zenpundit.com

By Charles Cameron

Something veeery interesting is breaking in the blogosphere: Leah Farrall is talking with Abu Walid al-Masri.

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Leah Farrall blogs with verve and insight. She has been a “senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal
Police and the organization’s al Qaeda subject matter expert” who served as “senior Intelligence Analyst in the AFP’s Jakarta Regional
Cooperation Team (JRCT) in Indonesia and at the AFP’s Forward Operating Post in response to the second Bali bombings”. She’s now working on here PhD thesis on “Al Qaeda and militant salafist jihad”.

One of the leading figures in the interwoven tales of Al Qaida and the Taliban is Abu Walid al-Masri, who also blogs. According to his West Point CTC bio, Abu Walid fought for eleven years as a muj against the Soviets in Khost, Afghanistan, where he “gained a reputation as a skilled and pragmatic strategist and battlefield tactician”. He criticized bin Ladin’s 1991 decision to relocate AlQ to the Sudan, and was an early member of Mullah Omar’s circle. He also served as a reporter for Al-Jazeera, and (as the profile puts it) ended up wearing “several hats: Taliban propagandist, foreign correspondent, and al-Qa’ida trainer and strategist.” He strongly opposed 9/11.

In his early writings, he quoted Lenin, Mao, and Sun Tzu — and his writings have been extensive. Leah writes that in her view:

“….his work (12 books in all plus articles) was the most comprehensive and accurate of all memoirs or first hand accounts of al Qaeda and more broadly the history of Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion. I reached this conclusion after literally spending years and years cross checking his work with other accounts and all manner of sources, from both sides, for use in my thesis…”

And now for the drama:

As Leah notes with understandable excitement, Abu Walid has begun to respond to her blog posts with his own.

Readers of Zenpundit already know the power of multi-blogger conversations, and indeed it was one such conversation that gave rise to the Boyd Roundtable book that Zen himself edited.

This engagement between Leah and Abu Walid takes things a step further — two enemies, one an intel analyst and the other an insurgent strategist, are now holding a debate in public across the blogs.

That’s an interesting conversation to watch in its own right — and I trust Leah will bring Abu Walid’s side of it across into English. It is
also, it seems to me, an historic moment in the use of cyberspace.

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Postscript:

Leah on Abu Walid responding to her blogging:

Text of Abu Walid’s response in Arabic — Leah notes she hopes to put up an English digest, if not a full translation, shortly:

It’s worth noting that there’s a somewhat similar conversation developing between some UK-based Sunni Salafist supporters of the Baluch action and western analyst-bloggers:

Again, it’s fascinating if you’re interested in web-based discourse, and with a nice Mahdist strand in there to please little old me.

I hope to pick up on that aspect with a post here shortly.

And then there’s blogger friend John Robb, who has recently been emailed by the Nigerian Henry Okah, whom Robb considers “hands down the most innovative and successful guerrilla entrepreneur in the world today”:

If you have visited SWJ Blog today then you have already seen that novelist and blogger Steve Pressfield is running an important paper by SF Major Jim Gant at his Tribes site:

One Tribe At A Time #4: The Full Document at last! 

I’ve been promising for several weeks to have a free downloadable .pdf of One Tribe At A Time. Finally it’s here. My thanks to our readers for their patience. On a personal note, I must say that it gives me great pleasure to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence I hope it will have within the U.S. military and policymaking community.

One Tribe At A Time is not deathless prose. It’s not a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members-and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again

Here is Major Gant’s PDF:

One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan

This matters because the Afghanisatan debate has been too much a COIN or CT or COIN/CT Hybrid discussion and this paper puts forward a strategy option based upon decentralization, which given the strongly localist tradition of Afghani politics, should have been on the table from the inception.  The nation-building, NGO, IGO community love to think in terms of “top down” or “capital city outward” but not every country has that kind of political tradition embedded in their national culture.

