factors such as terrain, weather conditions and population density would also play an important role in determining the effects of such a device.

Significantly, while the radiological effects of a dirty bomb may not be instantly lethal, the radiological impact of an RDD will in all likelihood affect an area larger than the killing radius of the IED itself, and will persist for far longer. The explosion from a conventional IED is over in an instant, but radiation released by a RDD can persist for decades unless the area is decontaminated. While the radiation level may not be strong enough to affect people exposed briefly in the initial explosion, the radiation will persist in the contaminated area, and the cumulative effects of such radiation could prove very hazardous. (Here again, the area contaminated and the ease of decontamination will depend on the type and quantity of the radioactive material used. Materials in a fine powdered form are easier to disperse and harder to clean up than solid blocks of material.) In either case, it will be necessary to evacuate people from the contaminated area, and people will need to stay out of the area until it can be decontaminated, a process that could prove lengthy and expensive.

Therefore, while a dirty bomb is not truly a WMD like a nuclear device, we frequently refer to them as “weapons of mass disruption” or “weapons of mass dislocation” because they may temporarily render contaminated areas uninhabitable. The expense of decontaminating a large, densely populated area, such as a section of London or Washington, is potentially quite high. This cost would also make a dirty bomb a type of economic weapon.

Historical Precedents

The world has not yet witnessed a successful dirty bomb attack by a terrorist or militant group. That does not necessarily mean that militant groups have not been interested in radiological weapons, however. Chechen militants have perhaps been the most active in the realm of radioactive materials. In November 1995, Chechen militants under the command of Shamil Basayev placed a small quantity of cesium-137 in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park. Rather than disperse the material, however, the Chechens used the material as a psychological weapon by directing a TV news crew to the location and thus creating a media storm and fostering public fear. The material in this incident was thought to have been obtained from a nuclear waste or isotope storage facility in the Chechen capital of Grozny.

In December 1998, the pro-Russian Chechen Security Service announced it had found a dirty bomb consisting of a land mine combined with radioactive materials next to a railway line frequently used to transport Russian troops. It is believed that Chechen militants planted the device. In September 1999, two Chechen militants who attempted to steal highly radioactive materials from a chemical plant in Grozny were incapacitated after carrying the container for only a few minutes each; one reportedly died. This highlights another difficulty with producing a really effective dirty bomb: The strongest radioactive material is dangerous to handle, and even a suicide operative might not be able to move and employ it before being overtaken by its effects.

Still, none of these Chechen incidents really provided a very good example of what a dirty bomb detonation would actually look like. To do this, we need to look at incidents where radiological isotopes were dispersed by accident. In 1987, in Goiania, Brazil, a tiny radiotherapy capsule of cesium chloride salt was accidentally broken open after being salvaged from a radiation therapy machine left at an abandoned health care facility. Over the course of 15 days, the capsule containing the radioisotope was handled by a number of people who were fascinated by the faint blue glow it gave off. Some victims reportedly even smeared the substance on their bodies. The radiation was then dispersed by these people to various parts of the surrounding neighborhood, and some of it was even taken to nearby towns. In all, more than 1,000 people were contaminated during the incident and some 244 were found to have significant radioactive material in or on their bodies. Still, only four people died from the incident, and most of those who died had sustained exposure to the contamination. In addition to the human toll, the cleanup operation in Goiania cost more than $100 million, as many houses had to be razed and substantial quantities of contaminated soil had to be removed from the area.

In a more recent case involving a scrap dealer, this time in a slum outside New Delhi, India, eight people were admitted to the hospital because of radiation exposure after a scrap dealer dismantled an object containing cobalt-60. The material apparently arrived at a scrap shop March 12, and the owner of the shop was admitted to the hospital April 4 suffering from radiation-poisoning symptoms (again another case involving prolonged exposure to a radiation source). The radiation source was found at the scrap yard April 5 and identified as cobalt-60. Indian authorities hauled away eight piles of contaminated scrap. The cleanup operation was easier in the Indian incident, since the radioactive material was in metallic form and found in larger pieces rather than in powdered form seen in the cesium in Goiania. Intriguingly, a nearby scrap shop also was found to be contaminated April 16, but it appears from initial reports that the second site was contaminated by a second radioactive source that contained a weaker form of cobalt-60. Though we are watching for additional details on this case, so far, despite the long-term exposure to a potent radioactive source, no deaths have been reported.

At the other end of the spectrum from the Goiania and New Delhi accidents is the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine, when a 1-gigawatt power reactor exploded. It is estimated that more than one hundred times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb was released during the accident — the equivalent of 50 million to 250 million grams of radium. More than 40 different radioisotopes were released, and there was a measurable rise in cesium-137 levels across the entire European continent. No RDD could ever aspire to anything close to such an effect.

Chernobyl wrought untold suffering, and estimates suggest that it may ultimately contribute to the deaths of 9,000 people. But many of those affected by the radiation are still alive more than 20 years after the accident. While STRATFOR by no means seeks to downplay the tragic human or environmental consequences of this disaster, the incident is instructive when contemplating the potential effects of a dirty bomb attack. In spite of the incredible amounts of radioactive material released at Chernobyl, only 31 people died in the explosion and immediate aftermath. Today, 5.5 million people live in the contaminated zone — many within or near the specified EU dosage limits for people living near operational nuclear power plants.

It is this type of historical example that causes us to be so skeptical regarding claims that a small dirty bomb will cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Instead, the most strategic consequences of this sort of destruction are economic. By some estimates, the Chernobyl disaster will ultimately cost well in excess of $100 billion. Again, in our opinion, a dirty bomb should be considered a weapon of disruption — one that will cause economic loss, but would not cause mass casualties or any real mass destruction.

Fighting Panic

Analytically, based upon the ease of manufacture and the historical interest by militants in dirty bombs — which ironically may in part be due to the way the RDD threat has been hyped — it is only a matter of time before militants successfully employ one. Since the contamination created by such a device can be long-lasting, more rational international actors probably would prefer to detonate such a device against a target outside their own country. In other words, they would lean toward attacking a target within the United States or United Kingdom rather than the U.S. or British embassies in their home country.

And since it is not likely to produce mass casualties, a dirty bomb attack would likely be directed against a highly symbolic target — such as one representing the economy or government — and designed to cause the maximum amount of disruption at the target site. Therefore, it is not out of the question to imagine such an attack aimed at a target such as Wall Street or the Pentagon. The device would not destroy these sites, but would limit access to them for as long as it took to decontaminate them.

As noted above, we believe it is possible that the panic caused by a dirty bomb attack could well kill more people than the device itself. People who understand the capabilities and limitations of dirty bombs are less likely to panic than those who do not, which is the reason for this analysis. Another important way to help avoid panic is to carefully think about such an incident in advance and to put in place a carefully crafted contingency plan for your family and business. Contingency plans are especially important for those who work in proximity to a potential dirty bomb target. But they are useful in any disaster, whether natural or man-made, and something that should be practiced by all families and businesses. Such knowledge and planning provide people with the ability to conduct an orderly and methodical evacuation of the affected area. This allows them to minimize their exposure to radioactivity while also minimizing their risk of injury or death due to mass hysteria. For while a dirty bomb attack could well be messy and disruptive, it does not have to be deadly.

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25. April 2010 by admin.

The LONG TERM goal of jihad is world domination – a global Islamic state under Islamic law.

