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Colonel David Maxwell, who has probably forgotten more about North Korea than I ever knew in the first place, has an insightful analytical piece up at SWJ Blog:

Irregular Warfare on the Korean Peninsula

….This paper is written with the concepts of “military misfortune” in mind. In Eliot Cohen and John Gooch’s seminal work on military failures, they determined that militaries are generally unsuccessful for three reasons: the failure to

learn, the failure to adapt, and the failure to anticipate. This paper will recommend that the ROK-US alliance learn from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, adapt Irregular Warfare concepts to the security challenges on the Korean Peninsula and anticipate the collapse of the Kim Family Regime and the complex, irregular threats that collapse will bring.

The conventional wisdom would postulate that the worse case situation would be an attack by the north Korean military because surely the devastation and widespread humanitarian suffering as well as global economic impact would be on a scale that would far exceed any crisis that has occurred since the end of World War II. While that could very well be the case, there is little doubt about the military outcome of an attack by the north on the South and its allies and that would be the destruction of the north Korean People’s Army and the Kim Family Regime. Victory will surely be in the South’s favor; however, this paper will argue that the real worse case scenario comes from dealing with the aftermath; either post-regime collapse or post-conflict.

Maxwell’s operative assumptions are particularly good. I especially like:

….The fifth and final assumption is that while some planning has taken place to deal with north Korean instability and the effects of Kim Family Regime collapse, there has been insufficient preparation for collapse. Furthermore, in addition to planning for collapse, actiocan and should be taken prior to collapse in order to mitigate the conditions and deal with the effects of collapse of the Kim Family Regime. Unfortunately, despite some planning efforts tocounter specific irregular threats, the ROK, and the US in particular, has been distracted by the very real and dangerous threat of north Korean nuclear weapons and delivery capabilitiesproliferation of same while at the same time ensuring deterrence of an attack by the north. Deterrence is paramount and the nuclear problem is a critical international problem; however, successful deterrence over time will likely result in the eventual collapse of the regime and the associated security and humanitarian crises that it will bring.

In other words, not only are US and ROK policy makers not preparing for the most probable second and third order effects of a North Korean collapse scenario, but the status quo on the Korean penninsula represents a wicked problem that is essentially a trajectory toward a worst case scenario collapse.

 Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Instituteand Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Khorasan: A Muslim Once and Future Kingdom

by Charles Cameron

The title of an interview in a Taliban sponsored magazine with Hammam Khalil al-Balawi — the Jordanian jihadist physician and double-agent / informant who signed himself Abu Dujana al-Khorasani on jihadist forums, and carried out the recent CIA bombing in Khost — is intriguing in a self-referential, “Doug Hofstadter might like this” sort of way:

Interview with Brother Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani, a Well-Known Blogger in Jihadi Forums, and a Newcomer to the Land of Khorasan.

In his appearances on the web, al-Balawi / Abu Dujana had given himself the geographic cognomen “al-Khorasani” meaning “from Khorasan” — yet he was a Jordanian by birth, and the interview title calls him a “newcomer” to Khorasan, while the interviewer himself remarks, “Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani (sic) is actually now inside Khorasan, and the decision to travel to the lands of jihad is a divine blessing and a magnificent grace.”

The Khorasan that Abu Dujana “is actually now inside” is presumably Afghanistan on the literal, geographical level — but what of the Khorasan of the mind and heart to which, as his choice of handle indicates, Abu Dujana must have long aspired?

What is the significance of “Khorasan”?

It’s a bit like “Jerusalem” — only yesterday I was reading that Grand Rapids, Michigan is referred to as “Jerusalem” by some folk of Dutch extraction in the Pacific Northwest. I think we’ll get the sense of the idea if we call it of “Khorasan of sacred memory and present hope”.  As the UCLA scholar Jean Rosenfeld puts it (personal communication):

In any event, Khorasan refers to much more than a former region of the Islamic empires.  It has a mythical meaning that is being taken seriously as a “once and future kingdom” in the millennial mindset of al-Qaida.

The territory once called Khorasan — and the borders covered by that name shifted a great deal over the centuries — covered parts of what we now know as Iran (which still has a province named Khorasan), Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and NW Pakistan.  I’m finding references that suggest the name originally meant “the place where the sun rises” — the East, the Orient.

