Organisation was there none. It is a chimera. It was created by those you trust (!) to justify military intervention.
2.3 THE RISE OF BIN LADIN AND AL QAEDA (1988-1992)
A decade of conflict in Afghanistan, from 1979 to 1989, gave Islamist extremists a rallying point and training field. A Communist government in Afghanistan gained power in 1978 but was unable to establish enduring control. At the end of 1979, the Soviet government sent in military units to ensure that the country would remain securely under Moscow's influence. The response was an Afghan national resistance movement that defeated Soviet forces.19
Young Muslims from around the world flocked to Afghanistan to join as volunteers in what was seen as a "holy war"-jihad-against an invader. The largest numbers came from the Middle East. Some were Saudis, and among them was Usama Bin Ladin.
Twenty-three when he arrived in Afghanistan in 1980, Bin Ladin was the seventeenth of 57 children of a Saudi construction magnate. Six feet five and thin, Bin Ladin appeared to be ungainly but was in fact quite athletic, skilled as a horseman, runner, climber, and soccer player. He had attended Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. By some accounts, he had been interested there in religious studies, inspired by tape recordings of fiery sermons by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian and a disciple of Qutb. Bin Ladin was conspicuous among the volunteers not because he showed evidence of religious learning but because he had access to some of his family's huge fortune. Though he took part in at least one actual battle, he became known chiefly as a person who generously helped fund the anti-Soviet jihad.20
Bin Ladin understood better than most of the volunteers the extent to which the continuation and eventual success of the jihad in Afghanistan depended on an increasingly complex, almost worldwide organization. This organization included a financial support network that came to be known as the "Golden Chain," put together mainly by financiers in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. Donations flowed through charities or other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Bin Ladin and the "Afghan Arabs" drew largely on funds raised by this network, whose agents roamed world markets to buy arms and supplies for the mujahideen, or "holy warriors."21
Mosques, schools, and boardinghouses served as recruiting stations in many parts of the world, including the United States. Some were set up by Islamic extremists or their financial backers. Bin Ladin had an important part in this activity. He and the cleric Azzam had joined in creating a "Bureau of Services" (Mektab al Khidmat, or MAK), which channeled recruits into Afghanistan.22
The international environment for Bin Ladin's efforts was ideal. Saudi Arabia and the United States supplied billions of dollars worth of secret assistance to rebel groups in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupation. This assistance was funneled through Pakistan: the Pakistani military intelligence service (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISID), helped train the rebels and distribute the arms. But Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States.23
April 1988 brought victory for the Afghan jihad. Moscow declared it would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan within the next nine months. As the Soviets began their withdrawal, the jihad's leaders debated what to do next.
Bin Ladin and Azzam agreed that the organization successfully created for Afghanistan should not be allowed to dissolve. They established what they called a base or foundation (al Qaeda) as a potential general headquarters for future jihad.24 Though Azzam had been considered number one in the MAK, by August 1988 Bin Ladin was clearly the leader (emir) of al Qaeda. This organization's structure included as its operating arms an intelligence component, a military committee, a financial committee, a political committee, and a committee in charge of media affairs and propaganda. It also had an Advisory Council (Shura) made up of Bin Ladin's inner circle.25
Bin Ladin's assumption of the helm of al Qaeda was evidence of his growing self-confidence and ambition. He soon made clear his desire for unchallenged control and for preparing the mujahideen to fight anywhere in the world. Azzam, by contrast, favored continuing to fight in Afghanistan until it had a true Islamist government. And, as a Palestinian, he saw Israel as the top priority for the next stage.26
Whether the dispute was about power, personal differences, or strategy, it ended on November 24, 1989, when a remotely controlled car bomb killed Azzam and both of his sons. The killers were assumed to be rival Egyptians. The outcome left Bin Ladin indisputably in charge of what remained of the MAK and al Qaeda.27
The country needs its best young men and women, now, to deal with the disaster in the Gulf states. Unfortunately they mostly have been sent overseas to kill foreigners, by the criminal in the White House.
Mr Bush, you are a bigger disaster for your country than even I realised.
A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."
I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?
I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history" and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.
One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.
The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?
I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.
The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.
Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)
The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.
One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?
THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:
"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.
Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.
I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"
I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)
There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.
It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.
Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.
At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.
Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent: There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So that's easy enough.
The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .
DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:
(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.
(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.
(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)
(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.
(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.
(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.
(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.
(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.
It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.
The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. A recent essay of his appears in the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, newly published by the University of California Press.
Adding the name "McTag" after the name "Hillary Clinton" would be appropriate if McTag were to ever run for election somewhere.
Quote:Adding the name "McTag" after the name "Hillary Clinton" would be appropriate if McTag were to ever run for election somewhere.
What is this? Damnation by association?
Shame.
In a Corner of Pakistan a Debate Rages: Are Terrorist Camps Still Functioning?
By DAVID ROHDE and CARLOTTA GALL
Published: August 28, 2005
MANSEHRA DISTRICT, Pakistan - Mujahid Mohiyuddin insists that he and his district are innocent.
Speaking in his religious seminary, or madrassa, in the Mansehra district of northern Pakistan, the young cleric admitted receiving military training in 1996 from Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, or Movement for Holy Warriors, a Pakistani group linked to Al Qaeda and the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.
Scott Eells for The New York Times
Sher Ali, in a Kabul jail, described a system in Pakistan that trains fighters and sends them to Afghanistan.
But he insisted that the group had disbanded and that training camps no longer operated in the district. "The government has imposed restrictions on the holy war," he said. "There are not any training camps in the country, especially Mansehra."
This picturesque area of rolling Himalayan foothills, thick forests and isolated farms is the focus of bitter charges that Pakistan continues to allow terrorist training camps to operate on its soil.
During the past year, Taliban prisoners captured in Afghanistan, opposition politicians in Pakistan and Afghan and Indian government officials have said repeatedly that training camps are active in the Mansehra district and other parts of Pakistan, while Pakistani officials vehemently deny they exist.
Last summer, a young Pakistani captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan said in an interview with The New York Times that he was trained in the Mansehra district by the group Mr. Mohiyuddin said had been disbanded. An armed Pakistani captured in Afghanistan told a private Afghan television channel in June that he had been trained there.
In July, two militants told a Pakistani journalist working on contract for The New York Times that they met one of the July 7 London bombing suspects, Shehzad Tanweer, on a trip to a militant training camp in the Mansehra district last winter. Three Pakistanis recently sentenced to prison terms in Afghanistan for trying to assassinate the American ambassador said they had been trained in the district, an Afghan intelligence official said.
Another Pakistani captured in Afghanistan this month said he had been trained in the Mansehra district.
Sher Ali, a 28-year-old night watchman from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province who was caught in July on his way to join the mujahedeen, described his training in an interview in a Kabul jail.
The interview took place in an office at the prison on Aug. 14, with no guards present. Mr. Ali described a seemingly underground system in Pakistan that trains fighters and sends them into Afghanistan. He said he met an Afghan at a friend's house in Miranshah, in Pakistan's tribal areas of North Waziristan, a lawless mountain region in which Pakistan says it has deployed 70,000 troops to hunt for militants.
After receiving directions from the Afghan, he journeyed alone to a camp hidden in the mountains above the Mansehra district. "Nowadays they don't have legal camps," he said. "I got the feeling it was a very secret place."
He was given directions and walked for three hours until he came to a small white tent pitched in a clearing. From there, two men took him on foot for another hour or two and he joined a group of 20 Pakistanis. Some, he said, were being trained to fight Indian forces in the disputed region of Kashmir and some were to go to Afghanistan.
There were no buildings, he said, and the men slept on the ground. Their trainer, whom they knew as Maksud, spoke Urdu, he said. "He taught us to use a Kalashnikov and a rocket-propelled grenade," he said. After just three weeks there, he set off for Afghanistan, he said.
But the Afghan police identified him as a Pakistani and detained him.
In southern Afghanistan, a Taliban commander who recently defected to the Afghan government, Mullah Sayed Mir, said a training program for new recruits was also being conducted in and around the southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta.
"The Taliban have rented houses in Pakistan, they live there and also get training there," he said in a recent interview in Zabul Province. "Then, they are sent to Afghanistan."
