Last Night an iPod Saved My Life

Here's a CENTCOM General in a recent interview:

"The Internet is the most important venue for the radicalization of Islamic youth."

"I see 16-, 17-year-olds who have been indoctrinated on the Internet turn up on the battlefield. We capture them; we kill them every day in Iraq, in Afghanistan."

"It's a battle of perceptions, and al Qaeda understands it. And America needs to understand it."

Maybe, if we got the American schoolchildren to write their letters to Iraqi, Iranian, Saudi, Syrian children ... or, they could make videos to them, and post them on YouTube.

Update: Juba the Sniper is all the evidence you need.

Jihadists Use Internet as Recruiting, Networking Tool

Here's a senior US government official, speaking at a recent conference:

"Al Qaeda has the ability to use the virtual and physical network, all tied together in this center of gravity of this radical Islamist ideology. The fact that it uses the most advanced methods of communications to get what it needs to be done is truly remarkable."

"It has truly got its stuff together in terms of fighting as a network."

"It is a generational fight; it’s not one that we’ll see completed any time soon."

"This enemy is ingenious."

Building Global Network, Denying Safe Havens Essential in War on Terror

A Taliban official told the newspaper: "There is gloom in our ranks."

Separately, suspected pro-Taliban militants blew up a barber shop and a music shop in Pakistan's Bajaur tribal region on the Afghan border for violating orders to cease "un-Islamic" practices.

Taliban 'Gloomy' After Pakistani Arrests

He saw the letters of support from schoolchildren, and he wondered why there was not more support from adults.

Honestly ...

Returning, Safe, After a Year’s Service in Afghanistan

I've asked him to improve information sharing within the intelligence community and with officials at all levels of our government, so everyone responsible for the security of our communities has the intelligence they need to do their jobs. I've asked him to ensure that our intelligence agency focus on bringing in more Americans with language skills and cultural awareness necessary to meet the threats of this new century. I've asked him to restore agility and excellence to our acquisition community, and ensure that our nation invest in the right intelligence technologies. I've asked him to ensure that America has the dynamic intelligence collection and high-quality analysis that we need to protect our country and to win this war against these extremists and radicals.

President Bush Attends Swearing-In of Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence

"Whoever is against mujahideen is against Islam and they are the enemies of this country," former fighter Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (*), now an influential lawmaker, told the crowd of demonstrators.

...

Youths later marched through the streets of the city, shouting "Death to the enemies of Afghanistan!" and "Death to America!".

(*) Abdul Rasul Sayyaf:

According to the Wikipedia article:

Abdul allegedly arranged the interview in which Ahmad Massoud was assassinated.

According to Global Security:

Sayyaf, a Wahabi Muslim, had a close relationship with Osama bin Laden during the jihad against the Soviets.

BBC offers a photo and a personal account, from 2001:

I ventured west to the district of Afshar, where block after block of shattered housing resembles the ruins of an ancient civilisation.

In 1993, it was the site of repeated human butchery during fighting between a faction that adheres to the Shi'ite Muslim faith and followers of a Saudi backed Mujahideen leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

Amnesty International reported that Sayyaf's forces rampaged through Afshar, murdering, raping and burning homes.

Now Sayyaf's forces are back in Kabul, a key component of the Northern Alliance army.

In 2004, Foreign Affairs published Kathy Gannon's Afghanistan Unbound:

In 1994, bitter fighting between competing warlords raged throughout Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city. It was a time marked by endless attacks, many of them on civilians. I saw one young boy raise his hand to catch a ball, only to have it sliced off at the wrist by a rocket. A 13-year-old girl, running home to retrieve blankets and clothes left behind by her fleeing family, stepped on a land mine, which exploded and blew off the bottom of her leg. All told, 50,000 Afghans -- most of them civilians -- died in the four-year fight for Kabul, and even more were maimed.

In one particularly grisly attack, five women from the Hazara ethnic group were scalped. Their attackers were not Taliban; this was still two years before that radical Islamist militia took Kabul. The assailants were loyal instead to one of many warlords battling for control of the city: Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

It's interesting that, according to the Afghanistan Justice Project, Massoud was once Sayyaf's commander:

The Afshar massacre and mass rape in Kabul by Abdul Rasul Sayy... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Afghan warlords in amnesty rally

"The extra soldiers and Marines ... will prepare the forces for missions in areas besides Iraq and Afghanistan ... I believe we're a nation at war. I think that Afghanistan and Iraq represent the first battles of this long war ... this war against Islamic extremists."

These guys are Big Army. They just don't seem to understand that the "long war" is 5% brawn and 95% brain. From the QDR:

Finally, by emphasizing greater cultural awareness and language skills, the QDR acknowledges that victory in this long war depends on information, perception, and how and what we communicate as much as application of kinetic effects.

Nor do they seem to realize that the forces are more effective when deployed in small numbers for focused, low intensity missions. From Robert Kaplan in 2005:

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

This latest testimony is rich with meaningless buzzwords and jargon:

"... the proper slope ..."

"... whether or not we should look at off-ramping [2, 3]..."

SEC. RUMSFELD: Once we started --

LT GEN RENUART: It started much earlier than that --

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- Earlier than that, in terms of the timing and the preparation and all of that. And then we said, okay, should there be some on-ramps or off-ramps if you need to add somehow. And they did. They came back with some --

LT GEN RENUART: Off-ramps.

SEC. RUMSFELD: -- off-ramps, we called them.

"We can't do it by keeping shooting behind the ducks ... We have to get ahead of the program ..."

"These additional Marines will allow us the additional ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Force Increase Necessary for War on Terror, Leaders Say

Gen. David H. Petraeus formally took command of American troops in Iraq on Saturday, declaring that the mission here is hard but not hopeless.

Petraeus ... will oversee 132,000 American troops currently in Iraq and thousands more on their way as part of a so-called surge that is widely considered the last, best effort to bring peace to a country increasingly riven by sectarian violence, crime and corruption.

Iraqi officials, faced with such relentless violence, seemed unsure of whether a new American commander and the new plan could clot the bloodshed. Among American military officers, General Petraeus is considered an imaginative leader with a deep understanding of Iraq's problems, culled from two tours here. But for some in Baghdad, his assumption of control looked routine.

Iraq Mission 'Hard But Not Hopeless', says Petraeus

The nature of terror has changed beyond recognition since Philip Geddes died in an IRA explosion in 1983. That change, and the response of the media class to it, is the theme of this unapologetically personal essay.

This is an edited version of the Philip Geddes Memorial Lecture given in the Examination Schools, University of Oxford, on Friday 27 October 2006.

About the Author: Matthew d’Ancona is editor of The Spectator and political columnist for The Sunday Times and GQ. He was named Political Journalist of the Year in 2006 by the Political Studies Association.

Confessions of a Hawkish Hack: The Media and the War on Terror