Top Billing! WIRED (Michael Tanji) – Spies Protest After Intel-Sharing Tools Shut Down

Having the worst intelligence failure in American history on their watch is no reason that the IC old guard can’t quietly kill some of the post-9/11 reforms designed to remediate their dysfunctional managerial culture.

“….Security concerns” is the excuse being used to take down uGov, but that doesn’t explain why BRIDGE has to go too unless “security concerns” is code for “we’ve been hacked.” That’s pure speculation on my part, but if you have tracked any of the traffic related to Cyber Command, the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, or the “Cyber Czar,” you know that systems like uGov or BRIDGE would make for attractive targets by myriad adversaries. And while such systems would surely be outfitted with some of the best security mechanisms the IC could provide, if it’s connected to the ‘Net, its hackable. Even a small compromise would be all the excuse needed to get such systems shut down en masse. The “deny all” security mindset that prevails in the community hasn’t prevented our adversaries from compromising us in the past, its really just a convenient way to hate on collaboration”

If crazy is keeping on doing the same thing that doesn’t work, then what do we call going back to the old way that doesn’t work?

Thomas P.M. Barnett – So Iran Caved on the Bomb. What Now?

….And so, after almost a quarter-century of quiet cooperation with the Americans, Israel is now on the verge of perfecting a multi-layered missile-defense shield that protects against short-range rockets coming out of southern Lebanon and Gaza, plus anything Iran can toss its way. Not only will Israel remain on the map following a potential first strike, it’ll have second-strike capabilities secure enough to wipe off the map any fantasy-league roster of neighboring Islamic regimes you care to name.

Proceedings (David J. Danelo) – Disorder on the Border

A Criminal Insurgency

In 2008, Los Angeles County Sheriff John Sullivan and analyst Adam Elkus argued that Mexico’s drug cartels represented a criminal insurgency that threatened state stability.¹ “Not all insurgencies conform to the classic Leninist or Maoist models,” wrote Sullivan and Elkus. “Some insurgents don’t want to take over the government or force it to accede to ideological demands. They want a piece of the state that they can use to develop parallel structures for profit. Inasmuch as they use political violence to accomplish this goal, they are insurgents-albeit of a criminal variety.”

That such an article is appearing in Proceedings indicates that the USG national security community, or at least the official portion of it, is inching closer to admitting that a catastrophe is building unchecked on our Southern border.

All Things Counter-Terrorism is a gold mine of a blog. Hat tip to Charles Cameron and Shlok Vaidya.

SWJ Blog – Toward a Kilcullen-Biden Plan?

A Tony Corn piece.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SECURITY NETWORK ( Samuel Logan and John P Sullivan ) – Costa Rica, Panama in the Crossfire

“….Around 65 percent of the drug smuggling traffic through Costa Rica and Panama is maritime, and most of the rest is over land,” Paul Knierim, an Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with experience in Central America and currently working as the staff coordinator in congressional and public affairs, told ISN Security Watch.

Extreme violence is also on the upswing. In April, alleged members of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel abducted two suspected Envigado Cartel members outside Panama City’s Metro Plaza mall, just one sign of the country’s burgeoning drug trade. It is fueling a new generation of gangs (108 gangs at current count), paid ‘in-kind’ with drugs by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other traffickers.”

Is it time yet to speak of Mexico “going Lebanon” in polite company?

Global Guerillas – HENRY OKAH!

John Robb, premier theorist of systemic insurgency and systempunkt, is contacted by a transnational practitioner of global guerillaism. Commenters go nuts.

Steven Pressfield – Interview with a Tribal Chief #4: Warlords and Taliban

….Chief Zazai: The people are caught between two fires. When the warlords ran Afghanistan after the Soviets got kicked out, a poor person had to pay a “tax” to have a bicycle, to buy rice, if you sneezed they took money out of your pocket. The Taliban arose in response to this and were backed by the people who thought, These guys are bad but at least they are honest. At least they believe in something beyond their own greed and gangsterism. But then the Taliban became just as much of a plague upon the people by jamming their cruel ways down everybody’s throat. And we saw what Mullah Omar let happen, culminating on 9/11.

