The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with a terrorist attack. But while everyone takes Massoud’s threat to the stability of the Greater Hindu Kush area seriously, nobody seems to take his threat to do this very seriously. As Spencer Ackerman says “It’s difficult to see how Beitullah Massoud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has the capability to launch attacks against the U.S.”
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that this points to what I think is a serious conceptual flaw in the administration’s thinking—this heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to deny al-Qaeda a “safe haven” in Afghanistan or Pakistan. As Andrew Exum observes, it’s not at all clear that a “safe haven” is necessary to carry out a terrorist attack:
Thus, [European governments] are wary of their Afghanistan operations leading to greater unrest in their own immigrant communities, being as likely to look to the suburbs of Paris and London for terror plots in utero as they are to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The foiled 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, for example, was allegedly plotted almost entirely within the confines of my old neighborhood in East London. And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–traveled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”
And as per Spencer’s point, not only is a safe haven not necessary, it’s not sufficient either. A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for. And as Exum explains, it could easily lead to dangerous overreach:
The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?
I think that’s right. You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Al Qaida: Entrapaneurship and Modular Terrorism
Version/ Public Release 0.8.8 posted on Monday, April 17, 2001. Version/ Public Release 1.0.2 posted on Friday, September 14, 2001 and scored 50 % by graduate professor with academic experience ("incorrect understanding of al-Qaida (the freedom fighter)" and "not having correct understanding of freedom fighter and terrorist.") Version/ Public Release 1.1.3 posted on Monday, February 18, 2002. Version/ Public Release 1.7.3 being approved and edited for post by Thursday, May 27, 2006 (unknown.) In Place Of updated on Thursday, October 8, 2009.
SUMMARY ONLY------------------------SUMMARY ONLY
Al Qaida: Entrapaneurship and Modular Terrorism
Roy Mitsuoka
General Staff
Summer 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
------------------------
IN PLACE OF------------------------IN PLACE OF (Part 1 of Part 2; See Below)
Should we prepare for big wars or small ones? After Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer might seem obvious, but the truth is harder and more expensive: both.
Great armies and navies are always tempted to fight the last war, especially if they won it. The British Army entered World War I wedded to the "up and at 'em" infantry advances of Waterloo—even though by the turn of the century the Maxim gun had made such tactics tantamount to suicide. Truly fearsome militaries prepare to fight the next war. Think of how the German Army used planes and tanks in a coordinated blitzkrieg to outmaneuver the Allies at the outset of World War II.
But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world's greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight "big wars" against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term "low-intensity conflict" but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the "savage wars of peace"—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq.
The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today's messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds. Many of the combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who are among the most capable and experienced young officers America has had in a generation, fall into the latter camp. But the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. military may not have the resources to be able to fight both kinds of war with any assurance of victory. Though political leaders have barely begun to address the problem, the shape, size and funding of America's armed forces is one of the most pressing issues the next president will face.
The end of the cold war was supposed to give the winning superpower a breather. In 1999, the then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke of his desire to "skip a generation" of weaponry, to move to a shiny new age of high-tech warfare in which sensors, satellites and computers would replace manpower. Among military planners, phrases like "network-centric warfare," "digitization" and "the transparent battlefield" were all the rage. The new thinking was given a partial test after 9/11 when the military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's push to employ a faster, leaner, more-wired force worked well. In Afghanistan, Special Forces working with local warlords used their laptops to call in precise airstrikes and topple the Taliban; in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks could boast that "speed kills"—and Baghdad fell in less than three weeks.
Then came disaster. In Afghanistan, American forces and their unreliable allies were not able to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban survived to fight another day. The growing insurgency in Iraq overwhelmed U.S. forces and left a good portion of the American people and their elected representatives believing that the war was a lost cause. The military seemed caught by surprise, its high-tech forces unable to defeat a shadow army that wired bombs with garage-door openers and the sort of cheap electronic gizmos that could be purchased from RadioShack.
In retrospect, the military's unpreparedness seems puzzling. According to the Congressional Research Service, since the end of the cold war in 1990 the U.S. military has been deployed 88 times—to fight in a series of savage little wars of peace from Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone. Didn't the Army learn anything from the experience?
The answer is yes and no. The older generation of officers—the generals who run the show—were trained to fight the Soviet Army as its tanks powered through the Fulda Gap in Germany. These officers were steeped in tank battles and artillery duels, and although the Big One never came, they did get a chance to fight a conventional armored conflict against the Iraqi Army in 1991, crushing Saddam Hussein's forces in less than 100 hours. After the gulf war, the Army shrank in size by about 40 percent. The officers who advanced to the top ranks tended to be conventional warriors; the outliers and mavericks—the few who knew other cultures, had trained Third World armies and had studied the small wars of the colonial era—were confined to the ghetto of Special Forces or let go altogether. The men who ran the lightning invasion of Iraq and the long, botched occupation that followed tended to be Desert Storm vets who knew little or nothing about counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called "A Failure of Generalship." He painted the Army's high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, "does little to reward creativity and moral courage." On the contrary, to move up, an officer "must only please his superiors." Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq.
He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today's force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control.
Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen "Iraqi" villages, complete with several hundred "Iraqis"—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor.
But the real test of the Army's commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that ... we have to change the Army," says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. "We have to make sure we don't lose this." His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can't take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus's own "brain trust" of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations.
But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn't the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military's performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each?
Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school.
Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army's current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech "Future Combat System," a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation's political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.
------------------------
IN PLACE OF------------------------IN PLACE OF (Part 2 of Part 2)
This year Al-Qaeda celebrates its 20th birthday, having outlived the Bush administration. It may even outlive the Obama administration as well, despite all the all the manpower and resources that have been allocated to the war in Afghanistan.
Abdel al-Bari Atwan, the editor-in chief of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told Arabic News Broadcast (ANB), “Al Qaeda continues to strengthen and expand despite the 8 years of search and destroy, which shows that the US has lost, not al Qaeda”.
Atwan said that Al Qaeda has managed to drag the US into wars of attrition. He explains, “when I met bin Laden in November 1996, he told me ‘I can’t fight America inside America, but if I manage to drag America to Arab and Islamic countries, then I can win because I would be fighting it in our land.’” The US so far has spent $918 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at a time when its economy is in serious crisis.
Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape message confirms that he views the war in Afghanistan as an opportunity to fight a war of attrition against the US. Bin Laden said in the tape, which was aired on September 13, “If you [Americans] stop the war, then fine. Otherwise we will have no choice but to continue our war of attrition on every front just as we have worn out the former Soviet Union for ten years until it disintegrated.”
“Continue to fight for as long as you wish,” bin Laden warned. “You are fighting a desperate war that you can’t win.” He also observed that Obama was "powerless" to halt the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and must rethink his policy on Israel.
Dia Rashwan an Egyptian expert at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told Al Jazeera English that Al Qaeda became an enfranchised enterprise after the war in Afghanistan. Radical Islamic groups - such as the Algerian Salafi Group for Combat and Islamic Call, and the Tawhed and Jihad group of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in Iraq -- joined Al-Qaeda by simply declaring allegiance to the organization.
Atwan agreed with that assessment. He said before the war in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was confined to “a cave in Tora Bora,” but now has presences in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Europe, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and North Africa. And the list is growing.
This makes it extremely difficult to defeat Al-Qaeda because it requires defeating many Al-Qaeda-franchised groups on many war fronts, Rashwan said. While Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were weakened in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, other Al-Qaeda groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa were strengthened.
Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Asia Times bureau chief, told Al Jazeera English that “Al Qaeda is no longer an Arab organization. Now it is more of a South Asian organization because a big number of men from this region [“Tribal area”, in Pakistani] joined the organization”.
Therefore, defeating Al-Qaeda can only be achieved by defeating its ideologies.
Atwan said that Western media, and even some Arab media, have mistakenly concluded that Al-Qaeda was weakened because it failed to carry out attacks inside in the West in recent years. Rather, it is a new strategy by Al-Qaeda, which no longer considers carrying out attacks inside the West and the US a priority, especially after the election of Barack Obama.
Atwan told ANB, “without a doubt the election of Barack Obama put Al-Qaeda in a very awkward position. So far Obama’s policies have deprived Al Qaeda from many justifications that Al-Qaeda was using to fight the US.” He added, “Obama is an American president that wants to reconcile with the Muslim world. His father was a Muslim. He gave a speech in Cairo in which he spoke about mutual respect and interests.” Obama, in effect, has managed to pull the rug from under Al-Qaeda by his reconciling speeches.
Atwan added, “this was like an earthquake that shook all Al-Qaeda’s plans, and ideologies.” This explains the change of Al-Qaeda strategy, which was evident in Bin Laden’s latest audio recording.
Osama bin Laden said in the audiotape, which was aired on Al Jazeera English on Sep 13, that he wanted Americans to stop their support for Israel. Bin Laden said, “Are your children, money, jobs, homes, economy and reputation more important to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy? Should you choose your security and stopping war, this would require you to hold accountable those who are meddling in our security on your behalf. We are ready to respond positively to this option on solid and fair bases.”
This is a big change from bin Laden’s previous messages, in which he threatened bloody attacks against western and Arab countries.
Bin Laden even had an intellectual suggestion to the American people, urging them to read books by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to find out for themselves about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the US.
Dia Rashwan also saw a dramatic change in tone. He told Al Jazeera English, “I think that Osama bin Laden changed his speech compared to previous speeches. For example, Osama bin Laden spoke about September 11 attacks without saying ‘Ghazwa’ which means conquest; he only said 9.11. He never mentioned his 19 martyrs, his heroes. For the first time, he is making a distinction between bad and good American administrations.” In this case, the bad administration was that of former President George Bush’s.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Vice President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, saw it in another way. He told Al Jazeera English, “Bin Laden referenced John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and their assassinations. He argued that once a train is on its tracks, it can’t leave those tracks. His argument is that if Obama deviates too much from the Bush administration, then he can get assassinated. In essence… regardless of if you like [Obama] more than Bush, the nature of the US is not going to change. That is a very defensive stance vis-a-vis Obama.”
Bin Laden’s focus on the Palestinian plight in his latest speech may have also been intended to offer a new image of Al-Qaeda in contrast to the bloody one that has been imprinted in the minds of Muslims worldwide. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were responsible for a great deal of bloodshed not only in western countries but also in Arab and Muslim countries, including Iraq and Algeria.
Giving up its rhetoric about using violence against Arab regimes, and confining its armed attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at least temporarily makes Al-Qaeda appear less extremist. Bin Laden hopes this will reestablish its legitimacy, clearly eroded after Obama’s election.
------------------------
SUMMARY ONLY------------------------SUMMARY ONLY
Al Qaida: Entrapaneurship and Modular Terrorism
Roy Mitsuoka
General Staff
Summer 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
------------------------
IN PLACE OF------------------------IN PLACE OF (Part 1 of Part 2; See Below)
Should we prepare for big wars or small ones? After Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer might seem obvious, but the truth is harder and more expensive: both.