Jihad is not, as some Western apologists claim, simply a striving for individual perfection. Rather, jihad is an expansionist totalitarian ideology that seeks to establish a global Islamic state ruled by Islamic law, or sharia. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief henchman said in the summer of 2006: “Jihad seeks the liberation of Palestine, the entire country of Palestine and to liberate every land that used to be a territory of Islam, from Spain to Iraq.”

The jihad’s IMMEDIATE Objective is “Death to America.”America,” declared Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith, “is the head of heresy in our modern world, and [as a result] . . . we have the right to kill 4 million Americans — 2 million of them children — and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons.” The Saudi Sheikh Nasser ibn Hamed gives an even higher figure for appropriate American deaths: “If a bomb was dropped on them [i.e. the Americans] that would annihilate 10 million and burn their lands to the same extent that they burned the Muslim lands – this is permissible….” Jihad demands the killing of “infidels” or their subjugation under Islamic law.

Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad jihad has offered three choices to the non-Muslim: conversion to Islam, submission under Islamic rule, or death. One manual of Islamic law states that if “the infidels” do not convert, “it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them.”

The jihad kills women.

Jihadis believe, among other things, that women are inferior to men, and must be ruled by them; that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter; that a husband should beat a disobedient wife; that adulterous or lewd women can be eliminated in “honor killings.”.

Jihad calls for the extermination of the Jews.In a Friday sermon in Gaza that was broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television, Sheikh Ahmad Abu Halabiya summed up jihadis’ attitudes toward the Jews: “Have no mercy on [them], no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them…”

Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizballah, takes the anti Semitism of jihad a step further, calling Jews “grandsons of apes and pigs” and cautioning that they are “a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”

JIHAD KILLS GAYSJust before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime punished two men convicted of homosexuality. The Taliban’s Islamic jurists had no doubt that death was the proper punishment. The only question was how to carry out the execution. One group of scholars believed that the homosexuals should be taken to the top of the highest building in the city, and hurled to their deaths. The other recommended that a pit be dug near a wall somewhere, the two men put in it, and the wall toppled so that they were buried alive. The jihad is not about American policy towards Israel or about israel’s policy towards the palestinians.Many, particularly on the American Left, believe that if the U.S. decreases its support for Israel, and if Israel surrenders further territory, jihad violence will cease. This is as naïve as it is untrue. The Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, the first modern Islamic terrorist organization and the direct ancestor of Hamas and Al-Qaeda, was founded in 1928 – twenty years before the founding of the State of Israel. Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas Foreign Minister, says: “Even if the U.S. gave us all its money in return for recognizing Israel and giving up one inch of Palestine, we would never do so even if this costs us our lives.” The jihad is not the result of Islamists’ current grievances about Afghanistan, Iraq or other hotspots in the Middle East.The international media focus on conflict in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, but the jihad continues in a lower key and largely out of sight on a daily basis in places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Chechnya, the Balkans, and Nigeria, to say nothing of the “soft jihad“ being waged in Europe.

There is nowhere in the world where one can escape the jihad. Wherever Muslims are found, which is in almost every country on the planet, there are adherents of the ideology of jihad.

The jihad subverts democratic institutions.Jihadis in Europe have been forthright about their intentions. In England, for instance, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, has said that the transformation of Britain into an Islamic state could come about by means of an “invasion [from] without.” But if this doesn’t happen, Bakri says that jihadis will convert the West to Islam “through ideological invasion …”  

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25. April 2010 by admin.

 The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 4: The View from Kabul

April 20, 2010

Amid a surge of Western troops into Afghanistan, a raging Taliban insurgency and Pakistan’s attempts to consolidate its influence in the country, Kabul is being pulled in many directions. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, now at the beginning of its second five-year term, is trying to secure its own future as well as balance the ambitions of other key players, all while preventing the already war-torn country from becoming a proxy battleground.

A growing Taliban insurgency and a surge of U.S. and allied forces into the country are shaking things up in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. There, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, now in his second five-year term, has been formally in power since 2002 and in elected office since 2004. After several years of being portrayed as an American lackey, perceived more as the mayor of Kabul than the president of Afghanistan, Karzai has tried to break out of this mold and secure his own political survival. This at a time when the Taliban have emerged as a major force and the United States has made it clear that its commitment to Afghanistan is limited.Karzai’s problems have only escalated since the Obama administration took office. Relations began to sour in the run-up to last year’s Afghan presidential election, when elements in Washington began searching for alternatives to Karzai, who was being criticized for corruption. But with years of experience in managing his country’s many regional warlords, Karzai was able to quickly align with all major ethnic groups and ensure his victory in the election, despite the entire process being marred by charges of fraud.Tensions with Washington throughout the election helped Karzai create his own political space within the country, space that he sought to expand even as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry behind the scenes expressed doubts about Karzai’s viability as an effective American partner. In recent weeks, Karzai took his efforts to a different level by accusing the United States of engaging in fraud during the Afghan election, triggering a strong response from Washington. His move paid off. After a couple of weeks of high tensions, senior U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, moved to ease the strain, calling the Afghan president an ally and partner. With almost all of a second five-year term still ahead of him, Karzai is as much a political reality in the country as the Taliban. 

Objectives and Problems

 The main objective of the current Karzai regime is to maintain as much of the existing political structure as possible and to maximize its position within that structure. This is a system that has been crafted and staffed in large part by Karzai and his inner circle, and thus it bolsters their position disproportionately. But because the Taliban are also a political reality, Kabul must work to achieve meaningful political accommodations that will serve to stabilize the security situation in the countryside.To maximize its leverage, Kabul must do this rapidly. The surge of U.S. forces into the country and the money, aid and advice that the Karzai regime receives will never be more abundant than it is right now, so with his power at its height, Karzai must reach these political accommodations as soon as possible.Meanwhile, Kabul has two main problems. The first is that it has limited means to compel the Taliban to negotiate on the requisite timetable while the Taliban have every incentive to hold out on any meaningful talks. The Karzai government is working with interlocutors (mostly former Taliban officials who still retain influence) to negotiate with the jihadist movement, but the question is the pace at which real progress can be made. At the heart of these negotiations is the question of who speaks for the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s single largest demographic segment, accounting for more than 40 percent of the country’s population.Nor will political accommodation come cheaply. The Taliban will not be won over with a few Cabinet positions. The current discussions include the need for constitutional change that will allow more room for Islamic law and perhaps an extra-executive religious entity that controls the judiciary. Just how much of a stake the Taliban would have in the government and what shape that stake would take remains to be seen. In any case, it will likely require substantial concessions in Kabul.  