Rosenfeld suggests that Khorasan “is code in al-Qaida for the warrior sect itself” — “the army of the (future) caliphate in the mind of the International jihad” and thus, Al-Qaida in Fawaz Gerges’ broad sense.  My own reading ties it in with the ahadith about the “black banners of Khorasan” and the army which will sweep down from Khorasan to Jerusalem…

As I’ve noted before   there are many variant ahadith describing the army of the Mahdi.  Here is one commonly cited version:

If you see the black flags coming from Khurasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice, for this is the army of the Caliph, the Mahdi and no one can stop that army until it reaches Jerusalem.”

Quite how we should align that with actual jihadist entities such as AQ core and or its subsidiaries or the various bodies called Taliban, however, I’m not sure. The clearest implication I can see is to the place of origin of the Mahdi’s army.

It is at least as much an eschatological as a geographic claim.

Since the imagery of Khorasan is closely tied to that of black flags, I would like to take a slight detour here.  We have seen that the black flags signify the army of the Mahdi, but what are its origins, and how widely is it used?

The Islamic Imagery Project at West Point Combating Terrorism Center lists “Black Flag” under the heading “Warfare Motifs“, saying:

The Black Flag (al-raya) traces its roots to the very beginning of Islam.  It was the battle (jihad) flag of the Prophet Muhammad, carried into battle by many of his companions, including his nephew ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib.  The flag regained prominence in the 8th century with its use by the leader of the Abbasid revolution, Abu Muslim, who led a revolt against the Umayyad clan and its Caliphate.  The Umayyads, the ruling establishment of the Islamic world at the time, were seen as greedy, gluttonous, and religiously wayward leaders.  The Abbasid revolution, then, was aimed at installing a new, more properly Islamic ruling house that would keep orthodox Islam at the center of its regime. Since then, the image of the black flag has been used as a symbol of religious revolt and battle (i.e. jihad).  In Shiite belief, the black flag also evokes expectations about the afterlife.  In the contemporary Islamist movement, the black flag is used to symbolize both offensive jihad and the proponents of reestablishing the Islamic Caliphate.

The flag is frequently identified with specific jihadist groups — thus Bill Roggio, writing in Long War Journal, refers to “the al rayah, the black flag of al Qaeda” in his 2007 article, “Musa Qala and the NATO offensive”.

Likewise, the Somalian president Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed in 2006 is reported to have spoken in 2006 of “the ‘black flag’ of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban” — and as recently as this month, Al-Shabaab “vowed to replace the Somali flag with its (al-Shabaab’s) black flag”.

So the Black Flags or banners represent the Prophet as warrior at one end of Islamic history and the Mahdi’s army from Khorasan at the other — and have been adopted as symbols of jihad by different groups from the Abbasids to al-Shabaab. They are indeed indicative of jihad, but it is their association with Khorasan that gives them a specifically Mahdist reference.

The defeat of the Umayyads and establishment of the Abbasid caliphate, and hence also the golden age of Islamic culture, was strongly supported by forces raised in Khorasan, and David Cook in his Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature suggests that “the Abbasids sought to present their movement as the fulfillment of messianic expectations, and so they produced a great quantity of materials given in the form of hadith traditions to indicate that the Mahdi would come from this region.”

The tale lives on. As I’ve mentioned before, Cook notes that bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, made fresh use of this line of messianic tradition and “popularized the position of Afghanistan as the messianic precursor to the future liberation of Palestine” in his book, From Kabul to Jerusalem, while bin Laden refers to finding “a safe base in Khurasan, high in the peaks of the Hindu Kush” in his 1996 Declaration of Jihad.

The spiritual geography, then, is clear: Khorasan is that place in the east, somewhere in the general region including eastern Iran and northern Afghanistan, from which the Mahdi’s army will come — and it is very plausibly also a place the jihadist might need to “crawl over ice” to reach.

I think Rosenfeld is right in suggesting that al-Balawi’s geographic cognomen is a significant one, as is “Abu Dujana” — the name of a particularly valiant companion of the Prophet, as I discussed in a previous post.

But which of the various jihadist forces currently deployed in Afghanistan and nearby might be the nucleus of the Mahdi’s forces? The army with black flags from Khorasan has been identified with the Abbasids, with the Iranian revolutionaries, and with the Taliban. Bin Laden would presumably wish for it to be with al-Qaida, and Cook also says, this time in Understanding Jihad:

Since Afghanistan, as Khurasan, has powerful resonance with many Muslims because of the messianic expectations focused on that region, this gave the globalist radical Muslims associated with al-Qa’ida under the leadership of Bin Ladin additional moral authority to proclaim jihad and call for the purification of the present Muslim governments and elites.

