Jihadi Readings of Qur'anic Verses Regarding Jihad

Page of Koran
Memri

The Director of South Asia Studies Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Tufail Ahmad, writing "The Terrorist Groups' Interpretation of the Koranic Verses Regarding Jihad" (Memri, Inquiry and Analysis Series Report No. 1098, June 4, 2014), notes an interesting point:

Although liberal commentators argue that jihadists are inspired by radical Egyptian teacher Sayyed Qutb and Pakistani cleric Maulana Abul Aa'la Maududi among others, it doesn't appear that the jihadists are quoting these writers; most of the jihadist literature essentially cites the Koran and the Hadiths.

As evidence, Ahmad goes on to note that one Pakistani terrorist group (Jaish-e-Muhammad), visited 18 cities in Pakistan to give "lessons that taught translation and interpretation of more than 558 verses on jihad." In fact, says Ahmad, "Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar . . . cited several Koranic verses to explain the jihadist mission in Islam":

Allah . . . in Chapter Anfal . . . says: 'Fight them until no corruption (kufr) exists and all religion (worship) is for Allah' (Chapter Anfal, Verse 39). This verse refers to the final objective of jihad, which is to exterminate every shred of resistance that kufr offers so that Islam dominates over all other religions and all abide by the law of Allah.

The jihadist scholars cited by Ahmad take note of various liberal Muslim interpretations of Qur'anic verses, countering each one of them with withering scorn based on close readings of the Koran and Hadiths. No one seems to be citing Qutb or Maududi, as Ahmad notes, but upon reflection, that shouldn't really be surprising since the writings of Qutb and Maududi are secondary sources, lacking the divine authority to be found in the Qur'an or the revered authority found in authentic Hadiths.

For the full report, see Memri.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid - "Don’t Blame the Taliban - Part III"

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

A Brave Man, No Kidding

Google Images

I've drawn attention to the Pakistani journalist Kunwar Khuldune Shahid and his criticisms of Islam twice before (here and here), and he has now published "Don't Blame the Taliban - Part III" (November 10, 2012) over at Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch. I should note that I read Spencer regularly but very critically because he has a tendency to shoot from the hip -- often accurately, I think, but sometimes off target -- and because he too often relies on snark that -- in my opinion -- mars his analysis. He wouldn't agree with me, of course, for he's defended his intentional snarkiness in response to criticism from others.

Be that as it may, I'd like to quote from Shahid's article, the third in his series taking Pakistani Muslim liberals to task for defending their moderate Islam as if it were the true Islam and not criticizing Islam itself, which according to Shahid is the Islam practiced by the Taliban. For instance, he cites the Qur'an 9:29 against the view that "Islam only prescribes 'defensive' Jihad":

"Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

He then explains its context to clarify its application to offensive Jihad:

Verse 9:29, revealed during the preparation of Battle of Tabuk, kick started the three-pronged Muslim course of battle - 1. Invitation to accept Islam 2. Demand for the payment of Jizya and 3. Instigation of war. This tradition was carried forward throughout Islam's expansionist phase; wherein refusal to accept Islam or pay Jizya was considered reason enough to launch a "defensive" war against the infidels. This trend was continued by the first four caliphs of Islam and the leaders that followed en route to formulating a gargantuan Islamic empire. Again, if the "blessed companions" of the prophet misapprehended his and Allah's ostensible concept of a "defensive war" the skeptics of Islam can be forgiven for the "misunderstanding" as well. Or of course it could mean that the prophet, the caliphs, and leading Islamic scholars understood the concept of Jihad rather well but the present-day apologists want Quran's message to appear differently, since the original command doesn't fit in too nicely with the modern-day norms.

For Islam, in Shahid's view, a "defensive" jihad is what the rest of the world would call offensive! Is there then -- in Shahid's view -- no hope? Oh, he offers a glimmer:

Islam needs a massive revamp for it to become attuned with the present day, which should begin with not taking it [the Quran] literally as the word of a divine deity. One could then perceive the Sunnah as fitting for the political movement at the time, and mould the teachings to ensure their compatibility with the modern age. We would then have the ideology that the [liberal] Muslim apologists propagate, which although is quite palatable and tranquil, it is still light years away from the original Islamic scriptures and their teachings.

