zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron -- a single word in a very small book, and the world that hangs in the balance ]
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I’ve just read Hegghammer & Lacroix on The Meccan Rebellion. At 78 pages and 5.3 x 8.3 inches, it’s a tiny book in hardback and quite a delight to hold — the electricity in my city block went out for a while the other day, and I took pleasure in reading it out under the sun — and it contains, in essence, the two authors’ paper, Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia (Int. J. Middle East Stud. 39 (2007), 103–122) and a companion piece by Lacroix titled Between Revolution and Apoliticism: Nasir al-Din al-Albanai and his Impact on the Shaping of Contemporary Salafism.

Blog posts tend to present a point of view – whether to preach to the choir, promote it to unbelievers, stir up trouble, or simply add detail or a fresh angle to an existing narrative. Seldom do they ask questions.

My own instincts — in line with Madhyamaka as I briefly encountered it in the teachings of Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel — lead me to leave some kinds of questions open: I use my DoubleQuotes format to set the juices flowing, by providing nudges to thought rather than outright statements – but on this occasion I have a question to ask, and as it’s too long for Twitter I’ll post it here.

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Here’s my question. Juhayman al-Utaybi believed one of his companions, Muhammad al-Qahtani, was the Mahdi, the awaited Coming One of Islam — and that, in our authors’ words, “consecrating him [al-Qahtani] in Mecca on the turn of the hijra century” would ”precipitate the end of the world”.

In my view, a great deal rests on that simple word, “precipitate”. Would “usher in” do as well? Or “mark the beginning of” perhaps? Or is the idea of forcing the hand of God present, as it is in Reuven Paz’ phrase, “hot-wiring the apocalypse”?

There’s a lot riding on that issue: whether or not it is possible to force the hand of God, to accelerate destiny, to hasten apocalypse.

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Okay, let’s go light-footed into this issue. In The Question in the DC Comics universe, we have a character described thus:

During service in Vietnam Jeremiah Hatch got insane, he began to hear the voice that urged him to do the will of the Lord by serving the Devil. He thought that his mission was “to hasten the corruption, to nurture the foulness until the almighty has no choice but to rain down fire and brimstone and overthrow the cities and the plain and all the inhabitants of cities and all that grows on the ground…”

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Hastening the apocalypse — it’s an idea you can find in the world of DC Comics, but it was Israeli analyst Dr Reuven Paz who presented it to us in canonical “national security” form in his paper, Hot-wiring the Apocalypse, where his actual words are:

The Jihadi and nationalist insurgency in Iraq, which feeds the motivations and enthusiasm of growing number of Islamist youth to search for Jihad, look for the “culture of death and sacrifice,” and self-radicalize themselves, is another factor in the growing sense of Jihadi pride, which also hotwires the sense of the apocalypse.

That’s a faily imprecise form of words (‘The sense of apocalypse”) from a careful scholar, and Paz applies the concept in a specifically Sunni context. This, however, doesn’t prevent a popular Christian writer such as Joel Rosenberg from applying the same idea to the Shi’ite rulers of Iran:

Only when we understand the eschatology currently driving Iranian foreign policy, can we truly begin to understand how dangerous the regime in Tehran is. Only then can we fully appreciate how events like the revolution underway in Egypt only encourages Twelvers like Khamenei to take still further provocative and perilous actions to hasten the coming of the Twelfth Imam.

So the idea is afloat that both Sunni jihadists in Iraq and the Shi’ite state of Iran ay be about the “hastening” business.

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Blog-friend Dr. Timothy Furnish, as I’ve noted here before, rebuts the application of Paz’ concept by Rosenberg, Glenn Beck and others to the situation in Iran, saying of it:

It posits that there is a strain of Islamic eschatological thought which hopes to force Allah’s hand in sending the Mahdi, as it were, via sparking a major conflagration (nuclear, or otherwise) with the West (either the U.S. or Israel). This may be true of some of the Sunni jihadits with an apocalyptic bent, but there is very little evidence that such an idea is operative in the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ayatollahs may be cut-throat, anti-Israeli and anti-American-but they are not stupid. They know full well that any nuclear attack on Israel of the U.S. would be met with a crushing retaliation. (Besides, what good would it do for the Mahdi to come and establish his global caliphate over smoking radioactive ruins?)”

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And if I might ask a follow-up question — is the first of the Juhayman Letters, which is devoted to the theme of the coming of the Mahdi, available in English?