In Jordan via the jihadist web forums, al-Balawi signaled his identification with the victorious army of the coming Mahdi and with jihadists in Afghanistan by his choice of the cognomen “al-Khorasani” — but the name alone does not tell us which particular jihadist group he might have been thinking of, and that may not even have been an question he felt the need to resolve at that time.

  Once in Khorasan itself, al-Khorasani left us two “media” items, a magazine interview and a video, and we might hope that they would add to our understanding of the more literal, geographical meaning his name carried, for they clearly indicate his associations.

According to Flashpoint-Intel, who provided the version of the interview I’ve seen, al-Khorasani’s interview was given to “Vanguards of Khorasan” which they describe as “a well-known Taliban propaganda magazine” and released by the Al-Fajr Media Center, which they term “the official online logistical arm of Al-Qaida”. SITE refers to “Vanguards” as “the … magazine of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan”. Others more familiar with the logistics may want to clarify the point.

The video, then, seems to give the clearest indication. Al-Khorasani was taped sitting next to Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the Terik- i-Taliban Pakistan or TPP (whose death in a drone strike is reported but unconfirmed at the time of writing), and indicated his allegiance with the words, “We will never forget the blood of our emir Baitullah Mehsud” — referring to Hakimullah’s predecessor.

In general, “Khorasan” doesn’t appear to function as code for a particular jihadist organization, but as a more general symbol for victorious jihad — coming from the East, faithful to the truth, unstoppable, ushering in the Caliphate, serving the cause of the Mahdi, and thus heralding the End of Days.

I’m intrigued to note that the Australian analyst / scholar Leah Farrall at All Things Counter Terrorism blogged on Abu Dujana today  (after I’d “completed” this post) and closed her post with an aside. I’ll quote the whole paragraph for context, but it’s the last point that ties in here:

Another point of interest is Khorasani’s  internet history circa 2001- 2003. Despite what Khorasani said in his interview in the Taliban magazine ( I think it was the Taliban mag if memory serves), one does not get to be a forum administrator overnight. I watched another person rise through the ranks this way and he had direct contact with  a mid-level AQ commander. It still took him 18 months or so. This brings me back to my question about Khorsani’s early internet history and possible real world history. As an aside, back then, in the early days you didn’t write Khorasani, Kandahari etc unless you had been there. It was used as an identifier. This has changed in recent years but I do wonder about this with him too.

Leah’s curiosity on this point reminds me that along with the general symbolism of Khorasan, which I have tried to explore here, there are intriguing aspects to the particular use Abu Dujana made of the name.

I look forward to any further thoughts she may have.

Grateful thanks to Jean Rosenfeld for our very helpful conversations around this and related topics, and for the comment that gave me its title.

Reader Isaac, points to an excellent analytical overview of Pakistan’s national nervous breakdown at Dawn.com, by Nadeem F. Paracha. It is a lengthy but stupendous post with some 200 + comments:

Little monsters

There is nothing new anymore about the suggestion that over a span of about 30 odd years, the Pakistani military and its establishmentarian allies in the intelligence agencies, the politicised clergy, conservative political parties and the media have, in the name of Islam and patriotism, given birth to a number of unrestrained demons which have now become full-fledged monsters threatening the very core of the state and society in Pakistan.

A widespread consensus across various academic and intellectual circles (both within and outside Pakistan), now states that violent entities such as the Taliban and assorted Islamist organisations involved in scores of anti-state, sectarian and related violence in the country are the pitfalls of policies and propaganda undertaken by the Pakistani state and its various intelligence agencies to supposedly safeguard Pakistan’s ‘strategic interests’ in the region and more superficially, Pakistan’s own ideological interest.

….The 1980s and the so-called anti-Soviet Afghan jihad is colored with deep nostalgic strokes by the Islamists and the military in Pakistan. Forgetting that the Afghans would have remained being nothing more than a defeated group of rag-tag militants without the millions of dollars worth of aid and weapons that the Americans provided, and Zia could not have survived even the first MRD movement in 1981 had it not been due to the unflinching support that he received from America and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani intelligence agencies and its Afghan and Arab militant allies were convinced that it was them alone who toppled the Soviet Union.

The above belief began looking more and more like a grave delusion by the time the Afghan mujahideen factions went to war against one another in the early 1990s and Pakistan was engulfed with serious sectarian and ethnic strife. But the post-1971 narrative that had now started to seep into the press and in many people’s minds, desperately attempted to drown out conflicting points of views about the Afghan war by once again blaming the usual suspects: democracy, secularism and India.