 The second problem is that Kabul’s efforts to negotiate with the Taliban are being pulled and manipulated from all sides. This is the real challenge for the current regime — balancing all the outside players who are trying to shape the negotiations. Kabul needs to prevent the already fractious and war-torn country from becoming a proxy battleground for the United States and Iran or Pakistan and India (among other countries). The difficulty of maintaining this balancing act — while also maintaining local support — is increasing by the day.Kabul’s closest allies are the United States and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Although Washington and Kabul do not always see eye to eye, and Karzai is trying to distance himself from the United States in order to downplay the puppet image, the United States and other coalition countries provide the foundational support for his government as well as security in the countryside. And while the United States likely views Karzai as a convenient scapegoat as well as an interchangeable political part, it is trying to demonstrate some confidence in the Afghan president. At a major tribal meeting in Kandahar on April 4, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the ISAF, was notably silent, allowing Karzai to speak and lead the discussion.Aside from the United States, Pakistan is the next biggest player in Afghanistan, and because of its own links to the Taliban, it has far more practical leverage than the United States does in shaping the negotiations (of which it has every intention of being at the center). Pakistan’s arrest of senior Taliban figure Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is now believed to have been carried out to disrupt direct negotiations between the Taliban and Kabul in which Baradar is thought to have been engaged. A strong Pakistani hand in Afghanistan is a longstanding reality for Kabul, but Islamabad is maneuvering to consolidate its influence as a planned American drawdown in 2011 approaches.But Pakistan’s resurging role in Afghanistan places Karzai in a difficult place between his eastern neighbor and its regional rival India. New Delhi has invested a great deal in development and reconstruction work in Afghanistan since 2002, and Kabul will need to balance this aid with the need for Pakistani assistance with the Taliban. And complicating all this, of course, is India’s alignment with Russia on the Afghanistan issue.Perhaps more critical than the Indo-Pakistani struggle over Afghanistan is the U.S.-Iranian contest. Although Iraq is the main arena for Washington’s struggle with Tehran, the focus of the contest is shifting to Afghanistan, along with the U.S. military effort. Iran also has considerable influence to its east, with deep historical, ethno-linguistic and cultural ties that it has adroitly established and cultivated not only among its natural allies — ethno-political minorities opposed to the Taliban — but also among some elements of the Taliban themselves. Though this influence is not decisive (the Taliban have their own interests, and many groups opposed to the Taliban are close to Karzai and the West), Tehran has the ability to influence events on the ground in Afghanistan, and an eventual settlement of the war cannot happen without Iranian involvement. From Karzai’s point of view, he has to balance his alignment with the United States with the fact that Iran is always going to be Afghanistan’s western neighbor, long after U.S. and NATO forces have left his country.This is really the ultimate problem. On its best day, Afghanistan is poor, lacks basic infrastructure and is economically hobbled. With weak domestic security forces and little to offer the outside world, Kabul can only hope to continue to entice more international aid while playing all the various countries with vested interests in Afghanistan against each other. Incorporating the Taliban into the political framework will be especially important over the next few years, but when and if that happens, the balancing act will continue to be played by any central government in Kabul.

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25. April 2010 by admin.

The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 3: The Pakistani Strategy

 Pakistan is central to the U.S. war in Afghanistan — and Islamabad views Kabul’s fate as central to its own. No other country is as pivotal to Afghanistan’s long-term fate as Pakistan is, and in this part of our series we examine the country’s long historical relationship with the Taliban and its strategy and objectives going forward.The Pakistani strategy of securing influence in Afghanistan is dictated by the unalterable reality of geography. With a long common border, a strong Pashtun population on both sides and active militant groups interconnected with each other across the border, Pakistan is forced to take an active role in Afghanistan. It’s the same sort of geopolitical imperative that bound the colonial British to the region, and before them the Muslim emperors, and before the Muslim emperors the Hindu rulers.Pakistan’s core is comprised of the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, which encompass the country’s demographic, industrial, commercial and agricultural base. From Punjab in the north, this heartland extends southward through Sindh province, flowing seamlessly along the Indus River valley into the Thar Desert. This means Pakistan’s core is hard by the Indian border, leaving no meaningful terrain barriers to invasion. (Indeed, the Punjabi population straddles the Indian-Pakistani border much as the Pashtun population straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border). This narrow strip of flat land is inherently vulnerable to India, Pakistan’s arch-rival to the east, a geographic arrangement that was no accident of the British partition. Hence, suffering from both geographic and demographic disadvantages vis-a-vis India — and with no strategic depth to speak of — Pakistan is extremely anxious about its security in the east and is forced to look in the opposite direction both out of concern for its depth and in search of opportunity.

West of the Punjabi-Sindhi core lay the peripheral territories of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan province. Though the Pakistani buffer territories of the NWFP and FATA are far more interlinked with Afghanistan than with Pakistan by virtue of the common Pashtun populations, they do provide Pakistan with some of the depth it lacks to the east and also protect against encroachment from the northwest. Having firm control of its own heartland and secure access to the sea through the port of Karachi, Islamabad must also control these buffer territories as a means of further consolidating security in the Punjabi-Sindhi core.In this effort, Afghanistan is both part of the problem and part of the solution. It is part of the problem because the Islamist insurgency that Islamabad once supported in Afghanistan has now spilled backwards onto Pakistani soil; it is part of the solution because Afghanistan remains a critical geopolitical arena for Islamabad. By securing itself as the single most dominant player in Afghanistan, Pakistan strengthens its hand in its own peripheral territories and ensures that no other foreign power — India is the immediate concern here — ever gains a foothold in Kabul. If India did, it would have Pakistan more or less surrounded. Indeed, the need to assert influence in Afghanistan is hardwired into Pakistan’s geopolitical makeup.

History

Afghanistan already was an issue for Pakistan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the final days of 1979. A secular Marxist government was in Kabul supported by arch-rival India and bent on eradicating the influence of religion (a powerful and important aspect of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan). When the Soviets invaded, Pakistan used Saudi money and U.S. arms to back a seven-party Islamist alliance. In the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, Pakistan threw its support behind the much more hard-line Islamist Taliban and gave it the training and tools it needed to rise up and eventually take control of most of the country. Though Afghanistan was still chaotic, it was the kind of Islamist chaos that the Pakistanis could manage — that is, until Sept. 11, 2001, and the American invasion to topple the Taliban regime for providing sanctuary to al Qaeda.Thus ensued an almost impossible tightrope walk by the government of then-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan was forced to abruptly end support for the Taliban regime it had helped put into power and around which its strategy for retaining influence in Afghanistan revolved. Islamabad tried to play both sides, retaining contact with the Taliban but also providing the United States with intelligence that helped U.S. forces hunt the Taliban. This engendered distrust on both sides in the process. The Taliban realized that they could not depend on or trust Pakistan as they once did, and from 2003 to 2006, American pressure on Islamabad to crack down on al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas directly contributed to the rise of the Pakistani Taliban. So as the Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan spilled backwards into Pakistan, the cross-border Taliban phenomenon began to include groups focused on the destruction of the Pakistani state. To this day, however, despite the inextricably linked nature of these Pashtun Islamists, there is still an inclination within many quarters in Islamabad to distinguish between the “good” Taliban, who have their sights set on Afghanistan and ultimately Kabul (and with whom Pakistan retains significant, if reduced, influence), and the “bad” Taliban, who have become fixated on the regime in Islamabad and have perpetrated attacks against Pakistani targets. There also are other, non-Pashtun renegade Islamist elements that have carried out major attacks beyond Pakistani borders that have risked provoking Indian aggression, such as the militant attack in Mumbai in 2008.Nevertheless, Pakistan has realized that the militant problem in Afghanistan has endangered the weak control it does have over the buffer territories of the FATA and NWFP and is applying military force to the problem on its side of the border. It also appears to be working closer with the United States in terms of sharing intelligence. Across the border in Afghanistan, Pakistan does not want to see the Taliban stage too strong a comeback because of the offshoots of the movement that are becoming problematic on Pakistan’s own turf.Strategy But the Afghan Taliban can neither be ignored nor destroyed. They still have utility for Islamabad and must be dealt with. This will require skillful handling on the part of the Pakistanis, who have lost a lot of leverage over the group. Islamabad’s strategy is to try and balance a domestic policy that seeks to militarily neutralize Taliban rebels on the Pakistani side of the border while working with the Taliban on the Afghan side to achieve its foreign policy aims. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, can provide devastating intelligence on the Taliban movement to the Americans, giving Islamabad leverage over Washington. And its long-standing connections to the group put Islamabad in a unique position to facilitate and oversee any negotiated settlement.So Pakistan is seeking to maximize its influence within the Afghan Taliban movement, gain control and ownership over any negotiation efforts and establish international recognition as the single most important player in Afghanistan. The West’s interest in withdrawing from Afghanistan puts Pakistan in a good position to succeed here. The Americans know Pakistan must be part of the solution and are anxious for Islamabad to provide that solution.But to succeed, Pakistan must again walk the middle ground between the United States and the Taliban. And once it is at the center of the negotiations, it must not only push both parties toward each other, it must also pull them in a third direction in order to satisfy its own aims — namely, to establish long-term conditions for Pakistani domination over Afghanistan.And to succeed in this effort, Pakistan will need more than just the Taliban. It must establish influence with the other key players in Afghanistan — particularly the government of President Hamid Karzai, who recently acknowledged that Islamabad will have a great deal of influence in the country but that he wishes to place limits on it as much as possible. And this is where things get tricky. The United States may ultimately have no choice but to work with Pakistan in attempting to secure a negotiated settlement with reconcilable elements of the Taliban. But Karzai is also seeking a deal with the Taliban, and if he can achieve one outside of Pakistan’s influence, he can try and minimize Pakistani influence in the negotiations (though Pakistan can no more be cut out of the negotiations than could the Taliban).

