Abu Walid al Masri’s questions and my response
Ok folks, this has been a ridiculously long time in coming. But I have finally managed to finish my response to Abu Walid’s questions. You can find the translation of his questions and my response here. I have also invited a few other people to respond to his questions and I’ll post links to their responses as they finish them.
And yes, I am still on my blogging break, so apart from this, and a review of Alex and Felix’s wonderful new book My Life with the Taliban (which I am reading at the moment) I won’t be posting long commentary for a while as I do battle with the thesis deadline. As I said earlier I read the news every day anyway, so will keep posting anything I see of interest, but that’s about all I can manage at the moment.
But I really wanted to post these responses and I’m hoping that Abu Walid and I can continue our dialogue and am looking forward to reading his response to my answers.
John Brennan says it like it is
Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America’s counterterrorism professionals and America’s system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.
Opposing view: ‘We need no lectures’ – Opinion – USATODAY.com.
Some observations from the forums
I am treating myself to a small procrastination break to relax the brain for a little while before kicking into the next section of the pesky chapter. So I have taken a little wander through the forums. Anyway, I haven’t done a post on that for a while so I’m just going to list a few things that struck me as I read.
First, the new AQAP audio from Al Shehri, which seems to have generated the usual breathless media coverage.
Al Shehri has for the most part reiterated what AQAP *already said* in an earlier statement. And this includes the threats against the US and the naval issues, which I blogged about earlier– when numpties on the forums started taking it seriously enough to form their own little intel gathering groups on US naval capacities. As I noted then the material they are gathering is fairly rudimentary. But herein lies one of the main mistakes made when analysing this type of information. People pay attention to the rudimentary nature of the materials being collected instead of the group formation taking place. These groups do have some form of contact and that is where the danger lies. Again and again you see this happening. But back to that audio.
To my mind the potential significance of this audio is that it contains public messages for bin Laden. Again, however, this is not necessarily new. We saw a lot of this in earlier campaigns. To some extent it needs to be treated with a grain of salt and what it means is up for question. I’ll have to make some time to consider this in a little more depth. But generally speaking AQ has a history of communicating and receiving op orders in this way (here I mean between core and franchise) so it shouldn’t necessarily be discounted as a propaganda rant. Between franchise and cells or groups that it has authority over (the degree of which can vary depending on which region these cells are operating in) these types of orders and communications have, in the past, been communicated via the Q&A section of magazine publications or on forums as well as via more covert means, depending on what is being discussed. Obviously not all the details end up on forums or Q&A sections of magz but there has been, in the past, enough to get the gist of what is going on if you know who’s who. However, this is a historical example and I haven’t had the time to scour through current AQAP mags to see if this is again occurring. Having said that I mention it because it is a well established modus operandi.
Keeping with the theme of AQAP,next up we have Karim al Mejjati, his son Adam and Karim’s widow.
Karim, and Adam died in a shootout with Saudi authorities in 05 I think it was, or maybe 06. I forget. Karim was a senior AQAP figure. Anyway, there has been another little spike in stuff about him across several forums. The last one I saw was in November last year. Anyway, a small video montage has been made and offered up as tribute to Karim’s widow.
What has me interested is that she is a member of and regular poster (via her intermediary) to the Al Falluja forum. And she commands a great deal of respect and attention. She’s been active again in response to the montage and other tributes. So I find this quite interesting.I’m entirely too lazy to post to all these links but if you want them let me know.
Although she doesn’t quite have the authority of Malika El Aroud whose first husband was one of the two men who killed Masoud on 9 Sept 01 and second husband reportedly took the Belgian-French group they recruited to train with AQ in Waziristan in 08. However, she does command a great deal of respect.
Which brings me to Abu Dujana al Khorasani’s widow
She’s actually triggered a few anxious posts by a couple of jihadis. Again too lazy to post all of them, but the gist is that they wanted to know whether they can view her, because she wasn’t fully veiled in the interview she gave, which is doing the rounds of the forums. They were also wondering why she didn’t observe the four months and ten days they thought a widow should lock herself away from the world after losing her husband before she came out and gave media interviews.
