Inside the Mavi Marmara

The Standard Weekly published a very intersting investigation inside the Islamist organization IHH, who masterminded the Mavi Marmara flotilla plans. Many details about the current political connections from Turkey, in the electoral but as well as geopolitical perspective.

The extensive footage of the interviews is here.

And a couple of information about Neturei Karta.

Abusing women and Islam

by Mona Eltahawy.

The Counterinsurgency in Pakistan

Kamran Bokhari and Fred Burton

Stratfor

August 13

Since the start of the U.S.-jihadist war in late 2001, and particularly since the rise of the Taliban rebellion within its own borders in recent years, Pakistan has been seen as a state embroiled in a jihadist insurgency threatening its very survival. Indeed, until late April, it appeared that Pakistan was buckling under the onslaught of a Taliban rebellion that had consumed large chunks of territory in the northwest and was striking at the country’s core. A Shariah-for-peace deal with the Taliban in the Swat region, approved with near unanimity by the parliament, reinforced the view that Pakistan lacked the willingness or capability to fight Islamist non-state actors chipping away at its security and stability.
In the last three months, however, the state has staged a dramatic comeback, beginning with an offensive in Swat and adjacent districts that has resulted in the state regaining control over most of the affected areas. (The offensive is still under way.) The government action in Swat was followed by limited air and ground operations in the South Waziristan region, along with an intelligence campaign in cooperation with the United States, which has resulted in a two-month respite from any major insurgent suicide bombings. Most important was the killing Aug. 5 of top Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud in a bombing strike by a

U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle.

While many observers still view Pakistan as a state beset by a jihadist insurgency, the government’s counterinsurgency campaign has clearly taken center stage. This does not mean that the jihadists no longer constitute a threat. They are and will remain a significant threat for the foreseeable future, but the state has recently gained the upper hand in the struggle — at least for now.

