More on Pakistan

Mark Steyn lays his finger on one of the biggest problems in Pakistan:

It’s easy to tell Musharraf what he should do. Over one thousand Pakistani soldiers have been killed fighting Islamists in Waziristan and other tribal lands. That would be a lot even for an army solidly behind Musharraf. But in Pakistan every institution charged with “relentlessly hunting down terrorists” has, to one degree or another, been subverted by them: Pakistan’s military – the least corrupt agency in the country – and its intelligence service, the ISI, are both riddled with Islamist sympathizers. As Churchill noted, the British had a fondness for the more bloodcurdling Pushtun warriors: In 1939, for example, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sanders accepted an invitation to tikala (lunch) from the tribesman who’d blown him up. The Pushtun apologized for costing the Colonel his right arm, and the Colonel accepted the apology and raised his glass in a presumably left-handed toast, and they got on splendidly and had a whale of a time. But a mutual respect between combatants is very different from the ties that bind Taliban leaders in Waziristan with elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence service: Two groups, nominally at war with each other, nevertheless share indistinguishable views on the joys of hardline sharia and the wickedness of the United States.

Read the whole thing--link, as usual, in the title. Really.

The Jihad Is Over

At least according to one Al Qaeda imam:

WASHINGTON — One of Al Qaeda's senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a "catastrophe for all Muslims."

In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and for insulting the Prophet Muhammad by comparing the September 11 attacks to the early raids of the Ansar warriors. The lapsed jihadist even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and his old comrade Ayman al-Zawahri.

The disclosures from Mr. Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl and Abd al-Qadir ibn Abd al-Aziz, have already opened a rift at the highest levels of Al Qaeda. The group's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, a former associate of the defecting theologian in Egypt, personally mocked him last month in a video, remarking that he was unaware Egyptian prisons had fax machines. Meanwhile, leading Western analysts are saying the defection of Mr. Sharif indicates the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda.

So who is this guy?

Mr. Sharif, currently serving a life sentence in an undisclosed Egyptian prison, wrote in the 1980s two of the modern seminal texts for Sunni jihadism and in particular Al Qaeda, in "Fundamental Concepts Regarding Jihad" and "The Five Ground Rules for the Achieving of Victory or Its Absence." Those books are scholarly justifications, citing the Koran and Hadiths, for joining a war against Muslim apostates such as the Egyptian ruling class and for a broader jihad against the far enemy of America.

Oh, Senator Reid... do you still think the war is lost? Senator Edwards, is the war on terror still a bumper sticker?

Iraqis Take On Al-Qaeda On Their Own

More signs of progress that Reid, Pelosi, MoveOn, and those of like mind will not care to see:

BAGHDAD - Former Sunni insurgents asked the United States to stay away, and then ambushed members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said yesterday.

The Islamic Army in Iraq sent advance word to Iraqi police requesting that US helicopters keep out of the area because its fighters had no uniforms and were indistinguishable from Al Qaeda, according to the police and a top Islamic Army leader known as Abu Ibrahim.

Abu Ibrahim said his fighters killed 18 Al Qaeda militants and captured 16 in the fight southeast of Samarra, a mostly Sunni city about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

"We found out that Al Qaeda intended to attack us, so we ambushed them at 3 p.m. on Friday," Abu Ibrahim said. He would not say whether any Islamic Army members were killed.

Much of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, has joined the US-led fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq along with Sunni tribesmen and other former insurgents repelled by the terror group's brutality and extremism.

An Iraqi police officer corroborated Abu Ibrahim's account, but said police officers were not able to verify the number of casualties because the area was still too dangerous to enter.

(emphasis mine)

Then there's this:

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala Province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation yesterday against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Iraqi Army said.

About 60 militants were captured and handed over to Iraqi soldiers, an Army officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to media.

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting "Down with Al Qaeda!" and "Diyala is for all Iraqis!"

Like the Islamic Army, the 1920s Revolution Brigades includes former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party and officers from his army. Hundreds of 1920s members now work as scouts and gather intelligence for American soldiers in Diyala.

And at Baghdad's most revered Sunni shrine, the Abu Hanifa mosque, voices blasted from loudspeakers yesterday urging residents to turn against Qaeda: "We are your sons, the sons of the awakening, and we want to end the operations of Al Qaeda."

