Tag Archives: al Qaeda

A devil of a dilemma: Assad or al Qaeda?

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We’ve been here before. We’ve had Stalin on one side and Hitler on the other. Which one do we side with? In the event we went with Stalin but that didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped, we’d chosen one butcher over another.

We have the same dilemma again. We have Assad on one side and al Qaeda on the other. Which one do we side with?

True, it’s not just al Qaeda, there are other rebel forces too, some backed by the Saudis and some backed by the Iranians. But we must understand that if Assad loses, al Qaeda will ultimately win. They will simply crush any other rebel organisations as they are doing right now in Libya for example. It’s what they’re good at. They will participate in the civil war and then turn their weapons on the other rebels and hijack the resulting victory.

In the meantime a cultured and civilised people of innocent men women and children, are being mercilessly slaughtered.

Along with the inevitability of al Qaeda coming out on top, we need to accept that if we put one foot into this quagmire we will be there for a generation to come. Thousands of our men and women will lose their lives in military operations, and billions of pounds will be expended. Blood and Treasure the Americans call it. Are we willing to pay that price? Are we even able to afford it? We have made and we continue to make deep cuts in our armed forces. If we depose Assad we will need to stay there to enforce the peace. We had to do that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and pretty soon we’ll have to decide whether to let Libya go or step in, and whether to support the Egyptian military or let Egypt go.

It won’t work to arm the rebels. It’s what we did in Afghanistan and it’s what got al Qaeda started.

There is another problem for us. Having expended all that blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then shamelessly abandoned the returning soldiers, including the wounded, we have all but destroyed the fighting spirit of our armed forces. We are going to find it very difficult to recruit again enough young men and women of the calibre we need and send them into combat. They won’t be that stupid. They won’t be that well equipped, either. As operations over Libya showed us, we seriously lack ability to project our forces and indispensable aircraft carriers have been dispensed with in the interests of sort-term expediency. No lessons have been learned and moronic command-level decisions have been made that cannot quickly be undone.

So we stand impotently at the sidelines watching the slaughter.

The solution may be to support intervention from moderate Arab states. We can supply equipment and technical support where needed, that would be useful. But the problem is that most of the moderate Arab states are pariahs with the left-leaning intelligentsia. We would be giving them legitimacy and obligating ourselves to them for saving us from having to intervene ourselves. Bang goes any hope of democratic reforms, they can suppress any dissent in their own countries and we won’t dare to complain.

My solution would be nevertheless to support Arab intervention. Wholeheartedly. No half measures. We should show leadership in this crisis and put together a coalition of mostly Arab troops. As we did to liberate Kuwait but with very few front-line troops of our own on this occasion. It should be a mostly Arab force. We and the Americans can provide a unified command structure, perhaps with a Saudi general in overall command. We can provide technical and communication facilities and offer Cyprus as a base. The Americans can additionally provide carrier-borne air cover.

And then we must learn the lessons of our own mistakes. We must start to rebuild our armed forces on a basis of trust. Those who enlist will be given the support they deserve, especially if they are wounded. They must never again be allowed to sleep on the streets or to be denied disability allowances by a rigid and unsympathetic system. They must be given the weapons they need, the vehicles, the helicopters and the ships.

Because the day will come, sooner than we think, when the violence will spill over into our own lands and we will have nobody to call on.

Careless Talk Saves Lives

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Like all good patriotic citizens, I hate my government. Every day they remind me why by a constant diet of incompetence and ineptitude. Bungled policy after failed initiative in badly managed agencies and departments throughout government. And on top of that they wrap me up in red tape and tax me into penury. But as much as I hate my government, and believe me it is a lot, I know that they are not actively trying to kill me. That’s what Islamist terrorists are trying to do. At their training camps, in their radical mosques and right here amongst us, they plot to kill us. Day in and day out, it’s all they talk about.

All that’s stopping the terrorists is my government. Yes, the one I hate. I know that is beyond comprehension and knowing how dysfunctional they are makes it more worrying. It brings the prospect of not being killed down to a matter of sheer luck, and as the IRA used to say, they only have to get lucky once, we have to be lucky every time. So I am totally in favour of my government spying on me and everyone else, intercepting emails, telephone calls and whatever else they want in order to track down and capture the terrorists before they get lucky. I don’t care that the government will find out what I say in private to my friends and colleagues. I don’t care what they find out about me. It’s what they find out about the terrorists that I care about. Any careless talk on their part might give our people the breakthrough they need to foil anther outrage and save innocent lives. Mine, perhaps. Or yours, perhaps.