At the same time, Islamabad must find common ground with other regional players — Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — in order to roll back Indian influence in Afghanistan (there even appears to be an emerging axis of sorts consisting of the Americans, the Saudis and the Turks). But Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited New Delhi March 11 in order to coordinate and craft a common strategy for Afghanistan — a strategy being formulated between two countries that share a common interest in Afghanistan that runs counter to Pakistan’s and is coming closer to aligning with Iran’s.

In sum, Pakistan retains more levers in Afghanistan than any other single country, and with Saudi money and American might it is maneuvering to be the pivotal player in a powerful coalition with abundant resources. But Pakistan will continue to face challenges as it tries to distinguish between and divide the Taliban phenomena in Afghanistan and within its own borders.

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25. April 2010 by admin.

The Afghanistan Campaign Part 2: The Taliban Strategy

The Afghan Taliban is a group of insurgents who ultimately seek to secure power over Afghanistan, but first they must merely survive as a cohesive entity during the current International Security Assistance Force offensive. Nevertheless, the Taliban is a diffuse entity being pulled in many directions by multiple actors, and the precise definition of “securing power” and the appropriate strategy to regain that power are still being debated.

It was thus clear to the Taliban long before U.S. President Barack Obama’s long-anticipated announcement that some 30,000 additional troops would be sent to Afghanistan in 2010 that there would be more of a fight before the United States and its allies would be willing to abandon the country — a surge that is an attempt, in part, to reshape Taliban perceptions of the timeline of the conflict by redoubling the American commitment before the drawdown might begin.

And though it took the Taliban a while to regroup, a considerable vacuum began to grow in which the Taliban began to re-emerge, particularly amid poor, corrupt and ineffectual central governance. As early as 2006, it was clear that the Afghan jihadist movement had assumed the form of a growing and powerful insurgency that was progressively gaining steam; the situation was beginning to approach the point at which it could no longer be ignored. As the surge in Iraq began to show signs of success, the United States began to shift its attention back to Afghanistan.

While the U.S.-led coalition never stopped pursuing the Taliban, Washington’s attention quickly shifted to Iraq. In Afghanistan, the mission quickly evolved from toppling a government in Kabul to combating a nascent insurgency in the south and east. U.S. officials, led by the American ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, first began the process of talking to the Taliban on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. All this took place while Washington continued to press Islamabad to do more against the Taliban.The Taliban were never defeated in 2001, when the United States moved to topple their government in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They largely declined combat in the face of overwhelmingly superior military force. Though they were not, at that moment, an insurgent force, their moves were classic guerrilla behavior, and their quick transition from the seat of power back to such tactics is a reminder of how well — and how painfully — schooled Afghans have been in the insurgent arts over the last several decades.

Overall, the Taliban ideally aspire to return to the height of their power in the late 1990s but realize that this is not realistic. That ascent to power, which followed the toppling of the Marxist regime left in place after the Soviet withdrawal and the 1992-1996 intra-Islamist civil war, was somewhat anomalous in that the circumstances were fairly unique to post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban’s opponents are much stronger and far better equipped to challenge the Taliban than in the mid-1990s; this opposing force is as much a reality as the Taliban and has a vested interest in preserving the current regime. The old mujahideen of the 1980s, whom the younger Taliban displaced in the 1990s, have grown steadily wealthier since the collapse of the Taliban regime and are now well-settled and prosperous in Kabul and their respective regions, benefiting greatly from the Western presence and Western money. This is true of many urban areas of Afghanistan that have been altered significantly in the eight years since the U.S. invasion and have little desire to return the Taliban’s severe austerity. In many ways, this fight for dominance is between not only the Taliban and the United States and its allies; it is also between the Taliban and the old Islamist elite, the former mujahideen leaders who did their time on the battlefield in the 1980s.

So, in addition to fighting the current military battle, there is a great deal of factional fighting and political maneuvering with other Afghan centers of power. At a bare minimum, the Taliban intend to ensure that they remain the single strongest power in the country, with not only the largest share of the pie in Kabul (the ability to dominate) but also a significant degree of power and autonomy within their core areas in the south and east of the country. But within the movement (which is a very diffuse and complex set of entities), there is a great deal of debate about what objectives are reasonably achievable. Like the Shia in Iraq, who originally aspired to total dominance in the early days following the fall of the Baathist regime and have since moderated their goals, the Taliban have recognized that some degree of power sharing is necessary. The ultimate objective of the Taliban — resumption of power at the national level — is somewhat dependent on how events play out in the coming years. The objective of attaining the apex of power is not in dispute, but the best avenue — be it reconciliation or fighting it out until the United States begins to draw down — and how exactly that apex might be defined is still being debated.

But there is an important caveat to the Taliban’s ambitions. Having held power in Kabul, they are wary of returning there in a way that would ultimately render them an international pariah state, as they were in the 1990s. When the Taliban first came to power, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognized the regime, and the group’s leadership became intimately familiar with the challenges of attempting to govern a country without wider international recognition. It was under this isolation that the Taliban allied with al Qaeda, which provided them with men, money and equipment. Now it is using al Qaeda again, this time not just as a force multiplier but, even more important, as a potential bargaining chip at the negotiating table. Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s central leader, wants to get off the international terrorist watch list, and there have been signals from various elements of the Taliban that the group is willing to abandon al Qaeda for the right price. This countervailing consideration also contributes to the Taliban’s objective — and particularly the means to achieving that objective — remaining in flux.