In short, drop the universal Muslim view of the Qur'an as Allah's direct revelation. Well, good luck with that . . .

Don't Blame the Taliban -- Islam Really is the Problem!

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Google Images

Or so insists Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, the Pakistani journalist whom I wrote about several days ago, for he has posted another bold critique of Islamic ideology, "Don't blame the Taliban II," this one appearing in The Telegraph (October 19, 2012), where the original can also be read. But here's some of what he writes in the follow-up:

Which ideology can possibly justify killing a 14-year-old school going kid? . . . The Taliban claim that their ideology does . . . . The Taliban have defended the attack on Malala Yousafzai according to their scriptures and history . . . . Like for instance the case of Asma bint Marwan, a poetess whose murder was sanctioned in 2 AH[, i.e., two years following Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina,] after she conspired against Islam and the Holy Prophet, as narrated by Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa'd. And then there are Ibn Khatal's two slave girls Fartana and Qaribah, who used to sing songs against the Holy Prophet and were among the ten shortlisted to be executed at the Conquest of Makkah[, i.e., Mecca,] in 8 AH -- one of them was killed, the second managed to escape (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat - Vol 2). Women were ordered to be killed for conspiring against the religion by their ideological predecessors, and so is it entirely the Taliban's fault for taking cue and attempting to kill a girl who criticised their fundamentals; the fundamentals emanating from their 'authentic' religious scriptures? . . . [Moreover, a]ccording to Islamic teachings you're an adult and responsible for your actions when you reach puberty -- if a 9-year-old is considered old enough to get married [i.e., Aisha to Muhammad], a 14-year-old should be old enough for being condemned for 'conspiracy'. A plethora of Malalas under the pretext of threat to the religion bit the dust when the religion was expanding and therefore, if you're defending Islam as the ultimate truth you can't blame the Taliban for adopting violence as a means to assault the sceptics, unless you denounce the violence in 7th century as well and question the ideology.

There's much more that follows, wherein Shahid dismantles three critiques of the Taliban by moderate Muslims. His point seems to be that if you oppose the Taliban, you have to oppose Islam itself, for everything that the Taliban does can be condoned on the basis of Islam's fundamental sources. He closes his own critique by calling for voices to be raised against silence in the face of such barbarism:

Condemning violence but remaining shushed about its roots is not only hypocritical but pointless if you actually want to uproot the cause . . . . [L]ives are being taken every single day in our neck of the woods in the name of the 'religion of peace'. Considering the response to last week's piece there are many who are categorically against this ignorance -- how long do all of you plan on remaining silent about it?

I'm guessing that the man was shamed out of his own previous silence by the bravery of Malala Yousafzai -- even though he himself now must face the same threat of being shot . . .

Don't Blame the Taliban -- Islam is the Problem?

Malala Yousafzai

Wikipedia

As most of my readers are probably aware, Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl who harshly criticized the Taliban for closing girls' schools, was recently shot in the head by gunmen sent from that Islamist organization and left critically wounded, an atrocity raising near universal criticism, even in Pakistan. One fascinating article, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, was rather provocatively titled "Don't blame the Taliban" (Pakistan Today, October 12, 2012), and it says some correspondingly provocative things -- indeed, more than correspondingly provocative, as I shall make clear by bracketed specifications referring to Shahid's intended designation of Islam itself:

The Malala incident is déjà vu times million. You have religious 'extremists' manifesting brutality; the 'educated' class calls the act heinous, the 'intellectuals' label the offenders as beasts, the 'liberals' protest against the 'cowardly act' and while everyone is condemning the act, they remain shushed about the root cause of it all: the ideology.

Does Shahid mean Islamist ideology? No, he doesn't:

Throughout the past every single person who has denounced the Taliban has acted as an apologetic, justifying the religious ideology [of Islam itself!] and claiming how those 'uneducated morons' have 'unfortunately' misinterpreted the teachings of peace and tranquility -- no, they haven't, 'unfortunately' . . . . The poor chaps are only doing what their scriptures [of Islam itself!] -- the ones that the pseudo intellectuals extol, or don't have the cojones to criticize -- tell them to do.

