by Robert Haddick Brigadier General H.R. McMaster has sent to Small Wars Journal the latest draft of Army Capstone Concept version 2.7. McMaster leads a team at TRADOC that is charged with revising the Capstone Concept, which provides fundamental guidance to the Army’s doctrine and training efforts.
By December, McMaster and his team will complete their work on the Capstone Concept. Between now and then, he wants to hear from you. So please open this file, read it, and provide your comments, either here or at the Capstone Concept comment thread at Small Wars Council. McMaster and his team will read these comments and use them to improve this important document.
(You will note that the Capstone Concept draft we received is marked “For Official Use Only.” I assure you that we received this document openly from the Army and for the purposes explained above. McMaster and his colleagues at TRADOC want Small Wars Journal‘s readers to help them improve the Capstone Concept.)
Ok. Mil/intel/strategy/national security/COIN bloggers. We’ve been blogging on the “future of warfare” for five or six or more years. Some of us have also written books and journal articles, spoken at conferences and done op-eds. Along the way, there has been periodic lamentation (i.e. whining) that the powers that be don’t “get it” and no one pays attention anyway. Well HR McMasteris asking for input on shaping official military policy. A “put up or shut up” moment for the bloggers.
Returning as a guest-blogger, Charles Cameron, who is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with theCenter for Millennial Studiesat Boston University. The topic is an update on Cameron’s previous cautionary post on the potential implications of an emerging strand of Mahdism among radical Islamists.
( Ed. There will be an update later with two supporting images when I resolve a minor technical issue….)
Iran or Afghanistan? The Black Flags of Khorasan…
By Charles Cameron.
i
A couple of days ago I saw a video, posted on YouTube September 12, 2009, titled “The Army Of Imam Mahdi”. It carries the subtitle: “Soon the Army of Imam Mahdi will start its march from Afghanistan towards The Holy Land( Palestine ) and liberate it from the claws of Israel”. I have embedded it for your viewing convenience at the bottom of this post.
This video suggests that I should follow-up on my previous post, “Mahdism in the News” at , in which I noted that the personal representative of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Jurisprudent of (Shi’ite) Iran, had issued a call to neighboring and sympathetic nations to a joint mobilization in preparation for the return of the Mahdi.
That was a Shi’ite affair: but Sunni Muslims also await the Mahdi’s arrival, though not as the returning Shi’ite Twelfth Imam — and this video correspondingly offers us an appropriate parallel to Ali Saeedi’s call — but IMO should not be confused or conflated with it.
ii
I would like to make this much clear at the outset.
It is roughly as likely that the Ayatollah Khamenei would accept a Mahdi from among Al Qaida or the Taliban as it is that Pope Benedict would accept a Christ who staged his Second Coming in support of the fiercely anti-Catholic Rev. Ian Paisley of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.
That’s not a scholarly comparison, by the way — more of a powerful hunch. But I think it needs to be said.
The Imam Mahdi of the Shi’ites is himself their Twelfth Imam, who was born in 869 CE and then “occulted” — hidden from mundane sight — centuries ago, returning among us in the fullness of time. He is Shi’a of the Shi’a, Muhammad ibn Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the last and greatest in the great Shi’ite lineage of the Twelve Imams.
iii
It was Joel Richardson’s blog at that first alerted me to this video (hat-tip, Joel). He writes:
This is the first time that I have seen solid proof that al-Qaeda and the Taliban is thoroughly guided by Islam’s demonic eschatology. For those who claim that Mahdism is only held by Shi’a, take note that it is a Sunni group that has created this thoroughly Mahdist video and not Shi’a. Al_Qaeda and the Taliban literally views themselves collectively as the Mahdi’s army carrying the Black Flags that will march to Jerusalem to “liberate” it from the Jews. This is a full blown Al-Qaeda / Mahdi Army recruitment video.
I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. I’d say more cautiously that this is evidence that al-Qaeda and the Taliban can be construed in light of Sunni Mahdist expectation, and may view themselves as the Mahdi’s army — and definitely shows that a Mahdist current is at work in some Sunni circles.
The sheikh who is quoted in the video is from Trinidad.
In a more far reaching post at , Joel also claims that the video was ” released under the al-Sahab label” — the al-Sahab logo appears on some of the footage, but the video itself is not from al-Sahab as far as I can determine — and his subtitle, which may have been provided for him by a WND editor, claims the video contains “footage confirming unity of apocalyptic Muslims”. Given Joel’s reference in the same post to the recent Iranian “mobilization” call on which my own earlier post was also based, I think it is important to emphasize:
(a) that while Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims may both be in expectation of the Mahdi, and may indeed both (sometimes) draw on ahadith about his army coming with black flags out of Khorasan, this does not mean that the two streams of Mahdism can be lumped together as a single movement, and
(b) that this video appears to be a production of sympathizers with the Taliban, rather than an Al-Q / al-Sahab production.