What Changed and How

This dramatic change begs the question: How was the government of Pakistan able to turn the situation around? This is an important question given the complex and historic relationship between the country’s security establishment and Islamist militants of various stripes. This relationship has long prevented the state from taking decisive action — even in the face of a growing threat to the state’s integrity. The first stirrings of the change can be traced back to the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, which brought Pakistan to the brink of war with India at a time when Islamabad was also facing a raging insurgency at home.
The dual security threats from domestic and foreign jihadists, coupled with political instability and an economy on the verge of collapse, created intense pressure on the Pakistani state. This pressure led to a consensus within the military-intelligence establishment that regaining control over Islamist militants was critical to the survival of the country. After aligning with Washington in the war against the jihadists, Islamabad had gradually lost control of Islamist militant groups it had previously backed as instruments of foreign policy in dealing with Afghanistan and India. (Islamabad had even helped create some of these groups.) While Pakistan was trying to balance its need to maintain influence over these groups with its obligations to the Americans in the U.S.-led war against jihadists, many of these groups, to varying degrees, moved into al Qaeda’s orbit.
The first order of business for Islamabad was to deal with renewed pressure from Washington and defuse tensions with New Delhi in order to avoid war. This required going after rogue elements of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) — aka Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) — which, Pakistan acknowledged, masterminded the Mumbai attacks. Because LeT/JuD had morphed over the years into a wider social phenomenon in Pakistan, isolating the rogues from the mainstream group has been no easy task, evidenced by the fact that the effort is still under way.
Getting tough with LeT/JuD required the military-intelligence leadership to make further personnel changes within the country’s premier spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, a process that had been under way since army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani appointed the current ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in September 2008. Dozens of ISI officials were replaced, and under its new leadership the directorate played a lead role in the crackdown on rogue members of LeT/JuD. However, the state’s need to deal with the crisis triggered by the Mumbai attacks and focus on the LeT/JuD problem provided the Pakistani Taliban the time and space to further entrench themselves in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Pakistan was able to ward off the threat of war with India but, in the process, the Pakistani Taliban assumed a more menacing posture. The crackdown against LeT/JuD was useful in that it was the first major move against a former proxy — an experience that paved the way for a wider campaign against Taliban forces in Swat and FATA. If Pakistan could no longer allow LeT/JuD (a group that it was not at war with) to use the country as a staging ground for attacks against India, it certainly could not tolerate the Pashtun jihadists and their Punjabi allies who were waging an open rebellion on Pakistani soil.
The stakeholders in Islamabad had begun to realize that there was no alternative to fighting the Taliban rebels, but this, too, was a daunting task. Clearly, Islamabad was not capable of waging an all-out assault against the entire rebel movement, for this entailed battling multiple groups in multiple theaters. A lack of consensus within the state and a dearth of support from the Pakistani public for such an initiative meant that a major offensive would only make matters worse.
For one thing, there was the risk of exacerbating the situation in cases where Taliban groups that were not fighting Islamabad could align with the likes of Mehsud and Maulana Fazlullah (leader of the Taliban group in Swat). The fear of turning more and more Pashtuns into Taliban served as a major arrestor, preventing the state from taking meaningful action beyond limited successes achieved by Frontier Corps-led security forces in the FATA’s Bajaur agency. These considerations, and the need to buy time, led to negotiations with the Taliban group in Swat that resulted in the peace deal.
Emboldened by their victory in establishing a Taliban emirate in the greater Swat region, the Taliban group there decided to push farther eastward, sending its fighters into Buner district and demanding that Shariah be imposed not just in the greater Swat region but also in the entire country. In fact, the lead negotiator on behalf of the Swat Taliban, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, declared the Pakistani Constitution un-Islamic and those who opposed Shariah infidels. Meanwhile, the suicide-bombing campaign of the Mehsud-led Taliban group, which targeted mostly security forces in major cities like Islamabad and Lahore, had generated widespread public outrage.
The move on the part of the Swat Taliban to try and project power beyond their turf proved to be the turning point where the state finally realized it needed to take a firm stand against the rebels. It was at that time, in late April, that the government embarked on Operation Rah-i-Rast with the goal of eliminating the Taliban stronghold in the Swat region. Though the offensive was limited to Swat and its adjacent districts, the state took advantage of the budding public opinion against the jihadists and launched a major media campaign against “Talibanization” that proved extremely useful. It was also very timely, given the fact that more than 2 million residents of the greater Swat region were displaced from their homes during the government offensive, and this could well have undermined public support for the operation.
In the three and a half months since the Swat offensive began, the government has successfully cleared Taliban fighters from most of the region. Indeed, the Swat Taliban network has been disrupted and its war-making machine degraded to the point where it no longer has the capability to regain control over the area — though the leadership is still at large, which means a low-intensity conflict will continue to simmer for some time. Security forces are likely to remain in the area for at least two years and there reportedly are plans to build a permanent military garrison in Swat for the first time.
In early June, after its initial success in Swat, the military turned its attention to the country’s largest jihadist hub — South Waziristan — where it knew it couldn’t stage a major offensive along the lines of what it was doing in Swat. The hostile terrain — both physical and human — coupled with its status as an autonomous region and the government’s lack of troops, forced the state to combine limited air and ground attacks with intelligence operations to isolate Mehsud and his Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan movement from the wider Taliban phenomenon.
In the midst of this campaign, the ISI, working in coordination with the CIA, was able to eliminate Mehsud, under whose leadership the Pakistani Taliban went from being a low-level militancy in South Waziristan to being a broad insurgent movement throughout the FATA, large parts of the NWFP and in parts of the core province of Punjab. Mehsud’s death has initiated a power struggle among his associates for control of his group that Islamabad is trying hard to exploit.

Where to From Here?

