Why do they hate our NGO funding?

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.29.13

In recent decades, government sponsored nongovernment organizations (NGOs) have played a big role in trying to promote democracy across the world, from the former states of the Soviet Union to the Balkans, through the Middle East, and on to Indonesia and other parts of Asia.

And not surprisingly, they've also attracted the attention and fear of governments that see them as fifth-columns who exist to undermine their leaders and practices. Much of this verges on conspiracy theory, with claims that the role of such groups is to specifically destroy existing governments (the pro-democracy NGOs financed by billionaire George Soros are particular targets for this kind of complaint).

Well, various governments without exactly sterling human rights and democracy records have been pushing back hard against NGOS, drawing outrage from democracy advocates and governments such as the US.

Russia passed a law last year requiring NGOs that receive foreign money to either register as "foreign agents" or give up the cash, and has been vigorously enforcing it of late. More than 500 nongovernment organizations, who do election monitoring, human rights work, and run anticorruption efforts, are under investigation as deserving of the label.

In Turkmenistan, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov decreed that a state commission be created to supervise all foreign funded projects and Eurasianet claims that "if implemented in its entirety, the decree would enable the government effectively to take financial control of all forms of nonprofit activities in the Central Asian state."

Egypt, just two years after its uprising against Hosni Mubarak and now ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, is also getting in on the act. A new draft NGO law is drawing fury from human rights workers and political activists. Heba Morayef, the Egypt director for Human Rights Watch, writes on Twitter today that it looks "like latest draft of NGO law bans all foreign governmental & inter-governmental funding of NGOs. Bye bye UN, EU, USAID, DFID funding."

Amnesty International responded to the draft law and was scathing, saying that if it is approved it "would effectively be a death blow to independent civil society in Egypt."

President Morsi announced today that he had referred the law to the Shura Council, Egypt’s nominal upper house of parliament. While the lower house remains dissolved, the Council has the authority to pass new legislation until elections are held to elect a lower house.

“If they pass the law in its current form, the Egyptian authorities would send a message that little has changed since the Mubarak era, when the authorities restricted independent human rights organizations to stop them from exposing abuses,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Programme Director at Amnesty International. “Passing a law such as this one in a country with a long history of cracking down on the work of human rights organizations would be incredibly dangerous. If Egypt is serious about moving forward from its recent past, the authorities must turn away from this law and instead enable an environment for NGOs to ensure human rights are protected and promoted.”

Since the fall of Mubarak, Egypt has been incredibly wary of foreign NGOs – a group of NGO workers are currently on trial for receiving foreign funding, one of them an American.

But it's not hard to understand why governments don't like NGOs getting hard-to-control foreign funding (in poorer countries there isn't much money available for such groups and the locally wealthy who might help them out can be easily leaned on by the state). More openness and transparency are, after all, threats to many of these regimes – as are flourishing democracies.

This image from amateur video shows rebel fighters in Daraa, Syria, Tuesday. Europe's decision to allow member states to arm Syrian rebels and Russia's renewed pledge to send advanced missiles to the Syria regime could spur an arms race in an already brutal civil war and increasingly turn it into a East-West proxy fight. (Ugarit News via AP video/AP)

Why Syria is (still) different for the West

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.29.13

The US position on Syria's civil war remains, in public at least, much as it has long been: The end of President Bashar al-Assad's rule via some sort of negotiated settlement between the rest of his regime and the patchwork of secular Syrians, mainstream Islamists, and jihadis fighting against him.

That's the premise for a conference the US, France, and Britain have been pushing for in Geneva next month. But recent battlefield gains for Mr. Assad's forces, a Russian promise of a delivery of advanced air defense systems to the government (which would make a US-led air campaign more dangerous), and a divided political leadership for the opposition all make it appear very unlikely that peace will break out next month in Switzerland. 

Put simply, the Syrian opposition has not come together in the way the US had hoped – not in its military composition, which now involves a lot of foreign travelers from a regional Al Qaeda affiliate, nor on the international diplomatic front, which is fraught with infighting and doubt about the worth of a conference far from the battlefield.

Meanwhile, members of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah continue to pour into Syria to fight for Assad, with Iranian and Russian military support for the regime lurking in the background. 

That's made the opposition in some ways almost as unattractive from a US perspective as Assad himself, and explains American reticence. But the fact remains that Assad has long been isolated and sanctioned by the US, and the civil war has claimed at least 80,000 lives so far, with cities like Homs and Aleppo reduced to rubble by the government's long-range shelling. 

Speaking today, Fred Hof, who resigned as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's special representative on Syria last September, said: "This is a war Iran and Hezbollah have decided not to lose... we have not seen the same level of commitment from US."

