The weekly wrap-up of the week’s top stories with James Rubin, an adjunct professor at Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs, joining Martin Savidge to discuss the implications of the killing in Dubai and the NATO offensive in Afghanistan.
Thirty-two leaders from the Americas agreed to create a new regional cooperation organization that would exclude the United States and Canada. Christopher Sabatini offers his perspective.
There was a major blow to the Taliban with the arrests of three senior leaders in Pakistan, including the number-two Afghan Taliban official. While this was a victory for U.S. and Pakistani intelligence, it was also a reminder of how the Taliban have used Pakistan as a base. Joining Daljit Dhaliwal to talk about the Marjah offensive and more are Gideon Rose and Susan Chira.
The New York Times reports that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a “founding father” of the Afghani Taliban and the number two in command behind the blind cleric Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, has been captured in a joint US-Pakistani operation in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and commercial capital. According to US government officials, the capture of Mullah Barader occurred “several days” ago and remains in Pakistani custody, with both US and Pakistani intelligence officials taking part in interrogations.
In addition to running the Taliban’s military operations, Mullah Baradar runs the group’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura so called because the Taliban’s leaders for years have been thought to be hiding in or near Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, the restive province in southwestern Pakistan. Here some more background on Mullah Adul Ghani Baradar from a Newsweek profile in July 2009:
In more than two dozen interviews for this profile, past and present members of the Afghan insurgency portrayed Baradar as no mere stand-in for the reclusive Omar. They say Baradar appoints and fires the Taliban’s commanders and governors; presides over its top military council and central ruling Shura in Quetta, the city in southwestern Pakistan where most of the group’s senior leaders are based; and issues the group’s most important policy statements in his own name. It is key that he controls the Taliban’s treasury—hundreds of millions of dollars in -narcotics protection money, ransom payments, highway tolls, and “charitable donations,” largely from the Gulf. “He commands all military, political, religious, and financial power,” says Mullah Shah Wali Akhund, a guerrilla subcommander from Helmand province who met Baradar this March in Quetta for the fourth time. “Baradar has the makings of a brilliant commander,” says Prof. Thomas Johnson, a longtime expert on Afghanistan and an adviser to Coalition forces. “He’s able, charismatic, and knows the land and the people so much better than we can hope to do. He could prove a formidable foe.”
No one among the Taliban—least of all Baradar himself—will say he’s taken Omar’s place. On the contrary, Baradar portrays himself as a loyal lieutenant carrying out the orders of his absent boss. “We are acting on [Omar's] instructions,” he told NEWSWEEK via e-mail in a recent exclusive interview. He didn’t reveal how or when he gets those instructions, saying only that “continuous contacts are not risk-free because of the situation.”
Yet while Taliban fighters are reluctant to be seen criticizing Omar in any way, they clearly imply that his deputy has a more modern, efficient style of command. Baradar is consistently described as more open, more consultative, more consensus-oriented, and more patient than Omar. Taliban operatives say he’s less mercurial and more willing to hear different views rather than act on hearsay, emotion, or strict ideology. “Baradar doesn’t issue orders without understanding and investigating the problem,” says a commander from Zabul province who met with him in March and asked not to be named so he could speak freely. “He is patient and listens to you until the end. He doesn’t get angry or lose his temper.”
That’s raised another question: whether the Americans and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai might ultimately be able to strike a deal with Baradar. His influence among the insurgents—and with Mullah Omar—is unmatched, and he’s not as close-minded as many of the leaders in Quetta are. Back in 2004, according to Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban cabinet minister who now lives in Kabul, Baradar authorized a Taliban delegation that approached Karzai with a peace offer, even paying their travel expenses to Kabul. That outreach fizzled, but earlier this year another two senior Taliban operatives sent out separate peace feelers to Qayyum Karzai, the Afghan president’s older brother, apparently with Baradar’s approval, according to three ranking Taliban sources. They say the initiatives were quickly rescinded. Still, when NEWSWEEK spoke to the elder Karzai last week and asked him about the story, he did not deny that such contacts had taken place, saying only, “This is a very sensitive time, and a lot of things are going on.” Publicly, Baradar, who belongs to the same Pashtun tribe as Karzai, has scoffed at peace efforts, denouncing them as a ploy to split the insurgency. But that may simply reflect his feeling that the insurgents currently have the momentum.
Baradar can take much of the credit for rebuilding the Taliban into an effective fighting force.
There are a number of takeaways to the capture of Mullah Baradar. First it took place in Karachi, a teeming city of over 14 million people, suggesting that much of the Taliban’s leadership has migrated away from the border areas. Mullah Barader may have been forced to flee from the increasingly less secure hiding places alongside the Afghan-Pakistani frontier as a result of the increased number and ever more effective strikes by unmanned predator drones.
