Center for a New American Security

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.