Barakzai's Recommendations

[faye]

i think you might find that is one of the fake videos put out by rita katz, an iraqi/israeli whose father was a spy for israel and who has been in the idf. is that the one with the music to distract you?

[Da_Kunar_Ghro]

BRAKZAI KANDHARIS recommendations lol

[BarakzaiAbdali]

From Pat Buchanon:

The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden

When President Obama announced that U.S. special forces had helicoptered into Pakistan, broken into a secret compound an hour from the capital, and killed Osama bin Laden, celebrations broke out all across America.

The man who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 of us had at last received his just reward. College students ran to the White House to chant “USA! USA!”
Even if one believes that rejoicing at executions of murderers is unseemly for a Christian people, the demands of justice had been met. The world is a better place without bin Laden, who was developing plans to blow up U.S. passenger trains on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Yet, in Pakistan and across the Middle East, even in London, some came out to praise the “martyr” and threaten revenge.

In a way, this is the more interesting phenomenon. Why would people, who must believe themselves righteous and moral, keen and wail at the death of a monster who did what bin Laden had done?

Though Osama’s time was past—only 18 percent of the Arab world held a favorable view of him at his death—he was once among the most admired figures in the Islamic world.

In 2003, in Jordan, 56 percent of the pubic voiced confidence in Osama. In 2005, in Pakistan, 52 percent agreed. In July 2009, after Obama’s Cairo speech to the Muslim world, 22 percent of Palestinians said the U.S. president inspired confidence; 52 percent said Osama bin Laden did.

How to explain this? Do Arabs and Muslims approve of mass murder of innocent civilians? Why did so many find so much to admire in a man who planned the atrocities of 9/11?

In one man’s judgment, Osama was admired because he alone in the Arab world had the astonishing audacity to stand up and smash a fist into the face of the world’s last superpower, which had become one of the most resented powers in the Middle East. He was applauded because he had struck the most savage blow dealt America since British troops burned the Capitol and White House in 1814.

In short, the awe and admiration accorded bin Laden in the first half of the last decade were directly proportional to the depth of Arab and Muslim resentment and rage at the United States.

He was admired—for the enemy he hated and had attacked.
Nor is this unusual.

Why does Mao Zedong, who murdered 10 times as many Chinese as Japan in World War II, lie in honor in a crystal sarcophagus in Tiananmen Square? Because Mao is still seen to have “liberated” China from a century of rule by hated Japanese and Western imperial powers and their lackeys.

Why was Saigon renamed for Ho Chi Minh? Why do his remains rest in honor in Hanoi? Because “Uncle Ho” is seen by his people as having driven out the Japanese, French, and Americans and united all Vietnamese in a national home.

Even Fidel Castro, who brought the most successful country in Latin America down close to the level of Haiti, still has admirers inside and outside Cuba. Why? Because he defied the “Yanquis” and threw them out, along with their quisling, Fulgencio Batista.

Like Mao, Ho, and Castro, Osama tapped into the most powerful current of the age: ethnic nationalism, the desire of peoples to be rid of foreign rule and any oppressive foreign presence, and to put up against a wall all indigenous traitors who do the foreigners’ will.

Lest we forget, Osama was once an ally of Ronald Reagan’s America. We provided the Stingers, and he provided the money for the Afghan mujaheddin to administer the deathblow to the Soviet Empire.

Some yet argue that Osama and al-Qaeda attacked us because they hate our freedoms. Why, then, did they fight the Russians? Did they hate the freedoms enjoyed by Soviet citizens in Leonid Brezhnev’s time?

In his 1998 declaration of war, Osama gave three reasons. Americans, he said, had deployed their infidel troops on sacred Saudi soil. Americans were strangling a crushed Iraqi people with murderous sanctions. Americans were enabling Zionists to oppress and rob Palestinian Arabs of their lands.

Osama plugged his personal war into the anti-American currents running in the region. It was whom he was fighting against, us, not the new caliphate he claimed to be fighting for, a utopian absurdity, that caused scores of millions to admire him, even if many were horrified by his methods.

It was when al-Qaeda took to killing Arabs and Muslims that Osama lost the prestige he once had.

Osama is dead and gone. But the ideas he tapped into—the desire of Arab peoples to break free, to reclaim their sovereignty, to restore their past greatness, to be rid of the foreigner and his lackeys—are also the motivating ideas of the Arab Spring.

And as Victor Hugo reminded us, “Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.”

[ghundal]

Buchanan has spoken sense. The media's view of Islam is so obvious. Why label it the Arab Spring when Egyptians, and most other regional people want an Islamic government which they have been deprived of?

WHy not call it the Islamic spring?

[BarakzaiAbdali]

The latest from Dr. Michael Scheuer:


In Afghanistan – Taleban: Islam triumphant; America: self-defeated, ready to run


While Mrs. Clinton, General Petraeus, and Senator Kerry leak information to the media about “accelerating” peace talks with the Taleban, Mullah Omar and his lieutenants are thanking Allah for Islam’s clearly approaching victory in Afghanistan. The Clinton-Petraeus-Kerry disinformation now flowing is simply meant to prepare Americans for a U.S.-led surrender in Afghanistan. We are defeated there, and while Democrats and Republicans may tart up the retreat of the U.S.-NATO coalition as “mission accomplished,” the truth will be that the second superpower was defeated in Afghanistan by mujahedin armed only with faith and weaponry of Korean War vintage.

