The life and times of Osama bin Laden

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 12 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

The compound was neither a mansion, nor a fortress; it was a prison. For months, maybe even years, the planet’s most-wanted man hid behind its high, razor-wire topped walls, trying to obscure his presence from spies, satellites and drones. The house had no phone or Internet connections. Garbage was burned in the courtyard. And afraid of being recognized simply by his tall, skinny frame, he could not even venture outdoors.

In the end, the first real contact Osama bin Laden had with the outside world since he fled Afghanistan in December 2001 came when a team of U.S. Navy Seals touched down at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, hiding spot Sunday. Forty minutes later, he was dead—shot through the head in a bedroom, his blood spreading across a shabby oriental carpet.

The 54-year-old’s death came as he had often predicted, from the barrel of an American gun. Perhaps he even welcomed it. “I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God,” bin Laden once told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a British-based Arabic language newspaper. “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two,” he proclaimed on another occasion. And few, in the West at least, will term it anything but justice. Author of deadly bombings in East Africa and Yemen, the Saudi-born scion of a multi-millionaire construction magnate had been at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list since 1998. Then on Sept. 11, 2001, he dispatched teams of hijackers to fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, murdering 2,933 people. (Forty more died when a fourth plane was brought down in a Pennsylvania field, short of another presumed Washington target.) The fires set that day still burn across the globe.

For a decade now, Osama bin Laden has been the object of our fascination and the repository of our fears. Academics and the press have parsed his hidey-hole communiqués looking for an ideology or explanation. Booksellers’ shelves are crammed with dozens of biographies and oral histories, purporting to deliver the “inside” story of his and al-Qaeda’s rise. Yet the motives, life and now death of a figure destined to go down as one of history’s greatest villains remain muddled.

Some accounts of the bedroom firefight say a woman tried to shield bin Laden with her body. The Americans think it was his wife, although which one, or even how many he had (some sources suggest four, others five) is a mystery. The same for a son reportedly left dead in the compound—one of his 13, or 19, or maybe 23 children. The fate of the terrorist leader’s body, spirited away and said to have been buried at sea, is already the subject of conspiracy theories. Osama’s violent demise may offer “sober satisfaction,” as Stephen Harper put it, but it won’t end the questions. Killing the myth may prove even harder than killing the man.

The date and place of Osama’s birth—March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—are clear. But not so much the circumstances. As one of the 52, or maybe 54, offspring that Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden sired with his 22 wives, perhaps that’s understandable. The elder bin Laden emigrated to the kingdom around 1930. A porter in his native Yemen, he found a new calling in construction, building a palace on the cheap for King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud and securing a lifelong patron. Lucrative contracts for roads and bridges followed, as well as prestigious commissions to renovate Islam’s holiest sites in Medina and Mecca. By the time of Osama’s birth, Muhammad was among the country’s wealthiest men. But he remained renowned for his piety—praying at three different mosques each day, never having more than four wives at one time in accordance with religious law, and renovating the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem at cost. He was also a fierce believer in the prevailing Arab cause. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, Osama once told an interviewer, Muhammad tried to have his company’s 200 bulldozers converted to tanks so he could launch his own invasion.

He had met Osama’s mother, Alia, during a visit to Syria in the mid-1950s. The marriage—his 10th—lasted only a few years and produced just the one child. By some family accounts, Alia was more of a concubine than wife. In others, she was a headstrong and sophisticated woman who demanded a divorce and adopted Western dress when outside the country. What is certain is that Osama adored her. “First comes God and then his mother,” Osama’s half-brother Ahmad Muhammad al-Attas told journalists in the months after 9/11. During his years of exile in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden made a point of calling her frequently, even though security officials at home and in the U.S. were surely monitoring the calls.

Osama’s relationship with Muhammad, who died in a September 1967 plane crash, was not as close. One friend claims bin Laden only met his father five times. But he was accepted by his many half-siblings, and given an inheritance—shares in the family firm that were worth somewhere between US$8 million and $250 million, according to widely divergent accounts. Whatever the amount, he didn’t do much with it. Compatriots remember him as a quiet kid, who enjoyed picnics and soccer games, and had one notable passion—horseback riding.

While many of his brothers and sisters travelled and studied abroad, Osama preferred to stay in Saudi Arabia. There have been reports that he once travelled to Sweden as a teen, and Chicago as a young adult, but the only confirmed voyages were annual visits to Syria to see his mother’s family. As a student at the prestigious al-Thager Model School in Jeddah—where the royal family educates its boys—he was considered passably bright. In 1978, he entered King Abdul Aziz University to study economics, management and business administration. Already married and the father of two boys—he had wed his 14-year-old first cousin, Najwa, when he was 17—he didn’t stick at school for long, and was soon back working for the family firm. But what bin Laden did discover during his brief post-secondary career was his first spiritual mentor, a Palestinian firebrand named Abdullah Azzam. A follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam was a deep believer in the concept of jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the religious scholar issued his own fatwa, declaring it every Muslim’s duty to join the struggle.

Soon after, Azzam left Saudi Arabia for the border regions of Pakistan to minister to the mujahedeen. Bin Laden followed. Some sources suggest the two men worked together raising money and setting up training camps for the fighters. Others like Michael Scheur, in his recent biography of the terrorist leader, claim Osama spent five years doing the bidding of Saudi intelligence, using his family’s equipment to build hospitals and cut roads through the border mountains to ease arms deliveries. By the time they officially set up a joint operation in 1984—the Maktab al-Khadamat (services office)—to welcome foreign fighters, bin Laden had become a recognized force in his own right, possessed with the kind of confidence that made men follow. “He was a natural leader,” Khalid al-Batarfi, a friend, told Peter Bergen, the author of The Osama I Know. “He leads by example and by hints more than direct orders. He just sets an example and then expects you to follow and somehow you follow even if you are not 100 per cent convinced.”

