Notes and Comments
Terror in Norway
American counterterrorism officials have long worried about the possibility of a “lone wolf” jihadist committing a terrorist attack. Such individuals, inspired by ideology alone, can come out of nowhere. And if they are truly unconnected to the international terrorist network then they can be undetectable, setting off no warning bells before their day of terror.
Anders Behring Breivik, the man arrested in the wake of Friday’s terrorist attacks in Oslo, is no jihadist. Instead, he is a right-wing terrorist who held extreme and bizarre views regarding Marxism, multiculturalism, and Muslims. But while more has been learned about his ideology, an important question remains unanswered: Was he truly a “lone wolf”?
The New York Times cites Roger Andresen, a Norwegian police official, as saying: “We are not sure whether he was alone or had help. What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.” The next line of the Times article summarizes a manifesto Breivik reportedly penned (emphasis added):
In the 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intend to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
In other words, while Breivik has told police that he acted alone, the authorities are not sure whether Breivik is a true “lone wolf” or not. The terrorist attacks he carried out required a great deal of planning and coordination – it is not easy to set off a car bomb outside government buildings one moment and execute a shooting spree on an island hosting a youth camp the next. But without knowing more, all we can do is speculate. And there is no evidence thus far that he had any accomplices. . . .
AQAP has achieved little success, to date, in its effort to recruit “lone wolf” jihadists. Anders Behring Breivik, however, may have just proven the power of this concept. If he truly acted alone – and, again, we do not know for sure that is the case – then he is the most deadly “lone wolf” terrorist in recent memory.
Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who slaughtered at least 92 people, is not only a terrorist and a murderer, but also a plagiarist: Sections from his 1,500-page manifesto were copied directly from that of the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski. And even the material he wrote himself is derivative: From the parts of the rambling and disjointed manifesto that I have been able to read thus far, his bigoted and paranoid worldview seems to have originated — either directly or indirectly — with The Turner Diaries, a hack science fiction novel written 33 years ago by an American white supremacist named William Luther Pierce. The Turner Diaries feature prominently on a Swedish Nazi Internet forum called Nordisk, of which Breivik was a member.
Like Breivik, Pierce’s terrorist protagonist (“Earl Turner”) was a do-it-yourself bomb-builder who attacked a large public building with a car bomb largely consisting of ammonium nitrate fertilizer-based explosives, and then used firearms to kill innocent people randomly. As with Breivik, Pierce casts Turner as a revolutionary patriot, attacking a decadent and race-treasonous government. Like Breivik, Turner sought to set off an apocalyptic race war that would cleanse his society of “foreign” elements.
Breivik seems to have absorbed a variety of plot details from The Turner Diaries. For instance, Turner is described in Pierce’s book as being the leader of one of 12 terrorist cells in the Washington, D.C. area. After successfully blowing up the FBI building in Washington, he and other loyal cell leaders are inducted into a secret terrorist society called The Order, which is pledged to the eradication of blacks and Jews. Breivik claims to have been part of a similarly clandestine group whose goal was to “seize political and military control of Western European countries,” killing or wounding more than a million people in the process. He describes a Turner-style council of exactly 12 cell leaders from different parts of the Western world, which (he says) met in London in 2002 to create their own secret society — a reinvention of the Knights Templar. (He signs off his letter with the title “Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement.”)
Many commentators are calling Breivik “Norway’s Timothy McVeigh” — a reference to the right-wing American terrorist who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. There is some basis to this: McVeigh called The Turner Diaries his “bible,” and sold copies of it to like-minded extremists. His criminal plot, like Breivik’s, was almost identical to the one described in Pierce’s book.
Yet there are also important differences between Breivik and McVeigh, between the pre-9/11 era of right-wing extremism and the post-9/11 variety on tragic display in Norway. And they are worth exploring, through the lens of The Turner Diaries, which — though largely unread and unknown in mainstream Western societies — has become an immensely influential underground inspiration for two generations of white-supremacist murderers.
Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto [written by suspect Anders Behring Breivik] bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.
“It seems to be an attempt to mirror Al Qaeda, exactly in reverse,” Mr. Hegghammer said
A year-long military-led investigation has concluded that U.S. taxpayer money has been indirectly funneled to the Taliban under a $2.16 billion transportation contract that the United States has funded in part to promote Afghan businesses.