He said Pakistanis, including local policemen, aided the Taliban. "The Pakistanis would give us some equipment and money if we needed it," he said. "Also they were helping with renting houses in Pakistan for the Taliban." Once, he said, he and a group of 20 fighters had a Pakistani police escort to the border.
kistani officials deny aiding the Taliban and say they are aggressively cracking down on all militants. In an interview on July 29, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, said there were no training camps operating in Pakistan with government support.
This spring, some militant groups began using abandoned camps in the Pakistan-controlled portion of the disputed Kashmir region, he said, but government forces intervened.
"There were some vacant camps, and we got information they were being used," said General Musharraf. "We are now going to occupy them."
American officials have credited Pakistan with aggressively cracking down on foreign militants, particularly Al Qaeda.
At the same time, some Afghan and American officials say Pakistan is making little effort to fight the Taliban. Those officials say Pakistan is effectively holding that group in reserve, intending to use it to dominate Afghanistan once the United States withdraws its troops.
Independent and reliable confirmation of any claims about the camps is difficult, if not impossible, to verify.
Foreign journalists are not allowed access to the lawless tribal regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the Pakistani controlled portion of Kashmir, two areas where many of the camps are reported to be operating.
Pakistani officials also have begun issuing restricted visas that bar foreign journalists from traveling to Quetta and Peshawar, another place where there are said to be training camps. Pakistani officials say the restrictions are for their safety.
But foreign journalists are allowed to travel to the Mansehra district, an area only 60 miles north of Islamabad.
A one-day visit in early August produced ample evidence that militant training camps had operated in the area for years, but no proof that they are still active today.
Local politicians proudly declared that the area supported several training camps in the past 15 years, but those trained only young men fighting Indian forces in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
The government closed the camps, they said, when the India-Pakistan peace talks resumed in early 2004.
"There were camps," said Mohammed Yunus Khattack, the deputy chief of the hard-line Jamaat Islami religious party in the Mansehra district. "But now this is finished."
During the past two months, other reports of training camps in Pakistan have emerged.
In July, a reporter for one of Pakistan's leading news magazines wrote that he had recently visited a reopened training camp in the Mansehra district. The article in the magazine, The Herald, said 13 camps reopened in the Mansehra area in May, including one near the home village of Mr. Mohiyuddin, the cleric who said the camps had closed.
A Pakistani opposition leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, then accused the Pakistani Army of helping and training militants to fight in Afghanistan and of deceiving the West about its commitment to the campaign against terrorism, comments he retracted the next day. Mr. Rehman is the head of a coalition of six Islamist parties in Pakistan and the leader of an opposition bloc in the Pakistani Parliament.
On the road to Mr. Mohiyuddin's village, the seal of Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen was visible on several buildings, but district residents insisted the signs were old.
During a lengthy interview in his madrassa, Mr. Mohiyuddin again denied that training is occurring in the area and repeated the canard that American and Israeli intelligence operatives had staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to create a pretense to invade Muslim countries.
Mr. Mohiyuddin, a small, charismatic man with a boyish face who said he was "about 30," also appeared to be very popular. Residents said that crime, which had flourished under corrupt local police and government officials, virtually disappeared after Mr. Mohiyuddin returned from Afghanistan.
Relaxed and confident, Mr. Mohiyuddin described himself as a pious schoolteacher and courageous local crime fighter. He said local politicians jealous of his popularity had unfairly placed him on a list of wanted criminals.
Asked about repeated reports that Harkat is still training militants here, he insisted that the group was no longer active.
"The government disbanded that organization," he said. "We people are now struggling for our living."
David Rohde reported from the Mansehra district in Pakistan for this article, and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan. Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Zabul Province, Afghanistan, and Talat Hussainfrom Islamabad.
Mideast Course At the Mercy of Local Factions
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 29, 2005; A01
For all the attention and resources the Bush administration has poured into the Middle East, the outcome of its two most critical initiatives is increasingly vulnerable to the sectarian passions, tumultuous history and political priorities of the local players, say U.S. officials and regional experts.
Two developments over the past week marked major movement for the U.S. agenda: Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, a critical step in the creation of a Palestinian state and regional peace. And Iraq submitted a constitution to its national assembly, offering the legal foundation for a new Iraqi state.