It is a wonderment to me to see the left-wing chattering classes complaining bitterly about that surveillance. They seem blind to the threat from terrorists who are interested only in killing as many of us as they can. Incredibly, they regard the government as a bigger threat. Given the choice between having their emails read and innocent people being blown up on a plane, they’d sacrifice the innocent people. So I’m not happy about all this agitation over Snowden blowing the lid on government surveillance. What he did was wrong and is a setback in the war on terror. It will assuredly lead to innocent people losing their lives because tracking down and stopping terrorists will be that much harder now they have learned they have to be even more careful.

In short, I resent that Snowden and people like him have appointed themselves the guardians of my civil liberties, especially as the trade-off they have accepted on my behalf is greater risk to my life and safety.

This is not dissimilar to airport security: having our passports and tickets checked, being frisked and searched, having our baggage and shoes x-rayed. What is the left-wing chattering class take on that? Is that an invasion of civil liberties? Yes, of course it is, and I resent it too. But if we campaign against airport security, and like another self-appointed Snowden we disrupt their efforts, the result will be a free pass for terrorists to plant bombs aboard our flights. So a government agent wants to look inside your hand luggage? So what? So a government agent wants to read your emails? So what?

I have great confidence in the technical skills of those working in the intelligence community. I trust them to be able to sift through billions of messages and find actionable information about the terrorists. I am glad the government gave them the funding and the cover to go ahead and I am hopeful the government will act decisively when presented with opportunities. That may seem a forlorn hope given my opinion of government competence, but fortunately any action that needs to be taken will be taken by the security services and I have the highest respect for their professionalism too.

So, Snowden, shut up, you’re making things worse.

The Legacy of the Neocons on 9/11

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Saddam Hussein brutalised his country and ruled it by fear. He was without question an evil man responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqis. But he posed no threat to the West in general or the United States of America in particular. No threat whatsoever. Osama bin Laden on the other hand was a major proven threat. He had orchestrated numerous attacks against American lives and interests culminating in the 9/11 attacks when hijacked airlines, packed with passengers, were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another plane was brought down in open fields by a brave but ultimately fatal passenger rebellion. Three thousand innocent people were killed that day.

Yet the Neoconservatives, the lunatic right wing of the Republican Party in power in the Pentagon and the White House at the time, still saw Saddam as the main enemy instead of bin Laden. After 9/11 they launched a justified invasion of Afghanistan where bin Laden had a safe haven and they came close to wiping him out along with his entire organisation. Holed-up in Tora Bora, with no possibility of escape, and with American bombers pounding the mountains with fuel-air bombs of devastating power, bin Laden wrote out his last will and testament. Then a miracle happened. The Americans scaled down their operations and left a route open for bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. He would live to spread terrorism for another decade.

In “Deafness Before the Storm” Kurt Eichenwald explains how the Neocons briefed against the CIA who in the days leading up to 11th September 2001 were frantically trying to alert the White House to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Acknowledging bin Laden as the principal threat did not fit with Neocon priorities so they did everything they could to discredit the CIA warnings. You can read the full article here. Outright lies and denying facts was stock-in-trade to them, indeed Karl Rove is attributed with saying they made their own reality.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defence during George H W Bush’s Presidency, and Vice President to George W Bush. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defence to President George W Bush. Together, they regarded deposing Saddam during Bush 43 as unfinished business from Bush 41. The idea that after 9/11 they could still regard Saddam as a greater threat to America than bin Laden is extraordinary, but clearly they did. They diverted vital resources away from Afghanistan when US and allied forces were on the cusp of finally eradicating al Qaeda and they threw everything into a war against Saddam. A war predicated on the lie that Saddam was a threat to the West and to America when he was no such thing.

So that, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld legacy to America. They could not have prevented it, let’s be realistic, the CIA did not have sufficient evidence of the exact nature and timing of the attack. But they could have snuffed out al Qaeda in December 2001. Instead, they let bin Laden off the hook. They let him get away. They let him plot terror against America and her allies for another ten years. And even though bin Laden is now dead, no thanks to them, al Qaeda has grown stronger and more dangerous with semi-autonomous organisations in several regions of the world. Thanks to Neocon stupidity we are all at greater risk than ever before and another 9/11 scale atrocity has a frightening inevitability about it.

As the IRA used to say, “We only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky every time.”

