Al-Qaeda Today

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence has just released its assessment of the intentions and capabilities of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, seven years after the start of the war on terror.

Key points:

* The core Al Qaeda leadership remains in place, but it is still far from recovering the position of strength it enjoyed in 2001.

* There has been a considerable backlash against Al Qaeda-inspired violence across the Muslim world, with the result that even in places where Al Qaeda used to be highly active - such as Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi-Arabia - its campaign has lost traction and influence.

* The one geographical area where Al Qaeda has retained influence, or even consolidated or increased its standing over the last three years, is the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

* The key to defeating Al Qaeda will be to undermine its local base in the Afghan-Pakistan border area.

* It will be important to promote the drift of the Afghan Taliban away from Al Qaeda, which could be achieved by allowing President Karzai more political room to negotiate a deal.

* Al Qaeda will aim to provoke further intervention by foreign forces, knowing that this is the one thing all the tribes will combine to oppose.

Entire paper available here.

Leon Klinghoffer Was Not Killed By "Islamo-Fascists"

So the Republican candidates degenerated into an undignified squabble tonight during the NH debate, in which they argued over whether al-Qaeda’s strategy is a reaction to American foreign policy or a logical consequence of Islamic jihadist ideology. (It couldn’t possibly be both.)

Participants drew on some rather strange supporting examples, including Giuliani who threw out Leon Klinghoffer’s name in a long list of Americans who supposedly fell victim to Islamic jihadism since the 60s. His reference of course is to the 69-year-old Jewish disabled tourist singled out for execution by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985.

It would be unfortunate if voters accepted Giuliani's interpretation of events, since this example not only doesn’t work for his argument (since the crucial aspects of US foreign policy to which al-Qaeda is said to be a reaction predate the 80s anyway) but contains a serious factual distortion. The Palestinian militants who hijacked the Achille Lauro were nationalists, not jihadists.

Nationalist terrorists use methods such as hostage-taking and suicide attacks against a regime from whom they are seeking independence, or against third parties whose attention they are hoping to attract to their cause. There are many such movements, including the Irish Republican Army, the ETA in Spain, and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; many of the world's nationalist terrorist groups happen to be or to have been Muslim-majority, such as the former KLA in Kosovo, the Chechen rebels in Russia in the early 1990s, and the former Palestinian Liberation Organiazation. Such groups have specific territorial and political ambitions and use terrorism strategically to achieve these aims; many have no intention of creating an Islamic state upon victory. They differ markedly from salafi jihadists who are as interested in sowing global disorder to bring about an Islamic caliphate according to some millennial ideal - or, perhaps, simply to get into paradise.

This is a pretty important distinction for a commander in chief to understand, particularly if he’s preparing to set forth a political agenda that includes “keeping the US on the offensive in the war against Islamofascim” as your defining “principle.” (This was in response to a video question by President Bush.) Giuliani, for one, doesn’t know the difference between a jihadist and a nationalist willing to use terrorist methods who also just happens to be Muslim.

Then again, none of the other candidates called him on it, so…

Kenya is Not Rwanda

I have read a number of op-eds this morning comparing the mounting post-election violence in Kenya to the Rwandan genocide or referring to the violence as "tribal." I think this is a mistake for a number of reasons.

First, it's not conceptually accurate. Second, exaggerating the facts at a moment of crisis can inflame political violence, whereas what is needed is efforts to mute it.

Kenya is not Rwanda - not yet, anyway. Like other genocides, the Rwandan genocide was deliberately planned and orchestrated by the opposition elite that had captured the state apparatus. Second, the Rwandan Hutu Power movement sought to deliberately wipe out an entire ethnic group as such, rather than to terrorize them for specific political reasons. Third, this event occurred in the wake of a long civil war and aborted peace process, not in a country characterized by relative stability, prosperity and a recent election.

At least two patterns of violence are occurring in Kenya (this is at a glance - if there is one thing the study of violence tells us is that it's always more complicated than two sides). First there are deaths as a result of police shooting into crowds rallying for a re-count. These seem to be simply the tactics of a regime on its last legs attempting to frighten the political opposition. We see this often where political authority is threatened - Tienamen, Abidjan, etc. This is not genocide against a racial, religious or ethnic group but rather run of the mill political violence (no less atrocious for that however, but it rarely results in a million deaths).

