http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-cellphones23apr23,1,7408228.story
From the Los Angeles Times
In Afghanistan, insurgents attacking cellphone network
Taliban fighters are blowing up telecom towers, hoping to foil NATO-led forces who from hunt them down via cellphone signals. Afghans are fuming.
By Laura King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 23, 2008

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Afghans tend to be stoic in the face of poverty, hardship and seemingly endless warfare. But mess with their cellphones, and the response is one of undiluted outrage.

For the last two months, Taliban fighters have been blowing up telecommunications towers, with the aim of preventing NATO-led forces from hunting them down via cellphone signals. It could hardly have been a worse public-relations move for the insurgency.

Fuming Afghans call the tactic nonsensical.

"I'm so, so furious about this," sputtered businessman Rahim Agha. "Why do they have to do this to us? Why can't they just turn off their phones?"

To Afghans, the country's rapidly expanding cellphone network is a symbol of pride and hoped-for prosperity. Cellphones are a lifeline to Afghanistan's vast rural hinterlands, an engine of commerce, and a vital link with millions of Afghan refugees around the world.

There is intense competition among the country's cellphone providers -- four private companies and a state-run one. Spurred by the scramble for revenue, they provide service in 70% of Afghanistan's territory, from trackless deserts to jagged mountains.

The customer base has essentially doubled every year for three years. About 5.4 million people, about one in six Afghans, have a cellphone, an extraordinary rate of market penetration in a country so poor.

"Just look around in any bazaar," said Amirzai Sangin, the minister of communications. "Everyone in sight has a cellphone."

That includes Taliban fighters -- and therein lies the problem.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces recently have had unusual success in tracking and targeting mid-level Taliban field commanders, killing scores of them in pinpoint airstrikes. Military officials, without giving details, say they have a variety of means of conducting such manhunts, but the fighters blame cellphone signals for giving away their location.

The reach and availability of cellphones apparently have been seductive even to some fugitive commanders, who use numbers only for a short time before discarding them.

In addition to attacking about a dozen towers, the insurgents have threatened the telecom companies, forcing them to cut off service at night in southern Afghanistan. More than a quarter of a million people have been affected by disrupted service across the south, where fighting between insurgents and coalition troops is the most intense.

A few weeks ago, insurgents killed two police officers escorting engineers who had been sent to repair a disabled tower.

Medical professionals are particularly alarmed by the curtailed service. In remote villages, when someone falls ill or a childbirth takes a perilous turn, families are unable to call for help or get advice on how to provide emergency treatment, said Merza Khan, who runs a health clinic in the southern province of Helmand.

"People are dying from the lack of communication," he said.

Because travel in the south is so dangerous, and land-line phone service is rare outside cities, cellphone conversations often replace face-to-face encounters.

"I can't always travel to where my constituents are," said Anwar Khan, a member of parliament from Helmand province. "But they would use their cellphones to talk to me, to tell me what was happening. Now they can't."

The Taliban, though, may be reconsidering its highly unpopular campaign. Commanders have been quoted as saying they are aware of the angry public backlash and may allow the resumption of normal service.

Sangin, the Afghan communications minister, said he had heard reports that fighters themselves were grumbling about the restrictions, suggesting that the entire contretemps might have been caused by a lack of discipline in the militants' ranks when it comes to cellphone usage.

"This is not an attack on the coalition or the government, but on the people," Sangin said. "Cellphones are a huge part of everyday life, and no one is willing to go back in time."

laura.king@latimes.com

Iraq: Foreign Fighters Continue To Wreak Havoc

By RFE/RL analyst Kathleen Ridolfo

A Sunni Arab tribal leader in restive Diyala Governorate announced this week that tribal fighters obtained Al-Qaeda records documenting the names of 6,000 suicide bombers who have carried out attacks in Iraq since the fall of the Hussein regime.

