Comments posted on Brookings website over Bruce Riedel’s article: Al Qaida’s Yemen Connection, America and the Global Islamic Jihad

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/1230_terrorism_yemen_riedel.aspx?comments=1

Comments posted on Brookings website over Bruce Riedel’s article: Al Qaida’s Yemen Connection, America and the Global Islamic Jihad

Jan 4, 201011:10 AM

The way 'failed states' are popping up, one recalls Powell's comments, you broke it, you own it. US will have to be alert to moves by vested interests to drag it into ever widening quagmire of failed states, in the name of its own 'security' and the ghosts of demons around the world, ever ready to attack the US and its pet 'Ally'. The Muttalab incident should point to a virtual civil war raging within the circle of US agencies confronting each other with differing or even divergent views on America's security. The more strong the US is portrayed, the more it is becoming prone to face challenges testing its reach and tenacity. Obama must go for a drastic change. He may decide to move the goal post.

—Ghulam Muhammed

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/1230_terrorism_yemen_riedel.aspx

Al Qaeda’s Yemen Connection, America and the Global Islamic Jihad

Terrorism, Middle East, Islamic World

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

The Brookings Institution

DECEMBER 30, 2009 —

The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year. Since merging with the al Qaeda franchise in Saudi Arabia last January and renaming itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), it has stepped up operations in Yemen itself, struck into Saudi Arabia, and now operates on the global stage. The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP.

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Protesters shout slogans as they march on a street in the southern Yemeni town of Radfan.

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Al Qaeda has long been active in Yemen, the original homeland of Osama bin Laden's family, and one of its first major terror attacks was conducted in Aden in 2000, when an al Qaeda cell nearly sank the USS Cole. A year ago, the al Qaeda franchises in Saudi Arabia and Yemen merged after the Saudi branch had been effectively repressed by the Saudi authorities under the leadership of Deputy Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Nayif. The new AQAP showed its claws last August, when it almost assassinated the prince with a suicide bomber who had passed through at least two airports on the way to his attempt on Nayif. 

The same bombmakers who produced that device probably also manufactured the bomb that Omar al Farooq Abdulmutallab used on Flight 253. In claiming credit for the Detroit attack, AQAP highlighted how they had built a bomb that "all the advanced, new machines and technologies and the security boundaries of the world's airports" had failed to detect. They praised their "mujahedin brothers in the manufacturing sector" for building such a "highly advanced device," and promised that more such attacks will follow. 

Yemen has sought to repress al Qaeda off and on for the last decade, with little success. The Saleh government has other more immediate problems on its plate, in particular a rebellion among Shia Zaydi tribes known as Houthis in the north that has escalated in the last two months with attacks by the rebels into Saudi territory. The southern part of the country, which only merged with the north in 1990 and fought a bitter civil war in 1994 when it tried to break away, is hostile to the Saleh government and is looking for a chance to split off again. The economy is weak and heavily dependent on dwindling oil reserves, and the majority of the 23 million Yemenis are illiterate and poor. 

The Obama administration has offered Saleh additional military assistance, and has encouraged the government to strike hard at al Qaeda hideouts in the last few weeks. The attacks have killed some AQAP leaders, but it is unclear exactly how serious a blow these attacks have inflicted on the group as a whole. AQAP has vowed revenge for the strikes, which it blames on an alliance between America, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Saleh government. 

AQAP has also provided refuge for the Yemeni-American cleric Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki was in contact with U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009. In an interview with Al Jazeera released on December 23, Awlaki said he had encouraged Nidal to kill his fellow soldiers because they were preparing to go to Afghanistan and were part of the Zionist-Crusader alliance that al Qaeda says it is fighting. The next day, December 24, Awlaki was reported to be among those killed in a Yemeni-American strike on the AQAP leadership, but that is still unconfirmed. In claiming credit for the Christmas Day airline attack, AQAP also lauded the Fort Hood massacre and urged other American Muslims to emulate Nidal Hassan. 

Al Qaeda has always found weak and failing states like Yemen to be its best staging bases and sanctuaries. Along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, Yemen offers an ideal location to operate with little outside interference. The president has been right to focus additional resources on combating AQAP, but the battle has just begun. If the Yemeni state becomes further destabilized, bin Laden’s cadre in the Arabian Peninsula will have more room to operate. 

The attack on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight also shows that al Qaeda remains obsessed with striking the American airline industry, a target it has gone after repeatedly since 1999. If AQAP has now been told by the al Qaeda core leadership to take on the job, we can probably assume that other al Qaeda franchises in North Africa, Iraq, Southeast Asia and elsewhere have also been pressed to attack.