Top Billing! HNN Dr.Tim Furnish -The Ideology Behind the Boston Marathon Bombing 

…..Much of the world, including the twittering class, woke up to the relevance — if not existence — of Chechnya this past week. (The Tsarnaev brothers’ parents were Chechen, but Dzokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan and Tamerlan in Russia proper; both had also lived in Dagestan.) Still a part of Russia, despite violent efforts at independence, this small region is home to about 1.3 million people, mostly Sunni Muslims, and is located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Islamic militancy has been part of this Caucasus Muslim culture for at least two centuries, until recently mostly in the guise of the various Sufi jihads waged against their Orthodox Christian (or Marxist) Russian overlords — exemplified by that of Imam Shamil (d. 1859). (The Sufis are the mystics of Islam, usually peaceful but never pacifist.) Throughout the twentieth century the Sufis in Chechnya, Dagestan and environs — predominantly two orders known as the Naqshbandis and Qadiris — increasingly eschewed jihad and, in recent decades, their Islamic militancy mantle has been taken on by Muslims (both indigenous Chechen and foreigners, such as Arabs) of the more Wahhabi/Salafi tendency (who have even killed Sufi leaders there). Salafis are Sunnis who believe in emulating the salaf, “pious ancestors” of Muhammad’s time — think Primitive Baptists, but wielding swords. Wahhabis are a specifically Saudi Arabian type of Salafi, intellectual heirs of the Sunni fundamentalist Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) who had resurrected and repopularized the strict Sunni teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) which, inter alia, included a dislike of Sufis (for their love of saint veneration, seen as shirk, “idolatry”) and the duty to fight jihad against any rulers deemed insufficiently Islamic as well as, a fortiori, non-Muslims.

This was the Chechen Islamic context which incubated both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before they came to the U.S. as young men and, after over a decade here, seemingly assimilated. However, Internet sleuthing by various outlets indicates that the elder Tsarnaev, at least, was being pulled back into strict Islamic norms: he was a purveyor of the online sermons of one Feiz Mohammed, whose views were so Islamically “extremist” they might have made Ibn Taymiyya blanch; he may, as well, have become enamored with the ideas of a Pan-Islamic Caucaus Emirate and may have received training from jihadists of that self-styled polity; finally, perhaps most tellingly, Tamerlan was influenced by Islamic eschatological teachings about the coming of the Mahdi.   

Foreign Policy J.M. Berger -Boston”s Jihadist Past 

….It will take time to discover whether there was a militant connection and, if there was, to what extent it is pertinent to the Tsarnaevs’ decision to bomb the marathon.

But if the lead pans out, it won’t be Boston’s first brush with that faraway war. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, Islamist foreign fighters operated robust recruiting and financing networks that supported Chechen jihadists from the United States, and Boston was home to one of the most significant centers: a branch of the Al Kifah Center based in Brooklyn, which would later be rechristened CARE International.

Al Kifah sprang from the military jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Through the end of the occupation, a network of centers in the United States helped support the efforts of Afghan and Arab mujahedeen, soliciting donations and recruiting fighters, including at least four from Boston who died in action (one of them a former Dunkin Donuts employee). When the war ended, those networks did not disappear; they refocused on other activities.

In Brooklyn, that network turned against the United States. The center’s leaders and many of its members helped facilitate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and they actively planned and attempted to execute a subsequent plot that summer to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in New York, which would have killed thousands.

When the FBI thwarted the tunnels plot, the Brooklyn Al Kifah office and most of the other satellite locations were shuttered. But in Boston, the work continued under a new name and with a new focus: supporting foreign-fighter efforts in Bosnia and Chechnya. 

Dr. Chet Richards -Is 4GW dead? 

….The 9/11 attacks, by a transnational guerrilla movement, seemed to confirm 4GW in both of its forms. In the last few years, however, everything has gone quiet. Transnational insurgencies, “global guerrillas” as John Robb terms them, have not become a significant factor in geopolitics. “Continuing irritation” might best describe them, whose primary function seems to be upholding national security budgets in frightened western democracies. The state system has not noticeably weakened. So it might be fair at this point to conclude that although 4GW was a legitimate theory, well supported by logic and data, the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it proposed.

