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 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.

To the legacy society of the nation-state and the hierarchical transnational corporation:

MILESTONE

….It’s time to up the ante and move onto the next phase:  the birth and rapid growth of new societal networks.*  This is going to be a fun ride!

* As in, new societal networks that can outcompete (trounce evolutionarily) all existing status quo organizational forms  (this should not be confused with the diminutive form of ‘social networking,’ as in Facebook and Twitter).

Long term, I think this is correct and that Robb is, as usual,  ahead of the curve on what will become the zeitgeist in the next few decades ( I will add that this evolutionary path appears to be happening much faster than I had considered, by at least 15-20 years). The movement in the 21st century will be toward networked civilizations on one end of the spectrum that will be pretty nice places to be and on the other, a kind of emergent, hypermobile, barbarism where life is hell on Earth. 

The proper response for existing institutions is to swing their resources, their mass and their remaining legitimacy behind the triumph of the former and gracefully adapt and acclimate rather than be disintegrated by the latter. I considered this in the essay ” A Grand Strategy for a Networked Civilization” that I wrote for Threats in the Age of Obama (p.208):

….Nation-states in the 21^st century will face a complex international ecosystem of players rather than just the society of states envisioned by traditional Realpolitik. If the predictions offered by serious thinkers such as Ray Kurzweill, Fred Ikle or John Robb prove true, then  technological breakthroughs will ensure the emergence of “Superempowered Individuals”[1] on a sizable scale in the near future.  At that moment, the reliance of the State on its’ punitive powers as a weapon of first resort comes to an end.  Superemepowered individuals, separatist groups, insurgents and an “opting-out” citizenry will nibble recalcitrant and unpopular states to death, hollowing them out and transferring their allegiance elsewhere.

While successful states will retain punitive powers, their primary focus will become attracting followers and clients in whom they can generate intense or at least dependable, loyalty and leverage as a networked system to pursue national interests.  This represents a  shift from worldview of enforcement  to one of empowerment, coordination and collaboration. States will be forced to narrow their scope of activity from trying to supervise everything  to  flexibly providing or facilitating core services, platforms, rule-sets and opportunities – critical public goods – that the private sector or social groups cannot easily replicate or replace.  Outside of a vital core of activity, the state becomes an arbiter among the lesser, interdependent, quasi-autonomous, powers to which it is connected.”

In other words, America and our “leaders” need a Boydian strategy and a ruthless commitment to honest clarity and sacrifice in order to weather the transition and retain some relevance. This is what makes the current cultural trend toward a political economy of oligarchy among the elite so worrisome. Their careerist self-interest and class values will push them to make all the wrong choices at critical junctures.

Matt Armstrong has sent out a call to arms on our most important structural problem in foreign policy – that the Department of State is broken as an institution and needs a complete overhaul on the lines of The Goldwater Nichols Act:

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

….The last major reorganization of the State Department was in 1944. That reshuffling was internally driven, and today’s change could occur within the bureaucracy’s walls as well. But the complexity of the department today likely requires a major realignment of fundamentals, something on the order of magnitude of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. That landmark legislation shifted the Defense Department’s operational focus from the services (Army, Navy, Air Force) to the regional commands (Central Command, Pacific Command, etc.).

Foggy Bottom’s regional bureaus are, on their face, like the Defense Department’s combatant commands. But in reality, they are merely support staff for the embassies (the “country teams”). If Defense were to mimic State’s structure, it would be akin to making European Command subservient to individual U.S. military bases in Europe.

Each of State’s regional bureaus are led by an assistant secretary who reports to the under secretary for political affairs. (The under secretary also has other responsibilities, such as overseeing development and implementation of U.S. government policies with the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, as well as the fight against international narcotics and crime.) The under secretary, in turn, reports to the Secretary of State. By contrast, the combatant commander, the assistant secretary’s ostensible counterpart in Defense, has a direct line to the Secretary of Defense.¹

The State Department’s hierarchy was fine for another era when issues were confined within state borders by local authority, geography, and technology. But in recent years, the structure’s flaws have become conspicuous. The department’s ability to respond to crisis is fragmented and sclerotic. When successes do happen, they tend to be the result of individuals working around or outside the bureaucracy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has circumvented the current system with crisis-specific czars called Special Representatives. These Special Representatives, like Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, operate like super ambassadors with regional powers that should reside – but don’t – in the regional bureaus.²

For State to be a viable national security actor, the old hierarchy must be flattened and power should be redistributed. It is hard to imagine isolating a combatant commander by reducing his rank to three-star general and having him report to a four-star general – who then decides what the Secretary of Defense should be bothered with.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a subject on which I have written many times and I am in complete agremeent with Matt.