The unreleased investigation provides seemingly definitive evidence that corruption puts U.S. transportation money into enemy hands, a finding consistent with previous inquiries carried out by Congress, other federal agencies and the military. Yet U.S. and Afghan efforts to address the problem have been slow and ineffective, and all eight of the trucking firms involved in the work remain on U.S. payroll. In March, the Pentagon extended the contract for six months.
According to a summary of the investigation results, compiled in May and reviewed by The Washington Post, the military found “documented, credible evidence .?.?. of involvement in a criminal enterprise or support for the enemy” by four of the eight prime contractors. Investigators also cited cases of profiteering, money laundering and kickbacks to Afghan power brokers, government officials and police officers. Six of the companies were found to have been associated with “fraudulent paperwork and behavior.”
“This goes beyond our comprehension,” said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), who last summer was chairman of a House oversight subcommittee that charged that the military was, in effect, supporting a vast protection racket that paid insurgents and corrupt middlemen to ensure safe passage of the truck convoys that move U.S. military supplies across Afghanistan.
The military summary included several case studies in which money was traced from the U.S. Treasury through a labyrinth of subcontractors and power brokers. In one, investigators followed a $7.4 million payment to one of the eight companies, which in turn paid a subcontractor, who hired other subcontractors to supply trucks.
The trucking subcontractors then made deposits into an Afghan National Police commander’s account, already swollen with payments from other subcontractors, in exchange for guarantees of safe passage for the convoys. Intelligence officials traced $3.3 million, withdrawn in 27 transactions from the commander’s account, that was transferred to insurgents in the form of weapons, explosives and cash.
Stronger medicine is needed if the U.S. is to assist the astonishingly brave Syrians who are fighting and dying to oust Assad — an outcome that is unambiguously in the interests of the United States and the West in general. To that end, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), whose board of directors includes William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor, last week issued a “fact sheet“ of “five steps to hasten Assad’s exit.”
The first is for President Obama to “unequivocally” call for Assad to step down, as he did when Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak — whose misdeeds never approached those of Assad — became the object of widespread protests.
The second is for the U.S. to impose much tougher unilateral sanctions and work for serious multilateral sanctions on Assad, his family, and his cronies, and to push for U.N. Security Council condemnation of the regime. As Tony Badran, a Levant expert at FDD, wrote, “The United States, along with Britain and France, is halfheartedly seeking to overcome Chinese and Russian objections to a Security Council resolution condemning Assad. . . . The position of the superpower, after all, matters.”
The third step is to withdraw the U.S. ambassador from Syria and expel Syria’s envoy from the United States. Ambassador Robert Ford has done a commendable job — his visit to Hama, where protests were mounting, is what precipitated the assault on the U.S. embassy. But as Elliott Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations noted, unless Ford is now willing and able to ratchet up his “public displays of disgust with the regime and its behavior . . . there is no point in his remaining in Syria.”
Fourth, the U.S. should energetically support Syria’s referral to the U.N. Security Council for stonewalling the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has been trying to investigate Assad’s nuclear program — revealed only when the Israelis, in 2007, destroyed a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor secretly built with North Korean assistance.
Fifth, the U.S. could be encouraging Turkey to apply pressure on Assad. As FDD’s Gerecht has also pointed out, Turkish public opinion has turned against Assad, making this the moment to challenge the strength and wisdom of Ankara’s “nonsectarian, pro-Muslim, ‘neo-Ottoman’ policy.”
I would add this: The U.S. should directly (though perhaps covertly) assist the liberal opposition movements in Syria. In recent days, Syrian dissidents have received secure communications technology — but from private sources, not the U.S. government. ...
Assad’s ouster would be consequential. So, too, would be Assad’s survival. If there are any strategic thinkers inside Obama’s White House, Clinton’s State Department, and what is about to become David Petraeus’s CIA, they will grasp that — and act upon it.
WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents hunting for Pakistani spies in the United States last year began tracking Mohammed Tasleem, an attaché in the Pakistani Consulate in New York and a clandestine operative of Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.
Mr. Tasleem, they discovered, had been posing as an F.B.I. agent to extract information from Pakistanis living in the United States and was issuing threats to keep them from speaking openly about Pakistan’s government. His activities were part of what government officials in Washington, along with a range of Pakistani journalists and scholars, say is a systematic ISI campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the United States.
The F.B.I. brought Mr. Tasleem’s activities to Leon E. Panetta, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and last April, Mr. Panetta had a tense conversation with Pakistan’s spymaster, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
Within days, Mr. Tasleem was spirited out of the United States — a quiet resolution typical of the spy games among the world’s powers.