U.S. officials have told the media that they are talking to Taleban leaders about what “conditions” they want in exchange for joining a Karzai-led Afghan government. They ought to save their time. The Taleban and its allies today want what they have demanded since 12 September 2001: POWER. This is the non-negotiable demand of Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Afghan insurgent leaders. These men know that the Afghan war is a zero-sum game; they either win or they lose. They also know that there will be no post-NATO coalition arrangement that lasts any longer than the departure of the last Western bayonet. The Afghan leaders may give the U.S.-NATO coalition a decent interval to withdrawal — as they did the Red Army — but Karzai and any of his colleagues who stay behind will be tortured, carved up, and then hung from the same lampposts the Afghan communist leader Najibullah and his sidekicks were hung from in the 1990s after Moscow abandoned them.

Currently, the Taleban and its allies are on top of the world. The Obama administration, the British and French governments, and most of the other coalition countries are publicly discussing an accelerated withdrawal. Telling Mullah Omar and his colleagues that you are going to leave is — of course — music to the ears of men whose forte is patience, fatalism, and a killer instinct. And after all, what could be a more heady experience for Allah’s warriors than to hear the leaders of infidelity publicly admit they are licked and about to creep shamefully away, tails appropriately between legs.

The death of Osama bin Laden also helps the Taleban. Mullah Omar and the other mujahedin would have preferred that he lived, but his death does not hurt the Taleban’s war effort. At the most basic level, U.S. military officials already have said that al-Qaeda’s main assistance to the Taleban — training, logistical support, and intelligence gathering — continues without interruption. In addition, Mullah Omar will be forever honored across the Muslim world as the one Muslim leader who was willing to defy the United States and temporarily lose his country to host and protect a fellow Muslim mujahid, the “great lion of Islam,” Osama bin Laden. Omar’s protection of bin Laden moved the largely localized Taleban movement onto the Islamic world’s center stage.

Bin Laden’s death also removes a hindrance from Taleban fund-raising. As long as bin Laden was alive and closely identified with Omar and the Taleban, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Peninsula regimes had to be circumspect in how much and how openly they funneled money to the Afghans. Absent bin Laden — and given their growing anger and contempt for the Obama administration’s slavish support for Israel and back-stabbing of Arab leaders — the Saudi regime and its fellow Gulf tyrannies can be less clandestine and more generous in moving funds to the Taleban, which, after all, is more accurately described as the product of the Saudi religious establishment, rather than that of Pakistani machinations. Private donations to the Taleban from wealthy Gulf Arabs and wealthy Muslims worldwide never ceased, and now are likely to increase.

Finally, the Taleban will receive even more support from the Pakistan’s army and intelligence service. With Obama and NATO leaders having thrown in the towel in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s generals must move to start cleaning up the mess NATO will leave behind and to begin stabilizing their country, which first of all means finding a modus vivendi with the Pakistani Taleban that will begin to curtail that group’s violence inside Pakistan.
If that can be accomplished — and supplies of Arab-provided money and guns will speak loudly — the generals will then encourage the Pakistani Taleban to assist Mullah Omar and his allies in intensifying their war of attrition against the U.S.-NATO coalition and, after the coalition’s defeat, to aid in the destruction of Karzai’s regime. All of this promotes Pakistan’s vital national interests: lessening domestic violence; removing U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan; eliminating Karzai’s pro-Iran, pro-India regime; reinstalling an Islamist government in Kabul; and leaving India’s presence in Afghanistan untenable, thereby restoring Pakistan’s strategic depth on its western border and allowing the repositioning of military units to its border with India.

The way ahead in Afghanistan, therefore, seems to have been clearly demarcated by the West’s feckless politicians, diplomats, and — most especially — generals. The coming bottom line appears to be: The West loses, and the Taleban wins.

But not so fast, there is more to it. While it is true that the West loses, it is more accurate to say that Islam wins. And when thinking about what that victory will mean, it is worth recalling that Osama’s bin Laden and his generation were galvanized in favor of defending Islam via a jihad by the Afghan mujahedins’ defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan. It probably is wise — although a bit late — to ponder what impact the mujhaedins’ defeat of the U.S. superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq will have on this generation of young Muslims, including those in North America.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

please help your great BANNISEE nation. Thank you.

I have Sir. But I cannot tout it.

[Da_Kunar_Ghro]

^ lol. BARCKZAI_OBAMA has now transformed into a BANNISEE lol.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...956696675.html

Emperor Obama vs the Arab people Despite calling for change in some parts of the Middle East, the US president reaffirmed the status quo where it counts.

In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered an important speech titled Wind of Change, first in Accra and later in Cape Town, signaling British decolonisation of its African territories and warning the South African regime to move away from its apartheid policies. In 2011, US President Barack Obama begged to differ. While dubbing his speech Winds of Change, in reference to the uprisings ongoing across the Arab World, his speech made it clear that the same winds were not yet blowing in Washington DC, and perhaps never will. President Obama's second speech on the Arab world, delivered on 19 May, showed such constancy and lack of change in US policy as his first speech, delivered in Cairo on 4 June 2009. This is not to say that the two speeches lacked flair and imperial hubris in the delivery, but rather that their characteristic lack of substance or novelty, let alone their decorative and gratuitous verbosity, demonstrate that imperial climate control in Washington can never be "changed", not even by the wind of the Arab uprisings.