….The conditions for insurgency, as described by Boyd in Patterns of Conflict, had been defused by reforms in the early 20th century. Within the last 25 years or so, these conditions have returned. The austerity measures in southern Europe, the decline in living standards and economic polarization in the United States, and the enormous increase in firepower available to the general citizenry (at least in the US) will combine to produce abrupt changes in political organization. So long as the democratic process remains uncorrupted, these changes will be largely peaceful. In non-democratic states, and in those democracies where the beneficiaries of highly-skewed income and wealth distributions attempt to hang on to their gains by whatever means they deem necessary, we should expect higher levels of violence.

Social Evolution Forum – How to Overthrow an Empire and Replace it with your Own

Registan.net -Contextualizing Media Claims in Boston, About the Central Asian Link to those Boston Bombers, Freedom and Fear in Central Asia: How the Security Assistance Debate is Asking the Wrong Questions

Haft of the Spear -Explaining Computer Security Through the Lens of Boston 

Global Guerrillas -OPEN SOURCE WARFARE never goes away 

Marine Corps Gazette Blog - Marine Corps End Strength: 100k and End Strength 100k: Fixed-Wing Air 

Hmmm…America wants more than a tiny Marine Corps

Dr. David Ronfeldt -Further points about “tribes” (T) — plus a new proposition about TIMN as a whole

WPR Dr. Steven Metz -Strategic Horizons: U.S. Professional Military Education on the Chopping Block 

Campaign Reboot – Kill Chain 

SWJ El Centro - How to Win the Mexican Drug War 

Jamestown Foundation  - Shattering the al Qaida-Chechen Myth 

Nick Carr – Augmentor and Augmentee 

Presentation Zen -Should we be suspicious of stories?

That’s it!

[ by Charles Cameron -- and I should add that I don't think it's a matter of a minor side street crossing a grand boulevard ]
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I have high regard for Mark Juergensmeyer, whose book Terror in the Mind of God is rightfully a classic, and I don’t by an means always trust tweets from a TV channel… but in this case I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if NBC Nightly News had it right, and Mark Juergensmeyer was shading things just a bit too cautiously.

Sources:

Mark Juergensmeyer, Don’t Blame Religion for Boston Bombings

NBC Nightly News, on Twitter

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But look, I feel the way I do about the intersection of religious and political motives — in this and other cases — because I have some personal understanding of how passionate a matter religion can be, and a sense, too, that our secularizing age wouldn’t mind at all if religion quietly dropped off the edge of the world.

Having said that, I like to listen to the voices of those who may see things in a different light, so perhaps I may point you to two recent articles by two of the keener observers of the Islamist political scene — Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel:

Olivier Roy, Boston: More Like Sandy Hook Than 9/11

Gilles Kepel, Après le printemps arabe, l’hiver islamiste… Est-ce une bonne description de la réalité

Two people with very rich exposure to the varieties of contemporary Islam speak to us in those two pieces.

Top Billing! T. Greer -Far Right and Far Left – Two Peas in a Pod?

….There are two groups who consistently oppose this plutocratic “pragmatic” consensus: the far left and the far right. These two groups, seemingly divided, are united by their “radical” opposition to many otherwise unquestioned aspects of America’s standing political regime. To name but a few:

• The belief that the United States federal government should play a strong role in holding up the U.S. economy - particularly sectors deemed “Too Big To Fail.” 

• Strong support for subsidies or other forms of ‘corporate welfare’ for influential or strategic industries (“The Farm Lobby,” “Big Pharma,” and the energy sector – both the “Big Oil” and green energy varieties - are prominent examples).

• A commitment to America’s global hegemony and globalization writ large. The chosen instruments for this are transnational economic agreements, financial interventions (as pioneered by the IMF), or offers of substantial military assistance. 

• The use of drone strikes, special forces and other ‘limited war‘ operations as the most effective response to international terrorist movements.

• A disdain for the rule of law and governmental transparency. 

• Prioritizing national security over privacy and individual rights.

• Eclipse of the legislative branch in favor of an increasingly large, complex, and powerful executive. Outsourcing legislative policy making to congressional, think tanks, or industry wonks.  

Tea-party and Occupy members are opposed to most, if not all, of these things. However, identfying the real problem does not ensure the two sides will agree on solutions. What party program could unify the two sides? Mr. Parameswaran outlines one possible solution. He labels it “radical centrism: [....] 

