Category Archives: Afghanistan

Ralph Peters Q&A

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This is interesting. This retired colonel and author has a fair grip on geopolitical historical reality. I love what he says about Persia.

I also agree with him exactly on the millimetre wave scanner for air travel. It is exactly the wrong solution. Here is the speech to which the video below is the Q&A

I believe it was KitmanTV who was kind enough to lead me to this video today. It has been a wildly busy day with the Geert Wilders trial, actual work for a living etc. so I may have lost track. Sorry if this was recommended by someone else.

Stratfor: The Khost Attack and the Intelligence War Challenge

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By George Friedman and Scott Stewart of STRATFOR:

As Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi exited the vehicle that brought him onto Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009, security guards noticed he was behaving strangely. They moved toward al-Balawi and screamed demands that he take his hand out of his pocket, but instead of complying with the officers’ commands, al-Balawi detonated the suicide device he was wearing.

The explosion killed al-Balawi, three security contractors, four CIA officers and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) officer who was al-Balawi’s handler. The vehicle shielded several other CIA officers at the scene from the blast. The CIA officers killed included the chief of the base at Khost and an analyst from headquarters who reportedly was the agency’s foremost expert on al Qaeda. The agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan was allegedly among the officers who survived.
Al-Balawi was a Jordanian doctor from Zarqa (the hometown of deceased al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Under the alias Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani, he served as an administrator for Al-Hesbah, a popular Internet discussion forum for jihadists. Jordanian officers arrested him in 2007 because of his involvement with radical online forums, which is illegal in Jordan. The GID subsequently approached al-Balawi while he was in a Jordanian prison and recruited him to work as an intelligence asset.
Al-Balawi was sent to Pakistan less than a year ago as part of a joint GID/CIA mission. Under the cover of going to school to receive advanced medical training, al-Balawi established himself in Pakistan and began to reach out to jihadists in the region. Under his al-Khurasani pseudonym, al-Balawai announced in September 2009 in an interview on a jihadist Internet forum that he had officially joined the Afghan Taliban.

A Lucky Break for the TTP

It is unclear if al-Balawi was ever truly repentant. Perhaps he cooperated with the GID at first, but had a change of heart sometime after arriving in Pakistan. Either way, at some point al-Balawi approached the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main Pakistani Taliban group, and offered to work with it against the CIA and GID. Al-Balawi confirmed this in a video statement recorded with TTP leader Hakeemullah Mehsud and released Jan. 9. This is significant because it means that al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, and not part of some larger, intentional intelligence operation orchestrated by the TTP or another jihadist entity like al Qaeda.
The TTP’s luck held when a group of 13 people gathered to meet al-Balawi upon his arrival at FOB Chapman. This allowed him to detonate his suicide device amid the crowd and create maximum carnage before he was able to be searched for weapons.
In the world of espionage, source meetings are almost always a dangerous activity for both the intelligence officer and the source. There are fears the source could be surveilled and followed to the meeting site, or that the meeting could be raided by host country authorities and the parties arrested. In the case of a terrorist source, the meeting site could be attacked and those involved in the meeting killed. Because of this, the CIA and other intelligence agencies exercise great care while conducting source meetings. Normally they will not bring the source into a CIA station or base. Instead, they will conduct the meeting at a secure, low-profile offsite location
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Operating in the wilds of Afghanistan is far different from operating out of an embassy in Vienna or Moscow, however. Khost province is Taliban territory, and it offers no refuge from the watching eyes and gunmen of the Taliban and their jihadist allies. Indeed, the province has few places safe enough even for a CIA base. And this is why the CIA base in Khost is located on a military base, FOB Chapman, named for the first American killed in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. Normally, an outer ring of Afghan security around the base searches persons entering FOB Chapman, who the U.S. military then searches again at the outer perimeter of the U.S. portion of the base. Al-Balawi, a high-value CIA asset, was allowed to skip these external layers of security to avoid exposing his identity to Afghan troops and U.S. military personnel. Instead, the team of Xe (the company formerly known as Blackwater) security contractors were to search al-Balawi as he arrived at the CIA’s facility.
A Failure to Follow Security Procedures