iv
The key passage in the video is a discourse attributed to Sufi Shayk Imran Nazar Hossein, who says:
The true messiah will destroy the false messiah. And when that happens then a Muslim army will liberate the Holy Land. The Prophet said, when you see the black flags coming from the direction of Khurasan, go and join that army. That army has already started its march. They know it, and that’s why they demonize as a terrorist anyone, anyone who supports that army. That army will liberate every single territory in a straight line until it reaches Jerusalem said Muhammad (as). At the heart of Khorasan is Afghanistan, and that’s why they have occupied Afghanistan. When that army liberates every territory on its way to Jerusalem, there will be in that army Imam al-Mahdi, and so the liberation from oppression in the Holy Land is not going to come about through any negotiations…
This would appear to be the Islamic scholar Imran Nazar Hosein (to use the spelling of his name used on the website dedicated to his work ), and the video clip that shows him was very likely taken some years back.
His biography can be found here. He appears to have had a distinguished career, including a period spent as Director of Islamic Studies for the Joint Committee of Muslim Organizations of Greater New York, and is the author of Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem.
v
The video includes clips of various mujahideen firing weapons and practicing martial arts, including one with shots of riders with a black flag…
and an image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Baitul Maqdas), which appears to be their final goal.
vi
The hadith about the “black flags of Khorasan” mentioned here are, as I understand it, not strongly supported in the hadith literature, but they are available for quotation by those who wish to suggest that the Mahdist army will come from the general area now known as Afghanistan — or Iran, for that matter — a suggestion that gains interest as Afghanistan — or Iran — gains in geopolitical prominence…
Some quick indicators:
Sheikh Salman al-Oadah — once imprisoned for criticizing the Saudi regime and now one of its approved religious spokesmen — writes:
The hadith about the army with black banners coming out of Khorasan has two chains of transmission, but both are weak and cannot be authenticated. If a Muslim believes in this hadith, he believes in something false. Anyone who cares about his religion and belief should avoid heading towards falsehood.
Some people have used this hadith to support their claim that the Mahdi is from the family of al-Abbas and that the Mahdi is from of the Abbasid dynasty. There were Abbasid Caliphs who went by the name al-Mahdi.
The banners of the Abbasid State were black. It is not hard to see how this weak hadith might have been fabricated or at least tampered with to support the Abbasid cause.
That’s the negative view, to be set against significant Sunni jihadist currents that find the hadith useful.
As David Cook notes in his Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, p. 173-74), Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, “popularized the position of Afghanistan as the messianic precursor to the future liberation of Palestine” in his book, From Kabul to Jerusalem. Cook also quotes an Egyptian apocalyptic author, Amin Jamal al-Din, as identifying the Taliban with the black flags and the Mahdi’s awaited campaign.
And while Ali-Saeedi, the spokesman for Khamenei, did not mention the Khorasan and black flag hadith in his call for a general mobilization in preparation for the Mahdi’s coming, Cook notes that the hadith in question have earlier been applied to the Iranian revolution of the 1980s under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Timothy Furnish, in his book Holiest Wars: Islamic Manhdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, discusses the Khorasan (“today eastern Iran and western Afghanistan”) and “black flags” hadith together with various Western theses as to their historicity, concluding that “the mass of hadiths” in general functions like a marketplace in which there is “a saying of the Prophet available off the shelf as a legitimizing agent for just about any position”.
Combine that with the apocalyptic habit of associating apocalyptic texts with events in today’s news, and you have a field ripe for what millennial historian Richard Landes calls “semeiotic arousal”.
One unfortunate consequence of the obsession with “great power” status is that it leads Russians to neglect the internal conditions in their country. And here there is much to be done. To begin with: the economy. The Russian aggression against Georgia has cost it dearly in terms of capital flight. Due to the decline in the global prices of energy, which constitute around 70% of Russian exports, exports in the first half of 2009 have fallen by 47%. The stock market, which suffered a disastrous decline in 2008, has recovered, and the ruble has held steady, but the hard currency reserves are melting and the future does not look promising: The latest statistics indicate that Russia’s GDP this year will fall by 7%. It is this that has prompted President Dmitry Medvedev recently to demand that Russia carry out a major restructuring of her economy and end her heavy reliance on energy exports. “Russia needs to move forward,” he told a gathering of parliamentary party leaders, “and this movement so far does not exist. We are marking time and this was clearly demonstrated by the crisis… as soon as the crisis occurred, we collapsed. And we collapsed more than many other countries.”
….Today’s Russians are disoriented: they do not quite know who they are and where they belong. They are not European: This is attested to by Russian citizens who, when asked. “Do you feel European?” by a majority of 56% to 12% respond “practically never.” Since they are clearly not Asian either, they find themselves in a psychological limbo, isolated from the rest of the world and uncertain what model to adopt for themselves. They try to make up for this confusion with tough talk and tough actions. For this reason, it is incumbent on the Western powers patiently to convince Russians that they belong to the West and should adopt Western institutions and values: democracy, multi-party system, rule of law, freedom of speech and press, respect for private property. This will be a painful process, especially if the Russian government refuses to cooperate. But, in the long run, it is the only way to curb Russia’s aggressiveness and integrate her into the global community.