Between the re-taking of most of Swat, which has allowed for the return of some 765,000 displaced residents, and the elimination of Mehsud, Pakistan has gained an important edge in its struggle against its Taliban rebels that it can build upon to deliver a decisive blow. But there are a lot of moving parts in play that have to be dealt with in order to ensure continued progress.
Though the Swat Taliban have been damaged, they have not been entirely defeated, which will not happen until their leadership is captured or killed (or until they cannot recruit new fighters from their madrassas). And as displaced residents return to the region, a massive amount of reconstruction and development work is necessary to prevent unrest that the Taliban could exploit. Restoring the writ of the state entails the re-establishment of political administration and local law enforcement, and there are other areas in the NWFP — especially the districts that run parallel to the FATA — that also need to be brought back under government control.

In Waziristan and the rest of the FATA, Mehsud’s death has wounded the Taliban, but they are very much entrenched in the region, along with their al Qaeda and other transnational allies. Any counterinsurgency campaign in the tribal areas is going to be exponentially more difficult than the offensive in Swat. This is why the military is now aligning itself with pro-Pakistani tribal and militant forces to try and root out those waging war against the state. Being able to distinguish between those militants hostile to Pakistan and those focused on Afghanistan is going to be hard not only because of the fluidity of the Taliban phenomenon but also because it complicates U.S.-Pakistani relations.
Then there is the matter of how Islamabad balances its efforts to re-assert state control over areas on its side of the border with an international move to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The challenge for Pakistan is to regain influence in its western neighbor by reviving its contacts and thus influence with the Afghan Taliban while rolling back Talibanization in its own Pashtun areas. Efforts to neutralize FATA-based domestic rebels impacts Taliban groups focused on Afghanistan, whose support Pakistan needs to crush the domestic insurgency and re-establish its influence in Afghanistan.
While Pakistan’s Pashtun areas are most affected by Talibanization, the phenomenon has made considerable inroads into Pakistan’s core, where the Taliban, like the LeT/JuD, manifest themselves more as social movement. This is why, in addition to the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign, Pakistan has also begun focusing on anti-extremism and de-radicalization efforts — the ideological battle — which is designed to drain the swamp in which the jihadists are able to grow and operate. While Pakistani public opinion has turned against the Taliban in a meaningful manner, there are still significant pockets of social support and a large number of people who remain ambivalent about the need for a comprehensive campaign against the jihadists.
Pakistan’s ability successfully to press ahead with this multidimensional effort depends on its ability to contain political instability within tolerable limits and improve economic conditions. While the judicial crisis ended with the reinstatement of the chief justice fired by former President Pervez Musharraf, political stability remains elusive because of the country’s fragmented political landscape and the weakness of its civilian institutions. And while a loan from the International Monetary Fund has helped Pakistan avoid bankruptcy, it will be some time before the economic conditions begin to improve to the point where Islamabad is able to meet its routine financial obligations and pay the multibillion-dollar cost of fighting the Taliban.

Paying Attention to the Grassroots

Scott Stewart and Fred Burton

Stratfor

August 5

Seven men accused by U.S. authorities of belonging to a militant cell appeared in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, N.C., for a detention hearing Aug. 4. The hearing turned out to be very lengthy and had to be continued Aug. 5, when the judge ordered the men to remain in government custody until their trial. The seven men, along with an eighth who is not currently in U.S. custody, have been charged with, among other things, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons in a foreign country.
According to the grand jury indictment filed in the case, one defendant, Daniel Boyd (also known as “Saifullah,” Arabic for “the sword of Allah”), is a Muslim convert who was in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1991 attending militant training camps. The indictment also states that Boyd fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, though we must note that, because the Soviets completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, it is more likely that any combat Boyd saw in Afghanistan was probably against Soviet-backed Afghan forces during the civil war waged by Islamist militants against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (a socialist state and Soviet ally) was overthrown by Islamist forces in 1992.
Islamist veterans of that war in Afghanistan are held in reverence by some in the Muslim community, tend to be afforded a romanticized mystique, and are considered to be victorious mujahideen, or “holy warriors,” who defeated the Soviets and their communist (and atheistic) Afghan allies. The grand jury indictment implies that Boyd used the prestige of his history in Pakistan and Afghanistan to influence and recruit others to participate in militant struggles abroad. It also charges that he helped train men inside the United States to fight in battles abroad and that he helped them attempt to travel to conflict zones for the purpose of engaging in militant activities such as guerrilla warfare and terrorist operations.

