Center for a New American Security

The BBC reports that thousands of people turned up for the funerals of victims of the suicide attack on Shia worshippers in Karachi.

...Keep watching this space.

UPDATE: AFP reports that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Also, Karachi is still on fire after angry Shia rampaged following the bomb.

"We carried out the suicide bombing in Karachi," Asmatullah Shaheen, a top militant commander based in South Waziristan, told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location. Shaheen, whose name is on a government list of 19 most-wanted militants, said "he (the bomber) was our man; his name was Hasnain Muawia".

Interestingly, Muawia is the name of the first caliph of the Umayyad Dynasty. He fought Ali, the Prophet Mohammed's cousin, who is revered by Shia as his rightful successor. Muawia's son Yazid is seen as the villain in the events that led to the death of the prophet's grandson Hussain. The Shia worshippers targeted by the Taliban were commemorating Hussain's death at the hands of Yazid's forces when the bomber struck.

Nir Rosen and I had breakfast this morning and caught up over coffee and eggs, but that hasn't stopped us from going at each other in this month's Boston Review, which features an article by Nir and then a forum in which I participate along with Alex Thier, Andrew Bacevich, Aziz Hakimi, Syed Saleem Shahzad and Helena Cobban. In my contribution, I argue that Afghanistan will mark the end of what I'm calling the "Third Counterinsurgency Era". While small wars and insurgencies will continue to take place across the globe, the United States and other western powers will not soon stomach another large-scale intervention requiring counterinsurgency operations along the lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe the United States and other great powers will continue to be challenged through "small wars", of course, but we are more likely to fight these wars by, with and through local forces rather than directly -- as in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why I think foreign internal defense (FID), unlike COIN, is underdeveloped doctrinally in light of the challenges the United States and its allies will face in the future. I hope Brimley and the other new whiz kids at the Pentagon are thinking about that as they go about drafting the new QDR.

[The existing joint doctrine for FID can be found here (.pdf). One wonders whether or not we should convene a group of scholars and practitioners to scrub this in the way that we did FM 3-24 in 2005.]

I have not been posting much recently, enjoying my retirement from daily blogging, but Richard Fontaine and I got name-checked in the lead editorial from today's Washington Post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on account of this policy paper we wrote on Yemen for CNAS, so if you have not read it, do. I re-read it today to make sure I still agree with what we wrote and ... yup, I still do. My friend Gregory Johnsen is the real subject matter expert on Yemen, though, and since he's the guy I turn to for a sanity check whenever I say anything about the Arabian Peninsula, you could do worse than to follow his blog for more information on Yemen and AQAP.

In other news, I read and greatly enjoyed Stefan Aust's page-turning history of the Red Army Faction this Christmas holiday. If you watched and enjoyed the movie (like Tom did), you need to read the book. Watching just this trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking a tour in the Baader-Meinhof gang must have been a lot of fun. The reality, as Aust chronicles, was a lot less romantic.

A few readers have sent me Sean Naylor's unbelievably damning article in the Army Times on the Stryker Brigade in southern Afghanistan. Friends like Gian Gentile are worried good battalion and brigade commanders are being slandered for not bowing to the COIN orthodoxy, but while I have some sympathy for that lament, the relevant question about Col. Harry Tunnell is is not whether or not COIN is the correct or incorrect operational response to the problems facing U.S. forces in Afghanistan but whether or not the commander is following the pretty explicit guidance issued by the commanding general in Afghanistan. Sean has been a friend of mine since he embedded with my platoon during Operation Anaconda in 2002, and he's not the kind to go hunting the scalps of tactical commanders for the sake of it. What he saw in southern Afghanistan, though, raised a lot of questions for him, and it segues in nicely with Noah's worry about whether the U.S. Army can or will even do what's being asked of it.

Now I'm trying to catch up with some work while listening to the Nosaj Thing remix of Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Heaven Can Wait", which has the second most bizarrely awesome video for any song to which I have ever listened. First prize in that category goes to Bat For Lashes for "What's a Girl to Do?":

A suicide bomber killed around 30 people in Karachi today during traditional Shia Muharram ceremonies. It's not clear at this point whether the attack was part of Karachi's long-simmering sectarian problems, a statement of intent by the Pakistani Taliban to expand into the country's biggest city, or some sort of mixture of the two.

Over the past few weeks, suicide bombs and attacks in Pakistan have slipped from the news agenda. News coverage pays a decreasing amount of attention to events the more often they occur. Even though the loss of innocent life is equally tragic whether it is happening in the first attack of its type or the 100th, the Karachi attack deserves special attention because of its location and timing.

The Muharram ceremonies mark one of the main events in the Shia religious calender. Millions of Shia Muslims across the world mark the death of the Prophet's grandson Hussein in a one-sided battle as emblematic of the eternal struggle for truth and justice against overwhelming odds. Many non-Muslims will recognise Muharram ceremonies from images of bare-chested men flaying themselves in symbolic remorse for not coming to Hussein's aid. 

An eyewitness told local channel Geo News that the suicide bomber detonated himself away from the main procession, which limited the number of casualties. Five security personnel died in the attack as well as a number of children. The explosion happened near a group of scouts who had been taking part in the procession.

