Center for a New American Security

When Sen. Barack Obama was running for president, it emerged that one of his informal advisors, former Clinton official Rob Malley, had met with members of Hamas as part of his work with International Crisis Group. The right-wing media went bezerk, and the Obama campaign distanced itself from Malley, a respected scholar and former diplomat.

Now we learn one of Perry's informal advisors, Gen. (Ret.) Peter Pace, has been shilling for the terrorist group Mujahedeen Khalq along with a boatload of other people from both sides of the aisle -- including former Obama Administration National Security Advisor Gen. (Ret.) Jim Jones. 

What is the appropriate response here? Should Gov. Perry distance himself from those who have associated with and advocated on behalf of Mujahedeen Khalq?

Uh, no. In his column today, Joe Nocera writes:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

 

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.

Terrorism is defined by Bard O'Neill as "the threat of physical coercion, primarily against noncombatants, especially civilians, to create fear in order to achieve various political objectives." That's a pretty solid definition, and though the Tea Party has certainly relied on other forms of coercion to get its way, in effect threatening to destroy the global financial system, it has never resorted to force or the threat of force. Calling Tea Partiers terrorists is, at the very least, incorrect. Using the term "jihad," meanwhile, is even more fraught with peril. I often suggest people go consult the Encyclopedia of Islam entry for the word before using it themselves. Nocera, meanwhile, is just using it to score cheap rhetorical points.

I have a lot of trouble saying anything good about the Tea Party. The Tea Party -- and the obstructionism and rigid adherence to orthodoxy it represents -- has done more to undermine U.S. economic, diplomatic and military power than al-Qaeda.* That is no exaggeration. But using words like "terrorists" and "jihad" to describe the Tea Party helps no one. They further poison the American discourse, and they also make life really difficult on people like me who spend a lot of time parsing terms like "terrorism" and "jihad" in the face of others who throw those terms around carelessly.

Joe Nocera should continue to criticize the Tea Party, but he should apologize for the language in his op-ed today.

***

Earlier this morning, I approvingly linked to Nocera's op-ed on my Twitter account. And indeed, I largely agree with everything in the op-ed aside from the language in the introductory and concluding paragraphs. But I should have stated more clearly, from the beginning, that Nocera's clumsy use of such loaded language was at best unhelpful and at worst as irresponsible as the language so often used by Nocera's antagonists.

*I actually did back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the amount the United States will pay over a 10-year period if our debt is downgraded (about $1 trillion), the number of projected cuts to our national defense budget ($700+ million), etc. And I cannot estimate the degree to which the international system -- to include the markets -- now has a lack of faith in the ability of the United States to govern itself. Or the degree to which economic growth will now slow because we are cutting discretionary spending but not making the long-term structural changes (cutting entitlements, raising revenues) necessary for long-term fiscal health. I mean, if you think that we can cut short-term public expenditures and it's not going to have an effect on the private sector, I sell bottles of snake oil that might interest you. But don't just take my word -- take the word of the guy who helps run PIMCO. More on the market fall-out here. More here.

This one comes via a Russian jihadist website:

Success in guerrilla warfare (the conduct of combat operations on territory occupied by the enemy) by the will of God largely depends on the help of the local population.

Успехи партизанской войны (ведение боевых действий на территории, оккупированной врагом), по воле Аллаха во многом зависят от помощи местного населения.

Note to the person who wrote this: blowing yourself up in the subways used by the local population is probably not the most effective way to gain their support. (Thanks, Dan.)

Tom Friedman's column today about how we can build more schools and defeat terrorism is one of those things that sounds right but probably isn't. Leave aside the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- by Friedman's own admission, the only reason he is in Yemen right now -- is a graduate of University College London and the product of a superb secondary education before that. Alan B. Krueger and others have shown that the causal relationship between education and terrorism is weak. Very well-educated men and women can fall under the sway of extremist ideologies and go on to do evil things -- like blow up airliners and buy Coldplay albums.

This is no reason not to build schools. Building schools is a lovely thing, and as the great Greg Mortenson pointed out to me in Kabul once, when you teach little girls to read, you teach entire villages to read. (Because the girls teach their mothers.) And female literacy then leads to a healthy drop in birth rates and less poverty. That's all wonderful. Education transforms societies. But education only has a place in counterinsurgency -- most naturally a subfield of stabilization operations -- if you can prove that a lack of schools is a driver of conflict. And as far as counter-terrorism is concerned, well, the idea that more schools will lead to a drop in terrorism remains one of those things that sounds good when discussed at dinner parties but has yet to be proven and is, if we are to trust our research thus far, most likely false.

[All that having been said, allow me to stress once again that building schools in underdeveloped societies is something we should all support. Maybe not for reasons of counter-terrorism or counterinsurgency but for more altruistic reasons. So everyone buy Greg Mortenson's new book to help the cause, okay?]

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?":

Rep. Peter King wonders whose side Eric Holder is on with respect to the investigation into alleged torture conducted by our intelligence agencies. That's all fine and good, and I am glad Rep. King is so tough on Islamist terrorism, but I imagine there are those in the United Kingdom who wonder whose side King was on in the 1980s when he shamelessly carried the PIRA's water.

