Terrorism

ASP in the News | May 7-9

Ian McAllister — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:22:00 -0400

The Washington Post (05/08) features Peter Bergen savaging Morgan Spurlock's new documentary.
Wired Magazine (05/07) quotes Jeffrey Lewis on the dynamics of space warfare
The Orion (05/07) cites Afshin Molavi on the pressures within Iranian culture

ASP in the News | May 5-7

Ian McAllister — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:28:00 -0400

Pacific Daily News (05/07) analyzes Parag Khanna's hypothesis of the decline of U.S. hegemony.
US News (05/06) quotes Sherle Schwenninger on the cost of doing business in the U.S.
AFP (05/06) cites Steve Clemons discussing the negative impact of Clinton's comments on Iran.
Hard News (05/06) discusses Peter Bergen's research on the link between education and terrorist recruitment.
The People's Daily (04/25) quotes Steve Clemons arguing against a boycott of the Beijing Games.

American Strategy in the News | April 18 - 21

Faith Smith — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:59:00 -0400

Book TV (4/21) interviews Steve Coll about his new book, The Bin Ladens.
The Washington Post (4/20) asks Flynt Leverett's opinion of UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
The Moderate Voice (4/19) quotes Daniel Levy on Israeli roadblocks as an obstacle to peace.
The Telegraph (4/19) reviews Parag Khanna's new book, The Second World.
The New Republic (4/18) follows Stephen Clemmons debate on the US response to the Beijing Olympics.
The Daily Yomiuri (04/17) features Steve Clemons analyzing Hillary’s Beijing boycott call.
PBS (4/17) speaks with Afshin Molavi about Iran's contemporary politics and culture.

Steve Coll on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Patrick Doherty — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:23:00 -0400

Steve Coll on The Daily Show

Troy K. Schneider — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:20:00 -0400

New America President Steve Coll was a guest on The Daily Show last night to discuss his new book, The Bin Ladens. Video of his clip can be viewed below:

Osama bin Laden is Planning Something for the U.S. Election

Patrick Doherty — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:04:00 -0400

The term "October surprise" used to refer to an international event that caused a major turn in a U.S. presidential campaign. Steve Coll, New America's president and CEO, thinks that this year's October surprise may be from Osama bin Laden, perhaps at home. Der Spiegel interviews Coll on this and other insights into Osama bin Laden and his large family from his new book, The Bin Ladens.

'Osama bin Laden is Planning Something for the US Election'

Der Spiegel | April 2, 2008

US author Steve Coll spent years looking into Osama bin Laden's family. Now, his new book provides a unique insight into the clan. SPIEGEL spoke with him about where the terrorist might be hiding, how his father got his start, and the unique romantic liasons pursued by one of his brothers.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Coll, Osama bin Laden recently broke a long silence. He threatened Europe and called for the "liberation" of the Gaza Strip. How seriously should we take these missives? Do they tell us anything about him or about where he might be?

Steve Coll: Bin Laden has long formulated his messages such that they touch on current events. It is not difficult to imagine him hidden away somewhere on the Afghanistan border watching al-Jazeera or CNN and taking notes for his next communiqué. I think his comments on Europe were mostly an effort to make headlines -- written after he heard about the Muhammad caricatures being reprinted. But it could also be an indication that he got wind of a plot developing in Europe. In the last two years, we have found connections between such plots and al-Qaida headquarters. His mention of Gaza is typical of his attempt to play a role in current events. He simply wants to show that he is still alive and keeping abreast of developments in the Muslim world.

SPIEGEL: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accuses the Bush administration of having dangerously neglected the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist. Is he right?

Coll: It would have been possible to eliminate Osama bin Laden, specifically between 1998 and 2001, in the time before Sept. 11. We had agents on site at the time, and they gave (former President Bill) Clinton the chance to strike three times. One time he decided against a missile attack, because he was unwilling to accept the deaths of children. A swing was distinguishable on a satellite image of bin Laden's base near Kandahar. It probably would also have been possible to surround the camp with Special Forces and extract him. But those weren't the political priorities at the time. But even after 9/11 there was an opportunity. Bin Laden himself later wrote about how desperate his situation was during the heavy bombing of his cave hideout in Tora Bora near the Pakistani border in December 2001. He managed to escape at the last minute. Whether some of the Afghan troops that had advanced with US troops into the mountains were simply too half-hearted or actively helped him get away, it's hard to say. In any event, we neglected to bring in the Tenth Mountain Division, which specialized in that type of combat and was partly stationed in Uzbekistan at the time. It was a bad decision.

SPIEGEL: Where is bin Laden now?

Coll: I am firmly convinced that he is on Pakistani soil, and I would even venture to say where: in the mountainous region of North Waziristan, near the city of Miram Shah. Bin Laden knows the area like the back of his hand. It is controlled by the Haqqani clan, in which he has deep roots. Pakistan's army doesn't dare enter the region.

SPIEGEL: Do you think he's in some sort of al-Qaida camp where he can play a role coordinating the group's activities?

Coll: Osama probably moves from place to place, protected by friends -- which doesn't mean that someone won't betray him one of these days. And he apparently has access to modern means of communication, like satellite TV. The Miram Shah region, unlike rural Afghanistan, is further developed in this respect than we in the West generally assume. I imagine that Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, isn't in the same place as bin Laden.

SPIEGEL: Out of caution or for tactical reasons?

