Tag Archives: terrorism

#BringBackOurGirls: US will send hostage team to Nigeria

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nigeria-map-cia
If you want to see a multi-national popular pressure / “awareness” campaign that has actually made a difference, you’ll want to check out the #BringBackOurGirls effort all over social media in the United States and Nigeria.

The northern Nigerian separatist extremist group “Boko Haram” — background briefing here — recently kidnapped over two hundred girls from a boarding school as child brides for their members and sympathizers (and as a source of revenue). The Nigerian government, which has been more or less overwhelmed in the face of wave after wave of massive terrorist attacks by Boko Haram in the past several years, initially responded with relative indifference — essentially writing off the girls as just more unrecoverable casualties of the terrorists.

This prompted very justified outrage within the country — which is Africa’s largest economy, most populous nation, and the biggest power in West Africa — and within the major Nigerian diaspora population in the United States. This led to the creation of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign targeting three groups of people: Nigerian government officials, U.S. media and celebrities, and U.S. officials. After a slow start at the beginning, it caught fire and has gone viral. Tonight in particular, it is finally blowing up on Twitter, especially among celebs, although fortunately the two governments had begun grinding into action already.

The first and third groups of people are, of course, the ones most empowered to do something about the situation. But the celebs and U.S. media are key in force-multiplying the pressure on the U.S. officials. And that’s what we’ve finally seen happen, at very high levels.

Reversing course, Nigeria’s government and (very sizable) military have vowed to make an active effort to rescue the kidnapped girls — which is a huge improvement over the plan to do nothing.

And rather than ignoring the situation (or trying to find a way to bomb the problem away), the U.S. government is making specific and useful commitments to help bring the girls back, by sending a team of experts in hostage negotiation and recovery. According to Thompson Reuters reporting:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the American embassy in Nigeria is “prepared to form a coordination cell” that would include U.S. military personnel and law enforcement officials with expertise in investigations and hostage negotiations.

The U.S. “coordination cell” also would include people who could provide expertise on providing victim assistance, Psaki said.

 
It’s a reasonably small and easy commitment to make but it could make a very real difference.

Keep up the pressure. This effort has affirmed, in my mind, that a persistent social media campaign with clear, narrow, and specific goals to mobilize government resources in multiple countries is possible. And it’s a much worthier cause than some of the other viral campaigns we’ve seen.

Unfortunately, the New York Times reported today that Boko Haram has kidnapped more girls in a new, smaller attack. Let’s hope the U.S. effort will result in everyone coming home as safely as possible.

Beyond that and the immediate Nigerian government response, the only true countermeasure in the long-term to the overall terror campaign raging across northern Nigeria will be to inject substantially more development aid and investment into the country’s north. That can provide jobs to disaffected and disenfranchised potential recruits, discouraging them from joining such terrible organizations.

Want to put names to the numbers? Here are 180 names of those girls kidnapped in Nigeria in the initial attack.

Backgrounder: Who are the Boko Haram?

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Basic Facts

Location: northern Nigeria (and somewhat into southern Niger, the country to the north, where the U.S. has a military drones base)
boko-haram-attacks-nigerian-states-2010-2013

  • Northern Nigeria is mostly Muslim, southern Nigeria is mostly Christian
  • Always a tenuous balance of resources distribution and national leadership affiliation (north vs. south)
  • Boko Haram established circa 2003 but only became seriously active in last few years
  • Hausa language name = “Western Education is Sinful.” [Edit, 5/7/14: Apparently, more properly translated from Hausa as “Fraudulent Colonial Education is Sinful,” a local phrase developed in response to British colonialism and the Roman alphabet being imposed into the country’s North.] Full translated name = Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad.
  • They advocate for the imposition of total Sharia law, instead of the partial Sharia found in most northern states in Nigeria.
  • Violent, coordinated attacks against civilian, Christian, educational, political, military, or police targets across Northern Nigeria
U.S. Perspective / Longterm Outlook
  • U.S. government/military asserts close ties to “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (and thus to Arabian funding and Al Qaeda global network) – however, it may be more of a looser affiliation of convenience (see note at bottom).
  • Boko Haram uprising led in 2013 to an invocation of a state of emergency in the entire northern half of the country by Christian president Goodluck Jonathan. He is originally from the Niger Delta region, in the south, which was the site of a much older terrorism campaign by a different group. Pres. Jonathan has sent a lot of troops north, with mixed success.
  • Local leaders in the north say military approach is doomed to fail and only answer is development and job creation.