Many years and follies later, and in the midst of unprecedented violence being perpetrated in the name of Islam, Pakistanis today stand more confused and flabbergasted than ever before.

The seeds of the ideological schizophrenia that the 1956 proclamation of Pakistan being an ‘Islamic Republic’ sowed, have now grown into a chaotic and bloody tree that only bares delusions and denials as fruit.

Read the rest here.

There has been an ocean of ink spilled about the Obama administration’s Hamlet-like deliberation over a war strategy for Afghanistan and on the implications of agreeing to 30,000 rather than the 40,000 new troops for the “Afghan Surge”, as Gen. McChrystal had originally requested. The 10,000 difference in boots is not the salient strategic point, though it is the one that excites political partisans on the Right, Left and anti-war Far Left. It also distracts us from debating our fundamental strategic challenge.

The horns of our dilemma is that our long time “ally” whom we have hitched ourselves to in a grand war effort against revolutionary Islamist terrorism is not our ally at all, but a co-belligerent with our enemy. By every policy measure that matters that causes the United States – justifiably in my view – to take a tough stance against North Korea and Iran, applies in spades to Islamabad. Yet none dare call Pakistan a rogue state.

It is the elephant in our strategy room – if the elephant was a rabid and schizophrenic trained mastodon, still willing to perform simple tricks for a neverending stream of treats, even as it eyes its trainer and audience with a murderous kind of hatred. That Pakistan’s deeply corrupt elite can be “rented” to defer their ambitions, or to work at cross-purposes with Pakistan’s perceived  “interests”, is not a game-changing event. Instead, it sustains and ramps up the dysfunctional dynamic we find ourselves swimming against.

We play a bizarre game, our leaders being more concerned about Pakistan’s “stability” than Pakistan’s own generals and politicians who egg on, fund and train the very militant Islamist groups spreading death and chaos inside Pakistan and beyond its borders. Why can we not find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar ? Because they are high value clients of the ISI which is no more likely to give them up than the KGB was to hand over Kim Philby.  

Until America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite grapple with the fact – and it is an easily verifiable, empirical, fact – that Pakistan’s government is in chronic pursuit of policies that destabilize Central Asia, menace all of Pakistan’s neighbors, generate legions of terrorists and risk nuclear war with India, no solutions will present themselves.

A strategy will only have a chance of success when it is grounded in reality.

The Call of Nepal: My Life In the Himalayan Homeland of Britain’s Gurkha Soldiers by Col. J.P. Cross

Nimble Books, a publisher I am proud to be associated with, is rolling out the American edition of the memoirs of the legendary COIN specialist, soldier and linguist, Colonel John Philip Cross, of the Gurkhas. Foreword by Robert D. Kaplan.  Disclosure – I had a part, albeit a small one, along with Lexington Green, in connecting Col. Cross with Nimble Books, and I could not be more pleased to see this memoir in print. Not many books these days start by announcing how modern academics will hate it.

Cross was the focus of a story by Kaplan in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 2006.

Review soon to come….

Dr. Chet Richards has reviewed the latest translation of one of the world’s oldest and greatest military classics:

The Art of War, trans. Thomas Huynh

One significant difference between Huynh and the other two is how they handle comments. Both Griffith and Cleary include remarks by the “canonical” commentators, a group of Chinese generals and pundits from Sun Tzu’s day through about the 12th century. They both also limit their own commentary to introductory remarks, 62 pages in the case of Griffith, 37 for Cleary. Huynh does not provide any of the canonical commentary. He does have a fairly brief introduction and translator’s note (totaling 18 pages), but most of his commentary is incorporated into the even-numbered pages that face the text on the opposite (odd numbered) pages.

Whether you like this is a matter of personal taste. It does allow for a smooth, uninterrupted reading of the Sun Tzu text itself, which is difficult in translations that have commentary interspersed with the words attributed to Sun Tzu. This is a huge plus. As for Huynh’s comments, they fall into two categories. One, which all readers will appreciate, concerns his insights into the language of the text and the environment of Sun Tzu’s day.

….A new translation of Sun Tzu from original sources is a major event, and this one would make a good addition to any library. If you get only a half dozen new insights – and you will (I did) – the book will repay its price many times over. Add it to the translations you’re using now and you’ll gain another source of ideas.

Read the rest here.