The revelation comes amid reports that three Kuwaiti nationals -- one who served time in the Guantanamo Bay detention center -- blew themselves up in Mosul last week.

Sheikh Sabah al-Shammari, spokesman for the Awakening Council of Ba'qubah Clans, told Iraqi media outlets that the documents revealed that the majority of the suicide bombers were foreign Arab nationals. He said the documents also revealed that widows of suicide bombers were present in training camps set up by Al-Qaeda in the Hamrin mountain area of Diyala. At least 15 women were being trained for suicide operations, he said.

The continuing reports of foreign fighters infiltrating from Arab states come as some neighbors have moved more aggressively to secure their borders, but they might also highlight problematic frontiers with other countries, including Syria and Iran.

Iraq has witnessed a surge in female suicide bomb attacks in recent months. At least two of those attacks were carried out in Diyala. A May 1 attack in Diyala was carried out by a woman who wore an explosives-filled vest and was pretending to be pregnant. She blew herself up outside a cafe and a children's shoe store. A male accomplice blew himself up at the scene as police and medical personnel tried to assist the wounded. At least 29 people were killed and 52 others wounded. While it remains unclear whether those attacks were perpetrated by foreign fighters, it is clear that insurgent bomb attacks in Diyala Governorate, which lies northeast of Baghdad, have not subsided despite the growing presence of Iraqi and coalition security forces.

Meanwhile, a former detainee from the Guantanamo Bay detention center reportedly carried out a suicide bomb attack in Mosul on April 30. According to Kuwaiti and pan-Arab media reports, Kuwaiti national Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi was released from Guantanamo in late 2005 and, upon returning to Kuwait, appeared to have been rehabilitated. Family members said they were shocked to learn that he carried out a suicide attack along with fellow Kuwaiti national Nasir al-Dawasari some three weeks after disappearing from home.

Al-Ajmi's cousin, Salim al-Ajmi, told Al-Arabiyah that his family was surprised when people in Iraq telephoned the family to say Abdullah was in Iraq. "His recent behavior was normal; we never expected him to go back to his past behavior," Salim al-Ajmi said. "We noticed that he would disappear every now and then. He would not return home or socialize after his return [from Guantanamo] like he used to do in the past."

He added that the Kuwaiti government "did not fail to give those young men [who were in Guantanamo] the chance to return to society," noting Abdullah and others "were offered assistance." Al-Ajmi said that Abdullah had an excellent financial situation and was married following his release from Guantanamo, with one child and another on the way.

The Kuwaiti website "Al-Siyasah" quoted sources on May 6 as saying a third Kuwaiti national was involved in the April 30 Mosul attack, identifying him as Badr al-Harbi. According to the website, al-Harbi had spent time in Afghanistan and was later jailed in Kuwait on unknown charges. The report said the Interior Ministry was looking for him when he disappeared, apparently fleeing to Syria for Iraq alongside the other two Kuwaitis. The sources told "Al-Siyasah" that al-Harbi was in a second suicide vehicle.

Meanwhile, a Yemeni state security court of appeals this week reduced a jail term for a national convicted of trying to go to Iraq for jihad. Bashir Muhammad Nu'man was sentenced last week to five years in prison for using a forged passport to travel to Syria with the intention of joining Al-Qaeda. The appeals court reduced the sentence to two years in prison for Nu'man, who was said to have been arrested in Syria and extradited to Yemen in February 2007, reportedly without offering any explanation.

The continuing flow of foreign fighters from Arab neighboring states to Iraq raises concerns that Iraq's neighbors are not abiding by pledges to help improve security in the war-torn country. Foreign ministers from Iraq's neighboring states reiterated commitments to help stem the flow of foreign fighters at a recent security meeting in Kuwait. The meeting came on the heels of increased U.S. and Iraqi pressure for neighboring states to do more. It also came just one week after officials from neighboring states met in Damascus for a security cooperation meeting that focused on the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq, in which participants endorsed the view that Iraq's security was the joint responsibility of all regional states.

