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In which ISI safe house do you have Zawahiri stashed, anyway?

None dare call Pakistan a Rogue State….until last night.

We’re going to be hearing it a lot more often, I think. Which is good because it is reality.

Perhaps it is time to look at al Qaida through a historical, analytical, lens that questions “To what degree was it always a state-sponsored terrorist organization?”

Recommended Reading on Bin Laden’s Death:

CNAS Experts Comment On Death Of Osama bin Laden

Lieutenant General David Barno, USA (Ret.), Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow: “The death of Osama bin Laden marks the most significant U.S. victory to date in the U.S war on terrorism.  Its full consequences will play out in the coming weeks and months, but it is not too early to characterize this event as a true ‘game changer’ in a decade-long conflict. Bin Laden’s influence came not from his daily command and control of al Qaeda cells around the world, but from the inspiration that his iconic leadership provided. His taunting image, his fiery words and his seemingly unstoppable videos have all served to sustain the motivation of a growing franchise of like-minded groups. Bin Laden’s death unravels that critical motivational thread, one that is unlikely to be replaced.  Al Qaeda as a brand built on one man’s personality and apocalyptic vision has just suffered a blow that, over time, may well prove lethal.  For now, it remains a deadly, diffused organization – but its end may now be more imaginable.”

Foreign Policy (Daveed Gartenstein-Ross) –Don’t Get Cocky, America

Essentially, bin Laden sat at the top of a major multinational organization during the Afghan-Soviet war. Its members included fighters, aid workers, and other volunteers. It enjoyed a significant media presence, external donors, and widespread support. And when al Qaeda later engaged in a global fight against America, bin Laden and his companions similarly understood the media and the struggle for sympathy and allegiance throughout the Muslim world as crucial battlefields. In a 2005 letter to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al Zawahiri noted that “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Zawahiri said that when it comes to attaining the caliphate, one of al Qaeda’s overarching goals, “the strongest weapon which the mujahidin enjoy, after the help and granting of success by God, is popular support from the Muslim masses.”

Col. W. Patrick Lang –#Are we there yet?

Any notion that some portion of Pakistan’s military and security institutions did not know of UBL’s long term presence in the suburbs of Islamabad is just silly.  Abbotabad is the home of Pakistan’s West Point.  Many retired officers live in the town.  We are to believe that the Pakistan equivalent of the FBI did not take an interest in this big compound with no telecommunications connectivity?  We are supposed to believe that?  I have too much respect for the Pakistanis to believe that.  They knew.  This is part of the phenomenon of “distancing” from the US that we have discussed so thoroughly here at SST.  If we think the Pakistanis are “allies,” then we are fools.

SWJ Blog –Bin Laden News Roundup, Bin Laden’s Abbottabad Compound and Robert Haddick’s A really bad day for bin Laden – and for Pakistan

Most notable was Obama’s willingness to shatter America’s relationship with Pakistan in order to take a gamble on getting bin Laden. For this raid is a black day for Pakistan and its relationship with the United States. As the White House background briefing on the raid makes clear, the United States kept the raid completely concealed from the Pakistani government. Combine this with the fact that bin Laden was found in a highly protected compound in a wealthy town near Pakistan’s capital, and a stone’s throw from a Pakistani military academy. Americans will be right to conclude that Pakistan was bin Laden’s long-time friend and not America’s. What little support Pakistan still enjoys in Washington will now likely melt away. Pakistan will have to look to China, its last friend, for the support it will need to survive.

That’s it.

May he rot in Hell. 

Osama Bin Laden, sponsor of 9-11 and founder of al Qaida is dead, killed in Pakistan by a US JSOC-CIA team, possibly with Pakistani cooperation (or…maybe not).

Details will emerge that Bin Laden has not been in a cave for the past decade.

A great day for the United States! The Obama administration deserves credit here and the military and intelligence personnel deserve our deepest thanks!

Ya Mullen Huzzah!  

About  goddamn  time ….

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

I thought I’d back-track a little, and drag in two blog posts that I made elsewhere back in March of 2008, which may help to explain my basic outlook on the sorts of issues that analysts face.

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I. The version of the idea as poetry:

I am Charles

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My concern is the human mind in service
to an open heart, and my problem
is that the heart picks issues rich in ambiguity
and multiplicity of voices, tensions
and torsions tugging not one way but
in many directions, even dimensions, as does
a spider’s web weighed down with dew –
to clarify which a mind’s abacus is required
.
equal in subtlety to subtlety itself, while
in all our thinking and talking, one
effect follows one cause from question
to conclusion down one sentence or white
paper — whereas in counterpoint,
Bach’s fugal voices contain their dissonance.

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II. The same idea presented in prose — as I say, a few years back — with graphical illustration:

Spiders and dewdrops

Spiders and dewdrops do a pretty convincing job of portraying a certain level of complexity in this node-and-edge diagram of the global situation.

