Shadows stand tall at the dusk and the dawn of the day
Doug Ross has a report on the neighborhood that Barack Obama worked in as an “activist”. It’s a must see, here’s a teaser photo, please stop by to read the whole thing. If elected, would everywhere become like Obama’s ‘hood?
Updated: [Last night I put down my initial thougthts and today I'm expanding a few sentences with some analysis.]
I’ve said for a long time that AQ and the Taliban pretend to be world Islamists looking for Kalipha as a recruiting tool, but that they are really collective gangs of regional thugs set on temporal power and protection racketeering. Their goal is (and was always) power within the Islamic world, and with their new manifesto they accept defeat from the west and have decided to turn inward.
The new manifesto, written by Al Qaeda’s chief theoretician, Sheik Abu-Bakar Naji, details this scheme in a more realistic view of their sinking fortunes. You can see that they’ve clearly failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and because of that they’ve shifted focus south to Pakistan, as I told you they would in early 2007:
As noted in previous Pakistan updates, I think AQ has changed tactics. They now realize the cause is lost in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are now focused on taking down the government of Pakistan. This is evidenced by the large influx of foreign fighters these past few weeks — numerous extremists have been picked up at the Taftan border crossing, but how many of the veterans from Iraq are getting through, and planning on taking over in the NWFP?.
Their guise will be extending Islamism, but they are the really the new Islamic Mafia, and Muslims will be their major prey (remember that AQ always has the published goal, but also always has the hidden goal known by leadership.) This model allows them to extend by incorporating criminal gangs, non-islamist allies, and the lower rungs of Islamic society. They will take occasional forays at attacks on the US and Israel when recruiting falls off, but they will not be directly confronting our troops where they can avoid it.
The three key regions AQ has succeeded in creating their ungoverned wilderness’ are : Sudan, Somalia, and the tribal regions of Pakistan. The other middle Eastern states seem pretty stable with the exception of Iran and Syria, so you might see moves there, both on the political and terror fronts. Expect much more political unrest in Egypt as well, but I do not expect them to escalate to terror along the Nile as it would put too much of the braintrust at risk.
They are a raiding force in Afghanistan, but not a permanent army there anymore. I expect that to continue as long as they are able operate freely in Pakistan. They are at work trying to destabilize in Algeria, Yemen, Kashmir, Thailand, and other places. They are obviously trying to implement this strategy elsewhere, but failing. Look for them to work through political groups to destabilize, they will use race, sectarianism, class, and any popular cause they can co-opt wherever they can now, so expect to see some new bedfellows who might seem strange, groups that they have previously shunned. Look for them to also extend the alliance more closely to fringe left terror groups , as they will look for help anywhere they can get it. Expect them to adapt socialist and communist terminology in place of Sharia in places as well.
Amer Taheri has a good review of this new manifesto here.
That persuaded some al Qaeda leaders that a new strategy of smaller, slower but steadier attacks was needed. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s No. 2, has advocated such a strategy since 2003, arguing that the jihad should first target Muslim countries where it has a chance of toppling the incumbent regimes.
Essentially this is acknowledgement that they can’t defeat the West in any war, and a lowering of goals and standards. Muslims everywhere will need to fear as the Al Qaeda Mafia is now stalking them. Western countries must read this new manifesto and take it to heart especially if they have large Muslim populations — moderates will be the first victims of the takfirist crime-lords. The new low-burn intifada against moderate muslims will only make the news on occasion, but the Muslims will all know and fear it.
The best way to combat Sharia and Al Qaeda in the west is to firmly enforce existing western law, and to exterminate the warlords and crimelords in the ungoverned zones that exist now. Of course we must still take active anti-terror measures, and we must finish the job of destroying them in Afghanistan and Iraq. We must now however extinguish the slightest bits of Sharia in all secular, western states whenever attempts are made to supercede western laws. Allowing them to undermine the leadership in existing western Muslim communities would be the biggest mistake we could make, and where we find hate priests and murder mullahs they must be expelled.
My coumsel to leaders in the Islamic world would be to watch your back since cornered beasts are always most dangerous, and also that you better get them before they get you.
There are a few good articles with many details on the destabilizing conditions inside Pakistan right now as their civil war continues.