To understand the Taliban and their current strategy, it helps to begin with the basics. The Taliban are insurgents, and their first order of business is simply survival. A domestic guerrilla group almost always has more staying power than an occupier, which is projecting force over a greater distance and has the added burden of a domestic population less directly committed to a war in a foreign — and often far-off — land. If the Taliban can only survive as a cohesive and coherent entity until the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan, they will have a far less militarily capable opponent (Kabul) with whom to compete for dominance.

Currently facing an opponent (the United States) that has already stipulated a timetable for withdrawal, the Taliban are in an enviable position. The United States has given itself an extremely aggressive and ambitious set of goals to be achieved in a very short period of time. If the Taliban can both survive and disrupt American efforts to lay the foundations for a U.S./NATO withdrawal, their prospects for ultimately achieving their aims increase dramatically.

And here the strategy to achieve their imperfectly defined objective begins to take shape. The Taliban have no intention of completely evaporating into the countryside, and they have every intention of continuing to harass International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, inflicting casualties and raising the cost of continued occupation. In so doing, the Taliban not only retain their relevance but may also be able to hasten the withdrawal of foreign forces.

Judging from the initial phase of Operation Moshtarak in Marjah and what can likely be expected in similar offensives in other areas, the Taliban strategy toward the surge is: 1) largely decline combat but leave behind a force significant enough to render the securing phase as difficult as is possible for U.S.-led coalition forces by using hit-and-run tactics and planting improvised explosive devices; 2) once the coalition force becomes overwhelming, fall back and allow the coalition to set up shop and wage guerrilla and suicide attacks (though Mullah Omar has issued guidance that these attacks should be initiated only after approval at the highest levels in order to minimize civilian casualties). In all likelihood, this phase of the Taliban campaign would include attempts at intimidation and subversion against Afghan security forces.

Being a diffuse guerrilla movement, the Taliban will likely attempt to replicate this strategy as broadly as possible, forcing ISAF forces to expend more energy than they would prefer on holding ground while impeding the building and reconstruction phase, which will become increasingly difficult as coalition forces target more and more areas. The idea is that the locals who are already wary about relying on Kabul and its Western allies will then become even more disenchanted with the ability of the coalition to weaken the Taliban. However, the ISAF attempting to take control of key bases of support on which the Taliban have long relied, and the impact of these efforts on the Taliban will warrant considerable scrutiny.

For now, the Taliban appear to have lost interest in larger-scale attacks involving several hundred fighters being committed to a single objective. Though such attacks certainly garnered headlines, they were extremely costly in terms of manpower and materiel with little practical gain. And with old strongholds like Helmand province feeling the squeeze, there are certainly some indications that ISAF offensives are taking an appreciable bite out of the operational capabilities of at least the local Taliban commanders.

Conserving forces and minimizing risk to their core operational capability are parallel and interrelated considerations for the Taliban in terms of survival. If the recent assault on Marjah is any indication, the Taliban are adhering to these principles. While some fighters did dig in and fight and while resistance has stiffened — especially within the last week — the Taliban declined to make it a bloody compound-to-compound fight despite the favorable defensive terrain.

Similarly, the U.S. surge intends to make it hard for the Taliban to sustain — much less replace — manpower and materiel. Taliban tactics must be tailored to maximize damage to the enemy while minimizing costs, which drives the Taliban directly to hit-and-run tactics and the widespread use of improvised explosive devices.

There is little doubt that the Taliban will continue to inflict casualties in the coming year. But there is also considerable resolve behind the surge, which will not even be up to full strength until the summer and will be maintained until at least July 2011. Indeed, it is not clear if the Taliban can inflict enough casualties to alter the American timetable in its favor any further.

There is also the underlying issue of sustaining the resistance. Manpower and logistics are inescapable parts of warfare. Though the United States and its allies bear the heavier burden, the Taliban cannot ignore that it is losing key population centers and opium-growing areas central to recruitment, financing and sanctuary. The parallel crackdowns by the ISAF on the Afghan side of the border and the Pakistani crackdowns on the opposite side, where the Taliban has long enjoyed sanctuary, represent a significant challenge to the Taliban if the efforts can be sustained. Signs of a potential increase in cooperation and coordination between Washington and Islamabad could also be significant.

In other words, despite all its flaws, there is a coherency to what the United States is attempting to achieve. Success is anything but certain, but the United States does seek to make very real inroads against the core strength of the Taliban. One of those methods is to reduce the Taliban’s operational capability to the point where it will no longer have the capability to overwhelm Afghan security forces after the United States begins to draw down. There is no shortage of issues surrounding the U.S. objectives to train up the Afghan National Army and National Police, and it is not at all clear that even if those objectives are met that indigenous forces will be able to manage the Taliban.

But the Taliban must also deal with the logistical strain being imposed on it and strive to maintain its numbers and indigenous support. Central to this effort is the Taliban’s information operations (IO), conveying their message to the Afghan people. Thus far, the ISAF has been far behind the Taliban in such IO efforts, but as the coalition ratchets up the pressure, it remains to be seen whether the more abstract IO will be sufficient for sustaining hard logistical support, especially with pressure being applied on both sides of the border.

Similarly, there is the issue of internal coherency. Any insurgent movement must deal with not only the occupier but also other competing guerrillas and insurgents, whether their central focus is military power or ideological. The Taliban’s main competition is entrenched in the regime of President Hamid Karzai and among those in opposition to Karzai but part of the state; at issue are the Taliban’s sometimes loose affiliations with other Taliban elements and al Qaeda. The United States, the Karzai regime, Pakistan and al Qaeda are all seeking and applying leverage anywhere they can to hive off reconcilable elements of the Taliban.

The United States seeks to divide the pragmatic elements of the Taliban from the more ideological ones. The Karzai regime may be willing to deal with them in a more coherent fashion, but at the heart of all its considerations is the partially incompatible retention of its own power. Al Qaeda, with its own survival on the line, is seeking to draw the Taliban toward its transnational agenda. Meanwhile, Pakistan wants to bring the Taliban to heel, primarily so it can own the negotiating process and consolidate its position as the dominant power in Afghanistan, much as Iran seeks to do in Iraq. Each player has different motivations, objectives and timetables.

Amidst all these tensions, the Taliban must expend intelligence efforts and resources to maintain cohesion, despite being an inherently local and decentralized phenomenon. As Mullah Omar’s code of conduct released in July 2009 demonstrates, “command” of the Taliban as an insurgent group is not as firm as it is in more rigid organizational hierarchies. The reconciliation efforts will certainly test the Taliban’s coherency.

If history is any judge, in the long run the Taliban will retain the upper hand. In Afghanistan, the United States is attempting to do something that has never been tried before — much less achieved — i.e., constitute a viable central government from scratch in the midst of a guerrilla war. But the Taliban must be concerned about the possibility that some aspects of the U.S. strategy may succeed. Central to the American effort will be Pakistan — and Islamabad is showing significant signs of wanting to work closer with Washington.

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25. April 2010 by admin.

The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 1: The U.S. Strategy

The United States is in the process of sending some 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, and once they have all arrived the American contingent will total nearly 100,000. This will be in addition to some 40,000 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) personnel. The counterinsurgency to which these troops are committed involves three principal players: the United States, the Taliban and Pakistan. 