The other key takeaway is that the capture of Mullah Baradar suggests that the US has finally impressed on the Pakistani authorities the urgency of dismantling the Taliban networks inside Pakistan and that the Pakistanis are now more engaged in counter-terrorism operations. US intelligence officials have long accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of sheltering and protecting the more senior and high-ranking members of the Taliban.
The participation of Pakistan’s spy service could suggest a new level of cooperation from Pakistan’s leaders, who have been ambivalent about American efforts to crush the Taliban. Increasingly, the Americans say, senior leaders in Pakistan, including the chief of its army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, have gradually come around to the view that they can no longer support the Taliban in Afghanistan — as they have quietly done for years — without endangering themselves. Indeed, American officials have speculated that Pakistani security officials could have picked up Mullah Baradar long ago.
The officials said that Pakistan was leading the interrogation of Mullah Baradar, but that Americans were also involved. The conditions of the questioning are unclear. In its first week in office, the Obama administration banned harsh interrogations like waterboarding by Americans, but the Pakistanis have long been known to subject prisoners to brutal questioning.
American intelligence officials believe that elements within Pakistan’s security services have covertly supported the Taliban with money and logistical help — largely out of a desire to retain some ally inside Afghanistan for the inevitable day when the Americans leave.
The ability of the Taliban’s top leaders to operate relatively freely inside Pakistan has for years been a source of friction between the ISI and the C.I.A. Americans have complained that they have given ISI operatives the precise locations of Taliban leaders, but that the Pakistanis usually refuse to act.
The Pakistanis have countered that the American intelligence was often outdated, or that faulty information had been fed to the United States by Afghanistan’s intelligence service.
For the moment it is unclear how the capture of Mullah Baradar will affect the overall direction of the Taliban, who have so far refused to disavow Al Qaeda and to accept the Afghan Constitution. American officials have hoped to win over some midlevel members of the group.
Mr. Riedel, the former C.I.A. official, said that he had not heard about Mullah Baradar’s capture before being contacted by The Times, but that the raid constituted a “sea change in Pakistani behavior.”
In recent weeks, American officials have said they have seen indications that the Pakistani military and spy services may finally have begun to distance themselves from the Taliban.
While the capture of Mullah Baradar is a significant development, it is the level of cooperation between the US and Pakistani authorities that is the larger story. That’s the real breakthrough.
Nonetheless, it must also be underscored that Pakistan’s government is likely to feel the heat from a large segment of the Pakistani population that is vehemently opposed to close US-Pakistani cooperation.
The UK Foreign Office has released video highlights from the London Conference on Afghanistan.
The London Conference on Afghanistan took place in London at Lancaster House on January 28 2010. The London Conference on Afghanistan brought together Foreign Ministers from International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) partners, Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours and key regional players as well as representatives from NATO, the United Nations, the EU and other international organisations such as the World Bank to fully align military and civilian resources behind an Afghan-led political strategy.
The idea of a negotiated settlement to the Afghan war gained new currency this week. In our weekly roundtable, James Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, and Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs magazine, join Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the pitfalls and possibilities of negotiating with the Taliban.
The London Conference on Afghanistan took place in London at Lancaster House on January 28 2010. The London Conference on Afghanistan brought together Foreign Ministers from International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) partners, Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours and key regional players as well as representatives from NATO, the United Nations, the EU and other international organisations such as the World Bank to fully align military and civilian resources behind an Afghan-led political strategy.
The 34 point conference communiqué is below the fold. (more…)
Ahmad Kamal, Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, and Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani government official who is now with the Asia Society, join Edie Magnus for a roundtable on AfPak. They discuss power-sharing with the Taliban, drone strikes along the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan and American foreign policy challenges in the region.
People & Power looks at the rise of radical Islamic in the former Soviet states in Central Asia.
The evolution of radical Islam in the years just prior to and immediately following the collapse of Soviet rule has its roots in earlier decades. Radical Islam represents both a battle between Islam and outside forces that seek to transform Islam’s sociopolitical role and doctrinal disputes within Islam that have been characteristic of the practice and teaching of the faith for more than five hundred years.
Central Asia’s Muslims have traditionally practiced Islam as it is interpreted by the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which is known for its liberalness and respect for personal freedom. Although there have been Salafi Muslims—those who reject all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence—in the area, historically they have not played a strong role in the region. This creates an uphill battle for modern-day proponents of a return to the caliphate.
Over the centuries, however, many have been critical of how traditional Hanafi Islam has been practiced in Central Asia, and many of these critics can be, and were, viewed as fundamentalists and even as Wahhabis by the clerical establishment they sought to transform.