Looks like we're doing good work there... but the Defeatocrats still want us to pull out.

Remember that next November.

Al Qaeda Fumbles Again

Looks like instead of creating terror, one of the most recent attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq has had the opposite effect:

RAMADI, Iraq - Iraqi tribal leader Ahmed Abu Risha speaks very softly, but his voice resonates determination—the revolt his brother started against Al Qaeda in Anbar province will not falter despite his death.

A bombing claimed by Al Qaeda killed Shaikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha in his car on Sept. 13 in the provincial capital Ramadi. Ahmed quickly took over an alliance of Sunni Arab tribal leaders his brother had headed to avoid a leadership crisis.

‘The effect his assassination left is only emotional, that we have lost him,’ the quietly-spoken shaikh told Reuters over the weekend in his first face-to-face interview with the Western media since assuming control of the Anbar Salvation Council.

‘His assassination has increased our will to fight Al Qaeda,’ added Ahmed Abu Risha, 42, speaking at the family compound in Ramadi, a series of homes heavily protected by dozens of Iraqi police and armed guards.

(Emphasis mine.)

In fact, this is not the first time that Al Qaeda has miscalculated like this. 9/11 was supposed to send Americans into terror, not send American troops into Afghanistan and Iraq to root out these Islamoterrorists. Also, the reason for the current Iraqi grassroots uprising against Al Qaeda is, in large part, because of the excesses of Al Qaeda in dealing with the Iraqi tribes (which I have blogged about before).

Also worth noting is this story:

TAJI, Iraq - More than 1,200 Iraqi males from in and around Tarmiyah stood in line for hours to join Iraqi Security Forces, local sheiks and Coalition Forces in the fight against al-Qaeda and other insurgent militias in Tarmiyah Sept. 12.

Local sheiks and CF from 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment reached out to the Iraqi people, asking the citizens of the small town of Tarmiyah to volunteer to defend their homes and neighborhoods against the terrorist insurgency in their town.

This concept of the people standing against al-Qaeda and other insurgents has been dubbed an "awakening," or the mental realization that the terrorists offer nothing but fear and injustice.

In short, the enemy is faltering in what used to be their stomping grounds. The Iraqis are realizing that if they want Al Qaeda out of their neighborhoods, they have to help us. This is not the time to turn our backs on the Iraqi people and walk away. This is the time to join hands with them and fight alongside them to defeat our common enemy.

How We Are Winning in Iraq, Part IV

I didn't start this to be a series, but it seems to be going well, so why stop now?

From another reporter embedded with our troops in Iraq:

JUST TWO WEEKS AGO, Captain Thompson, along with a squad of soldiers from Baker Co's 3rd Platoon, met with the representatives of the al Jabouri tribe. As we sat down in the living room of the house owned by the sheik and his brother, the men told us of how their tribe's village had, in recent months, been the focus of insurgent attacks. Black scorch marks on the portions of the cement floor not covered by carpet, as well as on the walls (despite their recent plastering), backed up their story of fire having been set to their house in particular in recent months.

Thompson wrote down the information they offered about this and other past attacks, and thanked the tribal representatives -- the sheik, his brother, and a pair of neighborhood gentlemen -- for contacting him. "We're here to help you," he said. "Tell me what you need." The brothers and their companions spent over an hour detailing the transgressions of the insurgency against their tribe and their village, from the fire to alleged kidnappings, and expressed a great interest in manning their own tribal security force. "We set up a police checkpoint for you right outside the neighborhood here," Thompson reminded them, noting that crime and terrorism had gone down since then.

The sheik, though, was less than impressed with the work of the NPs -- who, he noted, "only work from 7am to 5pm."

"We need an army here," he declared, "and you are not enough soldiers to keep us safe."

Thompson very quickly explained the ground rules of the Concerned Citizens program, from the allowance for (but not provision of) AK-47s, to the uniform requirement, to the requisite stipulation that the armed guards must submit to the National Police and to coalition forces unquestioningly. The latter caused a bit of consternation on the part of the al Jabouri (a sizable portion of the NP force is believed to be corrupt), but the desire to secure themselves outweighed whatever concerns they might have had.