The problem with US policy in the Arab world is not only its insistence on broadcasting credulous US propaganda - easily fed to Americans, yet with few takers elsewhere in the world - but also that it continues to show a complete lack of familiarity with Arab political culture and insists on insulting the intelligence of most Arabs, whom it claims to address directly with speeches such as Mr Obama's.

US diversions
In the past three decades, Arab leaders allied with the United States (and even the few who were not) have been telling their peoples that Iran, Shia, Sunni Islamists, the Palestinian people and their wretched cause, among others, are the reason for the hardship of Arabs. Indeed this conjuring up of enemies started with the US-Saudi-Kuwaiti plan to subcontract an all-out war against revolutionary Iran, as the enemy of Arabs, which was launched by Saddam Hussein in 1981 to defend America's oil wells - and which resulted by 1988 in the death of one million Iranians and 400,000 Iraqis.

In the meantime, and since the late 1960s, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon have engaged in wars with the Palestinian guerrillas and against Palestinian civilians, whom they identified as the enemy. Egypt launched a war against Libya when Sadat was in power, and later, under Mubarak, against its own Islamists and against the Palestinian people. Indeed even Algeria was conjured up as the enemy of Egyptians in Mubarak's last year on the throne.
Saudi Arabia, while repressing all of its population in the name of Wahabism, has not stopped hatching various plans (and plots) since 1982 to bring Israel into the Arab fold. When President Obama peddles the Israeli lie, that his pro-Israel advisors at the White House - and there has been no other kinds of Middle East advisors at the White House since the Clinton administration - feed him, that "too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people's grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression," to which leaders is he actually referring? Sadat, Mubarak, Ben Ali, Kings Hussein and Abdullah II of Jordan, Kings Hasan II and Muhammad VI of Morocco, President Bouteflika, any of the Gulf monarchs or the two Hariri prime ministers, Rafiq and Saad?

Not only are such lies not believable to anyone in the wider world, but also, were the US administration to believe them, explain the ongoing foreign policy failures in a region the US insists on dominating - but which it refuses to learn much about.

Popular opposition and leadership support
Opposition to the United States and Israel in fact is something espoused by the peoples of the Arab world, not by their leaders, who have been insisting for decades that the US and Israel are the friends of Arabs. Indeed the people of the region have been the only party that insisted that US policies and domination in the region and constant Israeli aggressions are what make these two countries enemies of the Arab peoples, while Arab rulers and their propaganda machines insisted on diverting people's anger toward other imagined enemies, which the US conjured up for the region, while making peace with Israel.

Obama's attempt to deny the hatred that Arabs feel towards the United States and Israel because of the actions of these two countries is nothing short of the continued refusal of the United States and Israel (not of Arabs) to take responsibility for their own actions by shifting the blame for the horrendous violence they have inflicted on the region onto their very victims. When Obama and Israel call on Arabs to take responsibility for the state of the region and not blame the US and Israel for it, what they are essentially doing is to refuse to take responsibility for what they have inflicted on Arabs.

Arabs have clearly taken responsibility and have been trying to remove the dictators that the US and Israel have supported for decades - and which they continue to support. The only parties refusing to take responsibility here are the United States and Israel. Obama's speech, sadly, continues this intransigent tradition.
In the same vein, Obama chastises Syria for following "its Iranian ally, seeking assistance from Tehran in the tactics of suppression. And this speaks to the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime". He would have done well to accuse the French, British, and his own
government - with whom the regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak consulted until their last moment in office. The scandal of French collaboration with Ben Ali's and Mubarak's governments until the last minute, especially in "security" matters, has filled world newspapers over the past months, as did the news that both the Egyptian defense minister Muhammad Tantawi (now in charge of the military council governing post-Mubarak Egypt) and army chief of staff Sami Anan spent much of the Egyptian uprising in Washington DC consulting with the Americans on how best to "deal" with the uprising - leaving aside the other direct line to Mubarak and Omar Suleiman that many US government and security organs had until the last moment of Mubarak's rule - and since.

But Obama thinks Arabs are stupid or ignorant of the fact that it is the US and European countries who train and fund almost all governmental security agencies in the region. Iran's help to Syria may expose Iranian hypocrisy, but US, British and French hypocrisy, thankfully remains unexposed.

Freedom - for some
Obama spoke of how "there must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity", but given his insistence that such change be brought about in Syria and Libya, but not in Oman, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain (among others), does raise many doubts. The silence on demonstrations in monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, Morocco) and the mild criticisms of Yemen, whose popular uprising precedes Libya's, stand in stark contrast with the vehemence of Obama's criticisms of Syria and Libya.

The belated mention of Bahrain stood out as a sign of a lack of courage, as now weeks after the Bahraini uprising has been successfully crushed through use of a US-supplied and supported Gulf mercenary force led by Saudi Arabia, Obama mustered the courage to speak about ongoing arrests there and the destruction of Shia mosques.

In the case of Syria, however, his criticisms and those of his government started from day one. Indeed when juxtaposed with his statement that "we will keep our commitments to friends and partners", a clearer picture was revealed about where and what kinds of changes the US welcomes - and where and what kinds of changes it does not. Obama even went further by enumerating where America's "core" principles should apply: Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa, and Tehran, in addition to Benghazi, Cairo, and Tunis - but not Riyadh, Manama, Muscat, Amman, Algiers, or Rabat.