Hypocritical US?-

But after decades of claims that US foreign policy is a "moral" one and calls for a US ready to end horrific wars after the genocide in Rwanda, some in Washington say the US looks hypocritical for not at least giving the rebels more advanced weapons and, perhaps, using air power to halt Assad's advances and give the rebels enough breathing room to regroup and win their war.

US Sen. John McCain, who darted across the Turkish border into rebel-held Syria on Monday, has been leading that charge. On a visit organized by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a pro-rebellion group based in Washington, he met with Free Syrian Army leaders. He met with Gen. Salim Idris, a Free Syria Army leader, who according to the group "asked that the United States increase its aid to the Free Syrian Army in the form of heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on Hezbollah."

Earlier this month Senator McCain said "the strategic and humanitarian costs of this conflict continue to be devastating" and called on the US to consider an "overt and large-scale operation to train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces" and said that "we could use our precision strike capabilities to target Assad’s aircraft and SCUD missile launchers on the ground without our pilots having to fly into the teeth of Syria’s air defenses. Similar weapons could be used to selectively destroy artillery pieces and make Assad’s forces think twice about remaining at their posts. We could also use Patriot missile batteries outside of Syria to help protect safe zones inside of Syria from Assad's aerial bombing and missile attacks."

But is anyone in Washington listening? President Obama has been very cautious about getting more involved and today his administration poured water on a story in The Daily Beast yesterday that, citing "two administration officials," claimed that "The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria that would be enforced by the US and other countries, such as France and Great Britain."

USA Today quoted National Security Council Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden this morning as saying: "I'm not going to discuss our internal deliberations, but we have said for many months that the administration is prepared for a variety of contingencies in Syria and all options are on the table."

That sounds about right. The Pentagon is always readying contingency plans in responses to conflict, particularly when it looks like US politicians might request action. It's safe to assume a variety of no-fly and no-drive zone plans have already been drawn up. Whether the US imposes any of them is a matter of politics, of course.

And as horrific as Syria is now for the people living through the war, the possibility of broadening the conflict, already spilling over into Lebanon and Iraq, to involve Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Israel (they have conducted airstrikes against what they alleged were attempted Assad weapons transfers to Hezbollah) would give any president pause. This is a far more dangerous situation than in Libya.

Where are the hawks?

But the push for war continues. In the Washington Post yesterday there was a curious news story about the dearth of "liberal hawks" who were bullish on the Iraq war speaking out in favor of armed US intervention in Syria – curious because it gives so little time to liberal hawks who are skeptical of armed intervention in Syria. In the long, three-page piece you have to read until the middle of the third page to find a supporter of the Iraq war who opposes a US war in Syria (the columnist Fareed Zakaria) being quoted (it is also only on the third screen that an overall critic of liberal interventionism, Stephen Walt of Harvard, is quoted).

But amid the burst in outside engagement, one influential group seems noticeably silent. The liberal hawks, a cast of prominent left-leaning intellectuals, played high-profile roles in advocating for American military intervention on foreign soil — whether for regime change or to prevent humanitarian disasters. They pressured President Bill Clinton to intervene in Bosnia, provided intellectual cover on the left for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and urged President Obama to engage in Libya. But even as the body count edges toward 100,000 in Syria and reports of apparent chemical-weapons use by Assad, liberal advocates for interceding have been rare, spooked perhaps by the traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clear reluctance of a Democratic president to get mired in the Middle East. Call them Syria’s mourning doves.

This is certainly true. There are fewer members of the US political, academic and journalistic establishments that support an armed US effort in Syria than did in Iraq. And the poor outcome of that war, which led to a sectarian civil war that claimed over 150,000 lives, certainly plays in to many calculations. But it isn't just that people feel burned by Iraq. Many people view the situation in Syria today particularly dangerous, with the likelihood of nasty effects in neighbors Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. And the sectarian element of the conflict can't be denied.

It is not inherently inconsistent to support intervention in Libya, a tiny and far more homogenous country that had no powers standing behind it, and still be leery of one in Syria, where Iran and Russia back Assad. It is the specifics of Syria that must be taken on in making the case for war there – not potentially foolish appeals to consistency. 

Of windmills and donkeys

Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center made the case for the US to give up what he describes as a "quixotic" effort to mold a Syrian opposition to its liking, and accept the Syrian opposition as it actually is. Writing in The Atlantic, he says it's a folly to wait "for a more perfect Syrian opposition" and appears to call for more arms for the rebellion, notwithstanding that it's armed component is "effectively dominated by Salafis and Islamists."

The original sin of US policy was taking military intervention off the table and focusing instead on a "political settlement," as if the two were mutually exclusive. Instead, intervention and diplomacy should have proceeded in parallel. It was only a credible threat of military action that would have brought the regime, or at least elements of it, to the negotiating table. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the Serbian government gave up its ethnic cleansing campaign and agreed to Western terms only after NATO military intervention, not before...