Had proper security procedures been followed, the attack should only have killed the security contractors, the vehicle driver and perhaps the Jordanian GID officer. But proper security measures were not followed, and several CIA officers rushed out to greet the unscreened Jordanian source. Reports indicate that the source had alerted his Jordanian handler that he had intelligence pertaining to the location of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. (There are also reports that al-Balawi had given his handlers highly accurate battle damage assessments on drone strikes in Pakistan, indicating that he had access to high-level jihadist sources.) The prospect of finally receiving such crucial and long-sought information likely explains the presence of the high-profile visitors from CIA headquarters in Langley and the station in Kabul — and their exuberance over receiving such coveted intelligence probably explains their eager rush to meet the source before he had been properly screened.
The attack, the most deadly against CIA personnel since the 1983 Beirut bombing, was clearly avoidable, or at least mitigable. But human intelligence is a risky business, and collecting human intelligence against jihadist groups can be flat-out deadly. The CIA officers in Khost the day of the bombing had grown complacent, and violated a number of security procedures. The attack thus serves as a stark reminder to the rest of the clandestine service of the dangers they face and of the need to adhere to time-tested security procedures.
A better process might have prevented some of the deaths, but it would not have solved the fundamental problem: The CIA had an asset who turned out to be a double agent. When he turned is less important than that he was turned into — assuming he had not always been — a double agent. His mission was to gain the confidence of the CIA as to his bona fides, and then create an event in which large numbers of CIA agents were present, especially the top al Qaeda analyst at the CIA. He knew that high-value targets would be present because he had set the stage for the meeting by dangling vital information before the agency. He went to the meeting to carry out his true mission, which was to deliver a blow against the CIA. He succeeded.
The Obama Strategy’s Weakness

In discussing the core weakness in the Afghan strategy U.S. President Barack Obama has chosen, we identified the basic problem as the intelligence war. We argued that establishing an effective Afghan army would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the Americans and their NATO allies lacked knowledge and sophistication in distinguishing friend from foe among those being recruited into the army. This problem is compounded by the fact that there are very few written documents in a country like Afghanistan that could corroborate identities. The Taliban would seed the Afghan army with its own operatives and supporters, potentially exposing the army’s operations to al Qaeda.
This case takes the problem a step further. The United States relied on Jordanian intelligence to turn a jihadist operative into a double agent. They were dependent on the Jordanian handler’s skills at debriefing, vetting and testing the now-double agent. It is now reasonable to assume the agent allowed himself to be doubled in an attempt to gain the trust of the handler. The Jordanians offered the source to the Americans, who obviously grabbed him, and the source passed all the tests to which he was undoubtedly subjected. Yet in the end, his contacts with the Taliban were not designed to provide intelligence to the Americans. The intelligence provided to the Americans was designed to win their trust and set up the suicide bombing. It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that al-Balawi was playing the GID all along and that his willingness to reject his jihadist beliefs was simply an opportunistic strategy for surviving and striking.
Even though encountering al-Balawi was a stroke of luck for the TTP, the group’s exploitation of this lucky break was a very sophisticated operation. The TTP had to provide valuable intelligence to allow al-Balawi to build his credibility. It had to create the clustering of CIA agents by promising extraordinarily valuable intelligence. It then had to provide al-Balawi with an effective suicide device needed for the strike. And it had to do this without being detected by the CIA. Al-Balawi had a credible cover for meeting TTP agents; that was his job. But what al-Balawi told his handlers about his meetings with the TTP, and where he went between meetings, clearly did not indicate to the handlers that he was providing fabricated information or posed a threat.
In handling a double agent, it is necessary to track every step he takes. He cannot be trusted because of his history; the suspicion that he is still loyal to his original cause must always be assumed. Therefore, the most valuable moments in evaluating a double agent are provided by intense scrutiny of his patterns and conduct away from his handlers and new friends. Obviously, if this scrutiny was applied, al-Balawi and his TTP handlers were still able to confuse their observers. If it was not applied, then the CIA was setting itself up for disappointment. Again, such scrutiny is far more difficult to conduct in the Pakistani badlands, where resources to surveil a source are very scarce. In such a case, the intuition and judgment of the agent’s handler are critical, and al-Balawi was obviously able to fool his Jordanian handler.
Given his enthusiastic welcome at FOB Chapman, it would seem al-Balawi was regarded not only as extremely valuable but also as extremely reliable. Whatever process might have been used at the meeting, the central problem was that he was regarded as a highly trusted source when he shouldn’t have been. Whether this happened because the CIA relied entirely on the Jordanian GID for evaluation or because American interrogators and counterintelligence specialists did not have the skills needed to pick up the cues can’t be known. What is known is that the TTP ran circles around the CIA in converting al-Balawi to its uses.
The United States cannot hope to reach any satisfactory solution in Afghanistan unless it can win the intelligence war. But the damage done to the CIA in this attack cannot be underestimated. At least one of the agency’s top analysts on al Qaeda was killed. In an intelligence war, this is the equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in a naval war. The United States can’t afford this kind of loss. There will now be endless reviews, shifts in personnel and re-evaluations. In the meantime, the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan will be attempting to exploit the opportunity presented by this disruption.
Casualties happen in war, and casualties are not an argument against war. However, when the center of gravity in a war is intelligence, and an episode like this occurs, the ability to prevail becomes a serious question. We have argued that in any insurgency, the insurgents have a built-in advantage. It is their country and their culture, and they are indistinguishable from everyone else. Keeping them from infiltrating is difficult.
This was a different matter. Al-Balawi was Jordanian; his penetration of the CIA was less like the product of an insurgency than an operation carried out by a national intelligence service. And this is the most troubling aspect of this incident for the United States. The operation was by all accounts a masterful piece of tradecraft beyond the known abilities of a group like the TTP. Even though al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, not the result of an intentional, long-term operation, the execution of the operation that arose as a result of that lucky break was skillfully done — and it was good enough to deliver a body blow to the CIA. The Pakistani Taliban would thus appear far more skilled than we would have thought, which is the most important takeaway from this incident, and something to ponder