Coll: Probably both. But in the last two or three years, the two have regained so much confidence that I've heard they even get together at Shuras, the group consultations among the al-Qaida leadership. We don't know whether Bin Laden himself issues commands to carry out terrorist attacks. But it's practically certain that he knows about most al-Qaida operations.

SPIEGEL: You devote much of your new book to his family and its origins. Why?

Coll: I believe that Osama bin Laden and the broad contradictions among religion, tradition and modernity in the Middle East, with enmity toward the West on one side and the attractiveness of our ideas and way of life on the other, is best understood through the prism of this clan.

SPIEGEL: Do you see the bin Ladens as a terrorist clan? Or are they just a nice family with one well-known black sheep?

Coll: They are a large family, at any rate. Osama alone has 24 brothers and 29 sisters, and the bin Ladens have always been a clan that encompasses an astonishingly broad range of ideologies -- from those of its completely worldly members, like bon vivant Salem bin Laden, a Beatles fan and playboy, to those of its religious fanatics. This diversity was also evident on that fateful day in America. When the terrorists slammed their hijacked American Airlines jet into the Pentagon, Shafiq bin Laden, Osama's half-brother, was in a conference with investors at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, just a few kilometers away. The conference was sponsored by the Carlyle Group, in which both the bin Ladens and the Bush family held shares.

SPIEGEL: As with most of the world's successful family clans, the bin Ladens also got their start behind a powerful patriarch.

Coll: Indeed. Osama's father Mohammed was a self-made man who transformed himself from a simple, illiterate farmer's son to a multimillionaire. He comes from the inhospitable Hadramaut, a bitterly poor region in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, whose name couldn't be more appropriate. Hadramaut means "death is among us." At 14, Mohammed took his fate into his own hands. In 1925, he crossed the Red Sea to the north on an overcrowded wooden dhow, wandered half-starved through the desert, and eventually made it to Jiddah, a dismal and stiflingly small city at the time. But Osama's father overlooked the poverty and saw an opportunity.

SPIEGEL: What was he able to do that others couldn't have done?

Coll: He had seen the astonishing, tall clay brick buildings his fellow Saudi Arabians had built in the Hadramaut. He wanted to become a builder, to tear down houses and build towers. Towers, and later aircraft, would, in surprising variations, determine the fate of this family.

SPIEGEL: Where did Mohammed bin Laden get the startup capital for his business?

Coll: He slept in a hollow in the sand, worked part-time in a shop for pilgrims, cooked, worked in a stone quarry and saved every cent. He started a company in 1931 and soon became involved in housing construction. In the days of the first oil boom, he used ambition, hard work and good contacts to become the top builder for the Saudi royal family. Soon, in addition to high-rises, he was building dams and roads. He became rich.

SPIEGEL: A lot of folks were rich. Where did his influence come from?

Coll: Money couldn't change his social position in Saudi Arabia, even though he was awarded a cabinet position in 1955. The al-Saud royal family appreciated his honesty and reliability, but they would never allow their daughters to marry him or any of his sons. If Mohammed wanted to ensure that his children would have better opportunities -- and that was something he wanted more than anything else -- a first-class education was critical.

SPIEGEL: He must have had his favorites, among the 54 children from his 22 wives. Was Osama one of these favorites?

Coll: Mohammed bin Laden quickly divorced Osama's mother, a Syrian woman from the port city of Latakia. But everything suggests that the father was an important role model for Osama. As a young boy, he accompanied his father to Mecca and Medina, where Mohammed completed extensive renovation work, just as he did in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, an important religious site for Muslims. The senior bin Laden was a devout man, and these projects in Islam's holiest places were of great personal importance to him. But he was by no means a fanatic, and he was surprisingly cosmopolitan for a man of his background. He was a modernizer.

SPIEGEL: How can you tell?

Coll: He also employed Christians and other "infidels" on his construction site in Jerusalem, bought more than half a dozen modern Packard two-seaters from the United States and was the first private citizen in Saudi Arabia to have his own airplane. He had it maintained by TWA. An American pilot would eventually lead to his downfall, when he crashed the bin Laden family plane on a September day in 1967.

'Osama Was More of a Shy Boy'

SPIEGEL: Had the patriarch clearly set up his succession? Did Osama play a role?

Coll: Osama, son number 17, was just 10 years old when the father died. Like the other male heirs, he received a 2.3 percent share of the company, while each of the daughters received only 1 percent. This money and the interest on the company's annual profits -- invested, contrary to the rules of Islam, with Western banks -- made Osama a rich man. He was a millionaire, but he wasn't worth 300 million as has been claimed. After a transition period, in which King Faisal assumed a guardian-like role, Salem bin Laden was made the head of the huge family company. He was at least 10 years older than his brother Osama and had attended a British boarding school.

SPIEGEL: Some of the siblings received their education in the West or in the Lebanese capital Beirut, which was very liberal at the time, while others stayed in Saudi Arabia. Didn't Osama want to venture out into the world?

Coll: He visited Beirut once, but he apparently found life there to be more alienating than fascinating. Sometimes he watched American TV series like "Bonanza" and "Fury," and sometimes he played football, but always in long trousers. But Osama, who was more of a shy boy, sought his role model, his new father figure, elsewhere. He was heavily influenced by a teacher who promoted the ideas of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Osama's radicalization was not directed against the family. He accepted Salem's authority without objection, even though he must have disapproved of his drinking habits, his playboy lifestyle and his fondness for Western pop music. But at first Osama's religious and revolutionary zeal by no means contradicted the policies of the Saudi royal family, especially when it came to issues like the call to "liberate" Jerusalem, and then, later on, the fight against the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan, which he plunged into with enthusiasm.