Rattling the Cage: A taboo question for Israelis - By Larry Derfner -THE JERUSALEM POST

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1262339377294&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Dec 30, 2009 21:26 | Updated Jan 3, 2010 11:08

Rattling the Cage: A taboo question for Israelis

By LARRY DERFNER 

There's a question we Israelis won't ask ourselves about the Palestinians, especially not about Gaza. The question is taboo. Not only won't anyone ask it out loud, but very, very few people will dare ask it in the privacy of their own minds.


However, I think it's time we start asking it, privately and in public. If we don't, I think there's going to be Operation CastLead II, then Operation Cast Lead III, and each one is going to be worse than the last, and the consequences for Palestinians and Israelis are going to be unimaginable.


The question we have to ask ourselves is this: If anybody treated us like we're treating the people in Gaza, what would we do?

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• My Word: After the war....

We don't want to go there, do we? And because we don't, we make it our business not to see, hear or think about how, indeed, we are treating the people in Gaza.
All these shocked dignitaries, all these reports, these details, these numbers - thousands of destroyed this and tens of thousands of destroyed that. Rubble, sewage, malnutrition, crying babies, humanitarian crises - who can keep up? Who cares? They did it to themselves. Where to for lunch?


IT'S NOT that we can't imagine life in Gaza. It's that we are determined not to try to imagine. If we did, we might not stop there. Next we might try to imagine what it would be like if our country were in the condition in which we left Gaza. And sooner or later we might try to imagine what we would do if we were living over here like they're living over there.


Or not even what we would do, just what we would think - about the people, about the country, that did that to us and that wouldn't even allow us to begin to recover after the war was over. That blockaded our borders and allowed in only enough supplies to keep us at subsistence level, to prevent starvation and mass epidemics.
What would we think, what would we do, if somebody, some country, did that to us?


A lot of people here, I'm sure, would reply angrily: So why won't the Gazans try making peace?


But is that how we would react? Is that what Israelis would do if a foreign army did to this country what the IDF did to that one a year ago? If another country sent F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous, drones, tanks and battalions into Israel, if any nation bombed and killed over here like we bombed and killed in Gaza, then rubbed our noses in it afterward, would we want to make peace with them?


Forget we; does anyone know a single Israeli who would?


I'M SURE a lot of people would argue: What about Sderot? Didn't the terrorists in Gaza bomb and kill in Sderot? Let's the turn the question around: What would the Gazans have done if another country did to them what they did to the people in Sderot?


Fair enough. Yes, they would have hit back, too. They're not pacifists, either, to say the least. In fact, their elected leaders are fanatical, murderous Jew-haters sworn to Israel's destruction. That's extremely important to remember, and we do. But what we don't want to remember, what we make 100 percent sure to forget, is that we do all sorts of hateful things to Gaza that they don't do to us, and that this is the way it's been since 1967.


Aside from choking the flow of goods to Gaza by land, we blockade their entire coast. We don't allow ships to sail into Gaza or out. Does anyone stop ships from coming and going at the ports of Eilat, Ashdod or Haifa? What would Israel do if anyone tried? (Think of what Israel did two weeks after Egypt blockaded the port of Eilat in May 1967.)


We also blockade Gaza's airspace, preventing planes from flying in or out. Does anybody stop planes from flying in and out of Israel? Would we stand for it if someone did?


For 37 years, between 1967 and 2005, our soldiers and settlers were the overlords of the Gaza Strip. If foreign soldiers and settlers tried to come in and take over Israel, what would we do?


And regarding the years of rocket attacks on the people in Sderot, I've never been through such an ordeal, but I imagine it's hell. However, I've also never been through the ordeal that people in Gaza have gone through, and are still going through, yet I know - as everyone in the world knows, except Israelis - that life in Gaza is incomparably worse than life in Sderot ever was.


DURING THE 2008 US presidential campaign, Barack Obama visited Sderot, saying, "If missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that."


Absolutely right. I wonder, though, what sort of empathetic reaction he might have had if he'd also visited the Jabalya refugee camp that summer. I wonder how he'd react if he visited Jabalya now.


And how would we react? If we Israelis could go to Gaza and see in person what we've done to that place and its people, would we be capable of empathy? If we thought of our children living in a country that was just like postwar Gaza, would we allow ourselves to think what we might do?