But some of the secrets of that hidden world became public last week when two Pakistani-Americans working for a charity that the F.B.I. believes is a front for Pakistan’s spy service were indicted. Only one was arrested; the other is still in Pakistan.
The investigation exposed one part of what American officials say is a broader campaign by the Pakistani spy agency, known as the ISI, to exert influence over lawmakers, stifle public dialogue critical of Pakistan’s military and blunt the influence of India, Pakistan’s longtime adversary.
In Kabul, the hard-as-a-rock, 5-foot-9, 150-pound, distance-running, push-up-pumping Petraeus has conducted the war from a rundown Edwardian villa, surrounded by a labyrinth of shipping containers piled into two-story blocks of offices and sleeping quarters, and all of it behind high walls, concertina wire, and a lot of firepower. ...
Since at least the end of 2008, Petraeus has been a key figure in efforts to develop new approaches to covert warfare and take full advantage of real-time information on enemy movements captured by drone technology. The military’s Special Operations Forces and the CIA’s Special Activities Division carry out attacks with ever-higher levels of coordination and integration in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Somalia—and, indeed, in Afghanistan. The way Obama shuffled his cabinet recently (Gates, a former CIA director, has been replaced as defense secretary by outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta) is testimony to the president’s faith in this approach, at least when it comes to fighting Al Qaeda and its spinoffs.
Petraeus, the hardened veteran of four decades in the Army, will confront a hardened bureaucracy at CIA headquarters. His friend and political ally Sen. John McCain may call Petraeus “the most impressive combination of character, leadership, and intelligence I have ever encountered,” but many in the CIA, looking coldly at Petraeus’s record, may not share that effusive view. . . .
Not everyone in Afghanistan fully appreciates what Petraeus has achieved in his year there, says Saad Mohseni, director of the country’s largest media company, the Moby Group: “Much of General Petraeus’s good work has been overshadowed by accusations and counteraccusations, the Afghans accusing the Americans of killing civilians, the Americans accusing the Afghans of ineptitude and corruption.” Even so, he adds, Petraeus’s departure worries a lot of people. “Given his reputation, many Afghans would feel compelled to believe that the Americans are downgrading their engagement in Afghanistan”—especially since the general’s return home coincides with Obama’s drawdown announcement.
And now that Petraeus is headed home, what life might he be looking forward to post-CIA? It’s not an unfair question to ask. Petraeus always thinks ahead, and not a few people in Washington remember the way he campaigned for the Iraqi surge in 2007. Behind the scenes he worked closely with three senators—Republicans McCain and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman—to promote the idea. “The best salesman was Dave himself,” recalls Graham, himself an Air Force reservist who served in Iraq. “I remember parking him in a room somewhere off the [Senate] floor, and I grabbed individual senators, saying, ‘I just need five minutes.’ And Dave would make the pitch, one by one. He could articulate a complicated system like counterinsurgency in two minutes. And after you met him, it was pretty hard not to want to give him a chance to succeed.”
The July 5 killing of yet another white jihadi commander in an American drone strike in the North Waziristan tribal agency of Pakistan - an Australian national this time - has given credence to earlier reports by Western intelligence agencies that the Pakistan-based al-Qaeda network is recruiting Western Muslim converts to widen the pool of potential terrorists beyond traditional Asian and Middle Eastern radicals who could foil racial profiling and carry out terrorist attacks in the West.
According to Pakistani media reports, the white jihadi killed by two missiles fired by a drone at around 11 pm on July 5 in Mir Ali area of North Waziristan has been identified as Saifullah, who used to serve as a key aide to Osama bin Laden and had been working in tandem with al-Qaeda’s chief military strategist, commander Ilyas Kashmiri, who has been reported as killed in a drone attack on June 3.
Saifullah, 50 years old, has been described as a middle-ranking al-Qaeda leader, though little more is known about him. The deadly strike actually targeted a guesthouse and also killed five other militants. The Mir Ali area, where Saifullah was killed, is in the sphere of influence of Abu Kasha al-Iraqi, an al-Qaeda leader who serves as a key link to the Taliban and supports the external operations network of al-Qaeda, now led by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Pakistani Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar, who is still considered by the Pakistani establishment as a “good Taliban”, and the Haqqani network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani’s elder son Sirajuddin Haqqani, also operate in Mir Ali, a known hub for al-Qaeda’s military and external operational councils.