SPIEGEL: Did the other Bin Ladens admire Osama, or did they just see him as an eccentric?

Coll: They thought the intensity and rigor with which he lived his faith were odd. For example, he forbade his young wife from drinking through a straw and his children from drinking from a bottle, because he felt that these things were un-Islamic. But by no means did they see him as a sectarian outsider. Just as it was once customary in families of the European nobility for a son to choose the priesthood, they considered it quite normal that one of their own would choose the call of religion.

SPIEGEL: It soon became more than that.

Coll: Yes. Osama became radicalized in 1979, with the attack of radical Islamists on the Great Mosque in Mecca, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His ego and his ambition grew when, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, he distributed money, most of it donated by his family, to the Afghan insurgents and then joined the mujaheddin in their holy war.

SPIEGEL: How was the family able to maintain this split between Mecca and the West?

Coll: Salem was quite successful as the head of the family and as a businessman. He knew how important the donations were for the Afghan resistance movement. On the advice of his politically influential US friends, he also helped finance the CIA's campaign against the Contras in Nicaragua. Most of all, however, Salem bin Laden lived his American dream, which included villas, cars and private planes. He liked to travel and he loved singing to an audience. He once sang Bavarian folk songs at the Oktoberfest in Munich, after paying $2,000 in cash to buy a spot in the overflowing beer tent. His love life was especially eccentric.

SPIEGEL: In what way?

Coll: He had five preferred girlfriends: an American, a Briton, a Frenchwoman, a Dane and a German. One day he had them all flown to London, introduced them to each other and announced that he wanted to marry each of them and give them each a villa. The only condition was that they would have to be available for him at all times -- and have their respective national flags flying on their property and a car made in their respective country parked in front of the door. He dreamed of his own, private United Nations. The German, nicknamed "my Panzer," left immediately, while most of the others played hard-to-get. Salem eventually married the British woman…

SPIEGEL: …but was unable to enjoy his good fortune for long.

Coll: That's right. A short time later, in May of 1988, he took off in an ultralight aircraft from the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams in San Antonio and, though he was an experienced pilot, inexplicably hit power lines and crashed. It was yet another aviation death, and once again it was linked to America. The brother who then took over as head the company, Bakr bin Laden, was a moderately religious, internationally experienced and worldly man.

SPIEGEL: How did the rupture between Osama and the family come about?

Coll: Osama had found a new mentor in the Pakistani-Afghani border region. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar with the Muslim Brotherhood, acquainted him with the concept of international jihad. New weapons, paid for with Saudi money and delivered by the United States, turned the war around in favor of the mujaheddin. After Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan and he returned home to Saudi Arabia, Osama began searching for new projects. When the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in 1990, he offered the royal family his Arab fighters for a punitive expedition against Saddam Hussein, playing the loyal Islamic guerilla leader in the service of the monarchy. But to his great disappointment, the rulers in Riyadh chose to pin their hopes on the Americans and agreed to allow the US to station large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia.

SPIEGEL: But didn't the bin Laden family make money on the deal?

Coll: The company, under Bakr's leadership, built a helicopter landing site for the US Army. All of this was too much for Osama: the humiliation stemming from the rejection of his support, and the certificates of appreciation that US General Norman Schwarzkopf handed to individual executives within the bin Laden Group for their "invaluable support." He sharpened the tone of his political speeches, and then took his four wives and many children to live in exile in Sudan. After the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, when Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization came under suspicion, the family officially disowned him.

SPIEGEL: Were all contacts truly cut off?

Coll: No. Osama's firstborn son Abdullah had already abandoned the father before he moved on to Afghanistan and became more and more involved in terrorism. But we know that the mother and several other family members traveled to Kandahar to attend the wedding of the second-eldest son Mohammed in January 2001.

SPIEGEL: Carmen bin Laden, a sister-in-law of Osamas who lived in Saudi Arabia for a long time, told SPIEGEL that she believes that the "Bin Ladens never disowned Osama; in this family, a brother remains a brother, no matter what he has done." Do you have evidence to support this claim?

Coll: No direct evidence. One of the family members, Saad bin Laden, is under house arrest in Tehran as a suspected terrorist. And there are financial transactions by individual family members that are difficult to trace and therefore suspicious, but no overwhelming evidence. Bakr bin Laden and the globalized family company are far too dependent on international acceptance to remain in contact with Osama, no matter what they think of him. After Osama's declaration of war on the United States, the family hired a former Wall Street Journal journalist as a PR advisor. And with only one exception all bin Ladens who were living the United States left the country shortly after the attack.

SPIEGEL: And now the family is spread across the globe. Can you give us a short summary?

Coll: Yeslam bin Laden has secured the rights to the family name for his Bin Laden Fashions, which he abandoned in the face of protests. Abdullah owns an event management agency in Jiddah. Hassan is one of the principal shareholders in the Hard Rock Café Middle East. Other family members finance Hollywood films, own or have owned privatized prisons and an airport in the United States. Bakr and the Bin Ladin Group are bidding on the contract to build the world's tallest building in Dubai. He counts Prince Charles, George Bush senior and Jimmy Carter among his close acquaintances. He has also taken flying lessons and pilots his private jet himself.