Great armies and navies are always tempted to fight the last war, especially if they won it. The British Army entered World War I wedded to the "up and at 'em" infantry advances of Waterloo—even though by the turn of the century the Maxim gun had made such tactics tantamount to suicide. Truly fearsome militaries prepare to fight the next war. Think of how the German Army used planes and tanks in a coordinated blitzkrieg to outmaneuver the Allies at the outset of World War II.
But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world's greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight "big wars" against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term "low-intensity conflict" but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the "savage wars of peace"—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq.
The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today's messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds. Many of the combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who are among the most capable and experienced young officers America has had in a generation, fall into the latter camp. But the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. military may not have the resources to be able to fight both kinds of war with any assurance of victory. Though political leaders have barely begun to address the problem, the shape, size and funding of America's armed forces is one of the most pressing issues the next president will face.
The end of the cold war was supposed to give the winning superpower a breather. In 1999, the then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke of his desire to "skip a generation" of weaponry, to move to a shiny new age of high-tech warfare in which sensors, satellites and computers would replace manpower. Among military planners, phrases like "network-centric warfare," "digitization" and "the transparent battlefield" were all the rage. The new thinking was given a partial test after 9/11 when the military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's push to employ a faster, leaner, more-wired force worked well. In Afghanistan, Special Forces working with local warlords used their laptops to call in precise airstrikes and topple the Taliban; in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks could boast that "speed kills"—and Baghdad fell in less than three weeks.
Then came disaster. In Afghanistan, American forces and their unreliable allies were not able to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban survived to fight another day. The growing insurgency in Iraq overwhelmed U.S. forces and left a good portion of the American people and their elected representatives believing that the war was a lost cause. The military seemed caught by surprise, its high-tech forces unable to defeat a shadow army that wired bombs with garage-door openers and the sort of cheap electronic gizmos that could be purchased from RadioShack.
In retrospect, the military's unpreparedness seems puzzling. According to the Congressional Research Service, since the end of the cold war in 1990 the U.S. military has been deployed 88 times—to fight in a series of savage little wars of peace from Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone. Didn't the Army learn anything from the experience?
The answer is yes and no. The older generation of officers—the generals who run the show—were trained to fight the Soviet Army as its tanks powered through the Fulda Gap in Germany. These officers were steeped in tank battles and artillery duels, and although the Big One never came, they did get a chance to fight a conventional armored conflict against the Iraqi Army in 1991, crushing Saddam Hussein's forces in less than 100 hours. After the gulf war, the Army shrank in size by about 40 percent. The officers who advanced to the top ranks tended to be conventional warriors; the outliers and mavericks—the few who knew other cultures, had trained Third World armies and had studied the small wars of the colonial era—were confined to the ghetto of Special Forces or let go altogether. The men who ran the lightning invasion of Iraq and the long, botched occupation that followed tended to be Desert Storm vets who knew little or nothing about counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called "A Failure of Generalship." He painted the Army's high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, "does little to reward creativity and moral courage." On the contrary, to move up, an officer "must only please his superiors." Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq.
He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today's force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control.
Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen "Iraqi" villages, complete with several hundred "Iraqis"—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor.
But the real test of the Army's commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that ... we have to change the Army," says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. "We have to make sure we don't lose this." His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can't take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus's own "brain trust" of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations.
But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn't the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military's performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each?
Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school.
Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army's current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech "Future Combat System," a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation's political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.
------------------------
IN PLACE OF------------------------IN PLACE OF (Part 2 of Part 2)
This year Al-Qaeda celebrates its 20th birthday, having outlived the Bush administration. It may even outlive the Obama administration as well, despite all the all the manpower and resources that have been allocated to the war in Afghanistan.
Abdel al-Bari Atwan, the editor-in chief of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told Arabic News Broadcast (ANB), “Al Qaeda continues to strengthen and expand despite the 8 years of search and destroy, which shows that the US has lost, not al Qaeda”.
Atwan said that Al Qaeda has managed to drag the US into wars of attrition. He explains, “when I met bin Laden in November 1996, he told me ‘I can’t fight America inside America, but if I manage to drag America to Arab and Islamic countries, then I can win because I would be fighting it in our land.’” The US so far has spent $918 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at a time when its economy is in serious crisis.
Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape message confirms that he views the war in Afghanistan as an opportunity to fight a war of attrition against the US. Bin Laden said in the tape, which was aired on September 13, “If you [Americans] stop the war, then fine. Otherwise we will have no choice but to continue our war of attrition on every front just as we have worn out the former Soviet Union for ten years until it disintegrated.”
“Continue to fight for as long as you wish,” bin Laden warned. “You are fighting a desperate war that you can’t win.” He also observed that Obama was "powerless" to halt the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and must rethink his policy on Israel.
Dia Rashwan an Egyptian expert at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told Al Jazeera English that Al Qaeda became an enfranchised enterprise after the war in Afghanistan. Radical Islamic groups - such as the Algerian Salafi Group for Combat and Islamic Call, and the Tawhed and Jihad group of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in Iraq -- joined Al-Qaeda by simply declaring allegiance to the organization.
Atwan agreed with that assessment. He said before the war in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was confined to “a cave in Tora Bora,” but now has presences in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Europe, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and North Africa. And the list is growing.
This makes it extremely difficult to defeat Al-Qaeda because it requires defeating many Al-Qaeda-franchised groups on many war fronts, Rashwan said. While Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were weakened in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, other Al-Qaeda groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa were strengthened.
Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Asia Times bureau chief, told Al Jazeera English that “Al Qaeda is no longer an Arab organization. Now it is more of a South Asian organization because a big number of men from this region [“Tribal area”, in Pakistani] joined the organization”.
Therefore, defeating Al-Qaeda can only be achieved by defeating its ideologies.
Atwan said that Western media, and even some Arab media, have mistakenly concluded that Al-Qaeda was weakened because it failed to carry out attacks inside in the West in recent years. Rather, it is a new strategy by Al-Qaeda, which no longer considers carrying out attacks inside the West and the US a priority, especially after the election of Barack Obama.
Atwan told ANB, “without a doubt the election of Barack Obama put Al-Qaeda in a very awkward position. So far Obama’s policies have deprived Al Qaeda from many justifications that Al-Qaeda was using to fight the US.” He added, “Obama is an American president that wants to reconcile with the Muslim world. His father was a Muslim. He gave a speech in Cairo in which he spoke about mutual respect and interests.” Obama, in effect, has managed to pull the rug from under Al-Qaeda by his reconciling speeches.
Atwan added, “this was like an earthquake that shook all Al-Qaeda’s plans, and ideologies.” This explains the change of Al-Qaeda strategy, which was evident in Bin Laden’s latest audio recording.
Osama bin Laden said in the audiotape, which was aired on Al Jazeera English on Sep 13, that he wanted Americans to stop their support for Israel. Bin Laden said, “Are your children, money, jobs, homes, economy and reputation more important to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy? Should you choose your security and stopping war, this would require you to hold accountable those who are meddling in our security on your behalf. We are ready to respond positively to this option on solid and fair bases.”
This is a big change from bin Laden’s previous messages, in which he threatened bloody attacks against western and Arab countries.
Bin Laden even had an intellectual suggestion to the American people, urging them to read books by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to find out for themselves about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the US.
Dia Rashwan also saw a dramatic change in tone. He told Al Jazeera English, “I think that Osama bin Laden changed his speech compared to previous speeches. For example, Osama bin Laden spoke about September 11 attacks without saying ‘Ghazwa’ which means conquest; he only said 9.11. He never mentioned his 19 martyrs, his heroes. For the first time, he is making a distinction between bad and good American administrations.” In this case, the bad administration was that of former President George Bush’s.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Vice President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, saw it in another way. He told Al Jazeera English, “Bin Laden referenced John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and their assassinations. He argued that once a train is on its tracks, it can’t leave those tracks. His argument is that if Obama deviates too much from the Bush administration, then he can get assassinated. In essence… regardless of if you like [Obama] more than Bush, the nature of the US is not going to change. That is a very defensive stance vis-a-vis Obama.”
Bin Laden’s focus on the Palestinian plight in his latest speech may have also been intended to offer a new image of Al-Qaeda in contrast to the bloody one that has been imprinted in the minds of Muslims worldwide. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were responsible for a great deal of bloodshed not only in western countries but also in Arab and Muslim countries, including Iraq and Algeria.
Giving up its rhetoric about using violence against Arab regimes, and confining its armed attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at least temporarily makes Al-Qaeda appear less extremist. Bin Laden hopes this will reestablish its legitimacy, clearly eroded after Obama’s election.
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Ozzie FUSEs Social Media Teams in Microsoft Reorg by Steve Gillmor
For months now we’ve been wondering when Microsoft was going to start making moves in the social media space. Rumors of talks with Twitter have been swirling at all levels of the company, but now a subtle re-org may shed light on what Microsoft might do internally to shore up its presence in the RealTime Wave. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has announced the formation of Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, a new group led by general manager Lili Cheng. FUSE Labs is being seeded with a range of related talent and software by combining much of Lili’s Creative Systems Group with Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. In the past, she’s been able to move social technologies from the labs into product.
In an internal memo, Ozzie talks about the growing vortex of social media and realtime:
"For many years, technology-based ‘social’ innovations have been most commonly viewed through the lenses of communications and collaboration: messaging, chat, calls, meetings, conferences, co-editing, document sharing, collaboration, multiplayer gaming and the like.
More recently, many factors have begun to transform all that which is ‘social’: the ever-present, high-bandwidth internet both wired and wireless; the ease of connecting people; the dramatic rise in digital cameras, camera phones and ‘app-capable’ phones; net-connected game consoles & TVs; and so on.
Myriad scenarios involving the notion of ‘social’ have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.
The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.
FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts. Working closely with MSR and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity."
Cheng, who will report directly to Ozzie, moves from Microsoft Research (MSR) and her Creative Systems team, which most recently produced Kodu, which teaches kids how to create games and stories on the Xbox. Previously, Cheng was in the Windows division where she managed the User Experience teams for Windows Vista. Before that, she ran the Social Computing Group within MSR, which developed projects such as Wallop and VChat. Cheng first joined Microsoft in 1995 as part of the Virtual Worlds Group within MSR.
Cheng will retain most of her original team from Redmond while traveling to Cambridge to consolidate the other teams. Kostas Mallios, general manager of the Rich Media Lab, will continue to report to Ozzie and take on business development responsibilities assisting the incubations within Ozzie’s org. Reed Sturtevant, managing director of the Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, has decided to pursue interests outside Microsoft.
In an internal memo, Ozzie talks about the growing vortex of social media and realtime:
"For many years, technology-based ‘social’ innovations have been most commonly viewed through the lenses of communications and collaboration: messaging, chat, calls, meetings, conferences, co-editing, document sharing, collaboration, multiplayer gaming and the like.
More recently, many factors have begun to transform all that which is ‘social’: the ever-present, high-bandwidth internet both wired and wireless; the ease of connecting people; the dramatic rise in digital cameras, camera phones and ‘app-capable’ phones; net-connected game consoles & TVs; and so on.
