Yup! The 154 Jihad Verses in the Koran are still at work in the minds of Muslims!

Terrorism in kashmir can be looked at in this space. Here's a diablocal jehadi gameplan, bankrolled by a national treasury (Pakistan's) to annex a beautiful valley (kashmir proper) that belongs inside a secular democratic republic (India) into a theocratic islamic state next door (Pakistan).
Also on display is evidence of what happens when islamofascism wins - The minority Hindu Pandits of kashmir, some 400,000 strong stand driven from their homes, lost their property and livelihood and now live in makeshift camps in Jammu - refugees in their own country. But trust them not to beg for refugee alms - they've proven to be enterprising and have rebuilt their lives. (Contrast that with The palestinians, who some 50 yrs after Israel's creation still live on UN and EU doles).
A good site that does a through job of exposing pakistan is www.pakistan-facts.com
well, that's it for today. More later.

Interesting first two comments.

Anyway, nicely done. As to your question -- I'll say that I'm rooting for Abdallah. I would shed no tears for Sultan and Naif, on the other hand.

praktike, you're probably right, had Sultan and Naif been the targets there is probably little debate. The fact that we must view Abdullah as the lesser of two evils is repugnant, though.

Sud voly, If you do a search for 'kashmir' in the Winds of Change site, you'll see the issue has been addressed in previous Winds of War & Asia briefs and other areas by Dan, Robi and others. I did not find any breaking news on Kashmir this weekend. I do agree with your sentiments on the issue, and Kashmir is worthy of a Special Analysis of its own.

Well, I think Abdullah is pretty good, and I don't view him as a "lesser of evils" at all. He has been interested in reform at various levels of Saudi society, and he is a very pro-American. My view is that he is being stymied at every turn by Sultan, Nayef, Azouzi and whatshername, and the rest of the Al-Sa'ud royalty.

praktke, If he is the actual leader of the Magic Kingdom, then he needs to step up, snuff out the likes of Nayef and others and take control of the security services by appointing royalty more in line with his thinking. I think the 'Abdullah is good, Nayef is evil' argument is overly symplified. The problems of succession in Saudi Arabia contribute to this, and until the king dies we will not know the real mettle of Abdullah. The death of the king should create turmoil that will rival the plottings of Shakespeare's greatest works.

My understanding is that the King's wife and son are quite powerful, and generally collude with Sultan and Nayef (and I think Turki still flits about) to exclude Abdullah. It helps that Bandar is Sultan's son, and has a direct pipeline to all the playas in Washington. I doubt that Abdullah trusts Bandar very much. The fact is, there are multiple centers of power in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah doesn't control enough of them to be fully in charge. Sultan can extract enormous rents from "commissions" on defense contracts, and then basically use that money as he sees fit. Nayef seems to be a terrorist, more or less, and could probably have Abdullah killed if he really wanted to.

At any rate, if you have anything negative to share about Abdullah, please dish. I've always seen him as a good guy bound by certain family constraints.

asdf, I have no specific dirt on Abdullah, my argument is that if he truly is the leader of Saudi Arabia, he needs to lead, not be led. It is difficult to know if he is the 'good cop' of the House of Saud - the face to show Saudi Arabia is working from within to reform, like Iran pulled this trick with its 'reformers' - or a legitimate reformer and ally. Until he stands up to the rest of the princes we will never know for sure.

Ah, but you see, Abdullah is (a) not truly the leader of Saudi Arabia, and (b) he does stand up to the other princes, often. But as I said, they have their own sources of power, and can thwart him in myriad ways. One of these is by implicitly threatening to kill him. Another is by cancel his local elections, or pitching a fit when he tries to bring some transparency to defense contracting.

asdf, I mainly agree with you. I stated this earlier, I don't think we'll really know about Abdullah until (if) he becomes king. We could be watching the same shell game played in Iran. How do we really know if he is a legitmate reformer or the good face for the Saudi gov't?

At any rate, if you have anything negative to share about Abdullah, please dish.