John Seely Brown: “The Social View of Learning”

Complexity and Social Networks Blog – You Lie 2.0

Any attention, even the worst kind, is leverage. If you know how to use it.

The Glittering Eye – Are We Promoting Our Grand Strategy?

Altogether this provides the United States with an ability to project force unparalleled in human history. Our military spending is commensurate with that and by nearly any reckoning we spend more on our military than any other country. Indeed, our spending exceeds that of the next fourteen largest spenders by a considerable margin, 41.5% of all military spending.

Whether we should be spending that much or will continue to spend that much is a matter of lively, sometimes bitter, discussion. Although I think its a reasonable subject for discussion, that’s not the question I’d like to raise here. My hydra-headed question is does our degree and manner of projection of force promote our grand strategy

Dave always likes to ask the uncomfortable questions. 🙂

That’s it!
 

Is coming.

Rand emeritus David Ronfeldt posed an interesting question in the comment section of an earlier post that I wanted to bring to the fore, make a few observations about and open for some crowdsourcing to see if anyone has some good information on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC or Pasdaran) leadership:

I had a stray thought this morning about Iran’s IRGC, and wanted to risk asking about it somewhere.  in doing a quick search of blogs I follow, this is the only one that has recently made passing reference to the IRGC, specifically in this post.  so I’ll try first here.

I keep re-learning what a massive operation the IRGC is – tantamount to  what Jane Jacobs termed a “monstrous moral hybrid” perhaps.  the IRGC/IRG starts as an effort to consolidate various paramiltary forces following the 1979 iranian revolution.  now it has its own ground, naval, air, and special forces.  more interestingly, it has expanded economically, and acquired assets to become a multi-billions enterprise, including public construction projects, and even dentistry and travel.  it can shut out private business competition, for it can easily underbid and then overrun, while also using recruits and conscripts as labor.  in sum, it represents an hybrid of tribal, hierarchical, and market priniciples, if not network ones too. 

Now, that supports the usual way of looking at this:  just a gigantic hybrid operating inside a state, almost as a semi-autonomous state within a state.  and that’s not uncommon in many countries.  the chinese and cuban militaries are heavily involved in economic enterprises too.  and in parallel fashion, this is a growing trend  among criminal enterprises as well, like the zetas mentioned in your reading  recommendations above.  

but then I had this stray thought:  the IRGC is not so much a state within a state, as a caliphate within a state.  I am not well-informed about how to define and think about caliphates.  but the little I know leads me to think this might be a thought worth further consideration and analysis.  esp. if the irgc could be considered as a model for an emerging Shia caliphate, and one that is way ahead of radical Sunni aspirations. 

so: an emerging caliphate within a state.  any comment?  advice for further thinking?   

I am not a Persianist or expert on Twelver Islam but David’s questions cross a number of disciplinary boundaries, as most interesting questions usually do. Using one “lens” here, such as security studies or Iranian history or IR theory, by themselves, are not enough with a semi-opaque government like that of Iran. This analysis probably should be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, so I welcome anyone out there with a relevant perspective to add what you know about Iran and the Pasdaran in the comment section.

I think that the issues here are structure, behavior and motivation of the Pasdaran as an institution within Iran.

First on the “state within a state”model:

If we look at previous historical examples of “state within a state” entities with which to compare the Pasdaran, the SS and the NKVD stand out as superior in my mind to that of China’s PLA, which was always tightly integrated into the CCP ( much moreso than the Soviet Red Army leadership in the USSR) and as a regular army, never dominated the party after 1949.  By contrast, the SS after 1934 quickly “mestastasized” to “colonize” the Gestapo ( memory tells me that SS men were something like a third of Gestapo officers) and Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler attempted to do so with other ministries by granting influential Nazi party organ and German state officials high SS rank, enjoying a limited success in penetrating other centers of power in the Third Reich. The war and the Holocaust allowed the SS to field an elite guard army in the Waffen-SS and supplementary expeditionary/constabulary forces abroad in the form of Einsatzgruppen, Totenkopf and ordinary reserve police battalions under SS command.