It is a testament to the faith that the Syrian opposition still places in the United States that they are even willing to go to Geneva. They, and we, have been through this before, the cycle of hope, followed by disappointment and even betrayal. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they still hope that American policy might change and adapt, after yet another round of diplomacy fails, as it almost certainly will.

In a series of tweets this morning, Hamid expanded on what he'd like to see happen, while also saying "in some ways, it's already too late for Syria." (he thinks the US should have gotten seriously involved 18 months ago, before the presence of jihadis within the insurgency grew.) He wrote the US should provide advanced weapons to the Free Syrian Army (the US has worried that such weapons, particularly portable anti-aircraft systems, could end up in the hands of jihadis), announce a deadline for the regime to step down and strikes against government and military installations (I originally misunderstood Hamid as meaning regime figures, he clarified later), and a "no-drive zone" imposed by air power if it does not comply. 

Prime Minister-elect and leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) political party Nawaz Sharif speaks to his party workers during a seminar in Lahore, to mark the anniversary of Pakistan's first successful nuclear test in 1998, Tuesday. (Mohsin Raza/Reuters)

Should we stop worrying and learn to love the 'Muslim bomb?'

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.28.13

Today is the 15th anniversary of the day Pakistan decided to go nuclear and the world, supposedly, changed forever.

Pakistan's decision to test a nuclear device was driven by age-old enemy India's nuclear tests a few weeks earlier (though India first tested a small nuclear device in 1974, it hadn't crossed that line again; Pakistan had vowed to go nuclear if India did).

India and Pakistan's dueling tests fueled frightened headlines and editorials around the world, economic sanctions that did more harm to Pakistan's economy than to India's (though the situation changed after Sept. 11, 2001), and intense polarization about what was to be "done" about South Asia. It also spurred talk of Pakistan's "Muslim bomb" as if the weapon would somehow be used to in the interests and at the demands of all Muslims, rather than in the interests of Pakistan.

(The history of that phrase would be interesting to pursue; its first appearance in this paper appears to be 1981 and I also found a quote in an August 1981 New Yorker article in which an unnamed Pakistani general paraphrases former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of the nuclear program, as saying "There is a Christian bomb in the US, a Jewish bomb in Israel, a Hindu bomb in India, why not a Muslim bomb in Pakistan?")

And yet, 15 years later ... nothing particularly awful has happened because of Pakistan having joined the nuclear club. In fact, the past 15 years has been the quietest such stretch when it comes to nuclear testing since the US was first to test a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, following that up just a few weeks later with the only aggressive use of nuclear weapons in history - the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though North Korea exploded its first bomb in 2006, its three separate nuclear tests have been the only nuclear detonations in the past 15 years.

And yet, this paper wrote the day after the Pakistan test in a dispatch from Washington that:

Peace in South Asia, home to the poorest one-sixth of humanity, and the future of global disarmament have been plunged into uncertainty by Pakistan's detonation of five nuclear devices in response to five by rival India. In setting off the devices yesterday in an underground shaft at a site in the remote Chagai region, Pakistan ignored threats of economic sanctions and pleas for restraint by President Clinton.

... Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif bowed to intense domestic pressure stoked by national pride and demands he ensure Pakistan's security... These tests by India and Pakistan have transformed the global balance of power within 17 days.

Transformed the global balance of power? Maybe. They've certainly made India and Pakistan less likely to be invaded. And while they've made their mutual hostility more dangerous, they've also restrained their hands from all out war. The two countries had three major wars before Pakistan went nuclear and, depending on how you view the Kargil conflict in 1991 which claimed about 1,000 lives, one or none since (restraint from both sides may have had something to do with fears of nuclear escalation).

After Pakistan's second nuclear test that weekend, the Monitor quoted the soon-to-be notorious AQ Khan.

"Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said yesterday that a nuclear warhead could be deployed on missiles "within days" if "we are forced to do something," but he also believes that nuclear capability can help guarantee peace.

Other officials say Pakistan's next move could be diplomatic. "If there is a conciliatory signal from India or the US offering itself as a conciliator, that may move the process ahead," said an official who requested anonymity. "Pakistan could also probe ideas for peace. But the exact strategy is still being devised."

So far, India and Pakistan have avoided another all-out war. And both countries have been more restrained in flexing their nuclear muscles through testing than almost all the other countries that joined the nuclear club before them.

Does this mean the tongue-in-cheek headline at the top of this story should be taken literally? No. Nuclear weapons are scary, and the more people that have them the scarier they get. But the track record of countries who get the bomb behaving responsibly with them has held.

To get the rhythm of nuclear explosions and how governments have responded with tit-for-tat nuclear tests – the ultimate in macho posturing – and how much things have improved, have a look at this fantastic illustration of the timing and location of all nuclear explosions in history up until 1998 (there have been three more tests since 1998, all by North Korea). 

