Obama and the "Yes-You-Can" terrorists

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President Obama’s speech, announcing his intent to reign in America’s global war on terror is playing out with a certain grisly irony here in England, a country reeling from the latest terrorist act.

The media here is filled with ghastly images of a man, clad in a jacket and woolen cap, glaring at the camera, a knife and meat cleaver in his bloody hand—just after he and his partner hacked to death and tried to behead a young British soldier in Woolwich in southeast London two days ago.

 What is particularly alarming is the similarity of these two newest terrorist murderers in the name of Islam to the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon last month, to the 23 year-old son of Algerian immigrants, who shot down seven people in France a little more than a year ago. 

In England, as in the earlier attacks in the U.S. and France, the terrorist killings provoked a wave of horror and outrage across the country. Islamic leaders denied such dastardly deeds had anything to do with the true faith. The murders were condemned as the totally senseless, cowardly act of unhinged killers, their minds deranged by radical Islamist claptrap.

“Britain will never buckle,” said Prime Minister David Cameron. “The terrorists will never win because they can never beat the values we hold dear.”

In fact, however, as one of the two killers in Woolwich talked to a horrified onlooker before the police arrived, in his own mind, at least, their actions were quite rational. They were in retaliation for Britain’s participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.” the man with the meat cleaver said. “Your people will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying by British soldiers everyday. We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same.”

He went on, “So what if we want to live by the Sharia in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists, kill us?”

“Rather, your lot are extreme. You are the ones. When you drop a bomb, do you think it picks on a person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family?’

The investigation in London is just getting underway, but there is no evidence that the two men of Nigerian parents were part of al-Qaeda or any sophisticated terrorist network. One of them had converted from Christianity to Islam, but they were what the British authorities call “self-starters,”a potentially far more dangerous threat to Britain and the West than al-Qaeda itself.

They were almost certainly swayed by radical Islamic clerics in England or via the Internet, such as the fiery English-language sermons delivered by Anwar al-Alwaki, an Al Qaeda preacher based in Yemen. An American citizen, he was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the West’s dilemma is that his call for wannabe jihadis to launch whatever bloody attacks they can conjure, echoes on—as does the motto “Just Do It.”   

That’s also the story behind the bombings at the Boston Marathon, perpetrated by the two young Tsarnaev brothers, immigrants from the restless Muslim nation of  Chechnya. Here again, there is yet no evidence that they received any serious terrorist training or were acting as agents of any sophisticated network. Like the two men in Woolwich, they were freelancers--carrying out their own murderous schemes, inspired by nationalist cum religious sentiments, abetted by on-line instructions about bomb-making.

Their motives?  The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was determined to make them clear. As he lay bleeding from his wounds, hidden from the police inside a boat in the back yard of a Watertown, Ma., he wrote a message on the interior wall of the cabin.

The note said the bombings were in retaliation for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims "collateral damage" in the same way innocent victims have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," Tsarnaev wrote.

Again, in March 2012, France was traumatized by the murderous outburst of another young Muslim in Toulouse.  Mohammed Merah, 23, first gunned down three French soldiers—one of them Muslim—then three days later he methodically shot four more people—a rabbi and three students at a nearby Jewish School.  

He attacked the military base, Merah later told police, because of France’s involvement in Afghanistan; and the Jewish school because “The Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” He was also outraged, he said, by France’s ban of the full veil.

As in Woolwich and Boston, the immediate suspicion that Merah was somehow linked to al-Qaeda; but it turned out that it wasn’t. As I blogged at the time, Merah had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but there was no evidence that this former petty criminal was part of any serious terrorist network.

That being the case, how on earth can the authorities in the U.S. and Europe deal with the threat of such “Just-Do-It” jihadis?  

Since 2005, for instance, British security services have prevented more than a dozen terrorist plots on British soil, including a scheme to blow up airliners with liquid-based bombs, to targeting shopping centers and nightclubs with fertilizer-based explosives, to taking out the London stock exchange. But the two Woolwich killers slipped through.

This, despite the fact that, according to reports here, both of them had been on an MI-5 watch list. One had apparently been arrested while attempting to travel to Somalia to join a radical Islamic group.