Londonstani heard about the attack shortly after meeting a member of the Pakistani military. Predictably, the conversation revolved around the nature of Pakistan's security threat. Who was it exactly the army was fighting? Well, India of course, said the officer. Londonstani's arguments about India's own national interest in Pakistan's stability as well as the international community's stake in Pakistan's wellbeing and prosperity were all brushed aside. The army had proof of India's involvement, said the army man. Pakistanis fighting for the insurgency were illiterate young men led astray by foreigners bent on Pakistan's destruction. Many Pakistani officials Londonstani has met do not connect the country's present conflict to the internal tensions that exist within the country.

It's these tensions that are in danger of being further fanned by the attack in Karachi. Even though the official mindset refuses to accept that Pakistan's very serious social problems might underpin terrorism, many people were expecting the Shia ceremonies to be targeted. The only question was when, where and how bad. Londonstani's money was on Lahore, where a huge procession winds through very narrow streets. Shia leaders in they city's old quarter had told Londonstani that they had received direct threats from militants. Karachi, Londonstani thought, was too risky for the Taliban to target. Karachi is presently thought to be home to more Pashtuns than any other city in Pakistan. At the same time, the movement uses the city to raise funds and move supplies - alongside material moving to Afghanistan for ISAF. It's safe to assume whoever organised the attack had a larger aim.

A suicide attack suggests Taliban-style militants were behind the incident rather than Karachi's local Sunni thugs. Following the attack, enraged Shia worshippers set fire to nearby buildings and cars. As Londonstani writes, Geo News is reporting that fires are still raging in Karachi's commercial areas.

A Karachi resident told Londonstani over the phone; "What you are seeing in Karachi now with all the anger, rioting and burning of buildings is just a taste of what could happen. Karachi is more of a tinderbox than pretty much anywhere else in Pakistan and if someone wants to ignite a Baghdad-type inter-Muslim war in Pakistan, Karachi is the place to do it."

Shia leader Hasan Zafar Naqwi came on a number of the news channels denouncing the attacks. In the clips on the following news bulletins, the editors decided to repeat his comments that the terrorists who talk about countering America are only killing Muslims and damaging Pakistan. However, this was only a small part of what he said. His wider comments were much more telling of Shia reaction to the attacks.

"We have been killed in the hundreds for years. How long are we supposed to tolerate this?...I want to say to the nation, what have we done to deserve this? Lahore, Peshawar and now Karachi have become our Karbala," he said referring to the battleground where Hussein was killed. "We are mistreated yet where is the voice of the nation? When Shia die, no one says anything. The silent support that the terrorists enjoy has to end."

Karachi leaders, Shia as well as Sunni and representatives of various ethnic-based parties are appealing for calm. But Londonstani thinks the Naqwi's expression of anger at what he sees as Pakistan's Sunnis majority's disregard for Shia suffering will more accurately reflect the conversations that go on behind closed doors over the coming days.

Nick Francona -- U.S. Marine, Penn graduate and all-around American Hero -- emailed me to wish me a Merry Christmas and to say he gave me a shout out on ESPN.com. Nick's story is a pretty incredible one, and I for one am really resisting the urge to make a comment about the patriotism of Red Sox fans as compared with fans of another club (that will go unnamed lest I draw the wrath of the Jeter-loving Lady Muqawama). But if you happen to be a fan of baseball, read this article. Go Red Sox, and Semper Fi.

US Special Forces have conducted multiple raids into Pakistani territory, local daily The Nation reported today in a front-page article that was basically just quoting an earlier Guardian story. 

One previous US raid that occurred in 2008 was already known about. And when it happened, there was serious concern as to whether such actions by the Americans might lead to the breakdown of the Pakistani army. One respected London-based Pakistan academic said if American troops kept crossing into Pakistani territory he could envisage a situation where Pakistani commanders would lose control over soldiers who would want to fight the incursions.

That might explain this comment:

"The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations."

Read the original Guardian story here.

This blog has previously noted the rise in the number of American militants.

How does the greater accessibility that American universal values are supposed to offer immigrants explain events at Ft. Hood? An isolated incident? Well, what about, Najibullah Zazi, who planned "Mumbai-on-the-Hudson" with help from extremists in Pakistan. Or, Byran Neal Venas, a Hispanic American convert, who was captured in Afghanistan and admitted to helping with initial plans to launch an attack in the US. Or David Hedley, an American who planned to kill an editor at the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen. If he had managed, the US would have joined the list of nations that have become a launching pad for extremist violence.

Read Peter Bergen's Foreign Policy article where he outlines these cases and others in more detail and effectively makes the case that the US has basically just been lucky so far. And as we know, luck is no basis from which to argue for policy direction.

Recently, this new American problem managed to link up with a slightly older American problem; namely Pakistan. The Daily News reported:

"Police on Wednesday arrested five American nationals believed to have gone missing from the Washington DC area last month, officials from both countries said.
The five were arrested at the house of a member of the banned terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad in Sargodha, District Police Officer Usman Anwar told AFP."

Londonstani thinks that on the one hand this means American policy makers and commentators will be slightly less smug sounding when comparing community cohesion in the United States with Britain, but at the same time this case and others like it knock another presumption away from the general understanding of what causes extremism and radicalisation in the first place. If the US has a growing home-grown extremism problem, under the current logic, it means either that its social integration mechanisms aren't as good as it thought, or that social integration is not the key factor everyone thought it was.

