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Archive for November 19, 2014

US military continues to claim al Qaeda is ‘restricted’ to ‘isolated areas of northeastern Afghanistan’

November 19, 2014

US military continues to claim al Qaeda is ‘restricted’ to ‘isolated areas of northeastern Afghanistan,’ Long War Journal, Bill Roggio, November 19, 2014

A recently issued report on the status of Afghanistan by the US Department of Defense has described al Qaeda as being primarily confined to “isolated areas of northeastern Afghanistan.” But information on Afghan military and intelligence operations against the global jihadist group contradicts the US military’s assessment.

The Defense Department released its “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan” in October. The report, which “covers progress in Afghanistan from April 1 to September 30, 2014,” contains only nine mentions of al Qaeda. Five of those mentions simply reference the mission to conduct “counterterrorism operations against remnants of core al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

The US military’s report states that “[s]ustained ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] counterterrorism operations prevented al Qaeda’s use of Afghanistan as a platform from which to launch transnational terrorist attacks during this reporting period.”

Then the report goes on to describe al Qaeda as “isolated” in the northeastern part of the country, a reference to the remote mountainous provinces of Kunar and Nuristan.

“Counterterrorism operations restricted al Qaeda’s presence to isolated areas of northeastern Afghanistan and limited access to other parts of the country,” the report continues. “These efforts forced al Qaeda in Afghanistan to focus on survival, rather than on operations against the West. Al Qaeda’s relationship with local Afghan Taliban organizations remains intact and is an area of concern.”

Al Qaeda’s operations contradict US military claims

For years, the US military has claimed that al Qaeda is constrained to operating in northeastern Afghanistan, but ISAF’s own data on raids against the terrorist group and its allies has indicated otherwise. According to ISAF press releases announcing operations between early 2007 and June 2013, al Qaeda and its allies were targeted 338 different times, in 25 of 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces. Those raids took place in 110 of Afghanistan’s nearly 400 districts. [See LWJ report, ISAF raids against al Qaeda and allies in Afghanistan 2007-2013.]

Continuing this pattern, while the latest DoD report, which covers the period between April 1 and Oct. 30 of this year, claims that al Qaeda is restricted to northeastern Afghanistan, reported Afghan military and intelligence operations during the same time period indicate that al Qaeda remains active beyond Kunar and Nuristan.

The most high-profile operation against al Qaeda was conducted in Nangarhar province in October. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security reported that al Qaeda leader Abu Bara al Kuwaiti was killed in a US airstrike in Lal Mandi in Nangarhar’s Nazyan district. The airstrike took place at the home of Abdul Samad Khanjari, who was described as al Qaeda’s military commander for the province.

Abu Bara likely served in al Qaeda’s General Command. He was close to al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri, and had served as an aide to Atiyah Abd al Rahman, al Qaeda’s former general manager who was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan in August 2011. Abu Bara wrote Atiyah’s eulogy, which was published in Vanguards of Khorasan, al Qaeda’s official magazine. US intelligence officials have told The Long War Journal that Abu Bara was the most senior al Qaeda leader killed in Afghanistan in years. [See LWJ report, Senior al Qaeda leader reported killed in US airstrike in eastern Afghanistan.]

Another senior al Qaeda leader known to operate in Afghanistan is Qari Bilal. In August, Afghan officials said that he commands more than 300 fighters in the northern province of Kunduz, where several districts are controlled or contested by the Taliban. Bilal is also a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an al Qaeda-linked group that has integrated its operations with the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.

Bilal escaped from a Pakistani jail in 2010, entered Afghanistan, and was subsequently captured by ISAF special operations forces in 2011. He was later freed by Afghan officials and rejoined the fight. [See LWJ report, Senior IMU leader captured by ISAF in 2011 now leads fight in northern Afghanistan.]