Terry Glavin: Afghanistan: A Quagmire Of Confidence, Progress And Optimism.

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From Terry Glavin’s blog. A word of advice to any0ne interested in the issue of Afghanistan and the NATO mission there. Do not solidify an opinion until you have read Terry Glavin on the subject. I include myself in this admonishon as I myself have changed my views a fair amount after reading Terry.
Eeyore for Vlad:
This latest poll is the now the 14th survey of which I am aware that wholly defies the received wisdom (which is to say the fashionable delusions and popular frenzies) abroad in the rich countries of the world about Afghanistan, and about “what Afghans think.” I am aware of no poll – not one – that supports the self-obsessed and fraudulent “anti-war” opinion in Canada on these subjects, or that does not expose bourgeois “left-wing” opinion to be objectively far-right, reactionary, and in opposition to the hopes and aspirations of the Afghan people.

‘Troops Out Now!’

Sixty-one per cent of the Afghan respondents support the U.S./NATO “surge” of 37,000 troops. Only 25 per cent agree with the American (and Canadian) plan to start withdrawing troops in 18 months, and while 22 per cent say foreign troops should start to pull out sooner, 21 per cent say foreign troops should in fact stay longer, and 29 per cent (the most sensible cohort, in my view) say troop withdrawals should depend on the security situation at the time. More than 70 per cent of Afghans rate the performance of American and other NATO/ISAF troops as excellent, good or fair.

‘Why Do They Hate Us?’

They don’t, so all those drippy Californian society ladies who hold such sway over “progressive” opinion in Canada should avail themselves of their hankies and smelling salts and shut their gobs. Continue Reading →

Another Mujahadeen auto-felating about killing people

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his is the video given to the BBC from Al Jazeera, claiming to be of the man who killed all those CIA operators in Afghanistan. I hope he is sucking dick in hell where he belongs like all terrorists. Remember, his motive for his ‘revenge’ against the West, is that he is not being allowed to oppress the Afghans and indeed the world with his barbaric pedophile religion. Less than 4% of Afghanis support the Taliban. For an excellent analysis of the fight in Afghanistan please click herehttp://vladtepesblog.com/?p=17188

Terry Glavin on CFRA Dec 22 2009

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It is difficult to get people to listen to radio in a video age. And I have posted another Terry Glavin interview in the last 30 days from CBC. However this one is different and I ask Vlad’s readers to please settle back with a drink and put this most excellent, scholarly, informed and hard hitting interview about Afghanistan and Canada’s role there.