A paper entitled Roots of Radical Islam in Central Asia by Martha Brill Olcott of the Carnegie Endowment (pdf.) looks at the roots of radical Islam in Central Asia with a particular emphasis on the events in Uzbekistan.
In Tajikistan’s civil war, Islam was used for mobilization and legitimization, according to Dr. Barnett Rubin. This 1992 conflict pitted clans linked to the country’s former Communist power base against another situated closer to Afghanistan, which adopted the Islamic Renaissance Party as its leadership. But it was a regional alliance more than a religious one, he insists. “What led to this conflict had nothing to do with Islam,” he says. “When these groups were mobilized, they used Islam, and made certain Islamic demands such as making Muslim holidays into public holidays but it would be quite misleading to call it a religious conflict. The mullahs belonging to the regional groupings of northern Tajikistan and the other group, the Kolabis, who were in power and supplied the troops, did not support the Islamic Party because it was Islamic. They supported the leaders of their own region.”
In Uzbekistan, an intense Islamic revival took place in the highly populated, ethnically diverse and industrialized Ferghana Valley, a center of resistance to Soviet rule in the 1920s and 1930s. During the transition to independence in 1991-1992, crime rose and security became an issue, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan at the present time. Young men affiliated with unofficial mosques in the city of Andijan stepped into the vacuum to restore law and order, much as in Iraq, and armed groups took up crime prevention duties in conjunction with local police. Eventually they developed into a movement called “Adalat” (justice) and asked for the implementation of Sharia Islamic law. The response of the government was to suppress the membership of the group seen as a threat to the authority of the central government. Several hundred ran away and joined the Islamic fighters in Tajikistan and eventually fought in Afghanistan, where they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). But things were relatively quiet in the Ferghana valley.
In 1996 and 1997 when Russia and Iran tried to settle their differences in Central Asia so they could focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic party in Tajikistan chose nationalism over an international Islamic radicalism. And it made that choice despite the fact that the Taliban captured a leader’s plane and tried to convince him to join the Jihad. However the Uzbeks did not have that choice and they joined the Taliban and became integrated with Al Qaida. The United States wiped out their bases in Afghanistan in bombing raids after September 11, 2001. And since then there has been virtually no violence in Uzbekistan attributed to the IMU.
A third Islamic movement is now more threatening to the Central Asian countries. The Hizb ut-Tahrir movement has a global agenda and is growing in all countries in the region. Started as the Party for the Liberation of Palestine, it is now headquartered in London and has no links to Palestine. The Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for a worldwide establishment of a Caliphate, through a Da’wah, or call to convert, rather than Jihad, or struggle. They fight largely through leaflet dispersal and the movement is financed through the Internet from sources in the West, such as Muslims in Denmark, Germany and the UK. It is finding support among those Uzbeks whose trade is suffering from the newly erected closed borders in the Ferghana Valley.
Another scholar who has studied the rise of radical Islam in Central Asia is Professor Irina Zvyagelskaya of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies. She finds that the rise of radical Islam is in part due to societal factors such as the need for an identity in uncertain times.
The collapse of the USSR triggered the rise of religion and the wave of nationalism which swept through the new independent republics. It was all made much worse by the kind of market economy they have in these countries today, the total injustice of it, the vast gap between rich and poor, the corruption, the ruling clans. It’s bound to be attractive when the Islamists start talking about building a just world. It gives them hope.
The Islamists favour abolishing borders (Hizb ut-Tahrir, for example, wants to see the establishment of a caliphate). This appeals to people because it is what they used to have. Unlike the previous administrative borders, the state borders have split up ethnic communities and large families, and destroyed traditional patterns of economic activity, which involved free movement across the territory depending on the season (this was important for honey producers, for example). But today some of those borders are even mined.
The Islamists do more than preach too. They also provide material assistance. Hamas, Hezbollah and others are serious social institutions, activist organizations. When the state is weak, they take on many of its functions – they start acting out the role of state. Yes, they use terrorist tactics, but it would not be right to say that they use terror just for the sake of it. They enjoy wide popular support because they do support the poor, and create jobs.
“He’s a warrior. He’s a poet. He’s a scholar. He’s a pundit. He’s a military commander. And he’s a very charismatic, young, brash rising star within Al-Qaeda, and I think he has become the heir apparent to Osama bin Laden in terms of taking over the entire global jihadist movement. — Jarret Brachman on Abu Yahya al-Libi
In this clip from a panel discussion on the future of Al Qaeda at the Carnegie Endowment, Dr. Jarret Brachman summarizes an interview of high-ranking al-Qaeda official Abu Yahya al-Libi, whom Dr. Brachman believes is the likely successor to Osama bin Laden, in which al-Libi taunts the U.S. by offering six strategies the military could use to defeat the terror network.