President Bush yesterday and in his radio address Saturday hailed the two events as turning points in promoting democracy and peace in the region. On Iraq, Bush said its people have "demonstrated to the world that they are up to the historic challenges before them. The document they have produced contains far-reaching protections for fundamental human freedoms, including religion, assembly, conscience and expression."
But the actual implementation of Iraq's constitution and the viability of Gaza will now depend largely on forces beyond Washington's control -- and both face mounting challenges.
"The theme in this region is the reality of a foreign military power that comes in with great determination and overwhelming force, defeats people, subjugates a nation and then gets completely lost in the local maelstrom of interests and the irresistible force of indigenous identity -- religious, ethnic, sectarian, national. People act in a maniacal way when they assert these identities, which includes nurturing and protecting them," said Rami Khouri, a U.S.-educated Arab analyst and editor of Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper.
"Every single foreign power that has been in this region since Alexander the Great -- through the Romans, Greeks, Ottomans, British, French and now Americans -- has learned the same lesson," Khouri said.
The growing U.S. challenge in trying to influence events was reflected when Bush called a top Shiite politician Wednesday, a day before Iraq's constitution was due, to warn against alienating the Sunni minority and potentially sabotaging the entire process. But the Shiite parties did not quickly or fully appease Sunni concerns -- and Iraq missed its deadline for a third time on Thursday.
"The U.S. is shackled by the very forces that it liberated," said Robert Malley, the International Crisis Group's Middle East program director and a former Clinton administration National Security Council staff member.
"All those forces silenced during Saddam Hussein's rule are using a period of transition, when Iraq is remaking itself, to express themselves or gain advantage. Even though the United States is the dominant force, it is increasingly finding itself a bystander as Iraqis vie for power and to define what a future Iraq is going to be," Malley said.
The administration acknowledged yesterday that political transformations take time and often do not unfold evenly -- and that the outcome is far from guaranteed.
"If the Sunnis do vote for it and approve the constitution, if the constitution is not stopped, then it will be a national contract and it will help with the counter-insurgency strategy," Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "If they don't, then it will be a problem."
Bush also acknowledged the split among Iraqis, which he described as a right of free individuals living in a free society. "We recognize that there is a split amongst the Sunnis, for example, in Iraq. And I suspect that when you get down to it, you'll find a Shiite in disagreement with a Shiite who supports the constitution, and perhaps some Kurds are concerned about the constitution," Bush said. "We're watching a political process unfold."
But rivalries over shaping that future in a free environment have also sparked tensions, even within sectarian factions. Despite the presence of more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, clashes erupted last week between two Shiite militias: Troops loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr fought the Badr Organization of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Militia wings of Iraq's political parties are "looking out for their own future" and will continue to "act in ways that strengthen them, politically and militarily," said Edward Walker, president of the Middle East Institute and former ambassador to Egypt and Israel. "They see themselves winning [over other groups] and now they're fighting to see who gets the biggest piece of the action. That puts the U.S. in a different position."
On Gaza, U.S. goals are likely to be heavily influenced over the next year by internal Israeli and Palestinian politics. Both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon face significant political foes -- and critical elections.
The Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which already has a substantial base of support in Gaza, is increasingly challenging Abbas's authority. The competition between secular and religious parties will play out when Hamas runs for the first time in legislative elections in January.
Despite Israel's insistence, Abbas has refused to disarm Hamas's militia wing -- and is unlikely to take that unpopular move before the January voting. That, in turn, will hurt U.S. efforts to solidify security arrangements and then move forward on the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the roadmap.
Sharon is facing a revolt in his Likud Party over his controversial decision to withdraw from Gaza, with one poll showing him 17 percentage points behind former finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu among party supporters. Netanyahu quit the Sharon cabinet earlier this month in opposition to the Gaza decision. Elections are expected by November 2006.
As the Gaza withdrawal neared, Sharon moved to placate his right-wing base by pushing forward with construction of a security fence, slicing through Palestinian farmland, to encircle and protect the largest settlement on the West Bank. The move infuriated Palestinians and could undercut support for Abbas.