Millions to Hamas, not to mention his virulent Jew-hatred.

A good guy constrained in to doing bad things (or not acting at all) is useless, and arguably not a good guy at all.

For example, millions of good Europeans with no antisemitic sentiments watched as the Nazis marched millions of Jews away to death camps. I don't want to debate the difference between "couldn't act" and "wouldn't act", but the end result remains the same. That goes for Abdullah, too. I don't care if he's a Yankees fan, loves Hebrew National hotdogs and thinks Mohammed was basically a nut; Saudi Arabia is still a crackpot theocracy responsible in large part for the spread of Islamism.

Well, HAMAS is not an enemy of the United States, for one, and I think the alternatives are far worse.

On the whole, Saudi Arabia has been quite accommodating as regards Israel, despite obvious popular anti-Semitic sentiments among the populace. Indeed, one of the standard Islamist complaints is that Saudi Arabia has stood by while other Arab countries were fighting. Now, if a democracy were to suddenly flourish in the Arabian desert, it would be virulently hostile to Israel. That's a far larger problem, and it's something we haven't quite figured out how to mitigate.

Well, HAMAS is not an enemy of the United States

If the US is fighting against a global jihad, I'm afriad that includes everyone from Abu Sayyaf to (struggles to think of group beginning with z). That includes Hamas.

I think the alternatives are far worse.

If you mean in terms of who KSA could sponsor, how about al-Qa'eda?

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5190

"Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to Al Qaida over the past decade, according to a report prepared for the United Nations.

The report asserts that the Saudi funds represent the most important source of financing for Al Qaida and that Riyad, pressured by leading officials, has failed to stop the flow of money to Al Qaida in wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide attacks on New York and Washington."

Setting that aside, the Sauds are bankrolling Wahhabi mosques all over the world. They're advising Nigerian Sharia courts, armed Bosnian jihadists, and according to a declassified Israeli intelligence report, even funded FARC in Colombia for a while.

Indeed, one of the standard Islamist complaints is that Saudi Arabia has stood by while other Arab countries were fighting.

Well, that's true. On the other hand, the Saudis paid for the others, in large part, Syria in particular. Saudi capital has kept the PLO going for decades, and I'd hardly call the PLO "accommodating".

Now, if a democracy were to suddenly flourish in the Arabian desert, it would be virulently hostile to Israel. That's a far larger problem, and it's something we haven't quite figured out how to mitigate.

That's true, and certainly something we'll have to figure out. Iraq should be out of the picture for a while, in terms of fighting Israel - they'll have enough of their own problems to deal with, not to mention 150,000 US troops in their backyard.

In the long run, though, I suspect an Arab democracy will end up governed along tribal lines (essentially a tyranny with elections).

Colt, I don't think we want to get involved in fighting HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah in the occupied territories. That's Israel's problem for now. By the way, the PLO doesn't exist anymore, although the PA does. But I don't see us being able to stop these funds from flowing to these groups at present, any more than we can stop the sun from rising in the morning.

As for Saudi Arabia, of course various people in the country funded Al Qaeda, and may well be still. But since they've seen their own regime threatened, the princes have taken some steps towards reform, most recently by putting all of the charities under one roof. Can you imagine a Saudi Arabian government led by the mob taking this step? I can't. That's what I mean when I say that the alternatives are worse.

asdf:

By the way, the PLO doesn't exist anymore, although the PA does.

The PLO still has a foreign minister, a president and a council, not to mention a plan to destroy Israel (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10768).

Is there any real difference between the PA and PLO? The PLO were brought in from Tunis to be the PA (or, more accurately, the PNA). Same people and unfortunately, same story.

I don't think we want to get involved in fighting HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbollah in the occupied territories.

I agree - the IDF and Shin Bet can handle them there. That said, we should keep an eye on Hizbollah and the Damascus Hamas leadership, who've both said they're at war with America.

But I don't see us being able to stop these funds from flowing to these groups at present, any more than we can stop the sun from rising in the morning.

Not without genocide, no. That isn't a reason to remove the large sponsors though.