SPIEGEL: And Osama…

Coll: …is by no means the country bumpkin, the fanatic fundamentalist he is sometimes portrayed as in the West. He sees himself as a master of global changes and their technologies. He believes, not quite incorrectly, that he has used the modern media more effectively than his American adversaries. Robbed of his Saudi Arabian identity, at home in international jihad, Osama, as his most recent messages from the underground show, sees himself as a true world citizen.

SPIEGEL: He sent a message to the candidates in the American presidential campaign four years ago, shortly before election day…

Coll: …and the Democrats and (former presidential candidate) John Kerry see this as one of the main reasons behind their loss. I believe that he wants to influence America this time, as well. There is a threat of the terrorist attack on American soil that al-Qaida has long warned of. Osama bin Laden is planning something for the US election.

SPIEGEL: He could harm the Democrats, who have long led in the opinion polls, but are seen as less competent when it comes to fighting terror. Could Osama be the Republicans' last hope?

Coll: This is the year of the Democrats, unless there is a huge disaster.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Coll, thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Erich Follath

Like the Wild West, Plus al-Qaeda

Patrick Doherty — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:17:00 -0400

Is it possible that Iraq is still sucking up all the best intelligence and counter-insurgency assets of the U.S. Government and leaving only the scraps to deal with the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan? New America Fellow Nick Schmidle, whose New York Times Magazine cover story got him and his wife expelled from Pakistan by the Musharraf government, looks at the state of play in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas in this piece in Sunday's Washington Post. With unmanned Predator strikes killing civilians and senior military advisors trying to replicate Iraq's Anbar Awakening, the answer seems clear.

Like the Wild, Wild West. Plus al-Qaeda.

By Nicholas Schmidle
March 30, 2008 | The Washington Post

Darra Adam Khel, a small burg in Pakistan's tribal areas, is the quintessential frontier town. Picture Wyatt Earp sashaying down the streets of Tombstone in a turban, and you begin to get the idea. Because Pakistani laws don't apply here, smugglers, gunsmiths and, most recently, the Taliban find Darra, as it's locally known, an optimal place to do business.

Most stores along the main road sell firearms or drugs. In one, freshly pressed slabs of hashish are cured in goat skins, stacked up like a new line of sweaters at the Gap. Next door, customers can walk in, pull a Kalashnikov from the rack and step outside to test-fire it into the sky. On my first visit to Darra, I opened the car door just as a prospective AK-47 buyer rattled off a few rounds. Thinking that I'd stumbled into a duel, I dove into a ditch for cover.

It's hard to believe that the limits of American power -- and the future of how it's projected -- could reside in the streets of a Wild West-era holdover like this. But, handicapped by the lack of a good plan, reliable allies or decent intelligence, the United States has watched as this strip of mountainous territory wedged between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become the most ungoverned, combustible region in the world. The U.S. intelligence community has described it as a refuge for Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda's reconstituted leadership. And recently, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that the next terrorist attack on the United States would originate from the tribal areas, probably from a town much like Darra.

Seven years after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ditched the Afghan Taliban to join the United States in the "war on terror," a new generation of Pakistani Taliban has brazenly turned the tribal areas into its bailiwick. In Darra, Taliban-inspired gangs have run out hash dealers, bombed DVD and CD shops, and closed girls' schools. In January, jihadists car-jacked five military supply trucks loaded with weapons and ammunition and kidnapped more than 50 Pakistani paramilitary troops on a stretch of highway near the town.

When the Pakistani army deployed to the region in 2003 for the first time since 1948, a cleric in Islamabad issued a fatwa proclaiming that any Pakistani soldier killed fighting the Taliban in South Waziristan should be denied a Muslim burial. Last August, militants under the command of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader accused of masterminding former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination, kidnapped more than 200 soldiers in South Waziristan.

The Pakistani Taliban hasn't toppled the political order and gained power, but it has overthrown centuries of traditional authority. With al-Qaeda, it has slaughtered hundreds of maliks, or tribal chiefs, branding them as traitors for dealing with Musharraf's government or as spies working for the Americans and NATO. Their corpses (often headless) are routinely dumped in town bazaars as a warning to any who might be plotting against the Taliban. Earlier this month, tribal elders gathered in Darra to draft a strategy for purging their area of militants. As the meeting ended, a suicide bomber ran into the crowd and blew himself up, killing more than 40 people, including many elders.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, are a conglomeration of seven "agencies" and six "frontier regions" comprising an area slightly smaller than Maryland. Elected representatives from the FATA sit in Pakistan's parliament, but the laws it drafts mostly don't apply in the tribal areas. The national government's degree of involvement in local affairs varies -- Darra, for instance, which belongs to Frontier Region Kohat, is slightly more integrated into Pakistan's legal, political and administrative framework than South Waziristan, the largest agency. But all the tribal areas are "governed" by the Frontier Crimes Regulations, which give the tribes autonomy as long as they take collective responsibility for the actions of individual tribesmen.

The tribal belt is dominated by Pashtuns, an ethnic group of about 20 million who live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pashtuns are renowned for their hospitality and their martial ways, a people reputed to treat guests like kings but eye strangers with suspicion. U.S., Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies banked on this when they armed Pashtuns to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Today, Pashtuns compare the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan to the Soviet one, and residents of North and South Waziristan regard the Pakistani troops there, most of them Punjabis, as foreign invaders.

