Islam

An advertisement in the classifieds section of the International Herald Tribune, of November 4, 2010, caught my eye. It was posted by the "2nd Family Court of Kadikoy" and related that a ruling had been passed granting a divorce to Akay Viran, born in Antalya (in the village of Yuksekalan), Turkey, from Siti Mariam Seikh Abu Bakar, "of Malaysian nationality."

Malaysian? Perhaps, as many Muslims would put it, the Muslim world (Dar al-Islam) is one and all Muslims are brothers (even if on occasion they seek divorce).

I moved on to The Guardian (London) of the same date, where I read an interview with one Roshanara Choudhry. Eh, not exactly an interview. Rather, extracts from the interrogation of Choudhry by detective sergeant Simon Dobinson and detective constable Syed Hussain, both of the London police. Choudhry was arrested on suspicion of the May 2010 stabbing of Labour MP Stephen Timms (who has since recovered).

Choudry was earlier this month given a fifteen-year-minimum prison sentence for the attempted murder. A top student in her class at King's College, London University, where she was studying English and Communications, Choudhry decided to quit school and kill Timms because he had supported Britain's participation in the war in Iraq. She was persuaded to adopt this course while listening to online sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni preacher regarded as the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Two package bombs sent from Yemen have touched off the latest flurry of commentary about the nature of terrorist threats currently facing the United States and from whence those threats come. A couple of features of earlier rounds of commentary have also been prominent in this round. One is the tendency to think in territorial terms—to focus on country X from which the latest threat has come, and to regard counterterrorism as a problem of crafting policy toward country X. Afghanistan has been—and still is, in terms of being the focus of U.S. attention and resources—the principal country filling this role. With the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner last December and now the package bombs, Yemen is challenging Afghanistan for this role in American thinking about thinking, although it still has a long way to go. The challenge is salutary insofar as it reminds us that Afghanistan is not in fact the alpha and omega of transnational terrorism, or anything close to it. But similarly narrow country-specific thinking is now characterizing much of what is being said about terrorism and Yemen.

The method used in the latest attempted attack ought to remind us that terrorism is transnational and not limited or defined by territorial boundaries. Bernard Haykel, a professor of New Eastern studies at Princeton, made a pertinent observation that one does not need to be a Middle Eastern expert to make: that “in Yemen, you can walk into a local branch of FedEx and mail something to the U.S. You can't do that in Somalia or in rural Afghanistan.” True, and if the availability of FedEx and UPS outlets is a measure of terrorists' operational opportunities, be aware that we have a whole lot more of them in the West, including the United States, than in either Yemen or Afghanistan.

On October 27, 2010, Al Jazeera television network broadcasted a new audiotape by Osama bin Laden meant to exploit the Muslim world’s growing anger toward France specifically, and against Europe generally. Defending the recent kidnapping of five French nationals in Niger, bin Laden said the act was an appropriate response to France’s ongoing intervention in the affairs of Muslims in North and West Africa; its persecution of Muslim women in France via its ban on burqa wearing; and the presence of 3,500 French troops in Afghanistan. Bin Laden warned Paris that it is foolish to think France’s anti-Muslim actions would go unanswered by al-Qaeda and other mujahideen. “The equation is very clear and simple,” bin Laden said, stressing, as he always does, the justice of reciprocal treatment in wartime. “[T]he fault lies with the one who initiates [the hostilities]. . . . as you kill, you will be killed; as you abduct, so shall you be abducted; as you ruin our [Muslim] security, so shall we ruin your security.”

With the news that a suburban Virginia man—a Pakistani-born naturalized U.S. citizen—has been arrested for surveilling stations of the Washington area's Metrorail system as preparation for bombing them, authorities have stressed that the public was never in danger. Of course it wasn't; the only apparent plot in this case was a phony one that was part of an FBI sting operation. The Bureau deserves applause for taking out of circulation one individual who, regardless of the artificiality of the plot that snared him, evidently was quite willing to assist an operation that could as easily have been a real plot to kill a lot of real people. The success of the sting operation is reassuring as far as it goes, but the case provides reminders that are less reassuring.

A fair and important question about the war in Afghanistan that I have had to field several times concerns the Taliban’s treatment of women. If we do not prevail militarily over the Taliban, I am asked, are we consigning the women of Afghanistan to treatment that is medieval at best and more likely cruel? Some very pointed questions along this line were raised last month at the release of the report of the Afghanistan Study Group, with which I have been associated and which calls for de-emphasizing the military effort in Afghanistan as a way of dealing with threats emanating from South Asia. The topic came up again a couple of weeks ago in a briefing on the group’s report that I helped to present to Congressional staffers.