Shahid offers several examples of what he says the Qur'an teaches Muslims and throws them in the face of Muslim liberals who venerate the Qur'an but condemn the very practices and acts that it condones and even exhorts:

When you are being taught, through the scriptures [of Islam itself!] that are universally recognized by the followers as 'authentic', that all the non-believers or threats to the grandeur of your ideology [of Islam itself!] should be killed, you will kill them, where is the misinterpretation here? [Or here:] Finding [ownership of] slaves or slave girls, repulsive; physically assaulting women, disgusting; cutting off hands for theft, inhuman; stoning people to death, beastly and then venerating the ideology [of Islam itself!] that permits this at the same time is hypocrisy of the very highest order. You sit there, criticize and mock the Taliban that follow your religion [of Islam itself!] in its true form while you live in oblivion with your extremely palatable, but simultaneously blatantly fallacious, brand of religion and then claim that the Taliban are misinterpreting and misapprehending your ideology [of Islam itself!]? Oh, the irony.

Shahid points to Islam's history -- in which even Muslim liberals take pride -- as filled with the same sort of atrocity as befell Malala Yousafzai:

The Taliban have defended the attack on Malala Yousafzai through scriptures and historic precedents. You can clamor all you want about how there is a lack of understanding [of Islam itself!] on the part of the Taliban, but how on earth can you refute clear messages of violence and historical evidence -- scribed by historians of your faith [of Islam itself!] -- depicting brutality on the part of some of the most illustrious people in the history of the religion [of Islam itself!]? It is easy to launch vitriol against the Taliban for attacking a 14-year-old girl, but it is also equally hypocritical and pathetic when you eulogize people from your history who did the same in the past, who massacred masses, destroyed lands, pulverized places of worship, raped women, just because they ostensibly did it in the name of your religion [of Islam itself!]. Don't blame the Taliban for following their lead, don't blame the Taliban for using violence as a means to cement religious superiority [of Islam itself!] -- something that has been done for centuries -- don't blame the Taliban for the fact that you don't have the guts to call a spade a spade even though it has been spanking your backside for centuries now.

Shahid calls for liberal Muslims to make a choice:

It's time our 'thinkers' stopped taking the easy way out and finally picked a side. You either follow a religion [of Islam itself!] in its true form or you're irreligious. The Taliban know which side they are on. Do you?

Rather bold. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid speaks like an irreligious 'Muslim' sounding a call to arms against the religion not of Islamism, but of Islam itself! I wonder how long before the Taliban go after him for . . . for . . . for saying that they're being faithful Muslims?

Not that I agree with him, of course . . .

Awais Aftab on Islamism

Salman Taseer

(Image from Wikipedia)

Recently, Salman Taseer, the secular governor of Pakistan's Punjab Province, was assassinated by one of his bodyguards, Mumtaz Qadri for his outspoken opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy law, which mandates the death penalty for anyone who insults the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Concerning Mr. Qadri, we should note a particular point:

Taseer's self-confessed killer, Mumtaz Qadri, was associated with the moderate Barelvi sect, according to one his colleagues. The Barelvis originated in India in the 19th century to defend traditional Islam and many practices and rites associated with the mystical Sufi strand of the faith.

Five hundred Barelvi scholars warned that anyone who expresses grief over Taseer's assassination could suffer the same fate.

This was from the report "Pakistan: Punjab governor's assassin 'linked to Islamic group'" in Adnkronosinternational (January 5, 2011), and the notable point to be focused upon is the fact that the Barelvi sect to which Mr. Qadri belongs is considered moderate in Pakistan. Yet, not only did this moderate Mr. Qadri murder Mr. Taseer, 500 moderate Barelvi scholars threatened the lives of any who mourned Mr. Taseer's death.