Read more

Somalia: When the terrorists go locavore

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Shabab-Logo-somaliaAccording to an al Jazeera report, farmers in a major grain-producing region of Somalia under the control of the al-Shabab terrorist group (responsible for much of Somalia’s post-2008 violence and several major terrorist attacks across Eastern Africa) say that the group’s farm reforms have been extremely beneficial.

After a 2011 famine killed 250,000 people, the Islamist group began construction on new irrigation systems and canals to prevent such disasters. In total, they’ve already spent $2 million on infrastructural development to boost farm capacity.

The group also more recently kicked out the Western aid NGOs (non-governmental organizations) who were importing non-local food for humanitarian relief purposes. While that food aid might seem helpful, it essentially meant they were giving out free alternatives to buying from local farmers. This established a cycle of dependency where no one bought food from local farmers (because they could get free meals instead) and then the local farmers became destitute as well and must depend on the food aid from the West. Each additional farm failure reduced the region’s food supply, further increasing dependence.

The next step al-Shabab took was to reform the tax system of their jurisdiction and drive up demand for the local food:

By not taxing farmers for their land but for what they produce, Boru said al-Shabab is encouraging more people to farm – which means more tax income from the increased produce. And by providing rent-free premises for restaurateurs who serve only locally sourced food, the group is maintaining the demand for local food and safeguarding their coffers, he added.

 
al-Shabab also staged a PR campaign to promote local food purchases, including having doctors tell patients it would be healthier to eat locally. Both production and demand have risen dramatically in the region and may help ward off famine and reduce extreme poverty. al-Shabab will, of course, also make a lot more revenue, which means that — beyond having more money to buy weapons for the civil war and terrorism campaigns — they’ll likely be able to provide additional social services and food aid to the needy in their territory.

Everyone wins, more or less. Even the Western NGOs will suffer fewer attacks after several years of skyrocketing attacks.

Like it or not, one of the ways terrorist groups become broad-based political movements, rather than just isolated bands of disaffected young men with violent solutions, is when they transition successfully into the role of de facto local government and social service provider.

This development — not overly surprising from a group that grew out of the governance-oriented Islamic Courts Union movement last decade — demonstrates a higher level of strategic and long-term planning than your average group of heavily armed rebels. In many ways, such reforms will make al-Shabab both a stronger military force to be reckoned with and a more legitimate political force to have to bargain with.

Last Uighurs released from Guantanamo; Here’s what to know

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central-asiaIn 2001, during the opening weeks of the War in Afghanistan, the United States military — partly coming in alongside Taliban arch-rivals the “Northern Alliance” — got to experience firsthand the deeply complex and fluid border regions of (and surrounding) northern Afghanistan, which are far more vaguely defined in reality than on maps. The wider region remains home to a multitude of different ethnic groups, religions, languages, and cultures. Some of these populations are still semi-nomadic and many, at the very least, don’t constrain themselves reliably to the modern borders of the countries.

“East Turkestan”

One of the places (just barely) bordering northern Afghanistan is China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Xinjiang, sometimes formerly known as Chinese or East Turkestan, is China’s largest administrative area. It is located in northwest China, north of the Tibet region, and it shares borders with several former Soviet Republics, plus Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Xinjiang is nearly evenly split between China’s overall majority ethnic group the Han and the ethnic minority Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) — who are the largest ethnicity in the Xinjian region, a situation which is highly unusual for Chinese minority ethnic groups nationwide.

Uighurs argue (probably correctly) that they are an oppressed minority in China. The Communist Party, in return, doesn’t trust them, both because they are dissimilar from the rest of the country and because they actively waged an Islamic insurgency during the 1950s against the People’s Republic of China. This rebellion was nominally in support of their Nationalist allies, who had fled to Taiwan after the end of the Chinese Civil War at the end of the 1940s, but was of course largely motivated by a desire for self-rule after many generations of outside domination.

In fact, Uighur support for the Nationalists was a rare exception to their historic trend of generally resisting all outsiders, including a Soviet invasion in 1934, the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and various Chinese dynasties that attempted to assert control over the area throughout history.

They are, essentially, another of the many small and diverse warrior cultures of Central Asia, which we’ve seen in action in Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the past decade — except that they happen to fall within China, on the map, as opposed to one of the “Stans.” And indeed they are more closely related to the ethnic groups in those areas than to the rest of China, which is one of the sources of conflict.