When, say, Castro hands over power to his brother, or Musharraf has to give up control of the Pakistani army, it’s like snipping a couple of threads in that spiders web — and the droplets fall this way and that, carom into one another, the fine threads they’re on swing down and around until a new equilibrium is reached…

But try thinking that through in terms of Cuba and Pakistan before breakfast one morning if you’re Secretary of State, with a linear Cold War mind, Russia going through its own changes, and al-Qaida and associates training and recruiting in the background…

Well, those two instances have been and gone, and the new configurations are now the tired old same old configurations we believe we’ve figured out — until another dewdrop slips, and a thread breaks, and all things are once again new…

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Funnily enough, I think this spider’s web of mine ties in with the Hokusai quote I posted in response to Zen‘s quote from Steven Pressfield yesterday, and with a piece I read today about intelligence analysts — Martin Petersen, What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence.

It’s the web of tensions that constitutes the “complexity” that must somehow be grasped by the analyst, the writer, the historian…

And Hokusai, watching across the years how grasses bend in the winds, reach for sunlight, bow under the weight of dew — and spring back when released — may finally have a mind that’s attuned to that kind of complexity — to a degree that linear thinking will never reach…

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

Prospect magazine just published Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece Jihadi MCs — which is about Omar Hammami and his jihadist rap songs, and more generally, the use of pop culture and tech in jihadist recruitment.

Culture as recruitment: that interests me a great deal.

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I keep an eye out for Pantucci’s work. He’s an Associate Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation, and one of the people who writes about contemporary jihadism with insight. I follow his tweets and mostly click through up on the links he suggests, and we’ve exchanged emails a couple of times. So I clicked through to the Prospect site and read his piece.

And because I’m a writer, I tried to imagine his audience. Who, for instance, is this intended for?

But it is Somali group al Shabaab (“The Youth”) that is at the forefront of this new media approach. Omar Hammami’s recent hip-hop release is merely the latest from the jihadi MC. In his earlier work “First Stop Addis” he rapped about his earnest desire to become a martyr, over shots of him and his “brothers” training and fighting in Somalia. Released through extremist websites, but also widely available on YouTube, the MTV-inspired videos and songs seek to show kids how cool it is to be a mujahedin. Other videos released by the group show young warriors from around the world speaking happily into the camera as they boast, sometimes in perfect English, of how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” (unbeliever) government in Somalia.

First, like every researcher worth his salt, I imagine Pantucci peers into these things to inform himself, to figure out significant currents in the world he lives in: he’s interested, he’s engaged. Second, it seems to me, he must be writing with an eye to his peers in the field of jihadist studies, to inform them of what he’s been able to piece together, to alert and inform those who are actively engaged in decision-making as part of the war of ideas, and perhaps to hammer some sense into the pundits who routinely misinform the public.

But on this occasion he has a third audience: he’s also addressing interested parts of the general public himself — in this case, the readers of a British magazine.

*

For most of his Prospect readers, this article will be informative background reading – but not, so to speak, “actionable intelligence”.

Let’s say that the “actionable” part of what he writes – more accurately, the analytic content – is the gold, and everything else is the glitter.

The general reader of a magazine like Prospect takes in the gold with the glitter, but in all probability wouldn’t get the gold at all if there was no glitter surrounding it. If Prospect had published Pantucci’s paper, The Tottenham Ayatollah and The Hook-Handed Cleric: An Examination of All Their Jihadi Children (it appeared in the academic journal, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism) or his more recent ICSR paper A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists, I somehow doubt the readers of Prospect would have been so keen to read them. They contain, if you will, too high a ratio of “gold” to “glitter”.

The glitter is there in his Prospect piece on Hammami, we might say, to catch and hold those readers’ attention. To, if you will, recruit their interest.

Nothing new or bad about that, we all write for different audiences, with different ratios of anecdote and statistic, fact and anecdote, humor and persuasion…

*

Here’s what interests me.

The “glitter” in Pantucci’s piece isn’t from Pantucci – it’s the glitter that the jihadists themselves are adding to the “gold” of their Islamist message.

So if you read Pantucci’s piece not just to inform yourself on a few new data points about al-Shabaab but in the relaxed mode of your average magazine reader, all the bits that seem like the neat “glitter” that make the article well-written and readable …

hip-hop .. rap .. socially networked revolution .. funky imagery and slang .. fanzine .. videos and songs .. how cool it is to be a mujahedin .. other non-traditional means .. dial-in conference calls .. how much fun it is to be fighting against the “kuffar” .. Facebook messages .. “‘Sup dawg. Bring yourself over here” to “M-town.”

… are also the specifics that al-Shabaab is using to recruit the attention of those who more or less idly surf YouTube and run across one of their videos…

The glitter is the gold.

In this case, I mean, the cool is the recruitment.

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Update:

Of course, if the rap itself is uncool as rap, that’s not so cool after all…

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross @DaveedGR tweets: “Seriously, John Walker Lindh is a better rapper than Omar Hammami: http://bit.ly/ifoafQ” — and Adam Serwer @AdamSerwer: “The lyrics to Omar Hammami’s rap don’t do it justice. Dude just has absolutely no rhythm whatsoever.”

Dawg.