A brave correspondent from Pakistan, Mr. Awais Aftab, who mourns Mr. Taseer despite the credible warnings of 'moderates', has written to my friend Bill Vallicella and has had a message posted on Bill's blog, Maverick Philosopher. In that post, Mr. Aftab links to his own blog, A Myth in Creation, which has this to say about The Islamist Consensus:

The varieties of Islam that are being used in discourse these days are "Fundamentalist/Orthodox Islam" and "Liberal/Moderate/Progressive Islam". Whenever Western thinkers criticize[d] Islam at any point, the objection came up [from Muslims:] "Oh, no, the fundamentalists are just a minority. There is also the Moderate Islam. Talk about us; we are nice people." And that was what was assumed by most, and which even West had to concede to [this] in the name of political correctness. However, the current circumstances in Pakistan surrounding the murder of Salman Taseer have revealed something entirely different. Turns out, the silent majority, when it has spoken, doesn't belong to Liberal Islam. Surprise, surprise, they all uphold fundamentalist ideology. The Fundamentalist Islam not only has a sweeping consensus of followers, it also has a well-developed theology, with all the references to Koran and Hadith & Sunnah worked out in detail. The Liberal Islam, in contrast, is not only in an exceeding[ly] small minority, it also lacks any consensus, it has barely any prominent scholars to point to, and it has no well-developed theology. Most of the proponents of Liberal Islam are actually young kids, who barely have an adequate knowledge of theology to compete in the religious discourse. One single properly referenced Hadith from a Fundamentalist can deflate a Liberal's case. Yes, it's that easy.

I propose that Mr. Aftab's point supports my own previously stated point, namely, that "Islamism is radicalism at the core of Islam." The Islamists, as Mr. Aftab notes, have "a well-developed theology, with all the references to Koran and Hadith & Sunnah worked out in detail." By contrast, "[l]iberal Islam . . . lacks any consensus, . . . has barely any prominent scholars to point to, and . . . has no well-developed theology."

People used to refer to economics as the "dismal science" because those who studied it found it so depressing, but today's dismal science is surely the study of contemporary Islam . . .

UPDATE: I received a note from Mr. Aftab:

[M]uch gratitude for this post. Can you, however, remove my picture from it? I'm going to take it off from my blog as well. Probably not very safe in these times.

For this reason, I have removed Mr. Aftab's photo and replaced it with Mr. Taseer's photo.

Terrorism's 'Brute Cause'?

The Washington Post

I don't want to be one of those joining in the chorus clamoring against Ezra Klein for speculating on the root causes to Faisal Shahzad's attempt at terrorism, but we can at least examine what Klein said in a May 4th column titled "The economic crisis meets terrorism":

Annie Lowrey catches something unexpected: The arrested subject of last weekend’s Times Square bomb plot is a homeowner in the midst of foreclosure. Here's MSNBC:

[Faisal Shahzad] defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on his Connecticut home and the Shelton property is now in foreclosure, according to court records. The foreclosure records show Faisal Shahzad took out the mortgage in 2004, and that he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian. Chase Home Finance LLC sued Shahzad, 30, in September to force the foreclosure. The case is pending in Milford Superior Court.

This guy is like string theory for the media: He brings together the seemingly incompatible stories that drove the past decade. That said, you of course don't want to speculate on why someone "really" did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex. But it's a reminder that foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don't make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we've done to save the financial sector, we've not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.

Klein is being cagy, careful not to say the wrong thing on the root causes of terrorism, but he does seem to be tracing, if obscurely, a line from foreclosure to terrorism in Shahzad's case. This line, however, only connects things if one holds the usually unarticulated assumption that Islam is a religion intrinsically more susceptible to violence on the part of its adherents. In fact, a lot of people appear to think this about Islam, including very many Muslims themselves since we're often warned by Muslim spokesmen that depictions of their prophet, for instance, will result in violent outbursts by Muslims around the world, violence that these same spokesmen can do nothing to forestall.

Call this the assumption of terrorism's 'brute cause': Islam.

But while Islam is certainly a factor, given the overwhelming fact of so many Islamist terrorists, not every Muslim turns to terrorism -- in fact, most do not. Obviously, other factors play a role, perhaps even a foreclosure on one's home.

