The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.
PeterBergen
I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Continue reading “Journal: Tora Bora Revisited by Peter Bergen”
BOSTON REVIEW
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
The Obama administration’s troop surge fails to address the real threat in Afghanistan: the insurgents’ efforts to develop a regional strategy in South Asia. Washington’s focus—members of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the traditional Afghan Taliban—misses the mark. Nir Rosen does, too, when he asks whether “a few hundred angry, unsophisticated Muslim extremists really pose such grave dangers to a vigilant superpower, now alert to potential threats.”
The November 2008 Mumbai attacks and the recent FBI arrests in Chicago for conspiracy to launch attacks in New Delhi suggest that containing the threat from Afghanistan is extremely complicated, and solutions must go beyond troop surges in Afghanistan, training Afghan police and soldiers, or even political dialogue with Taliban commanders inside the country. Intelligence agencies are now realizing that both the Mumbai events and the Delhi plans—plotted directly by al Qaeda affiliated groups, which I call the Neo-Taliban—were directly linked to Afghanistan, but also incorporated wider aims. The goal was to expand the theater of war to India so that Washington would lose track of its objectives and get caught in a quagmire.
USAID: Understaffed and overwhelmed in Afghanistan
Obama's troop surge fails to address how to improve delivery of aid.
A dramatic shortage of program officers as well as auditors and investigators and poor security conditions on the ground have all conspired, the 128-page report concludes, to “significantly impair” the objectives of USAID’s mission, which is to provide economic development and humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and around the world.
The failure of USAID to effectively monitor the development projects threatens to undermine the U.S. military’s new counterinsurgency strategy and troop surge, which is built upon the effective delivery of aid in the struggle against the Taliban for hearts and minds.
AA: Playboy undercover with Dennis Montgomery, who ‘fooled CIA over Al-Jazeera codes'
AF: Afghanistan For The Short Term
AF: Allegation: Some Contractors In Afghanistan Paying Protection Money To Taliban
AF: First New U.S. L-3 Spy Plane Due In Afghanistan By Christmas
AF: The Familiar Road To Failure In Afghanistan
IQ: ‘It’s A Whole New Mission’–Iraq: Stryker troops doing detective work
A 9/11 in Indonesia: JI's planned aviation attack: info Noordin Top's laptop
Countering terrorist ideology: the ideological response unit (Singapore)
Global (Terrorism) Pathfinder (Singapore)
The ICPVTR Terrorism Database – Global Pathfinder – is a one-stop repository for information on the current and emerging terrorist threat. The database focuses on terrorism and political violence in the Asia-Pacific region – comprising of Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania.
In addition to providing the latest information on terrorist attacks and pronouncements, Global Pathfinder also includes over a hundred terrorist training manuals, counter terrorism legislations and conventions, analytical papers on terrorist ideologies, commentaries on terrorist trends and patterns, transcripts of landmark cases, interviews with terrorists as well as photographs from different conflict zones across the world. Further, Global Pathfinder also has a huge collection of jihadi websites, the contents of which are routinely translated and analysed by our analysts.
The Global Jihad Network: Why and How al–Qaeda UsesComputer Technology to Wage Jihad
One of the main architects of the new al-Qaeda is a man named Abu Musab al-Suri. He put down his vision for the future of jihad in a book entitled Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, a one-thousand six-hundred page manifesto published on the Internet in 2004.
…he sought “…to transfer the training to each house of each district in the village of every Muslim….making appropriate training materials available to more than a billion Muslims….
Systems Approach To Terrorism: Countering The Terrorist Training Subsystem
Celebi's thesis focuses on the use of the Internet both in general and in the case of the Kurdish group PKK. The work is strongest in its discussion of what the author calls the training subsystem, and in his explication of that system as involving more than tradecraft and being increasingly based online. This training subsystem is seen as having four core functions:
1. The training subsystem creates, intensifies and sustains the competence, commitment and the skills that the terrorists will apply to reach their goals.
2. The training subsystem not only teaches the ways and means, but also justifies them by means of intensive indoctrination.
3. The training subsystem establishes ties to the group and creates a sense of belonging.
4. The training subsystem enables knowledge to be stored inside the boundaries of the system, and facilitates its passing through generations.
This article is one of two cited by a top US flag officer speaking to COINSOC in Iraq. The other one is Reference: One Tribe at a Time by Maj Jim Gant.
Taliban Insurgency in Pakistan: A Counterinsurgency Perspective
How counterinsurgents manipulate insurgents’ disadvantage in their own favor would ultimately prove crucial. The task requires vision, will and capacity, but so far the state seems to lack effective strategy on this tactical front. The Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas has regional dimensions as well, with regional and global actors trying to secure their own interests in the area. But ignoring Pakistan’s concerns and regional interests would frustrate the counterinsurgency effort. Pakistan cannot snuff out the insurgency alone.
Exploring the Mindset of the British-Pakistani Community: The Socio-cultural and Religious Context
The study finds that British-Pakistanis are almost all Muslims and have a mainly rural background. Their first generation in Britain was very conservative and did not let the next generation assimilate and become part of British society. There is lack of political, social and economic awareness among British-Pakistanis, many of whom are still confused and divided, not only physically but mentally as well, between their adopted and native countries. Moreover, there are some radical elements amongst this population also. The socio-cultural and religious identities of the British-Pakistani community may become more crucial in their potential to evolve parallel closed societies within the mainstream host society if not brought into the mainstream immediately
Pakistan Jihad: The Making of Religious Terrorism
Dr Eamon Murphy & Dr Ahmad Rashid Malik
Central Asia: Islamists in Prison