The man now poised to succeed Osama bin Laden as terrorist-in-chief, and the embodiment of the “New Al-Qaeda Man,” is Sheikh Abu Yahya al-Libi. Although he has a long track record of terrorism, even serving as the Taliban’s webmaster in 2001, Abu Yahya al-Libi’s climb officially began in July 2005 when he escaped from the US-run Bagram military prison north of Kabul in Afghanistan. An obscure terrorist at the time of his prison break, he has since enjoyed a meteoric rise into the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda and has been integral in recalibrating the organization.
Dr. Jarret Brachman is an internationally recognized expert on Al-Qaeda. In 2003, while completing his PhD from the University of Delaware, he served as a Graduate Fellow at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC). In 2004, Dr. Brachman joined the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Dr. Brachman became the CTC’s first Director of Research and oversaw a number of research projects about Al-Qaeda ideology and strategy.
In 2008, Dr. Brachman resigned from the West Point CTC and returned to his hometown in North Dakota. He is now on faculty with North Dakota State University and conducts private consulting on Al-Qaeda for clients both inside and outside of government. Brachman published his first book, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice in 2008. He is currently working on his new book, entitled The Next Bin Ladin: The Rise of Abu Yahya Al-Libi.
In September 2009, Dr. Brachman wrote an article in Foreign Policy highlighting the emergence of the charismatic sheikh.
There is no doubt that when bin Laden and Zawahiri die or are captured, al Qaeda’s global movement will look to Abu Yahya to seize the reins. He has become the obvious heir apparent. But with Abu Yahya at its helm, al Qaeda is certain to become a far more frightening enemy.
Al Qaeda’s primarily Egyptian senior leadership founded and built the group on principles of elitism and secrecy. The leaders saw themselves as the vanguard, the tip of Islam’s last and only spear. Their doctrine was restrictive and exclusionary. Their bureaucratic structure was stifling and micromanaging. They saw themselves as terrorists’ terrorists, and acted the part.
A lifelong student with an easy smile and a gift for gab, Abu Yahya sees the world quite differently. For him, al Qaeda’s fight is not just about unseating Arab governments or pushing U.S. troops out of the Middle East. In this paradigm, al Qaeda is first and foremost an intellectual and religio-ideological insurgency — not just a terrorist group. Its goal is to capture the imagination of Muslims worldwide. Abu Yahya is not just trying to make Muslims love al Qaeda (like bin Laden tries to do) or make the “Zionist Crusaders” fear al Qaeda (like Zawahiri does). Abu Yahya’s goal is nothing short of remaking Islam from the inside out, and he does so in a candid, compelling, and inherently populist fashion. In other words, what we know about how al Qaeda does business is about to completely change.
Despite the qualitatively different threat that Abu Yahya poses, however, he remains a virtual unknown outside a small circle of counterterrorism professionals in the United States. Of those who do know him, most view him as just another target. Abu Yahya’s obscurity to senior policymakers — and the similar obscurity of al Qaeda’s other young guns who are modeling themselves after Abu Yahya — is more than an oversight. It reflects a continued and pervasive ignorance across the U.S. government about the kind of war in which the United States is engaged. This is a fight in which ideas have become the new center of gravity.
The Libyan-born Abu Yahya al Libi was a military commander in Afghanistan until his capture by the US military during 2003. He rose to prominence in Al Qaeda after he escaped from Bagram Prison in Afghanistan in the summer of 2005, along with senior al Qaeda operatives Abu Nasir al Qahtani, Abu Abdallah al Shami, and Omar Farouq, a grouping known as the “Bagram Four.”
Abu Yahya al Libi is the only member of the “Bagram Four” still active in Al Qaeda. Since the 2005 escape, two of his fellow escapees have been killed and another has been captured. In March 2009, the US put a $5 million bounty out for information leading to his arrest. In December 2009, after a missile strike in South Waziristan, there was speculation that Abu Yahya al Libi may have been killed. Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal discounts the idea that Abu Yahya al Libi has been killed. US officials have suggested that Saleh al-Somali, who was responsible for al Qaeda’s operations outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, was the one killed in the December 11th predator drone attack.
Robert Grenier, a long-time CIA officer who served as head of the CIA station in Islamabad, offers his thoughts on the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Grenier, who rose to become the top counter-terrorism expert in the CIA, was relieved of his duties in February 2006 over substantial differences with political decisions made by the Bush Administration by then CIA Director Porter Goss. Mr. Grenier had expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists. He also opposed “enhanced” interrogation techinques such as waterboarding.