[ssf] Fw: How the Taliban pressed bin Laden + A very pale shade of green in Iran

[Gerald Ali.]

1/.     A very pale shade of green in Iran 
2/.     How the Taliban pressed bin Laden 
3/.     Yemen, the new Waziristan 
4/.     US keeps its eye on al-Qaeda in Yemen 
-------------------------------------------

A very pale shade of green in Iran 

"Where were the Greens of Tehran? 1. On the Internet reading about the Trojan horse plan; 2. On YouTube learning about the 'action'; 3. Chatting online in the afternoon about where to meet in the morning." - Iranian blogger Alireza Rezaie. 

"To ignore the democrats and fail to support them in clear and strong terms would be a sign of poor political judgment ..." - Amir Taheri, Wall Street Journal. 

Iran's "democrats" (the Greens) were deafeningly silent as Iran celebrated the 31st anniversary of its revolution last week. Those actually in Tehran for the occasion saw hardly any sign of them. The reason, according to Taheri, is that the clerical "regime" is being replaced by a military dictatorship. (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently reads Taheri: she has taken now to parroting his "military dictatorship". But it's not smart to believe Taheri, as explained below.) 

Taheri writes that "The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] controlled Tehran with the help of tens of thousands of club-wielding street fighters shipped in from all over the country ... For the first time, the regime had to transform Tehran into a sealed citadel [creating] an atmosphere of war in the divided city." 

Taheri adds: "With the Internet shut down and foreign radio broadcasts jammed, the regime imposed its own version of events." Try telling that to the blogger quoted above, who managed to post his comments on a popular Iranian website. Taheri might also care to tell us where he got his information. 

Not content with the foregoing hyperbole, Taheri tells us, mystifyingly, "An opposition attempt at storming the Evin Prison, where more than 3,000 dissidents are being tortured, did not materialize. The would-be liberators failed to break a ring of steel the IRGC threw around the sprawling compound." (So ... was there an attempt or not? Or was this the only way to get "torture" into this porridge?) 

Taheri has been trying to convince American readers for a long time that popular opposition is burgeoning in Iran and all that's needed to topple the "regime" is a push by Washington. This is the same "expert commentator" who told us about the "regime's" plan to force Jews to wear colored badges, a piece of disinformation quickly withdrawn with much embarrassment by its publishers. (See Yellow journalism and chicken hawks, Asia Times Online, May 24, 2006.) 

Apparently, Taheri is still color blind, and astonishingly still lecturing Americans about political judgment and democracy, albeit in the Murdoch media. We thought democracy had something to do with government by the people, not by a small minority abetted by an outside power. The rudderless Green leadership, for its part, has not enough democratic gumption even to abjure clerical rule. 

The people of Iran, meanwhile, celebrated the anniversary of the revolution that ousted the epitome of dictators, the US-backed Shah of Iran. And the "Trojan horse" - Greens who would infiltrate the crowds wearing ordinary clothes before shedding them to reveal their true colors - remained a cyber-concept with a digital "nay". 

Allen Quicke is Editor of atimes.net 

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) 
---------------------

How the Taliban pressed bin Laden 
By Gareth Porter 

WASHINGTON - Evidence now available from various sources, including recently declassified United States State Department documents, shows that the Taliban regime led by Mullah Mohammad Omar imposed strict isolation on Osama bin Laden after 1998 to prevent him from carrying out any plots against the United States. 

The evidence contradicts claims by top officials of the Barack Obama administration that Mullah Omar was complicit in bin Laden's involvement in the al-Qaeda plot to carry out the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. It also bolsters the credibility of Taliban statements in recent months asserting that they have little interest in al-Qaeda's global jihadi aims. 
A primary source on the relationship between bin Laden and Mullah Omar before 9/11 is a detailed personal account provided by Egyptian jihadi Abu'l Walid al-Masri and published on Arabic-language jihadist websites in 1997. 