Myriad scenarios involving the notion of ‘social’ have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.
The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.
FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts. Working closely with MSR and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity."
Cheng, who will report directly to Ozzie, moves from Microsoft Research (MSR) and her Creative Systems team, which most recently produced Kodu, which teaches kids how to create games and stories on the Xbox. Previously, Cheng was in the Windows division where she managed the User Experience teams for Windows Vista. Before that, she ran the Social Computing Group within MSR, which developed projects such as Wallop and VChat. Cheng first joined Microsoft in 1995 as part of the Virtual Worlds Group within MSR.
Cheng will retain most of her original team from Redmond while traveling to Cambridge to consolidate the other teams. Kostas Mallios, general manager of the Rich Media Lab, will continue to report to Ozzie and take on business development responsibilities assisting the incubations within Ozzie’s org. Reed Sturtevant, managing director of the Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, has decided to pursue interests outside Microsoft.
Computational GPU Unveiled by NVIDA
NVIDIA Corp. today introduced its next generation CUDA GPU architecture, codenamed “Fermi”. An entirely new ground-up design, the “Fermi” architecture is the foundation for the world’s first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both graphics and GPU computing.
“NVIDIA and the Fermi team have taken a giant step towards making GPUs attractive for a broader class of programs,” said Dave Patterson, director Parallel Computing Research Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley and co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. “I believe history will record Fermi as a significant milestone.”
Presented at the company’s inaugural GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, California, “Fermi” delivers a feature set that accelerates performance on a wider array of computational applications than ever before. Joining NVIDIA’s press conference was Oak Ridge National Laboratory who announced plans for a new supercomputer that will use NVIDIA GPUs based on the “Fermi” architecture. “Fermi” also garnered the support of leading organizations including Bloomberg, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
“It is completely clear that GPUs are now general purpose parallel computing processors with amazing graphics, and not just graphics chips anymore,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The Fermi architecture, the integrated tools, libraries and engines are the direct results of the insights we have gained from working with thousands of CUDA developers around the world. We will look back in the coming years and see that Fermi started the new GPU industry.”
As the foundation for NVIDIA’s family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce, Quadro and Tesla − “Fermi” features a host of new technologies that are “must-have” features for the computing space, including:
ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale
* 512 CUDA Cores featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs
* 8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA’s last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry
* Support for concurrent-kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX fluid and rigid body solvers)
* NVIDIA Parallel DataCache - the world’s first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand
* Nexus – the world’s first fully integrated heterogeneous computing application development environment within Microsoft Visual Studio
More on “Fermi” can all be found at: www.nvidia.com/fermi
“NVIDIA and the Fermi team have taken a giant step towards making GPUs attractive for a broader class of programs,” said Dave Patterson, director Parallel Computing Research Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley and co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. “I believe history will record Fermi as a significant milestone.”
Presented at the company’s inaugural GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, California, “Fermi” delivers a feature set that accelerates performance on a wider array of computational applications than ever before. Joining NVIDIA’s press conference was Oak Ridge National Laboratory who announced plans for a new supercomputer that will use NVIDIA GPUs based on the “Fermi” architecture. “Fermi” also garnered the support of leading organizations including Bloomberg, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft.
“It is completely clear that GPUs are now general purpose parallel computing processors with amazing graphics, and not just graphics chips anymore,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The Fermi architecture, the integrated tools, libraries and engines are the direct results of the insights we have gained from working with thousands of CUDA developers around the world. We will look back in the coming years and see that Fermi started the new GPU industry.”
As the foundation for NVIDIA’s family of next generation GPUs namely GeForce, Quadro and Tesla − “Fermi” features a host of new technologies that are “must-have” features for the computing space, including:
ECC, a critical requirement for datacenters and supercomputing centers deploying GPUs on a large scale
* 512 CUDA Cores featuring the new IEEE 754-2008 floating-point standard, surpassing even the most advanced CPUs
* 8x the peak double precision arithmetic performance over NVIDIA’s last generation GPU. Double precision is critical for high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as linear algebra, numerical simulation, and quantum chemistry
* Support for concurrent-kernel execution, where different kernels of the same application context can execute on the GPU at the same time (eg: PhysX fluid and rigid body solvers)
* NVIDIA Parallel DataCache - the world’s first true cache hierarchy in a GPU that speeds up algorithms such as physics solvers, raytracing, and sparse matrix multiplication where data addresses are not known beforehand
* Nexus – the world’s first fully integrated heterogeneous computing application development environment within Microsoft Visual Studio
More on “Fermi” can all be found at: www.nvidia.com/fermi
'Sinister' Integral Energy Virus Outbreak a Threat to Power Grid by Asher Moses
A virus outbreak is wreaking havoc with Integral Energy's computer network, forcing it to rebuild all 1000 of its desktop computers before the "particularly sinister" bug spreads to the machines controlling the power grid.
A spokesman for Integral Energy, a major energy supplier, confirmed that the company had called in external information security experts to "rebuild all desktop computers to contain and remove the virus".
The malware had not affected power supplies to customers or business data and was "contained within Integral Energy's information technology network", the spokesman said.
But Chris Gatford, a security consultant at Hacklabs who has conducted penetration testing on critical infrastructure, said there was often "ineffective segregation" or "more typically none at all" between the IT network and the network that monitors and controls the infrastructure."
He said the two networks often needed to be connected in some way in order to share data such as usage information that is used in the billing process or quality of service measuring.
"The risk of having a virus in this type of environment is it might affect the operation of the power grid if the virus was to infiltrate the process control network," said Gatford.
"I think they're to be commended for this extreme reaction when dealing with something that could potentially affect the supply of energy."
Integral Energy said the virus was the W32.Virut.CF strain, which computer security company Symantec describes on its website as "a particularly sinister file infector" that spreads quickly and "is proving difficult to remove from infected networks".
Ironically, Integral Energy's computer networks are protected by a Symantec security solution, a source said. Symantec has had a virus signature for W32.Virut.CF since February.
"This might indicate the antivirus software was not updated in a timely matter on some machines or that the Symantec product was not able to detect it due to the obfuscation techniques used by the malware," Gatford said.
The Symantec website also said that the virus installs a back door, enabling hackers to issue commands to the infected machines via an internet relay chat (IRC) channel.
Gatford said this was a "big concern" when on sensitive networks but most corporate networks "would not allow for this traffic to be passed by the malware".
The Integral Energy spokesman said the company had put in place recovery plans to eliminate the virus from its business systems and maintain service levels to customers.
"As part of these plans, an investigation is under way into the cause of the infection and a strategy to minimise this risk in the future," he said.
A spokesman for Integral Energy, a major energy supplier, confirmed that the company had called in external information security experts to "rebuild all desktop computers to contain and remove the virus".
The malware had not affected power supplies to customers or business data and was "contained within Integral Energy's information technology network", the spokesman said.
But Chris Gatford, a security consultant at Hacklabs who has conducted penetration testing on critical infrastructure, said there was often "ineffective segregation" or "more typically none at all" between the IT network and the network that monitors and controls the infrastructure."
He said the two networks often needed to be connected in some way in order to share data such as usage information that is used in the billing process or quality of service measuring.
"The risk of having a virus in this type of environment is it might affect the operation of the power grid if the virus was to infiltrate the process control network," said Gatford.
"I think they're to be commended for this extreme reaction when dealing with something that could potentially affect the supply of energy."
Integral Energy said the virus was the W32.Virut.CF strain, which computer security company Symantec describes on its website as "a particularly sinister file infector" that spreads quickly and "is proving difficult to remove from infected networks".
Ironically, Integral Energy's computer networks are protected by a Symantec security solution, a source said. Symantec has had a virus signature for W32.Virut.CF since February.
"This might indicate the antivirus software was not updated in a timely matter on some machines or that the Symantec product was not able to detect it due to the obfuscation techniques used by the malware," Gatford said.
The Symantec website also said that the virus installs a back door, enabling hackers to issue commands to the infected machines via an internet relay chat (IRC) channel.
Gatford said this was a "big concern" when on sensitive networks but most corporate networks "would not allow for this traffic to be passed by the malware".
The Integral Energy spokesman said the company had put in place recovery plans to eliminate the virus from its business systems and maintain service levels to customers.
"As part of these plans, an investigation is under way into the cause of the infection and a strategy to minimise this risk in the future," he said.
Hamas: Ideologically Challenged, Militarily Limited by Matthew Levitt
Hamas in the Gaza Strip is under significant stress. As a government it has failed to provide for the needs of its purported constituents, and remains an international pariah under economic siege. At the same time, its credentials as a “resistance” movement lose currency by the day as the movement continues to refrain from attacking Israel for fear of reprisal attacks in the wake of Israel’s Caste Lead operation in December 2008 and January 2009.
Al Qaeda itself, which highlights the Palestinian cause in its rhetoric but gives the issue short shrift in its operational planning, has taken advantage of the opportunity to try to lure Hamas operatives away from the movement’s nationalist focus to the cause of global jihad. In February 2008, the elusive Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, denounced Hamas’ leadership for betraying Islam and called on Hamas’ military wing to break off from the group and join the global jihadist movement.
Recognizing the damage such challenges pose to Hamas’s own jihadist credentials, the movement’s Izz al Din al Qassam terrorist wing posted a paper on its website last month entitled “The Concept of Jihad as the Islamic World Understand” [sic] highlighting the work of Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, famous for his religious edicts (fatwa) justifying suicide bombings targeting civilians in Israel and Iraq. Qaradawi, the paper stresses, “is extremely careful to distinguish between extremist groups that declare war on the whole world, killing indiscriminately, tainting the image of Islam and providing its enemies with fatal weapons to use against it, on the one hand, and on the other groups resisting occupation.” The effort to cloak itself in the mantle of a noted Islamist theoretician like Qaradawi, who is known for his vocal support for violent jihad, is a telling sign of the pressure Hamas feels it is under in the wake of its poor performance fighting Israel last winter and in light of its relative quiet since. Israeli officials have described the current Hamas policy as “industrial quiet,” which includes a pause in violence for the practical purpose of rearming and the strategic aim of consolidating its control in Gaza.
Hamas failed to inflict significant Israeli casualties over the course of the Caste Lead battles, and instead of protecting its civilian population Hamas hid its leaders and armaments behind civilian structures such as mosques and hospitals. According to a new Washington Institute study, Hamas in Combat: The Military Performance of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, despite the violent threat Hamas poses to regional stability, the movement’s fundamental military strength should not be overestimated.
Engaged in secular politics, failing to institute shariah law, and cracking down on fellow Palestinians who attack Israel or threaten Hamas’s rule, Hamas in Gaza has created a vacuum which salafi-jihadi groups – often populated by disgruntled Hamas operatives – have been keen to fill. To date, however, al Qaeda inspired groups in Gaza have enjoyed very limited success.