Whether you agree with the mission or not, no matter what your position this is a highly informative and important interview. Nick Vandergragt told me he felt this was the best interview he ever did.

I believe him. Terry one could argue, is Canada’s answer to Christopher Hitchens. This is a fair comparison on many levels. Both men are brilliant, have profound convictions and I might add, the courage that those convictions bring.

Terry also, being a leftist himself, knew exactly how to speak to what one might call, the new left, and how it abuses terms like The Peace Movement and so on. All this to say, this really is an excellent interview on Afghanistan and Canada’s role and I really do hope you will take the time to listen. I have edited out the commercials for your convenience and optimized it in some ways. Please feel free to download it and send it anywhere and post it anywhere you want. But please do not edit it. Post it intact. If you disgaree with Terry, please make sure you disagree with what he actually says and not what some would make him say.

Posting will be light as I am in a rather low internet zone enjoying a wonderful Christmas with some fantastic friends. I hope all of you are as well.

Have a Merry Christmas and I hope you enjoy all the peace, comradeship of friends and family, and human contact that make this time of year so special and important.

Eeyore for Vladtepesblog

Terry glavin with video from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

Canterbury Tales: British Armed Forces Bishop urges sympathy for the Devil

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Just as Rowen Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury arches his back in subservience to radical Islam, Rt. Reverend Stephen Venner, Bishop of the British Armed Forces clearly knows nothing of the Taliban.

From The Telegraph U.K.

Taliban can be admired for their faith and loyalty, says bishop

The Taliban can be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to one another, the new Bishop for the Armed Forces has claimed.

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones and Duncan Gardham
Published: 5:52PM GMT 13 Dec 2009
Taliban militants - Taliban can be admired for their faith and loyalty, says bishop

Taliban militants in Afghanistan Photo: AP

The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists that recognises their humanity.

The Church of England’s Bishop to the Forces warned that it will be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the Afghan insurgents are portrayed too negatively.

His comments came as the Prime Minister visited Afghanistan and warned that the Taliban was fighting a “guerilla war” aimed at causing “maximum damage”. Gordon Brown said soldiers were discovering improvised explosive devices every two hours.

Mr Brown stayed overnight in the Allied base in the southern city of Kandahar, the first British Prime Minister to spend the night in a war zone since Winston Churchill. His visit came days after the death of Lance Corporal Adam Drane, the 100th member of the British forces to die in Afghanistan this year. His death brought the total number of British service personnel who have died since the start of operations in 2001 to 237.

Bishop Venner stressed his admiration for the sacrifices made by the British forces fighting in Afghanistan but also urged the need for a reassessment of how the Taliban are viewed.

“We’ve been too simplistic in our attitude towards the Taliban,” said Bishop Venner, who was recently commissioned in his new role by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really.

“The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

Besides their attacks on the armed forces, the Taliban have also been responsible for public beatings, amputations and executions and have launched bomb attacks on the civilian population in Afghanistan.

They often refer to foreign forces as “Crusaders” in an echo of the religious wars of the Middle Ages.

The bishop said that some of their methods of combat are not honourable or acceptable, but argued that it was unhelpful to demonise them.

“We must remember that there are a lot of people who are under their influence for a whole range of reasons, and we simply can’t lump all of those together.

“To blanket them all as evil and paint them as black is not helpful in a very complex situation.”

Bishop Venner said that everyone in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, would have to be included in discussions to find a solution to the conflict.

“Afghanistan is going we hope in the end to find a way to live together with justice and prosperity for all. In order to do that we have to involve all the people of Afghanistan to find it.

“It is that lasting and just peace that will in the end justify the sacrifices our servicemen and women have made.”

In the meantime, he said, the Government has “a moral duty” to ensure that the army is properly equipped.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander in Afghanistan who has written about the insurgency, said the bishop was being naïve.

“We clearly need to understand our enemy but that is more of a military issue rather than a religious one,” he said.

“There are elements in the Taliban who do not act from a religious perspective and it is important to understand and turn them around.