This month, Afghan officials announced the capture of Eqbal al Tajiki, a citizen of Tajikistan who served with al Qaeda’s network in Kunduz. Sediq Sediqi, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said that Eqbal “is an active member of the al Qaeda network” who was “transferred by his colleagues to northern parts of Afghanistan to carry out terrorist activities,” according to Afghan Channel One TV. Sediqi said Eqbal had “received terrorist training in North Waziristan for three years.”

Eqbal may have been a member of the Qari Salim Group, “a high-profile Al Qaeda affiliate” that is commanded by Qari Khaluddin, Pajhwok Afghan News noted in October. Khaluddin “had recently trained in Pakistan’s city of Quetta.” The group is said to have been plotting to attack a military base in Kunduz.

Another al Qaeda group known to be operating in Afghanistan is Junood al Fida. In early October, Junood al Fida released video that purported to show the group taking control of the district of Registan in the southern province of Kandahar.

Junood al Fida, which is comprised of Baluch jihadists, has sworn loyalty to the Taliban but also describes Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri as “Our Shaykh al Habeeb” [beloved leader] and its “Ameeruna” [our chief]. The group’s propaganda routinely attacks the US. [See LWJ reports, Baloch jihadist group in southern Afghanistan announces death of commander and Jihadist group loyal to Taliban, al Qaeda claims to have captured Afghan district.]

Categories: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Department of Defense
Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Department of Defense

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Obama’s ineptness prompts a hawkish revival – The Washington Post

November 19, 2014

Obama’s ineptness prompts a hawkish revival – The Washington Post.

By Jennifer Rubin November 19 at 12:45 PM http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/follow_button.7d87d44c6efd84b46a6b666b7cd8f385.en.html#_=1416420199184&id=twitter-widget-0&lang=en&screen_name=JRubinBlogger&show_count=false&show_screen_name=true&size=m

If nothing else, President Obama’s inept and incoherent foreign policy is helping to reestablish the GOP as the party of hawks. We saw it yesterday in the vote led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) against the ill-advised attempt by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to restrict intelligence-gathering in wartime.

The Free Beacon reports on other setbacks for “what was once perceived as a rising tide of libertarianism in the GOP and an accompanying aversion to military intervention and defense spending”:

That sort of noninterventionist position contributed to the defeat of Rep. Mick Mulvane’s (R., S.C.) bid to lead the Republican Study Committee, a 173-member bloc of the party’s most conservative members.

RSC elected Rep. Bill Flores (R., Texas) as chairman on Tuesday. He took 84 votes to Mulvane’s 57 in the second round of voting. . . .

Another of its signatories, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R., Texas) was elected to succeed McKeon as Armed Services Chairman on Tuesday, handing another victory to RSC’s national defense contingent. . . . The Republican Party’s libertarian wing suffered another defeat on those issues with the election of Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes has defended National Security Agency surveillance programs that have come under fire from civil libertarians since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden stole and leaked classified documents about those programs last year.

Certainly, some of the sentiment stems from total frustration with the White House. At an extraordinary session at the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Reagan library in California on Saturday, former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley took turns slamming the administration while Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, one of the panelists, squirmed in his seat.

In a bipartisan bashing, the former officials and McCain denounced the White House for micromanaging military operations (while praising Bush 41 and Bush 43 for refraining from doing so), stupidly telling the enemy what we will not do, abandoning the people of Ukraine by refusing to give them weapons to defend themselves and refusing to explain on a daily basis why we are fighting, how we are doing it and what we are trying to accomplish. Panetta warned that the president has “to be able to use every possible option on the table … You never tell the enemy what the hell you’re going to do!” He lectured the president in absentia that he takes an oath to defend this country and “if you are going to do it, you have to be wise and flexible enough” to use all available tools. Gates was even harsher, excoriating Obama for not matching his military authorization with his rhetoric. Without Special Operations forces, embedded trainers and advisers and forward air spotters we cannot defeat the Islamic State, he said. “It cannot be done.” And to the applause of the crowd and some panelists he declared, “The president of the United States cannot make a threat, cannot draw a red line and not fulfill, not carry it out … The credibility of the entire country is on the line, and it sends a powerful message to ISIS or anybody else when we don’t follow through on threats.”

