Update: Part two of this series on IEDs is here: ‘The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces’.
The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but is now affecting about 40% of the country. It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and – intriguingly – is filtering into Shi’a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to “flip”, with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.
Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ’s standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so “embedding” the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me “we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa’ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it’s hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.”) Well, indeed.
More after the jump.
Continue reading Tribes, marriage and terrorists in Iraq
Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America’s military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar – not to mention the two carrier battle groups in the Gulf or the 8,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. In the event of an American or Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example, the troops in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan would be in even greater danger than they already are, vulnerable to an Iranian counterattack or, more likely, an Iranian-sponsored terror campaign.
Second, there exists a tremendous sense of guilt among the US senior officer corps for what is seen as a failure to stand up to the civilian leadership in the rush to go to war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Much of the current divide between America’s generals and its junior officer corps boils down to a sense on the part of junior officers that their superiors largely acquiesced to whatever Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in the run-up to the Iraq war. The charge of spinelessness is one that hurts America’s generals, especially as it comes from lieutenants and captains who have proven themselves on the battlefield of Iraq.
Third, in the wake of the Iraq war, professional military officers are more suspicious than ever of think-tank types with theories on how easy military victories can be achieved. As an active-duty US Army officer recently told me: “If I hear one more lawyer with no military experience explain to me how air power alone really can do it this time, I’m going to kill him.”
Can’t we just have a military coup right now, please?
La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l’ouest algérien, vendredi. L’origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.
L’hypothèse d’un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l’autre rive, comme l’Espagne, l’Italie ou la France est avancée. “On peut supposer qu’il s’agit d’une expérience scientifique d’armes conventionnelles”, explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d’astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L’Expression.
L’hypothèse d’un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n’a touché qu’une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.
Une secousse sismique d’une magnitude de 4,6 sur l’échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.
Weird. Will feed the conspiracy theories of already paranoid Algerians for weeks, I’m sure.
WASHINGTON – When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders.
A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy.
They banded together at AEI headquarters in downtown Washington early last December and hammered out the surge plan during a weekend session. It called for two major initiatives to defeat the insurgency: reinforcing the troops and restoring security to Iraqi neighborhoods. Then came trips to the White House by AEI military historian Frederick Kagan, retired Army Gen. John Keane and other surge proponents.
More and more officials began attending the sessions. Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. “We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration,” said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner. “It became sort of a magnet for movers and shakers in the White House.” Donnelly said the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. The two Army generals then in charge of Iraq had opposed a troop increase.
Quite aside from whether the surge is working or not (I have no idea, although the continuing death tolls in Iraq would suggest it hasn’t done much outside of a few areas), should think-tankers trump generals in planning wars? Isn’t this what you always learn is a bad thing for military performance — like Hitler taking over war-planning from the Wehrmacht? (Obviously I am not comparing the AEI to the Nazi Party, trolls.)
‘In the month of August 1797 he [Bonaparte] wrote “that the time was not far distant when we should see that, to destroy the power of England effectually, it would be necessary to attack Egypt.”
In the same month he wrote to Talleyrand, who had just succeeded Charles de Lacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, “that it would be necessary to attack Egypt, which did not belong to the Grand Signior [Ottoman Emperor].” Talleyrand replied, “that his ideas respecting Egypt were certainly grand, and that their utility could not fail to be fully appreciated.”
More from that except here.
As Egypt has brought to perfection the art of donor-shopping probably more then any other nation, I guess in the end they’ll find someone stupid enough to pay the bills submitted by the Egyptian army.
In contrast to what appears to be common in other countries, the Egyptian army maintains its monopoly over mine-clearing. Which is why not much has happened until today and which is why most donors rightfully so are reluctant to contribute.
Excerpt from the English translation:
It was not until 1982 that the Egyptian government acknowledged the problem. “It was a question of costs and priorities,” Fathy El Shazly, director of the national northwest coast development program, frankly admits.
He refers to the history of his country, which after the Second World War was first busy gaining independence and then tied up in four wars against Israel. A bit more haste would have been advisable, though.
According to the NGO “Landmine Monitor,” there have been 8,313 mine-related casualties in this region since 1982, including 619 deaths. As can be observed again and again whenever natural disasters or accidents occur, however, the Egyptian government evidently does not place much importance on its own citizens. It has done little to help the victims to date.
The Egyptian army did clear some 3.5 million pieces of ammunition out of the desert between 1982 and 1999, but since then a lack of funds has slowed down their efforts – at least that’s the official line.
Since things are moving much too slowly for the private sector, which has great plans for the region, some hotels and oil companies have begun to remove buried ammunition at their own expense in order to build access roads to their projects.
From The Times:
Mr Marwan’s death will send shockwaves across the Middle East and among some of Britain’s wealthiest people. His associates included Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, Ken Bates, the football club chairman, the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the late Tiny Rowland.
If found to be murder, his death will carry echoes of last year’s assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent.
In any case, he was close to Nasser and Sadat and must have made his fortune thanks to the connections he developed during that time, in particular when he overlooked the businesses of the Egyptian military in the 1970.
Yet it is true that while Lebanon whets appetites with its gorgeous landscapes, clement weather, energetic people, and wonderful food, trying to consume too much of it tends to bring on heartburn. Just ask the Ottoman Turks, the imperialist French, the US Marine Corps, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Syrians, or any number of Lebanese would-be overlords. The country’s infernally complex ingredients seem chemically incapable of melding into a digestible dish.
The second piece, by Jim Quilty for MERIP, focuses on the recent confrontation between the Lebanese army and an Islamist group operating out of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli:
If Lebanese politicians on both sides of the government-opposition divide have emphasized support for the army over empathy for human suffering in the camps, their rhetoric betrays the marginality of the refugee community. It also reflects the centrality of the Lebanese army in the ongoing contest over the future direction of state policy. At the end of the day, it is entirely likely that the Palestinians in Lebanon will be three-time losers in this bloody episode: enduring the humanitarian crisis that grows out of it, shouldering the burden of containing it and suffering a backlash in Lebanese political opinion for being seen as somehow responsible for it. The anti-Palestinian feeling in Lebanon is all the more bitterly ironic since so few of the radical Sunni Islamists battling the Lebanese army in Nahr al-Barid are themselves Palestinian.
Another key paragraph, on whether March 14 is financing Salafist-Jihadists groups (as famously but unconvincingly alleged by Seymour Hersh), is this one:
Whether or not the Hariris and their Saudi supporters have a soft spot for salafis is not the point. Rather, it is the culture of cooptation that has marked the Lebanese government’s approach to the challenges confronting the country since the Syrian withdrawal. Rafiq al-Hariri deployed his financial resources to great effect during his political career, but his purchase of loyalties was embedded in the Syrian occupation’s security regime. With the Syrians gone, and with Sunnis set against their Shi‘i countrymen — and with them the specter of Hizballah, the militants who stopped the Israeli army, Lebanese find the line between purchased loyalties and militant outsourcing a fuzzy one.
Although Quilty, like Rodenbeck, highlights the fact that some Syrian support for Fatah al-Islam operatives was probably necessary, he does not satisfactorily answer the various conspiracy theories about its origin — except to say that whatever help they may have secured, the members of the group appear to be genuinely nasty Jihadists, not just hired guns.
Read it all for the nitty-gritty detail of Palestinian camp politics.
Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack, and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.
Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms, Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.
Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country – US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in “defence” products to the United States – up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.
Much of this growth has been in the so-called homeland security sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and services are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.
And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror”.
There is a more sophisticated, highly original version of this thesis in the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, notably in their groundbreaking book The Global Political Economy of Israel.