An outstanding post . Hat tip to L.C. Rees 

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen – (Blaisep)Under a Field of Flowers: Captain Emil Kapaun 

….As Chinese Communist forces encircled the battalion, Kapaun moved fearlessly from foxhole to foxhole under direct enemy fire in order to provide comfort and reassurance to the outnumbered Soldiers. He repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire to recover wounded men, dragging them to safety. When he couldn’t drag them, he dug shallow trenches to shield them from enemy fire. As Chinese forces closed in, Kapaun rejected several chances to escape, instead volunteering to stay behind and care for the wounded. He was taken as a prisoner of war by Chinese forces on Nov. 2, 1950.

After he was captured, Kapaun and other prisoners were marched for several days northward toward prisoner-of-war camps. During the march Kapaun led by example in caring for injured Soldiers, refusing to take a break from carrying the stretchers of the wounded while encouraging others to do their part.

Once inside the dismal prison camps, Kapaun risked his life by sneaking around the camp after dark, foraging for food, caring for the sick, and encouraging his fellow Soldiers to sustain their faith and their humanity. On at least one occasion, he was brutally punished for his disobedience, being forced to sit outside in subzero weather without any garments. When the Chinese instituted a mandatory re-education program, Kapaun patiently and politely rejected every theory put forth by the instructors. Later, Kapaun openly flouted his captors by conducting a sunrise service on Easter morning, 1951. 

Emil Kapaun, US Army captain, Catholic priest, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient and a martyr for religious freedom, is the American Maximilian Kolbe

SWJ - Understanding Groupthink and Aligning FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency with Reality 

….To illustrate the nuanced challenges of groupthink, we informally surveyed a small group of Intermediate Level students at one of the Defense Department’s educational institutions.  The students were junior field grade officers from joint and international services, nearing the end of their year-long education.  Our survey asked two questions:  1) Whether their education had formally addressed groupthink as a subject; and 2) What were groupthink’s causes?  A little more than half of the group responded that while groupthink had been discussed early in their education year, albeit briefly as part of a broader class topic, groupthink was not a central focus of the class.  In response to the causes of groupthink, about half of the group cited dominant personalities within a group who ignored dissenting opinions, and the inclination of group members to remain within the group’s good graces by avoiding dissention.  Less than one-fourth of the responses cited direct pressure on any member who objected to group opinions.[2]  What strikes us is not what the students said, but what they did not say.

Two excellent and – I might suggest, related – articles.

Lexington Green – Margaret Thatcher: Revolutionary, Leader

….There is always a “them” who are the current ruling group. They are the ones dealt into the existing game, its apologists and advocates. To take them on, to organize and lead an opposition movement, the leader must have extremely strong character. Such a leader must be self-assured, know how things really work, and have a very thick skin. The leader must have no regard for conventional wisdom and no respect for the often unstated limits of what can be done or, even more, what is “simply not done” or “simply not said.”

As a practical matter, such a leader must have the capacity to speak plainly and clearly to a majority of ordinary people who are quietly victimized in the existing game, to show them how certain changes will be good for them, and good generally. They do not lead by force or lies, they lead by telling hard truths and gaining assent to the hard path to better things.

Mrs. Thatcher was such a leader.  

Strategic Studies Institute – (Manwaring) Venezuela as an Exporter of 4th Generation Warfare Instability and (Bunker) Op-Ed: The Need For A “Half-Pivot to the Americas” 

Kings of War – (Betz) Kim Jong Un, We’re all gonna be like three little Fonzies here, OK? and (Egnell) Rethink, but don’t dismiss – on U.S. training of foreign troops 

The Glittering Eye – Personal Computers Aren’t Too Good 

Forbes -Nanotechnology’s Revolutionary Next Phase 

Taking Note -Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error 

It’s easy to see how not trying to find out who had done the erasing–burying the problem–was better for Michelle Rhee personally, at least in the short term. She had just handed out over $1.5 million in bonuses in a well-publicized celebration of the test increases[9]. She had been praised by presidential candidates Obama and McCain[10] in their October debate, and she must have known that she was soon to be on the cover of Time Magazine[11]. The public spectacle of an investigation of nearly half of her schools would have tarnished her glowing reputation, especially if the investigators proved that adults cheated–which seems likely given that their jobs depended on raising test scores.

Moreover, a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own “Produce or Else” approach to reform. Early in her first year she met one-on-one with each principal and demanded a written, signed guarantee[12] of precisely how many points their DC-CAS scores would increase.