But since they've seen their own regime threatened, the princes have taken some steps towards reform, most recently by putting all of the charities under one roof.

Which roof is that? And I'm afraid I still don't think that's enough of a safeguard.

Can you imagine a Saudi Arabian government led by the mob taking this step? I can't. That's what I mean when I say that the alternatives are worse.

I'm not interested in steps, but results. If Abdullah can halt the spread of Wahhabism worldwide and stop the funding of jihadists, more power to him. But given the troubled loyalties of many of the people he's relying on to carry out his (limited) orders to that effect, I suspect he will fail.

At that point, saying it could be worse isn't much of a comfort.

Nope, it's not much of a comfort.

So what happens instead? Wahhabism is a strategic threat to the United States. There's no way we can let that continue.

praktike/Bill Roggio:

My own view of the situation is that trying to set up a dichotomy between the pro-Western Abdullah on one hand and the hardliners like Turki, Nayef, and Sultan on the other is probably somewhat misleading. A fair bit of that perception in the Western press is done by Abdullah's PR folks in order to keep the US as supportive of him as we are now, but as to the nuts and bolts aspects of it, Abdullah understands that some kind of reform is necessary in order for the House of Saud to survive in the twenty-first century. He is not, however, pro-democratic or pro-secular and his basic idea of reforming the Kingdom would be to create a kinder, gentler, totalitarian monarchy, abeit one that is unrestrained by religious extremism. I would also tend to debate him being pro-Western - I think that the best way to look at things is that he has these various domestic objectives that seeks to implement and he believes that backing the US is the best way for him to go about implementing those objectives. He certainly doesn't have anywhere resembling the proto-democratic impulses of the Jordanian or Moroccan monarchs, for example.

I agree that the real test for Abdullah and the rest of the Saudi dynasty is going be whenever King Fahd finally kicks the bucket. There's a lot of intrigue, plotting and double-crossing that goes on internally to the extent that it would drive Machiavelli himself mad. Praktike is right on about there being multiple centers of power inside the Magic Kingdom and I would keep in mind that Sultan is the guy who wants to buy Pakistani nukes to turn Saudi Arabia into a nuclear power (now there's a charming thought ...), whereas Nayef in all likelihood oversaw the assassination of 3 princes named by Abu Zubaydah as the chief liaisons between al-Qaeda and the Saudi royals (re: Posner's book). There's also a good case to be made that he tipped the GSPC off to assassinate another prince in Algeria last November. Nayef and Sultan are pretty much the two major centers of Wahhabism among the Saudi royals. Formerly, Prince Turki was the third member of their little cabal, but Nayef forced him out back in August 2001 and got him moved from running intel to the interior ministry, probably as a gentlemen's agreement among the princes that they would use Turki as the fall guy if word ever got out about the Saudi foreknowledge of 9/11, though so far they haven't had to play that card. That could change, however, in which case Turki's still the fall guy.

The thing to keep in mind with dealing with Abdullah (or Musharraf or Karimov, for that matter) is not to make the same mistake the US did when dealing with somebody like Aristide and mistake him for a genuine liberal democrat. Abdullah's probably the best of the lot as far as the princes are concerned, but the man is still virulently anti-Semitic, a despot, and in all likelihood had some kind of advance knowledge of 9/11 or that a major attack on the United States was impending. Sultan, Nayef, and Turki almost certainly did.

Colt:

The Bosnian (ethnic Albanian?) groups you're talking about are in many cases either the other side of the coin from their Serb counterparts during the 1990s or else part of al-Qaeda. One of the remarks I once made to praktike is that the 9/11 commission is never going to touch the role of the CIA or the State Department in facilitating the movement of "Afghan Arabs" into the Balkans to fight the Serbs at a time in which it was expedient for US interests to do so.

You do know that the US also shills out money to the Palestinian Authority, right? So does the EU.