Al-Masri had a unique knowledge of the subject because he worked closely with both bin Laden and the Taliban during the period. He was a member of bin Laden's Arab entourage in Afghanistan, but became much more sympathetic to the Afghan cause than bin Laden and other al-Qaeda officials from 1998 through 2001. 

The first published English-language report on al-Masri's account, however, was an article in the January issue of the CTC Sentinal, the journal of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, by Vahid Brown, a fellow at the CTC. 
Mullah Omar's willingness to allow bin Laden to remain in Afghanistan was conditioned from the beginning, according to al-Masri's account, on two prohibitions on his activities: bin Laden was forbidden to talk to the media without the consent of the Taliban regime or to make plans to attack US targets. 

Former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil told Inter Press Service in an interview that the regime "put bin Laden in Kandahar to control him better". Kandahar remained the Taliban political headquarters after the organization seized power in 1996. 
The August 1998 US cruise missile strikes against training camps in Afghanistan run by bin Laden in retaliation for the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa on August 7, 1998, appears to have had a dramatic impact on Mullah Omar and the Taliban regime's policy toward bin Laden. 

Two days after the strike, Omar unexpectedly entered a phone conversation between a State Department official and one of his aides, and told the US official he was unaware of any evidence that bin Laden "had engaged in or planned terrorist acts while on Afghan soil". The Taliban leader said he was "open to dialogue" with the United States and asked for evidence of bin Laden's involvement, according to the State Department cable reporting the conversation. 

Only three weeks after Omar asked for evidence against bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader sought to allay Taliban suspicions by appearing to accept the prohibition by Mullah Omar against planning any actions against the United States. 
"There is an opinion among the Taliban that we should not move from within Afghanistan against any other state," bin Laden said in an interview with al-Jazeera. "This was the decision of the Commander of the Faithful, as is known." 
Mullah Omar had taken the title "Commander of the Faithful", the term used by some Muslim caliphs in the past to claim to be "leader of the Muslims", in April 1996, five months before Kabul fell to Taliban forces. 

During September and October 1998, the Taliban regime apparently sought to position itself to turn bin Laden over to the Saudi government as part of a deal by getting a ruling by the Afghan Supreme Court that he was guilty of the embassy bombings. 

In a conversation with the US charge in Islamabad on November 28, 1998, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, Omar's spokesman and chief adviser on foreign affairs, referred to a previous Taliban request to the United States for evidence of bin Laden's guilt to be examined by the Afghan Supreme Court, according to the US diplomat's report to the State Department. 
Muttawakil said the United States had provided "some papers and a video cassette". but he complained that the video had contained nothing new and had therefore not been submitted to the Supreme Court. He told the charge that the court had ruled that none of the evidence that had been presented warranted the conviction of bin Laden. 
Muttawakil said the court trial approach had "not worked" but suggested that the Taliban regime was now carrying out a strategy to "restrict [bin Laden's] activities in such a way that he would decide to leave of his own volition." 

On February 10, 1999, the Taliban sent a group of 10 officers to replace bin Laden's own bodyguards, touching off an exchange of gunfire, according to a New York Times story of March 4, 1999. Three days later, bodyguards working for Taliban intelligence and Foreign Affairs Ministry personnel took control of bin Laden's compound near Kandahar and took away his satellite telephone, according to the US and Taliban sources cited by the Times. 

Taliban official Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, who was then in the Taliban embassy in Pakistan, confirmed that the 10 Taliban bodyguards had been provided to bin Laden to "supervise him and observe that he will not contact any foreigner or use any communication system in Afghanistan", according to the Times story. 

The pressure on bin Laden in 1999 also extended to threats to eliminate al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan. An e-mail to bin Laden from two leading Arab jihadis in Afghanistan in July 1999, later found on a laptop previously belonging to al-Qaeda and purchased by the Wall Street Journal, referred to "problems between you and the Leader of the Faithful" as a "crisis". 
The e-mail, published in an article by Alan Cullison in the September 2004 issue of The Atlantic, said: "Talk about closing down the camps has spread." The message even suggested that the jihadis feared the Taliban regime could go so far as to "kick them out" of Afghanistan. 

