more on the Militarization of terrorists
Militarization of terrorists
I originally wanted to title this post on last week's terror attacks as "Putting the bomb in Bombay," but the attacks involved shootings, not bombs. Plus, they're not calling it Bombay anymore, but "Mumbai." What's up with that? What's with all this name changing, often times to something stupid? Constantinople to Istanbul. Adrianople to Edirne. Burma to Myanmar. Rangoon to Yangon. Congo to Zaire back to Congo again. Chad Johnson to Chad Ocho Cinco (once he sells all those pre-printed jerseys). Anaheim Mighty Ducks to just plain Ducks.
(Of course, you occasionally though rarely get a good name change, like "Central African Empire" to "Central African Republic," the oxymoron of the former being too obvious to ignore.)
But my larger point is, IT'S BOMBAY, DAMMIT!!!
Anyhoo, Mark Steyn draws the general lessons to be learned:
Belmont Club has some additional thoughts:
Militarization of terrorists
I originally wanted to title this post on last week's terror attacks as "Putting the bomb in Bombay," but the attacks involved shootings, not bombs. Plus, they're not calling it Bombay anymore, but "Mumbai." What's up with that? What's with all this name changing, often times to something stupid? Constantinople to Istanbul. Adrianople to Edirne. Burma to Myanmar. Rangoon to Yangon. Congo to Zaire back to Congo again. Chad Johnson to Chad Ocho Cinco (once he sells all those pre-printed jerseys). Anaheim Mighty Ducks to just plain Ducks.
(Of course, you occasionally though rarely get a good name change, like "Central African Empire" to "Central African Republic," the oxymoron of the former being too obvious to ignore.)
But my larger point is, IT'S BOMBAY, DAMMIT!!!
Anyhoo, Mark Steyn draws the general lessons to be learned:
What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.
But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.
It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
When I heard about the attacks, my first thought was not al-Qaida, but the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the same people who created the Taliban, undercut our operations in Afghanistan and made Pervez Musharraf's life a living hell. The Bombay attacks just seemed more like a planned military operation.But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.
It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
Belmont Club has some additional thoughts:
The reality, according to an article in India’s Institute for Defence Studies & Analysis journal is that the relationship between terror groups and the Pakistani government is no longer simple. Although the Pakistani government may have initially fostered them, these terror groups, like Frankenstein’s monster, have acquired a life of their own, driven by the crime, unemployment and social conditions of the region.
Bill Roggio notes that both the Pakistani armed forces and a gigantic criminal/jihadi gang have been implicated in the latest attack on India. The sole surviving gunman in the Mumbai attack, Ajmal Amir Kasab has fingered the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, according to India Today, quoting police sources.
Dawood Ibrahim turns out to be one of those supremely powerful people who very few in the West have heard of. He also typifies the interchangeable nature of crime, government and the Jihad among the Muslim communities of South Asia. According to Wikipedia, Dawood Ibrahim “was No. 4 on the Forbes’ world’s Top 10 most dreaded criminals list of 2008″ and is widely believed to have been the man behind the Mumbai terror bombings of 1993. He is wanted by the United States and the United Nations and reportedly lives, unsurprisingly enough, in Karachi.
To put Ibrahim’s notoriety in perspective, the Forbes Number One criminal is Osama Bin Laden, also believed to be domiciled in those parts.
David Altman finds the attacks part of a larger and ominous pattern:The supporting structures for the proxy war in J[ammu] & K[ashmir] … have developed their own dynamics… Since the end of the Cold War, these structures have embedded themselves deeply in the political economy of the region. The Pakistani state does not control them but merely exercises influence over them and is able to exploit them to serve its own strategic designs. … Thus, there may be a grain of truth in Gen Musharraf’s statement that the Pakistan Army is unable to stop militants from crossing the LOC. The Pakistani ruling elites are not in complete control of the supporting structures for terrorism … because of the above factors, jehad and terrorism in … are likely to continue even if the Pakistani ruling elites give assurances about the withdrawal of their support.