But anyway, she seems well on her way to assuming a position along with these other two. I haven’t bothered to check but I bet somewhere out there she’s on one of the forums, so it will be interesting to see if she too starts becoming more active after losing her husband.
This brings me to a point in general about women on the forums.
I have found it fascinating to watch. When I first starting lurking about in 01 there were very few of them in the forums (at least who would acknowledge they were women). This has changed significantly over the years. And they are now welcomed and included on an equal level in discussions on these forums. The impact of social media I think has been quite significant in terms of pushing the role of women in jihad forward. It offers a forum where interaction is permissible whereas out say in Afghanistan the men and women could not meet and discuss these things. Of course that’s a very quick summation and the reality is a little more nuanced that this, but it is really striking that the militant salafist forums have become quite an open and accepting platform for female supporters of the jihad to join in.
Speaking of platforms and accessibility this brings me to my last observation for the day the uptake of new digital media formats
As I’ve been out and about downloading files I’ve noticed that files are no longer just uploaded in pdf, word, chm or even SWF/Flash formats. Now things are uploaded with support for universal ebook formats like EPUB, Kindle (yes I kid you not), and this is the most fascinating one to me, Daisy. Daisy format is for talking books.
Now I haven’t tried out any of these because I learnt my lesson messing with new formats last year… But nonetheless the uptake of new technology on the forums continues. So too does the pirating of software–especially adobe related products. I tweeted earlier today I was tempted to join in one of forums’ tutorials. They’re not bad.
So there you have it.
Obviously a lot more going on, but this is what interested me in tonight’s internet wanderings.
Ok back to thesis for me. Cheers.
Don’t wait for victory to start talking to the Taliban, Ainsworth tells Nato
Interesting article, I wonder if there is a transcript anywhere of Ainsworth’s comments. This snippet caught my interest.
I don’t believe that reintegration is something you do after victory. This is not total war. We’re not looking for unconditional surrender in Afghanistan. We’re looking for the stabilisation of a country and its participation in the world in a manner that doesn’t threaten its neighbours and doesn’t threaten us.
We mustn’t raise that bar too high in terms of our preparedness to bring people in. Neither should we wait until there is real victory before we try to reconcile or reintegrate those elements in the insurgency who are prepared to come across.
Some old photos released onto the forums
The photos are mostly of Abdullah Azzam and include some I hadn’t seen before. There’s some photos after he was killed. There’s also some MAK ( Azzam’s old organisation, which published the jihad magazine and supported the foreign fighters) documentation in there and a photo of Azzam with Sayyaf and Tameem Adnani. The case of Adnani is very interesting. He died in the US in 1988 I think it was. But Adnani was initially with bin Laden and Qaedat Ansarallah at Jaji and then left and aligned himself more closely with Azzam. He had issues with bin Laden’s agenda –as many did back then. Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested to see these pictures. I hope you can see the bigger files– if you click on them you should get a larger image view. The photo with Adnani is the sixth photo down in the right hand column. He’s the chubby one. To his left is Azzam and then Sayyaf. There’s a funny story of Adnani pitching a fit during or just after the battle of Jaji I think it was, and threatening a hunger strike when he wasn’t allowed to fight…. But I digress. Anyway, here are the pics.
Gilles Dorronsoro: U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has become almost bewilderingly self-destructive
A good article, if not a little depressing.
Charles Cameron reponds to Abu Walid al Masri
With permission, I’ve posted here a response by Charles Cameron to Abu Walid al Masri, which was originally posted to Zenpundit. Charles is a regular reader of my site, and I find his comments to be considered and insightful. By means of background here’s a brief bio from Charles, with his response following below.
Charles studied Theology at Oxford, and is a writer and independent scholar, presently based in California. He is keenly interested in the way religions have shaped our past and may well shape our future, and was a Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University during the run up to the year 2000. He is a regular guest blogger at Mark Safranski’s Zenpundit (http://zenpundit.com).
i
Some time back, I posted here about the conversation between Leah Farrall, until recently a senior analyst with the Australian Federal Police and their subject specialist for al-Qaida, and Abu Walid al-Masri, long time mujahid, writer and strategist, friend and frequent critic of bin Laden, and the first foreigner to give bayat to Mullah Omar. Leah is presently writing her doctoral dissertation on al-Qaida, Abu Walid is under house arrest in Iran. Their online conversation continues, as Leah has described in an article for The Australian, and I believe this in itself is a significant event in online discourse, as I suggest in a post on Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs blog.