An increasing number of Westerners have traveled to the Pakistani tribal areas in recent years to join the so-called jihad that al-Qaeda is waging against US-led allied forces in Afghanistan. Among the Westerners are Americans, Britons, Germans, French and Australians. ...
Therefore, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which runs the drone program, has been repeatedly targeting al-Qaeda hideouts in the Mir Ali area, ostensibly to wipe out the white jihadis’ networks. So far this year, the CIA has carried out 43 drone attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, killing more than 360 people. There were 124 drone strikes in 2010. ...
According to the findings of a recent study conducted by the Home Office in Britain, almost three quarters of the most serious terrorism cases investigated since the 7/7 London terrorist attacks had links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
Similarly, of the 90 individuals convicted or punished in Britain for their involvement in jihadi terror plots between September 2001 and September 2009, 64 were affiliated with al-Qaeda and 27 were trained either in Pakistan or in Afghanistan - more than in any other country across the world.
These figures clearly show that al-Qaeda now seeks to employ white men with Western nationalities to successfully strike in the heart of the West. Hence, the CIA is ruthlessly using drones to dismantle the network of the white jehadis in the Waziristan region in a bid to protect the West from any further act of jihadi terrorism.
The Bushehr nuclear plant, Iran’s first nuclear power station, begun operating in May. Iran says it is installing newer and faster centrifuges at its nuclear plants, with the goal of speeding up the uranium enrichment process.
The foreign ministry says the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has “full supervision” of the operation.
The French government has condemned the move as a “new provocation”.
France and other Western powers fear that Iran’s nuclear programme is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Iran says its programme is for civilian use. ...
“By installing the new centrifuges progress is being made with more speed and better quality,” said Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast.
He said the move showed Iran’s success in pursuing its “peaceful nuclear activity”, but did not say where the new generation of centrifuges would be installed, or provide details on the speed or capability of the machines.
France was quick to condemn the announcement.
“Iran is engaging in a new provocation by announcing the imminent installation of next-generation centrifuges,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement.
“[It] clearly confirms the suspicions of the IAEA and of the international community about the finality of a programme with no credible civilian application,” the statement said.
Diplomatic efforts to find a solution to Iran’s nuclear dispute have stalled, after talks between Iran and six world powers broke down in December last year.
“Iran must suspend its sensitive activities and create the conditions for reopening talks,” France said.
The country is subject to four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.
Last month, the British government accused Iran of testing missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, in contravention of a UN resolution.
The Iranians openly test-fired 14 surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 2,000km (1,250 miles) as part of a 10-day programme of military exercises.
Its foreign ministry said none of these missiles had nuclear capability.
The Dignite-al Karama, the sole representative of an initial 10-vessel flotilla, had earlier been warned to change course.
The Israeli military said the boat had been boarded peacefully. It was later escorted into the Israeli port of Ashdod.
An anti-blockade protest group said the boat had been in international waters.
Maxime Guimberteau from A French Boat for Gaza said activists on board the Dignite-al Karama had told him they were 40 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza when the boat was surrounded by four Israeli navy ships. He said their conversation then cut off. ...
The Hamas government in Gaza also condemned the takeover of the vessel.
An Israeli Defence Force statement said the Dignite-al Karama had been boarded “after all diplomatic channels had been exhausted and continuous calls to the vessel had been ignored”.
It said the navy had started a dialogue with the activists five hours earlier.
“Upon expressing their unwillingness to arrive at the Ashdod port, it was unequivocally necessary to board the vessel and lead it there,” the statement said.
“The soldiers operated in line with procedures and took every precaution necessary... [to] avoid causing harm to the activists on board while ensuring the safety of the soldiers.”
Hours later, the ship entered the port city of Ashdod flanked by three small Israeli naval vessels, witnesses said.
Israeli officials said those on board would be turned over to the Israel police, the immigration authority and the interior ministry at Ashdod.
The Dignite-al Karama is part of Freedom Flotilla II, which has been trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza since the end of June. Flotilla organisers say despite the opening of Gaza’s Egyptian border, the territory remains under “unlawful blockade” by the Israelis.