Londonstani's money is on imperfect American social cohesion. That's not to say there aren't a whole host of other factors. But "social cohesion" as a phrase seems to have gained popular currency as part of the extremism/radicalisation discussion, whereas there's no reason it has to refer to Islamism at all. If the discussion is about "social cohesion" as a stand alone phrase, it refers to the interlinking of the various strands of your society. This can refer to religious or racial communities, but also people of different generations, income levels, geographical areas, sub cultures etc. From Londonstani's experience of working in the UK and various countries in the Muslim world, extremism since 9/11 takes root in the fissures between those strands. Muslim populations are the initial audience as the message is crafted to appeal to their fears, concerns and prejudices. But it has moved on to other groups too. And the US definitely has its fissures, as do other places.

Having said all this, Londonstani still maintains that extremists aren't getting the kind of recruits they'd really like to be attracting. And as evidence he submits below exhibit 1, a police mugshot of the Sargodha wannabe warriors.

On December 4, four militants stormed a mosque used extensively by Pakistan Army personnel and killed 35 people who had gathered for Friday prayers. Among the victims were 17 children. Security forces battled the militants for an hour before three blew themselves up. The attack marked a return to the sort of well-executed, multi-pronged tactics that militants have used against the army on previous occasions. But the choice of target - Muslims at prayer - forced a response from the country's religious establishment.

Right after the attack, Interior Minister Rehman Malik called on Pakistan's religious figures to take a stand. Within hours Mufti Muneeb ur Rehman, an influential figure within the religious establishment was on television.

"We have issued a fatwa that suicide bombings, remote attacks and direct attacks against civilians or the forces of an Islamic country are haram (Islamically forbidden)", he said. "Suicide attacks are specifically forbidden because they are carried out by killing yourself, which is totally outside the rules of Islam.... Attacking mosques is totally unacceptable in the eyes of Islam."

Mufti Muneeb represents a mainstream Islamic outlook in Pakistan known as Barelvi, which encompasses the country's Sufi traditions. Much has been made of Sufis as the mainstream - largely apolitical - Islamic outlook that has the potential to provide Pakistan, as well as the wider Muslim world, with the religious legitimacy to counter the austere Salafi and more specifically the Jihadi-Takfeeri ideology that the likes of the Taliban adhere to. In 2007, the Rand Cooperation published Building Moderate Muslim Networks, which advocates engaging and bolstering the Sufi strand of Islam throughout the Muslim world.

But is it really as simple as that? The phrase might have become a cliche but Pakistan is presently the location of a very real battle for hearts and minds. Is it possible to pick a side and support it against another?

The Sufi tradition has very deep roots in Pakistan. The country is dotted with shrines that are visited by thousands of people daily from across Pakistan's ossified class structure. Londonstani's taxi driver of choice is a fairly typical adherent.

Chacha (uncle) supports eight children on about £7.40 a day, which takes him 12 hours of driving to earn. His family is from Murree, a hilly area about 2-1/2 hours drive from Islamabad. But he spends most days of the week living in a small unheated concrete room outside a small stall owned by a relative who also works in the capital. Chacha has a terrible cough, exacerbated by his constant smoking and his taste for the local Murree whiskey. If he could afford it, Chacha would go to the doctors to find out how to treat it. But unlike Londonstani, he's not too worried about it:

"You know, I thank God because health comes from Him. And when you are ill, it makes you remember your own mortality. It makes you remember that you will go back to God and you have to answer for your actions. So in that way, being ill is a blessing because it will make me closer to God."

Conventional wisdom in Pakistan states that men like Chacha uncritically accept whatever they are told by firebrand preachers - of the religious or secular variety that dominate the pulpits and the airways. Chacha, however, is nobody's fool when it comes to current affairs.

"Some people in Pakistan love America and others hate it. The ones that love it are the educated people and those who travel abroad and like fashions from abroad. They have investments in America and they travel there. So its no surprise that they love it.

"For the poor people, they don't see anything good coming from the friendship with America. All we see is that we are suffering for America's war. We didn't invade any country and start a war. The fight is between al Qaeda and America? It's nothing to do with us. But because the people in government are friends with America, we ended up fighting for them."

Despite being very clear about which section of the population he belongs in, Chacha has not resorted to a blind hatred of all things American or Western.

"All the Americans I've ever met are pretty nice people. But I think their policies are bad for our country. Sure, their government needs to look after their interests, but ours needs to look after our interests. That's not happening because the people in our government are looking after the interests of themselves, their family and their group of friends."

Chacha is a follower of Pir Ali Shah, whose shrine-complex is situated on the outskirts of Islamabad at Golra Sherif. 

Golra Sherif has attracted pilgrims for near two centuries. Every week, thousands of men, women and children gather in what has become a little town in its own right to hear Qawalis (devotional songs), pray at the various tombs and eat the food laid on by the shrine's guardians.

The outlook that includes Chacha and countless other Pakistanis is being challenged by the Takfeeri-Salafi mode of thought. The Taliban is the most vocal manifestation of this outlook but my no means its sole representative. Groups like Tehreek-e-Islam and al-Huda, while not explicitly violent, promote a "return to true Islam" message which sees the Sufi traditions of the country as a corruption of the true faith. Most of these groups are in some way or another an offshoot of the Deobandi school of thought which also gave birth to the Jamaat-e-Islaami political party which is sympathetic to the Taliban.