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States entered Afghanistan to conduct a limited war with a limited objective: defeat al Qaeda and prevent Afghanistan from ever again serving as a sanctuary for any transnational terrorist group bent on attacking the United States. STRATFOR has long held that the former goal has been achieved, in effect, and what remains of al Qaeda prime — the group’s core leadership — is not in Afghanistan but across the border in Pakistan. While pressure must be kept on that leadership to prevent the group from regaining its former operational capability, this is an objective very different from the one the United States and ISAF are currently pursuing.

The current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is to use military force, as the United States did in Iraq, to reshape the political landscape. Everyone from President Barack Obama to Gen. Stanley McChrystal has made it clear that the United States has no interest in making the investment of American treasure necessary to carry out a decade-long (or longer) counterinsurgency and nation-building campaign. Instead, the United States has found itself in a place in which it has found itself many times before: involved in a conflict for which its original intention for entering no longer holds and without a clear strategy for extricating itself from that conflict.

  This is not about “winning” or “losing.” The primary strategic goal of the United States in Afghanistan has little to do with the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. That may be an important means but it is not a strategic end. With a resurgent Russia, a perpetually defiant Iran and an ongoing global financial crisis — not to mention profound domestic pressures at home — the grand strategic objective of the United States in Afghanistan must ultimately be withdrawal. This does not mean total withdrawal. Advisers and counterterrorism forces are indeed likely to remain in Afghanistan for some time. But the European commitment to the war is waning fast, and the United States has felt the strain of having its ground combat forces almost completely absorbed far too long.

To facilitate that withdrawal, the United States is trying to establish sustainable conditions — to the extent possible — that are conducive to longer-term U.S. interests in the region. Still paramount among these interests is sanctuary denial, and the United States has no intention of leaving Afghanistan only to watch it again become a haven for transnational terrorists. Hence, it is working now to shape conditions on the ground before leaving.

  Immediate and total withdrawal would surrender the country to the Taliban at a time when the Taliban’s power is already on the rise. Not only would this give the movement that was driven from power in Kabul in 2001 an opportunity to wage a civil war and attempt to regain power (the Taliban realizes that returning to its status in the 1990s is unlikely), it would also leave a government in Kabul with little real control over much of the country, relieving the pressure on al Qaeda in the Afghan-Pakistani border region and emboldening parallel insurgencies in Pakistan.

  The United States is patently unwilling to commit the forces necessary to impose a military reality on Afghanistan (likely half a million troops or more, though no one really knows how many it would take, since it has never been done). Instead, military force is being applied in order to break cycles of violence, rebalance the security dynamic in key areas, shift perceptions and carve out space in which a political accommodation can take place.

  In terms of military strategy, this means clearing, holding and building (though there is precious little time for building) in key population centers and Taliban strongholds like Helmand province. The idea is to secure the population from Taliban intimidation while denying the Taliban key bases of popular support (from which it draws not only safe haven but also recruits and financial resources). The ultimate goal is to create reasonably secure conditions under which popular support of provincial and district governments can be encouraged without the threat of reprisal and from which effective local security forces can deploy to establish long-term control.

  The key aspect of this strategy is — working in conjunction with and expanding Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) forces to establish security and increasingly take the lead in day-to-day security operations. (The term was coined in the early 1970s, when U.S. President Richard Nixon drew down the American involvement in Vietnam by transitioning the ground combat role to Vietnamese forces.) In any counterinsurgency, effective indigenous forces are more valuable, in many ways, than foreign troops, which are less sensitive to cultural norms and local nuances and are seen by the population as outsiders.

  But the real objective of the military strategy in Afghanistan is political. Gen. McChrystal has even said explicitly that he believes “that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome.” Though the objective of the use of military force almost always comes down to political goals, the kind of campaign being conducted in Afghanistan is particularly challenging. The goal is not the complete destruction of the enemy’s will and ability to resist (as it was, for example, in World War II). In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the objective is far more subtle than that: It is to use military force to reshape the political landscape. The key challenge in Afghanistan is that the insurgents — the Taliban — are not a small group of discrete individuals like the remnants of al Qaeda prime. The movement is diffuse and varied, itself part of the political landscape that must be reshaped, and the entire movement cannot be removed from the equation.

  At this point in the campaign, there is wide recognition that some manner of accommodation with at least portions of the Taliban is necessary to stabilize the situation. The overall intent would be to degrade popular support for the Taliban and hive off reconcilable elements in order to further break apart the movement and make the ongoing security challenges more manageable. Ultimately, it is hoped, enough Taliban militants will be forced to the negotiating table to reduce the threat to the point where indigenous Afghan forces can keep a lid on the problem with minimal support.Meanwhile, attempts at reaching out to the Taliban are now taking place on multiple tracks. In addition to efforts by the Karzai government, Washington has begun to support Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani efforts. At the moment, however, few Taliban groups seem to be in the mood to talk. At the very least they are playing hard to get, hinting at talks but maintaining the firm stance that full withdrawal of U.S. and ISAF forces is a precondition for negotiations.

  The current U.S./NATO strategy faces several key challenges:For one thing, the Taliban are working on a completely different timeline than the United States, which — even separating itself from many of its anxious-to-withdraw NATO allies — is poised to begin drawing down forces in less than 18 months. While this is less of a fixed timetable than it appears (beginning to draw down from nearly 100,000 U.S. and nearly 40,000 ISAF troops in mid-2011 could still leave more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan well into 2012), the Taliban are all too aware of Washington’s limited commitment.

  Then there are the intelligence issues:

• One of the inherent problems with the Vietnamization of a conflict is operational security and the reality that it is easy for insurgent groups to penetrate and compromise foreign efforts to build effective indigenous forces. In short, U.S./ ISAF efforts with Afghan forces are relatively easy for the Taliban to compromise, while U.S./ISAF efforts to penetrate the Taliban are exceedingly difficult.
• U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan who is responsible for both ISAF and separate U.S. efforts, published a damning indictment of intelligence activity in the country last month and has moved to reorganize and refocus those efforts more on understanding the cultural terrain in which the United States and ISAF are operating. But while this shift will improve intelligence operations in the long run, the shake-up is taking place amid a surge of combat troops and ongoing offensive operations. Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. McChrystal have both made it clear that the United States lacks the sophisticated understanding of the various elements of the Taliban necessary to identify the potentially reconcilable elements. This is a key weakness in a strategy that ultimately requires such reconciliation (though it is unlikely to disrupt counterterrorism and the hunting of high-value targets).

 The United States and ISAF are also struggling with information operations (IO), failing to effectively convey messages to and shape the perceptions of the Afghan people. Currently, the Taliban have the upper hand in terms of IO and have relatively little problem disseminating messages about U.S./ISAF activities and its own goals. The implication of this is that, in the contest over the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, the Taliban are winning the battle of perception.   The training of the ANA and ANP is also at issue. Due to attrition, tens of thousands of new recruits are necessary each year simply to maintain minimum numbers, much less add to the force. Goals for the size of the ANA and ANP are aggressive, but how quickly these goals can be achieved and the degree to which problems of infiltration can be managed — as well as the level of infiltration that can be tolerated while retaining reasonable effectiveness — all remain to be seen. In addition, loyalty to a central government has no cultural precedent in Afghanistan. The lack of a coherent national identity means that, while there are good reasons for young Afghan men to join up (a livelihood, tribal loyalty), there is no commitment to a national Afghan campaign. There are concerns that the Afghan security forces, left to their own devices, would simply devolve into militias along ethnic, tribal, political and ideological lines. Thus the sustainability of gains in the size and effectiveness of the ANA and ANP remains questionable.   This strategy also depends a great deal on the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, over which U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has expressed deep concern. The Karzai government is widely accused of rampant corruption and of having every intention of maintaining a heavy dependency on the United States. Doubts are often expressed about Karzai’s intent and ability to be an effective partner in the military-political efforts now under way in his country.   While the United States has already made significant inroads against the Taliban in Helmand province, insurgents there are declining to fight and disappearing into the population. It is natural for an insurgency to fall back in the face of concentrated force and rise again when that force is removed, and the durability of these American gains could prove illusory. As Maj. Gen. Flynn’s criticism demonstrates, the Pentagon is acutely aware of challenges it faces in Afghanistan. It is fair to say that the United States is pursuing the surge with its eyes open to inherent weaknesses and challenges. The question is: Can those challenges be overcome in a war-torn country with a long and proven history of insurgency?