The Chinese words 'Ding Jinhao was here' is seen on artwork in the 3,500-year-old Luxor temple in Luxor, Egypt, May 6. (AP)

Egypt's antiquities face bigger problems than Chinese graffiti

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.28.13

A picture of a graffiti that a Chinese boy wrote on one of Egypt's grandest Pharaohnic temples went viral on Chinese social media over the weekend, stirring debate in that country over whether the legions of inexperienced tourists it sends abroad each year is replacing the old image of the "ugly American" with that of the "ugly Chinese."

The photo was posted on Friday by a fellow Chinese tourist, who was outraged to find that a countryman had defaced the monument.

In Egypt, the questions were far more practical in nature: Why, and how, is the government failing to protect the ancient temples, tombs and pyramids that lure millions of tourists a year? And how did this particular instance of defacement go undetected for so long (the parents of the boy, now in middle school, indicated he defaced the temple on a trip some years ago).

The Chinese teenager scrawled "Ding Jinhao was here" on one of the reliefs at the Temple of Luxor, which Pharoah Amenhotep III began constructing circa 1340 BC, or nearly 3,500 years ago. It has remained untouched for years. The temple is in the center of modern-day Luxor, a town on the banks of the Nile that was known as Thebes in antiquity and is today on the UNESCO World Heritage list, along with the surrounding region.

After the pyramids at Giza, the temple, connected to the equally famous Karnak Temple by a sphynx-lined boulevard, is one of Egypt's most visited ancient monuments.

At busy times, thousands of tourists a day pour through the complex (and at night, when it is spectacularly lit). That it's possible to scrawl graffiti there is unsurprising, though that it went unnoticed and unaddressed for so long is more alarming – as is the fact that parents would leave a child unsupervised long enough to carry out his vandalism.

State-run Xinhua, which generally operates as a government mouthpiece, writes that Jinhao's graffiti "caused his countryfolk to reflect on how to build a good national image... Leaving graffiti is common among Chinese tourists, damaging historic sites and demonstrating poor education and behavior."

China's image abroad has been a growing issue for the Communist Party that runs the vast country because in the past decade it's begun unleashing ever more of its increasingly wealthy citizenry on the world. In April, the United Nation's World Tourism Organization said China had for the first time become the largest source of international tourism, with 83 million Chinese traveling abroad last year and spending $102 billion in the process. The UN said Chinese spending on tourism is up 8 times from what it was just a decade ago.

China's export-led economic growth has been phenomenal, and has already left profound marks on Egypt and across the Middle East, displacing much of the local textile industry and manufacturing. Even local crafts have not been spared. In Egypt, it's traditional to light ornate lamps called fanoos during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, yet in recent years the locally produced glass and tin lanterns have been displaced by cheaper plastic Chinese versions. 

From an Egyptian perspective, the graffiti at Karnak is the least of the problems for its antiquities – a minor nuisance similar to a group of Russians who illegally climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza a few months ago and obtained some amazing pictures in the process. Far more troubling has been the rampant looting of less famous Egyptian sites accompanying the collapse of law and order since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak two years ago. Dahshour, a 4,500 year old grave and pyramid complex not far from Cairo, has been particularly hard hit.

The Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Egypt, at times publicly ambivalent about the symbols of pre-Islamic Egypt, has not made protecting that site a priority, though whether out of disinterest or distraction, is hard to say.

At any rate, the Chinese boys graffiti joins a long tradition of defacing Egypt's monuments that, when they get old enough, become interesting in themselves. The oldest vandals may be the Pharoahs themselves, who had a habit of defacing the tombs of dead predecessors, scratching out the cartouches that named the royal builders and often replacing them with their own names. When the Greeks came to Egypt, they felt compelled to scrawl on the monuments, as did the Romans after them. Egypt's early Coptic Christians wrote their names and crude paintings on the grand old temples, as did French soldiers in Napoleon's expedition to Egypt at the end of the 18th century (an earlier version of this piece stated the wrong century), as did the British who came after them.

Studying this graffiti is common among archeologists and historians.

All of which is to say, that young Jinhao was joining a grand and ancient tradition, however destructive, without knowing it. The world's wealthiest and most powerful nations have been drawn to Egypt for thousands of years. As the Chinese move into those ranks, more of them will come to Egypt, and leave their mark in one way or another.

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President Barack Obama makes a point about his administration's counter-terrorism policy at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington on Thursday. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

Obama rhetorically ends the 'war on terror'

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.23.13

President Barack Obama's sprawling national security speech this afternoon veered from the controversial drone program that has killed at least 3,000 alleged militants overseas since 2002 to the legality and ethics of his justice department snooping into reporter's emails.