Leah has been posting Abu Walid’s responses to her questions on her blog, first in Arabic and then as time permits in English, for some time now. Most recently, she posted her own detailed responses alongside Abu Walid’s questions to her — and the topic of their conversation accordingly shifted from issues of the structure and history of Al-Qaida and the Taliban (Leah’s academic interests) to issues of the morality of warfare, and of the jihad and war on terror in particular (Abu Walid’s concerns).
Leah has graciously invited me to respond to this new phase of the discussion, which cuts very close to my own heart.
ii
Abu Walid’s questions, as Adam Serwer has noted at The American Prospect, are largely focused on issues of due process:
Al Masri asks why the U.S. imprisons people based on secret evidence, why all detainees don’t get fair trials, and why the U.S. has tortured detainees. He brings up secret prisons and bounty hunters. He also alludes to America allowing “security departments in the underdeveloped world to do their dirty work, such as severe torture,” which I assume refers to extraordinary rendition.
Leah, who knows a great deal about these things, has responded to each of these points in detail. And Abu Walid and Leah are not alone in reproving such things — they have many critics, not least in the United States, some of whom have tracked these issues with a far closer eye than I have. Scott Horton, writing in Harper’s and elsewhere, knows far more about these practices, their justifications under recent Presidents, and their relation to US and international law than I do, and one of the reasons I find the western democratic tradition powerfully appealing is the fact that he can openly criticize his Presidents in the public media on such topics.
The topic of our behavior in time of war concerns me deeply, because it is fundamentally a topic about the gift of human life, how we should use it and how we should respect it. Islam, and before it Judaism, both declare that to take one human life is to extinguish a world, and that somewhat poetic statement is a brilliant summary of why the means of peace should be preferred to those of war.
This view, that every human life is of extraordinary worth, applies not only to the killing of humans, in war or elsewhere, but also to their mistreatment — what the New York Times has described as “dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs, hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture”.
So let me say directly that I too am opposed to torture, to beheadings, to attacks that cause civilian casualties, to the capture or killing of humanitarian aid workers, to extraordinary renditions.
My own hope is that the United States will not allow the tragic consequences of terror attacks to diminish the kind of freedom that allows people like Scott Horton to do the research, and to publish their findings freely. I find myself agreeing here with Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
My prayers are for an end to war, and until that time, for moderation in its practice.
iii
This post, then, is more a response to the fact of an emerging dialog between Abu Walid and Leah Farrall than it is to the specifics of their discussion. After reading Leah’s responses to Abu Walid, I find I have very little to add to what she has said.
What touches me most deeply, in fact, is neither the issue of the structure of Al-Qaida nor the rights and wrongs of the conflict, but the simple fact of dialog between these two persons. It is not a facing off between opposing sides, in which so often each side demonizes the other, that attracts me here — but the reaching out from both sides to find early signs of a shared humanity, a shared possibility of peace. And in order to clarify that response, I think I should say something more about my own history, and the way in which I arrived at my own views.
John Adams, the second President of the United States, wrote in a widely-quoted letter to his wife:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
I am the son and grandson of warriors, so it has been my privilege to study philosophy and poetry — bur neither poetry nor philosophy allows me to overlook war entirely.
I understand that there are injustices and brutalities in the world that cry out for redress, and that force of arms may at times be necessary. My own father was a naval officer, who fought Hitler’s navy in the grueling waters of the Arctic, and died young because of it. I honor him for it. My first great mentor was a priest who worked to end the brutalities of the apartheid regime in South Africa, because he saw all people, regardless of skin color, as the children of God. Explaining himself, he wrote:
My responsibility is always and everywhere the same: to see in my brother more even than the personality and manhood that are his. My task is always and everywhere the same: to see Christ himself.