Four months after American submarines began launching missiles and U.S. pilots began flying sorties, does anyone, perhaps even including President Obama, really know what we are trying to do in Libya? It is true that, compared to Afghanistan, a major war whose outcome is generally agreed to hang in the balance, and to Iraq, from which we have not yet completely withdrawn, and even to Somalia and Yemen, where the tempo of our counterinsurgency operations have been steadily increasing, both directly and by proxy, Libya may seem minor. But, if our military operations in that country are hardly the greatest burden our armed forces confront, they are also hardly trivial. Less than a month before he left office, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates estimated the U.S. would spend $750 million on the Libyan operation, while a Department of Defense document published in May revealed the American contribution to Operation Unified Protector involved 75 aircraft (including drones), flying 70 percent of the reconnaissance missions, 75 of refueling missions, and more than one-quarter of all air sorties. And yet, from March 28, when President Obama announced Operation United Protector’s predecessor, Operation Odyssey Dawn, until now, the fog of incoherent justification for the war has been at least as thick of the proverbial fog of war itself.
Have we gone to war? Well, no, not exactly. We were, Obama said in that first speech, “[committing] resources to stop the killings” of innocent Libyan civilians by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. If the United States has initiated combat operations, this really amounted not to war-fighting, but to taking “all necessary measures to protect the Libyan people” and to “save lives.” And did our actions mean that the goal of the mission was regime change, Iraq- or Afghanistan-style? Not at all, the president insisted. Taking a predictable swipe at the Bush administration, he said dismissively that we had already gone “down that road in Iraq.” It was an apt metaphor, if, perhaps, unconsciously so, since regime change would have required just that: sending troops down the road, on the ground in Libya. And that, the president argued, would be far more dangerous than what he was ordering the military to do.
This may have sounded like the prudent thing, but what it was—what it is, for nothing has changed at all in this regard over the course of the past four months, even though we have officially recognized the Libyan rebels—is the incoherent, internally self-contradictory thing. We believe Qaddafi must go, and we will not let him make significant advances on the ground, but we refuse to take responsibility for his overthrow. So, to use a military term of art, we have an end state—Qaddafi’s ouster—but we are not willing to do what is needed to attain that goal expeditiously, which, of course, is why there is at least, for the moment, still a stalemate on the ground in Libya. ...
Before the end, Ahmad Wali Karzai thought his assassin was his friend.?The colorful younger brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai was shot and killed last week at his home in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The assassin, Sardar Muhammad, was a close associate and security manager for the Karzai family. There has been no clear verdict as to why AWK — as he was known in U.S. diplomatic and military circles — was killed. It might have been a result of a family feud, or perhaps a Taliban plot. But there was never really a clear verdict on who AWK was in life, either: the King of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s Don Corleone, CIA informant, or a warlord who skillfully played the often deadly game of Afghan politics — until last week.
That we’re still guessing at his role demonstrates why he was such a successful politician in Afghanistan. The ability to be a bit of everything to everyone — from a friend of the Americans to a loyal member of the Karzai clan to a conduit to the Taliban — allowed him to thrive. He got his power both from skimming NATO contracts and from having a hand in the illicit smuggling networks operating across southern Afghanistan.
When I interviewed him in May of last year, Wali Karzai described himself as the “Nancy Pelosi of Kandahar.” It was an amusing metaphor, his way of explaining himself to a Western audience, which often viewed him with undisguised hostility. “Whatever she is doing in Washington I am doing at the Kandahar level in Kandahar,” he said. In other words, consolidating power, cutting deals, and making compromises. He offered that he was playing a conciliatory role in negotiations with the Taliban — a role he was uniquely posed to play. He represented, perhaps better than anyone else, the almost invisible line between the shadow and legitimate governments of Afghanistan. ...
Over the past few months, the U.S. has started to pursue more serious negotiations with the Taliban. AWK’s death — even if it wasn’t at the Taliban’s hands — compounds these already difficult negotiations, possibly igniting a power struggle in the restive south, where tenuous NATO gains could easily evaporate. (In another blow last week, the Taliban claimed credit for assassinating the former governor of the southern Uruzgan province, close Karzai aide Jan Mohammad Khan, who also would have played a role in negotiating with the Taliban.)
And if AWK was killed by a member of his own tribe, then we can only guess how other rival tribes felt about him. If folks within his own government wanted him dead, then prospects for reconciliation between the government and the insurgents seem even bleaker. Perhaps Pakistan wanted to knock him off, another theory has it, to ensure their Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) would have more control over any eventual agreement in the south.
In an interesting reversal, the liberals and secularists of post-’Arab Spring’ Egypt seem to be veering towards supporting the continued oversight of the army on the country’s affairs.