From Time Reporter Aryn Baker in Islamabad comes this report, detailing not only the war fronts, but also the politcal instability due to infighting between PPP (Zardari) and PML-N (Sharif) continues over non-essential matters. (side note, PPP and MQM seem to have reached some accomodation and we might see that as the future coalition, this even though they are rancorous rivals especially in Karachi.)
Bill Roggio has an update on a rare instance of cross-border cooperation on the Durand line.
Inside Pakistan the Taliban insurgency continues unabated as another checkpost is destroyed in Wana, and the Frontier Corps seized a huge weapons cache and might have freed those captive Iranian Border guards.
Sometimes you get to boring spots on calls during the workday, like when the tendentious melancholy bore drones on for a half hour about what process should be like in their perfect utopian septillion sigma Deming-certified non-existential chairman’s award universe. At times like those I do things like make rainbows with the hose in my backyard. The grass loves it, they make for great photos, and I best of all I don’t end up biting someone’s head off just so people can get some real work accomplished.
The Civil war in Pakistan has heated up again with assaults on proto-Taliban agents of Mangal Bagh in the Khyber pass (Taliban groups in Pakistan change names as the occasion or the goal allows, and they sub-contract with each other. In this case they are furthering tribal goals of Mangal Bagh and theirs as well. The Taliban goal here is retribution against the tribal forces that denied their takeover of the Khyber pass, Mangal’s is to extend his power.) Namdar, who leads the forces opposed to Mangal Bagh, is no friend to the US either but his desire to maintain control of the region counteracts that of the TTP/Mehsuds. Bill Roggio has a slideshow of the extremist leaders here.
This is the outcome I predicted in posts last year - when the new Government got rid of the old laws they failed to fill the vacumn, creating a power grab by every petty warlord in the frontiers. They removed the old power bases and authorities and didn’t replace it with anything.
As always the main Taliban forces fled before the Government forces arrived. This is the usual dumb-show cat and mouse we’ve seen for several years in the frontiers. In most cases the Frontier Corps will flee their checkpoint, base, or observation post before a Taliban attack, and the Taliban will flee their “hideouts” before the government attacks. It’s as if both sides know what the other is going to do in advance, and there appears to be a lot of winking and nudging going on in lower ranks.
Meanwhile the Pakistan Taliban Shura is following Baitullah Mehsud and has backed completely out of the peace talks, putting back in force the declaration of war from last September, once again showing they are really the lapdogs of Bin Laden and Zawahiri.
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The Aussie sleeps tonight
The civil war in Pakistan has heated up, with the brutal Taliban Warlord, Baitullah Mehsud in the lead.Baitullah established his leadership in the Waziristans by a steady campaign of brief offensives, assasinations of opposition leaders, and intermittent peaces with the Musharraf government forces the past three years when pressed.
Initially he was applauded as a possible force for good as he warred against the foreign Uzbeks and Chechen forces in Waziristan who had established a record of brutality of their own. That history of foreign brutality allowed him to scapegoat them while cementing his authority with the Mehsud tribes. The factors that allowed him to do this were complex and several, ranging from the decrement of Afghan Taliban forces in Pakistan as refugee camps and ISI supported Terror training camps closed - prior to that the opposition from the Afghan Taliban within Pakistan was too strong. He also used the political warring between factions in the Sindh and Punjab to create a network of affiliations with the urban criminal gangs, renegade Frontier corps personnel, and the disaffected Kashmiri Jihadis flushed from the government-supported terror camps back in October 2006.
This created a rift within the Taliban and with Al Qaeda for a short period, in the Taliban you even saw cross-border fighting between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban at junctures while he firmly established his independence. After his leadership in the Waziristan region was firmly cemented he quickly re-opened channels with the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has returned to attacks in Afghanistan — half-hearted to be sure, but attacks nonetheless, which demonstrate he is allied again with them.
I’ve said since his breaking of the original accords that his real goal is temporal power within Pakistan, and Al Qaeda is now in line with that. The hand writing is on the wall northward in Afghanistan: while they can create a long campaign of insurgency, it will diminish and become less effective year over year, and they are taking heavy losses over time, in both territory, personnel, and leadership. Played out long term that’s a losing game for them and Al Qaida is now really penned back to their original base inside Pakistan. Their last hurrah will be in Pakistan, and you’ve seen them work at that the past two years.