But I doubt that foreclosure is the significant factor in Shahzad's case. Rather, I suspect that Pakistan's long-standing identity crisis as a Muslim state carved out of a larger 'infidel' state is the significant factor. Pakistan has gravitated over the years toward an Islamist identity supported by the army to encourage animosity toward India and use jihadist ideology to motivate Pakistanis against Hindu India, a policy Fareed Zakaria reminds us of in a recent Newsweek column, "Terrorism's Supermarket" (May 17, 2010):

[F]rom its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish . . . . [T]he government's jihadist connections go back to the country's creation as an ideological, Islamic state and the decision by successive governments to use jihad both to gain domestic support and to hurt its perennial rival, India.

The dictatorships of prior years in Pakistan have subsidized radical Islam and allowed it to set up thousands of madrassas and dominate the field of education there. The resulting radicalization many young Pakistanis should therefore hardly be surprising. This sort of thing, rather than the brute fact of Islam alone, accounts for the specter of Islamist terrorism that confronts the world.

Or so it seems to me from where I sit . . .

Joshua Foust on Robert Kaplan

Registan Banner

(Image from Registan)

Joshua Foust over at his Registan blog takes issue with Robert Kaplan's Foreign Policy article that I commented upon and linked to yesterday. In particular, Foust dismisses the notion that the Taliban in any way signify Pashtun nationalism:

The Taliban are not an expression of Pashtun nationalism. As but one example, Abdulkader Sinno argues in excruciating depth that the Taliban were successful only because of their organization (and the disorganization of the mujahideen), and not necessarily because of their ideology or sense of nationalism. In fact, neither Afghan nor Pakistan Taliban are nationalist -- they are explicitly pan-Islamist. They want an Islamic State, not a Pashtun one (their ethnicity is merely how they are organized, not motivated).

Now that I think about the point, I realize that I ought to have recognized this myself. I've been reading about the Taliban since the 1990s, when they were relatively unknown but successfully bringing order to Afghanistan's chaos while also imposing their strict, Wahabi-funded version of Islam upon the areas that they had 'pacified.' I knew nothing then of an ethnic base to the movement, and the point made at that time was that this Islamist movement was being funded by Saudi Wahabists and organized by Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. Or so I read in the papers that I was reading in those days, e.g., The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, various German papers.

At the time, if I recall, one big question concerned their ideological motivation. Did they want Afghanistan alone, or did they have larger aims? The attacks of 9/11 focused attention on the fact that the Taliban was hosting Bin Laden, and even if they had not directly contributed to the attacks, the fact that they protected Bin Laden after 9/11 raised suspicions that they might have aims beyond Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, I've noticed that the Taliban are strongest in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, so Kaplan's view that the Taliban is an expression of Pashtun nationalism sounded plausible. But Foust is right about the Taliban: "their ethnicity is merely how they are organized, not [how they are] motivated." They are pan-Islamist, which helps explain why they would want all of Pakistan, why they have links to Al Qaeda, and why they have foreign jihadists among their fighters.

I need to read Joshua Foust at Registan more often (and thanks to John B. of Clever Turtles for the tip).

Robert D. Kaplan: "Revenge of Geography"

Geopolitics

Illustration by Aaron Goodman

(Image from Foreign Policy)

Robert Kaplan has an excellent (though disputed) article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy (May/June 2009): "The Revenge of Geography." Although his article is global in scope, emphasizing the role played by geography in conflicts along what he calls "shatter zones" (reminiscent of Huntington's "fault lines" between civilizations, except geographic rather than religious), it has some especially significant observations about the specific case of Pakistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups -- Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns -- for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.

The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces -- and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.

Geography, ethnicity, and religion -- a witches' brew that makes up the dysfunctional state that we know as Pakistan. We're rather far from Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, which saw human history as a struggle between ideologies that had reached its Hegelian goal of liberal democracy. But we're also not precisely in those civilizations where Samuel P. Huntington placed us, either, for the Islamic civilization that ought to glue Pakistan together is a rather weak binding agent, given the corrosive acid of ethnicity. The good news in what Kaplan shows is that the Taliban, being an expression of Pashtun nationalism, will encounter resistance from the Punjabis who rule Pakistan and wouldn't want their nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a different ethnic group. We can therefore expect the Pakistan army to show more resistance than it previously did, for the stakes have been raised by the Taliban's push beyond the Swat Valley.