In short, it is impossible to be taken seriously on national security as a Republican these days without renouncing chapter and verse the folly of the administration and reiterating the dangers of phony red lines, an insufficient strategy against the Islamic State and the inanity of the defense sequester cuts. Watching Panetta, Gates, Hadley and McCain, one could see a seasoned group of advisers whom any conservative seeking the presidency should consult and perhaps re-employ in national security posts. But if you have run around echoing Obama on “no boots on the ground,” the war-weariness of America, erasure of Syria’s red line and paranoid rationales for curtailing vital intelligence-gathering and defense spending, you should beware. The most informed, numerous and influential members of the party will eviscerate your presidential aspirations. And they should. Enough is enough. The country cannot endure another president this bad — or worse — when it comes to keeping us safe and secure.

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The 10 quiet years are behind us

November 19, 2014

The 10 quiet years are behind us – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Analysis: From one isolated incident to another, we’ve got ourselves an intifada on our hands, which is threatening to be as fatal as the two previous ones, both for us and for them. There are no winners here – only victims.

The image from the scene of Tuesday’s synagogue attack in Jerusalem takes us back to the most difficult situations in the history of the Jewish people, to the pogroms, to the riots, to the Holocaust: Jews massacred in their prayer shawls, in the middle of a prayer; holy books drenched in blood; a desecrated synagogue.

There isn’t any sophisticated reasoning that can explain such an act, not to mention justifying it. Therefore, we cannot accept the cries of joy in Gaza and in some of the West Bank cities. Those rejoicing in such a massacre lose their moral right to cry about the occupation. The Palestinians have had many joys in 100 years of conflict, and each one of them further deepened their tragedy.

We must remember of course that there has already been such a massacre of worshippers in the middle of their prayer, at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The murderer was Jewish; the worshippers were Muslim. Apart from a few people, the Israeli street responded to that massacre by condemning the act and expressed anxiety and fear. That’s not the way the Palestinian street responded on Tuesday.

From one isolated incident to another isolated incident, we’ve got ourselves an intifada on our hands, which is threatening to be as fatal as the two previous ones. Fatal both for us and for them: There are no winners in this affair – only victims.

The 10 quiet years, which began with Operation Defensive Shield, with Yasser Arafat’s death, with the construction of the fence and with the disappearance of the suicide terrorism, are behind us. It’s hard to know how long the current wave of terror will last and how strong it will be, but it hurts knowing that we spent these past 10 years in vain.

What is needed right now is a concentrated effort to put out the fire. The effort begins with immediate preventive measures: Boosting forces in Jerusalem and on the Judea and Samaria routes; increasing the trust between the IDF and Shin Bet and the Palestinian Authority’s security organizations, taking care of the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which have been neglected for years by the government and municipality.

The effort requires mutual restraint at the top, in the statements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and PA officials and in the statements made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers.

A concentrated effort is needed to put out the fire (Photo: Reuters)

Surveillance of extreme Jewish people and groups must also be expanded. According to past experience, when the government restrains itself, out of choice or due to constraints, the Jewish terrorists jump into the fire. Only a week ago they torched a mosque in a small village east of Ramallah. The price tag for the synagogue massacre could be much higher.

Back to the Palestinians: Netanyahu promised at his press conference Tuesday to demolish the homes of the families of those who committed the massacre. There is a dispute over the effectiveness of home demolitions: The Shin Bet says it has a deterring effect, while the IDF says it doesn’t and could even achieve the opposite goal – sowing the seeds to the next attack. Each side presents data affirming its opinion, and there is no one to decide.

But all that is irrelevant, because the government – from Naftali Bennett to Yair Lapid – feels it has to show the public that it is punishing the other side, otherwise they will say that it is leftist or weak, and the demolition of homes provides good photos.