My mentor was an extraordinary man who was known for his abhorrence of violence, and yet was willing to approve “defensive violence and armed struggle as a last resort against the oppressor“. So I was raised by a courageous warrior and an extraordinary man of peace, and the issue of human violence has been a topic of lifelong meditation for me, and I do not see it as simple in any way.
We all must choose where we shall expend our efforts, and my cause is that of religion: the astonishing generosity and compassion it can call forth in people, and the terrible consequences that follow when it is used to provide a sanction for killing.
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To be honest, I detest war.
I detest earthquakes. As I say that, I do not intend to blame God, nature, or any human agency for them — I understand that earthquakes happen, that we live in what might be described as a ‘violent” universe, that galaxies collide, stars explode, worlds and cultures come into existence and are snuffed out, people live and die.
What I mean to say is that I am saddened by the needless brutality that befalls humans and other creatures trapped in earthquakes, those who lose their limbs or sight, or who live for days in hope of rescue, buried under fallen masonry, and those others who survive, and are now widows, orphans, childless – because those they loved were in some other room, or some other part of town, or some other land when the quake hit.
I can acknowledge such things happen, but I cannot take joy in them, and I would not wish them on anyone.
In the course of war, many of the same effects are found — people die, lose their limbs, are buried under fallen masonry, blinded, orphaned, widowed — but on these occasions they are brought about by the hands of other humans, by human decision and choice.
If, as I say, I detest earthquakes, how shall I not also detest war?
v
And yet I feel kinship. I have a clan background: my father, and his father, and his father’s father were Scotsmen, all of them military men. I understand the honor that is due to one’s forebears, and I salute them.
I was born and raised in England. I love and honor the country of my birth, its sweet hills and trees and rivers, and there is a quality to those gently rolling hills that I will never forget, which is home to me. I studied in Oxford, in one of the great halls of learning, and it allows me to feel kinship with all those who have studied in the great universities and monasteries, from Oxford to Kyoto. I have lived for much of my life in America, and love, too, my adopted country.
And thus I understand what it is to be on one side of a dispute, not because that side is perfectly right and just in all matters, but because one belongs with that land or those people: they are one’s own.
My father, when I was a boy, told me the story of how another clan became in 1692 the enemy of our clan. It seems they accepted the hospitality of our clan allies, then rose in the night to slaughter their hosts. They thereby defiled their own honor by abusing the principle of hospitality — for, as a Scottish historian put it, “the Highlander, like the Arab, attached an almost sacred importance to the guest participating in his bread and salt”.
I have passed down to my own son the same story, but I have also made it clear to him that I hold no continuing grudge nor enmity against that other clan, and that I do not believe my father did either.
vi
Here, then, is the crux of the matter as I understand it, in Leah’s words:
Regardless of whether someone is our enemy or not, they are still, at the end of the day, human. They still have families, and in their milieu are probably viewed as good and decent people. Much the same way that we view ourselves. Somehow, in conflict this gets lost. That may be okay for fighting, but it isn’t when it comes to trying to bring an end to conflict.
We seem, thank God, to have arrived at the point where the idea of resolving the terrible conflict in Afghanistan is at last recognizably on the horizon. Secretary Gates said recently that “political reconciliation ultimately has to be a part of settling the conflict” — which seems to me to bode well for a dialog of this sort, preliminary though it is.
But I do not see the possibility of fruitful dialog just as a means to some form of political solution — to me it is more than that.
When the people of Israel escaped by night from captivity in Egypt, they were at first pursued by the army of Pharaoh. When they arrived at the Red Sea, God parted it so that they could make their escape. The sea then closed on Pharaoh’s army and drowned them, and the Israelites rejoiced, singing a song of thanks. In the Jewish lore of the Talmud, it is recorded that on that night the angels too wished to sing, and that God refused to hear their song of praise, rebuking them with the words, “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you will sing songs?”
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Vengeance dies hard, though, doesn’t it?