The situation, though causing consternation on the face of it, is perfectly simple. If elections are held in September as planned, or even a year later, there is a good likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood may come to power. At stake is the future constitution of Egypt: the secularists and the Islamists have, obviously, differing expectations. ...
The parallel to Pakistan is rather obvious, although of course the analogy does not fit exactly. The people likely reading this text — English-speaking, therefore likely to be of certain middle- and upper-class backgrounds, with exposure to the idea of secularism as delineated from ir-religiousness — would have cause to shiver.
Was it not the Jamaatud Dawa, the palatable face of the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba, that led a number of efforts of reconstruction after the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and other humanitarian efforts too? Is there not a long-standing argument that parents send their children to madressahs not because of ideological affiliations but because of the poverty of the state educational system, the prospect of some literacy, food and the distant dream of a future? Was the Taliban takeover of Swat not initially supported by the region’s general population, because the Taliban offered in part, a speedy justice system that the area glaringly lacked?
Meanwhile, so near across the border, we see that the US — after having waged war against the Taliban for a decade — is making an effort to bring the latter to the negotiating table.
The question, then, is that when does a terrorist/militant force become a legitimate, whether right-wing or left-wing, political force? There is the case of the Sinn Fein, after all.
The logical answer to that would be that any ideological group is a legitimate political force as long as it operates in the political arena and according to the rules of politics. And these rules require that the group bring voters on its side through debate etc, not through violent or coercive means. Politics the world over is a dirty game, but nowhere is it acceptable to argue from a point of vantage behind the barrel of a gun. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Sinn Fein, a host of others, gave up their guns to become political actors, regardless of whether they were radical or not. The Taliban, however, have consistently refused to turn take that route. Perhaps we should be thankful that they are not asking for themselves to be voted into power.
As long as any group is defined as militant, at least one can take refuge in the excuse that their will was forced upon society, rather than voted in.
What’s unclear is why the White House’s decision-making is this dilatory. The administration would no doubt argue “prudence,” but that is a hard case to make. There is no real reason why the announcement of the meeting with the Dalai Lama had to come on the day before he left town, nor why the Libyan TNC was not sufficiently legitimate on June 14 but became so the next day. In the Syrian case, the administration appears to have been moved by the attack on our embassy in Damascus — no casualties, very little property damage — rather than by the astonishing and continuing acts of murderous violence perpetrated by the Assad regime against the people of Syria. To many Syrians, many Americans, and others around the world, that will seem to be an odd scale of values.
The more likely answer is a kind of overload — too much happening all around the world to permit timely decisions on all of it — but that is an excuse. That would not happen unless every decision were being made by the president, as appears to be the case. The administration’s legal position on the War Powers Act was similarly, we are told, made not at the Department of Justice but by the president himself.
There are two problems here: the president’s belief in his omnicompetence, and the resultant inability of his administration to get its act together in a timely fashion. The consequence is that even when the White House makes the right decision, it gets there when much of the good from reaching that decision has been lost. Better late than never, to be sure, and better late and correct than early and wrong. But those ought not to be the only options for the world’s most important country. If the president were to surround himself with people he thought extremely smart (indeed, as smart as he thinks he is himself, if that is possible), and were to let them do their jobs, decisions would come faster and our government would not be The Late Show.
One of the most curious features of the Obama administration’s foreign policy is the contrast between the silky, non-confrontational public diplomacy it employs when dealing with dictatorships and adversaries, such as Russia, China and Venezuela — and the brusqueness with which it often addresses U.S. clients and allies.
The latest example of this came last week in Iraq, where the United States is engaged in a complex and high-stakes competition with Iran. At immediate issue is whether Iraq’s Shiite-led government will ask Washington to leave behind 10,000 or so soldiers of the 47,000 troops now there, instead of completing a full withdrawal by the end of this year.
The larger question is whether Iraq will be forced by a full U.S. pullout to become an Iranian satellite, a development that would undo a huge and painful investment of American blood and treasure and deal a potentially devastating blow to the larger U.S. position in the Middle East.
The administration has made it fairly clear that it is willing to make a deal to leave behind some troops. But coaxing the fragmented and prickly Iraqi leadership into making the right choice would require subtlety, patience and high-level engagement — like that the Bush administration employed when it negotiated a strategic framework with Iraq before leaving office in 2008, or that Vice President Biden used in helping to broker an agreement on a new Iraqi government last year. ...