Delegates in Damascus vowed to follow up on pledges made at the November security meeting in Kuwait and to "quickly name the liaison officers [on border security] who have not yet been named, to exchange information, and to hold another meeting on the sidelines of [an upcoming] interior ministers' meeting in Amman" in October. As RFE/RL reported at the time, that point demonstrates the snail's pace at which recommendations are being carried out, if they are being carried out at all.

Kuwaiti Interior Minister Jabir Khalid al-Sabah told the website "Al-Jaridah" last week that the men definitely did not enter Iraq via the Kuwait-Iraq border. He said the Interior Ministry does not restrict people from traveling abroad, and suggested the men had obtained visas before going to Syria. "The whole blame should be put on those who established these groups [such as Al-Qaeda], who took money from domestic and foreign destinations to destroy the sound human ideology, spoil it with falsehood, and call on Kuwaiti youth to [carry out] jihad," al-Sabah said. He added that the ministry does its best to keep suspected persons under surveillance and refer them to the authorities for arrest when appropriate.

Some neighboring states have taken the initiative to secure their borders with Iraq. Indeed, it does not appear that Arab foreign fighters have had any success in crossing the Kuwaiti, Saudi, or Jordanian borders into Iraq.

Syria has long been considered the main access point for foreign fighters, and despite some claims that the Syrian authorities are taking steps to control that flow, it is clearly not doing enough. Likewise, Iran has been reported to be another entry point for foreign fighters, particularly for Arabs entering Iraq from Afghanistan. Until Iraq can improve security along its porous borders with Iran and Syria, the problem will remain a major impediment to Iraqi security for years to come.

U.S. Weighing Readiness for Military Action Against Iran
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 26, 2008; A07

The nation's top military officer said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" as one of several options against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be "extremely stressing" but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability," he said at a Pentagon news conference. Speaking of Iran's intentions, Mullen said: "They prefer to see a weak Iraq neighbor. . . . They have expressed long-term goals to be the regional power."

Mullen made clear that he prefers a diplomatic solution and does not expect imminent action. "I have no expectations that we're going to get into a conflict with Iran in the immediate future," he said.

Mullen's statements and others by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently signal new rhetorical pressure on Iran by the Bush administration amid what officials say is increased Iranian provision of weapons, training and financing to Iraqi groups that are attacking and killing Americans.

In a speech Monday, Gates said Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." He said war would be "disastrous" but added that "the military option must be kept on the table, given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a future Iranian nuclear threat."

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who was nominated this week to head all U.S. forces in the Middle East, is preparing a briefing soon on increased Iranian involvement in Iraq, Mullen said. The briefing will detail, for example, the discovery in Iraq of weapons that were very recently manufactured in Iran, he said.

"The Iranian government pledged to halt such activities some months ago. It's plainly obvious they have not," Mullen said. He said unrest in the Iraqi city of Basra had highlighted a "level of involvement" by Iran that had not been clear previously.

But while Mullen and Gates have said that the government in Tehran must know of Iranian actions in Iraq, Mullen said he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership is involved."

In an incident early local time Thursday, a cargo ship contracted by the U.S. military fired "several bursts" of warning shots at two fast boats that approached in international waters off the Iranian coast, defense officials said yesterday.

The unidentified small boats approached the Westward Venture, a ship carrying U.S. military hardware, as it headed north through the central Persian Gulf, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for the Navy's 5th Fleet.

The U.S. ship initiated communications, and after receiving no response, it fired a flare. The speedboats continued to approach, so the ship fired warning shots. The boats then left the area, Robertson said.

In January, five Iranian patrol boats sped toward a U.S. warship in the Gulf and dropped small, boxlike objects in the water, an incident that President Bush called "a provocative act." The objects turned out to pose no threat to U.S. vessels.