The population, as is true of much of the Western half of China (outside of Tibet), is heavily Muslim. As a result — and due to its borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan — they have been somewhat accidentally caught up in the Global War on Terror.

Wrong place, wrong time

During the confusion of the initial invasion of Afghanistan and efforts to catch those responsible for 9/11, the U.S. military rapidly detained a lot of people suspected of possible al Qaeda involvement and shipped them to the Guantanamo Bay military base in the U.S. exclave in Cuba.

Among them were 22 Chinese-born men who are ethnically Uighur and were living in exile in Afghanistan or the surrounding countries when U.S. special forces arrived in late 2001. Some of the Uighur detainees admitted involvement in the anti-Beijing “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” separatist group, which China considers to be a terrorist organization.

Beyond the specific detainees in Guantanamo Bay, some of the activists for Xinjiang’s independence are indeed associated with so-called “Islamic terrorism,” but this is arguably a new cosmetic face of a much longer resistance against Beijing. (As an aside, there’s a compelling case to be made that the same is true for the “Islamic terrorism” once again rocking the Caucasus region of Russia, in that Islam has become the latest face of a much longer resistance against a distant capital that favors a different ethnic group.)

It’s certainly true that some Uighurs have taken up arms once more against the Chinese government in the past couple decades, and many of those fighters have even gone to militant training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there’s still not much evidence that this is due to any desire for global jihad against the West, rather than due to convenience with so many nearby “experts” in the waging of modern insurgency.

Moreover, in terms of the detainees in Guantanamo, many were simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, while living as exiles outside China. None of those Uighurs who were taken to Guantanamo Bay in 2001, it seems, were associated with or particularly sympathetic toward al Qaeda.

Amazingly, this fact was determined by the government as early as 2003, a full decade ago. Yet, because the United States could not repatriate them to China due to their likely status as anti-governmental rebels, all the men were still in detention by 2008, when a judge finally ruled that the United States had to find new homes for them.

Suggestions of moving them to the United States — including to Newton, Massachusetts, where some of their defense lawyers lived (which seems to me like a pretty solid recommendation of their characters even after having been held for years without charge) — were universally met with unreasonable howls of terror by Americans.

Gradually, some of them were resettled in various countries around the world — usually through expensive deals with the U.S. government for various goodies, in part to offset diplomatic or economic retribution from China for agreeing to take in anti-Chinese rebels.

But it was not until the final day of 2013 that the United States finally released the last three Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay, to Slovakia, one of the six host countries. A full twenty of them were only released in the last eighteen months — again, despite having been cleared of involvement with al Qaeda back in 2003.

Rethinking Muslim insurgencies

China is no doubt still very upset that the United States didn’t just hand over “their” ethnic minorities for punishment, particularly after Uighur militants recently staged a suicide car-bomb attack in Beijing’s Forbidden City at one of the Communist Party’s biggest symbols in the country: the huge picture of Mao.

But perhaps China should consider a different strategy to end resistance in Xinjiang, much as the United States needs to change its approach to counterterrorism in Central and Southwest Asia. Addressing the root causes of discontent — often ultimately economic more than inherently identity-based — and returning autonomous or sovereign political control to various oppressed minority populations would go much further than endless military campaigns that cost many lives and a lot of money but never truly end resistance.

And the United States in particular needs to stop lumping together every rural Muslim male with a gun as an “Islamic terrorist.” It’s not a helpful approach to the conflicts from southeast Europe to northwest China and everywhere south of that (including much of Africa now). It’s just as bad as our refusal to make nuanced distinctions among different Communist-affiliated nationalist independence movements in Africa and Asia during the Cold War.

In fact, as we heard in 2004 from one detainee, we might be missing out on opportunities to make new friends:

One of the Uighurs held at Guantanamo went before a special tribunal on Friday to argue that he was not an unlawful enemy combatant and should not have been arrested in Afghanistan and kept in the detention camp here. The man, a 33-year-old with an artificial left leg, told the military panel that he was not an enemy of the United States and that he hoped America would one day help the Uighur independence movement.

 
We’ve heard this before, after World War II, when the United States decided to fight pro-American independence groups like the Viet Minh because of their Communist alignment, instead of embracing fellow anti-colonialists.

Unfortunately, as with recent terrorist attacks in Russia, the U.S. media is already beating the war drums to label the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in China and Central Asia a major threat to the United States, even though they have nothing to do with us and aren’t opposed to us.

Let us hope that the United States government will be chastened, at least briefly, by its grave mistake with the Uighurs we picked up in Afghanistan 12 years ago.