Whose side are you on? A question for Pakistan

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America has presented hard evidence that the upper echelons of Pakistan’s military is leaking top secret intelligence to al-Qaeda.

It has been an almost open secret for years that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, and the military have been infiltrated despite strenuous denials from Pakistan. The evidence, carried in person by CIA boss Leon Panetta to Pakistan for a show-down meeting this weekend is damning. The CIA passed surveillance images showing the location of two terrorist bomb making factories to their opposite numbers in Pakistan. The Americans continued to monitor the factories and observed them being evacuated shortly before they were raided by the Pakistani army. Telegraph article: Pakistan accused of tipping off al Qaeda.

Pakistan's army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, right, and Pakistan's intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha met with Mr Panetta on Friday (Photo: AP)

Less than two weeks ago, a Pakistani journalist was tortured and murdered for writing about an al-Qaeda link with Pakistan’s navy. Telegraph article: Journalist murdered. One particular story he wrote about is the alleged involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agency in the Mumbai massacre. According to his information, the original idea had been put to the ISI by Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior commander in al-Qaeda as a way of provoking war with India, but ISI eventually shelved it. The plan was then taken over by Haroon Ashik, a former commander of Lashkar e Taiba, who spiced it up and put it into operation, murdering 166 people in a three day killing spree. It’s not so much a case of the ISI being innocent of involvement in the actual atrocity, if that’s the case, but that they are part of the terrorist network passing the plan amongst themselves. Telegraph article: Mumbai attack.

Do we know whose side Pakistan’s military is on?

We are still seeing the fall-out of trust between America and Pakistan now that we know bin Laden was living under Pakistan’s nose close to their top military academy in Abbottabad. Pakistan has nuclear weapons under the control of the military who are refusing American requests for access. Are we safe? Does ISI cooperation with al Qaeda and Lashkar e Taiba extend to nuclear weapons?

Update 16th June 2011

A really good article in today’s New York Times gives us the answer:  Pakistan’s military are against us.

“Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has led the army since 2007, faces such intense discontent over what is seen as his cozy relationship with the United States that a colonels’ coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question.”

“…demanding that General Kayani get much tougher with the Americans, even edging toward a break.”

“His goal was to rally support among his rank-and-file troops, who are almost uniformly anti-American.”

“That Bin Laden was living comfortably in Pakistan for years has evinced little outrage here among a population that has consistently told pollsters it is more sympathetic to Al Qaeda than to the United States.”

“…they were gradually “strangling the alliance” by making things difficult for the Americans in Pakistan.”

Seems pretty clear. Now, what about those nuclear weapons?

Sack no Soldiers; Sack no Coppers; Sack no Nurses

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I wish I had their confidence. The government is so convinced there could be no Mumbai-style attack in Britain they are cutting back on every resource we might need to deal with it. And as Liam Fox, Defence Secretary, told a Chatham House conference yesterday, there is more to come. He is right to say, “Tackling the crisis in the public finances is not just an issue of economics but an issue of national security too,” but as I asked in a post last year, “Should economic reality trump military necessity?” After all, we either spend the money and defend ourselves adequately, or we have no need for budgets for anything. This is a matter of survival, plain and simple.

Al-Qaeda could continue to target London, or they might do what the IRA did and seek out softer targets where they can stage what they also now call a “spectacular” with a higher percentage of success. In other words, an attack could happen anywhere in the country and we need the resources to cope with it throughout the country. But what are we doing instead?

Defence:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

Police:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

NHS:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

As Rolf Harris used to say, “Can you see anything yet?” Is there a pattern emerging? Yes there is. Soldiers, policemen and nurses are bearing the brunt of the cut-backs, but not the generals, police chiefs and hospital administrators. Yet in a Mumbai-style attack, the police will be the first on the scene, large numbers of casualties will need to be taken to hospitals, and ultimately the army will need to be called in to assist as even a small number of armed terrorists rampaging through a city would be beyond the resources of any local police force. The police and medical services would still be stretched even if the attack was a series of coordinated bombings across a city. I ought to acknowledge that the fire service also has a vital role to play in these scenarios.

The government needs to focus attention on making the cuts where they are most warranted – at the highest levels, and not where they are most damaging – at the front line.