The closest thing that Saudi Arabia has to a viable underground opposition is MIRA (Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia), which is basically an al-Qaeda front somewhat similar to the Algerian FIS. While I'm certain that most Saudi Shi'ites would welcome the opportunity to be freed from the princes' rule, don't look for any wellspring of support for democracy among the Wahhabis any time soon.

As far as stopping Wahhabism, the best defense begins at home. Maybe somebody should explain to me why exactly Alamoudi was so chummy with people inside the Beltway on both sides of the political spectrum?

asdf:

Hezbollah is not just Israel's problem. Imad Mughniyeh, their operations chief, trained the Mahdi Army fighters in Iraq at the behest of his masters in VEVAK and the IRGC.

As far as the Saudi charity reforms, I applaud their move in shutting down al-Haramain. However, their exec is still a free man, along with single member of the Golden Chain - the top al-Qaeda financiers. IIRO is still in existence, as are WAMY, Global Relief, and a number of other charities. The only thing that the Saudis have done is shut down the one al-Qaeda front that was directed tied to the Saudi government and basically told us that from now on all government charities will operate under one roof. Does anyone seriously believe that the Saudi elites were completely unaware of what al-Haramain was doing? They've known about it ever since Gore first confronted them on the issue after the embassy bombings in 1998 - six years ago!

Dan:

One of the remarks I once made to praktike is that the 9/11 commission is never going to touch the role of the CIA or the State Department in facilitating the movement of "Afghan Arabs" into the Balkans to fight the Serbs at a time in which it was expedient for US interests to do so.

Ah, good times, when the CIA, Iran, Hezbollah and the Saudis all worked towards the same end: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,688310,00.html

Macedonia is going to get interesting in the next 5-10 years. That incident with the Pakistani workers was probably a little embarrassing for the government, but given the state of non-Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia, I can understand the motivation to draw a line between al-Qa'eda and the Balkans Islamist movements.

You do know that the US also shills out money to the Palestinian Authority, right? So does the EU.

Yeah, that's a pet hate of mine. My point in bringing that up was that the Saudis bailed them out back when before they were "reputable men of peace", rather than thugs who hijack planes.

I can understand the motivation to draw a line between al-Qa'eda and the Balkans Islamist movements.

I mean, in Western opinion. The fact that there is more than a passing connection is beside the point.

Dan:

While I have your attention, I read somewhere that the AT missiles provided to Iran in the Iran-Contra affair were duds. Is there any truth to that?

Colt:

Like I said, the US government (at least in public hearings like the 9/11 commission) is never going to seriously examine the role we played in arming the very same people who had tried to blow up the WTC and various other NYC landmarks as well as planning the proto-9/11 just a year or so earlier. These "Afghan Arabs" called themselves the Kateebat al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Battalion) or el-Mudzahidin if you prefer and were part of the official order of battle of the Bosnian Muslims. After 1998, we started calling these people al-Qaeda (bin Laden always called his group the "International Islamic Front" before this and only started using al-Qaeda after we popularized it post-9/11) and with good reason. I've seen al-Qaeda documents gloating over just how stupid the US was in the Balkans and there's even a charming al-Qaeda recruiting video from that era showing al-Qaeda fighters playing soccer with the decapitated heads of Serbian soldiers. This doesn't justify the Serbs or Milosevic by a long shot, but it does need to be understood.

Also, the Saudis working with Iran and their pet Hezbollah in the Balkans would tend to disprove all this crap about Shi'ites and Sunnis never cooperating, but I digress ...

As far as Macedonia goes, there are ethnic Albanian Macedonians serving in al-Qaeda - Pakistan captured 4 of them fleeing Afghanistan back in November 2001 and there's all manner of claims that Ali Ahmeti or Gafurr Adili are really working for bin Laden by pro-Macedonian or pro-Serbian publications and websites. However, any attempt to seriously find out just how far those connections go have been seriously hampered by former interior minister Boskovski's antics.

Sorry, that's a no-no for me to get into at this point. Please try your question again later ;)

Dan:

This doesn't justify the Serbs or Milosevic by a long shot, but it does need to be understood.