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U.S., Allies See Progress in Selling Al-Qaeda As an Enemy to the Muslim World
By Walter Pincus
Monday, April 28, 2008; A13

The top White House terrorism expert thinks some gains are being made in the worldwide public relations battle against al-Qaeda, as the administration and its overseas allies press efforts to show that Osama bin Laden's network is killing Muslim civilians rather than defending its interests.

"More and more Muslim and Arab populations -- [including] clerics and scholars -- are questioning the value of al-Qaeda's program," Juan Carlos Zarate, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, said Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The efforts he described are in line with plans that Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed in February before the same organization. Leiter, who is responsible for strategic communications planning in the fight against terrorism, said the goal is "to prevent the next generation of terrorists from emerging."

One approach, he said, is "to show that it is al-Qaeda, not the West, that is truly at war with Islam."

Last week, Zarate echoed that theme. He said al-Qaeda "should be revealed as themselves being at war with Muslims, especially those who do not believe as they do or subscribe to the al-Qaeda agenda."

Zarate cited an Egyptian Islamic group, which includes former jihadist leaders, that recently published a series of books "highly critical of jihadists and al-Qaeda." He did not say who promoted or paid for the books, but in undertaking this program, Zarate said, "credible voices, outside of the U.S. government," had to carry the messages.

Another example is a widely circulated letter to bin Laden from a leading Saudi cleric, Sheik Salman al-Ouda, released last September, in which the religious leader asked: "How much blood has been spent" by al-Qaeda attacks?

In October 2007, Zarate said, the Saudi grand mufti, Abdulaziz Al-Sheik, warned Saudis against unauthorized jihadist activities and lectured wealthy Saudis against "funding causes that 'harm Muslims.' "

To illustrate the impact of these actions, Zarate noted a recent question-and-answer session on the Web with al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al- Zawahiri, who responded to some of the issues raised by the campaign against al-Qaeda. Asked about the book written by a former leading Egyptian jihadist, Said Imam al-Sharif, Zawahiri tried to minimize the author's credentials, according to an analysis by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

Zarate said Zawahiri "sidestepped" the issue of killing innocents "by claiming al-Qaeda does not target civilians and arguing the loss of innocent Muslim life was either accidental or the Muslims mixing with non-Muslims were fair game."

Zarate said that is a hard sell to Muslims in Baghdad, Riyadh, Algiers and Amman, where bombings attributed to al-Qaeda have occurred. He added that "victims of al-Qaeda terrorism are beginning to organize and are exposing the human toll of al-Qaeda's tactics."

He said "former extremists" had begun a campaign to discredit violent extremism through the Quilliam Foundation, a London think tank, and, according to the organization's Web site, to "help foster a genuine British Islam, native to these islands, free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world."

These attacks on al-Qaeda's legitimacy not only have an impact among Arabs but also affect the terrorist network's senior leadership, Zarate said. "They care about their image because it has real-world effects on recruitment, donations and support in Muslim and religious communities for the al-Qaeda message," he said.

Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Middle East who now teaches at Georgetown University, called the strategic communications program described by Zarate "worthwhile" and a "useful tool in our tool kit." But he warned that it is an approach that takes time, and said it "is difficult to identify specific benefits when they occur." He also agrees with Zarate that competing with al-Qaeda by attacking its activities "makes more sense than trying to sell pro-American ideology.

Zarate is more positive.

"These challenges from within Muslim communities and even extremist circles will be insurmountable at the end of the day for al-Qaeda," he said.

National security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus pores over the speeches, reports, transcripts and other documents that flood Washington and every week uncovers the fine print that rarely makes headlines -- but should. If you have any items that fit the bill, please send them to fineprint@washpost.com.

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Israel's Predicament at 60: World's worst neighbourhood

by Daniel Pipes
National Post (Toronto)
May 6, 2008
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5552
:

Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.

They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan's experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil, and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal political culture, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture, and impressive social cohesion.