Bin Laden: A Death on the Field of Battle

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Some people find it difficult to square the killing of Osama bin Laden with the actions of a law abiding state. There are questions in some quarters about extrajudicial killings, even of execution, and suggestions that he ought to have been captured alive – at any cost – and put on trial like the Nazi leaders of Germany were after the Second World War. But I think that confusion is entirely the result of regarding al-Qaeda “operatives” as ordinary criminals who should be prosecuted according to civil law. That is wrong. al-Qaeda is at war with us, and consequently, we with them.

It is true that we have developed the concept of war crimes since Nuremberg and we now have a permanent international court to aggressively prosecute anyone, including heads of state who offend international morality. Former President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic is the most recent high-profile defendant to have been arrested and brought to trial. He died before his trial was completed, but the warning is currently being given to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria regarding the mass murder of their respective civilian populations.

However, in all of these cases, prosecution followed, or would follow, the end of hostilities. The war with al-Qaeda is still on-going. So yes, bin Laden had a case to answer for war crimes, but that had to take second place to dealing with him not just as an active combatant, but as the leader of al-Qaeda. He was actively engaged in planning and directing continuing acts of terrorism against the West. He had a “second front”, as it were, against other Moslems who did not conform to his radical vision of Islam and his legacy is that he killed more Moslems than Christians.

Any reasonable person should accept that bin Laden was actively directing al-Qaeda from his Abbottabad compound and that he was not just a legitimate military target, but a necessary target. His death was therefore no different to any other combatant on the field of battle. An opportunity to surrender is not always offered to an enemy, a soldier’s first duty is to himself and his comrades, especially with an enemy who uses suicide as a weapon of war. As it is, the actions of the US Navy SEALs will go down in history as one of the outstanding commando raids.

In brief, we are at war with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed at a location where he was actively planning and directing a war against us.

It is a nonsense to regard al-Qaeda as civilians and to put them through civil courts and prosecute them in the ordinary way, as if they had committed a traffic offence. These people are at war with us and their chosen weapon is terrorism. The fiasco of Guantanamo Bay shows the folly of such an approach, releasing combatants to go back and resume fighting against us when they should remain locked-up for the duration. We didn’t treat German prisoners of war that way, nor Argentines taken prisoner on the Falklands. We didn’t hand them their weapons back and say, “Now don’t do it again.”

I have blogged on these aspects before:

The problem with treating enemy combatants as civil defendants. It doesn’t work.

What part of “We’re at war” do you not understand?

The problem with treating enemy combatants as civil defendants. It doesn’t work.

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The scene: The Old Bailey, sometime in 1942. Four German Luftwaffe airmen are in the dock charged with dropping bombs over England.

Defence Counsel rises: “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, my clients emphatically deny the charges you have heard today that they did deliberately drop explosive bombs on the Assembly Rooms in Bath, Somerset, causing the deaths of several residents of that fine city. The prosecution have presented no evidence whatsoever to link those bombs which tragically fell on the city that night, to my client’s aircraft, a Ju 88 manufactured by Junkers and Company of Dessau, Germany. My clients were in just one of many aircraft flying in the area at the time and any one of the others may have accidentally released the bombs with unfortunate consequences. Yet the prosecution have singularly failed to arrest any of them as suspects or even to question them as witnesses. The case against my clients is therefore one entirely of speculation. My clients were on an innocent pleasure flight, wishing only to enjoy by moonlight the pastoral scenes made famous by such renowned artists as Mr John Constable, RA, and to admire the architecture of some of our great cities, assisted in their exploration by a guide to Great Britain published by that noted Anglophile, Herr Karl Baedeker, a copy of which they had with them on their journey. It has to be said that their treatment as visitors to our country has been deplorable. They were quite outrageously attacked and shot at by a Royal Air Force fighter plane, causing them to crash land and to sustain whiplash injuries which may keep them away from operational duties for days if not weeks. The unprovoked attack on their aircraft, from behind, was a cowardly act completely disproportionate to the offences for which my clients stand accused and which they emphatically deny. Furthermore their subsequent treatment at the hands of the police fell far short of that expected in a civilised society such as ours. The police failed to provide wurst and sauerkraut when requested, and served instead tea with cucumber sandwiches from which the crusts had not been removed. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I am sure you share a deep sense of shame at what has been done to these fine young men in the name of our country, and I urge to you find them innocent of all charges.”

Verdict: Not guilty. Crown ordered to pay compensation to the aircrew, and damages to the German government for the loss of their aircraft.

Further news: An un-named RAF pilot has been arrested and charged with causing criminal damage to a Junkers bomber.