“But there are many others who will not be persuaded. Their central creed and ethos is about violent oppression which comes from a politics of extreme religion that has very little to commend it in terms that we would recognise or appreciate.

“In many ways it is a mistake to compare their faith of extreme holy war with the kind of religion of peace and understanding that the bishop follows. They certainly wouldn’t show understanding of his faith.”

Earlier this year, Peter Davies, the mayor of Doncaster, claimed that British society could learn from Taliban family values. He said that under the Taliban, Afghanistan had an “ordered system of family life”.

Last month David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, offered parts of the Taliban “an alternative to fighting” and said men now fighting against British forces should be encouraged to sit in the Afghan parliament.

His comments came a day after a new military strategy was unveiled that talked of the need to negotiate with the Taliban, offering them money or immunity from prosecution in order to secure peace.


Terry Glavin on CBC Cross Country check up from Afghanistan

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Terry Glavin, one of Canada’s premiere journalists, and perhaps the person who knows more about the conflict in Afghanistan than any other Canadian reporter, is interviewed on Canada’s CBC program, Cross Country Check up. Terry speaks directly to some important misconceptions and rumors that effect public opinion and hence policy on Canada’s mission to Afghanistan. Agree with the mission and Canada’s role or not, Terry deserves to be listened to. His expertise and eloquence on this matter are required listening and reading on the question of Afghanistan and NATO’s mission there.

Eeyore for Vlad. H/T Father Grace

Terry Glavin - Live from Afghanistan terry glavin     

Violence against Afghan, Pakistani women escalates in 2009

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It’s a shame that the activists didn’t take the extra step and blame Islam which prescribes these treatments of women. h/t Islam in Europe

burkas green

From The Finchannel

The FINANCIAL — KABUL, Human rights activists have noted a large-scale growth in violence toward Afghan women, hundreds of whom are beaten, intimidated or sexually assaulted by men daily.

According to figures from an Afghan independent committee on human rights published on Wednesday, 1,700 cases of violence toward women were officially registered since the end of March 2009. Last year, a total of more than 2,000 incidents were officially recorded.

International Day on the Elimination of Violence against Women is observed November 25.

According to the latest statistics released in a separate biannual report by Aurat Foundation, a total of 4,514 incidents of violence against women were reported in neighboring Pakistan in four provinces and the capital of Islamabad during January to June 2009.

According to the Aurat report, there were 691 registered cases of murder, 293 cases of honor killing, 1,046 cases of abduction, 332 cases of domestic violence, 388 cases of suicide and 466 cases of rape and gang rape.

According to the human rights activists’ publication, the number of suicides among women has also grown. In Afghanistan’s Herat province alone, there were 65 registered suicide attempts by women setting themselves on fire, the majority of whom died. Over the last week, there were five such incidents.

The activists believe that many Afghan women suffer from domestic violence, social disorder, unemployment, lack of medical services, drug addiction, hunger and chronic illness.

The activists named the armed conflict that has been going on for some 30 years in Afghanistan as one of the main factors for suicide and violence within the family.

Stratfor: Deciphering the Mohammed Trial

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Deciphering the Mohammed Trial

November 16, 2009 | 2035 GMT


Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report

By George Friedman

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in federal court in New York. Holder’s decision was driven by the need for the U.S. government to decide how to dispose of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. Naval base outside the boundaries of the United States selected as the camp in which to hold suspected al Qaeda members.

We very carefully use the word “camp” rather than prison or prisoner of war camp. This is because of an ongoing and profound ambiguity not only in U.S. government perceptions of how to define those held there, but also due to uncertainties in international law, particularly with regard to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Were the U.S. facility at Guantanamo a prison, then its residents would be criminals. If it were a POW camp, then they would be enemy soldiers being held under the rules of war. It has never really been decided which these men are, and therefore their legal standing has remained unclear.

War vs. Criminal Justice

The ambiguity began shortly after 9/11, when then-U.S. President George W. Bush defined two missions: waging a war on terror, and bringing Osama bin Laden and his followers to justice. Both made for good rhetoric. But they also were fundamentally contradictory. A war is not a judicial inquiry, and a criminal investigation is not part of war.