At the end of the meeting, Thompson agreed to return in the near future with money to purchase uniforms for the 60 promised guards, in exchange for their all being present at a formation so that he could input them into Baker Company's biometric identification database. He also informed them that, in the next week, Baker Co. would be holding a "Med Op," or a clinic for the villagers in the area. All sick and ailing were welcome to come, and coalition medics would treat them.

Note, especially, this line: "the desire to secure themselves outweighed whatever concerns they might have had." Al Qaeda is doing our recruiting for us, in a way. By being so brutal to those that would otherwise not give American troops the time of day, they are driving these people into our arms, despite their misgivings. We may be, in their eyes, the lesser of two evils, but we have the opportunity to show the Iraqi people that we are trustworthy. That is, unless short-sighted politicians in DC screw up a good military plan by trying to be armchair generals.

Sorry, Hillary, We're Not Losing in Afghanistan.

Once again, Hillary gets proven wrong. You'd think she'd learn to be careful about opening her mouth.

AFGHANISTAN--Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are "losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden" in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down.

The first encouraging sign came in Dubai as I boarded my flight for Kabul. Afghanistan's main private air carrier, Kam Air, has recently added a second daily round trip between Kabul and Dubai.

Once in Kabul I bought a new SIM card for my mobile phone and found that what would have cost me $40 a few years ago and $9 in September last year now cost only $3. Not surprisingly, mobile phones have spread to a broad section of Afghanistan's 24 million people, with the two major providers, AWCC and Roshan, claiming a total of three million subscribers, up from two million in September last year. Amin Ramin, managing director of AWCC, estimates that his company alone will count two million subscribers by the end of 2007 and three million by the end of 2008.

I spotted similarly hopeful trends in three heavily Pashtun provinces--Nangarhar, Laghman and Khost--in eastern Afghanistan.

It's more than just cell phones, tho.

The U.S. is now planning to start a second provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Nangarhar Province, and it will be staffed by military reservists who are farmers and ranchers in civilian life. This second PRT will work with local farmers in Nangahar's lush river valley, while also building infrastructure to get crops to market--cold storage facilities and local roads. Air Force Lt. Col. Gordon Phillips, the commander of the existing PRT, says that blacktop roads will link all district centers in the province to the main road to Kabul by the end of this year.

"Every day we open 15 to 20 new accounts," says Maseh Arifi, the 24-year-old manager of the Jalalabad branch of Azizi Bank, one of Afghanistan's two homegrown consumer banks. The branch opened at the end of last August and has 18,000 accounts. Next door, rival Kabul Bank has opened 9,400 accounts totaling $7 million in two years. The 27,000 bank accounts represent about 15% of 660,000 adults of Jalalabad--and doesn't count some of the most prosperous locals, who commute to Peshawar to do their banking. In Nangarhar, AWCC and Roshan together have about 206,000 mobile phone customers, 31% of the adults.

Further south is Khost, a province that received little help from the central government in recent decades. Now construction cranes hover over Khost City, with modern five- and six-story office buildings and shopping centers rising amid grimy two-story concrete bazaars. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently finished building a new university in the city. And this month the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, an investment-facilitating agency, is inviting 300 overseas Khostis to come discuss building an industrial park.

And there's still more good news. But ya gotta read the whole article.

Body Counts

During his radio show Thursday, Boortz related that one of the questions raised during the conservative talkers meeting with President Bush was the lack of body count of dead terrorists in Iraq. As Boortz related it, body count of terrorists is something that the Administration has distinctly and adamantly refused to engage in.

I've heard this point of contention raised several times during the War in Iraq. The media, every anti-war group and democrat politician can tell us with almost up to the minute exactness how many U.S. servicemen have been killed in Iraq, but we don't know how many terrorists and al Qaeda have been killed in the fighting. Oh, certainly, we'll hear the occasional news report of a major operation and that a certain number of terrorists were killed in the fighting, but no running total. It seems inconceivable that we have the number of U.S. military dead shoved in our face day after day, yet we have no comparable number of enemy dead to use as a yardstick for measurement.