The other pattern is mob violence against civilians of the ethnic group (Kikuyu) whose leaders hold disproportionate economic and political power. Again, this is as much a story of class conflict as of ethnic hatred. As Amy Chua has detailed in World on Fire, elections can be a recipe for violence when a minority ethnic group is also viewed as "market dominant" - the real issue is economic scarcity, but if resources have been distributed according along ethnic lines in the past, there will be incentives for aspiring politicians to play the ethnic card to get elected. Resource disputes, then, get transformed through the election process into ethnic disputes; if the election is contested citizens may be primed to take matters into their own hands. Socioeconomic frustration turns into targeted "killing by category" when all those of an ethnic group become associated with the old, unjust order. Once the ball is rolling however, the killings can take on a life of their own, and this is why Genocide Watch is calling the violence in kenya "a stage away from actual genocide."

None of this equals "tribalism." If there is one paralell to Rwanda, it is that mob violence is generally whipped up by a few demagogues and by terrorizing one's ethnic brethren into going along or facing equal punishment as traitors and collaborators. The genocide in rwanda was cooked up by a small band of extremists who ensnared the general Hutu population into participating not because they hated the tutsi, but because they feared for their own families' lives. Ordinary Kenyans of all political stripes and ethnic affiliations are seeking security and stability. Wild tales of a looming bi-lateral genocide can only undermine efforts of moderates in the country to appeal for calm.

This is not to say the situation is not extremely serious. Certainly we don't need the violence to reach Rwandan levels before concern is warranted, and perhaps it is the hope of attracting preventive action from the international community that underlies the Rwanda analogy. If the Kenyan government cannot or will not exercise its responsibility to protect civilians, the international community must step in quickly. Because the violence is not yet out of control there is an opportunity for regional and international organizations to do their part.

The question is whether the current diplomatic and media attention can be sustained over the next few days as the caucuses get under way in the US midwest.

Radicals in Kenya are probably hoping for the opposite.

Death Knell for the Death Penalty?

According to Foreign Policy's latest "web exclusive":

"Its critics call the practice barbaric. The United Nations General Assembly is voting to outlaw it. Yet, a closer look at the death penalty—and the countries that still use it—reveals that it’s far too early to pronounce a death sentence against capital punishment just yet."

When I first read this sentence I was eager to peruse the article, which I assumed would be a carefully-thought-out defense of capital punishment on empirical grounds. However, the sole evidence for this statement is to list a number of countries who have no intention of abolishing the death penalty including China, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the United States. These are compared according to the number of people executed annually as well as the type of crimes.

So, the claim seems to be not that the death penalty shouldn’t be abolished, but that steps in the direction of total abolition are empirically insignificant since these five countries, among others, are definitely not on board.

I beg to differ. Many important advances in human rights law took place without the involvement of a few renegade countries, and almost all took place without US ratification. Secondly, for the practice to actually be abolished in 189 governments of the world would constitute an unprecedented historical shift, even if certain holdouts took longer to come around to the newest standard of “civilization.”

Indeed, the campaign to abolish the death penalty may affect the incidence or nature of the practice among pro-death-penalty states. For example, while the US insists on the right to execute its criminals, it continues to attempt to humanize the means by which this is done. As for China, Foreign Policy acknowledges that executions have declined by 40% since Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics.

Why Was Bhutto Killed?

If like many of us your mind is on the future of Pakistan right now, have a look at what Nolocontendre is suggesting over at Piglipstick about the reason behind the assassination.

We are instructed to "check out what she says in passing at the 6:10 mark."



Even though the conspiracy theory is probably a stretch, the video itself ought to give you a jolt for obvious reasons.

US Deaths in Iraq at 3,900

So said the AP, a few hours before Bhutto's assassination overtook the headlines. (For a few good points about why Musharraf's cronies, not Islamists, may have been behind it, check out Shadow of the Hegemon.)

But let me not digress. The regular Americans-only body count is not just a distortion of the public's perspective, it's actually a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which mandate that an occupying force account for all casualties in the area under its control.

I liked One Pissed Off Veteran's take on the numbers, posted last Friday:

"Total American dead in the Iraq Illegal Occupation: 3896
Total coalition forces dead: 307
Total Iraqi Dead: 700,000+
Number of days since the illegal occupation of Iraq began: 1752
Number of days since "Mission Accomplished": 1695
Number of days between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII: Only 1347."

