Explaining the Murder Rampage atop the Empire State Building

As one of the many instances when the authorities refuse to recognize terrorism when it stares them in the face, I briefly recounted in 2002 the Empire State Building murder rampage that had taken place five years earlier:

Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian gunman hailing from militant Islamic circles in Florida, took a gun to the top of the Empire State building in February 1997 and shot seven people there, killing one. His suicide note accused the United States of using Israel as its "instrument" against the Palestinians, but city officials ignored this evidence and instead dismissed Abu Kamal as either "one deranged individual working on his own" (Police Commissioner Howard Safir) or a "man who had many, many enemies in his mind" (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).

I wrote these words in frustration. But now, Abu Kamal's relatives have come clean, according to a report by Mahmoud Habboush in the New York Daily News, "Killer's daughter admits it was political."

Ali Abu Kamal's relatives say they are tired of lying about why the Palestinian opened fire on the observation deck of Empire State Building, killing a tourist and injuring six other people before committing suicide. Kamal's widow insisted after the shooting spree that the attack was not politically motivated. She said that her husband had become suicidal after losing $300,000 in a business venture.

But in a stunning admission, Kamal's 48-year-old daughter Linda told the Daily News that her dad wanted to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel - and revealed her mom's 1997 account was a cover story crafted by the Palestinian Authority. "A Palestinian Authority official advised us to say the attack was not for political reasons because that would harm the peace agreement with Israel," she told The News on Friday. "We didn't know that he was martyred for patriotic motivations, so we repeated what we were told to do."

But three days after the shootings, Kamal's family got a copy of a letter that was found on his body, they said. The letter said he planned the violence as a political statement, his daughter said. "When we wanted to clarify that to the media, nobody listened to us," she said. "His goal was patriotic. He wanted to take revenge from the Americans, the British, the French and the Israelis."

She said the family became certain that he carried out the attack for political reasons after reading his diary. "He wrote that after he raised his children and made sure that his family was all right he decided to avenge in the highest building in America to make sure they get his message," said Linda, who works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. She said her mom burned the diary, fearing that it would cause the family trouble.

May 23: 2954
May 27: 3000

URL: http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=BARNETT-05-25-07
A brave new war

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
Scripps Howard News Service
2007-05-25 00:00:00

With the global economy's rapid expansion over the past two decades, globalization has entered into an extended period of frontier integration. This forces both the West and emerging markets to radically increase the resilience of all these new networks, especially those extending into regions still largely disconnected from globalization's deep embrace, such as Africa and the Middle East.

Why?

Very bad actors capable of very bad things tend to congregate in these thinly connected regions. Using guerrilla-style tactics, they can not only frustrate our efforts at postwar reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also bring their weapons of "system disruption" eventually to the very networks and infrastructure that fuel globalization's advance.

The 9/11 attacks previewed this new form of system-focused warfare, and since that fateful day the U.S. military and government have struggled mightily to construct new operational approaches to tame and ultimately marginalize transnational terrorism. What we have lacked most in this agonizingly slow adjustment is a good description of our enemy's emerging tactics -- in short, a "red team" expose of our own system vulnerabilities.

That wait is over.

A brilliant new book published by terrorism expert John Robb, titled "Brave New War," hit stores last month with virtually no fanfare. It deserves both significant attention and vigorous debate, in large part because it makes the provocative case that "global guerrillas" using "open-source warfare" can defeat nation-states in the same way that Wikipedia has eclipsed the Encyclopedia Britannica: the innovative mind of the many outweighs the dated knowledge of the few.

In an open-source world where research on, and development of, new technologies has become nearly as accessible as the Internet itself, conflicts are increasingly decided by which side learns the fastest. The same Internet that allows your teenager to share his latest video exploits with the world also enables every Osama-wannabe to share his latest terrorist technique, creating what Robb calls the "bazaar of violence," where bleeding-edge tactics are rapidly disseminated among globalization's many extremist opponents.

Analogizing the Iraq insurgency to the 1930s Spanish Civil War, which debuted many tactics later employed in World War II, Robb argues we're glimpsing the future of terrorism designed to "hollow out" weak states on globalization's fringes and keep them in perpetual failure. Robb believes these same tactics, properly developed, can bring advanced economies to their knees.

Here's where Robb's thesis stalls, in my opinion, because it's one thing to keep a weak state in failure, but quite another thing to sow systemic chaos in advanced economies. After all, these societies advanced precisely by mastering such network complexity in the first place, typically in response to disasters and scandals that regularly perturbed their systems and thus exposed vulnerabilities.