I'm with the President on this. I don't think a body count of dead terrorists is a good metric to use - especially in this kind of fight. If we were fighting a conventional standing army, or in pitched battle against a nation, then the number of enemy killed might be a useful measurement. In that type of fight you can use the number of enemy killed to gauge the deleterious effects it's having on their ability to fight effectively. You could use the number of enemy tanks or aircraft or ships destroyed to measure the ability of the enemy to attack or counter-attack.

In the fight in Iraq, we are not fighting a conventional force, nor a nation. We are fighting terrorists, a shadowy, non-cohesive enemy with no battle lines or fronts. There is no army to wage battle with, nor an entity that can surrender. All that will happen is they will melt away.

I think that many of the leaders of our military today are products of the Vietnam experience and it's aftermath. The body count was a much utilized measurement to indicate success or advancement in Vietnam. However, even if the North Vietnamese body count was ten times that of American forces, it didn't guarantee our success, nor popular support for the war. Part of this phenomenon can likely be found in the differences in our cultures and values. A loss of an American life in any effort is seen as a loss by Americans. In other countries, the loss of a soldier or fighter is just the loss of a soldier or fighter. This is probably more true of terrorists. The death of a terrorist is simply a martyr for jihad. Heralding and tallying their deaths probably only feeds their sense of martyrdom and can be used as a marketing tool for terrorism.

Yes, it would be nice if we had some distinct measurement of overall success in Iraq. It would make it much easier to debate with, and fight off, the anti-war hordes who can so easily hold up the number of American dead. However, this is a war that is different than a conventional war, and an enemy that is different than any we have met. A body count of dead terrorists to use as some artificial measure of success would be handy, but it would hardly be any measure of where we are at in attaining our goals in Iraq.

In reality, having a body count of the terrorists we have killed in Iraq would not sway the anti-war crowd one way or another. It might make us on the opposite side feel better if we had something to throw out there to counter their attacks. But, we can debate this war without an artificial measure of success like body counts. We can debate, and ultimately win this war, on the facts and the merits, and in the end, that's all that is going to count.

We Got Another One!

Associated (de)Press(ed) reports:

BAGHDAD (AP) - The U.S. command said Wednesday the highest-ranking Iraqi in the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq has been arrested, adding that information from him indicates the group's foreign-based leadership wields considerable influence over the Iraqi chapter

.

[...]

In Web postings, the Islamic State of Iraq has identified its leader as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, with al-Masri as minister of war. There are no known photos of al-Baghdadi.

Bergner said al-Mashhadani had told interrogators that al-Baghdadi is a "fictional role" created by al-Masri and that an actor is used for audio recordings of speeches posted on the Web.

"In his words, the Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al-Qaida in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq," Bergner said.

(emphasis added)

But it's a purely Iraqi civil war, right? Iran isn't involved, and claims to the contrary are just Dubya trying to start another unnecessary war, right?

VDH on Al Qaedism

Here's his opening paragraphs:

Why would Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees from the Balkans try to murder American soldiers? After all, the United States — not bin Laden’s rag-tag jihadists — saved Bosnia and Kosovo? And we did that by bombing the capital of a Christian European nation.

But then, why did a mixed-up Albanian Muslim in Salt Lake City, one Sulejman Talovic, go on a shopping-mall shooting spree? Five innocents were killed in the attack before the murderer himself was shot and killed.

And why, after pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan, did poor, mixed-up Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan Muslim, try to run over several innocents in San Francisco near a Jewish center in September 2006?

Or, for that matter, why did an angry Muslim Pakistani gun down Jews in Seattle?

Or, again, why earlier last year, did a 22-year-old Iranian-American Muslim drive his sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone at the University of North Carolina?

Read it all (link, as usual, in the title) to find out why.

Al-Masri May Be Dead

There are many reports floating around this morning that Abu Ayyub al-Masri may have been killed. Al-Masri is (or perhaps was) the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, or as the leftists might prefer to call it, Al Qaeda In Iraq Which Has Nothing To Do with Al-Qaeda Which Has Nothing To Do With Iraq.

I found this bit from the AP report quite interesting:

"Preliminary reports said he was killed yesterday in Taji area in a battle involving a couple of insurgent groups, possibly some tribal people who have problems with al-Qaida. These reports have to be confirmed."

Wouldn't it be highly ironic if al-Masri died as a result of the sectarian violence which AQI has been working so hard to create?