Balkan rules, I guess. The mass killings and rapes were wrong, yes. The ethnic cleansing? In a state of total war, I'm less sure about that. When it's cultural, and the presence of Muslim civilians in your territory is a victory for your enemy, well, how else do you win?

Also, the Saudis working with Iran and their pet Hezbollah in the Balkans would tend to disprove all this crap about Shi'ites and Sunnis never cooperating, but I digress ...

And it should do the same for 'seculars' and Islamists. If the two extremes of the Shia-Sunni schism can set aside their difference, I don't see why a two-bit fascist wouldn't do the same.

Dan, you have brain like a sponge. Have you studied terrorism at Uni? (Don't feel obliged to answer.) Congrats on the AEL post, BTW.

Thanks, will do.

My understanding is that Bin Laden believes it's okay to cooperate with Shi'ite radicals in the short run in pursuit of a common goal, after which time the Sunnis can crush the apostates.

Good point about Mughniyah. There's also Khobar towers, of course.

Not to mention the AMIA bombing.

Colt:

The Balkan feuds go back to fall of the Byzantine Empire if not earlier - a lot of Serbian atrocities against the Croats and Bosnians were seen as retaliation for what the Croat Ustashi and the Bosnian SS divisions did to them during World War 2. They'd call this stuff tribal warfare were it happening in Africa rather than in Europe and they'd be entirely correct to do so. I'm not a big fan of inter-generational feuds, so I tend to take a dim view of all sides in the conflict. The issue of ethnic cleansing (which was done by all 3 sides at one point or another) is another nasty tactic that I tend to think does need to be utilized by civilized cultures in order to achieve our war aims.

The secular-religious divide is IMO another straw man objection, just like the claim that bin Laden would never work with the princes whom he has stated his desire to overthrow.

I never studied terrorism at the university level (which is probably just as well for a number of reasons), though I have now had at least two published items on the subject, one of which is none other than one of the items I wrote up here on Winds of Change. The other is an official dossier on Ansar al-Islam explaining the group's origins, tactics, leadership, ideology, ect. It's AEI, BTW ;)

asdf:

That sounds to me much more like Zarqawi than bin Laden. Bin Laden tends to be fairly ecumenical because of the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri (whose group was funded in part by Iran) and Hassan Turabi (the first major Islamist leader to expouse the "big tent" school of thought as well as a pioneer in setting up what eventually became bin Laden's International Front). Turabi was the first one to suggest that the traditional Shi'ite/Sunni divisions be suspended at least until such time as the US was destroyed and the West completely evicted from the Middle East. He's much more pragmatic than his enemies give him credit for, which is one of the reasons why he'll be willing to work with anybody, even a Christian despot like Charles Taylor, in achieving his objectives.

Most of the stuff about the Iran-Hezbollah alliance with al-Qaeda came out at the 1998 embassy bombing trials. Bin Laden was frustrated by the failure of the 1993 WTC bombing, so he sent several of his senior commanders and camp instructors, including Saif al-Adel (al-Qaeda's current military commander), Saif al-Islam al-Masri, Abu Talha al-Sudani, Abu Jaffar al-Masri, and Salem al-Masri to travel to the Bekaa Valley and pick up training from their Hezbollah and VEVAK counterparts. A lot of the professionalism and quality of the explosives that were used by al-Qaeda in both the Riyadh National Guard and Khobar Towers bombings (as well as the embassy bombings themselves) can be readily attributed to VEVAK or Hezbollah influence. Bin Laden was also good friends with Sheikh Nomani (a Shi'ite) and had a good relationship with Mahdi Chamran, the external operations director of VEVAK. So I'd say that lumping him into the sectarian category would definitely be a mistake.

Zarqawi is another matter entirely, however, due to the fact that he was a member of the sectarian Pakistani groups Sipah-e-Sahaba and later Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which most likely played a factor in influencing his rather unfavorable view of the Shi'ites.

Dan:

No disagreement about the Balkans. Picking a side is pretty difficult, and I'd rather we hadn't.