But after that, what should the authorities have done? Hold him for life? Let him go but keep him under constant surveillance? With some 2.5 million people of Muslim descent in England? Many of them unemployed, alienated from their government and its tendency to follow the lead of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East. How do you keep a handle on them all?

French authorities also singled out Mohammed Merah for special attention after his trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Merah shared space on that watch-list with some 600 other radicals from right to left just in the Toulouse area alone. Don’t forget, there are more than five million people of Muslim descent in France, many of them also bitter, unemployed, poorly housed.

French authorities have also foiled terrorist plots over the past few years, but there is no way they could have predicted that a young man like Mohammed Merah, who first turned to Salafism in a French prison, would migrate from radical “attitude” into full-blown terrorism. Indeed, apparently before he set out to avenge his Moslem brothers for France’s military role in Afghanistan, Merah had earlier tried to enlist in the French army, presumably to go to Afghanistan to fight against Islamic radicals.

Thus, there are certainly other precipitating factors—apart from ideology alone--that transform young men and women into terrorists. The elder Tsarnaev brother in Boston, for instance, had been a promising amateur boxer. He was apparently radicalized when the people running the Golden Gloves championships restricted  admission to American citizens only. That decision meant the end to Tsarnaev’s boxing career and turned him towards religious extremism.

But, the only real common ground among the terrorist killers have been the statements they’ve issued themselves: Their bloody actions, they’ve all claimed, are retribution for the policies of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the lurid pictures of collateral damage from Drone strikes, and the continued shame of Guantanamo. 

Ironically, all those actions were supposedly undertaken to make the U.S. and its allies safe from terrorism.

Will the apparent shift in America’s policy announced by President Obama change that fatal dynamic? It depends on whether or not he now backs up his high-flying rhetoric with concrete action.

Mali: A double tale of unintended consequences

With hundreds of French troops in Mali, and hundreds more headed that way, the U.S. among other countries, has also pledged some limited support: intelligence, communication, logistics, unarmed drones. But Washington obviously would like to keep a low profile. Washington, in fact, had been militating against just such a move, fearing that another Western intervention in an Arab land would provide another ideal recruiting target for erstwhile jihadis across the Muslim world, not to mention to provoking a spate of terrorist attacks in Europe.

In fact, though, it turns out that the U.S. has already played a major role in the crisis. It’s a devastating lesson of plans gone awry, another dreary footnote to the law of unintended consequences.

According to an excellent New York Times account, for the past several years, the United States has spent more than half a billion dollars in West Africa to counter the threat of radical Islam, America’s “most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.”

The aim of the program was that, rather than rely on the U.S. and its allies to combat Islamic terrorism in the region, the United States would train African troops to deal with the threat themselves.

To that end, for five years U.S. Special Forces trained Malian troops in a host of vital combat and counterterrorism skills. The outcome was considered by the Pentagon to be exemplary

But all that collapsed as the result of another unintended consequence-- of the French-led intervention in Libya. After the fall of Khadhaffi, droves of battle-hardened, well-armed Islamic fighters and Tuareg tribesmen, who had been fighting in Libya, swarmed into Northern Mali.

Joined by other more radical Islamist forces, some linked to Al Qaeda, they had no trouble defeating the Malian army.

Why? Because of the defection to the rebels of several key Malian officers, who had been trained by the Americans.  Turns out that those officers, who were supposed to battle the rebels, were ethnic Tuaregs, the same nomads who were part of the rebellion.

According to the Times, The Tuareg commanders of three of the four Malian units in the north, at the height of the battle, decided to join the insurrection, taking weapons, valuable equipment and their American training with them. They were followed by about 1600 additional army defectors, demolishing the government’s hope of resisting the rebel attack.   

In other words, it’s very likely that the French and their allies-to-come in Mali will be battling rebel troops trained by the U.S. Special Forces.

Caught totally by surprise by the whole ghastly mess, the American officials involved with the training program were reportedly flabbergasted.

There are obvious questions: How was it possible for the Special Forces and their Pentagon bosses and the CIA to have had such a total lack of understanding of the Malian officers they’d trained and the country they’d been operating in for over five years?