The issue is not new, although it has been given additional poignancy recently by stories of atrocities such as the disfigurement of a woman whose picture then appeared on the cover of Time. Prior to 9/11, the Afghan Taliban’s abysmal human rights performance—including, but not limited to, issues involving the status of women—was a topic in policy deliberations on Afghanistan and public debate about the policy. Policymakers in the George W. Bush administration considered the issue during their first eight months in office but decided, like their predecessors in the Clinton administration, to focus on the number one problem involving Afghanistan, which was Osama bin Laden and terrorism. They were not going to crowd the agenda on Afghanistan, much less do something as costly to the United States as waging a war there, on behalf of Afghan human rights.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is planning to increase military assistance to Pakistan, in the hope that this assistance will encourage Pakistan to do more to fight militants that frequently attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

This is silly.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (D-MI) wrote recently:

“[T]he Pakistan military continued to avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or al-Qa’ida forces in North Waziristan. This is as much a political choice as it is a reflection of an under-resourced military prioritizing its targets.”

To some extent, Pakistan’s conventional military lacks the troops and equipment it needs to launch a full-scale clearing operation in North Waziristan. Nevertheless, Pakistan also continues to assist select militant groups in order to reinforce Islamist bonds across its borders as a buffer against Indian encirclement. That's an open secret.

No amount of pressure or persuasion will affect Pakistan’s decision to tackle extremism because its priorities are tied directly to that strategic interest, despite what U.S. officials would have you believe. I’ve spoken with analysts at the State Department and they get this, so it’s beyond me as to why U.S. policymakers ignore these core issues and realities.

John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 377 pp., $29.50.

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

THE COVER of John Calvert’s book parades the face that launched a thousand suicide bombers. Sayyid Qutb, the major ideologue of modern, ultraviolent Islamic fundamentalism, is staring through bars, probably during his Cairo trial in April 1966, shortly before his death sentence was pronounced. Bushy eyebrows, a full, dark, graying moustache, large brown eyes, inquisitive, wary, worried. But by some accounts, he was looking forward to his martyrdom: “I have been able to discover God in a wonderful new way. I understand His path and way more clearly and perfectly than before,” he wrote to a Saudi colleague in June. He was hanged by the Nasser regime, along with two fellow Muslim Brotherhood activists, in the early morning hours of August 29.

A recent profile of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, says that he has spent much of his time in the American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay reading Qutb. Apparently, so have many others among the fundamentalists wreaking havoc in Middle Eastern, Far Eastern and Western cities in recent decades. Qutb is the man whose books, written as he was edging toward Islamism in the late 1940s and after his “conversion” during the 1950s, explain why Muslims must wage jihad against both the “Near Enemy”—the Western-aligned and Western-influenced regimes in the Arab world—and the “Far Enemy”—meaning the West itself, especially the United States.

I commend Tuesday's op ed in the New York Times by Richard Barrett, who heads the United Nations team charged with monitoring developments involving Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. His comments on Afghanistan are those of an experienced and disinterested observer, not beholden to the policy commitments of any government. His comments also square with observations I recently made on a couple of issues concerning negotiations with the Taliban. My observations were based mainly on historical patterns of negotiating ends to wars. Barrett's observations are based on first-hand monitoring of what is going on in Afghanistan.

Reporting about the initiation of preliminary talks with the Afghan Taliban, and about the Obama administration's acceptance and even facilitation of such talks, has generated commentary and some skepticism about what we can and cannot expect from a dual track approach of combat and negotiation in Afghanistan. Skepticism is not surprising; Americans like to think of war and peace as two distinct states. They like wars to end the way World War II did, with their military forcing the enemy's military into submission and with peace treaties being something for diplomats to negotiate after guns have fallen silent.

But the United States has had plenty of experience negotiating while fighting; its involvement in both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars ended that way, with two years of negotiations in the former conflict and five years in the latter. The War of 1812 also ended that way—despite the slowness of early nineteenth century trans-Atlantic communications, which resulted in the Battle of New Orleans being fought after a peace treaty had been signed. War being an extension of politics by other means, simultaneous exercise of military and diplomatic instruments should be considered the norm rather than the exception. Frustrations and complications experienced in the aforementioned and other wars are not reasons to reject negotiating an end to an ongoing war; they are reasons to learn from earlier experiences and to shape our techniques and expectations accordingly.

Ten years ago, a U.S. Navy destroyer was bombed while refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden. The suicide attack killed seventeen American sailors and injured thirty-nine. Since the strike, the danger originating out of Yemen has only grown. While Osama bin Laden and other top U.S. targets continue to hide in Pakistan, al-Qaeda in Yemen is now even more dangerous than the central group. On the brink of collapse, Yemen is a nearly perfect haven for terrorists and the West must respond—but exclusively focusing on counterterrorism will only increase the risk for the United States.

American analysts now consider al-Qaeda's affiliate organization in Yemen a more pressing threat to U.S. national security than the central leadership as the Yemen-based outfit is increasingly agile and looking for opportunities to strike abroad. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was officially announced in January 2009 following the merger of the affiliates in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The group aims to use Yemen as a base for training and to plot, plan, and launch operations at home and abroad. While al-Qaeda in Yemen modeled itself on the original outfit, it's autonomous and doesn't take direction from bin Laden.