I never studied terrorism at the university level (which is probably just as well for a number of reasons)

Not least of which, the Middle East studies departments in the US. It's as bad here, too. I looked at SOAS, but it felt like I was in Netzarim - only two students doing Israeli history, with thousands of hostile angry Muslims learning Arabic to read the Koran.

My bad on the typo - it's etc, by the way ;-)

What are your sources? I thought I had a reasonable grasp, and you're talking about groups I've never heard of.

Colt:

In the Balkans, the US tried to back the least bad side, as is often the case. Certainly I would prefer the current and reasonably stable countries (save Macedonia and Kosovo) to the decades of protracted ethno-religious warfare that would have ensued had the Serbs been allowed to continue unabated. Bosnia would have turned into another Chechnya if Milosevic had been allowed to continue unimpeded and that would have meant a lot more dead bodies in the long run.

As far as book sources go, let me give you a couple to get you started:

• Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky

• The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism by Simon Reeve

• Inside Al-Qaeda by Rohan Gunaratna

• The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot by John Miller and Michael Stone

• Why America Slept by Gerald Posner

• Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid

• The Connection: How al-Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America by Stephen F. Hayes

• Unholy Wars by John Cooley

There are of course others, but these are the best IMO. The problem that one runs into with most popular literature on the subject of al-Qaeda is that they generally fit into one of the following categories:

right-wing: take Islamists at face value that their actions are in accordance with Islamic teachings, paint a picture of a clash of civilizations, and generally project a "Green Horde" view of the Islamic world. Also place a disporportionate amount of emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the global Islamist context.

left-wing: blames the US, the CIA, the West in general, or some combination of three for every problem in the Middle East and views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the root cause of any and all anti-Western views in the Muslim world. Blames poverty for terrorism and in actuality serves to contribute to anti-Americanism in the political discourse of the Arab world, where it is quite fashionable to paint the US as the source of all evil because it removes any problems that do exist from the fault of the existing government. There's also an attempt to Kremlinize all but the most radical Islamists into moderate/hardliner distinctions as well as a view that any pro-Western Arab government is an American puppet state.

journalist: people like Bergen or Emerson fall into this category. They're okay as far as they go but they frequently ignore the larger picture and tend to approach situations with a certain degree of populism or superficiality.

As far as the groups I mentioned earlier:

Sipah-e-Sahaba (SeS): Basically the Pakistani version of the KKK as far as Shi'ites are concerned. They were formed in Pakistani Punjab as a reaction to the Iranian Revolution and want to exterminate all Shi'ites. Musharraf banned them in 2002 and they've been operating underground ever since.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ): An unfortunately large and growing offshoot of the SeS, the LeJ is responsible for most of the major sectarian violence inside of Pakistan. They already have their own underground network inside the country (having been banned for their tendencies to kill large numbers of people) and have assisted al-Qaeda fighters in getting in and out of Pakistan. Al-Qaeda generally uses them either for their underground networks inside Pakistan proper or to kill large numbers of Shi'ites in Pakistan Baluchistan in order to deter them from assisting the military with finding al-Qaeda leaders.

Thanks Dan, that's great.

I concur with Dan's reading list (tho I confess I haven't read all of those. I would add The Age of Sacred Terror, Ghost Wars, From Beirut to Jerusalem, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and, my current reading, Barnett Rubin's The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. Throw in some V.S. Naipaul for color, or some Olivier Roy for depth and contrast. I would read Ghost Wars instead of Unholy Wars, as Cooley is not a great writer and tends to get mired in details, although he turned out to have been quite prescient.

As for Dan's typology, it's pretty good, although I might ascribe greater weight to the Palestinian questian than Dan would, as well as to the poverty problem. I think the appeal of political or radical Islam is a call to a time when the umma was strong united and strong

asdf:

I've actually read most of those as well, but especially with books like The Age of Sacred Terror I would definitely recommend getting a firm basis in what al-Qaeda is before one starts reading the various apologia or lack thereof of former government officials on the topic. The same goes with Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke.