However, Deobandis are not monolithic in their outlook. The Deobandi school of thought started in India in 1866 as a reaction to the British takeover of Muslim India. Its core message is a revival of Islam throught through Islamic learning. Mulana Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islaami, was a Deobandi student but others within the school of thought separated themselves from politics. The Indian branch of the Deobandi school issued a proclamation in 2008 condemning terrorism. In Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami has repeatedly refused to condemn the Taliban.

One consequence of the war in Afghanistan is the fracturing of Pakistan's religious patchwork quilt. Whereas once the fault lines lay between Shia and Sunni, these have now spread to Barelvi and Deobandis (who are both Sunni). As the Barelvis are seen to side with the state's stance against the local Taliban and its official backing for the U.S-led presence in Afghanistan, they have become exposed to allegations that they are "stooges" of "state-sponsored Islam". This has also opened them up to attack on religious grounds by the element of Deobandi thought that sees Sufi practice as unIslamic; a point of view shared by the Wahabis, Takfiris etc, basically, the kind of people who support the Taliban outlook.

A number of sources estimate that the majority of Muslims in Pakistan, India and South Asian communities in the United Kingdom are from Barelvi backgrounds. But whereas once the Deobandi-Barelvi divide was fairly pourous and devoid of any practical meaning, today it has taken on political connotations.

And those political connotations have very serious implications. A few weeks ago, Londonstani tagged along on a series of meetings organised by a British Muslim organisation that involved many leading Barelvi figures. One of the main issues that arose was the very real threat these figures faced if they took a stand against the Taliban. The delegation from Britain visited Jamia Naemia in Lahore, a Barelvi madrassa. The visit started with a prayer at the grave of the school's founder Sarfraz Naemi, who was killed by a suicide bomber weeks after denouncing the Taliban and issuing a fatwa against suicide bombings. It mattered little that he had previously criticised the government for its support of the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The explosive religio-political landscape of Pakistan is best illustrated by the security outside the madrassa guarding one set of Islam's guardians against another.

Mufti Muneeb was present during the meetings. He made the point that the Barelvis leaders knew that they had to make a stand, but were nervous as to what this would mean for the safety of their families and followers. The statement Mufti Muneeb made after the Rawalpindi attack did not mention the Taliban specifically. In reference to the attackers, he said: "We don't know who they are. But we hear from the media and the government that they say they are acting in the name of religion. That is why we issued a fatwa to refute their claims to have religious justifications for their actions." A few days after making the statement, Mufti Muneeb and several other leaders who echoed his call were laid up in hospital with suspected poisoning.

Supporting the Barelvis materially against the Deobandis is a dangerous logic to follow. It smacks of the sort of colonial and cold war era policies that pitted one group of "natives" against another and led to decades of warfare. At the same time, it overlooks the divisions within the ranks of Pakistan's "traditional Muslims". Any effort to provide material support would flounder at the first hurdle of who to distribute it to. But one practical and realistic suggestion the Barelvis did raise was of moral support from the wider community of Islamic leadership. Despite their numbers, the Barelvis are in danger of being bullied into silence. Their stance makes them appear as government - and therefore Western - stooges. Their opponents portray them as quietist fatalists who are unwilling to stand up for the honour of Islam. And if their opponents dominate the public Islamic discourse - as they are on course to do - anyone in Pakistan who opposes armed insurrection against the state and a fight to the death against anything that hints of tolerance, moderation and discourse will be forced into silence. The medium term consequences for Pakistan, the region and the international community will be dire.

This weekend, I went to the local coffeeshop to read two documents which I had previously skimmed but to which I wanted to devote more attention and felt deserved a closer reading. The first is the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 report, a paper that has gotten a lot of attention in policy circles for its blunt conclusions regarding the future environment. The second is Hizballah's new political manifesto [English, Arabic], a long-awaited update to the 1985 "Open Letter".

Reading the two documents in tandem was striking. First, there were some similarities. Both documents, for example, were quite bearish on the United States of America. The NIC report predicts a multipolar world in 2025 in which the United States is still the strongest but not the dominant power. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States’ relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline and US leverage will become more constrained". 

The introduction to Hizballah's new manifesto, meanwhile, states that "it's possible to say that we are amid historical transformations that predict the retreat of the US role as an omnipotent power, the break of the unipolar system and the historical immediate demise of the Zionist entity".

[يمكن القول: إننا في سياق تحولات تاريخية تُنذر بتراجع الولايات المتحدة الأميركية كقوة مهيمنة، وتحلُّل نظام القطب الواحد المهيمن، وبداية تشكّل مسار الأفول التاريخي المتسارع للكيان الصهيوني]

But whereas the NIC report -- together with most serious scholars of international relations -- is preparing for a post-American world, Hizballah's manifesto reveals a myopic obsession with the United States and an inability to view the politics of the Middle East through any lens other than American hegemony. At times, the manifesto reads like someone threw Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine into a blender with Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and hit "purée". What results is an incoherent, derivative mess. Take this peach of a section:

"The most dangerous aspect in the western hegemony -- the American one precisely -- is that they consider themselves owners of the world and therefore, this expanding strategy along with the economic-capitalist project has become a "western expanding strategy" that turned to be an international scheme of limitless greed.