The administration deserved credit for working hard to make the Gaza withdrawal a success, said Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland and the Brookings Institution, but "now it's clear everyone had not fully thought about the morning after." There is now a "huge gap in expectations," with the Israelis expecting a breather after last week's wrenching settler evictions from Gaza and the Palestinians expecting accelerated peace talks.
"Both sides are wrapped up in their own political dynamics," Telhami said. The Bush administration faces the challenge of "helping Sharon without hurting Abbas and helping Abbas without hurting Sharon."
Local economic and security priorities may also complicate the U.S. agenda. In creating a viable Gaza for 1.3 million Palestinians, the Palestinian focus is on building an economy that includes free flow of goods and people across the borders with Israel and Egypt. But Israel's primary focus is on security guarantees to ensure that extremists are unable to cross into Israel.
Administration officials acknowledge the pace of decisions is up to the two parties.
"We may have our views about any particular issue," Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch said last week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, "but at the end of the day, it's a matter for Israelis and Palestinians to decide."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
War on the Cheap
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: Are we serious or not?
by Irwin M. Stelzer
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
"WE WILL ACCEPT NOTHING less than total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology," President Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. But, as they say both on the streets of New York and the ranches of Texas, talk is cheap. We now have a choice--in the vernacular, it is to put up or shut up.
That choice can no longer safely be postponed. We can tailor our national security policies to the economic resources we are willing to commit to those policies, or we can commit sufficient resources to allow us successfully to implement the policies the president has decided are in the national interest. Put differently, if we want to continue to speak loudly, we will have to buy a big, expensive stick. If, instead, we decide that all we care to spend will buy only a tiny twig, we will have to speak more softly.
The first alternative, which we might call neo-realism (some will call it neo-isolationism) is both practicable and not without appeal. Here is what it would entail. Abandon the idea that we can only be secure if we spread democracy to the peoples of the world, all of whom we assume are yearning to breathe free. Even if they are, it is up to them to work out the means for attaining that goal, just as many of the countries of Eastern Europe did, without Iraq-style interventions on our part. We are not prepared to spend the blood and treasure to help them.
Abandon also the idea that we can participate in the real-world global economy by pretending that world markets are organized in a way that allows us to achieve Adam Smith-like efficiencies by espousing free trade. We are playing against a stacked deck, as recent experience with China shows.
First, currency manipulation guarantees China an advantage over and above the natural comparative advantage provided by its relatively low wages. Second, a lack of regard for property rights allows the Chinese government and other economic actors to steal American technology and intellectual property. Remember: The Chinese government feels it has made a commendable display of virtue by promising to stop using pirated software sometime in 2007--and that is the government that is supposed to prevent what passes for the country's private sector from engaging in such thievery. More important, the advantage China gains from distorting the patterns of trade provides the funds it is using to expand its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, fund military exercises with Russia, and extend the reach of its fighter fleet, nuclear submarines, and aircraft carriers.
So if we are to tailor our policies to fit our unwillingness to shore up our military power in the world, we have to abandon our long-held and, it can be argued, myopic view that more-or-less rigid adherence to free trade serves our geopolitical interests. True, we will sacrifice some of the efficiencies that have brought us a plethora of consumer goods at prices so low that they have offset the devastating impact of high oil prices on consumer budgets. But we will have traded cheap T-shirts for greater control over our monetary policy, and put something of a strain on the resources China is devoting to its military build-up.
Then, we must reduce our military commitments around the world. NATO now only serves the interests of a Europe that sees it as a handy source of what are called "assets" for its new, underfunded European army. South Korea has made it clear that it considers the presence of American troops in its country, placed there by us to serve as a "tripwire" (read, cannon fodder) in the event of an invasion by the more-than-slightly-mad North Korean regime, a threat to the virtue of its women and the safety of its nation. So bring them home.
In short, just as Ariel Sharon has shortened his defense lines and improved Israel's security by withdrawing from Gaza, George W. Bush can improve U.S. security by concentrating the nation's resources here at home, available for defense of the homeland and rapid deployment if direct threats must be dealt with, surgically, elsewhere. There are more examples, but you get the idea. On a limited budget, we have to use scarce resources in a way that maximizes our security.