Al Qaida essentially pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving skeleton crews of suicide bombers, local tribes, and kidnappers to maintain the fiction that they have real fronts there but their real strategy right now is one of defense through destabilizing Pakistan and establishing a new Taliban state in the Pashtun regions. In Afghanistan and Iraq the local tribes are disaffected from Al Qaeda, and you see the Nato forces now advancing to further interupt their ability to operate in Afghanistan after winning in Iraq. The Nato forces are establishing all along the border, and there aren’t forgotten zones like Nuristan and Helmand anymore.
Baitullah’s marshaling of Pashtun tribal nationalism is a troubling development with potential to create great harm to Pakistan, and to drive a wedge between the current government and Nato. They are continuing to work through student groups, political and religious groups in the moderate urban areas of Pakistan in an effort to Talibanize the nation and replicate the Iranian Revolution. It’s bound to fail as the Sindh and Punjab will not allow rule by tribals over the long run, no matter how fractional the factions within the government become. In their latest move it appears that they are attempting to move on Peshawar, one of Pakistan’s major cities, and a favorite haunt of Osama Bin Laden.
So what’s next?
There are two articles out this morn that detail the current fronts in the civil war in Pakistan, unusual in that the articles get things mostly right – prior reporting from and about Pakistan was thin, riddled with false perceptions, and pretty simplex up until the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto (also likely orchestrated or assisted by Baitullah.)
The first article has them massing outside of Peshawar, and the second from AP, details the fighting at the head of the Khyber pass.
My read on this is that the massing of Baitullah’s Tehreek Taliban Pakistan forces near Peshawar is a feint. They might attack and make sallies at Peshawar, but the real goal is control and blockage of the Khyber pass as they’ve been attempting for three months now.
The opposition within the pass proper is too tenacious, so they are now attempting to start at the beginning. It will be interesting to see these next battles unfold. The military doctrine of the Pakistan army proscribes leapfrogging and encirclement, instead favoring taking ground highpoint by highpoint in plodding, but over time effective long advance. This creates a rare opportunity and conundrum for the military leadership in Pakistan: if the TTP are going to mass, it’s a perfect time to crush them.
Meanwhile look for the usual things you see when the Taliban moves into a village in Peshawar: threats and attacks against media shops and girl’s schools, warnings about wearing burqa’s and barbershops. You will also undoubtably see some suicide bombings, mostly likely at transit stations or public art venues. The other aspect of this that cannot be overlooked is the population of Peshawar as hostage - if the government offensive goes well in the Khyber, the retaliation will go against civilians and politicians in Peshawar. PPP party members in the region should probabaly be extra cautious.
UPDATE I: more on the Taliban sallies into Peshawar here, here, and here.
UPDATE II: Much more detailed reporting of Pakistan’s Khyber Counter-offensive at The Long War Journal.
This video is counter point to the previous post on faith healing. Here you see people of a deeply conservative faith willing to use science because they value life first.
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Whether you think they thinned it a little, or thinned it a lot it is undeniable that the the massive undersea volcanoes deep under the Ice Cap had some effect. The story itself is just coming out here and here, since it was just published in Nature although the data was collected last year.
AJ at Stratasphere has done the best research on this, providing satellite imaging of the Ice thickness before, during, and after the massive event.
It’s highly unusual to have pyroclastic volcanoes at the depths found due to the massive hydrostatic pressure that deep. Regardless of the depth, the event would have created some warming trapped in the arctic basin, and the underwater magma explosions and earthquakes would have created massive pressures under the ice cap along with some warming. It’s undeniable that the volcanoes would have some effect on the ice cap, the remaining question is how much?
But the new findings, published in Nature, showed that “large-scale pyroclastic activity is possible along even the deepest portions of the global mid-ocean ridge volcanic system.”
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Sohn and his colleagues gathered their data in July last year aboard the ice breaker Oden, using state-of-the-art instruments including a mutlibeam echo sounder, two autonomous underwater vehicles and a sub-ice camera designed for the mission.