Thankfully, transnational terrorism remains a fringe activity with virtually no impact on the global economy's performance, which has remained at an unprecedentedly high level since 2001. In contrast, the cumulative impact of system perturbations caused by manmade and natural disasters in recent years has been far more substantial, and arguably far more beneficial in triggering new rule sets designed to prevent future disruptions.

But here is where Robb's warnings are dead-on: our global connectivity races ahead of our ability to manage all its vulnerabilities. In effect, our rules haven't keep pace, and those gaps and bottlenecks become obvious targets for our enemies in this long war against radical extremism. "Hollowing out" advanced states may be a tall order, but applying just enough system disruption to torpedo an emerging market gets a whole lot easier.

Think about how much simpler it would be to generate a financial panic in China than, say, the United States. Sure, authoritarian China might be more crudely robust in handling attacks on its less-developed infrastructure, but it has nowhere near our capacity for discounting strategic risk through agile capital markets, a responsive insurance industry or a federally insured banking sector -- to name a few examples.

"Brave New War" serves as a valuable guide to the forces of disconnectedness and the continuously evolving challenge they present.

(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.)

May 27, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Quiet Americans

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I’m not sure what they call this generation. Is it generation “X” or “Y” or “Zero” or “Me”? Having taken part in two other commencements this season, though, and knowing enough about what my own daughter’s friends are doing, I can say there is something quietly impressive about this cohort. In fact, if I were giving them a label I’d call them the “Quiet Americans” — not in the cynical way Graham Greene meant it, but in a very positive sense.

They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America they are about to inherit. They don’t take to the streets much — in part, I suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.

Four years ago, when my wife and I dropped our daughter off at college, I wrote that I was troubled that I was dropping her off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into — and I worried that she would not be able to travel in the carefree way that I had when I was her age. Her two summers teaching and researching in India have cured me of that misapprehension. Now I know how my mother felt.

“I don’t know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they read to them,” said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, the departing president of George Washington University.

“I’ve been a college president for 30 years, and these kids are more optimistic about the future than any I have seen — maybe more than they have reason to be,” he said. “They still believe that the world is their oyster and go abroad with abandon. Notwithstanding everything, they remain optimistic.”

In my previous column, I wrote about the number of foreign-born students who are dominating graduate science programs at our best schools, which I witnessed firsthand at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s commencement. But something else struck me at Rensselaer — the number of R.O.T.C. grads, including women, who came up and collected their degrees in full dress uniforms.

It was not only the pride with which they wore those uniforms that was palpable, but also the respect they were accorded by their classmates. I spoke to one young man who was going from graduation at Rensselaer right out to sea with the United States Navy. As bad as Iraq is, they just keep signing up. I have been equally impressed by the number of my daughter’s friends who have opted to join Teach for America.

And that can-do-will-do spirit is a good thing, because we will need it to preserve our democracy from those who want to steal the openness and optimism that make democracy work.

When I graduated in 1975, the world was dominated by interstate rivalries and conclusive wars. The class of 2007 is graduating into a world of state-versus-gang wars and gang-versus-gang wars that are often inconclusive. Look at the Middle East today. You have gangs fighting states and armies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Gaza.

If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and capitalism, the dominant clash of this generation is between “nihilism” — represented by suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to Baghdad — and “optimism” that a better social and political order can be created, and therefore service matters. That’s why this generation’s willingness to continue venturing into the world, whether to repair it or do business with it, is so important. It is exactly the opposite of what the nihilists want.

“Triumphing over fear is the victory of the democratic citizen against the paralyzing effects of terror,” the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi observed. “It has to be done, though, at the level of each citizen. Just as the violence has been fragmented, so must the victory over this violence be done one by one. Leaders can help, but ultimately victory is about not letting the fear engendered by this new era paralyze you.”

We have to hope, though, that the determination that characterizes these Quiet Americans extends into their adulthood, and is also shared by those who choose to be doctors, consultants, lawyers and bankers. So many big problems are going to come due on their watch — from underfunded Social Security to health care to climate change — that the effort needed to fix them will require them to stay involved, redouble their resolve and raise their voices.

May 27, 2007
Increased Strife Is Foreseen in Iraq if U.S. Troops Leave

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ALISSA J. RUBIN
WASHINGTON, May 26 — There is one matter on which American military commanders, many Iraqis and some of the Bush administration’s staunchest Congressional critics agree: if the United States withdrew its forces from Baghdad’s streets this fall, the murder and mayhem would increase.

But that is where the agreement ends. The wrangling in Washington over war financing, still fierce despite the Democrats’ decision to forgo for now withdrawal deadlines, has obscured a more fundamental debate over what Iraq’s future might look like without American troops.

Would the pullback of American forces unleash an even bloodier round of civil conflict that would lead to the implosion of the Iraqi government? Or would it put pressure on Iraqi politicians to finally reconcile their differences? More bluntly: how bad would things get?