 But you could ask that same question about U.S. military actions in any number of countries over the past few decades, from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan, where the most apt  comparison might be to releasing elephants into a porcelain shop.

Which leads to a more fundamental question: how is the U.S. to avoid similar catastrophic mistakes down the road? The Pentagon has recently announced that some 3,000 troops, no longer needed in Afghanistan, have been reassigned to work with the local military in 35 countries across Africa--to deal with the threat of Al Qaeda-linked terrorism.

Sounds just like what was going on in Mali.

But does anyone really think the U.S. and its military will have a better understanding of the myriad forces, tribes, religions, governments, legal and illicit financial interests struggling for power and influence in those countries than it did in Mali?  

Or in Iraq, Or Afghanistan or Iran or Somalia or Lebanon, or Vietnam or Cambodia.

And has France now embarked down the same tragic path?

Toulouse Aftermath: Is It really?

Mohammed Merah, a teenage loser, a petty thief and unemployed garage mechanic, who achieved instant worldwide notoriety as the latest symbol of Islamic jihad went down in a hail of bullets early this morning.

He leaves a string of unanswered questions and paradoxes in his wake.

Such as, to what degree was this beardless, hash-smoking, lacoste-wearing  young tough actually linked to al-Qaeda, as he claimed to police and reporters?  To what degree was he really a self-declared jihadist, acting almost entirely on his own?  An individual target, rather than part of an organized cell, a target much more difficult for police in France and throughout Europe to deal with.

--Another paradox, mentioned in my previous blog, but well worth repeating, because it leads to a further question:

France has chosen to spend hundreds of millions of dollars sending troops to Afghanistan to support Nato and the U.S.  The presumed theory being to prevent that country from remaining a breeding-ground for terrorists to attack France and Europe and the U.S.

But it’s almost certain that Merah, like hundreds of young would-be jihadists throughout Europe of Muslim descent, was drawn to Afghanistan, exactly because French troops had joined in the invasion of that Islamic country.

Which brings up another irony (and question for Mohammed Merah.)   

Why, if he was such a rabid jihadist, did Mohammed Merah attempt in 2010 to enlist in the French military, specifically the Foreign Legion? For some reason—either because he was rejected straight off, or got cold feet—he never wound up in uniform.

If he had, the young man who became an overnight symbol for the Clash of Civilizations, might with—just a slight twist of fate--have joined French troops in Afghanistan battling Islamic militants.

Another question: what impact will this bloody national trauma have on the presidential elections, the first round due next month. Difficult to say at this point, but many commentators think that—despite attacks from the far right that he has not been tough enough on radical Islamists—the speedy resolution of the affair will only bolster an embattled President Nicholas Sarkozy.

[The French and American authorities will presumably also have to explain the fact that Mohammed Merah was reportedly also on the U.S.  "no-fly" list.] 

Ironically, it was a similar tense standoff  in 1993 that first brought Sarkozy to the national spot light:

He was then the mayor of Neuilly, a tranquil community just outside Paris. when a gunman wearing a dynamite belt burst into a local school and demanded ransome to reslease eight hostages. 

With incredible aplomb, Sarkoy talked the gunman into releasing one child and—with the TV camers rolling—walked out of the classroom with the youngster in his arms. 

After 46 hours of talks, the gunman was finally killed by police sharpshoorters. The seven remaining hostages were freed unharmed. Sarkozy was launched.

The similar bloody denouement of Toulouse notwithstanding, whoever becomes France’s next President will continue to face enormous problems—and threats.

How many other Mohammed Merah’s are out there? 

Secret History of the "Arab Spring" Chapter 7

Recruits for Al Qaeda

Since 9/11 the overriding concern of U.S. policy across the Middle East and Central Asia has been to defeat Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on that obsession. Yet when the secret history of the current “Arab Spring” is written, we may learn that one of the many unintended consequences of U.S. attempts to keep up with—and influence--the historic events, was to provide a flood of new recruits to radical Islam.

 The immediate cause: Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

While America and its allies have launched a military effort to protect the rebels in Libya, America has voiced only muted protests as its major Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, crushes the rebels in Bahrain—with what could be ruinous reverberations for all concerned. 

