Link Banana

I wasn’t quite sure how to read a recent story in The Economist about demonstrations in Kashmir. Pankaj Mishra says that its clear evidence that if the Indian government doesn’t change its ways, it risks creating a new generation of motivated international terrorists.

A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them — until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links. It is up to the Indian government to reckon honestly with Kashmiri aspirations for a life without constant fear and humiliation. Some first steps are obvious: to severely cut the numbers of troops in Kashmir; to lift the economic blockade on the Kashmir Valley; and to allow Kashmiris to trade freely across the line of control with Pakistan.

The Big Picture has a great set about China’s recent “Great Wall 5” drills. Included is the already well-known snap of an armed SWAT team advancing on Segways.

Remember that hubbub about how radical Islam was fracturing? Count The Economist as a doubter:

There is no denying that al-Qaeda has damaged its own cause by killing so many Muslims. That is why even Sunni Arabs in Iraq have for now joined the American side. A report from Simon Fraser University in Canada notes an extraordinary drop in support for terrorist groups in the Muslim world.

And yet the impact of this on global terrorism may, alas, be small. Al-Qaeda has compensated for its strategic setback in Iraq by creating a sanctuary in the tribal areas of Pakistan. As for its ideological problems, these may well be outweighed by the continuing current of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world. Besides, the organisation has a simple remedy. It just needs to kill more Westerners and fewer Muslims. For this it does not have to attract millions of people to its cause: a small number of disaffected souls in the right places is all it takes.

Well not really. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, widely called “the mastermind of 9/11,” is refusing to take a lawyer because the United States allows same-sex marriage. He explained:

I will not accept anybody, even if he is Muslim, if he swears to the American Constitution,” he said, vowing to follow Islamic shariya and scorning the U.S. Constitution “because it allows for same sexual marriage.”

(via Passport)

Why refrain from calling terrorists jihadis?

First, to call a terrorist a “jihadist” or “jihadi” effectively puts any campaign against terrorism into the framework of an existential battle between the West and Islam. This feeds into the worldview propagated by Al Qaeda. It also serves to isolate the tens of millions of Muslims who condemn the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Islam.

Second, these words locate the ideological battle exactly where the extremists want it to be. The terms of discussion are no longer about the murder of innocents in terrorist acts; they are about theology.

Third, when American leaders use this language it sends a confusing message to the Muslim world, showing ignorance on basic issues and possibly even raising doubts about American motives. Why, after all, would we call our enemy a “holy warrior”?

When two publications simultaneously carry what is essentially the same — rather long — story, it’s got to be worth noting.

• In The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright has an exhaustive — 14 internet pages — profile of “Dr. Fadl”, who recently published a book admonishing Al Qaeda for it’s tactics.
• The New Republic’s (slightly) briefer article sees a trend of people like Dr. Fadl, who dissent from Al Qaeda’s tactics even if they share some of their aims.

The essential point of both, as stated in TNR:

Although Benotman’s public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating Al Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over Al Qaeda’s leaders, and who — alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and Al Qaeda’s barbaric tactics in Iraq — have turned against the organization, many just in the past year.

Malise Ruthven has an interesting review of the theories about what makes people become Islamic terrorists. One theory:

Sageman pays close attention to family networks, with about one fifth of his sample having close family ties with other global Islamic activists. His point is strongly reinforced by Bilveer Singh in The Talibanization of Southeast Asia, his study of jihadist groups in Southeast Asia. Singh sees kinship as being a vital element in the makeup of al-Jamaat al-Islamiyah—the organization responsible for the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. The people who form terror groups have to know and trust one another. In most Muslim societies it is kinship, rather than shared ideological values, that generates relations of trust.

A surprisingly apt follow-on to the last post… In a discussion of his new book, Fareed Zakaria makes an interesting point:

We have done a great job of scaring the hell out of people, telling them that they are living in frightening times. You know the list: terrorism, rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russian, an expansionist China. Throw into this mix suspicions of Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration and it seems as if the world is ganging up on the United States. In fact, the data overwhelmingly shows that we’re living in more peaceful times than at any point since the early 1950s, and perhaps in several centuries. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker says, “the most peaceful times in the species’ existence.”) Wars, civil wars, deaths are all down, down, down over the last twenty years. And economic growth is up across the globe.

(via Matt Yglesias)

EDIT (5/05/2008): Mr. Zakaria also got the cover of this weeks Newsweek. Had I seen it a few hours earlier, this story would be the title link.

I like to see TERRORISM!! reconsidered from time to time. Today (yesterday actually), Josef Joffe does the honors:

Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service. Think about the extra half-hour millions of airline passengers waste standing in security lines; the annual cost in lost work hours runs into the billions. Add to that the freight delays at borders, ports and airports, the cost of checking money transfers as well as goods in transit, the wages for beefed-up security forces around the world. And that doesn’t even attempt to put a price tag on the compression of civil liberties or the loss of human dignity from being groped in full public view by Transportation Security Administration personnel at the airport or from having to walk barefoot through the metal detector, holding up your beltless pants. This global transaction tax represents the most significant victory of Terror International to date.

A note: “TERRORISM!!” is a single-word expression for the monolithic baddy that haunts our dreams and causes us to act irrationally. “Terrorism” is “the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

Those angered by the system of justice being deployed at Guantanamo should probably blow their lids about what’s passing for justice in some cases in Afghanistan. Here, for example, was enough evidence to convict a man to eight years in prison:

“Confessions/Admissions/Incriminating Statements: None”

“Witnesses: None”

“Physical Evidence: None”

“Photographs: None”

(via brijit)

Carol Williams assembled — through the shards of information made public — what a day is like for prisoners at Guantanamo. There are several interesting bits, but this really caught my eye.

More than 2,000 books and magazines in 18 languages are stocked for the prisoners, each vetted for its potential to incite. The “Harry Potter” series had been the most popular selection before a recent influx of nature and music books.

At the new Camp 7 facility for high-value detainees — which jailers have dubbed “the platinum camp” — the book most in demand now is “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” a nearly 20-year-old treatise by Stephen R. Covey.

(via brijit)

Also of note: Raymond Bonner’s “Forever Guantanamo” rife with outrage about torture and having surprisingly little to say about the place itself.

Though most VoIP operators have now built in a way for authorities to monitor your calls, there’s still no good way for authorities to get into Skype. Whether this is a great thing or a troubling prospect probably depends on your feelings about privacy and your fear of terrorism.

As with other internet technologies and real-world rules, the authorities will probably always be behind in their bid to eavesdrop on criminals, and the legitimate desire for privacy and security will continue to come into conflict with the needs of law enforcement. So far, evidence from intercepted VoIP calls has not been used in court; e-mails are often presented as evidence, but they are easily retrieved direct from the hard disks of the sender or receiver, or from corporate back-up tapes, rather than being intercepted in transit. But once intercepted traffic is presented as evidence, it is sure to reignite the debate over civil liberties and internet wiretapping.

In a NY Times Op-Ed, William Dalrymple takes a small step toward correcting the too-rosy picture that has been painted of the late Ms. Bhutto:

Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.