An analogy might be drawn from Pearl Harbor. Imagine that in addition to stating that the United States was at war with Japan, Franklin Roosevelt also called for bringing the individual Japanese pilots who struck Hawaii to justice under American law. This would make no sense. As an act of war, the Japanese action fell under the rules of war as provided for in international law, the U.S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Japanese pilots could not be held individually responsible for the lawful order they received. In the same sense, trying to bring soldiers to trial in a civilian court in the United States would make no sense. Creating a mission in which individual Japanese airmen would be hunted down and tried under the rules of evidence not only would make no sense, it would be impossible. Building a case against them individually also would be impossible. Judges would rule on evidence, on whether an unprejudiced jury could be found, and so on. None of this happened, of course — World War II was a war, not a judicial inquiry.

It is important to consider how wars are conducted. Enemy soldiers are not shot or captured because of what they have done; they are shot and captured because of who they are — members of an enemy military force. War, once launched, is pre-emptive. Soldiers are killed or captured in the course of fighting enemy forces, or even before they have carried out hostile acts. Soldiers are not held responsible for their actions, but neither are they immune to attack just because they have not done anything. Guilt and innocence do not enter into the equation. Certainly, if war crimes are in question, charges may be brought; the UCMJ determines how they will be tried by U.S. forces. Soldiers are tried by courts-martial, not by civilian courts, because of their status as soldiers. Soldiers are tried by a jury of their peers, and their peers are held to be other soldiers.

International law is actually not particularly ambiguous about the status of the members of al Qaeda. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to them because they have not adhered to a fundamental requirement of the Geneva Conventions, namely, identifying themselves as soldiers of an army. Doing so does not mean they must wear a uniform. The postwar Geneva Conventions make room for partisans, something older versions of the conventions did not. A partisan is not a uniformed fighter, but he must wear some form of insignia identifying himself as a soldier to enjoy the conventions’ protections. As Article 4.1.6 puts it, prisoners of war include “Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.” The Geneva Conventions of 1949 does not mention, nor provide protection to, civilians attacking foreign countries without openly carrying arms. Continue Reading →

Why Pakistan is winning ITS war against the Taliban

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By way of a forward, I cant help but notice from the picture that perhaps if the Taliban didn’t watch as many cartoons they wouldn’t have such a warped world view. Does anyone in the photo in the story look familiar?

Dumb Donald, Taliban fashion man
Dumb Donald, Taliban fashion man

From The Daily Mail UK:

In Mingora, the city of 250,000 people that was until recently the headquarters of Pakistan’s Swat valley Taliban, the shopping centre is heaving.

‘Bloody Chowk’, the crossroads where the militants used to leave the butchered bodies of their victims every night, is once again merely a mini-roundabout, surrounded by camera and shoe shops.

Further up the valley, a scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest Frontier mountains, the girls’ schools that were blown up by the Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents.

Further up the valley, a scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest Frontier mountains, the girls’ schools that were blown up by the Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents.

PakistaniSuccess: Pakistani army soldiers with captured militants at Lower Dir in the Swat valley

The barbers ordered to stop shaving beards on pain of death are back in business, and Mullah FM, the radio station used by the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah to broadcast his extremist sermons, is off the air.

Western leaders often insinuate that there is something half-hearted about Pakistan’s struggle against those responsible not only for bringing terror to Swat but providing safe havens for the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the series of devastating bombings in the big Pakistani cities.

Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that some in Pakistan’s government must know the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, still said by some to be hiding in the frontier’s tribal areas.

Gordon Brown has repeatedly urged the Pakistanis to ‘do more’, claiming that three-quarters of terrorist plots in Britain have links to Pakistan.

Yet last week he also admitted that, across the Afghan border, some of the territory the British Army took at such terrible cost last summer is already back under Taliban control.

As I walked unmolested through the alleys of Mingora’s bazaar, his comments provoked some uncomfortable thoughts.

First the good news: the Swat example shows that the Taliban are not invincible, and that it is possible to fight a counter-insurgency against them and win.

Unfortunately, however, the very reasons Pakistan appears to be doing quite well, both in Swat and in the current military operation further south in Waziristan, make the prospects of Nato success in Afghanistan more remote.

Moreover, one of the Pakistanis’ evident strengths – a clear strategic focus with operations of limited scope that tackle the enemy one area at a time – is woefully lacking in Afghanistan.

‘You have to recognise the limits of your power. When you try to attain too many objectives simultaneously, you end up attaining nothing,’ General Athar Abbas, the Pakistan army’s chief spokesman, told me.

‘If you don’t have clarity from the beginning, especially about what to do after you capture somewhere, you will run into serious problems – and that is what’s happening across the border.

‘You have to retain your successes, and the only way to do that is with popular support.’

Life in Mingora isn’t yet back to normal: the death and destruction have simply been too great. Fazlullah used to be a chairlift operator and one of the first things the Taliban did was to blow up the Swat valley’s ski facilities.

Skirmishes continue in outlying areas and there is still a curfew. But the progress is unmistakable.

When I last visited Pakistan in June, at the height of the Swat campaign, there were more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the scorching plains in camps and relatives’ spare rooms.

But a remarkably efficient army-led transport and reconstruction effort has meant more than 95 per cent of them have been back home for weeks.

More impressive is the fact that despite having been IDPs, and in many cases having once been in favour of the Taliban, few Swat people appear to want them back.

‘When Fazlullah started his broadcasts, he had a lot of support,’ said Shiraz Khan, a local TV cameraman. ‘Not now. Their methods have been exposed.’

One night, he said, he was woken by the shrieks of his next-door neighbour. ‘The Taliban had come to her house and, in front of her and the rest of the family, they were murdering her oldest son and her husband by cutting their throats.’

‘When you see a dead body, its cut-off head lying on its chest, it’s a truly terrible sight,’ said a local professor, who asked not to be named.

‘The people supported the Taliban because they felt the state was not giving them justice. But now they are finished.’

The army is still in Mingora, but responsibility for law and order is back with the police.
‘The community is helping us with information,’ said Qazi Farooq, the district chief.

He said that ‘regular police work’ had led to the capture of dozens of militants, 60 of whom have already been charged in the criminal courts with crimes including murder and blowing up bridges.

In the remoter areas, ‘lashkars’ – tribal militias – have been formed to root out the last Taliban. If only the British Army had encountered similar reactions in Helmand, Afghanistan.

Last Friday, when I visited a new IDP centre established at a cricket ground in Dera Ismail Khan on the South Waziristan border, I heard the main reason why starkly expressed.

The IDPs there come from the same Pathan tribe, the Mehsuds, which is also the main source of the local Taliban.

But having been brutalised in a similar fashion to the people of Swat, several men told me they were ready to work with the army to ensure that its gains were maintained once they went home.

‘The thing is this,’ said Mohammed Qasar, a farmer from the district of Lada. ‘If the army treat us well, we will co-exist with them, because ultimately we are Pakistanis. The soldiers are our people, too.’

And there, alas, is the rub. The new counter-insurgency buzzword for Gordon Brown and Nato’s commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, is ‘protecting the population’ in order to consolidate gains.

But honorable as that intention may be, no Afghan Pathan will ever describe the British or US troops as ‘our people’. Whatever their avowed policy, Nato troops will always look like occupiers.

In Pakistan, the fact that the army is being deployed inside its own country is a possible source of weakness.

This imposes a delicacy that is often not appreciated: it is, in the words of one general, ‘a pretty big deal’, and in order to rely on public support, it has had to wait until the Taliban’s outrages have become manifest before launching operations.

But having got that backing, it has become a source of strength.

Meanwhile, General Abbas cited a further stupefying sign of Nato’s apparent absence of strategic co-ordination.

In the name of the new ‘protection’ strategy, the US has this autumn been withdrawing from its posts on the Afghan side of the frontier, including those in Paktika, the province next to South Waziristan.

‘It will create a vacuum,’ he said, ‘and if militants escape from Waziristan, what can we do? We cannot fire on them when they cross the border.’

For years, Nato chiefs have accused Pakistan of failing to deal with the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistani territory. Now, in one of the more bitter ironies of this ever-lengthening war, that role has been reversed.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1227826/Why-Pakistan-winning-ITS-war-Taliban.html#ixzz0WwNRoRSe

Why do we permit the translation as ‘marriage’?