But if the speech is remembered for anything years hence it will be as the moment when the president declared "The war on terrorism is dead! Long live the open-ended game of whack-a-mole against diffuse networks!"

Yes, that's right. Obama has rhetorically put to bed the frankly silly GWOT terminology – while obliquely calling for years of low-grade conflict. The president said that core Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan are on a "path to defeat" but said the use of the drone program, to kill people in far off lands we are not at war with, will have to continue for years.

"We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. What we can do – what we must do – is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold," Obama said. "Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America."

Of course, "persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists" doesn't fall as lightly off the tongue as does "global war on terror" or even the briefly popular GWOT ("Gee-WOT"). But that's what the US has mostly been doing in recent years with its killings in Pakistan and Yemen, which dramatically accelerated after Obama took office. And that's clearly the way Obama would like to keep it (for those keeping score at home, he mentioned Syria only twice, once in passing and once in a manner that contained a warning: "We must strengthen the opposition in Syria, while isolating extremist elements – because the end of a tyrant must not give way to the tyranny of terrorism.")

The US really is in a different era. Obama with his words hasn't opened it. In fact, they're an acknowledgement of a new reality, as was his urging of Congress not to extend the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that was passed 12 years ago and that began the overarching justification for so much that has happened since. The president was right to worry that open-ended war powers for presidents tend to lead nations in dark directions. He continued:

"I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing. The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states."

From here he went to a spirited defense of the drone program, calling it highly successful at disrupting Al Qaeda, legal, and necessary. Though he expressed some concerns – "to say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance" – he left little doubt that we'll be droning on. And on. And he did not appear to address the concerns of some that overuse of aerial bombings in foreign lands may help recruit new members to anti-American causes.

Soldiers pass by flowers left at a makeshift memorial outside an army barracks near the scene of a killing in Woolwich, southeast London, Thursday. British authorities believe that two men accused of the gruesome murder of a soldier yesterday on a London street was revenge for wars in Muslim countries. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters)

Did similar detours bring terrorism to streets of Boston and London?

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.23.13

The gruesome murder of a British soldier on the streets of Woolwich, London yesterday appears to have been carried out by men of Nigerian decent who converted from Christianity to Islam.

Reuters reports that "British authorities believe that two men accused of hacking a soldier to death on a London street in revenge for wars in Muslim countries are British of Nigerian descent, a source close to the investigation said Thursday." The wire service goes on to cite local media saying that one of the two suspects is a 28-year-old named Michael Adebolajo and that both men "appeared to have converted to Islam from Christian backgrounds," media said.

Now, "a source close to the investigation" and "media said" should always be approached with caution. But with both men in custody and alive, and with one of the killers having given a rambling interview while waving his bloodied hands yesterday, the chances that there's much confusion about his identity would seem to be low. 

So it seems that the two London killers have some commonalities with the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the bombing attack on the Boston marathon. The early indications point to both sets of killers being second generation immigrants, who either through their social networks or online media came to militant Al Qaeda-style Islam later in life. While the Tsarnaevs were nominally raised as Muslim, most accounts say the older brother had become markedly more religious – and more radical – shortly before the attacks. He was thrown out of a Cambridge, Mass. mosque for launching an angry rant against praise by a prayer leader there for Martin Luther King, a non-Muslim. 

The zealousness of converts to any cause has given rise to proverbs and copious academic research. Most converts to Islam are not violent, of course. But they are over-represented in cases of Islamist terrorism in the West. Also of note, Muslims who receive a devout religious upbringing are comparatively less interested in involvement in terrorism. Some have argued a strong, conventional Muslim religious education actively works against a willingness to commit terrorism to civilians, and in a lot of majority Muslim countries, former drug dealers and convicts have been prime recruiting grounds for militant organizations, more so than mainstream mosques.

Robin Simcox and Emily Dyer wrote for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center in March that from 1997 to 2011 that 171 people came up before the US military or civilian court systems for "Al Qaeda-related offenses." They found that a quarter of the people convicted were converts to Islam and that "in fact, in three of the years between 2007 and 2011, and in eight of the years between 1997 and 2011, converts committed a higher proportion of [Al Qaeda-related incidents] than non-converts."

They write (I've stripped out their footnotes from the text):

The vast majority of converts (95%) were U.S. citizens, significantly higher than the 54% of U.S. citizens among all AQRO perpetrators. The remaining 5% of converts were British (for example, the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid) or Australian (for example, David Hicks, who was found guilty in a military court of providing material support to al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan). By contrast, 45% of non-converts were U.S. citizens.

When disaggregated further, 83% of converts were born in the United States, significantly higher than the 21% among non-converts. Of all U.S.-born individuals, 54% were converts. Examples of U.S.-born converts include Hassan Abu-Jihaad, who provided classified information concerning the movements of a U.S. Navy battle group, and Daniel Maldonado, who received military training at a camp in Somalia where members of al-Qa`ida were present.

