Eric Umansky

Londonistan

The Jamestown Foundation, which does some of the best analyses of  jihadism,  put out a report last year about how Britain's lax asylum laws have helped make it a  home-away-from-home for many Islamic militants.

This kind of argument can  easily morph into racism or xenophobia. But the Jamestown folks. are serious analysts not 'immigration reformers' looking to  score cheap points.  And despite the queasiness connected to the conclusions they might also be accurate.  They're at least worth a read: 

You could say that London has become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East. A framework of lenient asylum laws has allowed the development of the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Just ask the French, whose exasperation with the indulgent toleration afforded to Algerian Islamic activists led them to dub the city dismissively as “l’antechambre de l’Afghanistan.”

They certainly have a point. Many of Bin Laden’s fatwas were actually first publicized in London. In fact, the United Kingdom in general seems to differ from other European states in the degree to which it became a spiritual and communications hub for the jihad movement. As such, it can furnish the indefatigable researcher a wealth of primary source material on Islamic terrorism.

The refuge the United Kingdom offers Islamist opposition is little short of bizarre. What appears to have happened is that the country’s asylum laws were designed to protect only dissidents and refugees from foreign governments. Victims of other persecutions, such as sectarian or ethnic struggles, fall through the net. The result of this is that, for the Middle Eastern refugee population, a proportion of them can claim asylum specifically on the basis of their Islamist political opinion and activity.

[...]

The latitude granted by British law to activities other countries would find impermissible has bred a stock of legally savvy Islamists who know how to express themselves as provocatively as possible but just staying a whisker within the law. Anjam Choudry, the chairman of al-Muhajiroun is a lawyer himself, and another master of the art is the Syrian born radical Islamist and veteran of the 1982 Muslim Brotherhood uprising, Sheikh Omar bin Bakri Muhammad, a founder of Hizb al-Tahrir and co-founder of al-Muhajiroun. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, Bakri had long presented himself as the spokesman of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, and funder of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But he came to notoriety as far back as 1991 and the first Gulf War when he claimed that the then UK Prime Minister, John Major, was “a legitimate target; if anyone gets the opportunity to assassinate him, I don’t think they should save it. It is our Islamic duty and we will celebrate his death,” [3] a point which he later clarified as “a legitimate target if he were to set foot in a Muslim country.”

The contradiction with reality is somewhat startling, as Sheikh Bakri acknowledged to the press that he had been living on social benefits from the British government of “nearly £300 a week in state handouts for himself, his wife, and their five (as of 1996) children.” He explained it thus: “Islam allows me to take the benefit the system offers. I’m fully eligible. It is very difficult for me to get a job. Anyway, most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefit.”

I don't know that the analysis is right--maybe it has the facts all screwed up. But it's worth finding out more about...

"Because he used to be with us"

As I flagged in TP last week, there have been some questions about the Big Shot status of al-Libbi. But even when I wrote about it a few days ago, it was clear that whatever his exact rank (which isn't neccesarily a useful or realistic metric)  many people in the know honestly believe that al-Libbii was some kind of significant player among the Osama-connected jihadists in Pakistan. This coming week's  Time  has a tidbit lending weight to that--and notice how it's not based on intel sources:

Hours before the Libyan's arrest was made public last Wednesday, two Pakistani journalists received telephone calls from men identifying themselves as al-Qaeda. The callers asked that news of al-Libbi's arrest be broadcast, hoping to dissuade other operatives from trying to contact him and to alert his associates to flee before U.S. and Pakistani authorities could track them down. When asked how he knew that al-Libbi had been caught, the caller replied, "Because he used to be with us."

The U.S.'s Quid Pro Quo in Sudan?

In this  morning's LAT, Ken Silverstein repors that the administration and Sudan are now BFF on the counter-terrorism front:

"They've not only told us who the bad guys were, they've gone out and gotten them for us," a U.S. source familiar with Sudan's cooperation said. "Hell, we can't get the French to do that."

Silverstein spends most of his  ink detailing the relationship, and simply raises the possibility that U.S. might go soft on Darfur as a kind of thank-you note. But Silverstein is missing something: The U.S. has already softened its stance on Darfur.

As Darfur-junkies know, the U.S. recently retreated from its labeling of Darfur as genocide. The labeling was just symbolic to begin with. But rhetoric can equal pressure. So why the ease up? 