Despite Netanyahu’s seniority as prime minister, the Palestinian wave of violence is a new experience for him. In previous terms, his predecessors took most of the blow, leaving him a period of relative calm. His first serious conflict with a terror organization was in the past summer, in Operation Protective Edge, and it was alarmingly long, alarmingly expensive, and ended in an embarrassing tie and a spillover of the fire to Jerusalem.

Now too, his tool box is empty. The books he published about the war on terror are unhelpful: He is forced to learn on the fly.

The assailants and their collaborators, if they had any, are to blame for the massacre. It’s wrong, and unfair, to place the responsibility for this horrible act on the shoulders of anyone on the Israeli side. The following lines, which relate to our side, were written therefore as footnotes, not in defiance.

First of all, we are lucky to have a prime minister from the right-wing camp. With all the pain and anger over the massacre, we have at least been spared mass protests demanding the prime minister’s resignation, pictures of him in a keffiyeh, inciting speeches from the balcony overlooking Jerusalem’s Zion Square, and a campaign for his removal funded by billionaires from America.

Secondly, Israel’s ministers would be wise to leave Abbas alone. Claiming that the two villains from Jabel Mukaber went out to murder because they heard Abbas give an inciting speech is like claiming that the “price tag” criminals went out to desecrate a mosque because they heard Netanyahu give an inciting speech. The Palestinian terrorists disregard Abbas just like the Jewish inflamers disregard Netanyahu.

It’s true that Abbas has delivered a number of false, demagogic speeches about Israel and the history of the Jewish people in recent weeks. It’s true that he is working to isolate Israel in the international arena. But on the terror front, there is no cleaner person.

As Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen said Tuesday, and as IDF commanders say, Abbas orders his people to fight terror. It is becoming increasingly difficult – but he does it without hesitation, and so far his people have been obeying his orders.

Netanyahu portrayed Abbas as a terrorist in order to gain international de-legitimization of the PA chairman’s diplomatic campaign against the Israeli government. The problem is real, but the move is pathetic: No one in the world buys into it. On Tuesday, Netanyahu realized the he and his ministers are losing their credibility. He moderated his comments.

He reiterated that “the incitement is the root of the conflict.” The incitement, indeed, inflames the hatred, but it is an outcome of the conflict, not the reason for its existence. Only a naïve person would believe that ending the incitement would end the conflict: There is a land here which both sides are finding it difficult to share, historic, religious, ethnic and national animosity. This bleeding conflict deserves some respect: Ending it with incitement belittles it.

The third point is that the terror is our problem. It is happening inside our capital and against our citizens. The prime minister’s appeal to the world to join our struggle is uncalled for. Jabel Mukaber is not Iran.

The fourth, and perhaps main point, is that the shift from a national conflict to a religious war has been in the air for quite a while. IDF, Shin Bet and police officials have been warning about it repeatedly. Leave God alone, they said, both our god and their god. Don’t get religion involved. A thousand firefighters are incapable of putting out a fire with God at its center.

The warnings did not receive the attention they deserved. On one side, they faced the nationalist populism of politicians like Uri Ariel, Moshe Feiglin, Zeev Elkin, Naftali Bennett, Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, Tzipi Hotovely, Miri Regev and others, who thought that changing the status quo on the Temple Mount would promote them.

(Most of them, by the way, disappeared from the horizon the moment the terror begun and there was a danger that someone would point an accusing finger at them. The Temple Mount has been deserted. Feiglin’s supporters are the only ones left there).

On the other side, the warnings faced the holy innocence of liberal circles, delicate and intelligent people in the State Prosecutor’s Office, in politics, in the public discourse, who failed to understand how dangerous it is to try to change the rules of the game on the Mount at this time.

Why shouldn’t Jews pray there, they asked. Why shouldn’t they build synagogues there? What’s the difference between the Women of the Wall and the Temple Mount Faithful? Both want to pray. They had a huge powder keg in front of them, and they let Feiglin and his friends play with matches.

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