America's alleged core principle of religious tolerance and equality is also highly country-specific. Aside from identifying Iraq, a country the US destroyed and where it instituted the most virulent form of religious sectarianism and ethnic hatred in the region, as "a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy", Obama's concern for religious tolerance applies to Egypt - and thankfully, but more mildly, to Bahrain only. But when it comes to Israel, this commitment disappears, as Obama insists that Arabs must "recognise Israel as a Jewish State", and once again threatens Palestinians (as he had threatened them in his Cairo speech) to desist from "delegitimising" Israel's right to be a state that discriminates by law against its non-Jewish citizens on a religious and ethnic basis.

"For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimise Israel will end in failure," he said. Supporting religious tolerance, one would think, should apply uniformly and not selectively. Obama's myopia, however, is such that he thinks Arabs will buy his anti-Arab and pro-Israel rhetoric readily.

This also applies to another of America's "core interests", namely nuclear proliferation. Obama shamelessly declared that his country has "for decades … pursued" a policy of "stopping the spread of nuclear weapons" in the region. But as the entire world has known for almost four decades, Israel is the only country in the region that possesses such weapons, which, at least, on one occasion it threatened to use - and refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

That the US has supported Israel in its nuclear pursuits, and blocks any UN decision that seeks to penalise it for it seems not to be in contradiction of America's "core interests." Iraq, Syria, and Iran should be prevented from having nuclear reactors, even for peaceful purposes - but Israel can and should be allowed to have all the nuclear weapons it wishes to have.

Sympathy for colonisers
Finally, Obama comes to the Palestinian question and tells us once again nothing new or substantive, Zionist protestations notwithstanding. First, Arabs are enjoined once again - as we were in his Cairo speech - to sympathise with the poor Israeli Jews who experience "the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them". That Israel and the leading US Jewish organisations have for decades been the main global purveyors of the most racist and virulent forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hateful propaganda seems to have escaped Obama and his advisors.
What kind of credibility does Obama think he will have with Arabs who have been on the receiving end of such global hatred for decades, when he wants them to sympathize with the suffering of their persecutors who have been blowing up Arab children non-stop since 1948?

But Obama went further, not only does he believe that, unlike all other countries in the region which must practice religious tolerance, Israel should be exempted from that condition and must be supported in its legal practice of religious and ethnic intolerance - but tells us that such exemption should only apply inside the state of Israel but not in the Occupied Territories.

When Obama declares that "the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation", he is telling us that it is possible to exist without tolerance, meaning that Palestinian citizens of Israel should continue to suffer ethnic and religious discrimination from the "Jewish and democratic state" - but not Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He remains unclear on whether Palestinians of the city of Jerusalem should suffer or not.

Right to exist

Obama proposes that the negotiations over the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem be postponed, but he simulatenously proposes that Israel should withdraw to the borders of 1967; here he is either showing ignorance of the situation, or outright malice. The 1967 borders of which Obama speaks include East Jerusalem, but Obama seems to have excepted the city from these borders a priori, as if it is not part of them, even though international law and the United Nations recognise it as part and parcel of the territories occupied through war in 1967.

This is aside from the fact that Israel has illegally expanded East Jerusalem at the expense of West Bank lands, with some estimates putting its current municipal size at ten per cent of the West Bank (in 1967 it was a mere six square kilometers). The so-called "mutually agreed swaps" of land that Obama proposes are no such thing. Israel already took a further ten per cent of the West Bank behind its apartheid wall. Add to that the settlements and the Jordan Valley, which Israel claims is the part it wants to swap land for.

What Palestinians have left at the end is less than 60 per cent of the West Bank that could be designated as a "Palestinian state", although even that state should be "non-militarised," yet surprisingly "sovereign", as Obama tells us.

Obama also remains concerned about Israel's right to exist but not that of the Palestinians. He declared,without irony, in reference to Hamas: "How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognise your right to exist?" After all, the Palestinians have been negotiating for two decades with Israel, which refuses insistently to recognise the Palestinians' right to exist in a state of their own.
If Harold Macmillan's speech in 1960 urged the South Africans to abandon apartheid, Obama's in 2011 insists that the Palestinians must recognise Israel's right to continue to be a racist state.
When Obama speaks of how America's "short-term interests" in the region, at times, "don't align perfectly with our long-term vision for the region", he is peddling the biggest imperial lie of all. America's short- and long-term interests in the region have always been control of oil resources, securing US profits, and defending Israel. Until "winds of change" blow on these interests, the position of the United States as the most powerful anti-democratic force in the Arab World will remain the same, Emperor Obama's speeches notwithstanding.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

[ghundal]

The latest from Dr. Michael Scheuer:


In Afghanistan – Taleban: Islam triumphant; America: self-defeated, ready to run


While Mrs. Clinton, General Petraeus, and Senator Kerry leak information to the media about “accelerating” peace talks with the Taleban, Mullah Omar and his lieutenants are thanking Allah for Islam’s clearly approaching victory in Afghanistan. The Clinton-Petraeus-Kerry disinformation now flowing is simply meant to prepare Americans for a U.S.-led surrender in Afghanistan. We are defeated there, and while Democrats and Republicans may tart up the retreat of the U.S.-NATO coalition as “mission accomplished,” the truth will be that the second superpower was defeated in Afghanistan by mujahedin armed only with faith and weaponry of Korean War vintage.