We can't go to Gaza, but we have to start using our imagination. We have to dare to put ourselves in those people's place. And we have to stop doing to them what we would never allow anyone to do to us. Otherwise, we Israelis have no conscience, and little by little we become capable of anything.

Comments posted on THE WASHINGTON POST website over Charles Krauthammer's article: A terrorist war Obama has denied

Comments posted on THE WASHINGTON POST website over Charles Krauthammer's article: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123101744_Comments.html

Your Comments On...

A terrorist war Obama has denied

The administration's response to terrorism has been incompetent and incomprehensible.
 - 

 By Charles Krauthammer

 

Comments

ghulammuhammed3 wrote:

Abdulmuttallab may be used by agencies to whip up the flagging interest in war on terror. His kid glove treatment with foreknowledge of all his moves, point to a controlled experiment to hoodwink people that Al Qaida is still active. If Al Qaida is active, there are reasons to believe that US agencies have handlers manipulating some of its moves. People should be wary of Neo-cons like Krauthammer, who still have plants in US administration and committed to build up a scenario of world wide terror to continue to be in business.

1/3/2010 12:54:00 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123101744.html

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A terrorist war Obama has denied

President Obama makes a statement Monday on the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. (Kent Nishimura/getty Images)   Enlarge Photo     TOOLBOX  Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz COMMENT  1213 Comments  |  View All »  POST A COMMENT Your washingtonpost.com User ID,ghulammuhammed3, will be displayed with your comment.  Discussion Policy WHO'S BLOGGING » Links to this article

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, January 1, 2010

Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."
And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate the mass murder there with Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.
More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.
This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.
The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.
The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist[s]."
A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

TIMES OF INDIA & JANG PAKISTAN AUGUR A NEW 'LOVE PAKISTAN' / 'LOVE INDIA' INITIATIVE WELCOMING NEW YEAR 2010

THE TIMES OF INDIA STARTED THE NEW YEAR 2010 WITH A FULL FRONT PAGE 'ADVERTISEMENT' ANNOUNCING AN IND0-PAK MEDIA INITIATIVE: 'LOVE PAKISTAN', TOGETHER WITH JANG GROUP OF PAKISTAN. AFTER 62 YEARS OF HATE-MONGERING AGAINST EACH OTHER, MEDIA, IS CHOSEN TO LEAD A PEOPLE TO PEOPLE EXERCISE TO CUT DOWN ON INSTITUTIONALIZED HATE THAT DIVIDES THE CONTINENT AND TO USHER IN A NEW ERA OF FRIENDSHIP AND COOPERATION AT THE LEVEL OF THE COMMON PEOPLE WHO NEVER BENEFITED FROM THE LONG NIGHT OF HATE AND DIVISION THAT HAD BEEN UNLEASHED BY THE DEPARTING COLONIALISTS. 

THE PRESENT INITIATIVE, THOUGH LONG OVERDUE, BUT STILL APPEARES TO BE MANAGED BY THE SAME COLONIZING POWERS THAT KNOW THAT THEY  AND ONLY THEY CAN IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON US HAPLESS PEOPLE. 

IF THEY WANT US TO HATE EACH OTHER, WE WILL HATE LIKE ZOMBIES. IF THEY WANT US TO LOVE EACH OTHER, THEY WILL HELP RELEASE A FULL PAGE ADVERTISEMENT IN BOTH COUNTRIES' PRIME NEWSPAPERS TO CALL IT A DAY. 

IT IS FOR US TO REFLECT AND QUESTION IF THESE PEACE MOVES HAVE BEEN AUGURED TO COINCIDE WITH ANY FOREIGN POWER AGENDA TO RE-ENTER THE SUBCONTINENT WITH RENEWED VIGOUR AND ONCE AGAIN HIJACK IT TO ABUSE ITS PEOPLE, ITS TERRITORY, ITS RESOURCES BY DIVIDING THE PEOPLE INTO HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS AND IMPOSE THEIR HEGEMONICAL WILL ON THE UNTHINKING MASSES AND UNCARING CLASSES OF THE SUBCONTINENT.

LET PEOPLE OF THE SUBCONTINENT UNITE, BUT ON THEIR OWN TERMS, ON THEIR OWN VOLITION, ON THEIR OWN REALIZATION OF THE DIRE NEED FOR UNITY IN A FREE, INDEPENDENT SUB-CONTINENT; --------- KEEPING THE OUTSIDERS OUT.

GHULAM MUHAMMED, MUMBAI

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