An examination of the indictment in the Boyd case reveals that the facts outlined by the government allow for a large number of parallels to be drawn between this case and other grassroots plots and attacks. The indictment also highlights a number of other trends that have been evident for some time now. We anticipate that future court proceedings in the Boyd case will produce even more interesting information, so STRATFOR will be following the case closely.

Homegrown Jihadists

As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, the threat from al Qaeda and its jihadist militant spawn has been changing, and in fact has devolved to pre-9/11 operational models. With al Qaeda’s structure under continual attack and no regional al Qaeda franchise groups in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the most pressing jihadist threat to the U.S. homeland at present stems from grassroots jihadists. This trend has been borne out by the large number of plots and arrests over the past several years, including:

A June 2009 attack against a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark.

A May 2009 plot to bomb Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The August 2007 arrests of two men found with an improvised explosive device in their car near Goose Creek, S.C.

A May 2007 plot to attack U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J.

A June 2006 plot to attack targets in the United States and Canada involving two men from Georgia.

A June 2006 plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago involving seven men from Miami.

The July 2005 arrests in Torrance, Calif., of a group of men planning to attack a list of targets that included the El Al airline ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, synagogues, California National Guard armories, and U.S. Army recruiting stations.

And now the organization led by Daniel Boyd.
We are listing the Boyd group as a grassroots cell because it appears to have only dated or tangential connections to the larger jihadist movement, though members of the group appear to have attempted to initiate stronger contact with other jihadist players. According to the indictment in the Boyd case, Daniel Boyd, his two sons and two other associates were largely unsuccessful in their attempts to link up with militant groups in Gaza to fight against the Israelis. One of Boyd’s associates, Hysen Sherifi, appears to have had a little more success establishing contact with militant groups in Kosovo, and another associate, Jude Kenan Mohammad, attempted to travel to camps on the Pakistani-Afghan border. (Some reports indicate that Mohammad may have been arrested in Pakistan shortly after his arrival there in October 2008, although his current whereabouts are unknown.)

A Known Quantity

Information released during the Aug. 4 detention hearing indicated that Boyd also attended training camps in Connecticut in the 1980s — an indication, perhaps, that he was then connected to the al Qaeda-linked “Brooklyn Jihad Office” (formally known as the al-Kifah Refugee Center), which trained aspiring jihadists at shooting ranges in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut before sending them on to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
According to some reports, Boyd and his brother Charles (also a Muslim convert) were arrested in Pakistan in 1991 and charged with bank robbery. The Boyd brothers were initially sentenced by a Pakistani court to have a hand and a foot amputated as punishment, but they were pardoned by a Pakistani court in October 1991 and deported. It is not clear whether the Boyds were guilty of the bank robbery, but interestingly, in a recording introduced during the detention hearing, Boyd could be heard saying that militant operations could be financed by robbing banks and armored cars, lending credence to the charge.
Due to Boyd’s activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan he was likely known to U.S. counterterrorism officials — there were many Americans who fought as jihadists in Afghanistan but very few were blond-haired, as Boyd is, and he would have garnered additional attention. The chance of his being on the U.S. government’s radar dramatically increased due to his alleged involvement in jihadist training inside the United States and his arrest in Pakistan. It is therefore not surprising to see that Boyd had been under heavy scrutiny, and evidence produced so far appears to indicate that not only was he under electronic surveillance but the FBI had also placed at least one confidential informant within his circle of confidants, or somehow recruited one of his associates to serve as an informant.
This government scrutiny of Boyd may also explain the problems he and his co-conspirators experienced when they tried to travel to Gaza to link up with militants there. The Americans likely tipped off the Israelis. This would also explain why Boyd was questioned by American authorities twice upon his return to the United States from Israel. Boyd has been charged in the indictment with two counts of making false statements to government agents during these interviews.