Further further news: A former poet has been jailed for life for race hate crimes after inciting violence against the residents of Slough, Berkshire. Sir John Betjemen said as he was lead away to prison, “I weep for my country.”

How goes the war on terror? A round up of recent news

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I’ve been astonished by a string of news stories in recent days that seem to suggest we haven’t a clue how to deal with terrorism. Click on each item to read the full report.

The Joseph Rowntree Trust and The Roddick Foundation have over recent years given £170,000 and £25,000 respectively to a protest group set up to lobby for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. The group praises the radical Yemen-based cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, describing him as an “inspiration”.

The “inspirational” Anwar al-Awlaki, see above, has released a new online video in which he calls for Americans to be killed, saying they are from the “party of devils” and so don’t require any special religious permission to kill.

46 convicted terrorists have been or are are to be released from prison despite security concerns and evidence that many are simply disappearing once freed.

Osama bin Laden is reported to be living comfortably in North Waziristan, protected by local militias and elements of Pakistan’s security services.

Meanwhile, China is to build another nuclear power station for Pakistan, adding to the one completed and the other four already planned or under construction. Agencies warn that Pakistan has accelerated the pace of its nuclear weapons programme and a row of new cooling towers at the first plant suggest production of plutonium could soon begin.

What part of “We’re at war” do you not understand?

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The release of dozens of convicted terrorists coupled with cutbacks in the defence budget indicates the government have a fatal misunderstanding of the peril we are in. Al Qaeda is at war with us, they seek to destroy us absolutely and impose their especially brutal version of Sharia law worldwide. The government are certainly aware of the threat and are devoting significant resources to combating it. Yet it seems that threat has to be offset against competing needs on the purse strings. Shall we build a new warship or shall we fund the Tyne and Wear Metro? Shall we have combat aircraft on the new carriers or shall we let Vodafone keep several billion pounds in unpaid tax?

The most glaring evidence of our disconnect from reality is our treatment of enemy combatants. We treat them as civilians, which they are most certainly not. To appreciate the absurdity of this, imagine treating Argentine troops the same way during the Falklands War. We did not haul them before the local magistrate and charge them with trespass, or being in possession of a 155mm Howitzer without a firearms license. They were not given suspended sentences with warnings to their future conduct and they were not sent back to their units to continue fighting.

Captured enemy combatants are prisoners of war. They are held in detention for the duration of hostilities. They are accorded all their rights under the Geneva Convention.

Losing two wars at once

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There are two wars going on in Afghanistan at present, not one as is generally perceived. The first is a war of choice against the Taliban in which we seek to build a stable, peaceful democratic Afghan state. The second is a war of necessity against al Qaeda who we seek to eliminate as a terrorist threat.

Neither war is going well. There is no conceivable hope that we can eliminate the rampant corruption at every level of the Afghan government, and therefore no hope that we can bring peace and stability to that country. But we continue to prop up Hamid Karzai while we try to win hearts and minds amongst the populace. To that end we go out to remote villages, find the village elders and sit down and talk with them. We offer education for their children, medical aid for their community, trading opportunities and financial support, and even weapons so they can defend themselves from the Taliban. The Taliban have a much simpler approach. They go to the remote villages, find the village elders and kill them. Their approach is going to trump ours every time because we can’t occupy and defend every village in Afghanistan and the Taliban know that what the Americans were fond of saying in Vietnam is true, “if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

So why don’t we cut our losses and just pull out? The problem we have is with the second war, against al Qaeda. We were on the verge of completely defeating them back in 2003 when we shifted our attention away and invaded Iraq instead. The war in Afghanistan suddenly became the forgotten war, starved of resources, devoid of leadership, and out of the public eye. Al Qaeda used that respite well. They have regrouped and organised a network of training camps not just in northern Pakistan, but in other regional hot spots around the world. Afghanistan is important to us because it is the only land base close to their heartlands from which we can operate. If, or when, we lose Afghanistan as a base, operations against al Qaeda can only be conducted by air across what will then be a very hostile Taliban controlled Afghanistan, or an already hostile Iran, or an increasingly hostile Pakistan. If we lose Afghanistan, we may lose any hope of defeating al Qaeda in Pakistan.

The consequences will be severe indeed. We will leave al Qaeda free to operate against us from a secure base, immune from attack by us. They will continue to destabilise Pakistan and will in a few short years take possession of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. We should then reflect on the lie of WMD’s that took us into war with Iraq and which gave al Qaeda this unprecedented opportunity.