Those questions loom as the administration debates how and when to wind down its troop increase in Iraq, as Iraqis weigh the trade-offs between autonomy and security, and as Congressional Democrats, frustrated by this week’s compromise with the White House, vow to hold a tougher line on future war financing.

To address the issue, The New York Times interviewed more than 40 Iraqi politicians and citizens and consulted recent surveys of public opinion in Iraq. The views of a broad range of senior military officials, American intelligence experts, politicians and independent analysts who have recently returned from Iraq were also solicited.

The somewhat surprising verdict of most Iraqis was clear. For all their distaste for the American occupation, many of them fear that a pullback any time soon would lead to a violent chain reaction that would jeopardize the fitful attempts at political dialogue and risk the collapse of the Iraqi government.

“Many militias and terrorist groups are just waiting for the Americans to leave,” said Salim Abdullah, the spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Arab group in the Parliament, who lost two brothers this year to attacks by insurgents.

“This does not mean the presence of American troops in Baghdad is our favorite option,” he said. “People in the street say the United States is part of the chaos here and they could have made it better and safer. Still, we need America to make the country more stable and not leave Iraq in the trouble, which they, themselves, have caused.”

Senior American commanders in Iraq have a similar assessment. A troop drawdown should not occur until security is improved, military commanders say, and even then it should be gradual and carefully engineered. “There will be a time when we will slowly remove ourselves from the Iraqi forces and allow them to take more and more control,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, who has privately recommended that elevated troop levels be maintained through early 2008. “But this should be done thoughtfully and methodically when conditions permit.”

If the American forces were reduced too soon, military officials say, the fledgling Iraqi Army and police forces could not hold the line against a rising tide of suicide bomb attacks by insurgent groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Shiite militias that had decided to lie low would resume large-scale attacks on Sunni residents. Mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, already growing scarce, would disappear, and Iraqi forces would fracture along sectarian lines.

The conditions that need to be achieved before a major troop reduction, General Odierno said, are a reduction in insurgent and militia attacks and an improved ability by Iraqi security forces to protect noncombatants.

A sharply divergent view is prevalent in Congress, where lawmakers have pressed, unsuccessfully, to impose a schedule for American troop withdrawal and binding benchmarks for Iraqi political reform. Some leading Democrats acknowledge a risk of increased violence if the United States pulls back, but they assert that the Iraqis will not take the painful steps toward a genuine political accommodation until American forces begin to leave.

“That is the leverage,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “They have got to look into the abyss. And this is the abyss: do they want a civil war, or do they want a nation?”

“I would begin a troop reduction as an action-forcing mechanism,” he added.

The View From Iraq

In trying to stem the violence in Iraq, the Bush administration is expanding the American force in Baghdad. The goal has not been to impose a military solution, but to provide enough security that Iraqis can move toward political reconciliation.

A National Intelligence Estimate made public in January analyzed the consequences of a complete withdrawal of American troops over 12 to 18 months. The document, which reflects the collective view of the United States intelligence agencies, said that American forces were an essential stabilizing element in Iraq and warned that Iraq’s security forces would be hard-pressed to assume significantly expanded responsibilities in that period. No similar intelligence assessment has been made public on what might occur if the United States pulled back from its effort to secure Baghdad several months from now but maintained a limited troop presence at the large bases in and around the capital.

But many Iraqis have a view on this question and on the consequences of a total withdrawal. Sheik Ajmi al-Mutashar, an agricultural engineer and businessman from Salahuddin Province in central Iraq and a Sunni, said he worried that an American troop pullback would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government. “If the government falls it will be impossible to form another one,” he said. “We will have small emirates or cantons divided on sectarian and ethnic lines.”

Several Shiites also agreed that an American pullback would severely weaken the already fragile Iraqi government and lead to a surge of fighting among armed factions. “Without a strong and visible American presence, the government would collapse,” said Abu Fayad, an aide to a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Of course there will be many different wars. Basra, Diwaniya, Baghdad. Everyone will try to control Iraq’s fortune. The Americans failed, but they should stay.”

Salah Sultan al-Obeidi, 39, a government employee who lives in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City but says he holds secular views, says he worries that moderate elements of Iraqi society would be even more vulnerable if the Americans were to leave. “In Baghdad there will be fierce fighting between Sunni and Shiite extremists. Sunni terrorists will kill all the Sunnis who took part in the political process.”

A recent analysis on Iraqi perceptions of the war by an American expert, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said most Iraqis did not see the American troops as allies or liberators, but still feared a sudden withdrawal. About 64 percent of Baghdad residents who were polled in late February and early March said American forces should remain until security was restored, until the Iraqi government was stronger or until Iraqi forces could operate independently. Only 36 percent said American troops should leave now, according to the polling data, which was commissioned by ABC News and other news organizations.