U.S. officials have told the media that they are talking to Taleban leaders about what “conditions” they want in exchange for joining a Karzai-led Afghan government. They ought to save their time. The Taleban and its allies today want what they have demanded since 12 September 2001: POWER. This is the non-negotiable demand of Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Afghan insurgent leaders. These men know that the Afghan war is a zero-sum game; they either win or they lose. They also know that there will be no post-NATO coalition arrangement that lasts any longer than the departure of the last Western bayonet. The Afghan leaders may give the U.S.-NATO coalition a decent interval to withdrawal — as they did the Red Army — but Karzai and any of his colleagues who stay behind will be tortured, carved up, and then hung from the same lampposts the Afghan communist leader Najibullah and his sidekicks were hung from in the 1990s after Moscow abandoned them.

Currently, the Taleban and its allies are on top of the world. The Obama administration, the British and French governments, and most of the other coalition countries are publicly discussing an accelerated withdrawal. Telling Mullah Omar and his colleagues that you are going to leave is — of course — music to the ears of men whose forte is patience, fatalism, and a killer instinct. And after all, what could be a more heady experience for Allah’s warriors than to hear the leaders of infidelity publicly admit they are licked and about to creep shamefully away, tails appropriately between legs.

The death of Osama bin Laden also helps the Taleban. Mullah Omar and the other mujahedin would have preferred that he lived, but his death does not hurt the Taleban’s war effort. At the most basic level, U.S. military officials already have said that al-Qaeda’s main assistance to the Taleban — training, logistical support, and intelligence gathering — continues without interruption. In addition, Mullah Omar will be forever honored across the Muslim world as the one Muslim leader who was willing to defy the United States and temporarily lose his country to host and protect a fellow Muslim mujahid, the “great lion of Islam,” Osama bin Laden. Omar’s protection of bin Laden moved the largely localized Taleban movement onto the Islamic world’s center stage.

Bin Laden’s death also removes a hindrance from Taleban fund-raising. As long as bin Laden was alive and closely identified with Omar and the Taleban, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Peninsula regimes had to be circumspect in how much and how openly they funneled money to the Afghans. Absent bin Laden — and given their growing anger and contempt for the Obama administration’s slavish support for Israel and back-stabbing of Arab leaders — the Saudi regime and its fellow Gulf tyrannies can be less clandestine and more generous in moving funds to the Taleban, which, after all, is more accurately described as the product of the Saudi religious establishment, rather than that of Pakistani machinations. Private donations to the Taleban from wealthy Gulf Arabs and wealthy Muslims worldwide never ceased, and now are likely to increase.

Finally, the Taleban will receive even more support from the Pakistan’s army and intelligence service. With Obama and NATO leaders having thrown in the towel in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s generals must move to start cleaning up the mess NATO will leave behind and to begin stabilizing their country, which first of all means finding a modus vivendi with the Pakistani Taleban that will begin to curtail that group’s violence inside Pakistan.
If that can be accomplished — and supplies of Arab-provided money and guns will speak loudly — the generals will then encourage the Pakistani Taleban to assist Mullah Omar and his allies in intensifying their war of attrition against the U.S.-NATO coalition and, after the coalition’s defeat, to aid in the destruction of Karzai’s regime. All of this promotes Pakistan’s vital national interests: lessening domestic violence; removing U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan; eliminating Karzai’s pro-Iran, pro-India regime; reinstalling an Islamist government in Kabul; and leaving India’s presence in Afghanistan untenable, thereby restoring Pakistan’s strategic depth on its western border and allowing the repositioning of military units to its border with India.

The way ahead in Afghanistan, therefore, seems to have been clearly demarcated by the West’s feckless politicians, diplomats, and — most especially — generals. The coming bottom line appears to be: The West loses, and the Taleban wins.

But not so fast, there is more to it. While it is true that the West loses, it is more accurate to say that Islam wins. And when thinking about what that victory will mean, it is worth recalling that Osama’s bin Laden and his generation were galvanized in favor of defending Islam via a jihad by the Afghan mujahedins’ defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan. It probably is wise — although a bit late — to ponder what impact the mujhaedins’ defeat of the U.S. superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq will have on this generation of young Muslims, including those in North America.

this is a very good article. I think it deserves a separate thread. Thanks for the find.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Latest from Dr. Michael Scheuer, former head of Alec Station, Central Intelligence.

Once again, this forms a clear rebuke to Alchemist's line of reasoning that the insurgency ought to recognize America is not going to leave and just fold their chairs and go home. These folks, who are fighting the US see this is a war of decades and have prepared mentally for this war of attrition. Mullah Omar's addresses regarding the wars against the British point out that the Taliban appear to have accepted a similar line of reasoning and are in this for the long haul. They understand that the kill ratio generally may be 30 Taliban for 1 US soldier, but they view this ratio as favorable per the impact that even 1 death makes on the American public. Note that Scheuer uses evidence based reasoning, citing references again and again. Most here are very unwilling to do so and just trumpet opinion pieces. I would advise that responses to Dresden be limited for this particular reason. Until evidence is provided for each of these outlandish claims, energy need not be expended on countering it.

http://non-intervention.com/937/alwa...n-in-al-qaeda/

Always ready for death: Leadership succession in al-Qaeda


In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, it is of first importance to confront the reality that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization, not a terrorist group. This is not a mere semantic difference.