Al Qaeda itself, which highlights the Palestinian cause in its rhetoric but gives the issue short shrift in its operational planning, has taken advantage of the opportunity to try to lure Hamas operatives away from the movement’s nationalist focus to the cause of global jihad. In February 2008, the elusive Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, denounced Hamas’ leadership for betraying Islam and called on Hamas’ military wing to break off from the group and join the global jihadist movement.
Recognizing the damage such challenges pose to Hamas’s own jihadist credentials, the movement’s Izz al Din al Qassam terrorist wing posted a paper on its website last month entitled “The Concept of Jihad as the Islamic World Understand” [sic] highlighting the work of Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, famous for his religious edicts (fatwa) justifying suicide bombings targeting civilians in Israel and Iraq. Qaradawi, the paper stresses, “is extremely careful to distinguish between extremist groups that declare war on the whole world, killing indiscriminately, tainting the image of Islam and providing its enemies with fatal weapons to use against it, on the one hand, and on the other groups resisting occupation.” The effort to cloak itself in the mantle of a noted Islamist theoretician like Qaradawi, who is known for his vocal support for violent jihad, is a telling sign of the pressure Hamas feels it is under in the wake of its poor performance fighting Israel last winter and in light of its relative quiet since. Israeli officials have described the current Hamas policy as “industrial quiet,” which includes a pause in violence for the practical purpose of rearming and the strategic aim of consolidating its control in Gaza.
Hamas failed to inflict significant Israeli casualties over the course of the Caste Lead battles, and instead of protecting its civilian population Hamas hid its leaders and armaments behind civilian structures such as mosques and hospitals. According to a new Washington Institute study, Hamas in Combat: The Military Performance of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, despite the violent threat Hamas poses to regional stability, the movement’s fundamental military strength should not be overestimated.
Engaged in secular politics, failing to institute shariah law, and cracking down on fellow Palestinians who attack Israel or threaten Hamas’s rule, Hamas in Gaza has created a vacuum which salafi-jihadi groups – often populated by disgruntled Hamas operatives – have been keen to fill. To date, however, al Qaeda inspired groups in Gaza have enjoyed very limited success.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Invent, Invent, Invent by Thomas L. Friedman
I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?
Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.
Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.
We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.
Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.
At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.
As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.
China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.
We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!
Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.
We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”
Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.
Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.
We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.
Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.
At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.
As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.
China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.
We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!
Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.
We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”
Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.
Beijing’s Afghan Gamble by Robert D. Kaplan
In Afghanistan’s Logar Province, just south of Kabul, the geopolitical future of Asia is becoming apparent: American troops are providing security for a Chinese state-owned company to exploit the Aynak copper reserves, which are worth tens of billions of dollars. While some of America’s NATO allies want to do as little as possible in the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, China has its eyes on some of world’s last untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium and precious gems, and is willing to take big risks in one of the most violent countries to secure them.
In Afghanistan, American and Chinese interests converge. By exploiting Afghanistan’s metal and mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize a tottering Kabul government. Just as America has a vision of a modestly stable Afghanistan that will no longer be a haven for extremists, China has a vision of Afghanistan as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So if America defeats Al Qaeda and the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, China’s geopolitical position will be enhanced.
This is not a paradox, since China need not be our future adversary. Indeed, combining forces with China in Afghanistan might even improve the relationship between Washington and Beijing. The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America’s military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.
But what if America decides to leave, or to drastically reduce its footprint to a counterterrorism strategy focused mainly on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Then another scenario might play out. Kandahar and other areas will most likely fall to the Taliban, creating a truly lawless realm that wrecks China’s plans for an energy and commodities passageway through South Asia. It would also, of course, be a momentous moral victory achieved by radical Muslims who, having first defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, will then have triumphed over another superpower.
And the calculations get more complicated still: a withdrawal of any kind from Afghanistan before a stable government is in place would also hurt India, a critical if undeclared American ally, and increasingly a rival of China. Were the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, India would face a radical Islamistan stretching from its border with Pakistan deep into Central Asia. With the Taliban triumphant on Pakistan’s western border, jihadists there could direct their energies to the eastern border with India.
India would defeat Pakistan in a war, conventional or nuclear. But having to do so, or simply needing to face down a significantly greater jihadist threat next door, would divert India’s national energies away from further developing its economy and its navy, a development China would quietly welcome.
Bottom line: China will find a way to benefit no matter what the United States does in Afghanistan. But it probably benefits more if we stay and add troops to the fight. The same goes for Russia. Because of continuing unrest in the Islamic southern tier of the former Soviet Union, Moscow has an interest in America stabilizing Afghanistan (though it would take a certain psychological pleasure from a humiliating American withdrawal).
In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.
Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.
Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.
But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.
In Afghanistan, American and Chinese interests converge. By exploiting Afghanistan’s metal and mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize a tottering Kabul government. Just as America has a vision of a modestly stable Afghanistan that will no longer be a haven for extremists, China has a vision of Afghanistan as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So if America defeats Al Qaeda and the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, China’s geopolitical position will be enhanced.
This is not a paradox, since China need not be our future adversary. Indeed, combining forces with China in Afghanistan might even improve the relationship between Washington and Beijing. The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America’s military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.
But what if America decides to leave, or to drastically reduce its footprint to a counterterrorism strategy focused mainly on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Then another scenario might play out. Kandahar and other areas will most likely fall to the Taliban, creating a truly lawless realm that wrecks China’s plans for an energy and commodities passageway through South Asia. It would also, of course, be a momentous moral victory achieved by radical Muslims who, having first defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, will then have triumphed over another superpower.
And the calculations get more complicated still: a withdrawal of any kind from Afghanistan before a stable government is in place would also hurt India, a critical if undeclared American ally, and increasingly a rival of China. Were the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, India would face a radical Islamistan stretching from its border with Pakistan deep into Central Asia. With the Taliban triumphant on Pakistan’s western border, jihadists there could direct their energies to the eastern border with India.
India would defeat Pakistan in a war, conventional or nuclear. But having to do so, or simply needing to face down a significantly greater jihadist threat next door, would divert India’s national energies away from further developing its economy and its navy, a development China would quietly welcome.
Bottom line: China will find a way to benefit no matter what the United States does in Afghanistan. But it probably benefits more if we stay and add troops to the fight. The same goes for Russia. Because of continuing unrest in the Islamic southern tier of the former Soviet Union, Moscow has an interest in America stabilizing Afghanistan (though it would take a certain psychological pleasure from a humiliating American withdrawal).
In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.
Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.
Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.
But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Trips to Mars in 39 Days by Nancy Atkinson
Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars – at quickest — lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has also signed an agreement with NASA to test a 200-kilowatt VASIMR engine on the International Space Station in 2013.
The tests on the ISS would provide periodic boosts to the space station, which gradually drops in altitude due to atmospheric drag. ISS boosts are currently provided by spacecraft with conventional thrusters, which consume about 7.5 tons of propellant per year. By cutting this amount down to 0.3 tons, Chang-Diaz estimates that VASIMR could save NASA millions of dollars per year.
The test last week was the first time that a small-scale prototype of the company's VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) rocket engine has been demonstrated at full power.
Plasma, or ion engines uses radio waves to heat gases such as hydrogen, argon, and neon, creating hot plasma. Magnetic fields force the charged plasma out the back of the engine, producing thrust in the opposite direction.
Plasma, or ion engines uses radio waves to heat gases such as hydrogen, argon, and neon, creating hot plasma. Magnetic fields force the charged plasma out the back of the engine, producing thrust in the opposite direction.
They provide much less thrust at a given moment than do chemical rockets, which means they can't break free of the Earth's gravity on their own. Plus, ion engines only work in a vacuum. But once in space, they can give a continuous push for years, like wind pushing a sailboat, accelerating gradually until the vehicle is moving faster than chemical rockets. They only produce a pound of thrust, but in space that's enough to move 2 tons of cargo.
Due to the high velocity that is possible, less fuel is required than in conventional engines.
Currently, the Dawn spacecraft, on its way to the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, uses ion propulsion, which will enable it to orbit Vesta, then leave and head to Ceres. This isn't possible with conventional rockets.
Additionally, in space ion engines have a velocity ten times that of chemical rockets.
Dawn's engines have a specific impulse of 3100 seconds and a thrust of 90 mNewtons. A chemical rocket on a spacecraft might have a thrust of up to 500 Newtons, and a specific impulse of less than 1000 seconds.
The VASIMR has 4 Newtons of thrust (0.9 pounds) with a specific impulse of about 6,000 seconds.
The VASIMR has two additional important features that distinguish it from other plasma propulsion systems. It has the ability to vary the exhaust parameters (thrust and specific impulse) in order to optimally match mission requirements. This results in the lowest trip time with the highest payload for a given fuel load.
In addition, VASIMR has no physical electrodes in contact with the plasma, prolonging the engine's lifetime and enabling a higher power density than in other designs.
To make a trip to Mars in 39 days, a 10- to 20-megawatt VASIMR engine ion engine would need to be coupled with nuclear power to dramatically shorten human transit times between planets. The shorter the trip, the less time astronauts would be exposed to space radiation, and a microgravity environment, both of which are significant hurdles for Mars missions.
VASIMR could also be adapted to handle the high payloads of robotic missions, and propel cargo missions with a very large payload mass fraction. Trip times and payload mass are major limitations of conventional and nuclear thermal rockets because of their inherently low specific impulse.
Chang-Diaz has been working on the development of the VASIMR concept since 1979, before founding Ad Astra in 2005 to further develop the project.
iPhone Gets Augmented Reality
You're walking down the street, looking for a good place to eat. You hold up your cell phone and use it like the viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what's in front of you.
But it also shows things you couldn't see before: Brightly coloured markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars.
Turn a corner, and the markers reflect the new scene. Click a marker for a restaurant, and you can see customer reviews and price information. Decide you'd rather be sightseeing? The indicators are easily changed to give information about the buildings you're passing.
This computer-enhanced view of the world is not just available to cyborgs in science-fiction movies. Increasingly it can be found on cell phones, for free or on the cheap, through programs that provide "augmented reality."
These applications take advantage of the phones' GPS and compass features and access to high-speed wireless networks to mash up super-local web content with the world that surrounds you.
That means you can see available apartments on the block you're moseying down. You can view photos other people have taken at the park you're passing, or find the nearest bus stop or hotel room - all by just holding your phone up and peering at its screen.
The possibilities for melding the virtual and actual worlds have just started to become apparent. The first phones with Google's Android operating system, which enables augmented reality, have come out in the past year. The iPhone became augmented-reality-friendly with the compass that debuted in June on the iPhone 3GS. Apple also recently joined Google in making it possible for software developers to overlay images on the phone's camera view.
As cell phones get even smarter and GPS and wireless networks improve, we may soon be spending more time in a virtually enhanced world, using information gathered from the internet to inform everything from eating to playing video games.
One company working to make this happen is Amsterdam-based Layar, which recently released an augmented reality browser by the same name for Android phones. Layar lets you search for things on Google, but delivers the results based on your location, which it determines from the GPS readout. So you can search for, say, a bike shop or a pet store close to where you happen to be.