Meanwhile, the genocide  rowback seems to be a harbinger of  a more substantive sellout.  The  Prospect reports:

An April 25 letter from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis obtained by the Prospect, the administration signaled its desire to strike the Darfur Accountability Act from the supplemental. Couching its reservations in a suggestion that the act may impede a separate peace accord reached between Khartoum and the rebels in south Sudan, the administration is now leaning on its congressional allies to scuttle the bill. "We are hearing that House Republicans will try to pull it out of conference," a well-placed congressional source told the Prospect.

Here's the Prospect's summary of the Accountability Act, which has already passed the Senate:

Led by Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas and Democrat John Corzine of New Jersey, the act appropriates $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur and establishes targeted U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime, accelerates assistance to expand the size and mandate of the African Union mission in Darfur, expands the United Nations Mission in Sudan to include the protection of civilians in Darfur, establishes a no-fly zone over Darfur, and calls for a presidential envoy to Sudan.

Not all that radical, right? So why is the administration opposing it?

You can argue that this all worth it:  Ignoring genocide is just the price you might have to pay for fighting terrorism.* I'd welcome that debate.

*Assuming there really is a cause and effect here. It's possible that the administration is going soft on Darfur for other reasons. Or a mix of them. Who knows.

Another Painful Powell Moment

Add another home run to the list of solid hits made  by Colin Powell during his fantabulist appearance before the U.N.  Powell, perhaps you remember, referenced an al-Qaida afilliated  "poison-cell" that had been operating in Britain.

Turns out a  jury just ruled on the case. Their conclusion: not so much. From Globalsecurity.org:

The trial of the infamous "UK poison cell," a group portrayed by Secretary of State Powell as al Qaida-associated operatives plotting to launch ricin attacks in the United Kingdom and in league with Muhamad al Zarqawi in Iraq, found nothing of the sort. The jury did find "the UK poison cell," known as Kamel Bourgas and others (Sidali Faddag, Samir Asli, Mouloud Bouhrama, Mustapha Taleb, Mouloud Sihali, Aissa Kalef), not guilty of conspiracy to murder by plotting ricin attacks and, generally speaking, not guilty of conspiracy to do anything. Kamel Bourgas had been previously convicted of murder of a British policeman in an unpublicized trial.

Two days after the January 5th search of the Wood Green "poison cell" flat, and well before the outbreak of war with Iraq, the chief scientist advising British anti-terrorism authorities, Martin Pearce -- leader of the Biological Weapon Identification Group at Porton Down, had finished lab tests which indicated the ricin finding was a false positive. "Subsequent confirmatory tests on the material from the pestle and mortar did not detect the presence of ricin. It is my opinion therefore that toxins are not detectable in the pestle and mortar," wrote Pearce in one document.

So a month before Powell's speech, the Brits knew the ricin wasn't really around. I'm not saying Powell knew that. But somebody screwed-up, or lied. Or both.

P.S. Bonus Media Angle:  The jury ruled last week. And how many papers have reported on it?

P.P.S. How do I know about it? Secrecy News.

Dept. of Desperation: Raising the Bounty

Per-capita-income in Pakistan is somewhere between $600 and $2,000. (The former being what Pakistan's government says; the latter is the CIA's estimate. Score another one for intel?) The income in tribal areas--where Osama is thought to be lurking--is almost certainly less than the country-wide average. That's because Waziristan and the other areas are primarily rural. Plus,  Pakistan's  government, trying to bring the region to heel,  imposed an "economic blockage" of the region for part of the past year.

So $10,000 would  make you pretty comfortable for a time, $100,000 would make you damn rich, and... $25 million, well that's got to an unimaginable sum.  There's been one way to get that last big Pay Day: Fingering Osama.  Is doubling the bounty to $50 million, as the administration appears to be planning to do, going to actually increase people's incentive? Unimaginable + unimaginable still equals unimaginable.

P.S. I'm not opposed to increasing the bounty; I just doubt it will do any good. And god help us if it's a significant part of the U.S.'s strategy (hope)  for getting the guy.

P.P.S. I imagine there are some economic theories that bear this out.  Namely there's probably a point of  dimishing returns for all economic incentives.  Am I right,  Brad?