The expanding concentration camp structure permitted the SS to become an economic power within the Third Reich in its own right both as a provider of slave labor to private industry and Nazi ministries for Labor, Agriculture and Armaments and War Production and in factories and mines controlled directly by SS concentration camp commandants. Albert Speer was Himmler’s most determined (and successful) rival in thwarting the growing power of the SS in economic affairs and Speer’s last book, published posthumously, INFILTRATION is a rambling but detailed account of Himmler’s bureaucratic imperialism and chilling ambitions for a postwar Nazi world ( an understudied and valuable book for insights into what might have been had Hitler won WWII).

The NKVD in the Beria period had an even more privileged and extensive place in Stalin’s USSR than the SS occupied in the Third Reich but the Soviet planned economy was substantially different from that of Germany’s or that of Iran’s today. While the NKVD had its own empire of enterprises, the capacity of the NKVD to maximize their value was sharply limited by fear of Stalin”s paranoid caprice and the absence of any private economy in the Soviet Union with which to profit from any ill-gotten gains. Nazi Germany’s weird, Fascist, economy with it’s mixture of oligopolistic cartels, private enterprise and state planning ( described well in Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy) and the place of the SS in it is a better analogy to Iran’s state enterprises, bazaari business elite, bonyads and undercapitalized small business sectors

On the IRGC as the seed or kernel of a “Caliphate”:

This is an ideological and motivational question that is apart from normal, secular, bureaucratic expansionism.

First, I’m not certain that “caliphate” is the best way to frame the discussion. All Shia Muslims are literally the Shiat ‘Ali or “Party of Ali”, going back to the dispute over succession to the Prophet Muhammed. I have to heavily qualify my comments by stating this is not my area of expertise, but as far as I am aware, “caliphate” has not been a major part of historical Shia dialogue as the modern Iranian clerical establishment emerged under the Qajar dynasty or later under the Pahlavis. The Persian Shahs did not claim that title, which was held by the Ottoman Sultan until it was abolished by Ataturk. A more appropriate question, which I believe David is getting at, would be “Is the IRGC leadership Mahdist?”.

If the IRGC is orthodox Shia in its orientation, then we might expect that the Pasdaran would behave more or less as a secular, if ideologically hardline, national security bureaucracy and a force within Iran for “siloviki” policies, Iranian style.

If the IRGC senior leadership has a heavy crossover in membership with the Hojjatiyeh, that would be far more worrisome and would raise the level of uncertainty regarding Iranian state behavior in crisis situations .

“Mahdi” theology is semi-heretical Islamic doctrine and has differing forms in Sunni and Shia Islam, on which I am not qualified to opine, but for our purposes, we can state that it contains a fairly dangerous element of apocalyptic millenarianism as a worldview. Moreover, in the Iranian context, the quasi-divine Hidden Imam emerging from Occultation, as virtually a messenger of Allah, would not be bound by any of the constraints contained within the Quran. Islamic jurisprudence normally disdains “innovation”, in interpreting scripture, but the Mahdi (and more importantly, his true believer followers) would be the great and messianic exception.

Of course, what we really need here is some hard data ( or at least reasonably informed speculation) regarding the factions within the Pasdaran and the clerical hierarchy, and their strength relative to one another. Since the election protests, the Pasdaran appears to have become the major political force inside the regime, akin to the KGB in the days of Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, except the KGB in the 80’s saw the need for economic reform in the USSR and the Pasdaran today appears to be entirely reactionary in its policy prescriptions for Iran.

Comments? Questions? Complaints?