Relying on the DC-CAS[13] was not smart policy because it was designed to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses. It did not determine whether students passed or were promoted to the next grade, which meant that many students blew it off. 

Recommended Viewing:

Top billing! Sam Liles  - Manhattan project for cyber security 

Mr. Lewis Shepherd of Microsoft came to Purdue to give a talk for CERIAS awhile back and he talked about how equating the Manhattan Project to the world of cyber security is completely wrong. I liked his talk quite a bit, and it aligned closely with something I’ve been talking to people about for awhile. Talking to people is important. I know my impact on the world is going to be negligible but I’ve dedicated my life to infecting the youth of the world with a few stray ideas. They call it teaching, and it doesn’t pay much. I think Mr. Shepherd was making a good case that scope, and cause and effect, and process of one program might no align realistically with another program. The secrecy, single mindedness, and type of problem that was the Manhattan project has almost nothing to do with the quite different project of cyber security. Much like I’ll never be able to equate my teaching to Socrates, the cyber security community shouldn’t really think “Manhattan Project”.

….Everything you likely think about defense in depth is wrong. All of the audit and compliance stuff is wrong. The firewall and intrusion detection and prevention technologies are wrong. The autocratic and dictatorial policies of information security are wrong. The underlying theories of robust and resilient programming are wrong. There is nothing about the current information technology infrastructure that is security oriented. The foundations of the technologies are fundamentally at odds with creation of an information secure culture. Now to be honest I didn’t say this. Neumann, Saltzer, Cerf, Bernack, and so many other people said this long before I did. But, maybe you haven’t read their stuff before.

How can I possibly support that they are all wrong and don’t work? Pretty simple. They don’t. Though we can secure systems to some point we are almost always talking about a security absent some failure in the system. There is nothing really secure. This is a huge problem that breaks most peoples “common sense” way of thinking about security. Simply put the way we do things will never be secure and we should stop trying to fix things the way we know doesn’t work. 

Read the rest here.

John Hagel -A Contrarian View on Resilience 

In a world of growing uncertainty and mounting performance pressure, it’s understandable that resilience has become a very hot topic. Everyone is talking about it and writing about it. We all seem to want to develop more resilience. But I’m going to take a contrarian position and suggest that resilience, at least as conventionally defined, is a distraction and perhaps even dangerous.

….In this context, the conventional view of “bounce back” resilience for enterprises is profoundly dangerous. It simply increases the ability of the institutional status quo to survive when conditions demand a fundamental transformation. It increases the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do. We already face a growing mismatch between the institutions and practices that dominate in business and the needs of the markets and societies that are being re-shaped by the global forces outlined earlier. As long as this mismatch persists, we will face increasing disruptions and stress as struggle to maintain institutions and practices that are no longer viable. We don’t need to bounce back; we desperately need to move forward.

International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) -“Who Matters Online: Measuring Influence, evaluating content and countering violent extremism in online social networks“ by JM Berger and Bill Strathearn

J.M. Berger, author of Jihad Joe (reviewed here by Charles) frequently tackles Islamist militants and various kinds of terrorism at Intelwire but the focus in the above paper is on far Right,  white nationalist and radical racist strands of violent extremism

SWJ Blog-  (Bunker) Review: Intersections of Crime and Terror and (Sullivan) Spillover/Narcobloqueos in Texas 

A new Texas Department of Public Safety Threat Assessment report states that  criminal cartels are operating in Texas and are the No. 1 threat to the Lone Star State. Narcobloqueos (narco-blockades) are now being seen north of the border.

Eeben Barlow – Failing to Listen 

….Often, the government forces appear to be very well trained in running away

Timothy Thomas – Why China is reading your email

Abu Muqawama (Trombly) – Limits of Proxy Warfare in Syria 

GLORIA Center – (Col. Norvel DeAtkine) Western Influence on Arab Militaries: Pounding Square Pegs into Round Holes 

David Stockman - State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America 

ZeroHedge – List Released With 132 Names Who Pulled Cyprus Deposits Ahead Of “Confiscation Day”

Harvard Magazine -The Humanities, Digitized 

Chicago Boyz (Foster) -RERUN–Author Appreciation: Rose Wilder Lane

From BOYD & BEYOND 2012:

Dr. Chet Richards on the work of  Colonel John Boyd: