Month: October 2006

My friend John from Power Line spent the better part of today cleaning up and re-editing the captured video from the al-Qaeda training facility. (I blogged about it this morning.) John’s efforts can be viewed through this Power Line News link. Be sure to check it out — if the earlier Times of London version gave you downloading headaches, John’s version should play much more smoothly.

With Pervez Musharraf appearing to retreat in the war on terror and Hamid Karzai demanding results, the situation in Afghanistan and the Waziristan region appears to be inexplicably troublesome of late. Musharraf and Karzai have more trouble than just borders in this situation, though, and what we are now seeing may be a nationalist movement that has escaped Western attention until now. The Toronto Sun’s Eric Margolis explains the problem, and Swaraaj Chauhan at The Moderate Voice produces an interesting map to underscore his point.
In order to understand the difficulties, Margolis argues, one has to understand the tribalism in play:

Tribal politics lie at the heart of their dispute. The 30 million Pashtuns (or Pathans), the world’s largest tribal society, are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan by an artificial border, the Durand Line, drawn by divide-and-conquer British imperialists.
Pashtuns account for 50-60% of Afghanistan’s 30 million people. The Taliban is an organic part of the Pashtun people. The Western powers and Karzai are not just fighting “Taliban terrorists,” but a coalition of Pashtun tribes and other allied nationalist movements. In effect, most of the Pashtun people. …
The other half of the divided Pashtuns live just across the Durand Line in Pakistan, comprising 15-20% of its population. Pashtuns occupy many senior posts in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. Pashtuns, including anti-Western resistance fighters, never accepted and simply ignore the artificial border bifurcating their tribal homeland.
Washington keeps demanding Musharraf crack down on Pakistan’s pro-Taliban Pashtuns. But Washington fails to understand that too much pressure on these fierce warriors could quickly ignite a major historic threat to Pakistan’s national integrity: A Pashtun independence movement seeking to join the Pashtun of Afghanistan and Pakistan in a new state — Pashtunistan.

Take a look at Swaraaj’s map:

What we’re looking at is something similar to the Kurds to the West. The Pashtuns spread out over a wide geographical area, and would be the dominant ethnic group in the region if not for the political borders drawn during the British administration of an earlier age. The Taliban sprang out of the ultra-Islamist Pashtun tribal structure, and that tribal society has a great deal of influence in Pakistani politics as well. Their stronghold is in the mountainous border region, including Waziristan.
So how does that impact the war on terror and on radical Islamists? This map shows that the entire effort in Afghanistan is taking place on enemy territory regardless of which side of the border one sits. Kabul sits in Pashtun turf, making it more difficult to ensure its security.
This shows the difficulty facing both leaders. Taking on the Pashtuns means fighting a significant component of both nations, and up to 30 million members of a closed-off tribal society. Their loyalties are to themselves rather than any sense of nationhood as the borders are drawn, and their recent actions may hint at a broader nationalistic impulse. Given their footprint in the area, that will play out mostly in Afghanistan, but it could threaten Musharraf’s power in Pakistan as well.
No wonder Musharraf cut a deal in Waziristan. He wants to mollify the Pashtuns in order to keep them from rising up and demanding an expression of nationalism within Pakistan. He doesn’t want to lose Waziristan as well as Kashmir. And this is why Karzai is so unhappy; without Pakistani pressure on the Pashtuns in Waziristan, they will have secured their flank enough to put all of their energy to undermine Karzai.
The problem with the Islamists might just be the symptom here of a greater tribal/nationalist problem.

Richard Clarke takes to the pages of the New York Times to deliver a lesson that everyone should have learned after 2004. The controversial former counterterrorism chief reminds Americans that we cannot secure the nation through blame games, and that the time has long since passed for us to exercise hindsight and start looking forward:

For most Americans the history is clear and well told in the 9/11 commission report: Almost 3,000 people were killed. In the years before that terrible day, the Clinton administration prevented some attacks and tried to destroy Al Qaeda and its leadership, but was unable to do so, in part because the institutional bureaucracy did not believe the magnitude of the threat.
As for the Bush administration, it deferred action on Al Qaeda until after 9/11, and then took a number of steps in response, including invading Iraq, but was also unable to destroy Al Qaeda or its leaders.
In short, both administrations failed.
All the finger-pointing and hunting for scapegoats last week won’t rectify those failures, or help us avoid future ones. Fortunately, unlike too many of our political leaders and pundits, most Americans are far more concerned about what we are doing now in the name of fighting terrorism than about petty partisan bickering about the past.

Unfortunately, Clarke uses this argument briefly to open an attack on the Bush administration’s decision to go into Iraq, which is another form of the same impulse he decries. The Iraq invasion happened three years ago. We now have to fight the terrorists in front of us, in Iraq and elsewhere, and we need to focus on that task. How do we best ensure the survival of the democratic government in Iraq and defeat the terrorists who want to destroy it? That should also be our focus.
He also attacks Bush for pushing too hard to get broader powers to fight terrorism. This seems a rather strange argument, considering the success we have had in preventing another major attack. Clarke also plays the canard of Congress refusing to provide Clinton with anti-terrorism tools he requested, which is a reference to the Aviation Security and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, a measure that had a lot more to do with domestic investigation of gunpowder than international terrorism. In fact, Congress earlier that year had passed the Terrorism Prevention Act, which really did provide counterterrorism tools to the federal government. At any rate, the powers granted to the executive since 9/11 have come from Congress, and Congress can rescind or adjust them if it feels that the executive is abusing them.
However, for the most part, Clarke has it correct. We need to look at the status quo and decide what steps we need to take in today’s situation to make the nation and our assets abroad safer. We need to end the partisan bickering over what happened before 9/11 and resolve to do better in the future.

The Times of London has new video of the 9/11 hijackers from more than a year prior to the attacks. Unlike other martyrdom videos that have been released, these tapes appear to have been less formal affairs. Without a soundtrack for some reason, no one can be sure what al-Qaeda’s intent was in taking them, but they look more like home movies than anything produced for a specific purpose:

It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.
Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.
The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack and a US source said lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.
Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.

The tapes display dates in January 2000. The Times argues that this clarifies a problem in the 9/11 timeline regarding the whereabouts of the Hamburg cell leaders, but that isn’t correct. The 9/11 report, in pages 166-167, describe very clearly the travels of Atta and Ziad Jarrah, both of whom can be seen in this tape. They left Germany in November 1999 for Afghanistan, and returned to Germany on January 31, 2000.
Whatever value is in these tapes lies in the behind-the-scenes look at the jihadis in their own environs. They look like they’re having a good time at a retreat, full of smiles and laughter while planning the mass murder of tens of thousands (the Towers would normally have held more that 30,000 people). Unlike the photographs of Mohammed Attah and Ziad Jarrah released after the attack, these two project an air of relaxed joy. We see none of the dead look in Atta’s eyes, nor the sharp figures that made his photo in particular seem so menacing. One can understand why he managed to hide himself in Western society so easily.
No one has been able to discern what the two men are saying on this tape. Apparently, AQ has issues with technical aptitude in its audio-visual department. The silence gives the video a disconcerting feel that mirrors our experience with the jihadis — a disconnect, a sense that what they have to say is so alien to us they may as well remain silent. It also reminds the viewer that their voices have been silenced … along with almost 3,000 others because of their bloodthirsty pursuit of a totalitarian vision.