UPDATE.  Somebody is thinking creatively. From this  week's  U.S. News & World Report:

U.S. "officials concede that sheepherders in Afghanistan often don't understand the value of $25 million, and they are looking into offering other forms of compensation. For his part, bin Laden, citing authority from the Koran, promises his followers who die in attacks on westerners a stable of virgins. Counters one official, 'We can't come up with 70 virgins, but we can come up with goats'."

al-Qaida, the Ford Foundation of terrorism

A couple of days ago, while pondering why AQ hasn't struck the U.S. itself since 9/11, I wrote that neither I nor some former spook types think Osama really controls more than a few hundred men. (Large numbers are inspired by him, but apparently don’t have the capability and/or level of commitment or desire to target the U.S. itself. ) I mentioned that the LAT's Terry McDermott is writing a book and the 9/11 plot and has come to a similar conclusion. I’ve now spoken with McDermott, who’s offered up the following excerpts from his upcoming book, Perfect Soldiers, (HarperCollins, April):

Al Qaeda itself was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed. Its core was at most a couple hundred men, but they sat at the heart of a sprawling web of other like-minded organizations spread across the globe. At its peak, there were operational off-shoots in 60 countries, a network of networks that was able to take advantage of traditional Muslim customs of hospitality and aid to co-religionists. Al Qaeda sat at the center of this web but was never in any sense in control of it.

American analysts sometimes likened it to the Ford Foundation of terrorism, suggesting it sat back and waited for plans to be proposed, then accepted or denied them. This did happen, especially in the early years when it collaborated with other organizations rather than running operations on its own, but after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan he and his top deputies – his number two, Zawahiri, and military chief, Muhammed Atef, both not coincidentally Egyptians - transformed Al Qaeda into a small operational organization, as well, that worked in cooperation or sometimes competition with other terror groups. Its own small size, with which came severe limits on the skills available from within its ranks, virtually required it to reach beyond its members for specific needs.

One under-appreciated aspect of Al Qaeda operations was how crude many of them were. Intelligence analysts sometimes cited the plans’ complexities and sophistication, as if blowing up buildings or boats or vehicles were high-end science. In fact, many Al Qaeda plots have been marked by the haphazardness of their design and execution. Over the years, many of the plots seemed hare-brained at worst, ill-conceived at best, pursued by ill-equipped and unprepared, inept men. Some were almost comical in their haplessness: boats sank, cars crashed, bombs blew up too soon. Some of the men virtually delivered themselves to police. The gross ineptitude of the execution often disguised the gravity of the intent, and hid, also, the steadfastness of the plotters. Whatever else they did, they did not go away.

[...]
The fact that Khallad was brought in to help direct the Cole attack, and that Mihdhar was involved illustrates again one notable aspect of Al Qaeda – how small the organization actually was. Over twenty-plus years, tens of thousands of men went through the Afghan training camps. In the same period, nearly a dozen attacks attributed to Islamic fundamentalists occurred around the world. But most of those men and most of those attacks had little, other than overlapping intent, to do with Al Qaeda. Most were independent groups running independent, often local, operations.

In the attacks that were instigated by Al Qaeda, the same handful of people was involved in virtually every one. Even foot soldiers were recycled to new operations. The organization was so small almost everybody in it at one time or another had personal interactions with top leadership. Men who went to the Al Qaeda camps almost casually would end up meeting bin Laden. Some men who trained at the camps but never joined the organization reported repeated meetings with bin Laden, Mohammed, the military commander Mohammed Atif and the recruiter Abu Zubaydah. Shared values enabled the organization to amplify its power by aligning with similarly politicized fundamentalist groups, many of them completely autonomous, around the globe. This made the group at times seem ubiquitous, but, in fact, it was a few men persistently pursuing a few deadly enterprises.

Why hasn't AQ attacked the U.S. again?

So it's E-Day and we now know one of our worst fears hasn't been realized: Osama and cohorts haven't pulled off a repeat of Madrid. Of course, the U.S. itself hasn’t been attacked again by AQ or other global jihadists since 9/11.

Why?

A few months ago, I speculated that there just aren’t that many jihadists with global reach or commitment:

I’m not talking about a coordinated, complex event like 9-11. I’m wondering why nobody has, say, sprayed a NY subway with an AK-47. (Note to the FBI: I’m not advocating that, thank you.) There are essentially no security barriers stopping someone from doing that.