If you don't feel like actively searching, you can sign up to have certain kinds of information automatically appear on your phone screen. For instance, Layar lets other companies build on its system to overlay information about such places as skateboarding spots and local landmarks. A startup called Brightkite uses Layar to let people post virtual tags, with their locations and activities, that other people can see if they use the same app.
Layar's goal is to create a "serendipitous experience" that lets you can discover new things about your surroundings, says co-creator Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald.
The company is working on a 3-D function, too, that it hopes to release in November. That will allow virtual objects to be placed "on" actual locations. A guy might be able to put a virtual heart in front of his girlfriend's house for Valentine's Day - and she would see it if she used the Layar app on her phone.
For a year, Yelp, a website with business reviews written by customers, had an iPhone app that used the device's GPS and wireless internet connectivity to deliver local search results. But when the iPhone got a compass, bloggers wondered whether Yelp would go further and make its app overlay information on to a real-time view of the world. After noticing the speculation, Yelp quietly created such an app this summer, spokesman Vince Sollitto said.
The augmented-reality program, known as Monocle, was built for Yelp by an industrious intern and originally hidden in Yelp's app. (It was activated if you shook the iPhone three times.) Monocle is now a formal feature that combines the iPhone's camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances and user ratings of proximate bars, restaurants and more. Poke a floating tag on the screen with your finger and up pops detailed information about the business.
Among the other augmented reality programs that recently have hit Apple's App Store is Robotvision, a 99-cent program built by Portland, Ore.-based developer Tim Sears.
If you hold your phone parallel to the ground, Robotvision displays a map of your surroundings. Hold the phone up, however, and it goes into augmented-reality mode, highlighting places like coffee shops and bars. Robotvision also can search for other kinds of businesses with Microsoft's Bing search engine. You can view pictures that people took nearby and posted to Flickr with a "geotag" of the shot's physical location. Or you can see Twitter postings composed in the area.
Next Sears plans to update the application with local content from Wikipedia.
"Looking at the world around you is something everyone can get. That, to me, is what makes it so fascinating," he said.
Consumers may feel that way initially, too. But Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor who runs the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, worries that the technological limitations these applications currently face will keep them from living up to what people imagine they can do. Similar disappointments followed early hype for virtual reality, a cousin of augmented reality in which the landscape is entirely computer generated.
Indeed, there are issues hindering augmented reality applications. Cell phones need to be more powerful, with improved cameras and graphics capabilities and more accurate GPS. The technology can generally pinpoint location to within 30 feet if a user is outdoors.
The limitations mean businesses you see on the screen are often not actually in front of you, though they are nearby. And often tags sometimes just kind of dart around on the screen, seemingly untethered to a physical place. Another problem: Using GPS for extended periods quickly sucks up the battery life on most phones.
Developers and industry watchers are optimistic, though, that in the next few years we might see everything from augmented reality video games to museum guide services that recognize paintings and can pull up videos showing the artist at work.
"Things are pretty cool right now," Sears says, "but they're definitely going to get better."
Who is Mohammad Khatami? by Ali Safavi
Mohammad Khatami was born in 1943 in Ardakan, in the central province of Yazd. His father was a cleric and Khatami completed his religious studies up to the lower intermediate level at Qom’s theological school. In 1978, a short while before the overthrow of the shah’s regime, he went abroad to administer the mosque for Iranians in Hamburg, Germany.
Khatami’s stature within the Shiite hierarchy is low because he has not sufficiently studied the classical religious curricula. Another factor that works against him compared with Khamenei, Rafsanjani and other leading clerics is that he has no record of political activity before the anti-monarchic revolution. Even in the first years after the mullahs came to power, he remained obscure, until the parliamentary elections in 1980, when he was elected as candidate of the Islamic Republican Party (set up at the time by Khomeini’s decree) from his hometown of Ardakan.
In the Majlis, Khatami was known as an active member of the Line of the Imam, the dominant grouping within the Islamic Republican Party most closely identified with Khomeini’s policies.
This faction was distinct from other factions for its absolute obedience to Khomeini's leadership, its opposition to individual and social freedoms under the pretext that they were "manifestations of liberalism," its emphasis on a centralized statist economy and its commitment to Khomeini's doctrine of exporting "Islamic revolution."
During those years, extensive feuding prevailed among the fundamentalists and those opposed to Khomeini’s theory of government, called velayat-e faqih, or absolute clerical supremacy in government. In his speeches and writings in the Majlis, Khatami quickly established himself as an active proponent of the velayat-e faqih theory of “Islamic government” and Khomeini’s unchallenged leadership. For this reason, when the journalists at Kayhan, the largest daily in the country, rebelled against government attempts to dominate the paper, Khomeini overlooked Khatami’s junior ranking within the clerical hierarchy and appointed him as his personal representative to overtake Kayhan, purge its journalists and turn the paper into a “Hezbollahi” publication. Khomeini wrote in his decree: “In view of your competence and your expertise in this field, I hereby appoint you to the post of supervising Kayhan newspaper which belongs to the oppressed.”1
Khatami demonstrated such vigor in this task that in 1982, upon Khomeini’s recommendation, Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, also from the Line of the Imam, appointed him the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
As Minister of Culture and Guidance, he was the mullahs’ chief censor in the media, the arts and culture. He also turned his ministry into an important organ for exporting fundamentalism. In the 1980s, it was Khatami who censored the country’s media. After shutting down all independent publications, he coined the term “self-censorship” for publications managed and edited by government officials themselves.
Contrary to some claims that Khatami contributed to the expansion of the film industry in Iran, exiled Iranian film makers say that the Ministry of Islamic Guidance would not allow any film maker to operate in Iran if he did not advocate and defend in his works the regime’s policy on the war and other issues. Many good films were censored and shelved by the Ministry’s censors. The regulations about restrictions on female actors and even the wearing of the hejab for small children in films were drafted and implemented during Khatami’s tenure as Minister of Islamic Guidance.
Khatami’s patron in those years was Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, who led the Line of the Imam faction. Ahmad Khomeini once said: “I have known Mr. Khatami for many years. God willing, he will carry out the tasks entrusted to him by the Imam (Khomeini) in a competent manner.”2
In an interview with Kayhan, Khatami said: “May God keep the exalted blessing of the Imam who was really the main architect and mentor of this revolution and the great player in our history. It was his great role that so dramatically changed this nation and caused such changes in this world along the divine path of human dignity.”3
During Khatami’s tenure, thousands of writers, musicians, poets, singers, sculptors, intellectuals and thinkers, all victims of the Ministry of Guidance’s cultural repression and inquisition, fled the country.
As a key member of the Supreme Council on Cultural Revolution, Khatami played an important role in purging all dissidents and enlightened elements from all universities and educational establishments.
Khatami stressed that “in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the pen, literature and arts must be completely subservient to the cause of the war.” He added in the same interview: “Arts and literature must be in the service of the war, and must serve the spirit of pride and resistance for all the oppressed people in history.”
For years the director of cultural affairs in the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the head of the War Propaganda Headquarters, Khatami played a crucial role in advancing the clerical regime’s warmongering policies.
Under Khatami’s direction, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance went far beyond cultural censorship and domestic inquisition. It became an important organ for exporting fundamentalism. Khatami enjoyed the cooperation of his close colleagues, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, at the time the ambassador to Syria and the founder of the regime’s terrorist networks in Lebanon, and Mohammad Moussavi Khoeiniha, the mastermind of the occupation of the U.S. embassy and the hostage-taking of U.S. diplomats in Tehran in November 1979.
Khatami secured a huge budget for setting up “cultural centers and bases” in different European, Arab and Islamic countries, all of which propagated Khomeini’s fundamentalist ideology among Muslims in different countries. Khatami’s agents were instructed to scout for “talents” - suitable individuals among non-Iranian nationals who could be recruited by the Revolutionary Guards’ terrorist networks. These “volunteers” were sent to Iran by Khatami’s scouts working under the cover of “cultural attachés” in Iranian embassies. They received political and ideological indoctrination and eventually joined the Guards’ extraterritorial unit, the Qods Force.
But Khatami’s star, much like that of all other figures in the Line of the Imam faction, began to fade with Khomeini’s death in 1989. With the ascent of Rafsanjani’s faction and Khamenei’s leadership, all key figures of the Line of the Imam were removed from important positions. Like his colleagues, Khatami was cast aside from his post as the Minister of Guidance in 1992 and given the ceremonious job of the Librarian of the National Library. By 1997, the clerical regime had reached such a state of turmoil that Khatami and the Line of the Imam were once again able to emerge from political hibernation and take over the helm of the state.
When Rafsanjani removed the Line of the Imam figures from their key government positions a few years ago, many observers outside Iran hailed the move as a sure sign of Rafsanjani’s moderation. Ironically, when the very individuals purged in that round of the clerical regime’s power struggle, including Khatami, regained some of their lost power in May 1997, those observers again called this a “victory” for moderation! It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to see how the dismissal and the reinstatement of the same individuals can both be interpreted as “a boost for moderation!”
A look at Khatami’s positions on different issues demonstrates his true colors:
On commitment to export of fundamentalism:
“What could we do in order to enter the world scene? We need a force which the enemy does not possess, and this is the force which is superior to technology and to arms. What we need as a balancing force is the newly born, fully-alert, and ready to sacrifice Islamic force. If the Islamic Republic is supported by such a force, the same force as in Algeria, then its movement would be taken seriously. Like Sudan is taken seriously. New centers of power are being formed in the Islamic world... This is a problem which should be dealt with seriously.”
Ressalat, June 5, 1991
On relations with the West:
“We are fundamentally and profoundly opposed to Western civilization and culture, which are engulfed in serious crises. We are talking about some very weighty issues, and those who want to propagate [Western] ways lack sufficient weight to be considered a serious threat...”
“The bullying attitude of America is a source of dual disaster. The American people have the shallowest culture in the entire world. They are a bunch of bullies and knife-toting adventurers...
“The worst of Europe gathered together and went there [to the United States] to find money. It is a culture without roots; it is based on the technology of force... Now the Americans, a nation without the least culture, have most of the world’s resources at their disposal. This represents a dual catastrophe for humanity.”
Ettela’at, July 7, 1991
On Saudi Arabia:
“If Saudi Arabia is really incapable of performing its duty to provide accommodation for the pilgrims, it should make it official so that the Muslims could do something about running the affairs of the two holy sites.”
State media, July 27, 1985
“The government of Saudi Arabia gives precedence to maintaining security and the interests of the enemies of Islam over providing security for Muslims around the world to perform their divine duties... We condemn this breech of Islam by the government of Saudi Arabia and warn the Muslims throughout the world that this inappropriate action marks the start of a new phase to tarnish the image of Islam and a serious threat to the beloved Ka’ba. We declare that we will not rest in the face of this great oppression and call on the Islamic world to rise to the occasion and carry out their religious and historic duty in the face of this blatant aggression against the divine rights of Muslims.”
Kayhan, July 29, 1985
On export of revolution:
“Today, the Hajj is the biggest forum for Islamic Revolution. The gathering of Muslims for the pilgrimage creates the best chance for the presence of the Islamic Revolution.”