Call this concentration of limited resources on defending the homeland neo-realism--an adaptation to our unwillingness to devote the resources needed to implement our current policies. It might send chills down establishment spines, but so long as our politicians are unwilling to provide the men and money to meet the commitments inherent in our current policies, it is the road best taken.
But it is not necessarily the road we must take. If we are willing to devote the necessary resources to
implement a policy that has at its core the assumption that we can only be secure if we take the fight to the enemy, if we encourage the spread of democracy, if we help form stable nation-states in areas that have traditionally provided a haven for terrorists, we can carry out such a policy. If we really believe that we are in a long-term war with the survival of our values at stake, we can win that war. Call this alternative to neo-realism the Bush-Blair doctrine.
That would entail, first and foremost, devoting to Iraq the resources needed to eliminate what is called the insurgency, to retaliate if Syria refuses to close its borders to terrorists, and to protect the nation's infrastructure.
But there is more to waging war than fielding an appropriately sized battle force. The domestic economy must also be mobilized. Franklin D. Roosevelt could get Henry Kaiser and other shipbuilders to produce two large cargo ships every day during World War II, but George W. Bush can't get the huge American economy to produce enough ceramic inserts for safety vests for soldiers in Iraq. Or armor for their vehicles. That the great American production machine cannot be marshaled to keep the lights on and the air conditioners humming in Baghdad suggests that we are not serious about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Then there is oil. If we seriously believe we are at war with a version of Islam that preaches jihad and finds much of its support in the Middle East, we have to wean ourselves off foreign oil. Not by passing a subsidy-laden, Christmas-tree of an energy bill that will not now, not soon, and probably not ever reduce our imports of oil, but by imposing a tax on imported oil--a tax that forces consumers to pay the costs we impose on society when we fill our tanks, and that is high enough to make more prudent use of oil the economic choice. Such a tax need not increase the flow of funds to Washington's wastrels: It can be offset by parallel reductions in the job-killing, regressive payroll tax.
We must also decide that we are in a game where free markets cannot provide the security we need. Our oil companies, responsible to their shareholders for maximizing profits, cannot be expected to compete successfully for supplies with state-supported entities that are playing a geopolitical rather than a purely economic game. While the Chinese and the Indians vie for Canadian sources, and can draw on their governments for financing and other support that permits them to pay a premium for supplies, our companies must rely on capital acquired in the free market. And while China can promise "social housing" to Venezuela and weapons to Iran, in addition to money, in exchange for oil, our oil companies cannot. Oil producers do not live by cash alone, and unless our government intervenes on a scale similar to the Chinese, we will lose out in the race for new supplies of crude oil.
We can remain big players in the global economy, using the muscle provided by our vast market to extract concessions from the European Union, which discriminates against America's three most important exports (agricultural products, audiovisual products, and aircraft); to deter China from competing for energy resources on a non-economic basis; and to persuade Latin American countries not to enlist in Hugo Chávez's anti-American crusade. Trade policy in the service of national security might not please free-trade purists, but it should make sense to those whose view extends beyond mere economics to political economy--Adam Smith's term of choice.
Finally, there is the way in which our government has chosen to allocate resources. Instead of building adequate equipment for our troops, it has decided to lavish highway-bill pork on bridges to nowhere in Alaska and South Carolina. Little wonder that the president is finding it difficult to persuade Americans that the sacrifices being made in Iraq--by the narrow segment of society called upon to make any sacrifice at all--are worth bearing. The president likens the battle against Islamofascism to our earlier battle against Nazi fascism. But he has called on America to devote less than 5 percent of the wealth it produces annually to this battle, whereas FDR enlisted close to half of our annual GDP to rid the world of Hitler & Co.
Only if the president and the American people decide to yoke their domestic policy to the requirements of a foreign policy that aims to fight the war on terror, can we win that war. Otherwise, give way to the neo-realists.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
Enough already with the malignancy crap.
Ican, the USA is in Iraq because of the oil reserves beneath it.
The pan-arab resistance to western occupation and control, which has been going on for 100 years, should be seen in that light.
Our actions make it easier for the mad mullahs to operate.
Enough already with the malignancy crap.
Ony those with the clarity of 40,000 foot vision are capable of recognizing the true malignancy of a class 4 hurricane ...........