–Al-Qaeda remains a formidable foe, even after bin Laden’s death, because it is a large, veteran, well-organized, and resilient insurgent group that long ago institutionalized planning for leadership succession in all facets of its operations, military, financial, logistical, training, etc.

–There is, in fact, no better proof that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization — and that the West fools itself by terming it a “terrorist group” — than its ability to absorb the killing of so many senior leaders while still functioning effectively and expanding in numbers and geographical reach.

–In terms of senior leaders killed, moreover, there is no Islamist terrorist group America has ever fought that could have endured and survived the punishment U.S. military and intelligence services have meted out to al-Qaeda since the late 1990s.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are both products of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies (1979-1992). This experience not only taught them that with faith, patience, and contiguous safe haven a superpower can be beaten, but that any group aspiring to fight and defeat a superpower must be prepared to suffer heavy and repeated loses not only of foot soldiers but also of leaders, including the most senior leaders of an organization.

–Bin Laden built al-Qaeda on the pattern of the major Afghan Islamist insurgent groups that fought the Red Army; namely, those of Ahmad Shah Masood, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and Yunis Khalis. These groups all suffered steady and significant leadership casualties at the hands of the Soviet military, which engaged in assassination operations on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during their ten-year occupation of the former. The Soviets found it impossible to defeat the Afghan insurgent organizations by killing their leaders, a process Washington is now calling “cutting off the head of the snake.”

–The Afghan Islamist groups, moreover, put a great deal of effort into succession planning not just because of Soviet targeted killings, but also because they suffered significant leadership loses from the internecine battles that raged between and among them; this was especially true for the groups of Masood and Gulbuddin. To date, this source of leadership losses is not one al-Qaeda has faced.

–Bin Laden — and, incidentally, Mullah Omar — took this lesson to heart, and since the early 1990s built an organization that expends substantial amounts of time, thought, and training preparing for leadership succession at all its levels.

As noted, the attrition of al-Qaeda’s leadership ranks has been steady for much more than a dozen years. Renditions, targeted killings, and battlefield kills and captures have all taken a toll, and yet there is little indication that the U.S.-NATO coalition has anything more than a body count to show for its work. Killing or capturing al-Qaeda leaders one at a time provides no credible metric with which to measure the overall progress of the U.S.-NATO war effort.

For the core of al-Qaeda, successful preparation for leadership losses is most apparent in the position of the group’s overall military commander.
–Al-Qaeda’s first military commander, Abu Ubaydah al-Panshiri, for example, died in Africa by drowning in May, 1996.

–Abu Ubaydah was replaced by Muhammad Atef — also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri — who ran al-Qaeda’s military operations until he was killed in Kandahar in November, 2001.

–Muhammad Atef was immediately succeeded by the former-Egyptian Special Forces officer, Sayf al-Adl.

–Sayf al-Adl remained commander until he was caught while traveling in Iran and held under house arrest for several years by Iranian authorities.
–Al-Adl was replaced by Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in May, 2005.

–Al-Qaeda’s overall military commander since Abu Faraj’s death has been difficult to determine from open sources, but much attention has been focused on the U.S.-citizen Muslim, Adnan Shukrajuma.

–Most recently, Sayf al-Adl is reported to have been released by Iran and has returned to al-Qaeda. Media reports claim al-Adl has been named interim leader for bin Laden. After bin Laden’s permanent successor is selected by al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, al-Adl may resume his former post as al-Qaeda’s overall military commander, and Shukrajuma may return to leading operations aimed at the continental United States, a post he is reported to have held before the death of Abu Faraj.

The foregoing rough — and perhaps incomplete — chronology represents a significant level of attrition among al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and yet, through it all, U.S. and British civilian and military intelligence estimates have continued to conclude that al-Qaeda remains a potent threat to the United States and its major allies at home and abroad.

It also must be noted that core al-Qaeda’s ability to fill significant and recurring leadership losses is also a characteristic shared by its branches outside South Asia.

–In Yemen, for example, al-Qaeda’s senior and talented chief, Abu Ali al-Harethi, was killed by a drone strike early in the war. Al-Qaeda in Yemen had difficulty in immediately finding a qualified replacement and lost several of al-Harethi’s successors until Abu Wahayashi escaped from a Yemeni prison and took over the post. Wahayashi — bin Laden’s former private secretary — now commands al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] and must be viewed as a candidate to succeed bin Laden. AQAP also appears to be al-Qaeda’s preferred venue for exhibiting and developing the talents of U.S.-citizen Muslim volunteers who join the group, including Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki.

–In Saudi Arabia, the al-Qaeda organization lost at least a half dozen leaders since its first leader, Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, was killed in the middle of 2003. This severe attrition in large part led to combining the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al-Qaeda and basing the overall command of al-Qaeda operations on the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.

–In Iraq, al-Qaeda-in-Iraq [AQI] lost its commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006 and then lost his replacement and its Iraq military commander — Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Muhajir, respectively — on the same day in 2010. The now resurgent AQI organization currently is led by Abu Bakr Husseini al-Baghdadi.

–Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb [AQIM], al-Qaeda’s allied group in Somalia [al-Shabbab], and al-Qaeda’s branches in Lebanon and Palestine have likewise replaced killed senior leaders while continuing to conduct organizational expansion, media activities, and military operations.