 

Savage capitalism forces -- embodied mainly in international monopoly networks of companies that cross the nations and continents, networks of various international establishments especially the financial ones backed by superior military force have led to more contradictions and conflicts -- of which not less important -- are the conflicts of identities, cultures, civilizations, in addition to the conflicts of poverty and wealth."

 

إنّ أخطر ما في منطق الهيمنة الغربي عموماً، والأميركي تحديداً، هو اعتباره منذ الأساس أنه يمتلك العالم وأنّ له حق الهيمنة من منطلق التفوق في أكثر من مجال، ولذا باتت الإستراتيجية التوسعية الغربية - وبخاصة الأميركية - ومع اقترانها بالمشروع الإقتصادي الرأسمالي إستراتيجيةً عالميةَ الطابع، لا حدود لأطماعها وجشعها.

إنّ تحكّم قوى الرأسمالية المتوحشة، المتمثلة على نحوٍ رئيسٍ بشبكات الإحتكارات الدُّولية من شركات عابرة للقوميات بل وللقارات، والمؤسسات الدُّولية المتنوعة، وخصوصاً المالية منها والمدعومة بقوة فائقة عسكرياً، أدى الى المزيد من التناقضات والصراعات الجذرية، ليس أقلها اليوم: صراعات الهويات والثقافات وأنماط الحضارات، إلى جانب صراعات الغنى والفقر.

You'll note I am including the Arabic text here. I do not want you to think this dog's dinner is some trick of translation. [And I myself am excerpting from the translation provided by Hizballah.]

Now there are two possible explanations for why Hizballah dedicates an entire third of their manifesto to whining about American hegemony after the rest of the world -- including U.S. policy-makers -- got the memo that U.S. power is on the wane. The first explanation is that Hizballah is simply saying, like a good proxy, what they think the Iranians want them to say. Iran wants to frame all tensions in the region in terms of U.S. hegemony, which allows it to avoid talking about internal tensions and answering questions like why all Iran's Arab neighbors can't buy U.S. weapons systems fast enough in the face of Iranian ascendancy. (Even though that's kind of tough to do on a day when -- oh, irony -- U.S. oil companies get frozen out of Iraq's largest oil rights auction in years.) And lord knows, it serves the interests of no one in either Iran or Hizballah to start saying something real about the security environment in the Middle East, because that would mean talking about things like Saudi-Iranian tensions, Saudi-Syrian tensions, Sunni-Shia tensions and a host of other politically sensitive topics that might offend your sponsors or further upset sectarian tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere. Focusing on the American imperial project is, intellectually and politically, a lot easier. This means, of course, that an organization that's plenty brave on the battlefield is pretty cowardly when it comes to rhetorically confronting, head on, what's really going on in their country and in their region.

There's something else here, though. Reading the manifesto alongside the 2025 report, I came to the conclusion that Hizballah is, while steadily maturing as a military actor, still hopelessly immature as a political actor. There is absolutely zero introspection in this manifesto, and whereas the NIC report was war-gamed in countless planning exercises and workshops -- including one held in China, for goodness sake! -- and arrived at conclusions most U.S. policy-makers would find inconvenient at best, Hizballah's manifesto reflects an organization that basically sat down among themselves to write a bunch of stuff that confirms all previously held assumptions and takes no brave or ground-breaking stand on any major issue confronting the Middle East.

If you look at Hizballah's flag, you'll note it says "The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon" at the bottom. Once upon a time, though, it read "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon". I think they changed this because it made everyone so nervous. Well, everyone can sleep easy, because there is nothing revolutionary about this militia-cum-political party anymore. Hizballah is just as much a part of the calcified political landscape of the Middle East as Hosni Mubarak. This cliché-spewing manifesto -- "American terrorism is the origin of all terrorism in the world", says the organization that popularized suicide bombings -- only serves to confirm that. Maybe this manifesto was intended to appeal to Western leftists -- until, presumably, those leftists remember Hizballah is a religious fundamentalist organization. But the effect is to make Hizballah seem stuck in 2003, unable to confront the hard internal challenges facing the Middle East as a region and still reliant on a U.S. bogeyman to justify all its actions and rhetoric.

A movie by that name opens today. But Spec. Brandon Marrocco, I believe, truly embodies the word. This guy is incredible.

Here you go...

Final/Not for distribution  Statement of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry Before the House Armed Services

Londonstani spent most of the summer on a housing estate clinging to the outskirts of Bristol. The job in hand was to investigate racism for a documentary by living as an immigrant in the kind of area many recent arrivals are housed in by local councils. But the experience also shed light on how the process of radicalisation plays out on the streets of modern Britain. Considering the recent debate about Prevent in the UK, Londonstani thinks it'll be useful to share his observations.

British readers will have little difficulty guessing Londonstani's identity from this post, but he would very much appreciate they keep it to themselves as full disclosure will threaten continued posting from Pakistan.

(preemptive apologies to Ma Exum and Lady Muqawama for some of the language in this post)

I'm used to hearing people in the Muslim world talk about life in Britain as a utopian fantasy. In Pakistan, on a daily basis, i hear rich and poor people talk about Britain's civilised society, it's impartial justice system and the humanitarian founding principles of a health system that provides care for all. Sometimes, I try to inject a little realism into the discussion by pointing out our social problems and the frequent complaints about the deteriorating quality of the country's social services. But I can almost see the words bounce off people's glazed expressions. This is not restricted to Pakistan. Even people in more stable countries like Egypt allow themselves to think of life in a developed economy as a heaven-like dream.