Turkey Bombs PKK; BBC Misconstrues International Law

From BBC this morning:

"Turkish officials said the warplanes had targeted the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), in areas near the border.

But officials in northern Iraq said the planes had struck several villages. There were reports that one woman was killed, although this was unconfirmed.”

Here is a classic example of the media using the wrong indicators to gauge whether air attacks are targeting military objectives: the sex of the victims. So the story goes, if there are “women and children” dead, then the attack has hit civilians.


The assumption – quite wrong in the case of the PKK, with its 40% female fighters – is that if you’re a woman, you’re definitely a civilian. On the other hand the bodies are “battle-age males” all is fair game, irrespective of whether those males were involved in the fighting.

The same grisly logic was behind Ratko Mladic’s careful separation of “women and children” from men and boys at Srebrenica, prior to massacring 8,000 unarmed “battle-age” males (some as young as twelve); and the US government’s refusal to allow “battle-age” males to flee Fallujah with their families in 2004. These are, of course, illegal acts, since civilians are protected under the Geneva Conventions irrespective of sex, and that immunity is lost only when one takes up arms during an attack.

Anyway, by acting as if sex and age are some kind of proxy for “civilian status,” the news media is fomenting this faulty assumption that so often results in war crimes. Its reporting would be better to emphasize whether the victims appeared to be close to military objectives, or whether they were armed or otherwise doing something associated with the lawful target of the attack.

Genocide and the Crime of War...

The doomed are transported in rickety boxcars. Though they must know in their minds what awaits them at the end, they do not rebel against the small cadre of grim-faced officers armed with pistols who oversee them. The trains arrive; the walking dead are disembarked, formed in to orderly groups, and marched off. It is still night; by the time the dawn breaks, they are arrayed in neat lines in front of the machineguns. The graves that many will occupy have already been dug in the muddy ground. The order is given. A whistle blows. The first rank clambers onto the killing field. At first they maintain their order, walking slowly. The machineguns begin to cut men down with short, ordered bursts. The rest begin to run. The machineguns fire faster. Over 5000 will die here today; but tomorrow is another day, and one can only bury so many bodies in one place.

Genocide scholars (and I shall deal with this lot in a later post) spend a great deal of time focused on the 5 million European Jews that died at the hands of the Nazis. What one never hears discussed is the OTHER 5 million German citizens who were sent to their deaths by the German government.

I speak, of course, of the German army; conscripted, forced by their own government to endure conditions that, imposed in any other setting than war, would be considered the height of cruelty- Starvation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, the mental torment of repeated bombardments; the mercy of death, when it came (as it did to 30% of these unfortunates) tended not to be surgical or methodical in nature. A bullet in the back of the head or a dose of VX sounds like a walk in the park compared to being shot in the guts and left to writhe for a few hours, being crushed to death by the tank treads, burned alive by a flamethrower, or being literally dismembered by a high-explosive artillery shell.

Of course, Germany was not alone, in World War II, or throughout history, in sending its citizens to a certain (and certainly horrific) death. Consider the spectacle described in the begininng of this piece; that was the British 8th Division on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

As Leon Trotsky wrote: "An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the command has the death penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements — the animals that we call men — will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear."

One can make no excuses for the "volunteer" armies of today, except to say that to call them "mercenary armies" may be more accurate; a $40,000 bonus for 4 years of work is a prettier penny than Rome paid her barbarian mercenaries before the Fall of the Empire.

But most countries still maintain it is their sovereign right to impress men into service (the dubious service of killing and being killed) at their whim; I should propose that the root of all war crimes, and in fact the crime against humanity that is war itself is the notion that any State has the sovereign right to make war, either against it's own citizens, or the citizens of other States.

As long as the world at large accepts this foolishness, it's no use decrying the cruel depradations of war and all that goes along with it (including the narrowly-defined genocide term over which so many likes to wail and gnash their teeth, but so few are willing to act).

Anyone foolish enough to live in a State which they have acknowledged has the right to imprison or kill its own citizens (we call this Law) or the citizens of other States, (we call this War) deserves what they get, and would be well advise to situate themselves in a position of wealth, power, and authority, so that when the time comes for the strong to do what they will, and the weak to suffer what they must, they can hand out the medicine rather than take it.