The biggest issue, like with China, is official corruption. The second is the pervasive depoliticization of the populace: they’ve never really had any experience picking their own leaders over the past 1,000 years. That fend-for-yourself mentality pervades the political system and its foreign policy. All citizens want from the state is order, and what they miss most about the Soviet past was that it preserved Russia’s contiguous empire beyond that of any in Europe or Asia.
Russians have no idea who they are today: they don’t feel either European or Asian. Eventually, they’ll come to some conclusion about what sitting between those civilizations means in terms of identity.
Russia has had repeated bouts of historical, “geographic schizophrenia”: the long Tatar Yoke, the age-old conflict between Petrine westernization and Orthodox slavophilism, the iron Soviet dictatorship, especially Stalin’s democidal rule. Russia has neither joined the West nor considered itself to be fully Asiatic. Instead, the Russians inherited a “Third Rome” complex from Byzantium that has helped keep them isolated from their own best opportunities as a great power. Fringe groups of ideologues promoting nutty “neo-Eurasianism” in Russia play upon this historical legacy.
To the extent that the cold-blooded Vladimir Putin and the Siloviki clan have made their nation into “Russia, Inc.” – a gas and energy monopoly in the tattered rags of a nation- state, the long term trend will be accepting globalization and integration, regardless of any deep cultural angst and Ivan Q. Public Great Russian nationalist-chauvinism along the way.
I have a mixed opinion on STRATFOR’s analytical products but Friedman is playing to his strengths here in a piece that is measured and thoughtful. Hat tip to Lexington Green.
LTC. Matt Morgan, USMC and Director of Public Affairs at US Marine Corps Forces Command, rolls up his sleeves and takes the highest ranking member of the US Armed Forces to task in a take-down guest post at Mountainrunner:
….Unfortunately, the reason for this gap can be laid at the feet of a few members of the Chairman’s own personal staff. Over the past few years, Adm. Mullen’s Public Affairs Office has systematically refused to take part in DoD’s various attempts to develop its integration processes or other Joint Staff and DoD efforts to coordinate organizational communication. As such, select members of the office appear ignorant to the efforts of other professionals across the U.S. military. They have failed to be the good listeners they claim to hold in such high esteem, and have consequently produced what reads like a condescending lecture from the Chairman.
Let us all be clear as to what this is really about. This is a turf war, and the authors have committed the ultimate sin of a staff officer: They have used their boss’ visage to advance their agenda, and in the process drawn an unfair portrait of a senior leader blind to the most progressive thinkers in his organization.
The authors are quick to undermine the term Strategic Communication, writing that the Chairman doesn’t care for it because, “We get too hung up on that word, strategic.” I don’t know who the “we” is in this case, but I can assure the Chairman that this is only true among those afflicted by what I call the “Type A” misunderstanding; that is, those who cannot get beyond the most literal comprehension of the word strategic. Oh, yes, a few of these types are out there. But when it comes to military leadership, anyone who has ever used the now-cliché term strategic corporal has at least a basic understanding of the notion that tactical actions can affect communication – for better or worse – at the strategic level.
The stated thesis of the essay, however, is belied by its conclusion:
Strategic communication should be an enabling function that guides and informs our decisions and not an organization unto itself. Rather than trying to capture all communication activity underneath it, we should use it to describe the process by which we integrate and coordinate.
Ah, there it is. The fear of subordination revealed.
If in fact, CJCS ADM Michael Mullen did not write his editorial, as LTC. Morgan asserts, I will have to retract my earlier praise. “Leadership” is not lending your name out to your staff to play el supremo. It’s fine for a busy man to lay out an outline of positions to an aide and then edit the aide’s draft; Eisenhower and Reagan, both excellent speechwriters, stopped writing their own speeches once they became POTUS. But saying “Here…do my thinking for me”, is not ok. It’s weak.
Assuming that Admiral Mullen did write his editorial, then the exchange with LTC. Morgan is what a healthy, intellectually open, adaptive organization should encourage and reward. Ideas matter, not rank.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
wants to hear from you. So please open this file, read it, and provide your comments, either here or at the Capstone Concept comment thread at Small Wars Council. McMaster and his team will read these comments and use them to improve this important document.
, 
and 
( I would pair the first with W.Bruce Lincoln’s 
to see the differences between the 
way eminent historians and political scientists handle the same topic). Dr. Pipes has written an op-ed for WSJ.com and it was reviewed by his former student, 
they’ve never really had any experience picking their own leaders over the past 1,000 years. That fend-for-yourself mentality pervades the political system and its foreign policy. All citizens want from the state is order, and what they miss most about the Soviet past was that it preserved Russia’s contiguous empire beyond that of any in Europe or Asia.