This summer, I saw reality hit home for those few who make it to Britain. I was sitting at a bus stop on the edge of Bristol's Southmead Estate. Beside me was a Sudanese man with his young daughter, who seemed about six years old. We sat on the same bench as he asked her about school and her homework. He had no reason to think I understood his northern Sudanese Arabic dialect, and I felt guilty being an unintended party to a private conversation between a father who looked like he'd just finished a long shift as a security guard at a supermarket and a child, who was plainly excited to be out with her father. 

I reached into the paint-splattered overalls that were meant to make me look like a Pakistani immigrant doing odd jobs to survive in his new home and pulled out a cigarette, hoping that leaning against the bus stop away from the Sudanese family would let me tune out of their conversation. On the other side of the road was another bus stop. A group of local girls, none older than 15, were talking to each other loudly. Amongst all the squealing, the only words I could make out were "fuck", "bastard" and "cunt". Occasionally one of the girls would pull her skirt up at a passing car of boys and the others would cheer and hand her a bottle of brightly coloured liquor to swig from. Every now and again, one of the cars would stop and another girl might stand in front of the passenger window and pull down her top. The boys would try and persuade them to get in. Eventually, two of the girls got into a crowded little car with wide tyres and lowered suspension.

I had been absent mindedly watching the events in front of us. After the car drove away, the Sudanese father turned to his daughter and said; "That's what English girls are like. Never talk to people like that."

A few days later at the same bus stop, two Indian low-grade computer technicians were discussing their new home. They probably assumed I understood their Hindi, but they didn't seem to care. They spoke of near daily verbal abuse and friends who had been attacked by teenage thugs.  England, they decided, wasn't what they thought it was. Just before they got on their bus, a group of teenagers outside the chip shop behind us proved the technicians' point by rounding on a passing elderly local.

"Look out, he's a perv," shouted one boy. Before another pushed the girl standing next to him in front of the old man and said, "I bet you wish you could fuck her". They all then burst into laughter.

Southmead is the Britain that most people do not see. This is perhaps understandable if you live abroad. But judging from comments after the broadcast of the documentary, people in Britain's more affluent areas are unaware of what happens in neighbourhoods literally on their doorsteps. The little attention places like Southmead merit on the public's radar, is inversely proportional to their physical presence. Places like Southmead exist on the borders of every British city and inside the largest ones. A very large proportion of Britain's immigrants live in places like Southmead and a sizeable chunk of the white population has grown up in similar surroundings. 

I saw these surroundings at close quarters. Hundreds of cans of high-strength cider littered the streets every Saturday and Sunday. I saw unemployed drunken youths accost shoppers in the mornings. The green spaces that looked inviting from afar were littered with used condoms, pregnancy test kits and the excrement of pitbull dogs that were popular pets amongst residents. In the daytime, teenage mothers pushed young children around the estate. I saw the partner of one young mother call a toddler a "fucking little shit" before smacking him hard enough on the back of the head to make the child drop to his knees and cover his head in the expectation of further violence. In the early evenings, young teenagers would sit at benches swigging from bottles of cheap alcohol. On one occasion, I became their target.

As an immigrant in Southmead, segregating yourself and your family was an act of self preservation. Two young British-born Pakistani boys I talked to told me earnestly that they were good because "we aint got no white friends". There were many helpful and kind local people living on the estate. But the few I bumped into were often quick to distance themselves from their environment. A retired man who used to try to talk to me every morning at another bus stop would freeze when tatooed men with aggressive dogs walked by. Young mothers who used the same stop would talk about needing to move out "for the sake of the kids".

The impulse to segregate was compounded by the messages that seemed to reinforce the idea that the treatment in Southmead reflected the mood and views of the rest of Britain. "Hundreds of thousands of migrants here for handouts, says senior judge". "Britain paying migrants £1,700 to return home BEFORE they've even got here" "The violent new breed of migrants who will let nothing stop them coming to Britain" These headlines were just three of many that were printed in the Mail, a right-wing daily during my time in Southmead. I don't usually take much notice of the headlines in the Sun and the Mail unless they are truly shocking, but in Southmead the headlines seemed to have an impact on the treatment we received. The level of low-level hostility from adults seemed to be directly linked to the content of the headlines. More outright hostility from younger adults and children followed a day or so later.

Walking around the estate, I often thought of British Pakistani and Somali boys growing up thinking their experiences were an accurate portrayal of what Britain was about. I imagined growing up with such a view of Britain would make the idea of fighting UK forces in Muslim lands seem righteous. On the battlefields of Iraq and/or Afghanistan, the young soldiers they would face would likely include the white youngsters who joined up hoping the army was their way out of Southmead.

But the army wasn't the only way out. There was also religion. If you decide that the dysfunctional reality of Southmead is a product of a permissive society, austere religion is a logical answer.

I met one man from Southmead who had made that decision. A local man had embraced a strict form of Islam. He told me that the problems of the area resulted from weak family values and a moral laxity that allowed the misuse of drugs and alcohol. Islam had provided him a way out and a template for a better life than the one he had seen growing up. Although we talked for literally minutes, it was easy to tell I was talking to a mature adult who made a considered decision that had helped him live as a productive and responsible member of society.

I heard of at least another local man who had embraced Islam. I didn't meet him but I read about him in the newspapers while he was on trial for trying to bomb a shopping centre in the city. When police raided his flat they found a suicide vest and explosives hidden in a biscuit tin.

Andrew Ibrahim is the son of middle class parents, who news reports said were Egyptian Christians. During the trial, a picture emerged of a young man with serious emotional and drug abuse problems. It was a picture I had come across before when looking at a new emerging breed of extremists who came from criminal backgrounds and actively sought out extremist Islam as a way of depicting their activities as more than mere criminality and a route to a new identity as warriors in a cosmic battle.

News reports said Ibrahim described the UK as a "dirty toilet". How much of his view was influenced by the surroundings of his upbringing?

The judge presiding over the trial, which ended with Ibrahim getting a life term, summed up the prosecution's portrayal of Ibrahim as one of a young man who suffered a disturbed adolescence and went on to become lonely, angry and alienated from society. The description could fit any number of young men in Southmead and other places like it. Not all will turn to extremism, but they will likely be drawn to other forms of angry destructive behaviour.

The ingredients that make a British terrorist are numerous, interact with each other in different ways and are changing constantly. Just looking at "Britishness" or identity fails to take into account the growing numbers of extremists that are emerging from non-Muslim backgrounds. But what affects one person doesn't necessarily affect another. Ibrahim's brother Peter was reported to be a Oxbridge educated lawyer. But whatever the ingredients are, it was clear from my time in Southmead that it's easier to find them in places that suffer social deprivation. And the UK has many of them.

The discussion about Muslim immigrants turning to extremism often centres around them not wanting to integrate into British life. But it never addresses the fact that many come with high hopes of a new life, and find reality bitterly dispiriting. They come to take advantage of social mobility and a law-abiding society to build a better life for their families. They end up feeling they need to protect their families from the very society they had idolised. Why don't they go home? Many people I met from more stable parts of the world talked about it "after saving enough". But like others before them, chances are that they will stay. People who had come with a fantasy of Britain ended just seeing it as an opportunity to earn and a contagion to avoid.

Government policy seeks to target resources to fix problems in the most cost effective manner. However, the problem of extremism now involves society as a whole. Pre 9/11 it was limited to a section of a section of the population. That has grown with the advent of the Iraq war and the emergence of an image of Muslim militants as righteous men ready to stand against a superpower and the ability to make the established powers of the world look impotent. It's an image that appeals to people of diverse backgrounds who are disillusioned with their societies. People who aren't necessarily observant Muslims, or even Muslims at all. But at the same time, the increasingly obvious bloodlust of the men and women drawn to the cause has alienated most Muslims.

What does that mean for initiatives like Operation Contest's Prevent aspect? (thanks davidpfbo) On the one hand, allies and partners are easier to identify, but the work that needs to be done has to reach out to more people and address wider issues in our society. Despite the protests of individual voices lobbying for the adoption of their own outlook, work on identity, engagement with more authentic Islamic voices and community work (including seemingly unconnected activities like sports) all have a roll to play. The undertaking is huge and constant fine tuning is vital. It also involves sums that the British government will struggle to find.

The UK's Department of Communities and Local Government is conducting an enquiry into the UK's government's Prevent strategy, one strand of the government's overall plan to tackle terrorism and its causes.

Before relocating to Pakistan, Londonstani spent a fair amount of time looking at extremism in the UK as well as efforts to counter it. Prevent seems to have started out very much as a "work in progress", meaning that the idea was to try a bunch of stuff and see how it played out before fine tuning the strategy. The broadbrush approach has drawn in community partners with differing views on the nature of the problem.

The way to see Prevent, Londonstani thinks, is as an effort by the government to draw in partners to help it understand an issue it realised was beyond its present capacity. The problem is that the partners might have had a snap-shot understanding of the areas in which they operate but who also lacked an overall understanding of the problem. This isn't a criticism of any given group - the problem is vast and the issues involved in it are manifold and constantly evolving.

Among the submissions to the enquiry are some interesting points made by the Quilliam Foundation, an influential think tank in the UK.

The argument that radicalisation is driven by grievances, in particular about foreign policy and the idea that of a "War on Islam", is a popular one but one that is undermined by a comparison between Britain and America. If British foreign policy feeds into a narrative of a "War on Islam" then America's foreign policy must also equally or more so. Yet, despite American Muslims sharing British Muslims' concerns about a "War on Islam"[5], America has seen nothing like the home-grown 7/7 attacks. This can be explained by the greater accessibility immigrants to America have to a shared identity built on universal values than is granted to immigrants to Britain.

Quilliam, to take this example, is very keen on the "inclusive British identity" approach. Others think extremists rise from disadvantaged communities and the main focus should be based on social services that tackle education, social exclusion etc.

However, Quilliam's above statement is a good example of the superficial nature of present extremism analysis. How does the greater accessibility that American universal values are supposed to offer immigrants explain events at Ft. Hood? An isolated incident? Well, what about, Najibullah Zazi, who planned "Mumbai-on-the-Hudson" with help from extremists in Pakistan. Or, Byran Neal Venas, a Hispanic American convert, who was captured in Afghanistan and admitted to helping with initial plans to launch an attack in the US. Or David Hedley, an American who planned to kill an editor at the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen. If he had managed, the US would have joined the list of nations that have become a launching pad for extremist violence.