Both sonar and visual images showed an ocean valley filled with flat-topped volcanos up to two kilometres (1.2 miles) wide and several hundred metres high.
If you remember we also had a previous poster child for global warming, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. As reported here that could have been due to undersea vulcanism as well since the only area of the antarctic shelf experiencing warming is the segment along the volcanic ridge.
Please check in on the From the Frontlines Web a Thon — they’ve raised close to half a million dollars for Care packages for our troops in their first few hours. From Michelle:
I’ll be in beautiful Mountain View, CA all day today for “From the Frontlines,” our ground-breaking web-a-thon for the troops. Move America Forward’s Melanie Morgan and I will go live on Ustream.TV and right here at MichelleMalkin.com (as well as at HotAir.com) at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific. (Just hit the play button on the embedded video player above when showtime arrives; if you’d like to join the live chatroom, make sure to register at UStream beforehand!) I’ll be updating this post all day as I liveblog the event from UStream’s studios. Thanks to all our fellow bloggers who’ve helped spread the word!
We’ve got a star-studded line-up of troops, military charities, celebs, and talk radio stars — from Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to Dr. Laura and Laura Ingraham to musician John Ondrasik and “Lone Survivor” author and Navy SEAL hero Marcus Luttrell — who’ll be joining us in our eight-hour marathon fund-raising drive to help send the largest number of care packages in history to our men and women in uniform serving overseas.
It’s an inconvenient truth that across the world valuable cropland is being converted from growing food to growing biofuel. The croplands are being converted with government subsidies, and we are about to learn a very harsh lesson.
In Egypt we have breadlines, in Pakistan and India soaring flour prices, and in the rest of the subcontinent we have rice shortages.
Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, said yesterday that land turned to biofuels in the US alone in the last two years would have fed nearly 250 million people with average grain needs. “This year 18% of all US grain production will go to biofuels. In the last two years the US has diverted 60m tonnes of food to fuel. On the heels of seven years of consumption of world grains exceeding supply, this has put a great strain on the world’s grain supplies,” he said.
The rising price of energy has decreased supplies of food in two ways: it’s made fuel crops more attractive and it’s made export and transport of food staples such as wheat, corn, and rice both more expensive and less appealing.
The outcome? We have breadlines in Egypt, we have spiraling food staples cost, and not enough food, which means people will be starving to death later this year. Yes, we passed a tipping point Al, and it was much closer and more easily seen than the one you spoke of in your movie.
Food production and commodities combined with free markets have kept famine at bay across most of the world since the early 80’s. The fact is that modern famines are created by government policies, or strife which interdicts transport. The Somalian famine was due to civil war against Islamists, and the Bangladesh famine was due to failed governance.
Any country can feed its people no matter how dense the population if they can farm at the level that 16th century Japanese peasants were capable of, this demonstrated in “A Step Further Out” by Jerry Pournelle. In the modern world with cheap transport and modern agriculture there’s simply no excuse for Famine, but I fear we’ve passed that point and that we will see some people starving to death this year.
Read the rest of this entry »
Zombie has a new report on the Berkeley Recruiting office protests, here’s a videotape of World Can’t Wait communists giving the Nazi Salute while the counterprotestors played the National Anthem.
This morning we awoke to a brief rainstorm whose clouds quickly fled before the rising sun. I caught a few escaping with the camera.
The product of your creativity belongs to you, and you are by law entitled to profit therefrom. In a cut ‘n paste world where sampling and remixing are the norm those lines become blurred. This however looks egregiously wrong to me if it’s true: [see update below, the Youtube vid could be a scam. - editor]
Update: more on this from AOL
UPDATE: Coldplay comes out with strong Denial:
“We totally refute their claims, and there are two facts that make it easy to disprove them,” said the band’s spokesman Murray Chalmers.
“First, on the night in October when the band say Chris Martin was watching them, he was actually working at the Air Studio in London, and we can prove that. Second, even if he had been at the gig, Viva la Vida was written and demoed seven months before the night in question, so it couldn’t possibly have been copied.”
Since there aren’t suits flying this ends up being either coincidence, a smart publicity scam, or … something. Look for more of the same in the future, as melodies can sometimes come to several people completely isolate from each other.
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