Also of interest is that in both cases, the motivations for the two sets of men had little to do with conflicts in their ancestral homes. Chechnya and Nigeria are both home to Islamist militant groups, and there was intense speculation that the Tsarneav's were somehow inspired by the Chechen conflict against Russia.

But as more information about them has come out, it seems their anger was directed at the US for fighting wars in Muslim lands, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq. The London killers appear to have been similarly angry at the UK's involvement in those two wars, as Ian Evans writes for the Monitor this morning. 

While Nigeria is home to an Islamist insurgency called Boko Haram, early indications do not point to the conflict there as a genesis for their rage. Instead, the target of a soldier and the statements from his alleged killers suggest they were reacting to the long British military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The emphasis from Boko Haram is more internal inside Nigeria and less international. They understand the British Army is not involved in suppression within Nigeria which is being carried out by the Nigerian Army," says Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford. The group is fighting to set up an Islamic state in the mainly Muslim north of Nigeria.

Instead, says the professor, the attackers appear at this point to have launched the attack on their own after being radicalized. "This is the type of thing that the British authorities are most worried about," he says. "Counter-terrorism has almost doubled in size over the last 10 years with over 10,000 people now working in it whether it’s MI5, MI6 or police. But their problem is, how do you stop random attacks?"

This again appears to fit with Tsarneav's. While it's hard for a complex terrorist attack in the US or the UK to maintain operational security, particularly if they're in electronic contact with a guiding organization abroad, a couple of mates who get inspired to act by rhetoric that they hear, read, or watch on YouTube don't throw off a lot of warning signs that authorities can home in on, if they're smart enough to keep their conspiracy small (bringing to mind the proverb "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.")

Finally there's the use of "our lands" by the killer who gave the interview yesterday. That led a lot of people to wonder "which lands" but probably, in the context of this attack, they meant all "Muslim" lands, bouncing off the nation-less concept of the ummah (the whole community of believers, which is central to Islam, but in jihadi circles is used to justify a broad war against all who might harm Muslims, anywhere).

According to The Independent, one of the attackers at least fell in with al-Muhajiroun, an Islamist group banned in the UK that praised the 9/11 attacks on the US, after his conversion. The group worked hard to find converts in the UK, and preached a chauvinistic and violent approach to the faith outside of the mainstream.

Anjem Choudary, the former leader of the group, Al Muhajiroun, confirmed that he had known the man who was seen on video in the immediate aftermath of yesterday's horrific killing waving a cleaver with bloodied hands and making political statements. Mr Choudary said Mujahid, who he said had converted to Islam in 2003 and was a British-born Nigerian, had stopped attending meetings of Al Muhajiroun and its successor organisations two years ago.

Mr Choudary told The Independent: “I knew him as Mujahid. He attended our meetings and my lectures. I wouldn’t describe him as a member [of Al Muhajiroun]. There were lots of people who came to our activities who weren’t necessarily members.

"Mujahid" means holy warriors. Running down an armed man in a straight from behind and butchering him isn't much like war. But war is clearly what these men had on their minds.

An Iraqi police officer uses a bomb detector at a checkpoint in central Baghdad, Iraq, in 2010. (Karim Kadim/AP)

Iraqi government still using bomb detectors it knows are faulty

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.22.13

In 2008 or so, magical ADE651 "bomb detectors" began turning up at Iraqi-managed checkpoints. Almost immediately, people I knew who seemed to know something about explosives were laughing about them. Even people like me who knew nothing about explosives were laughing about them, since they looked like old television antennas sticking out of the spout of a trigger-handled garden hose – sort of like a ray gun that Calvin would cobble together in his garage to shoot at Hobbes.

Within a few months it turned out the experts were right. The "machines," produced in Britain, were debunked as part of a highly lucrative scam and only a little more effective than a dowsing rod (that is, hardly at all).

But Iraqi soldiers and police were told the lie that it would keep the Iraqi people safe and instructed to wave the magic wands over cars for years. How many car bombs made it through checkpoints that had abandoned more effective measures (like actual physical searches or the use of dogs) over those years? How many people died as a result? No one will ever know. But the number well may be high, since tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by car bombs in the decade.

In 2008 there were ambitious claims being made that the things worked, and the Iraqi government was desperate to stop a wave of car bombs that were reaching a crescendo around 2007. While the government was incompetent, it was perhaps forgiveable that it was believing something that was unlikely to be true, perhaps out of desperation and inexperience.

Well. It turns out the detectors are still in use in Iraq today, on the order of the interior ministry and weeks after James McCormick, the grifter who made about $85 million selling the fake detectors to Iraq, was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the maximum because the British judge was incensed that his greed had almost certainly cost Iraqis their lives.