Kayhan, August 7, 1993
“Currently, the Ministry of Guidance has seven foreign language newspapers, one in Swahili, the language of East Africa. Its current circulation of 50,000 can easily be increased to 200,000.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On the fatwa:
“Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses, must be executed in accordance with the religious fatwa issued by His Eminence Imam Khomeini. He has no escape from this fatwa...
“By publishing the blasphemous book, Satanic Verses, the East and the West proved to the world that they were not only the enemies of the Islamic Republic and the Imam, but also the enemies of the great religion of Islam and more than one billion Muslims around the globe...
“The silence of Arab countries on the publication of Satanic Verses proved that they only defend Islam through words, not deeds. The opposition of His Eminence Imam Khomeini to the publication of this book demonstrated that he is the only real defender of Islam, the Quran and the oppressed. This has become obvious to the World Arrogance."
Kayhan, March 7, 1989
“The largest enclave of exiled Muslims live in Europe. They were brilliant in their religious activities, particularly their rallies and gatherings to condemn Salman Rushdie.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On freedom:
“If by freedom you mean confronting the aspirations of this nation and the foundations of the Islamic Revolution and Islam, Iran’s revolutionary people cannot accept it and will not allow it...”
Kayhan, June 10, 1986
On video tapes, music, and female singers:
“We consider videos to be much more dangerous for the Islamic Revolution than drugs.... The Ministry of Islamic Guidance has been among the most adamant opponents of legalization of videos in Iran... As the country’s chief authority on culture and arts, I declare that music is allowed in this country, but improper music is banned... The Islamic Republic prohibits female singers from solo performances for the public at large.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On satellite dishes:
“This issue is important because satellite television is a gap through which alien culture can penetrate our society and spread.”
Ettela’at, July 7, 1991
Khatami's positions after becoming president:
Defending clerical rule:
“We declare to the world that we will continue to tread along Imam Khomeini’s path... We will persevere to do so.”
State television, January 19, 1998
“Imam Khomeini’s notion of velayat-e faqih is the main pillar of the Islamic Republic. All citizens of the Islamic Republic have a practical commitment to velayat-e faqih. This means that all those who live under this system must abide by this principle and regulate their conduct within the framework of the constitution.”
Khatami’s declaration on the eve of the May 1997 presidential elections
“In the Islamic Republic, defending the law means defending the velayat-e faqih.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“Our state stands far above the wishes and tendencies of individuals. All tendencies must try to safeguard the Leader’s honor and the pillars of the state. The clergy must be at the forefront.”
State television, July 5, 1998.
“The main axis and the central pillar of our system is the Great Leader and the vali-e faqih, around whom other institutions and organs take shape.”
State television, May 23, 1998.
“The Leader (Khamenei) is the central pillar of the Islamic state and the symbol of national sovereignty.”
State television, May 1998
“I work under the supervision of the Leader, and His Eminence is the central pillar of our system.”
State television, April 22, 1998
“The Leader as the central pillar of the state and society stands above personal preferences.”
State television, January 24, 1998
Freedom of expression:
“Freedom without limits results in anarchy in society... Anarchy is much more damaging than dictatorship."
Tehran radio, September 8, 1998
“ Only those have the right to political activity and existence in Iran who have faith in Islam and the leadership.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“We must not act in a crude manner so that our enemies would take advantage of our approach to freedom. We must be vigilant so that while we work to institutionalize freedom, we do not align ourselves with the enemies.”
State television, May 23, 1998
“I really do not consider some slogans being chanted in different venues such as Friday prayers or student and religious meetings to be correct. They are very dangerous.”
Reacting to young people chanting “Down with dictatorship” at a rally in Tehran University, State television, July 5, 1998
Repression:
“The heroic people of Isfahan responded to the message sent by our generous Leader and the people showed their love for the state and the Leader through their presence and at the same time they demorlized the malevolent enemies.”
State television, April 22, 1998
“A punitive approach and the language of security (organs) should be employed in dealing with those who do not accept our regime and are conspiring to overthrow it.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“Today, the government, the Guards Corps and the Armed Forces stand shoulder to shoulder with His Eminence the Great Leader acting as the central axis in order to advance the revolution, and defend the dignity and independence of the nation... With our body and soul, we are proud of the Guards Corps.”
Tehran radio, May 24, 1998
Foreign policy:
“We have suffered more than any other (nation) from the oppressive policies of the United States... If we are seen to have turned away from our revolution and given up our identity, no matter what they would give us, we shall lose.”
State television, January 19, 1998
Khatami’s stature within the Shiite hierarchy is low because he has not sufficiently studied the classical religious curricula. Another factor that works against him compared with Khamenei, Rafsanjani and other leading clerics is that he has no record of political activity before the anti-monarchic revolution. Even in the first years after the mullahs came to power, he remained obscure, until the parliamentary elections in 1980, when he was elected as candidate of the Islamic Republican Party (set up at the time by Khomeini’s decree) from his hometown of Ardakan.
In the Majlis, Khatami was known as an active member of the Line of the Imam, the dominant grouping within the Islamic Republican Party most closely identified with Khomeini’s policies.
This faction was distinct from other factions for its absolute obedience to Khomeini's leadership, its opposition to individual and social freedoms under the pretext that they were "manifestations of liberalism," its emphasis on a centralized statist economy and its commitment to Khomeini's doctrine of exporting "Islamic revolution."
During those years, extensive feuding prevailed among the fundamentalists and those opposed to Khomeini’s theory of government, called velayat-e faqih, or absolute clerical supremacy in government. In his speeches and writings in the Majlis, Khatami quickly established himself as an active proponent of the velayat-e faqih theory of “Islamic government” and Khomeini’s unchallenged leadership. For this reason, when the journalists at Kayhan, the largest daily in the country, rebelled against government attempts to dominate the paper, Khomeini overlooked Khatami’s junior ranking within the clerical hierarchy and appointed him as his personal representative to overtake Kayhan, purge its journalists and turn the paper into a “Hezbollahi” publication. Khomeini wrote in his decree: “In view of your competence and your expertise in this field, I hereby appoint you to the post of supervising Kayhan newspaper which belongs to the oppressed.”1
Khatami demonstrated such vigor in this task that in 1982, upon Khomeini’s recommendation, Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, also from the Line of the Imam, appointed him the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
As Minister of Culture and Guidance, he was the mullahs’ chief censor in the media, the arts and culture. He also turned his ministry into an important organ for exporting fundamentalism. In the 1980s, it was Khatami who censored the country’s media. After shutting down all independent publications, he coined the term “self-censorship” for publications managed and edited by government officials themselves.
Contrary to some claims that Khatami contributed to the expansion of the film industry in Iran, exiled Iranian film makers say that the Ministry of Islamic Guidance would not allow any film maker to operate in Iran if he did not advocate and defend in his works the regime’s policy on the war and other issues. Many good films were censored and shelved by the Ministry’s censors. The regulations about restrictions on female actors and even the wearing of the hejab for small children in films were drafted and implemented during Khatami’s tenure as Minister of Islamic Guidance.
Khatami’s patron in those years was Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, who led the Line of the Imam faction. Ahmad Khomeini once said: “I have known Mr. Khatami for many years. God willing, he will carry out the tasks entrusted to him by the Imam (Khomeini) in a competent manner.”2
In an interview with Kayhan, Khatami said: “May God keep the exalted blessing of the Imam who was really the main architect and mentor of this revolution and the great player in our history. It was his great role that so dramatically changed this nation and caused such changes in this world along the divine path of human dignity.”3
During Khatami’s tenure, thousands of writers, musicians, poets, singers, sculptors, intellectuals and thinkers, all victims of the Ministry of Guidance’s cultural repression and inquisition, fled the country.
As a key member of the Supreme Council on Cultural Revolution, Khatami played an important role in purging all dissidents and enlightened elements from all universities and educational establishments.
Khatami stressed that “in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the pen, literature and arts must be completely subservient to the cause of the war.” He added in the same interview: “Arts and literature must be in the service of the war, and must serve the spirit of pride and resistance for all the oppressed people in history.”
For years the director of cultural affairs in the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the head of the War Propaganda Headquarters, Khatami played a crucial role in advancing the clerical regime’s warmongering policies.
Under Khatami’s direction, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance went far beyond cultural censorship and domestic inquisition. It became an important organ for exporting fundamentalism. Khatami enjoyed the cooperation of his close colleagues, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, at the time the ambassador to Syria and the founder of the regime’s terrorist networks in Lebanon, and Mohammad Moussavi Khoeiniha, the mastermind of the occupation of the U.S. embassy and the hostage-taking of U.S. diplomats in Tehran in November 1979.
Khatami secured a huge budget for setting up “cultural centers and bases” in different European, Arab and Islamic countries, all of which propagated Khomeini’s fundamentalist ideology among Muslims in different countries. Khatami’s agents were instructed to scout for “talents” - suitable individuals among non-Iranian nationals who could be recruited by the Revolutionary Guards’ terrorist networks. These “volunteers” were sent to Iran by Khatami’s scouts working under the cover of “cultural attachés” in Iranian embassies. They received political and ideological indoctrination and eventually joined the Guards’ extraterritorial unit, the Qods Force.
But Khatami’s star, much like that of all other figures in the Line of the Imam faction, began to fade with Khomeini’s death in 1989. With the ascent of Rafsanjani’s faction and Khamenei’s leadership, all key figures of the Line of the Imam were removed from important positions. Like his colleagues, Khatami was cast aside from his post as the Minister of Guidance in 1992 and given the ceremonious job of the Librarian of the National Library. By 1997, the clerical regime had reached such a state of turmoil that Khatami and the Line of the Imam were once again able to emerge from political hibernation and take over the helm of the state.
When Rafsanjani removed the Line of the Imam figures from their key government positions a few years ago, many observers outside Iran hailed the move as a sure sign of Rafsanjani’s moderation. Ironically, when the very individuals purged in that round of the clerical regime’s power struggle, including Khatami, regained some of their lost power in May 1997, those observers again called this a “victory” for moderation! It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to see how the dismissal and the reinstatement of the same individuals can both be interpreted as “a boost for moderation!”
A look at Khatami’s positions on different issues demonstrates his true colors:
On commitment to export of fundamentalism:
“What could we do in order to enter the world scene? We need a force which the enemy does not possess, and this is the force which is superior to technology and to arms. What we need as a balancing force is the newly born, fully-alert, and ready to sacrifice Islamic force. If the Islamic Republic is supported by such a force, the same force as in Algeria, then its movement would be taken seriously. Like Sudan is taken seriously. New centers of power are being formed in the Islamic world... This is a problem which should be dealt with seriously.”
Ressalat, June 5, 1991
On relations with the West:
“We are fundamentally and profoundly opposed to Western civilization and culture, which are engulfed in serious crises. We are talking about some very weighty issues, and those who want to propagate [Western] ways lack sufficient weight to be considered a serious threat...”
“The bullying attitude of America is a source of dual disaster. The American people have the shallowest culture in the entire world. They are a bunch of bullies and knife-toting adventurers...