–Beyond the leaders of these branches, al-Qaeda also has replaced such senior figures as Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Tawfiq bin Atash, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nasiri, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, Abu Layth al-Libi, Abu Mustafa Abu-al-Yazid, and dozen or more senior leaders who were captured before 9/11.

While planning for succession always has been a priority for al-Qaeda, the process was intensified after 9/11 both because of the group’s losses and bin Laden’s concern for al-Qaeda’s survivability in the event of his death, whatever its cause.

–Since he began speaking publicly in 1996, bin Laden said that he did not expect to live to see the end of the war he had declared against the United States. His wish, he said, was to die a martyr; he hoped that, if God granted him such a death, his blood would inspire young Muslims to join the jihad, which he clearly expected to be a multi-generational struggle.

–Reflecting this fatalism, bin Laden and his lieutenants after 9/11 began to disperse the organization in an effort to ensure that it could not be decapitated by the kind of operation that finally killed bin Laden. In this effort, they were overwhelmingly successful.

–At 9/11, for example, the majority of al-Qaeda’s manpower, training facilities, and planning operations were concentrated in Afghanistan, and much of that infrastructure was wrecked by the U.S.-NATO coalition by the middle of 2002.

–But even given this disaster, bin Laden presided over a dispersal process that today sees al-Qaeda with some presence in Afghanistan, and strong branches in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, the Levant, Palestine, Iraq, and across North Africa. Objectively, al-Qaeda today possesses a larger organization than it had at 9/11, as well as a far broader geographic base.

–In addition, bin Laden in the last five years of his life devoted time and resources to building al-Qaeda’s influence and operational capabilities in the English-speaking world. Through the rhetorical, operational, and media skills of U.S.-citizen Muslims like Azzam al-Amriki [Adam Gadahn], Adnan Shukrajuma, Samir Khan [Inspire Magazine], Omar Hammami [Somalia], and Anwar al-Awalki, al-Qaeda has inspired U.S.-citizen Muslims to undertake violent activities inside the United States, men such as Major Nidal Hassan [Fort Hood], Najibullah Zazi [NYC subways], and Faisal Shahzad [Times Square].

–That bin Laden consciously sought to prepare al-Qaeda and the Islamic world for his demise can also be seen in his relative quiet over the past five years, a quiet that was filled by repeated media presentations showcasing men from al-Qaeda’s next generation of leaders — men such as Abu Yaha al-Libi, Anwar al-Awalki, Abu Wahayashi, and Azzam al-Amriki. This process was aimed at acquainting Muslims with al-Qaeda’s future leaders.

–Overall, the success of al-Qaeda’s dispersal efforts has not only made the organization nearly impossible to decapitate, it has given it multiple operational platforms it did not possess in 2001. The activities of these branches, moreover, give many more men the opportunity to train, gain combat experience, and develop as leaders than did the al-Qaeda organization that existed on or before 9/11. The branches — which today are seldom the venue of U.S. drone or Special Forces attacks — likewise ensure that a pool of quality leadership candidates is largely safe and readily available for al-Qaeda’s senior leaders to designate as successors-in-waiting for those leaders who surely will be lost in combat or via capture.
In conclusion, it is fair to say that al-Qaeda has long been well prepared to handle the unexpected death of leaders, even of bin Laden himself.

–After nearly 16 years of trying, as the last three U.S. presidents have said, to bring al-Qaeda’s leaders “to justice one at a time,” the West finds itself faced with a most welcome body count of dead al-Qaeda leaders, but with no credible measure of progress against the group as a whole, much less the movement it inspires and instigates.

–While the West must clearly continue to kill and capture as many al-Qaeda leaders in as many places as possible, this alone will not stop the steady growth in al-Qaeda’s size and thus in its ability to replace leaders. Likewise, the martyrdom of bin Laden and other senior leaders is likely to inspire numbers of young men to join the cause.

–Until the West’s political leadership accepts the clear reality that young Muslims are inspired to join al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies not only because of the words and deeds of the groups and their leaders, but because of what Western governments do in the Muslim world, U.S. military and intelligence services will find that their efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamist chiefs will do little to slow the growth of the international militant Islamist movement in the coming generation, and with it the threat to U.S. interests at home and abroad.

[kakargirl]

Mashallah wror every post is excellent , very beautifully written my knowledge is expanding .

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Dresden answered by Scheuer. Note that Dresden cannot provide a single reference for his claims that the ANA is some amazing accurate Delta Force like contingent. Instead, it is a laughing stock lunatic military that has been infiltrated by the army:

http://non-intervention.com/948/here...ins-the-jihad/

Here’s how Afghanistan ends — America loses, Islam wins, and a new Muslim generation joins the jihad

By Michael Scheuer


Two simple truisms seem appropriate these days when discussing the Afghan war: “If you don’t understand your enemy, you will lose to him” and “If you do not kill your enemies, they will surely kill you”. U.S. political, military, and civil service leaders have neither tried to understand what motivates the Taleban and its allies, nor have they tried to comprehensively kill them. As a result, they now stand at the inevitable destination — the brink of a vastly humiliating defeat that cannot be disguised.

Following are four points that are useful to keep in mind when listening to the nonsense about a “negotiated settlement” in Afghanistan that is now flowing from the mouths of Obama, Brennan, Clinton, Levin, Petraeus, and prime ministers Cameron (UK) and Harper (Canada).