In the face of new Taliban hostility, bin Laden sought to convince Mullah Omar that he had given his personal allegiance to Omar as a Muslim. In April 2001, bin Laden referred publicly to having sworn allegiance to Mullah Omar as the "Commander of the Faithful". 

But al-Masri recalls that bin Laden had refused to personally swear such an oath of allegiance to Omar in 1998-99, and had asked al-Masri himself to give the oath to Omar in his stead. Al-Masri suggests that bin Laden deliberately avoided giving the oath of allegiance to Omar personally so that he would be able to argue within the Arab jihadi community that he was not bound by Omar's strictures on his activities. 
Even in summer 2001, as the Taliban regime became increasingly dependent on foreign jihadi troop contingents, including Arabs trained in bin Laden's camps, for its defense against the military advances of the Northern Alliance, Mullah Omar found yet another way to express his unhappiness with bin Laden's presence. 

After a series of clashes between al-Qaeda forces and those of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Taliban leader intervened to give overall control of foreign volunteer forces to Tahir Yuldash of the IMU, according to a blog post last October by Leah Farrall, an Australian specialist on jihadi politics in Afghanistan. 

In late January, Geoff Morrell, the spokesman for US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, suggested that the United States could not negotiate with Mullah Omar because he has "the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands", implying that he had knowingly allowed bin Laden's planning of the 9/11 attacks. 

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. 

(Inter Press Service) 
-----------------------------
Yemen, the new Waziristan 
By Pepe Escobar 

Like an ever-profitable horror B-movie franchise, the al-Qaeda myth simply refuses to die. 

United States intelligence has now focused its lasers on the alleged 300 al-Qaeda jihadis concealed in Yemen's craggy, rural Maarib province - as much as the Pentagon has deployed infinite might to find those maximum 100 prowling the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. 
But wait. Didn't top US intelligence officials recently swear on their government paychecks that it's all but "certain" that this sinister, multifaceted hydra with sleeper cells all over the planet - "al-Qaeda" - will attack inside the US within the next six months? 
What is more likely is that these neo-jihadis will never come from

Yemen or the Waziristan tribal areas in Pakistan or the whole AfPak tribal belt for that matter. And they will not be native, pious Sunnis from Saudi Arabia or Egypt either. They will have at best a vague connection to some Middle Eastern dictatorship/petro-monarchy. They will certainly be young, ultra-globalized and passionately, perversely addicted to a fantasy - the virtual ummah (Muslim community). 
Their life journey will certainly have evolved as in a triangulation. Many will have moved from their home country to live in a Western country - or even have been born there; and that's where they will have honed their yearning to join jihad in a third country. 

Like characters in a novel
Neo-jihadis may eventually - but not necessarily - go to Yemen or the Waziristans only after they have made the conceptual leap from idealizing the ummah on the Internet to actually feeling the irresistible urge to act on the ground. 

Whenever this happens, they have already broken communication with their families. This is the pattern followed by virtually every neo-jihadi - from Dhiren Barot (who planned to bomb the New York Stock Exchange) to the shy underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. They are all living exercises in deterritorialization. It's all virtual - especially their idea or vision of Islam itself. It's all very individualistic - no orchestration by a sinister "al-Qaeda" network. And it's all done in English - the lingua franca of global communication - not Arabic. Welcome to the age of the virtual jihadi nomad. In earlier times, these would have been characters in a Fyodor Dostoevsky or Albert Camus novel. 

As for the motivations of "al-Qaeda", Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a top global scholar of terrorism, argues that al-Qaeda "does not have a political strategy of establishing an Islamic state". But he insists al-Qaeda's global enemy is the West - not local regimes. That's not true; al-Qaeda, the historic leadership, treats local regimes as US lackeys, thus they should be toppled. It's not their priority; a hefty case can be made that "al-Qaeda" is nothing but a dissidence (or a "rogue" arm) of Saudi intelligence, considering the very close relationship between Osama bin Laden and wily Prince Turki bin Faisal, the former director general of Saudi intelligence. 