“The worst of Europe gathered together and went there [to the United States] to find money. It is a culture without roots; it is based on the technology of force... Now the Americans, a nation without the least culture, have most of the world’s resources at their disposal. This represents a dual catastrophe for humanity.”
Ettela’at, July 7, 1991
On Saudi Arabia:
“If Saudi Arabia is really incapable of performing its duty to provide accommodation for the pilgrims, it should make it official so that the Muslims could do something about running the affairs of the two holy sites.”
State media, July 27, 1985
“The government of Saudi Arabia gives precedence to maintaining security and the interests of the enemies of Islam over providing security for Muslims around the world to perform their divine duties... We condemn this breech of Islam by the government of Saudi Arabia and warn the Muslims throughout the world that this inappropriate action marks the start of a new phase to tarnish the image of Islam and a serious threat to the beloved Ka’ba. We declare that we will not rest in the face of this great oppression and call on the Islamic world to rise to the occasion and carry out their religious and historic duty in the face of this blatant aggression against the divine rights of Muslims.”
Kayhan, July 29, 1985
On export of revolution:
“Today, the Hajj is the biggest forum for Islamic Revolution. The gathering of Muslims for the pilgrimage creates the best chance for the presence of the Islamic Revolution.”
Kayhan, August 7, 1993
“Currently, the Ministry of Guidance has seven foreign language newspapers, one in Swahili, the language of East Africa. Its current circulation of 50,000 can easily be increased to 200,000.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On the fatwa:
“Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses, must be executed in accordance with the religious fatwa issued by His Eminence Imam Khomeini. He has no escape from this fatwa...
“By publishing the blasphemous book, Satanic Verses, the East and the West proved to the world that they were not only the enemies of the Islamic Republic and the Imam, but also the enemies of the great religion of Islam and more than one billion Muslims around the globe...
“The silence of Arab countries on the publication of Satanic Verses proved that they only defend Islam through words, not deeds. The opposition of His Eminence Imam Khomeini to the publication of this book demonstrated that he is the only real defender of Islam, the Quran and the oppressed. This has become obvious to the World Arrogance."
Kayhan, March 7, 1989
“The largest enclave of exiled Muslims live in Europe. They were brilliant in their religious activities, particularly their rallies and gatherings to condemn Salman Rushdie.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On freedom:
“If by freedom you mean confronting the aspirations of this nation and the foundations of the Islamic Revolution and Islam, Iran’s revolutionary people cannot accept it and will not allow it...”
Kayhan, June 10, 1986
On video tapes, music, and female singers:
“We consider videos to be much more dangerous for the Islamic Revolution than drugs.... The Ministry of Islamic Guidance has been among the most adamant opponents of legalization of videos in Iran... As the country’s chief authority on culture and arts, I declare that music is allowed in this country, but improper music is banned... The Islamic Republic prohibits female singers from solo performances for the public at large.”
Ettela’at, July 10, 1991
On satellite dishes:
“This issue is important because satellite television is a gap through which alien culture can penetrate our society and spread.”
Ettela’at, July 7, 1991
Khatami's positions after becoming president:
Defending clerical rule:
“We declare to the world that we will continue to tread along Imam Khomeini’s path... We will persevere to do so.”
State television, January 19, 1998
“Imam Khomeini’s notion of velayat-e faqih is the main pillar of the Islamic Republic. All citizens of the Islamic Republic have a practical commitment to velayat-e faqih. This means that all those who live under this system must abide by this principle and regulate their conduct within the framework of the constitution.”
Khatami’s declaration on the eve of the May 1997 presidential elections
“In the Islamic Republic, defending the law means defending the velayat-e faqih.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“Our state stands far above the wishes and tendencies of individuals. All tendencies must try to safeguard the Leader’s honor and the pillars of the state. The clergy must be at the forefront.”
State television, July 5, 1998.
“The main axis and the central pillar of our system is the Great Leader and the vali-e faqih, around whom other institutions and organs take shape.”
State television, May 23, 1998.
“The Leader (Khamenei) is the central pillar of the Islamic state and the symbol of national sovereignty.”
State television, May 1998
“I work under the supervision of the Leader, and His Eminence is the central pillar of our system.”
State television, April 22, 1998
“The Leader as the central pillar of the state and society stands above personal preferences.”
State television, January 24, 1998
Freedom of expression:
“Freedom without limits results in anarchy in society... Anarchy is much more damaging than dictatorship."
Tehran radio, September 8, 1998
“ Only those have the right to political activity and existence in Iran who have faith in Islam and the leadership.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“We must not act in a crude manner so that our enemies would take advantage of our approach to freedom. We must be vigilant so that while we work to institutionalize freedom, we do not align ourselves with the enemies.”
State television, May 23, 1998
“I really do not consider some slogans being chanted in different venues such as Friday prayers or student and religious meetings to be correct. They are very dangerous.”
Reacting to young people chanting “Down with dictatorship” at a rally in Tehran University, State television, July 5, 1998
Repression:
“The heroic people of Isfahan responded to the message sent by our generous Leader and the people showed their love for the state and the Leader through their presence and at the same time they demorlized the malevolent enemies.”
State television, April 22, 1998
“A punitive approach and the language of security (organs) should be employed in dealing with those who do not accept our regime and are conspiring to overthrow it.”
State television, November 18, 1997
“Today, the government, the Guards Corps and the Armed Forces stand shoulder to shoulder with His Eminence the Great Leader acting as the central axis in order to advance the revolution, and defend the dignity and independence of the nation... With our body and soul, we are proud of the Guards Corps.”
Tehran radio, May 24, 1998
Foreign policy:
“We have suffered more than any other (nation) from the oppressive policies of the United States... If we are seen to have turned away from our revolution and given up our identity, no matter what they would give us, we shall lose.”
State television, January 19, 1998
Monday, October 05, 2009
British Policy on the North-West Frontier of India 1877-1947: A Suitable Precedent for the Modern Day? by Dr Christian Tripodi
The activities of Pakistani and Al-Qa'ida militants within the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region since late 2001 has prompted the question of whether Britain's experience in administering the volatile tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier Province during the period of colonial rule holds any instructive 'lessons' for contemporary practitioners. Specifically, does the know-how acquired on the part of the Government of India (GOI) over the six decades between 1877-1947, of building working relationships with the numerous Pashtun tribes that inhabited the region, as well its response to the numerous armed uprisings on the part of those tribes, provide any concrete, instructive benefit to contemporary policy-makers? The answer, in short, is that the British colonial experience does indeed provide some food for thought in this regard. However, it does so in a negative sense; in other words it tends to highlight a number of fractures and failures that modern policy-makers might bid to avoid.
Differing Strategic Realities
The issue of contemporary relevance is of course complicated by the fact that, as always, there are few if any discrete 'lessons' from history; it is rare for the prevailing strategic, political and cultural conditions of one era to be replicated in another. In stark contrast to today, British colonial policy-makers enjoyed control of much of the sub-continent, access to comparatively vast human resources, an aura of permanence, the credibility provided by overwhelming military strength and an administrative infrastructure that provided the necessary apparatus for tribal interaction. But the greatest difference between the British colonial experience of the North-West Frontier to that of today lies in the fundamentally differing strategic picture. Whereas the activities of Al-Qa'ida and Pakistani militants within the present day Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has significant strategic implications both regionally and internationally, for British India, despite the logic of conventional wisdom, the tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier mattered relatively little in any conventional strategic sense. And the importance of this to the question posed lies in the fact that strategic appreciations decided tribal policies which in turn dictated the methods used; methods which contemporary policy-makers now examine for potential utility.
Colonial View of the North-West Frontier
How exactly then did the tribal areas of the Afghan-Indian border figure in British strategic appreciations? Despite well publicised concerns, on the part of the military especially, as to a Russian invasion of British India through the North-West Frontier, thus dictating firm control over the tribal lands of that region, the threat of a physical Russian invasion was to all intents and purposes a chimera, albeit one which policy-makers, dealing in the realm of potentialities as they were, had to account for. Rather, the true threat to British India was perceived to lie within India itself; a popular uprising that would have the potential, directly or indirectly, to make the British position there untenable. Russia might still pose a threat insofar that an advance to the borders of British India could inspire dissidents within to challenge British rule, hence two interventions in Afghanistan by Britain in 1839-42 and 1878-81 respectively designed to forestall such an advance. But if the threat to British India came from an 'internal enemy' comprised of some 300 million Indians rather than via actual physical invasion through the North-West Frontier, and if the tribes themselves posed no existential threat to British India, (despite several large scale armed uprisings on their part) then it becomes clear as to how British policy-makers over time began to view the volatile tribal regions of the North-West Frontier not so much a threat to India's defence, but as a very real drain on its resources, an appreciation that would be central to shaping the British response to tribal matters.
Fundamentally, the tribes of the North-West Frontier Province posed a danger not so much through their military capability but their potential, over time, to absorb scarce military and fiscal resources for little perceptible return in terms of control or adjustment of their behaviour. As time progressed therefore, particularly post 1900, there developed an essentially laissez faire policy of administration. The government became unwilling to expend resources on a barren and largely uninhabitable backwater - the reverse of today's strategic appreciation of the region - with the result that development policies were curtailed and the Indian army's role in tribal affairs was limited to coercion and little else. Relations between the tribes and the GOI were managed almost exclusively by combination of a small cadre of political agents, a system of Government service through native militia and Khassadar units and the payment of allowances to guarantee good behaviour. In return for this light administrative 'touch', the tribal agencies remained largely autonomous and free from the paraphernalia of colonial rule - courts, police and taxation. Despite outbreaks of violence, some huge in scale such as in 1897, 1919-21 and 1936-7, the system worked relatively well and if the accusation could be levelled at the British that they never exerted any real control over the tribal areas, the response would simply have been that, firstly, control was unnecessary and that secondly, the financial implications of trying to achieve such a state of affairs would have been entirely counterproductive with respect to India as a whole.
Of course, the British were able to develop some sophisticated techniques designed to facilitate a degree of influence within the tribal agencies. The use of political agents, a small number of specialists often ex-military and fluent in Pashtu, in order to manage relations with those tribes inhabiting the individual agencies, availed the British of an unobtrusive but relatively effective method of keeping the lines of communication open between the authorities and tribal groupings. These individuals disbursed allowances to tribal leaders, handled requests on the part of tribesmen, requested the apprehension and punishment of miscreants on behalf of the authorities, commanded local Khassadar units and kept the Government apprised of tribal sentiments and potential disturbances. When required, they would also act as political advisors to those military commanders tasked with mounting punitive raids into tribal areas. Good 'politicals' were of immense value to the Government and, if blessed with the requisite experience, stamina and personality could exert influence far out of proportion either to the cost of their employment or their numbers involved. The military, too, developed a certain degree of expertise in this particularly testing environment. Over the duration of the British presence on the Frontier, the Indian Army, by virtue of its repeated exposure to tribal Lashkars and the difficult terrain, became pre-eminent in the practice of mountain warfare. Its mixture of native and British units generally proved equal to anything that even the most combative of tribes, such as the Afridis, Wazirs or Mahsuds, could produce.