If I kill your soldier I have killed an enemy — but you have lost a father, a brother, a son, and left a widow, an orphan: your grief is then greater than my satisfaction, your thirst for revenge keener than my fear of it, and so you strike down one of mine, thinking you have killed an enemy — but losing me a father, a brother, a son, leaving me a widow, an orphan — and so the plague rolls on. You have visited anguish on me, I shall visit anguish on you.
Gandhi said it: An eye for eye, and soon the whole world is blind.
I choose, personally, to follow the principle of forgetting in such matters. Injustices are legion, and the roots of today’s struggles can in many cases be traced back across centuries, even millennia. Both perpetrators and victims are human.
viii
There will be some who ask if this does not make a “moral equivalence” between one side and the other, and is not one side — “ours” — righteous, and the other evil?
I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural here. He notes that in the American Civil War, both sides “pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other” and although it is clear where his own allegiance lies, he continues, “let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered – that of neither has been answered fully.“
I too have my preferences: what saddens me most of all, perhaps — for I am before all else a “lover of the lovers of God” — is the way in which religious feeling is used to provide sanction for killing.
But I think the issue cuts deeper even than that, and as I contemplate friend and foe alike — and indeed this dialog between, as Abu Walid puts it, “the (terrorist) and (counter-terrorist)“– I find the need to remember first my own humanity. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered enormous wrongs in the Soviet Archipelago:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an uprooted small corner of evil.
I too am human: the line runs through my heart, too – and in the final analysis, my response to this dialogue, like the dialogue itself, reaches beyond the issues that divide us, toward our common humanity, and toward peace.
Abdulhadi Hairan: A Profile of the Taliban’s Propaganda Tactics
This is absolutely worth a read. It gives a great breakdown of the Taliban’s propaganda apparatus.
Abdulhadi Hairan: A Profile of the Taliban’s Propaganda Tactics.
John Nagl and ‘the future of counterinsurgency’
Excellent post by Alex.
John Nagl and ‘the future of counterinsurgency’ at A Different Place.
Before everyone goes and gets hysterical about Shabaab can we have a little perspective please?
I tweeted earlier today that I think I might scream if I see one more headline announcing Shabaab has “joined” AQ. It hasn’t. It has made steps towards this goal, which shows it clearly follows the doctrine I keep harping about. But nothing has been officially sanctioned. Consider their announcement as a form of job application. AQ is still musing over it because of the situation in Somalia, and the fact that all of the groups aren’t unified. It may choose to weigh in to tip the balance if it thinks this will push things towards unity. But this far it has stood back and watched to see how things unfold.
And when the time does come for a merger, if it does, people might want to look back to how things went with the GSPC. I’ve included a small snippet here from 2007 when the GSPC changed its name. The reason I’ve done so is the bottom line, specifically the last few words of the sentence *until it received an order from bin Laden*.This order was for the name change but there was a similar order/announcement approving the GSPC joining AQ.
So until we hear about something along these lines, can we PLEASE quit with panicky fear mongering headlines that only serve to further lionise al Qaeda and pre-emptively make a mountain out of a mole hill. We’re going to have big enough problems when it does eventuate. And I don’t see how lionising it, along the lines of the way al Qaeda in Iraq was lionised before it even formed (and when Zarqawi actually only had 17 men) helps anyone. Ok rant over. And yes I did end up shrieking at the computer screen.
The Group for Preaching and Combat GSPC Changes Its Name to “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib”On January 26, 2007, Islamist websites posted a communiqué by the Algerian Salafi organization “Group for Preaching and Combat” GSPC, signed by organization commander Abu Mus’ab ‘Abd Al-Wadud, which announces that the GSPC has changed its name to “The Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghrib.” The message explains that, after “joining Al-Qaeda [in September 2006] and pledging allegiance to bin Laden… the organization had no choice but to… take a new name reflecting the unity, the strong affinity, and the real connection between the mujahideen of Algeria and their brothers in the Al-Qaeda organization.” The message further states that the GSPC was ready to change its name immediately after joining Al-Qaeda, but refrained from doing so until it received an order from bin Laden.
Did You Know Muslims Are Still Scary? — Registan.net
An excellent take down by Joshua Foust of some utter rubbish from Reuters.
Did You Know Muslims Are Still Scary? — Registan.net.