In other words the terror gangs have become a force unto themselves. With their money and ruthlessness, terror groups are now an established social institution. The Terror Wonk says “the extensive illicit arms trade within Pakistan which ensures that there is an endless supply of weapons, the uncontrollable sources of funding – particularly narcotics trafficking and donations both from within Pakistan and from around the world, and the tens of thousands of radical madrassas that indoctrinate Pakistani youth into radical Islam from Pakistan’s bottomless well of unemployed” have made groups like LeT much more permanent than a mere government in Islamabad. The terror groups are now as much able to manipulate the Pakistani military as vice versa. They have become so intertwined that determining where one begins and ends can be difficult.
Bill Roggio notes that both the Pakistani armed forces and a gigantic criminal/jihadi gang have been implicated in the latest attack on India. The sole surviving gunman in the Mumbai attack, Ajmal Amir Kasab has fingered the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, according to India Today, quoting police sources.
Dawood Ibrahim turns out to be one of those supremely powerful people who very few in the West have heard of. He also typifies the interchangeable nature of crime, government and the Jihad among the Muslim communities of South Asia. According to Wikipedia, Dawood Ibrahim “was No. 4 on the Forbes’ world’s Top 10 most dreaded criminals list of 2008″ and is widely believed to have been the man behind the Mumbai terror bombings of 1993. He is wanted by the United States and the United Nations and reportedly lives, unsurprisingly enough, in Karachi.
To put Ibrahim’s notoriety in perspective, the Forbes Number One criminal is Osama Bin Laden, also believed to be domiciled in those parts.
The world views terror incidents as sporadic, high-profile, and one-time events. They arouse fury, anger, and pain, yet they do not undermine the power of the state where terrorism takes place. Years ago, when Palestinian terrorists were blowing up airplanes, a terror leader was asked about the benefit achieved by his men while perpetrating horrifying incidents where hundreds of innocents are murdered. His response was as follows: “I get full attention – in the two minutes where the entire world’s attention is directed at me, I can express my message regarding the injustice done to me, and this is enough for me.”
Ever since that time, terrorism underwent a series of changes. The Vietnam War changed the conception of terror organizations and made them think that a terrorist army was not only meant to sting, but ultimately it also had the power to win. In a meeting held at the end of the war between representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and North Vietnamese General Giap, the PLO men congratulated him on his great victory and asked when he thought terror groups would be able to defeat Israel. He responded with one word: Never. When he was asked why, he replied: because of lack of determination.
Some observers believe this was one of the turning points for Islamic terror groups, as it prompted them to build an educational system that lauded suicide, thereby laying the groundwork for suicide terrorism. Their immediate interpretation was that determination meant willingness to offer personal sacrifice, and that the more people prove their willingness to die, the greater their determination would become, ultimately resulting in victory. Eventually, terror leaders realized that suicide bombers have a demoralizing effect and can create grave damage and prompt a government shakeup - for example, the attack on the Madrid subway system in 2004 that prompted a change of government in Spain.
However, terrorism upgraded itself into combat units. The Hizbullah terror organization does not premise its power on sporadic terror incidents. By now it has accumulated 42,000 rockets aimed at undertaking military terrorism and causing mass casualties, while challenging Israel militarily.
For a while now, Hamas has dealt not only with suicide terrorists, but rather, it is building an offensive arsenal of continuously upgraded rockets, while also forming military units whose modus operandi is wholly different than that of terror cells, and training a terror army that is also involved in military activity.
This conception has also been applied by the Iranian army that alongside combat units maintains the Revolutionary Guards, which in turn nurture paramilitary organizations combining terror and anti-terror activity with military activity. This is combined with a public relations war, which is the secret weapon of fundamentalist organizations and where they are more powerful than all Western states.