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As I have posted here before, the issue in front of western courts these days should not be one of polygamy, but of Muslim marriage itself.

If a group of people want to live together in any fashion at all, who are we to stop it? How do we stop it? Cameras under the bed sheets? Clearly there are legal implications to marriage that need to be examined, but well before we get there, the question needs to be asked, ‘Is marriage in Islam in any way related to the western concept of an adult man and adult women voluntarily entering into a contract where all parties are aware of, and consenting to, the arrangement and have more or less equal recourse to the law and an exit strategy.

Clearly in Islam, this is not remotely the case. Women under sharia law are property. All laws dealing with contractual arrangements having to do with women are property deals. Women may in some cases actually choose their own destiny in some Islamic nations but that would be a privilege. Very often, women are forced into marriage for money, or to settle a debt for a father etc. As these two excellent videos illustrate, the way women are viewed in islam simply has no parallel in western societies and the sharia arrangement where a woman is transferred from one man to another should under no circumstances be permitted to be translated as ‘marriage’.

These should be looked at, and treated in the west as we would slavery. pedophilia, prostitution of children, forced sex slavery etc. An examination of this is urgent. As it is now in western nations distinctly different legal standards are being applied to muslims and non muslims, a giant step towards the implementation of a two tier system making sharia, or muslim law, dominant and the rights of the dhimmi. or non muslims resident, as secondary.
h/t TT for these videos:
Link: Muslim marriage

Link: Women in Afghanistan

POLICE INFILTRATED BY THE TALIBAN ‘AT EVERY LEVEL’

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DailyExpress… A BRITISH war hero yesterday warned the Afghan national police had been “infiltrated at virtually every level” by the insurgency

Captain Doug Beattie also claimed that in British-controlled Helmand province Afghan police officers were almost all drug users.

Despite this, the vetting process for police recruits “is not serious”.

He also cited two incidents where Afghan national army soldiers had turned on British troops.

But he said Britain must stick to its policy of training Afghan security forces because it is “our exit strategy”. Capt Beattie won the Military Cross in Afghanistan in 2006 and served with the police both then and last year. He said part of the problem was that the police had not been given the same resources and training as the Afghan army.

But he said: “They are not really police. They are a tribal militia provided by their village.

“They are not controlled by central Government but by local warlords, jihadis and tribal elders. The Government pays them and sometimes elders pass the pay to the police. That’s why police sometimes set up road blocks and extract money from locals – to make ends meet.

“If the government’s paying them they’re reasonably happy. But if they don’t get enough money they’re quite happy to be paid by the insurgency.”

He alleged that a former chief of police in Helmand was caught talking directly to the Taliban on his personal phone on several occasions.

Capt Beattie, who left the Army this year after 27 years’ service, said: “The insurgency has infiltrated the police at virtually every level. Because they are poorly paid they take money from the highest bidder.”

He said drugs were readily available and about 80 per cent of the police in Helmand were “habitual users of cannabis or heroin”.

He told of the Afghan army holding one of his men at gunpoint while they murdered a Taliban prisoner before running off. And a British mentoring team had to be evacuated after paratroopers accidentally killed a child and locals attacked their base.

Captain Beattie is the author of Task Force Helmand (Simon & Schuster), priced £17.99.

Phyllis Chesler: A Dangerous Denial

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The New York Times does not tell us whether Tareq Mehanna, the 27-year-old Massachusetts pharmacist who was just arrested on federal terrorism charges, is or even might be a Muslim. In their pages, telling this particular truth is still verboten, politically incorrect, rude, racist, a cheap shot, even “Islamophobic.”

Look: Mehanna might have traveled to Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen (which he did) because, as a relatively young man, he just wanted to sew his wild oats. No matter that Mehanna and his “associates,” including one Ahmad Abousamra who subsequently fled to Syria, had traveled together “seeking training from terrorist groups to fight against American soldiers.” No matter that Mehanna had tried to buy a gun from one Daniel Maldonado who is “currently serving a 10-year-prison sentence for training with Al Qaeda in Somalia. “

Please click here to read the rest of this article. If you have any friends who are in denial of the facts of Islam, please send them this link. Chesler explains them rather well here.