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18. April 2010 by admin.

The Caucasus Emirate

April 15, 2010

By Scott Stewart and Ben West

On April 9, a woman armed with a pistol and with explosives strapped to her body approached a group of police officers in the northern Caucasus village of Ekazhevo, in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia. The police officers were preparing to launch an operation to kill or capture militants in the area. The woman shot and wounded one of the officers, at which point other officers drew their weapons and shot the woman. As she fell to the ground, the suicide vest she was wearing detonated. The woman was killed and the man she wounded, the head of the of the Russian Interior Ministry’s local office, was rushed to the hospital where he died from his wounds.

Such incidents are regular occurrences in Russia’s southernmost republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia. These five republics are home to fundamentalist separatist insurgencies that carry out regular attacks against security forces and government officials through the use of suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), armed assaults and targeted assassinations. However, we have noted a change in the operational tempo of militants in the region. So far in 2010, militants have carried out 23 attacks in the Caucasus, killing at least 34 people — a notable increase over the eight attacks that killed 17 people in the region during the same period last year. These militants have also returned to attacking the far enemy in Moscow and not just the near enemy in the Caucasus.History of Activity

Over the past year, in addition to the weekly attacks we expect to see in the region (such as the one described above), a group calling itself the Caucasus Emirate has claimed five significant attacks against larger targets and, notably, ventured outside of the northern Caucasus region. The first of these attacks was a suicide VBIED bombing that seriously wounded Ingushetia’s president, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, and killed several members of his protective detail in June 2009 as Yekurov was traveling along a predictable route in a motorcade from his residence to his office. Then in August of that year, CE militants claimed responsibility for an explosion at the Siberian Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam that flooded the engine room, disabled turbines, wrecked equipment and killed 74 people (the structure of the dam was not affected). In November 2009, the group claimed responsibility for assassinating an Orthodox priest in Moscow and for detonating a bomb that targeted a high-speed train called the Nevsky Express that runs between Moscow and St. Petersburg and killing 30 people. Its most recent attack outside of the Caucasus occurred on March 29, 2010, when two female suicide bombers detonated IEDs in Moscow’s underground rail system during morning rush hour, killing 40 people.

The group’s claim of responsibility for the hydroelectric dam was, by all accounts, a phony one. At the time, geo politics experts were not convinced at all that the high level of damage they saw in images of the site could be brought about by a very large IED, much less a single anti-tank mine, which is what the Caucasus Emirate claimed it used in the attack. Media sources in Russia later confirmed that the explosion was caused by age, neglect and failing systems and not a militant attack, confirming our original assessment. While the Caucasus Emirate had emerged on our radar as early as summer 2009, we were dubious of its capabilities given this apparent false claim. However, while the claim of responsibility for the dam attack was bogus, sources in Russia reports that the group was indeed responsible for the other attacks described above.

 So, although we were initially skeptical about the Caucasus Emirate, the fact that the group has claimed several attacks that our Russian sources tell us it indeed carried out indicates that it is time to seriously examine the group and its leadership.

Russian security forces, with the assistance of pro-Moscow regional leaders such as Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and Ingush President Yunus-bek Yevkurov, are constantly putting pressure on militant networks in the region. Raids on militant hideouts occur weekly, and after major attacks (such as the assassination attempt against Yevkurov or the Moscow metro bombings), security forces typically respond with fierce raids on militant positions that result in the arrests or deaths of militant leaders, among others. Chechen militant leaders such as Shamil Basayev (who claimed responsibility for the attack that killed pro-Russian Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and the Beslan school siege, both in 2004) was killed by Russian forces in 2006. Before Basayev, Ibn Al-Khattab (who was widely suspected of being responsible for the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia) was killed by the Russian Federal Security Service in a 2002. The deaths of Basayev, Khattab and many others like them have fractured the militant movement in the Caucasus, but may also have prompted its remnants to join up under the Caucasus Emirate umbrella.

It is impressive that in the face of heavy Russian pressure, the Caucasus Emirate not only has continued operations but also has increased its operational tempo, all the while capitalizing on the attacks with public announcements claiming responsibility and criticizing the Russian counterterrorism response. Between March 29 and April 9, the group coordinated three different attacks involving five suicide operatives (three of which were female) in Moscow, Dagestan and Ingushetia. This is a substantial feat indicating that the Caucasus Emirate can manage several different teams of attackers and influence when they strike their targets.

 Doku Umarov: A Charismatic (and Resilient) Leader

The Caucasus Emirate was created and is led by Doku Umarov, a seasoned veteran of both the first and second Chechen wars in which he was in charge of his own battalion. By 2006, Umarov had become the self-proclaimed president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, an unrecognized secessionist government of Chechnya. He has been declared dead at least six times by fellow militants as well as Chechen and Russian authorities, most recently in June 2009. Yet he continues to appear in videos claiming attacks against Russian targets, including a video dated March 29, 2010, in which he claimed responsibility for the Moscow metro attacks.

In October 2007, Umarov expanded his following by declaring the formation of the Caucasus Emirate as the successor to the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and appointing himself emir, or leader. In his statement marking the formation of the Caucasus Emirate, Umarov rejected the laws and borders of the Russian state and called for the Caucasus region to recognize the new emirate as the rightful power and adopt Shariah. The new emirate expanded far beyond his original mandate of Chechnya into Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia and other predominantly Muslim areas farther to the north. He called for the creation of an Islamic power that would not acknowledge the current boundaries of nation-states. Umarov also clearly indicated that the formation of this emirate could not be done peacefully. He called for the “Islamic” entity to be created by forcefully driving out Russian troops. The policy of physically removing one political entity in order to establish an Islamic emirate makes the Caucasus Emirate a jihadist group.

Later, in April 2009, Umarov released another statement in which he justified attacks against Russian civilians (civilians in the Caucasus were largely deemed off-limits by virtually all organized militant groups) and called for more attacks in Russian territory outside of the Caucasus. We saw this policy start to take shape with the November 2009 assassination of Daniil Sysoev, the Orthodox priest murdered at his home in Moscow for allegedly “defaming Islam,” and continue with the train bombing later that month and the Moscow metro bombing in March 2010.

Umarov has made it clear that he is the leader of the Caucasus Emirate and, given the effectiveness of its attacks on Russian soil outside of the Caucasus, Russian authorities are rightfully concerned about the group. Clearly, however, there is more there than just Umarov.