Parallels

In many ways, the activities of Boyd’s group closely mirror those of the group of jihadists in New York that would go on to assassinate Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan in 1990, help bomb the World Trade Center in February 1993 and attempt to attack other New York landmarks in July 1993. The members of that New York organization were very involved with firearms training inside the United States and many of them traveled overseas to fight.
It was this overseas travel (and their association with Sheikh Omar Ali Ahmed Abdul-Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh”) that allowed them to link up with the nascent al Qaeda network in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and company would later assign a pair of trained operational commanders and bombmakers from Afghanistan, Abdel Basit and Ahmed Ajaj, to travel to the United States to help the New York group conduct the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
One huge difference between the Boyd case and the 1993 New York cases is the legal environment. Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, there were no “terrorism” statutes concerning the use of weapons of mass destruction or acts of terrorism transcending national borders. Instead, prosecutors in terrorism cases struggled to apply existing laws. The defendants in the 1993 New York landmarks bomb-plot case were not charged with conspiring to build bombs or commit acts of international terrorism. Rather, they were convicted on the charge of seditious conspiracy — a very old statute without a lot of case law and precedent — along with a hodgepodge of other charges. This made the case extremely challenging to prosecute.
Because of cases like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the trial of the Blind Sheikh and his co-conspirators, that legal environment has changed dramatically. As highlighted in the Boyd case, today there are not only laws pertaining to terrorist attacks that have been completed, but prosecutors now can charge defendants with providing material support to terrorists (18 USC section 2339 A), or with conspiring to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons outside the United States (18 USC section 956 [a]).
Following 9/11, the PATRIOT Act amended many statutes in order to ease the prosecution of terrorist crimes and stop them before people were harmed. For example, the definition of “material support” in the statute (18 USC section 2339 A) was changed to include providing “expert advice or assistance” and “monetary instruments.” Such charges are far easier to prove in court than seditious conspiracy.
Before these legal changes, agents and police officers assigned to the joint terrorism task forces investigating the cases and the assistant U.S. attorneys they coordinated with needed to have all the goods on a suspect before proceeding to act on a terrorism case. (It was, quite frankly, easier to prosecute a terrorist case after the attack had been conducted, and the authorities didn’t want to risk losing the case in court. This often meant letting the conspiracy fully develop and get very close to action before authorities stepped in and interdicted the attack — a risky endeavor.) The newer terrorism laws mean that prosecutors can be far more proactive than they could be in the early 1990s, and this has allowed them to focus on prevention rather than prosecution after the fact.
One other interesting parallel between the Boyd case and the 1993 cases is the ethnic mix of militants involved in the plot. In the World Trade Center bombing, Egyptian and Palestinian jihadists worked with Pakistanis. In the follow-on July 1993 landmarks plot, there were Egyptians, Sudanese, an African-American and a Puerto Rican militant involved. In the Boyd case, we have Boyd and his sons, all Caucasian Americans, along with men from Kosovo, and Jude Kenan Mohammad, who appears to have a Pakistani father and American mother. Ethnic mixing also seems to be in play in the recent plot disrupted in Australia, where Somali militants were reputed to be working with Lebanese militants.
Ethnic mixing is not uncommon among Muslim communities in Western countries, just as Westerners tend to congregate in places like China or Saudi Arabia. Such mixing in a militant cell, then, reflects the composition of the radical Muslim community, which is a small component drawn from the overall Muslim population.