We might even go beyond Goldwater-Nichols and think in terms of the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947 under Truman which saw the end of the Department of War and the absorbtion of the Department of the Navy into Defense along with the other armed services.  State’s perverse dysfunctionality and empty pockets budget ( blame Congress here) has crippled public diplomacy, international development aid and the interagency process in which State too often plays the role of bureaucratic obstruction or hapless bystander.

What are the civilian foreign policy tasks we need to accomplish as a country and how can we streamline and empower our agencies so that we can advance our national interests ?

John Hagel is in a small category of thinkers who manage to routinely be thinking ahead of the curve ( he calls his blog, where he features longer but more infrequent posts than is typical,  Edge Perspectives). I want to draw attention to the core conclusion of his latest:

Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback

Innovation blowback

Five years ago, John Seely Brown and I wrote an article for the McKinsey Quarterly entitled “Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.” In that article, we described a series of innovations emerging in Asia that were much more fundamental than isolated product or service innovations. We drew attention to a different form of innovation – institutional innovation. In arenas as diverse as motorcycles, apparel, turbine engines and consumer electronics, we detected a much more disruptive form of innovation.

In these very diverse industries, we saw entrepreneurs re-thinking institutional arrangements across very large numbers of enterprises, offering all participants an opportunity to learn faster and innovate more effectively by working together. While Western companies were lured into various forms of financial leverage, these entrepreneurs were developing sophisticated approaches to capability leverage in scalable business networks that could generate not just one product innovation, but an accelerating stream of product and service innovations.

…. Institutional innovation is different – it defines new ways of working together, ways that can scale much more effectively across large numbers of very diverse enterprises. It provides ways to flexibly reconfigure capability while at the same time building long-term trust based relationships that help participants to learn faster. That’s a key breakthrough – arrangements that support scalable trust building, flexibility and learning at the same time. Yet this breakthrough is occurring largely under the radar of most Western executives, prisoners of mindsets that prevent them from seeing these radical changes.

Read the whole thing here.

Hagel is describing a mindset that is decentralized and adaptive with a minimum of barriers to entry that block participation or information flow. One that should be very familiar to readers who are aware of John Boyd’s OODA Loop, the stochastic/stigmergic innovation model of John Robb’s Open Source Warfare, Don Vandergriff’s Adaptive Leadership methodology and so on. It’s a vital paradigm to grasp in order to navigate and thrive in the 21st century.

Western executives (think CEO) may be having difficulty grasping the changes that Hagel describes because they run counter to cultural trends emerging among this generation of transnational elites ( not just big business). Increasingly, formerly quasi-meritocratic and democratic Western elites in their late thirties to early sixties are quietly embracing oligarchic social stratification and use political or institutional power to “lock in” the comparative advantages they currently enjoy by crafting double standards through opaque, unaccountable authorities issuing complex and contradictory regulations, special exemptions and insulating ( isolating) themselves socially and physically from the rest of society. It’s a careerism on steroids reminiscient of the corrupt nomenklatura of the late Soviet period.

As the elite cream off resources and access for themselves they are increasingly cutting off the middle-class from the tools of social mobility and legal equality through policies that drive up barriers to entry and participation in the system. Such a worldview is inherently zero-sum and cannot be expected to notice or value non-zero sum innovations.

In all probability, as an emergent class of rentiers, they fear such innovations when they recognize them. If allowed to solidify their position into a permanent, transnational, governing class, they will take Western society in a terminal downward spiral.

A great guest post at War Historian.org.

Why Military History Matters: Another Perspective

….Those unsympathetic to military history sometimes grumble that military historians simply posit the importance of military history as its own sub-discipline, with its own internal standards of scholarly value, depending in part on a mastery of distinct forms of military knowledge – defined around “operational” issues (i.e. historical topics that focus either directly on the fighting and violence that occurs in war, or issues closely related to that violence, as opposed to other topics such as the social composition of armies, gender views among combatants, etc.).  First off, military historians have in the past made attempts to argue for the importance of events such as battles – for example, James McPherson’s argument for important turning points during the American Civil War, which argue that certain battles could have turned out differently, leading to significantly different historical outcomes.  This is a classic counterfactual argument, and one also used by allied (and increasingly scarce) practitioners of political and diplomatic history.

While sympathetic to this argument, I would like to add another one to the mix.  Military history must by necessity remain a distinct sub-field, with its own distinctive body of knowledge and methods to master, because war itself represents a peculiar and distinctive form of human activity, focused above all else on a socially abnormal use of violence that larger societies both glorify and condemn