Iraqis who favor a speedy American departure include those who think the country will stabilize after a flaring of violence and redrawing of sectarian boundaries. Some factions, including many supporters of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, said they believed that they would be better able to bring stability, albeit on their own terms.

“I think the Sadr tide will rule the country,” said Muhammad Qasim Ali, a suitcase salesman in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Karada. “They are the majority and they have a good background, and that gives them a chance to take control. Once we take power, we will be merciful with Sunnis. Our way is to kill somebody only when we suspect he has a link to insurgents.”

A bare majority of Iraq’s 275-member Parliament recently signed a petition promoted by Mr. Sadr that called for a timetable for American troops to depart. Even so, the petition said the Americans should not leave until Iraqi security forces were ready to take over the job. “Pulling back to bases maybe makes sense,” said Mansour Abdul Mohsin Abboud, 66, a Shiite tribal sheik who lives in Najaf. “But leaving, withdrawing completely from Iraq, that means erasing Iraq from the map.”

The View From Washington

President Bush has said that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would invite catastrophe there, and that argument has been forcefully embraced by other Republicans, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. American military commanders are wary of being drawn into the American political debate over Iraq, but they have warned about the risks in quickly reducing troop levels.

In the end, Baghdad would not become an entirely Shiite city. The east, northwest, and southwest areas of Baghdad would likely be Shiite-dominated. But the west-central area of the capital would remain a Sunni stronghold, reinforced by the Sunnis from the nearby areas of Abu Ghraib, Taji, Yusifiya, and from the provinces Anbar and Salahuddin Province. That would set the stage for further conflict.

A number of Democratic lawmakers who have pushed for troop withdrawals insisted that forecasts of stepped-up violence were overstated. Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said that the violence had risen over the past four years despite the presence of American troops, and that the American capacity to control events in Iraq was limited. “Everybody predicts chaos: I don’t predict chaos,” he said. “It goes up for a short period and it is not nearly as intense as everybody is predicting.”

Senator Levin acknowledged a risk that violence could increase if troops began to leave soon, but asserted that such a move would prompt the Iraqis to assume more responsibility for their own security.

“There is risk, but I think the greater risk is not putting pressure on the Iraqis, watching them say that time is not relevant,” he said.

Several specialists who hold out hope for stabilizing Iraq, including Mr. Cordesman, said it was not practical to reduce American troop levels until next year. “We need to phase out slowly,” Mr. Cordesman said. “Most likely, the Iraqi police cannot possibly be ready to take over by this fall. And to pull out of Baghdad will be seen as pulling out of Iraq.”

“The people who should say when the U.S. should leave are the Iraqis, not experts and politicians in Washington,” he added. “The Iraqis don’t have any incentive to have the U.S. stay any longer than necessary, but they also have no incentive to rush events in Iraq to the point where a high-risk situation becomes certain failure.”

Even some specialists who take a bleak view of trends in Iraq said they doubted that beginning a phased troop withdrawal would prod the Iraqis to reconcile. “Projecting our hopes onto them does not correspond to anything we know about the way Iraqi politics has worked so far,” said Steven N. Simon, an aide on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and the author of a paper that advocates a military disengagement from Iraq.

Mr. Simon argued that the upheaval that would follow the departure of American troops would stop short of genocide, since Sunni Arabs would have a haven to return to in the western province of Anbar, the Kurds have northern Iraq, and the factions generally lack heavy weapons. He acknowledged that the violent partition of Baghdad neighborhoods was likely, and that there would be sectarian clashes in other cities, but said that there was little the United States could do to stop it if Iraqis were not prepared to compromise.

“It will get ugly,” he said. “There is no question about it. My argument is that it is unavoidable.”

Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star general who formerly led Central Command, strongly opposed the decision to invade Iraq, fearing that it might lead to sectarian fighting and regional destabilization. But now that American forces have occupied the country, General Zinni fears that a troop withdrawal will compound the instability. The notion that the United States can pressure the Iraqis to take more responsibility for their own security, the general said, was impractical: with Iraqi security forces still not ready, militias would fill the gap.

General Zinni said it made sense to keep American forces at current levels for a year or so before gradually reducing troop levels and executing a strategy to try to keep Iraq’s instability from spreading. “When we are in Iraq we are in many ways containing the violence,” he said. “If we back off we give it more room to breathe, and it may metastasize in some way and become a regional problem. We don’t have to be there at the same force level, but it is a five- to seven-year process to get any reasonable stability in Iraq.”

Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Baghdad. Wissam A. Habeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Tikrit, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and Sadr City.