Read Peter Bergen's Foreign Policy article where he outlines these cases and others in more detail and effectively makes the case that the US has basically just been lucky so far. And as we know, luck is no basis from which to argue for policy direction.

Drawing together lots of views and opinions is definitely a good approach, but Londonstani doesn't envy the people who have to navigate all the competing interests and ideologies that underlay the different views and come out with a better policy.

Big time attack in Rawalpindi today, where Londonstani went for eid prayers a couple of days ago. The BBC is reporting 32 dead in an attack on a mosque. People are calling relatives frantically. The mobile network is creaking under the strain of the extra calls.

After the eid holidays, militants seem to have decided to let everyone know they are still a force to be reckoned with. Maybe they had a point to prove after recent comments by government officials that they had scored major successes in the Waziristan operation, which were then repeated by senior US and British officials.

Pakistani TV station Geo News is saying that at least two attackers entered a mosque used by army officers during Friday prayers and started firing on worshippers and throwing hand grenades.

More details and analysis to come, but initially it looks like a message from militants that the army's efforts haven't dimmed their capacity to carry out the sort of well executed and professional attacks they used in the storming of GHQ in the same city in October.

Interior Ministry Rehman Malik has just given a press conference where he reitered bland statements along the lines of "We are going after the people responsible".. "these people aren't Muslims. They attacked a mosque!! etc etc" It looks like he failed to answer the urgent concerns of journalists who asked about whether this is related to Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The journalists also wondered whether Shia processions to mark Muharram in the next few weeks will be targeted by militants. Londonstani is in Lahore today, a big Muharram procession takes place here every year. Local people in the old city, where thousands of Shia mark the occassion in narrow streets were saying they have received drect threats.

Is anyone else thinking Algeria 1990s?

UPDATE: Geo is reporting a general is among the dead. It's worth keeping in mind that Geo has a habit of reporting first and checking later.

Oh, for goodness sake. Nathan Hodge starts by asking some fair questions about where defense and foreign policy think tanks get their money. (And has a kind word or two for this blogger. Back at you, Danger Room!) But Matthew Yglesias takes things a step too far. If he thinks this blogger -- or anyone else advocating the U.S. military take population-centric counterinsurgency more seriously -- is in the pocket of the military-industrial complex, he does not understand the acquisitions implications of an institutional move toward COIN, a form of warfare in which expensive weapons platforms like the F-22 have little utility.

On the other hand, I guess this is good news. After being accused of being a Luddite for the past three years, I must be doing something right if people are now tying me and my opinions to large defense contractors. I think you're going to have a very tough time, though, arguing that those making the case for a fundamentally low-tech COIN campaign in Afghanistan are carrying water for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, & Co. I very much doubt big defense corporations are charmed by this researcher saying things like language and cultural training matter as much as or more than the latest and greatest piece of military hardware.

I think this is another case of "they disagree with me on policy, therefore they must be intellectually dishonest". Or, hey, maybe we instead have a different set of assumptions, educations and experiences which lead us toward different conclusions. Maybe. (I'm just going to throw that out there as a possibility.) Anyway, I would ponder this question more but have to first go hop in the bathtub filled with gold Krugerrands donated to me by General Dynamics in thanks for my service to the evil military industrial complex.

Or, instead, I'm about to take the metro home to southeast DC. One of the two.

Update: Yglesias writes in.

I feel like you've engaged in a really egregious misreading of my post. I don't understand how you read the observation that "Even if you assume that nobody in the system is corrupt or dishonest, the system itself contains a systematic bias in favor of military action and against counsels of restraint" as an accusation of intellectual dishonesty. I also don't know why you read the post as specifically about advocates of population-centric counterinsurgency. At any rate, it's certainly true that spending $600 billion per anum on a military organized around COIN is less profitable for defense contractors than is spending $600 billion per anum on a military organized around heavy weapons systems. But my post was about a systematic bias in favor of military activism, rather than a foreign policy of restraint, which would be cheaper than either.

I think the headline hacked me off more than anything else, to which Yglesias replied, "Attention-grabbing headlines are perhaps not always the best way to make a point about a complicated issue." Anyway, I'm probably being too sensitive. But I should point out that a) CNAS makes the names of its corporate donors public, b) CNAS has over 100 donors and c) no single one of those donors contributes more than 5% of our budget. (And d), donors don't have editorial control. Obviously.)

In keeping with my abstinence from daily blogging, I will not have any in-depth comments on the president's speech tonight or tomorrow morning, but I was struck by President Obama's reference to Eisenhower. His words:

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

I was riding back from an event today with a retired Marine Corps officer friend of mine when we started discussing Eisenhower's guidance to Project Solarium:

1. I will not accept any strategy which undermines the economic foundation of this country.
2. I will not accept any strategy which assumes we will emerge from a war better off than when we entered.
3. I will not accept any strategy which must go forward without the consent and support of our key allies.

I do not know if President Eisenhower would have agreed with the current president's direction on Afghanistan, but I think he would have certainly recognized the considerations behind his decision-making process.