"You will have thousands of lives that will be lost, and the blood will be on Eric Holder's hands," he said.

Civilians killed during The Troubles (1968-1998): 1,857 (and an additional 705 from an army currently fighting alongside U.S. Marines in Helmand Province, Afghanistan)

Uh oh. The Scots-Irish and the Scots are falling out over terrorism. I don't even need to ask my relatives where they stand on this issue.

The Megrahi affair has highlighted the sometimes ambivalent relations between Americans and Scots. Millions of Americans claim Scottish descent and sociologists regard the Scots-Ulster heritage as a key ingredient of US culture, particularly in the rural south.

A Friends of Scotland caucus, with its own tartan, has 50 members in the US congress. Its leaders were in Scotland last week at the invitation of the Salmond government.

In Scotland itself, nationalists who include Mr Salmond have, however, criticised the folksy “whisky-and-shortbread” image of Scotland among their American cousins.

[Speaking of Inglourious Basterds, did any of you notice the theme music from The Battle of Algiers? It starts playing when they bust Hugo Stiglitz out of jail. One of the reason I love Tarantino is because of those little nods to classic movies, most of which I am sure I miss.]

James Brandon of our* very own Quilliam Foundation has an article out in the Sentinel arguing that the self-starting terror attacks launched out of the UK weren't actually all that self-starting.

As the press release sent out by the Quilliam Foundation says: "Brandon’s research shows that, while the leaders of terrorist plots such as the 7-7 and 21-7 bomb plots were mostly radicalised in the UK, they acquired their key bomb-making skills directly from al-Qaeda members in the Afghanistan and Pakistan region."

The bit that caught Londonstani's eye (because it seems to contradict what he found in six months of intensive meet and greets) was that: "evidence suggests that al-Qaeda continues to operate through a traditional hierarchical structure based on face-to-face contact – and that it may even still be able to directly recruit British Muslims at street-level in the UK."

But then the body of the article doesn't seem to substantiate that particular press release claim.

Most of the article seems culled from old press reports. And it fills Londonstani with dread when he sees academic type papers (supposedly serious) quoting as sources newspapers like the Independent, The Telegraph and The Mail (broke and don't really even try to pretend to be serious).

* By "our" the author is referring to the organisation's Britishness. And is not implying that Abu Muqawma owns the Quilliam Foundation, in any sense of the word. Promise.

Okay, I will admit that I had never even heard of the Continuity IRA until yesterday. (So many forms of the IRA: the IRA, the PIRA, the RIRA, the OIRA, the anti-treaty IRA ...) One of the things I have noticed while reading these reports on the events in Northern Ireland -- besides how unified the peoples of Northern Ireland seem to be at the moment against violence -- is the way in which these splinter groups are dangerous because of the way they attract young men looking for a purpose. While some revolutionary movements have broad appeal and legitimacy, many of the world's militant groups we see are mostly collections of young men looking for meaning to their lives. In this way, of course, terrorist groups are a lot like the United State Marine Corps. But whereas the latter applies disciplined violence in the service of both the status quo and a democratic process, the former apply more or less indisciplined violence against the status quo and often with few checks or controls over behavior. I realize this is one of the more obvious observations this blog has ever made. But as I read these stories out of Northern Ireland, I find myself wondering whether or not the key issue in combating terror is combating the "disaffected young men" problem. I suspect this problem will get worse, not better, with unemployment rising throughout the developed world.

By the way, Edward Gorman has it right.

Easily the most eerie aspect of the last couple of days for me has been the sound on my car radio of Martin McGuinness, allegedly once a senior IRA commander, sounding just like a Northern Ireland Secretary of State from the Eighties.

I think this is because McGuinness knows these attacks are as much a challenge to Sinn Féin as they are to British rule.

I feel bad for posting on top of Charlie's rather amusing State Department transcript (see below), but Crisis Group has a must-read report on Lebanon's Palestinian camps:

Palestinian camps are another instrument in the regional tug of war. For the West and its Lebanese allies who currently hold power, challenging the status quo in the camps is one way of advancing both Lebanon’s sovereignty and the cause of disarming all groups, Hizbollah included. The internal Palestinian conflict opposing Fatah and Hamas also manifests itself in the camps. For Syria, some of the Palestinian armed groups are cards to be used both in the context of negotiations with Israel and as allies on the Lebanese domestic scene. Finally, the spread of militant Islamist groups within the camps suggests they are becoming recruiting grounds for international jihadist movements.

The trick here, of course, is in the recommendations. (The report mentions tawtin -- a word virtually guaranteed to cause panic in some circles in Lebanon, especially in the run-up to June elections.) But the person I assume to be the lead author of the report, Sandrine Gamblin, is the author of an influential Crisis Group report on the Sinai that provided much-needed nuance on the terror attacks that have crippled Egypt's tourism industry. So without passing judgment on the policy recommendations put forth at the beginning and end of the document, I'll just say that this report is worth your time if only for the discussion of the problem.