One reason could be that AQ prefers to hold off and focus on “spectacular” attacks. Maybe. But then AQ isn’t really a cohesive organization and is more of a movement, with supporters encouraged to wreak havoc as they can. (See Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Spain, Indonesia, and Morocco--all victims of seemingly independently operating AQ sympathizers ) So why haven't they hit the U.S.? My guess: Without some local component (ending the occupation of Iraq, toppling the House of Saud, etc.) in the end there are very few willing and motivated enough to "martyr" themselves.

In this morning's Wash Post, David Ignatius adds some weight to that assessment (aka WAG):

The long-dreaded attack could still come at any time. But analysts suggest several possibilities: Al Qaeda may be much weaker than generally believed, bin Laden's ambitions may increasingly be political, and disruption efforts against him may be working.

The weakness of bin Laden's organization is clear to Peter Bergen, one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed him. "I don't think they have the people here in the United States to conduct operations. It's that simple," contends Bergen, who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation. This view is shared by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "He would have struck us by now if he could have," he argues.

Gerecht discounts a widely cited estimate that 18,000 to 35,000 terrorists passed through al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan. In rebuttal, he cites an interview he conducted in 1999 with bin Laden's chief Afghan rival, the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before Sept. 11, 2001. He told Gerecht that he had faced at most 700 to 1,000 of bin Laden's Arab-Afghan fighters.

The LAT's Terry McDermott, who'se writing a book about Khalid Sheik Mohamed and the 9/11 plot, has also come to the same conclusion. As he and I have discussed, most of the men who went through AQ's camps were cannon fodder to throw against the Northern Alliance. (McDermott has written about all this; I'll include the link as soon as I find it.)

Perhaps this year's most important story

The Post has an extraordinary and extraordinarily sobering assessment of the decisions Bush has taken against al-Qaida. It’s the best reported piece I’ve seen on it. And if you don’t have time to read the 5,000 words, I devoted half my column to it, about 500 words.

Jihadis: White House and its critics (including me!) both wrong?

White House officials—and their surrogates—tend to insist that Iraq is full of foreign jihadis. That fits nicely with their line that Iraq is just one front in the wider War on Terror ^TM. Critics of the administration, such as myself, have often flagged evidence that there don’t seem to be that many foreign fighters. Yet at the same time, we’ve (OK, I’ve) wholeheartedly agreed with the Richard Clarke-ian line that Iraq is AQ’s dream recruiting video.

How do you reconcile those last points? I don’t think it’s a black and white issue—it seems fairly obvious to me that our invasion of Iraq and the subsequent bungling of the occupation and guerrilla war is indeed serving to piss off many Muslim “undecideds.” But how much?

Doesn’t the lack of foreign fighters suggest we’ve not yet been accorded the much haloed “infidel” status, say, the Soviets in Afghanistan? In other words, many Muslims might be increasingly horrified and angry at the U.S.'s Iraq actions—for which we and the world will no doubt pay at various points—but unlike Afghanistan, few seem to be willing to put their lives on the lines for it. At least not yet.

P.S. This also reminds me of a related notion I’ve been batting around: I’ve long suspected, or understood, that there are far fewer international-focused jihadis than either the administration or often-times its critics have maintained. I do think they’re a jihadi movement, I just think most of them are locally focused.

Yes, of course some want to go long-distance—i.e. after the U.S. But if there are so many motivated to that, why hasn’t there been another jihadi attack in the U.S.? I’m not talking about a coordinated, complex event like 9-11. I’m wondering why nobody has, say, sprayed a NY subway with an AK-47. (Note to the FBI: I’m not advocating that, thank you.) There are essentially no security barriers stopping someone from doing that.

Now, one reason it hasn't happened could be that AQ prefers to hold off and focus on “spectacular” attacks. Maybe. But then AQ isn’t really a cohesive organization and is more of a movement, with supporters encouraged to wreak havoc as they can. (See Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Spain, Indonesia, and Morocco--all victims of seemingly independently operating AQ sympathizers ) So why haven't they hit the U.S.? My guess: Without some local component (ending the occupation of Iraq, toppling the House of Saud, etc.) in the end very few willing and motivated enough to "martyr" themselves.