Unlike Roy's assessment, al-Qaeda's fight has nothing to do with Che Guevara's in the 1960s. Al-Qaeda is certainly not about ideology - but about an idea/flame that seduces, as Roy puts it, "the lonely avenger, the hero, who can redeem a life he is not happy with by achieving fame while escaping a world where he finds no room". But that could also be a portrait of John Lennon's murderer. 
American intelligence is unlikely to consider these subtleties. The multi-billionaire machine is still hostage to the outdated notion of "territory". So it's automatic to have the Pentagon dispatch its might to fight "al-Qaeda" in Yemen and in the Waziristans. They will find nothing but ghosts. 

Iraq, AfPak and now Yemen have been granted by Washington the same holy trinity of building "development" and "governance", and counter-terrorism, which in practice means governance hijacked by Beltway-conceptualized counter-terrorism. No wonder this recipe was a failure in Afghanistan and will be a failure in Yemen. 

The Yemeni theater will feature yet another deadly mix of counter-insurgency as applied by the Israelis in Gaza and West Bank and the Americans in AfPak. What happened in the AfPak tribal belt is enlightening. The power of hardcore locals - the Pakistani Taliban - was greatly enhanced; and "al-Qaeda" jihadis quietly left the building, spawning a mini-global migration. The same will happen in Yemen. 
All this is tragically farcical. Obama has done a George W Bush in Afghanistan, branding the al-Qaeda ghost to justify Washington's "soft" invasion of Yemen. The government of US-aligned President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sana'a accuses the Huthis of being linked to both al-Qaeda (Wahhabi radicals who consider Shi'ites as worse than the plague) and Iran (Shi'ites who abhor al-Qaeda). It doesn't matter whether this is utter nonsense. Sooner or later, Washington will inevitably brand the Huthis as "terrorists" - just like every resistance in Iraq was "terrorist", whether they were Sunni or Sadrists. 

And the Pentagon runs amok 
Tens of thousands of foreign troops are bogged down in Afghanistan because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked its Article 5 collective defense provision in 2001 to fight "al-Qaeda". Sooner rather than later, NATO will also hit Yemen. 

As much as oil is power, the good ol' "war on terror" - rebranded or not by the US - is alive and kicking. Iraq, Afghanistan (then AfPak), Yemen, Somalia, these are all cogs in the relentless full spectrum dominance machine, the real deal behind the "war on terror" cover story, intimately linked to Washington's scramble to control and/or monitor as many global sources of oil and gas as possible. 

And for a Pentagon already running amok, it is getting deeper and deeper into this key stretch of the "arc of instability", from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, and at the same time instilling the flames of a new Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Blessed are those "al-Qaeda" virtual jihadi nomads. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com. 

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) 
-----------------------
US keeps its eye on al-Qaeda in Yemen 
By Jim Lobe 

The ceasefire announced late last week between Yemen's government and Houthi rebels in the northern part of the country is being greeted in the United States as an important initial step towards stabilizing the Arab world's poorest country and reversing advances by al-Qaeda's affiliate there. 

Washington wants the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to make the battle against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was allegedly behind the aborted bombing of a US commercial airliner on Christmas Day, its top security priority. It is providing tens of millions of dollars in training, arms and other assistance for that purpose. 

It is also pushing Saleh to focus more on fighting corruption and promoting economic development, although it is supplying
significantly less aid in those areas. 
Indeed, the imbalance between US military and non-military aid has been a source of severe frustration for many specialists in the US who have long warned that extremism in Yemen cannot be rooted out in the absence of far-reaching political and economic reforms. 
"Under currently discussed budget requests, military and security assistance greatly exceeds humanitarian aid," noted Christian Boucek, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who nonetheless described the ceasefire as "very welcome". 