In other words, not only has there not been any accountability in Iraq yet (it's hard to ever imagine, in the Iraqi political context, a no-bid series of contracts like the ones given to McCormick without substantial kickbacks) but people either embarrassed at their gullibility or guilty of graft are still putting their own people in harms way to protect themselves.

That's as stunning and direct a failure of political leadership as you'll find. This week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has defended the devices, saying "some" of them work. Former Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani, under whose watch the deals were signed, has likewise defended them. And persistent reports are coming in that they're in use around Iraq.

At least one Iraqi lawmaker has claimed that the scam reaches into the highest parts of the military and that Mr. Bulani was involved. But, as yet, there's no signs of an investigation, let alone a prosecution or senior officials. 

The incident is just among the most cartoonishly clear of the callousness and venality of large swathes of the political class in the new Iraq, and just one of the running sores that will continue to make it an extremely violent and unstable place.

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Iraqi security force members inspect the site of a car bomb attack in Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday. Two car bombings in the southern city of Basra, killing and wounding dozens of people, police said. Iraq has seen a spike of attacks, including bombings hitting both Sunni and Shiite civilian targets over the last week. (Nabil al-Jurani/AP)

Are tit-for-tat sectarian killings enough to tilt Iraq back to war?

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 05.20.13

After the death of more than 60 people in a series of car bombs today targeting Iraq's majority Shiite community and weeks of escalating sectarian attacks, many are wondering if the country's simmering sectarian tensions will tumble once again into all-out civil war.

The situation in Iraq is bad enough, as the attacks today make clear. Reuters reported there were two deadly blasts in the southern, largely Shiite city of Basra; 30 deaths in seven different blasts targeting Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad; and an attack on a bus carrying Shiite pilgrims near the town of Balad. 

This kind of violence, almost certainly carried out by Sunni militants, has ebbed and flowed for years in Iraq, without ever leading to large-scale sectarian bloodletting like that which occurred between 2005 and 2008, when tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed in fighting that transformed many of the mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities into entirely Shiite or Sunni enclaves. An Al Qaeda in Iraq attack on an important Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 touched off reprisal killings across the country.

Many have long wondered what event could be Iraq's next Samarra. The good news, if any good news can be taken from a society still as divided and violent as Iraq today, is that the general population and political elites have consistently shied away from the worst. And while the current flare-up is almost certainly going to claim more lives, the odds of all-out war are probably low, going by the experience of the past few years.

To be sure, the current situation is bad. Last Friday, at least 76 people were killed in bombs targeting predominantly Sunni areas in Iraq. Those attacks followed close on the heels of attacks against Shiites earlier in the week. In April, more than 700 people were killed, one of the highest monthly death tolls since 2008.

The government of Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has taken a hard line against Sunni protesters, with a deadly government raid on a protest encampment in the town of Hawija claiming at least 50 lives and infuriating the country's Sunni minority.

That protest encampment, like similar ones in Anbar province, was inspired by a widespread feeling among Iraqi Sunnis that they have been completely cut out of meaningful power by the country's Shiite majority, that Mr. Maliki is running the country in the interest of his sect rather than all citizens, and that the security forces commit human rights abuses with impunity.

While the worst of Iraq's fighting ended years ago, the national reconciliation that the US predicted would follow never occurred, leaving Iraq volatile and prone to violence. It has remained one of countries most beset by terrorism, and added to that volatile mix is the civil war in Syria, with many members of Al Qaeda in Iraq joining the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 

What's more, powerful Sunni leaders in Anbar province – which borders Syria and was the center of the insurgency during the US occupation – are being hounded by the central government (fairly or unfairly it's hard to say). Joel Wing has a good roundup on Sunni leaders in Anbar province, and their various recent conflicts with the central government's security forces. Ominously, a number of the people he discusses had been involved in fighting Sunni insurgents on the side of the government and US forces just a few years ago.   

"The recent raids, kidnappings, and the end of the call for talks with the authorities can only add to this growing fire," Wing writes. "Even if the mainstream protest movement like the one in Ramadi attempts to remain peaceful, it is apparent that more and more people in the governorate are at least open to the passive if not active support for attacks upon the security forces."

With all this, it's pretty easy to predict the worst. But Iraqis were so badly scarred by the sectarian civil war, with so much lost on every side, that it's hard to imagine the wildfire catching again soon. While average Iraqis have suffered due to a weak economy, both Shiite and Sunni political leaders have profited handsomely from high oil prices in recent years, and have little to gain from all-out warfare that would almost certainly end in the same result as last time: with the country's majority Shiite population still in the driver seat. 

Make no mistake. Iraq's situation is grim. But the country has repeatedly pulled back from the brink in recent years. And there's a good chance that it will again.

