Marching To One
This older NYT article discussing a lone gunman in Amman who opened fire on tourists and killed a British citizen – is littered with great quotes on small scale groups conducting terrorist activity:
“No force on earth could have prevented an attack like this,” said a senior Jordanian security official, who said Mr. Jaoura was surprisingly forthcoming under interrogation. “He was not an Islamist. He was isolated, and he did it on his own.”
Muhammad Abu Rumman, an expert on Islamist movements at the Jordanian daily Al Ghad[-] “There is a huge gap between the government and the people, and the government cannot control this sort of thing anymore.”
There’s no foolproof system to prevent an attack like this,” said Joost Hiltermann, an analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Amman. “That’s why this portends further attacks like it, because you can’t prevent them. The tourists are an easy target and you can have a real effect, so naturally you could expect each attack to get worse.”
Abu Musab al-Suri
Important piece in the New Yorker discussing the marginalized member of Al Qaeda who actually got it.
AQ followed an obsolete model pre-9/11 and should understand its fleeting nature –
“Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,” he writes. “It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Eventually, its leadership would be eliminated, he said… In the time that remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its main goal should be to stimulate other groups around the world to join the jihadi movement. His legacy, as he saw it, was to codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war…
He was on the trajectory of becoming a systems disruption knowledgable global guerrilla – emphasis mine –
The goal, he writes, is “to bring about the largest number of human and material casualties possible for America and its allies.
Wanted to open source the effort, tear down the existing state structure and replace it with an organic system of governance –
He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”
Luckily we managed to capture him in Pakistan last November. But the clock is ticking.
Federalism Is Dead In Iraq
WaPo –
The speaker of the Iraqi parliament said Tuesday that a controversial plan to partition the country into three autonomous regions is politically dead.
More accurately this plan is dead within the political system. But the real power is in groups extraneous to that system who gain power in fragmentation.
Michael Yon On Opium
Michael Yon is talking about the opium trade as well and puts the problem in a nutshell:
A reverse symbiosis is at work: Those who benefit most from the opium/heroin trades also benefit most from a destabilized Afghanistan, because a stable country with functioning government systems, reliable security forces, and a framework of laws is a bad climate for the drug trade. Conversely, farmers growing crops such as cotton and beans benefit from a stable government climate, which affords the opportunity to think beyond the next crop cycle. In order to make agriculture a more successful business venture, farmers need a stable government as a partner. But since the interests of poppy farmers and narco-kings are in aggressive opposition to any plan to stabilize Afghanistan, this partnership is not even in the talking stages.
Opium Wars
NRO’s The Corner calls for the white globalization that should be in place to supersede the black globalization of Afghanistan’s opium trade.
So here we have a desperately poor country that has a crop for which there is a proven “legitimate” demand and for which it actually has some sort of competitive advantage (opium harvesting is labor intensive, and thus relies on cheap labor), but which is not allowed to sell that crop. That seems absurd.