As far as the Palestinian issue is concerned, I don't so much want to downplay it as I want to keep it in perspective as far as the grand scheme of things are concerned. A lot of people forget that the Oslo peace process and the actual creation of the PA was going at the same time that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were planning Oplan Bojinka. Bin Laden's purported cause was getting the US out of Saudi Arabia, but our leaving voluntarily doesn't appear to have dampened his desire to kill us.

I don't think that poverty creates terrorism, but I do think that it provides a ready environment in which an awful lot of cannon fodder can be recruited. However, most of the al-Qaeda leadership is at least university-educated and comes from upper class if not Westernized background, so I don't necessarily think that fixing poverty is going to make demagogues like Abu Qatada or Abu Hamza al-Masri go away as far as their appeal is concerned. That's where the religio-ideological war of ideas comes in ;)

Thanks again. The New Jackals was already in my 'to read' pile and, asdf, so is The Dream Palace of the Arabs.

Since we're recommending books, I highly recommend "Lebanon: from Israel to Damascus".

Well, I would put Sacred Terror a cut or two above Against All Enemies in terms of scholarship and non-partisanship, and I think the charge of "apologia" is baseless. These guys were writing their book before 9/11, and I've seen nobody accuse these two of being asleep at the switch.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that anything short of "martyrdom" will dissuade Al Qaeda from carrying out its strategy. The point, rather, is to reduce its recruiting ability by making its appeals ring hollow as well as its capacity to foment mass uprisings in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Remember, the central appeal made by bin Laden and his ilk is that only through salaf can Muslims recreate the umma and be proud, strong, and militarily victorious. There is a debate over timing that goes on between militant groups like Al Qaeda and mostly political groups like Hib-ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood: do we wage jihad now or build institutions and support, and then destroy the unbelievers. To the extent that Muslim society can be proud, strong, and representative, via economic development, political reform, and a resolution of the gnawing cancer of the Palestinian question, undercuts the power of the radicals. A couple other reasons -- growing the private sector at the expense of the state, finding useful occupations for the millions of Arabs who are educated but can't find work commensurate with their abilities, building a generation comfortable with globalization, etc.

Compare the Muslim world today to a devastated Europe in the aftermath of WWII. Kennan's calculation was that the primary way to head off the onset communism (also an ideology led by young, highly educated radicals) in Western Europe was to eliminate the economic conditions under which it festered.

Of course, radical Islamic terrorism is a religious phenomenon, but religious movements don't just arise from the ether. The resurgence of religious sentiment worldwide (even in the United States) certainly suggests that other factors are at work here (television?), but I think it's clear that attacking poverty is a highly constructive way to approach the problem.

Without some sort of Middle East welfare program (not that welfare programs are terribly effective), I'm not sure what we can do to tackle poverty. Oil aside, the Arabs export next to nothing.

Well, we could slash ag subsidies, for one, which would certainly help the Egyptian and Kazakh cotton industries. Some of the Gulf States have done well as centers of commerce - in the UAE, for instance, only a third of the economy is oil and gas. Of course, a lot of the private sector activity is illegal! Saudi Arabia is developing a small scrap steel industry in which they melt down old tanks.

That's a start, but it's hardly the basis of an economy that reduces poverty.

I was joking about the tanks, and sort of about Dubai.

In any case, what's truly needed is high-level economic reform.

Many of these states are still stuck in command-style economies, Egypt, Syria, and the old Iraq being prime examples. Saudi Arabia, too, is basically a socialist country, but until recently, could simply take care of its citizens via oil wealth. The demographic trends are breaking the wrong way, and oil prices have been low since the early 80s. I would think that a China-style, carefully phased ecnomic reform program could lead the Middle East to the promised land, as it were. Take away the nanny state too quickly, and you'd have massive unrest and asset-stripping (see Russia); steadily erode it and you'll have better long-term results.

LOL! My mistake - the tank-scrap business does sound like a crazy scheme some layabout Saud prince might come up with.

There's not much in the way of enterprising spirit in the Middle East, and certainly not enough to compete with, well, anyone.