Or can we? Another scholar, Thomas Barfield, raises some doubts, noting the rise of Islamic radicalism within Pakistan's heavily Pashtun Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its previously secular army:

A lot of people in the ISI are Pashtuns because they had the language skills. During the Soviet War period, [Mohammad] Zia ul-Haq began Islamizing the army. Before, the army was fairly resolutely secular, but since the '80s you saw a greater and greater influence of Islamists in the army as well as the ISI. By the time they were helping the Taliban, some [army officials] were highly sympathetic to this idea of a Wahhabi-style Islamic state. Pakistan was formed as a state for Muslims separated off from India -- its name means "land of the religiously pure" -- and it's always been like, "Well, are we Muslim enough?" (Michael Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve Altogether? (Interview with Thomas Barfield)" Mother Jones, May/June 2009)

Barfield worries not just about a Pashtun attempt to take over Pakistan but also about even a failed Pastun attempt to grab the entire country if Pakistan's army holds steady and manages to keep the Punjab region for itself in the ensuing chaos:

The army has always stood to prevent that [sort of takeover], so presumably if they would hold on to the army, the army would hold on to Punjab and prevent things from getting out of hand. But then the question would be, if it starts to fall apart like that, would India feel the need to make a preemptive strike to go after the nukes? (Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve")

This is where things get really scary . . . and even scarier is the recognition that the world is full of 'Pakistans'! Perhaps not nuclear-armed ones, but increasingly militarized "shatter zones" destabilized by the tyranny of geography.

I have seen the future, and it is murder.

UPDATE: Commentor John B. (below) links to a strong and informed rebuttal of Kaplan at the Registan blog.

David Kilcullen on Insurgencies and Ideological Movements

Militiaman in Najaf, Iraq (2004)

Photo by Joao Silva

(Image from The New York Times)

Janine di Giovanni has a good review of David Kilcullen's book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.

Why should we care? Because:

David Kilcullen is a former officer in the Australian Army, a strategist . . . a scholar, . . . . an expert on counterinsurgency, . . . and one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White House and advised against the invasion of Iraq.

But also because:

[Concerning] Iraq and Afghanistan, . . . he still sees [them] as "winnable" with a long-term commitment.

Giovanni tells us that Kilcullen has read the French military expert on counterinsurgency, David Galula, who learned from France's colonial wars in North Africa as well as his diplomatic service in East Asia, where he observed the rise of communism. "Galula's thesis," according to Giovanni, "is that one aim of war is to support the local population rather than control the territory."

For those of us who have been paying attention in Iraq, this aim will sound familiar, for it has been the essence of General David Petraeus's strategy there. And little wonder, for:

Kilcullen went on to advise Condoleezza Rice and helped Gen. David Petraeus implement the 2007 surge -- which, up to a point, he believes has been successful, largely because of his friend Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

I read a book by David Galula several years ago, about a year after 9/11, but I guess that I should look at him again. According to Giovanni, Kilcullen read Galula when he was doing his doctoral work in political anthropology and learned from Galula to go directly to the primary sources (a bit more 'primary' than my own doctoral work on the Gnostics):

Part of Kilcullen's academic research involved living and working alongside villagers in West Java, trying to absorb the culture of Dar'ul Islam, a guerrilla movement hatched in the late 1940s (and later identified by some as an Indonesian clone and ally of Al Qaeda).

What Kilcullen wanted to do was to observe the movement the way the locals did -- not from the "official version I could find in books." So he lived in villages and conversed with his curious neighbors about blue jeans and the Internet, until they trusted him enough to share ­information.

"You should talk to old Mrs. N, her husband was an imam who worked with the movement," was the kind of lead Kilcullen would get after a time. And with patience and cunning, he built up the knowledge he needed.