A member of the Free Syrian Army holds his weapon as he sits on a sofa in the middle of a street in Deir al-Zor, April 2. The United States believes with varying degrees of confidence that Syria's regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale, the White House said on Thursday. But it added that President Barack Obama needed "credible and corroborated" facts before acting on that assessment. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)

Should use of chemical weapons in Syria be a 'game changer?'

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 04.25.13

The Obama administration said in a letter to senators today that it has seen evidence that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons against its opponents "on a small scale."

The letter drew howls from predictable quarters that the US must now do more to arm rebels or perhaps even go directly to war with Syria; cautions from Obama administration officials like Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that evidence isn't firm enough yet to be the "game changer" President Barack Obama had promised in March; and a reiteration from the administration itself that proven use of chemical weapons by Assad would draw a sharp response from the US.

"The President has made it clear," Miguel E. Rodriquez, Obama's director of legislative affairs wrote to Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin today, "that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States of America."

But why should the US commit itself to war with Syria on the basis of whether it used chemical weapons?  There's an unspoken assumption that chemical weapons are a special horror that requires special responses, but the underpinnings for this are rarely explored.

The catalog of likely war crimes by the Assad regime has steadily expanded since anti-government protests first broke out in early 2011. Thousands have been killed by cluster bombs, mortars, and scud missiles that have rained down on Syrian cities, with no discrimination between rebel fighters and civilians. Rebels, too, have been implicated in war crimes: executing prisoners, carrying out indiscriminate bombings in civilian areas, and participating in sectarian massacres.

At least 70,000 Syrians have died in the conflict and 1.4 million have fled the country, mostly to neighboring Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, where they're straining the budgets of the local governments and the United Nations agencies tasked with providing humanitarian assistance. Aside from death tolls and home losses, millions of Syrians are being plunged into poverty. 

So, the human need is great, regional strategic fears are mounting, and from the outside, the whole thing looks like a bloody stalemate. But the US has been reluctant to couple its insistence that Mr. Assad "must go" with the sort of military assistance that could prove decisive.

That's because Obama and many of his advisers are worried about the substantial presence amid the rebel fighters of the same brand of jihadis the US spent a fortune fighting in neighboring Iraq and the prospects for a major sectarian bloodletting in the country in the wake of a defeat for Assad. The US has also been reluctant to act without UN Security Council backing, something Russia has steadfastly opposed, at least until now.

But if all of these things have stayed Obama's hand, why would the "small" use of a chemical weapon, presumably some of the sarin nerve gas that has long been in the Syrian government's arsenal, change his strategic calculation?

Yes, there's a UN convention against chemical weapons (as there are against a great many things), but the world is filled with horrible crimes, and it seems to me the best way to measure them is by the number of their victims rather than the means of assault.

For instance, Saddam Hussein's famous chemical assault on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 claimed about 5,000 lives. But in the overall context of the punitive Anfal Campaign that he pursued in the late 1980s against Iraq's Kurdish population, the use of chemical weapons was small potatoes. Human Rights Watch estimated a minimum of 50,000 Kurds were killed during one six-month period in 1988 and perhaps as many as 100,000, almost all of them non-combatants.

Yet internationally, Halabja is spoken of again and again as evidence of Hussein's particular evil; the vastly greater number of people killed with conventional weapons is rarely mentioned at all. 

But both Obama's people and his more hawkish critics in congress appear to be in agreement that greater US action will be mandated by the use of chemical weapons in Syria. So what's the quality of evidence?

So far, evidence is sketchy and it appears to come entirely via Syrian opposition sources, who have a clear incentive to exaggerate or fabricate Syrian government crimes as they pursue international support for their cause. The administration's letter said, rather awkwardly, that the US intelligence community "does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale."

Varying degrees of confidence? Does that mean that one intelligence agency says "highly unlikely, but maybe" and in the analysis of another the situation is "highly likely, but not 100 percent for certain?" Given the poor intelligence analysis and the misuse of raw intelligence in the rush to war with Iraq in 2003, caution is clearly required.

The letter also says the "chain of custody" on "physiological samples" provided by opposition groups to the US claiming they prove chemical weapons use is unclear – by which the administration means it can't guarantee precisely when the samples, which Wired indicates were blood samples containing evidence of sarin gas exposure, were drawn, where they were drawn, or under what circumstances.

In other words, they could have been tampered with, or the evidence of sarin in them could have come from some other cause (rebel fighters handling captured chemical weapons?). Or maybe rebels used sarin they captured from Assad. Or, well, something else.

The good news for those worried about a rush to war is that Obama's people went to enormous pains today to insist that much harder evidence will be needed before the matter is considered settled. It was hard to read their comments as anything but a rebuke about the way things were done ahead of the Iraq war.

Obama's legislative affairs director Mr. Rodriquez wrote to Sens. McCain and Levin today: "Intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient - only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making, and strengthen our leadership of the international community."

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