What Ifs

Because investigators and prosecutors in the Boyd case had the luxury of pursuing the prevention strategy, Boyd’s cell did not have the opportunity to develop its conspiracy to a more mature form. This has caused some commentators to downplay the potential danger posed by the cell, pointing to its inability to link up with militant groups in Gaza and Pakistan.
However, it is important to remember that, although Boyd’s cell was seemingly unable to make contact with major jihadist groups, it seems to have tried. Had it succeeded in making contact with a major jihadist group — such as al Qaeda or one of its regional franchises — Boyd’s group, like the 1993 New York cell, could have played an important part in launching an attack on U.S. soil, something the jihadists have been unable to do since 9/11. Hopefully the lessons learned from the 1993 plotters (who were also under heavy scrutiny prior to the first World Trade Center bombing) would have helped prevent the group from conducting such an attack even with outside help.
Frustration over not being able to conduct militant operations abroad appears to be another parallel with the plot recently thwarted in Australia. The Somalis and Lebanese arrested there reportedly were originally plotting to commit violence abroad. After being repeatedly thwarted, they decided instead to conduct attacks inside Australia. In some of the evidence released in the Boyd case detention hearing, Boyd could be heard saying that he would consider attacks inside the United States if he could not conduct militant operations abroad.
It is important to remember that even without assistance from a professional militant organization, Boyd and his followers were more than capable of conducting small-scale attacks that could have killed many people. In addition to the training conducted with Boyd, other members of the cell had reportedly attended a private academy in Nevada where they allegedly received training in survival, assassination, and escape and evasion.
At the time of his arrest, Daniel Boyd was carrying an FN Five-Seven pistol and his son Dylan Boyd was armed with a 9 mm pistol. According to the indictment, Boyd had purchased a rather extensive arsenal of weapons — certainly enough for the group to have conducted an armed assault-style attack. An FBI agent testified during the detention hearing that agents seized more than 27,000 rounds of ammunition (some armor-piercing) from the Boyd residence while executing a search warrant.
As STRATFOR has noted repeatedly, even seemingly unsophisticated “Kramer jihadists” can occasionally get lucky. Aggressive counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 have helped reduce the odds of such a lucky strike, but as we move further from 9/11, complacency, budget constraints and other factors have begun to erode counterterrorism programs.

Obama's speech

an analysis by David Horovitz, from the Jerusalem Post.

For a new American policy in the Middle East

Obama's speech in Cairo.

A couple of observations:

- what during the electoral campaign was rather an argument against him, was used as an element of unity and common understanding with the Muslim world - his personal story, the Muslim ties and the youth spent in Indonesia

- it is time for a partnership between America and Islam

- criticism against some "liberal" Western countries trying to impose to the Muslims what to wear

- Israeli government should stop the policy of settlements (while denouncing the "inacceptable" situation of the Palestinians) and accept a Palestinian state it is in its interest too. Hamas should stop violence and play a role in unifying Palestinian people and recognize the state of Israel. Jerusalem should be the place of praying for Jews, Muslism and Christians

- the discourse was rather faced on the religious aspects and the need for an inter-faith dialogue, rather than on the variety institutionalized Islam took in the Muslim world

Reactions in the Muslim world

Shari'a Pact in Pakistan

Instead of solving a conflict, it would rather represent a step behind and will encourage similar moves in the neighboring Afghanistan as well.

Not everything started with us

Terrorism is not a reality we started to face only since 2001. The ways in which we, as Westerners, reconsidered the phenomenon and found appropriate to take action - using various tools - are different. Because, we, as history subjects are different, living in a different environment and give a different value to our life. Paul Berman, in Terror and Liberalism, is going far into the roots of the phenomenon as such and beyond the too facile explanation according to the "clash of civilizations"' paradigm. Rather, the conflict is between freedom and totalitarianism, started in Europe and after, translated in a various cultural context in the Muslim world.

Also on Paul Berman - Should We Love Che Guevara?, Slate, 2004 - Che Guevara is a political icon, but are we really aware of his bio and his deep creed? Or simply, we don't care too much, as long as it is an ideological fashion and nothing more?