Summary of NYT’s Benghazi report

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libya-flagThe huge New York Times investigation into the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack was released today. Here’s the super short version of the key findings:

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

 
The full article is rather long — though I do recommend reading it fully — so I’ve also provided a more detailed summary below.

While Susan Rice’s initial theory connecting the Benghazi raid to the anti-Muslim video was quickly discarded by people — mostly Congressional Republicans — eager to tie the attack to al Qaeda, it seems pretty likely now (based on many eyewitness accounts) that it was in fact the spark and the 9/11 anniversary was coincidental. Meanwhile, al Qaeda has never even internally claimed responsibility for the attack, and their documents as well as phone intercepts seem to indicate they had not been able to establish a foothold locally yet and were surprised when the attack unfolded.

Instead, the attack was haphazardly and quickly planned in the preceding days (and partly improvised that night) by local groups — not al Qaeda or any foreign group — and the impromptu signal to attack was the news coming over Egyptian satellite TV that Egyptian protesters (against the video) had gotten inside the Cairo compound by that evening.

In contrast to the heavily defended U.S. Embassy in Egypt, the Benghazi consulate (in Libya) was virtually unprotected that night. Angry gunmen from nominally pro-U.S. local groups quickly joined into the attack, after falsely hearing that U.S. guards had shot peaceful demonstrators protesting the video. The video seems to have been the straw the broke the tenuous back of U.S. relations with the many unpredictable and heavily armed local factions (or at least their foot soldiers). When the few remaining dedicated pro-American gunmen arrived to try to stage a rescue of U.S. personnel, they were heavily outnumbered and forced to turn away.

Certainly, it seems reasonable to say that the consulate and the nearby CIA office should have had much better protection than they did — given that they had almost none — but there was no coverup and there was no pre-planned international terrorist attack to mark the anniversary of 9/11. But I’m sure the New York Times won’t convince anyone who thought it was a vast conspiracy or whatever.

The Right to Resist

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revolution-of-1830Another excellent article by Ta-Nehisi Coates (aren’t his always?):
Mandela and the Question of Violence

Funny how Americans reserve the right to resist tyranny through violence — it’s one of the core premises of hardline Second Amendment fans — but they also want to reserve the right to declare when it is acceptable for others to do the same. By arming some groups and opposing the arming of others. By calling some “freedom fighters” and some “terrorists” who must renounce violence. And so on.

Who made us the arbiters anyway?

I’m not going to say I’m not sometimes guilty of some of the same double standards, but I’m also a lot more open than most to considering the legitimacy (or at least understandability) of armed resistances, even if I think it’s inadvisable in many cases.

Related Reading – The Globalist: Slavery and Guns: America’s “Peculiar Institutions” | How U.S. “gun rights” today are an extension of a right created to preserve slavery.

Securing loose arms

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Besides regular domestic gun control and gun safety, there’s also been a growing concern since the fallout from arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s as to what happens to those weapons (and bigger, military-grade hardware) once they go overseas into war zones. So how to solve that? Lots of solutions are being floated, and The Economist has an extended rundown on them:

Technological tweaks may be able to make possible weapons that stop working after a certain period of time, or can only be used by specific people or in particular places. Proponents of such technologies believe they have the potential to succeed where political and legislative attempts at arms control have failed…

I suspect — and this is sort of alluded to in the article linked above — that the major flaw in these concepts is that the secondary market, particularly in developing nations, doesn’t acquire the weapons until maybe 15 years after they were sold to the primary buyers.

I’m not an expert by any means, but just from reading news descriptions of the equipment seen in various ongoing conflicts, I think they end up having a use lifespan of 20-30 years (depending on the type of weapons). So most of the technologies being developed now could probably be hacked or eliminated in refurbishment by the time the secondary market was using them.

It would be like selling safes with fifteen-years-behind-state-of-the-art security to third world banks and then being surprised that ten years after they were first cracked in the first world, people were able to crack them all over the third world and make off with lots of money.

I guess then the question becomes whether this high-tech approach is better than doing nothing. Letting top of the line U.S. weapons systems and light arms fall into the wrong hands is something to be avoided, but this may not actually be solvable. And other, older weapons that can’t be traced (or even new issues of old models by less scrupulous manufacturers in some countries) are likely to be fueling wars for many years still to come. The people selling the tech are pitching this as a panacea that will succeed where legal measures have failed. I don’t buy that.