But for all its achievements, the Jewish state lives under a curse that Pakistan and most other polities never face: the threat of elimination. Its remarkable progress over the decades has not liberated it from a multi-pronged peril that includes nearly every means imaginable: weapons of mass destruction, conventional military attack, terrorism, internal subversion, economic blockade, demographic assault, and ideological undermining. No other contemporary state faces such an array of threats; indeed, probably none in history ever has.

The enemies of Israel divide into two main camps: the Left and the Muslims, with the far Right a minor third element. The Left includes a rabid edge (International ANSWER, Noam Chomsky) and a more polite centre (United Nations General Assembly, Canada's Liberal Party, the mainstream media, mainline churches, school textbooks). In the final analysis, however, the Left serves less as a force in its own right than as an auxiliary for the primary anti-Zionist actor, which is the Muslim population. This latter, in turn, can be divided into three distinct groupings.

First come the foreign states: Five armed forces that invaded Israel on its independence in May 1948, and then neighboring armies, air forces, and navies fought in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970, and 1973. While the conventional threat has somewhat receded, Egypt's U.S.-financed arms build-up presents one danger and the threats from weapons of mass destruction (especially from Iran but also from Syria and potentially from many other states) present an even greater one.

Second come the external Palestinians, those living outside Israel. Sidelined by governments from 1948 until 1967, Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization got their opportunity with the defeat of three states' armed forces in the Six-Day War. Subsequent developments, such as the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo accords, confirmed the centrality of external Palestinians. Today, they drive the conflict, through violence (terrorism, missiles from Gaza) and even more importantly by driving world opinion against Israel via a public relations effort that resonates widely among Muslims and the Left.

Third come the Muslim citizens of Israel, the sleepers in the equation. In 1949, they numbered merely 111,000, or 9 percent of Israel's population but by 2005, they had multiplied ten-fold, to 1,141,000, and to 16 percent of the population. They benefited from Israel's open ways to evolve from a docile and ineffective community into a assertive one that increasingly rejects the Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with potentially profound consequences for that the future identity of that state.

If this long list of perils makes Israel different from all other Western countries, forcing it to protect itself on a daily basis from the ranks of its many foes, its predicament renders Israel oddly similar to other Middle Eastern countries, which likewise face a threat of elimination.

Kuwait, conquered by Iraq, actually disappeared from the face of the earth between August 1990 and February 1991; were it not for an American-led coalition, it would quite certainly never been resurrected. Lebanon has been effectively under Syrian control since 1976 and, should developments warrant formal annexation, Damascus could at will officially incorporate it. Bahrain is occasionally claimed by Tehran to be a part of Iran, most recently in July 2007, when an associate of Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, Iran's supreme leader, claimed that "Bahrain is part of Iran's soil," and insisted that "The principal demand of the Bahraini people today is to return this province … to its mother, Islamic Iran." Jordan's existence as an independent state has always been precarious, in part because it is still seen as a colonial artifice of Winston Churchill, in part because several states (Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) and the Palestinians see it as fair prey.

That Israel finds itself in this company has several implications. It puts Israel's existential dilemma into perspective: If no country risks elimination outside of the Middle East, this is a nearly routine problem within the region, suggesting that Israel's unsettled status will not be resolved any time soon. This pattern also highlights the Middle East's uniquely cruel, unstable, and fatal political life; the region ranks, clearly, as the world's worst neighborhood. Israel is the child with glasses trying to succeed at school while living in a gang-infested part of town.

The Middle East's deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems. More sensible is to see Israel's plight as the result of the region's toxic politics. Blaming the Middle East's autocracy, radicalism, and violence on Israel is like blaming the diligent school child for the gangs. Conversely, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict means only solving that conflict, not fixing the region.

If all the members of this imperiled quintet worry about extinction, Israel's troubles are the most complex. Israel having survived countless threats to its existence over the past six decades, and it having done so with its honor intact, offers a reason for its population to celebrate. But the rejoicing cannot last long, for it's right back to the barricades to defend against the next threat