"While there is an immediate counter-terrorism imperative in Yemen, this planned framework does not adequately address the long-term systemic challenges to Yemeni security and stability. It is not AQAP that will lead to state failure or state collapse in Yemen," he added. 
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday hailed the still-shaky four-day-old ceasefire during a visit to Qatar, the first stop in a brief Gulf tour that will also feature talks with King Abdullah and other top officials in Saudi Arabia that will reportedly be focused mainly on Iran. 
"The United States welcomes the ceasefire in the conflict between the government of Yemen and the Houthi rebels," she said in a statement released by the State Department. 

"We understand that a mediation commission representing all parties is monitoring compliance with the terms of the ceasefire and beginning the urgent process of reconciliation and reconstruction needed to bring this conflict to a permanent end," the statement noted. 

It added that Washington "remains concerned about the humanitarian situation in the area, including the approximately 250,000 Yemenis displaced by the fighting". 

Clinton is likely to bring the same message to her hosts in Riyadh who, at US$2 billion a year, constitute Yemen's top aid donor by far. 
Saudi Arabia, which has accused Iran of supporting the Houthis, who belong to a Shi'ite sect called Zaidism, became involved in the fighting last November after rebel forces reportedly crossed the frontier, killed a border guard and briefly occupied the area. 
Despite a fierce three-month counter-offensive, the Houthis killed more than 130 Saudi troops and captured at least five others, one of who was handed over on Monday. 

The Houthi rebellion has been widely seen as a costly distraction for Yemen's government and armed forces that, in Washington's view, should be more focused on destroying AQAP, which was created last year by the consolidation of separate al-Qaeda affiliates in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. 

Al-Qaeda in Yemen had been largely decimated, with the help of US military and intelligence assistance, between December 2000, when it killed 17 US sailors in an attack on the USS Cole anchored off Aden, and 2003. 

But following a notorious jailbreak in 2006 it re-emerged as a significantly stronger force due to the influx of Saudi recruits and other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and success in building alliances with some of Yemen's powerful and conservative Sunni tribes, notably in the southern and eastern parts of the country. 
Al-Qaeda has also taken advantage of growing secessionist sentiment in the south where tensions with the central government have been on the rise for some time. 
AQAP's strength and global ambition were brought home to the US by the attempted Christmas bombing carried out by a Nigerian national reportedly trained and equipped by the group in Yemen. 

Reports that a US Army major had been in contact with a Yemen-based Yemeni-American cleric linked to AQAP before carrying out a shooting spree at a Texas army base that killed 13 soldiers last November has added to the notion that Yemen has become a top priority in what the George W Bush administration called the "global war on terrorism". 

In fact, Obama, who last month ruled out the use of US forces in any direct combat role in Yemen, had already been steadily increasing security assistance - much of it covert - to Yemen's security forces since he took office. 
In December, Yemeni forces carried out a series of lethal raids against AQAP targets. They were backed by US intelligence, equipment and "firepower", a word which many analysts interpreted as meaning drone or cruise-missiles strikes, although Sana'a has strenuously denied that claim while Washington has refused further comment. 
The administration plans to nearly triple security assistance to Yemen - from $67 million last year to $190 million in 2010. 

As part of what its top Near East official, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Policy Jeffrey Feltman, this month called a "new, more holistic Yemen policy", the administration is also committed to increasing economic and development assistance. 
But that the non-security aid - $121 million over the next three years - pales in comparison to the counter-terrorist budget, particularly given the enormity of the long-term development challenges facing Yemen. These include steadily diminishing oil revenues - its main source of foreign exchange - and rapidly depleting water supplies. 

"It's easier to do the hard [military] stuff, [but] achieving a balance is key," Michael Doran, a top Gulf expert at the National Security Council under Bush, told a conference on Yemen at the Bipartisan Policy Center this month. 
"There's a tremendous imbalance between the military and the political," he noted, adding that it will likely continue. 

"Are we making the same mistake again [in] giving too much support to the security institutions in Yemen?" asked retired General Mark Kimmitt, who served in top State Department and Pentagon Near East posts under Bush, at the same forum. 

(Inter Press Service) 
----------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/ssf/attachments/20100216/1812360e/attachment-0001.htm>