Washington's response to the Talibanization of western Pakistan has been clumsy and shortsighted. The White House's unwavering support for Musharraf backfired long ago, and Pakistanis, as I learned while living in the country for two years, by and large sympathize with the embattled tribesmen more than with their president. Periodic missile strikes at suspected al-Qaeda safe houses in the tribal areas by U.S. Predator drones have killed many civilians, creating more enemies than they eliminated. In October 2006, dozens of madrassa students died when a missile targeting al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, landed in Bajaur, the northernmost agency, a few hours after Zawahiri apparently left. The attack handed al-Qaeda a symbolic victory; pictures of dead kids can fire up jihadists for generations to come.

The State Department, meanwhile, has earmarked $750 million for development in the tribal areas to win hearts and minds by paving roads and building schools and hospitals. But who will regulate and oversee this development when foreigners are officially prohibited from the tribal areas and the Taliban and its affiliates authorize dealings in most parts of the FATA? When the Pakistani government launched a polio vaccination drive there last year, Taliban leaders used pirated radio stations to convince locals that the vaccine was an impotency serum sent from the United States to eradicate Muslims. Few children got the shots.

Meanwhile, the U.S. presidential candidates have remained mostly mute. When Sen. Barack Obama once suggested that, if elected, he might authorize bombing the tribal areas if intelligence showed that al-Qaeda was planning attacks against U.S. interests and Pakistan refused to act, critics from all sides chastised him. Yet since Feb. 5, a barrage of Predator-fired missiles has rained down on North and South Waziristan, killing more than 50 people.

As if the challenges of devising a counterinsurgency strategy in the FATA weren't enough, political obstacles in Islamabad also abound. The winners of last month's parliamentary elections have pledged to withdraw the army from the tribal areas, negotiate with the militants and curb Predator flights over Pakistani airspace. Responding to this softened tone, the Taliban has reciprocated with goodwill gestures of its own, saying that Pakistan could save some of its defense budget by withdrawing troops from the tribal areas and allowing the militants to enforce border security.

But as politicians seek some rapprochement with the Taliban, could the public be getting fed up? Just a week after the elections, another wave of bombings linked to the Taliban hit the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, including an attack in Lahore that killed more than 40. The victims weren't policemen or soldiers in South Waziristan, just ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"The crescendo of local violence has been a bad tactic on the part of the extremists," says Bob Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad and former head of the agency's counterterrorism center. "The counterinsurgency is now being aided by the cruelty of the enemy; they are their own worst enemy." According to a recent poll by the anti-terrorism organization Terror Free Tomorrow, Pakistani support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda has fallen to all-time lows of 18 and 19 percent, respectively -- half what it was in a similar survey taken last summer.

The United States may already be exploiting these sentiments. Recent missile strikes in the FATA killed a number of high-ranking foreign militants and caused little collateral damage. Such a marked improvement in accuracy is the result of better intelligence, gathered by capitalizing on inter-tribal dissent to lure informers.

And the Pentagon hopes to re-create an "Anbar Awakening" in the FATA. Anbar is the Sunni-dominated province in western Iraq where tribal leaders ditched al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with the U.S. military in 2006. The day after the bombing of the tribal meeting in Darra, I e-mailed a senior U.S. Army officer who's intimately familiar with the Anbar Awakening. I suggested that the tribal chiefs, under attack from all sides, would be hard-pressed to unite against the militants anytime soon. Based on his time in Iraq, he replied, "I would argue that attacks like yesterday's will only make the desire to organize against [al-Qaeda] and the Taliban more intense. Believe me, the murder of tribal leaders in Anbar was the impetus to the Awakening."

But for now, few elders dare to speak publicly against the militants, and even fewer would risk relying on the Pakistani army to guarantee their security if they did "turn." (Last fall, when a pro-Taliban cleric used his weekly sermons to merely criticize suicide attacks, he was shot and killed.)

And Pashtuns themselves admit that they can make for fickle strategic partners. The hashish dealers in Darra who were earlier driven out of business by the Taliban could just as easily be bankrolling them as fighting them tomorrow.

Last year, a man in Peshawar explained to me why the United States' efforts to subdue Afghanistan were faltering. "You thought Pashtuns were for sale, but you misjudged," he said, smiling. "We are only for rent."

Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is writing a book about Pakistan, where he lived from 2006 to January 2008.

I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

Patrick Doherty — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:05:00 -0500

"A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar was headed to his mosque....'Suddenly I was lifted in the air,' he recalled. He was dragged into a white van and beaten, he said...And so began Abu Omar's descent into one of the 21st century's nastier circles of hell..."

The story of the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar from the streets of Milan and the ongoing Italian criminal proceedings against the 26 alleged CIA employees involved has opened a window into the inner workings of the Bush administration's global war on terror. Published today in Mother Jones, the article is by New America Schwartz Senior Fellow and CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen, with assistance from New America program associate Katherine Tiedemann.

Click here for the New America Foundation report, "Extraordinary Renditions: A Look at the Data"

I Was Kidnapped by the CIA
Inside the CIA's extraordinary rendition program and the bungled abduction of would-be terrorists

by Peter Bergen, March 03 , 2008, Mother Jones

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an "extraordinary rendition"—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary renditions—in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of extracting information from them—have been one of the cia's most controversial tools in the war on terror. According to legal experts, the practice has no justification in United States law and flagrantly violates the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty that Congress ratified in 1994. Nonetheless, Congress and the American courts have essentially ignored the practice, and the Bush administration has insisted that it has never knowingly sent anyone to a place where he will be tortured.

