Memo: war not over. File under: kaleidoscopic.

Despite their advantages, many Diyala tribes are being overwhelmed by the scale of violence in the province, parts of which remain a haven for Sunni insurgents. Accounts of killings of volunteers in Diyala resemble Baghdad’s “intelligence war” less than they do conventional warfare.

Sheik Jafari said that 13 tribesmen were killed during one recent five-hour gun battle. Fighters for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are also blamed for the assassinations of several high-ranking sheiks in the province, including two tribal chiefs: Faiz Lafta al-Obeidi and Abu Sadjat, who was killed when a suicide bomber leapt onto his car.

While the attacks are taking a toll on Awakening members, they are causing even more damage to the delicate relationships between former insurgents and the government.

In Fadhil, the Awakening leader, Khalid al-Qaisi, said he had little hope that Iraqi politicians would support the movement and offered this opinion of Baghdad’s Shiite-led elite: “The garbage in Fadhil is better than the Iraqi government.”

From the archive:

LAUNCELOT: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.

GALAHAD: I don't think I was.

LAUNCELOT: Yes you were. You were in terrible peril.

GALAHAD: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.

LAUNCELOT: No, it's too perilous.

GALAHAD: Look, it's my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.

LAUNCELOT: No, we've got to find the Holy Grail. Come on!

GALAHAD: Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?

LAUNCELOT: No. It's unhealthy.

Attacks Imperil US-Backed Militias in Iraq

Jeffrey Goldberg:

A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future

After Iraq

Fouad Ajami:

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire (*) with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

(*) From "After the Apocalypse", a review by Michael Chabon of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road":

As they travel the father feeds his son a story, the nearest that he can come to a creed or a reason to keep on going: that he and his son are "carrying the fire." In what this fire might consist he can never specify, but from this hopeful fiction or hopeless truth the boy seems to intuit a promise: that life will not always be thus; that it will improve, that beauty and purpose, sunlight and green plenty will return; in short that everything is going to be "okay," a word which both characters endlessly repeat to each other, touching it compulsively like a sore place or a missing tooth. They are carrying the fire through a world destroyed by fire, and therefore—a leap of logic or faith that by the time the novel opens has become almost insurmountable for both of them—the boy must struggle on, so that he can be present at, or somehow contribute to, the eventual rebirth of the world.

The Clash

Data are now available from MNF-I and the Iraqi government that provide a much clearer picture of the trends in violence and casualties in Iraq. The attached report provides maps and graphics on the levels of killings in Iraq, the levels of violence by type, and the trends in terms of violence in key provinces and in Baghdad. It presents both MNF-I and Iraqi data through early January 2008.

The Evolving Security Situation in Iraq: The Continuing Need for Strategic Patience

The United States must shift its counterterrorism policy towards Pakistan away from a reciprocal approach—requiring Islamabad to perform desirable actions to receive support—towards one encouraging Pakistan to enact effective counterterrorism policies, not for an immediate payoff, but to strengthen institutionalized trust with the U.S. over time, according to a new report from the Carnegie Endowment.

In Pakistan and the War on Terror: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance, Carnegie Senior Associate Ashley J. Tellis points to growing dissatisfaction in the United States with the Musharraf regime’s commitment to counterterrorism operations, given the influx of U.S. aid. But while Pakistan’s performance in the “war on terror” has fallen short of expectations, Islamabad’s inability to defeat terrorist groups cannot simply be explained by neglect or lack of motivation. U.S. policy makers must take into account the specific and complex counterterrorism challenges facing Pakistan and move away from their current unsustainable policies.

Pakistan and the War on Terror: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Performance

A 13-year-old boy wearing an explosives-packed vest blew himself up Sunday among a group of tribal leaders in the western province of Anbar, becoming one of the youngest suicide bombers since the U.S.-led invasion, Iraqi police said.

The attack targeted a meeting of leaders from the Anbar Awakening Council, a U.S.-supported group that has turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq. A tribal chief, Hadi Hussein al-Isawi, was among those killed, police and Fallujah hospital officials said.

Another version of the lede:

A teenager holding a box of candy strode into a gathering of Sunni Arab tribal members near Falluja and detonated an explosive belt, killing four people and wounding nine, members of the Issawi tribe said Sunday. It was the second major bomb attack to strike American allies in Anbar Province in two days.

"He was a child and one of our people, so he did not raise doubts."

Contrary to some analysts' assertions, we have not "won the war."

Teenage Bomber Strikes In Anbar

Warfare is the use of extraordinary power -- that is, power that seemingly violates the ordinary normative rules governing civil activity -- to compel an adversary to submit to one's political will; and, asymmetric warfare seeks to do so by avoiding an adversary's strengths while applying one's own advantage against the other's weaknesses.

In the face of overwhelming U.S. military and economic power, America's adversaries -- including non-state actors such as al Qa'ida -- are increasingly turning to asymmetric strategies to oppose U.S. interests.

This essay provides a brief overview of the 'information battlefront' in the confrontation with militant Islamic extremism. In particular, this essay outlines how terror networks are increasingly using advanced information technology and the global communications network to expand their capacity and capability to wage a global insurgency against U.S. interests and surveys what counter-strategies might be employed in response.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to address the broader political or policy issues relating more generally to the global "war on terrorism," or to address the legal or ethical implications of employing the counter-strategies discussed below in any specific context. Rather, this essay focuses simply on surveying some of the information operations strategies that might be used to counter certain online activities of insurgents.

Author is K. A. TAIPALE, of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy.

Seeking Symmetry on the Information Front: Confronting Global Jihad on the Internet

Design Police on the beat:

Am I the only one who finds the FBI's newly redesigned Ten Most Wanted Fugitives page to be, well, a little cheesy?

I mean, it looks like something designed for a low-budget variety show, not for a list that includes the likes of Osama bin Laden.

Wanted: a new graphic designer

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level perspective.

Engineers of Jihad

Lawrence Wright discusses the United States’ intelligence strategy with Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence. In a rare interview, McConnell, who has been charged with bringing unity to a set of agencies that, for years, have been “brutally competitive, undermining one another and hoarding vital information,” speaks candidly with Wright about cyber-security, torture, intelligence leaks, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Cyber-security is one of McConnell’s top priorities; as he said in one Oval Office meeting, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focussed on a single U.S. bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy.” “My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens,” McConnell tells Wright. He is drafting a Cyber-Security Policy that seeks to protect not just government but also American industry and individuals from attack, but may be seen by some as violating privacy. Ed Giorgio, a former N.S.A. official working with McConnell on it, explains that the policy would give government “the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search.” Giorgio tells Wright, “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” and warns him, “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” Wright emphasizes this tension between security and privacy, saying, “Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically, the government has not proved worthy of that trust.”

Wright questions McConnell on the U.S.’s use of torture in intelligence investigations. McConnell denies that the U.S. tortures detainees, but says of the C.I.A.’s “special methods” of interrogation, “Have we gotten meaningful information? You betcha. Tons! Does it save lives? Tons! We’ve gotten incredible information.” When Wright asks him to define torture, McConnell answers, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.” On the subject of waterboarding, he says, for him, “Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”

Wright also discusses “the continuing failure of the intelligence community to capture or kill bin Laden and dismantle his organization.” David Shedd, McConnell’s deputy director for policy, tells Wright, “The trail is cold. It’s as hard a target as we’ve ever faced.” Wright notes that the C.I.A. shuttered its unit in charge of tracking bin Laden in 2005, and a former agency official tells Wright that “there’s a sense that there’s not a quarterback” in the fight against Al Qaeda. Regarding rumors that bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, McConnell st... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Spymaster