From what he gleaned, he learned to distinguish between local wars (with their 'accidental' guerrillas) and the larger-scale ideological movements (with their true-believing militants) to which they get linked up:

[The latter] is the larger international movement: the Long War, as the Pentagon calls it, against Al Qaeda. The [former] . . . , though largely ignored, is equally crucial: the uprisings of local networks and fighters. These are small insurgencies seeking autonomy that align themselves intentionally (or sometimes not) with the larger movement.

How does that alignment get established? Here's how:

Discussing the tribal areas of Pakistan, Kilcullen shows how Al Qaeda moved in by taking over communities -- establishing bonds by marrying local women, operating businesses, eventually recruiting the villagers as fighters.

I recall that Al Qaeda in Iraq attempted this with the large tribes in the eastern, Anbar Province, but it didn't work. The tribes didn't want to marry off their women to the outsiders, and Al Qaeda responded with a brutality that alienated the locals, resulting in the phenomenon called "Anbar Awakening." I wonder why the intermarriage strategy has worked in Pakistan. Anyway, once such links are established, the next phase begins:

Al Qaeda establishes its presence in a remote area of conflict, then penetrates the population the same way influenza infects a weakened immune system. Contagion occurs when the safe haven is used to spread violence. When outside forces intervene, disrupting the safe haven, the local population aligns with Al Qaeda. The terrorists' effort is meant to be long lasting, and it's highly effective.

The terrorists use their haven -- now reinforced if the outside forces fail -- to spread their influence by disrupting neighboring areas and then coming in to establish order, the process outlined in Abu Bakr Naji's Management of Savagery and commented upon in previous blog entries of mine, such as this one, but which sometimes fails to work (much to certain people's annoyance). How can we ensure that it fails much more often? Giovanni summarizes Kilcullen's solution:

Counterinsurgency, he says, "demands the continuous presence of security ­forces"; "local alliances and partnerships with community leaders; creation of self-­defending populations"; and "operation of small-unit ground forces in tandem with local security forces."

In short, a long-term commitment. Is the world up to that? The Islamists may be.

Taliban: Conquest of Pakistan?

Advancing on Mecca

The Life of the Prophet (1595)

Siyer-i Nebi

(Image from Wikipedia)

Many of us are watching with great interest and not a little apprehension as the Taliban make inroads into eastern portions of Pakistan. Recently, the government there turned over the Swat Valley to Taliban control, allowing implementation of Islamic law (sharia). Some readers will recall the recent video of a 17-year-old girl publicly whipped (34 lashes) for going outside her home without the escort of a close male relative. The comment of one moderate Muslim living in the city of Mingora is quite revealing:

When the Taliban took over Swat, they held a "peace" march. Thousands of men in black turbans and regulation beards stomped through the city. "There wasn't a single local among them," a schoolteacher in Mingora recalled. "I sat at home with my family and quivered with fear." Then he hesitated and made sure that my recorder was switched off, afraid that what he was about to say might be seen as blasphemous. "I felt like a non-Muslim citizen of Mecca the day it was conquered by prophet Muhammad's army. And I am a practicing Muslim." (Reported by Mohammed Hanif, "My Country, Caving to the Taliban," The Washington Post, Sunday, April 26, 2009)

To put this another way, the fearful schoolteacher felt that he would be treated by the Taliban as the infidels were treated by a conquering Muhammad: given the choice of submission to Islam . . . or death.

Now, it's true that not many Meccan infidels died when Muhammad marched victoriously in, but that's undoubtedly because they submitted to Islam and the destruction of the idols in the Kaaba. It's also true that 'monotheistic' non-Muslims are allowed to continue in their religion so long as the jizya is paid and other restrictions are accepted, but one purpose of the jizya and the various restrictions is to put pressure on non-Muslim 'monotheists' to convert to Islam, and the Taliban are already putting pressure on non-Muslims to pay the jizya, convert to Islam, or face execution.

The Taliban's aims are not limited to the Swat Valley. The great prize is Pakistan itself, and if the Pakistani government continues to 'cave' to the Taliban, then these Islamist militants could succeed.

And just to concentrate our minds, let's recall that Pakistan has an estimated 90 to 250 nuclear weapons.