But Abu Omar's case is unique: Unlike any other rendition case, it has prompted a massive criminal investigation—though not in the United States. An Italian prosecutor has launched a probe of the kidnapping, resulting in the indictment of 26 American officials, almost all of them suspected cia agents. It has also generated a treasure trove of documents on the secretive rendition program, including thousands of pages of court filings that detail how it actually works. Late last year, I traveled to Milan to review those documents and to Egypt, where Abu Omar now lives. What I found was a remarkable tale of cia overreach and its consequences—a tale that could represent the beginning of a global legal backlash against the war on terror.

An avuncular, portly man in his mid-40s clad in a turban and a floor-length blue robe, Abu Omar met me at a corner store near his home, the first time he had agreed to talk to an American magazine reporter. He took me to his tidy, cramped apartment near Alexandria's run-down Victorian rail station. The walls were bare other than some religious calligraphy. The screen saver on his computer was a picture of Mecca.

Abu Omar, whose full name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, served me pungent coffee and sugary biscuits prepared by his unseen wife. Then, leaning forward in a massive gilded chair, he told me how in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he'd felt he was being watched and followed as he walked the streets of Milan, where he'd been granted political asylum in 2001 following an earlier spell of imprisonment and torture in Egypt. A member of Egypt's militant Islamic Group and a part-time cleric, he had been waging a public campaign against the impending war; Italian authorities had been investigating his circle of acquaintances since mid-2002 and believed he might have been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq, a charge he denies.

A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar was headed to his mosque, incongruously located inside a garage. He strolled down Via Guerzoni, a quiet street mostly empty of businesses and lined with high, view-blocking walls. A red Fiat pulled up beside him and a man jumped out, shouting "Polizia! Polizia!" Abu Omar produced his ID. "Suddenly I was lifted in the air," he recalled. He was dragged into a white van and beaten, he said, by wordless men wearing balaclavas. After trussing him with restraints and blindfolding him, they sped away.

Hours later, when the van stopped, Abu Omar heard airplane noise. His clothes were cut off and something was stuffed in his anus, likely a tranquilizing suppository. His head was entirely covered in tape with only small holes for his mouth and nose, and he was placed on a plane. Hours later he was hustled off the jet. He heard someone speaking Arabic in a familiar cadence; in the distance, a muezzin was calling the dawn prayer. After more than a decade in exile, he was back in Egypt.

Abu Omar was taken into a building, put in a blue prison suit, freshly blindfolded, and presented to someone described as an important pasha, or government official. The pasha said he'd be released if he'd go back to Italy to spy on the militants at his mosque. He said no.

And so began Abu Omar's descent into one of the 21st century's nastier circles of hell. His cell had no lights or windows, and the temperature alternated between freezing and baking. He was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months. Interrogations could come at any time of the day or night. He was beaten with fists, electric cables, and chairs, stripped naked, and given electric shocks.

His tormentors' questions largely revolved around his circle of Islamists in Italy, though every now and again they'd indicate that they knew he wasn't a big-time terrorist. They were detaining him only because "the Americans imposed you on us." When he asked, "Why, then, do you abuse me so much?" they replied, "This is our family tradition."

In the fall of 2003, Abu Omar was taken to another prison; it was here that he was crucified and raped by the guards. After seven more months of torture, a Cairo court found there was no evidence that Abu Omar was involved in terrorism and ordered him freed. He was told not to contact anyone in Italy—including his wife—and not to speak to the press or human rights groups. Above all, he was not to tell anyone what had happened.

After agreeing to the conditions, he was deposited at his mother's home in Alexandria. He promptly called his wife in Italy. It was the first time she'd heard from him in 14 months. Italian investigators, who'd been monitoring Abu Omar's phone in Milan for years, recorded the call. His wife asked him how he had been treated. He told her sarcastically, "They brought me food from the fanciest restaurant," though nearly three weeks later, he admitted to her, "I was very close to dying." He also spoke with a friend in Milan, Mohamed Reda El Badry, whose phone was also being tapped by Italian investigators. "I was freed on health grounds," he told El Badry in one of the recorded calls. "I was almost paralyzed; still today I cannot walk more than 200 yards.... I was incontinent, suffered from kidney trouble."

And then, just as suddenly as Abu Omar had reappeared, he vanished again. Egyptian authorities had gotten wind of his calls to Italy. This time he was imprisoned for three years. He smuggled out a letter describing his ordeal, which found its way to the Arab and Italian press and international human rights organizations. Inevitably, that led to more torture.

Was it illegal for American officials to send Abu Omar to Egypt? Yes, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there are "substantial grounds" to assume that he might be tortured. Were there substantial grounds to believe that transferring Abu Omar to Egypt would result in his being tortured? Plenty, according to a State Department report that detailed the methods used by Egypt's security services during the year that Abu Omar was abducted and confined, including stripping and blindfolding prisoners; dousing them with cold water; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administering electric shocks; suspending prisoners by their arms; and sexual assault and threats of rape.

The White House has routinely claimed that when the United States renders individuals to other countries it receives assurances that, as President Bush stated at a press conference in March 2005, "they won't be tortured...This country does not believe in torture." Several months later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated, "The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured."