–1.) The United States and its NATO allies already have announced their defeat at the hands of the Afghan mujahedin. The U.S. and Britain will begin withdrawing troops next month at a time when the mujahedin have the battlefield initiative; have thoroughly infiltrated Karzai’s government and military and security forces; and have ample funds, arms, and volunteers provided by their benefactors on the Arabian Peninsula.

–2.) The Taleban have heard the U.S.-NATO coalition announce its surrender and have no reason to think there is any Western will left to fight, especially after hearing Obama whine out this week his and the West’s fatal lack of bloody mindedness in yet another weepy apology for civilian Afghan casualties. This war is absolutely a zero-sum game for the Taleban, the other mujahedin, and Pakistan — a mindset that the West believes no longer exists — and U.S.-NATO claims about likely compromise from the mujahedin’s side is no more than idle chatter meant to give Western populations hope where there is none.

–3.) Given NATO’s near-term withdrawal, absence of Western will power, and the combat ineffectiveness of Karzai’s forces the Taleban and its allies will continue their thousand-cut campaign, and let Obama and his NATO colleagues talk amongst themselves and to their media acolytes about the equitable negotiated peace that is approaching. In addition, Pakistan’s army and intelligence services — sick of its effete Western allies’ obsessive insistence that its Pakistan’s duty bleed and win the war for them — will increase aid to the Taleban and its allies to ensure that Karzai’s regime and India’s presence in Afghanistan are in time erased after NATO retreats. Pakistan will be supported in this endeavor by Arab Peninsula regimes eager to see an Islamist government restored in Kabul that will block the extension if Shiism through Afghanistan into Central Asia.

–4.) When the U.S.-NATO coalition withdraws or is driven out by the mujahedin, the Taleban and its allies: (a) will reestablish an Islamist government that will rule over most of the country with the same religion-based, brutal, but effective law-and-order regime that held sway on 10 September 2001, and this will be welcomed by most Afghans; (b) will wage a war of revenge against the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shias who were ahistorical enough to think the U.S. and its allies know how to win wars and stupid enough to support a vicious Western cultural war aimed at destroying Afghanistan’s conservative Islamic and tribal culture; and (c) will welcome al-Qaeda and other non-Afghan Islamist insurgent groups to resettle in Afghanistan, knowing full well that the West will not be back to fight, except with its usual feckless combination of threatening rhetoric and the long-failed of policy of trying to achieve victory by killing or capturing its Islamist enemies one at a time.

One final point is worth making about the coming U.S.-NATO defeat in Afghanistan, this one in regard to the Muslim world as a whole — which now includes North America and Europe — and especially its young men. When the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in February, 1989, it had a galvanizing impact on Osama bin Laden’s generation of young men. For the first time in several centuries, Allah had allowed Muslims to defeat a Western power, and one of the world’s two superpowers at that. Much of the inspiration that has put mujahedin on the battlefield against the West and Israel since 1989 flowed from the defeat of the Red Army, and the Muslim world’s consequent belief that the mujahedin had destroyed the Soviet Empire.

Even with this victory and even after the victory of 9/11, however, bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies found that they continued to encounter a deeply engrained defeatism among Muslims. The rhetoric of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other Islamist leaders contains a clear and consistent theme that such defeatism must be overcome in each Muslim before Allah will reward His faithful with victory over their remaining enemies. In other words, the Islamists’ message to their fellow Muslims is that Allah will not help those who do not get off their behinds and help themselves. The continuity of this theme in the post-bin Laden period is apparent in al-Qaeda’s 3 June 2001, 100-minute motivational video entitled “You are responsible only for thyself.”

It will be difficult, to be sure, to measure the worldwide galvanizing impact of the mujahedins’ Taleban-led defeat of the U.S.-NATO coalition in Afghanistan and the subsequent reestablishment of an Islamic Emirate there. But could that impact possibly be less than that which followed the Soviets’ defeat? In 1989, after all, there was no Internet and 24-hour Arabic television coverage of the Red Army’s humiliation; today such coverage is intense and ubiquitous. In addition, the mujahedin will have beaten the second superpower and its most militarily potent allies not only in Afghanistan, but in Iraq as well — something no other power on earth ever has accomplished. Most important, this accomplishment will be seen across the Islamic world as both the result of Allah’s will and His reward for those Muslims who got off their behinds to fight and defeat His and Islam’s infidel enemies.

Overall, the decision by Western political leaders to allow their armies to be so easily and cheaply beaten in Afghanistan will have for them and their peoples very unfortunate and bloody long-term consequences.

[MDresden]

Barakzai, you fail to remember that this is a Global War on Terror. There will always be special forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, just the main "military footprint" will stay in the usa.

Daily, the Taliban will be surgically [surgically meaning quick and efficiently] removed and killed from the populace. This is a global war on terror and with its regulations, probably won't end until the end of time.

[ScimitarXEdge]

Surgical removal, doesn't take 10 years to accomplish; just saying

you can try to inflate yourself with puffed up rhetoric; but really that's all merely to console your own ego. it doesn't represent ground reality

or truths exposed by Wikileaks ( and no Wikileaks is not some website randomly edited by users....don't try that hoakey tactic again please).

[ScimitarXEdge]

I wonder if Matt realizes for special forces to be in Afghanistan, requires an extensive budget; a budget which is rapidly lacking cannot sustain even a special forces operation.