Weaknesses in the British Colonial Model
However, the combination of skilful 'political' and professional, learned military hid a number of weaknesses, both conceptual and physical, in the British approach. To begin with, the beau ideal of the vastly experienced, all knowing political agent was in many cases precisely that; an ideal rather than a reality. Limited time in post, suspicions on the part of policy-makers and the military as to his true loyalty - tribe or Government - and a reluctance on the part of that Government to become engaged in any meaningful sense with the indigenous tribes robbed the political agent of much of his potential utility as an instrument of progressive policy. An often highly fractious civil-military relationship further complicated matters. The aforementioned suspicion of the political's true loyalties was frequently writ large in the minds of military officers, while in return the political considered his military counterparts to be often entirely ignorant of the nuances and delicacies of Government-tribal relations.
The latter point is an interesting one, for it challenges the popular assumption that Imperial militaries, and those of Britain in particular, were characterised by an institutional grasp of their environment - people, customs and language especially. On the Frontier, however, it is dubious as to whether the military at large devoted any real attentions to its surroundings save for tactical and operational considerations. Despite the fact that battalions might spend years on the Frontier, Officers and men displayed apparently limited inclination to learn about the tribal society within which they moved and while the Pashtun may have been admired as a warrior, there appeared to be scant regard for his system of government or his culture as a whole. Certainly, while many officers and men spoke Urdu and Hindustani, the number of those able to speak Pashtu was limited and observers were sometimes struck by the limitations in the military's grasp of tribal affairs, one going so far as to comment that, '[T]he average Army officer knows practically nothing about the tribal area, the people who inhabit it, their language and the way that they are controlled'. Of course, there were those within the military who displayed a firm grasp of such matters but to be fair, any institutional aversion to a deeper understanding of the tribal environment was in many ways simply a product of the Army's role. Tasked with national defence rather than influence building, only really entering the tribal areas in a punitive or preventative role, and often perceiving skirmishes as ideal training opportunities, there was little encouragement for the military to pay heed to the tribes unless actually fighting them.
Continuity and Change
The fundamental point, however, was not necessarily that British methods were possessed of inherent weaknesses. Any system of administration in an environment as testing as the North-West Frontier was and is bound to have its weaknesses exposed, as the contemporary Pakistani experience has illustrated. Rather, the point to be made is that those weaknesses had little effect in real terms because the British were afforded the luxury of being able, over time, to marginalise the tribal areas within their own strategic considerations. They could afford to persevere with a 'hands off' system of control and administration that was fully acknowledged to be faulty and lacking in imagination but which sufficed in the face of institutional conservatism; a state of affairs that one would presumably wish to avoid today.
This conservatism prevailed subsequent to the British departure from India. Post 1947, utilising the same basic structures of colonial administration - political agents, native militias and allowances reinforcing the basic concept of tribal autonomy - and similarly afforded the luxury of a laissez faire approach to frontier matters, the Pakistani Government was rewarded with stability within the tribal agencies. However, the flood of radical elements into that region during the Afghan-Soviet war since 1980, a trend that has only accelerated since the coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and the increasingly ambitious political agenda of certain of those elements has only highlighted the weaknesses of what is to all intents and purposes the British colonial system, in the face of a radically changed strategic environment.
Differing Strategic Realities
The issue of contemporary relevance is of course complicated by the fact that, as always, there are few if any discrete 'lessons' from history; it is rare for the prevailing strategic, political and cultural conditions of one era to be replicated in another. In stark contrast to today, British colonial policy-makers enjoyed control of much of the sub-continent, access to comparatively vast human resources, an aura of permanence, the credibility provided by overwhelming military strength and an administrative infrastructure that provided the necessary apparatus for tribal interaction. But the greatest difference between the British colonial experience of the North-West Frontier to that of today lies in the fundamentally differing strategic picture. Whereas the activities of Al-Qa'ida and Pakistani militants within the present day Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has significant strategic implications both regionally and internationally, for British India, despite the logic of conventional wisdom, the tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier mattered relatively little in any conventional strategic sense. And the importance of this to the question posed lies in the fact that strategic appreciations decided tribal policies which in turn dictated the methods used; methods which contemporary policy-makers now examine for potential utility.
Colonial View of the North-West Frontier
How exactly then did the tribal areas of the Afghan-Indian border figure in British strategic appreciations? Despite well publicised concerns, on the part of the military especially, as to a Russian invasion of British India through the North-West Frontier, thus dictating firm control over the tribal lands of that region, the threat of a physical Russian invasion was to all intents and purposes a chimera, albeit one which policy-makers, dealing in the realm of potentialities as they were, had to account for. Rather, the true threat to British India was perceived to lie within India itself; a popular uprising that would have the potential, directly or indirectly, to make the British position there untenable. Russia might still pose a threat insofar that an advance to the borders of British India could inspire dissidents within to challenge British rule, hence two interventions in Afghanistan by Britain in 1839-42 and 1878-81 respectively designed to forestall such an advance. But if the threat to British India came from an 'internal enemy' comprised of some 300 million Indians rather than via actual physical invasion through the North-West Frontier, and if the tribes themselves posed no existential threat to British India, (despite several large scale armed uprisings on their part) then it becomes clear as to how British policy-makers over time began to view the volatile tribal regions of the North-West Frontier not so much a threat to India's defence, but as a very real drain on its resources, an appreciation that would be central to shaping the British response to tribal matters.
Fundamentally, the tribes of the North-West Frontier Province posed a danger not so much through their military capability but their potential, over time, to absorb scarce military and fiscal resources for little perceptible return in terms of control or adjustment of their behaviour. As time progressed therefore, particularly post 1900, there developed an essentially laissez faire policy of administration. The government became unwilling to expend resources on a barren and largely uninhabitable backwater - the reverse of today's strategic appreciation of the region - with the result that development policies were curtailed and the Indian army's role in tribal affairs was limited to coercion and little else. Relations between the tribes and the GOI were managed almost exclusively by combination of a small cadre of political agents, a system of Government service through native militia and Khassadar units and the payment of allowances to guarantee good behaviour. In return for this light administrative 'touch', the tribal agencies remained largely autonomous and free from the paraphernalia of colonial rule - courts, police and taxation. Despite outbreaks of violence, some huge in scale such as in 1897, 1919-21 and 1936-7, the system worked relatively well and if the accusation could be levelled at the British that they never exerted any real control over the tribal areas, the response would simply have been that, firstly, control was unnecessary and that secondly, the financial implications of trying to achieve such a state of affairs would have been entirely counterproductive with respect to India as a whole.
Of course, the British were able to develop some sophisticated techniques designed to facilitate a degree of influence within the tribal agencies. The use of political agents, a small number of specialists often ex-military and fluent in Pashtu, in order to manage relations with those tribes inhabiting the individual agencies, availed the British of an unobtrusive but relatively effective method of keeping the lines of communication open between the authorities and tribal groupings. These individuals disbursed allowances to tribal leaders, handled requests on the part of tribesmen, requested the apprehension and punishment of miscreants on behalf of the authorities, commanded local Khassadar units and kept the Government apprised of tribal sentiments and potential disturbances. When required, they would also act as political advisors to those military commanders tasked with mounting punitive raids into tribal areas. Good 'politicals' were of immense value to the Government and, if blessed with the requisite experience, stamina and personality could exert influence far out of proportion either to the cost of their employment or their numbers involved. The military, too, developed a certain degree of expertise in this particularly testing environment. Over the duration of the British presence on the Frontier, the Indian Army, by virtue of its repeated exposure to tribal Lashkars and the difficult terrain, became pre-eminent in the practice of mountain warfare. Its mixture of native and British units generally proved equal to anything that even the most combative of tribes, such as the Afridis, Wazirs or Mahsuds, could produce.
Weaknesses in the British Colonial Model
However, the combination of skilful 'political' and professional, learned military hid a number of weaknesses, both conceptual and physical, in the British approach. To begin with, the beau ideal of the vastly experienced, all knowing political agent was in many cases precisely that; an ideal rather than a reality. Limited time in post, suspicions on the part of policy-makers and the military as to his true loyalty - tribe or Government - and a reluctance on the part of that Government to become engaged in any meaningful sense with the indigenous tribes robbed the political agent of much of his potential utility as an instrument of progressive policy. An often highly fractious civil-military relationship further complicated matters. The aforementioned suspicion of the political's true loyalties was frequently writ large in the minds of military officers, while in return the political considered his military counterparts to be often entirely ignorant of the nuances and delicacies of Government-tribal relations.
The latter point is an interesting one, for it challenges the popular assumption that Imperial militaries, and those of Britain in particular, were characterised by an institutional grasp of their environment - people, customs and language especially. On the Frontier, however, it is dubious as to whether the military at large devoted any real attentions to its surroundings save for tactical and operational considerations. Despite the fact that battalions might spend years on the Frontier, Officers and men displayed apparently limited inclination to learn about the tribal society within which they moved and while the Pashtun may have been admired as a warrior, there appeared to be scant regard for his system of government or his culture as a whole. Certainly, while many officers and men spoke Urdu and Hindustani, the number of those able to speak Pashtu was limited and observers were sometimes struck by the limitations in the military's grasp of tribal affairs, one going so far as to comment that, '[T]he average Army officer knows practically nothing about the tribal area, the people who inhabit it, their language and the way that they are controlled'. Of course, there were those within the military who displayed a firm grasp of such matters but to be fair, any institutional aversion to a deeper understanding of the tribal environment was in many ways simply a product of the Army's role. Tasked with national defence rather than influence building, only really entering the tribal areas in a punitive or preventative role, and often perceiving skirmishes as ideal training opportunities, there was little encouragement for the military to pay heed to the tribes unless actually fighting them.
Continuity and Change
The fundamental point, however, was not necessarily that British methods were possessed of inherent weaknesses. Any system of administration in an environment as testing as the North-West Frontier was and is bound to have its weaknesses exposed, as the contemporary Pakistani experience has illustrated. Rather, the point to be made is that those weaknesses had little effect in real terms because the British were afforded the luxury of being able, over time, to marginalise the tribal areas within their own strategic considerations. They could afford to persevere with a 'hands off' system of control and administration that was fully acknowledged to be faulty and lacking in imagination but which sufficed in the face of institutional conservatism; a state of affairs that one would presumably wish to avoid today.
This conservatism prevailed subsequent to the British departure from India. Post 1947, utilising the same basic structures of colonial administration - political agents, native militias and allowances reinforcing the basic concept of tribal autonomy - and similarly afforded the luxury of a laissez faire approach to frontier matters, the Pakistani Government was rewarded with stability within the tribal agencies. However, the flood of radical elements into that region during the Afghan-Soviet war since 1980, a trend that has only accelerated since the coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and the increasingly ambitious political agenda of certain of those elements has only highlighted the weaknesses of what is to all intents and purposes the British colonial system, in the face of a radically changed strategic environment.
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