The rebels in Bahrain are predominately Shiites—who have long chafed under minority Sunnite rule. Riding a mounting wave of popular protests, the Shiites seemed to be on the road to forcing the government in Manama to accept at least some of their demands.

With the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, U.S. officials have also been concerned about the unrest. But their attempts to encourage the government to meet some basic demands for change failed. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Manama on 12 March, criticized the regime for its “baby steps” toward reform.

Meanwhile King Abdullah in neighboring Saudi Arabia looked on with horror as the Arab Spring came sweeping towards him. The Saudis (Sunnis) have their own restive Shiite minority. The King was also concerned that a Shiite breakthrough in Bahrain would strengthen Iran’s sway in the region.

Even more alarming for Abdullah--the alacrity with which Obama turned his back on one-time dictator allies. America’s unceremonious dumping of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was a shocking harbinger. Could Washington’s remaining key Arab ally be next?

Thus, on March 14^th the Saudis (along with their Gulf allies ) finally acted--dispatching a thousand troops along with tanks and armored vehicles across the causeway that separates them from Bahrain-to help brutally stifle the revolt.

In the process, the Saudi king reportedly ignored a specific request from Obama to stay out. The Hell with the duplicitous Americans! He’d had enough of following Washington’s lead. The Americans were shocked and humiliated. Relations between the two governments are supposedly at a nadir. 

That’s the official version. But when the history of these events is written, I imagine the real facts will tell a more Machiavellian tale: that the U.S. in fact gave a tacit go ahead to the Saudis to act—with disastrous results.

There have been some unconfirmed reports to that effect, and they make sense. There was a trade off: Libya for Bahrain. Without the Saudis, the U.S. could never have convinced the Arab League to ask for the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya. And without that Arab League resolution, the intervention in Libya would never have occurred.  The Saudis and their Gulf partners are also taking part to some extent in that intervention, to provide at least a façade of Arab participation.

In return, U.S. officials have been very muted in any criticism of the brutal crack-down in Bahrain—a country much more vital to Saudi interests, than is Libya.

And brutal it has been:  Backed up by the Saudis, Bahraini security forces and pro-regime thugs armed with swords and clubs attacked demonstrators throughout the kingdom. Human rights activists have reported that a total of 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.

Yet scarcely a peep out of Washington.

O.K. you say, what’s wrong with the U.S. trading Bahrain for Libya. It’s realpolitik, right out of the Henry Kissinger playbook.

Except that the consequences of that Saudi intervention may prove much more disastrous to Western (and Saudi) interests than any possible positive fall-out from the adventure in Libya. 

That according to a study just issued by the International Crisis Group. What has happened, says the report, is that that from those hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful Shiite protestors in Bahrain, who had thought they could achieve change through peaceful protests--as the Americans have been advocating--that many of those thwarted, bloodied protestors may now turn to violence—exactly as Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups have been preaching.

 As the report puts it, “Manama’s crackdown and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention are dangerous moves that could stamp out hopes for peaceful transition in Bahrain and turn a mass movement for democratic reform into an armed conflict, while regionalizing an internal political struggle. They could also exacerbate sectarian tensions not only in Bahrain or the Gulf but across the region.

“Along with other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia purportedly is responding to dual fears: that the takeover would be tantamount to an Iranian one. Both are largely unfounded. It also is concerned protests might inspire similar movements among its own Eastern Province Shiites, oblivious that its involvement is likelier to provoke than deter them.

“Bahrain’s brutal crackdown and Saudi interference fan flames both want to extinguish. The most effective response to the radical regime change threat or greater Iranian influence is not violent suppression of peaceful protests but political reform. Time is running short and trends are in the wrong direction.”

 “In short, the intervention likely achieved precisely the opposite of what it intended.”

Over the years, throughout the region, from Egypt to Yemen to Saudi Arabia, such repression and subsequent radicalization has been a vital source of recruits for Al Qaeda.  

Yet, on his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense of what is still billed as the most powerful nation on the planet, Robert Gates reportedly didn’t even dare raise the issue of Bahrain issue King Abdullah.

Just imagine having to face the monarch’s wrath!