But in the case of Abu Omar, Rice's assertions are demonstrably false. According to a previously unpublished study conducted by Katherine Tiedemann of The New America Foundation and myself, the same is true of many of the extraordinary renditions going back to the program's beginnings in 1995. (See "Rendition by the Numbers," above.) Fourteen documented extraordinary renditions took place under the Clinton administration. Almost all of those prisoners were rendered to Egypt, where at least three were executed. After 9/11 the pace of renditions sped up and the program expanded dramatically. Prisoners were now also transferred to Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and even Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In all, we found 53 documented cases of extraordinary rendition since September 2001; only one prisoner specifically said he had not been tortured. Of the sixteen men who have been released, eight claimed they were tortured and/or mistreated while in foreign custody; one died within weeks of being released. Nineteen of the rendered men have not been heard from since they disappeared.

Brad Garrett is a former fbi special agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two of the most high-profile terrorists in recent American history: Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Mir Aimal Kasi, who shot and killed two cia employees outside the Agency's headquarters the same year. "The whole idea that you would send anyone to some other country to obtain the intel you want is ludicrous," he told me in an email. "If we want the intel, there are approaches that will render the information without torture. The problem is that someone in the U.S. government is convinced that torture is the way to go, and so if we are not allowed to do it, then send them to someplace where torture is sanctioned."

The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the cia official whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas. We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers," Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." He also claims that the program was overseen by congressional committees and "was lawyered to death." After 9/11, "The White House was desperate," Scheuer says. The rendition program quickly expanded because holding any but the most important Al Qaeda prisoners was a "burdensome proposition" for the Agency.

"Before 9/11 we never asked for some guarantee that prisoners would not be tortured or coerced," says Scheuer. The Bush administration says it has since sought such assurances, but Garrett, the interrogator, thinks those promises are worthless in any case. "In my view it is a shell game and a legal cya to say that the other country (Egypt—give me a break) will not use torture," he wrote. "We are unfortunately promoting terrorism by using these abhorrent approaches. Shame on us."

Milan's slate-grey skies glower over the city in both summer and winter, and charmless skyscrapers dominate the skyline of the financial, media, and fashion capital of Italy. It's an unlikely setting for the operatic tale of Abu Omar's cia kidnappers and their nemesis, Deputy Chief Prosecutor Armando Spataro.

Spataro may have launched the first-ever criminal case against American officials over an extraordinary rendition, but he's hardly a bleeding-heart Euro-liberal. A prosecutor for more than three decades, the affable 59-year-old has put droves of drug traffickers, mafia dons, and terrorists behind bars. When I asked him if he was anti-American, he laughed and asked, "What do you think?" gesturing around his massive office inside the gloomy, Mussolini-era Palace of Justice. The walls were festooned with photographs of marathons he has run in the United States, certificates of appreciation from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and reproductions of paintings by Warhol, Rockwell, and Hopper.

Spataro had been building a potential terrorism case against Abu Omar for months before his kidnapping; as a result of his investigation, a number of Abu Omar's acquaintances were convicted of terrorism offenses and in 2005 Abu Omar himself was indicted in absentia on charges that he had been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq. But his sudden disappearance into the bowels of Egypt's prisons had set back Spataro's probe dramatically.

I asked Spataro why he'd pushed so hard to investigate the snatching of a militant he himself was about to indict. In measured tones, he explained, "Kidnapping is a serious crime. It is important for European democracy that all people are submitted to the law. It is possible to combat terrorism without extraordinary means."

The prosecutor also didn't appreciate being lied to—American officials had let it be known around Milan that Abu Omar had likely fled to the Balkans. It didn't take Spataro long to get past the smoke screen and even track down an eyewitness to the abduction. But the bulk of his case would revolve around a rookie mistake made by the kidnappers: using cell phones, and unencrypted ones at that. Spataro's investigators reviewed the records from three Italian cell phone companies with relay towers in the vicinity of where the Egyptian militant disappeared and ran them through a commercial data-crunching program. Of the more than 10,000 cell phones in use during a three-hour window around the kidnapping, 17 were in constant communication with each other. The investigators also determined that soon after the abduction, some of the cell phones' users traveled to Aviano Air Base, a major American installation several hours east of Milan. And virtually all of the phone numbers stopped working two or three days after the abduction.

The suspicious cell phones had made calls to the American consulate in Milan and to numbers in Virginia (where the cia is headquartered). The phones, most registered under bogus names, also made many calls to prominent hotels in Milan—hotels where, the Italian investigators found, a dozen Americans had stayed in the weeks before the kidnapping. They registered under addresses in the Washington, D.C., area, and Spataro believes they used their real passports. Their movements matched those of the suspicious cell phones. Over the course of several weeks the Americans had blown more than $100,000 on easily traceable credit cards at hotels such as the Principe di Savoia, where rates start at $345 a night and which offers a special room-service menu for dogs. Others took side trips to Venice, where they stayed at the five-star Danieli and Sofitel hotels.

If the Americans had only used encrypted satellite phones and paid in cash—standard tradecraft, according to cia veteran Robert Baer, the former operative who was the model for George Clooney's character in Syriana—Spataro would have had fewer leads to follow. Why the sloppiness? Very probably, say law enforcement sources in Milan, because the Americans had clued in senior Italian intelligence officials about their plans and thus felt safe.