Al-Qaeda too has shifted from sporadic terror to military terror, and its operations are more complex and integrate more elements. They reflect the face of future warfare, which combines local terror with wide-scale terror that potentially includes biological and chemical weapons, and aspires to achieve nuclear terror using combat units operating differently than terror groups that attempt to undertake a local one-time attack.
India constitutes a broad testing ground for terror forces aiming to take over a large city while using military terrorism. The country constitutes a tool for learning terror’s new conceptions as they manifest themselves at this time, in the face of the conclusions of the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and terror attacks in Pakistan.
Therefore, the war on terror’s doctrine must change. The old-time suicide bombers mostly operated alone or in small groups, in order to prove their power and hurt the enemy as much as is possible. Yet their time has passed.
Today, we see the emergence of a dark, new, and different army, with new branches that include all the components of a military, yet still utilize the terror doctrine. The advantage of terrorist armies is first and foremost the fact they are not subjected to any law or international convention. They do not face any pressure and they are not accountable to anyone.
They tie the hands of the responding force, which is the only side subjected to conventions pertaining to human rights, war captives, and the targeting of civilians.
We will have to adjust our countermeasures accordingly. Refusing to shoot at the terrorists is not going to cut it.Ever since that time, terrorism underwent a series of changes. The Vietnam War changed the conception of terror organizations and made them think that a terrorist army was not only meant to sting, but ultimately it also had the power to win. In a meeting held at the end of the war between representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and North Vietnamese General Giap, the PLO men congratulated him on his great victory and asked when he thought terror groups would be able to defeat Israel. He responded with one word: Never. When he was asked why, he replied: because of lack of determination.
Some observers believe this was one of the turning points for Islamic terror groups, as it prompted them to build an educational system that lauded suicide, thereby laying the groundwork for suicide terrorism. Their immediate interpretation was that determination meant willingness to offer personal sacrifice, and that the more people prove their willingness to die, the greater their determination would become, ultimately resulting in victory. Eventually, terror leaders realized that suicide bombers have a demoralizing effect and can create grave damage and prompt a government shakeup - for example, the attack on the Madrid subway system in 2004 that prompted a change of government in Spain.
However, terrorism upgraded itself into combat units. The Hizbullah terror organization does not premise its power on sporadic terror incidents. By now it has accumulated 42,000 rockets aimed at undertaking military terrorism and causing mass casualties, while challenging Israel militarily.
For a while now, Hamas has dealt not only with suicide terrorists, but rather, it is building an offensive arsenal of continuously upgraded rockets, while also forming military units whose modus operandi is wholly different than that of terror cells, and training a terror army that is also involved in military activity.
This conception has also been applied by the Iranian army that alongside combat units maintains the Revolutionary Guards, which in turn nurture paramilitary organizations combining terror and anti-terror activity with military activity. This is combined with a public relations war, which is the secret weapon of fundamentalist organizations and where they are more powerful than all Western states.
Al-Qaeda too has shifted from sporadic terror to military terror, and its operations are more complex and integrate more elements. They reflect the face of future warfare, which combines local terror with wide-scale terror that potentially includes biological and chemical weapons, and aspires to achieve nuclear terror using combat units operating differently than terror groups that attempt to undertake a local one-time attack.
India constitutes a broad testing ground for terror forces aiming to take over a large city while using military terrorism. The country constitutes a tool for learning terror’s new conceptions as they manifest themselves at this time, in the face of the conclusions of the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and terror attacks in Pakistan.
Therefore, the war on terror’s doctrine must change. The old-time suicide bombers mostly operated alone or in small groups, in order to prove their power and hurt the enemy as much as is possible. Yet their time has passed.
Today, we see the emergence of a dark, new, and different army, with new branches that include all the components of a military, yet still utilize the terror doctrine. The advantage of terrorist armies is first and foremost the fact they are not subjected to any law or international convention. They do not face any pressure and they are not accountable to anyone.
They tie the hands of the responding force, which is the only side subjected to conventions pertaining to human rights, war captives, and the targeting of civilians.