A Confederacy of Militant Groups

The Caucasus Emirate appears to be an umbrella group for many regional militant groups spawned during the second Chechen war (1999-2009). Myriad groups formed under militant commanders, waged attacks (sometimes coordinated with others, sometimes not) against Russian troops and saw their leaders die and get replaced time and again. Some groups disappeared altogether, some opted for political reconciliation and gave up their militant tactics and some produced leaders like the Kadyrovs who formed the current Chechen government. All in all, the larger and more organized Islamist groups seen in the first and second Chechen wars are now broken and weak, their remnants possibly consolidated within Umarov’s Caucasus Emirate.

For example, the militant group Riyadus Salihin, founded by Basayev, seems to have been folded into the Caucasus Emirate. Umarov himself issued a statement confirming the union in April 2009. When Basayev was killed in 2006, he was serving as vice president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under Umarov. Significantly, Riyadus Salihin brought Basayev together with Pavel Kosolapov, an ethnic Russian soldier who switched sides during the second Chechen war and converted to Islam. Kosolapov is suspected of being an expert bombmaker and is thought to have made the explosive device used in the November 2009 Moscow-St. Petersburg train attack (which was similar to an August 2007 attack in the same location that used the same amount and type of explosive material) as well as devices employed in the March 2010 Moscow metro attack.

The advantage of having an operative such as Kosolapov working for the Caucasus Emirate cannot be understated. Not only does he apparently have excellent bombmaking tradecraft, but he also served in the Russian military, which means he has deep insight into how the forces working against the Caucasus Emirate operate. The fact that Kosolapov is an ethnic Russian also means that the Caucasus Emirate has an operator who is able to more aptly navigate centers such as Moscow or St. Petersburg, unlike some of his Caucasian colleagues. While Kosolapov is being sought by virtually every law enforcement agency in Russia, altering his appearance may help him evade the dragnet.

 In addition to inheriting Kosolapov and Riyadus Salihin, the Caucasus Emirate also appears to have acquired the Dagestani militant group, Shariat Jamaat, one of the oldest Islamist militant groups fighting in Dagestan. In 2007, a spokesman for the group told a Radio Free Europe interviewer that its fighters had pledged allegiance to Doku Umarov and the Caucasus Emirate. Violent attacks have continued apace, with the last attack in Dagestan conducted as recently as March 31, a complex operation that used a follow-on suicide attacker to ensure the death of authorities responding to an initial blast. In all, nine police officers were killed in the attack, including a senior police commander, which occurred just two days after the Moscow metro attacks. The March 31 attack was only the second instance of a suicide VBIED being used in Dagestan, the first occurring in January 2010. This tactic of using a secondary IED to attack first responders is fairly common in many parts of the world, but it is not normally seen in Dagestan. The timing of the attack so close to the Moscow metro bombing and the emergence of VBIEDs in Dagestan opens the possibility that the proliferation of this tactic may be linked to the expansion of the Caucasus Emirate.

In the Crosshairs

The Caucasus Emirate appears to have managed to centralize (or at least take credit for) the efforts of previously disparate militant groups throughout the Caucasus. Russia announced that it would start withdrawing troops from Chechnya in April 2009, but some 20,000 Russian troops remain in the region, and the start of withdrawal has likely led to a resurgence in local militant activity. Ultimately, Moscow will have to live with the threat, but it will work hard to ensure that militant groups stay as fragmented and weak as possible. While the Caucasus Emirate seems to demonstrate a relatively high level of organization, as well as an ability to strike at Russia’s heartland, STRATFOR sources say Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was outraged by the Moscow attacks. This suggests that people will be held accountable for the lapse in security in Moscow and that retribution will be sought in the Caucasus.

Umarov’s founding statement for the Caucasus Emirate, in which he called for the region to recognize the emirate as the rightful regional power and adopt Shariah, marked a shift from the motives of many previous militant leaders and groups, which were more nationalistic than jihadist. This trend of regional militants becoming more jihadist in their outlook increases the likelihood that they will forge substantial links with transnational jihadists such as al Qaeda — indeed, our Russian sources report that there are connections between the group and high-profile jihadists like Ilyas Kashmiri.

However, this alignment with transnational jihadists comes with a price. It could serve to distance the Caucasus Emirate from the general population, which practices a more moderate form of Islam (Sufi). This could help Moscow isolate and neutralize members of the Caucasus Emirate. Indeed, key individuals in the group such as Umarov and Kosolapov are operating in a very hostile environment and can name many of their predecessors who met their ends fighting the Russians. Both of these men have survived so far, but having prodded Moscow so provocatively, they are likely living on borrowed time.

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17. April 2010 by admin.

Waging Econo-Jihad

Jihadist terror organizations have set economic terrorism as their new target, intending to harm and paralyze Western economies, the United Sates in particular, claims Prof. Gabriel Weimann, expert researcher of terrorism over the Internet at the University of Haifa. Prof. Weimann monitored websites hosted by terrorist and terrorism-supporting organizations and concludes:

“For the Jihadists, the present economic crisis signifies an ideal opportunity and platform to leverage a economic terrorist campaign.”

In the course of a study that was carried out over a number of years, Prof. Weimann surveyed public and encoded websites run by Islamic terrorist organizations, forums, video clips, and practically all the information related to Islamic Jihad terrorism that is flowing through the network.

According to Prof. Weimann, the focus on economic terrorism was set in motion with the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, when Osama bin Laden stated on the video tapes that he sent out that these attacks mostly damaged the United States’ economic base and that these attacks, which cost $500,000 to carry out, cost the U.S. $500 billion.

Other publications by bin Laden himself and by other terrorist leaders show that they understand that Western and U.S. power lies in their economic strength and that the jihad movement should focus on damaging this power by employing various tactics, including:

+ hitting international corporations directly;+ harming international corporations by means of 1.5 billion Muslims boycotting them, which would pressure the respective governments to adjust their policies;+ striking at resources that were “looted” from Muslim countries, such as oil-drilling companies in Iraq;+ assassinating key personalities in the global economy, most of whom they believe are Jews, and killing anyone who collaborates with these personalities.

Monitoring the Muslim terrorist-related information on the Internet, Prof. Weimann also revealed that the armed struggle against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan is aimed at prolonging American expenditure on maintaining forces in these countries, and not necessarily at military defeat.

The jihadists believe that this would help drain America’s financial resources and eventually critically damage the American economy. Therefore, they aim to make the U.S. open as many military fronts around the world as possible.

Another result of this new focus on Econo-Jihad is an increasing jihadist interest in websites and online information on the American and Western economies, so as to glean an understanding of how these economies can be hit the hardest. Not only official websites are monitored: forums and e-mails of individual surfers are penetrated too.

By tracking Jihadist forums, Prof. Weimann has found that these surfers are increasingly following Western finance-related media publications too, as well as expert and academic analyses of the factors influencing Western economy, such as the war in Iraq, global terrorism, natural disasters, oil prices, unemployment rates, and declines in the stock market.

“One might think that an Econo-Jihad is less violent, but this is not the case. Jihadist Internet monitoring alongside terrorist activity in the field, is evidence that the economic turn actually influences the terrorists’ targets, which have included oil-drilling infrastructures, tourism, international economic institutions and more. Indeed, Islamic terrorism’s future devices will focus on targets that will yield the most economic damage,” Prof. Weimann concludes.

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