Next, Spataro's investigators began reviewing records from Italian air-traffic control, nato, and the main European air-traffic facility in Brussels. They discovered that a 10-seat jet departed from Aviano a few hours after Abu Omar was abducted and flew to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. An hour after it landed, an Executive Gulfstream with the tail number N85VM departed Ramstein for Cairo. In March 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported that this jet was owned by Phillip Morse, a partner in the Boston Red Sox and one of a number of individuals whose planes are occasionally rented by the cia.

One of the suspicious cell phones had made hundreds of calls in the vicinity of both the Milan residence and the country house of the cia's station chief in Milan, Robert Lady. Armed with a warrant, Spataro's investigators searched Lady's country house in June 2005 and found that he'd gone on a 10-day trip to Cairo a week after Abu Omar's abduction. The investigators also found surveillance photos of Abu Omar taken on the street where he was picked up, as well as printed directions to Aviano Air Base. And they discovered a telling email sent to Lady from a former colleague in the Milan consulate: On Christmas Eve, 2004, as Spataro's inquiry was gathering momentum, she told Lady she'd received an email "through work" titled "Italy, don't go there"—an apparent reference to the investigation. She'd also heard that Lady, who has since retired, had relocated to Geneva "until this all blew over."

Even Arianna Barbazza, the court-appointed public defender for 13 of the 26 American officials indicted in the Abu Omar case, conceded that the case against Lady and his colleagues is substantial. Lady could receive a sentence of up to 15 years. (The trial is scheduled to start in March, although none of the indicted Americans is expected to show up. The cia has refused to comment on the case or its rendition program.)

Another important break came when Luciano Pironi, the mysterious Italian police officer who had first "arrested" Abu Omar on the street, began to cooperate with Spataro. Prior to Abu Omar's arrest, Pironi was found to have been "frequently and intensely" in contact with Lady. Pironi said that Lady had told him that the operation was approved by the Italian military-intelligence agency, sismi, and that Lady had received a tip that Abu Omar was planning to hijack a school bus operated by the American school in Milan—a claim Italian law enforcement officials say is false.

Lady, who speaks fluent Italian and had good relations with his local counterparts, emerges from this tale as something of a tragic figure. He had opposed the snatch of Abu Omar on the grounds that it was counterproductive; he knew that Italy's counterterrorism police had been trying to build a case against the Egyptian militant and had even warned a top Italian counterterrorism official, Stefano D'Ambrosio, that the cia was planning the Abu Omar operation. D'Ambrosio told Italian investigators that Lady considered the whole scheme "stupid." But Lady was forced to lead the operation by his bosses in Rome and Langley, who were under intense pressure from the White House to produce results in the war on terrorism. Lady told Pironi that he'd never have spent all his savings to buy a retirement house in the Italian countryside "unless he had been sure that no inquiry against him was under way."

Today, that house has been seized by Italian authorities and Lady, who fled to the States, is the subject of a Europe-wide arrest warrant. In a final twist of irony, Lady told a friend in the Italian police that in his retirement he'd hoped to work for a firm made up of former cia officers who specialize in negotiating releases for people abducted in South America.

In february 2007, Abu Omar was finally released—this time, it seems, for good. "Without the human rights and media campaign, I would still be in prison," he told me. The conditions of his release were that he stay in Egypt and keep quiet about his treatment. But realizing that notoriety might be his best protection, Abu Omar attended the trial of a 22-year-old blogger whom the Egyptian government accused of insulting President Hosni Mubarak. (He was sentenced to four years.) In the Alexandria courtroom, he paraded his scars before the cameras and talked about his years of torture. "Now I am a public figure," he told me. "It protects me."

Jobless and still monitored by Egypt's security services, Abu Omar now spends most of his time cruising the Internet and posting occasional comments on Arabic-language newspaper sites. Toward the end of our interview he pulled out a plastic bag stuffed full of Christmas cards with pictures of windmills and little red robins sent by people in the United Kingdom who'd learned about his case through a letter-writing campaign organized by Amnesty International. He told me he is happy that these kind people write, sending the message that someone out there knows he hasn't disappeared.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress

Hamas not al-Qaeda, not Controlled by Tehran, says ex-Mossad Chief

Patrick Doherty — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Bush administration categorizes Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. President Bush wants an Israeli-Palestinian deal inked by the time he leaves office. Something has to give.

Daniel Levy, director of the New America Foundation's Middle East Policy Initiative, says former Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy's recent interview with Laura Rozen indicates that at least some influential Israelis are willing to start cracking the door to Hamas, starting with popping the myth that the movement is equivalent to al-Qaeda or controlled by Tehran.

I have quoted ex-Mossad Chief and Israeli National Security adviser, Efraim Halevy, in the past as an advocate of engaging with Hamas in line with arguments I have used many times. I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Halevy although we do not agree on many things and I particularly remember having my ear chewed by him when we met to discuss the details of the Geneva Initiative.

Laura Rozen, a highly impressive young journalist here in DC, has just done a great service to the cause of advancing more level headed thinking on Israel-Palestine issues by producing this interview with Halevy in Mother Jones. The interview is well worth reading in full but here are a few choice highlights.

Halevy:

Hamas is not al Qaeda and, indeed, al Qaeda has condemned them time and time again. Hamas may from time to time have tactical, temporary contact with al Qaeda, but in essence they are deadly adversaries. The same goes for Iran. Hamas receives funds, support, equipment, and training from Iran, but is not subservient to Tehran. A serious effort to dialogue indirectly with them could ultimately drive a wedge between them.

To continue reading, click here.