In 1986, bin Laden set up al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), his own training camp for Arab recruits in the mountains. But the man who was teaching others to fight had yet to see action. In the spring of 1987, the base—garrisoned by 50 or so fighters—came under attack from a much larger Soviet force. According to some accounts, the mujahedeen held out for a great victory. In others, they suffered heavy losses and retreated in disarray. For years afterwards, Osama was always pictured holding a Kalashnikov rifle he claimed to have taken away from a Russian he killed in hand-to-hand combat that week. As reports of the battle spread, his prestige grew. In the following weeks, he and other foreign commanders met to form a loose alliance of jihadis, which would ultimately morph into al-Qaeda. It was the beginning of bin Laden’s legend.

The FBI’s wanted poster is scant on details. “Usama” bin Laden is listed as between six foot four and six foot six and “approximately” 160 lb. His languages are Arabic and “probably” Pashtu. (What is not noted is that he also studied English in high school.) There are no known scars and marks. He is left-handed, walks with a cane, and has used the aliases the Sheik, the Prince, the Emir and the Director. But as of the morning of May 2, one hard fact had been added: the label “deceased” under his picture.

The emerging narrative of his death suggests the $25 million reward the United States government has been dangling for his “apprehension or conviction” played no role in the Abbottabad raid. So too the Pakistani authorities, who managed not to respond to a helicopter assault and lengthy gun battle at a compound located just a kilometre away from their chief officer-training school, the Kakul military academy, and nearby several other bases.

Official links to bin Laden have always been a touchy subject. In addition to Saudi support during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, it has long been reported he and his men also received training and arms from the CIA. Certainly he was once—and given his final location, almost assuredly still— friendly with elements of the Pakistani intelligence service.

In 1989, when the 32-year-old returned home to Jeddah after the Russian withdrawal, he was considered a hero. There were talks with Prince Turki Al Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, about overthrowing the Communists in Yemen—although the prince ultimately decided that such a war would be a little too close to home. In August 1990, when Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait, bin Laden offered his services and followers to defend the kingdom in the event that Saddam pushed on. He was turned down.

Osama’s rift with the West is often attributed to his anger over the garrisoning of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first Gulf War, a supposed “desecration” of Islam’s holiest sites. But he had already begun formulating a vision of global jihadism back in Afghanistan, working closely with a new mentor, the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1991, his anti-government proclamations became too much for the Saudis and he was asked to leave the country. He made his way to Sudan, where a hardline Islamic regime had seized power in 1989. Still, in those days he was hardly considered a global threat. In Khartoum, he operated in the open as a businessman, building roads for the government and importing medical equipment and supplies. It was Zawahiri and his continued attacks on Egyptian targets that drew the most attention. His friend bin Laden was considered to be a sympathizer, and perhaps financier.

At the behest of the Saudi government, friends and family continued to visit Osama in Sudan, trying to convince him to sever ties with his former Afghan comrades. At one point he supposedly mused about resigning from al-Qaeda to pursue life as a watermelon and peanut farmer. But in 1994, the bin Laden family found it necessary to take out advertisements in Saudi newspapers officially disowning Osama. (Although money continued to flow his way, and relatives travelled to see him in Afghanistan as late as January 2001 for the wedding of his son, Mohammed.) The Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and he replied with an open letter calling for the royal family’s violent overthrow.

It was the actions of Zawahiri’s followers, including a 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, which killed 17, that eventually got the pair expelled from Sudan. In May 1996, bin Laden chartered a private jet and flew to Kandahar, where he was greeted with open arms by the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar.

Al-Qaeda’s early Afghan days were idyllic, according to some. Followers, including Toronto’s Khadr family, congregated at a rough compound near Jalalabad. In their retelling, Osama was more like a sitcom dad than the father of a global terrorist movement. “He’s a normal human being,” Abdurahman Khadr told the CBC in 2004. “He has issues with his wife and his kids. Financial issues, you know. The kids aren’t listening. The kids aren’t doing this and that.” His sister Zaynab recalled a man who loved horseback riding, playing volleyball, and target shooting with the kids. Although he seemed a little strict, even by radical fundamentalist standards. The female bin Ladens “have lots of restrictions, where they go, when they go, where they come, when they come, who visits them and how long they can stay in their house and all that,” Zaynab explained.

Osama also harboured some prejudices against creature comforts, forbidding his family from having running water, electricity, or even using ice. “He is against drinking cold water,” said Abdurahman. “He didn’t want them in any way to be spoiled.” Conspicuous non-consumption was a bit of an obsession for the rich Saudi. In the stifling heat of Khartoum, he refused to install air conditioning. “We want a simple life,” was one of his mantras.

What bin Laden didn’t seem to shy away from was publicity. In the late 1990s, as his fame as a terrorist grew, he gave regular interviews to foreign journalists, and even held a press conference with Zawahiri in 1998 to announce the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews. A few months later, al-Qaeda staged its first major operation, bombing the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224. President Bill Clinton responded by firing more than 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s Afghan camps, but al-Qaeda’s leadership escaped unscathed. The Taliban, already internationally isolated, resisted UN sanctions and blandishments like a $5-million reward, and refused to hand the Saudi over. But they didn’t necessarily enjoy the grandstanding. Even long-time bin Laden deputies like Abu Musab al-Suri (captured in 2005 and sent to a secret Syrian prison) found it all a bit much. “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause,” he wrote in 1999.

It took a good long while for the Americans to figure out that they had missed their chance to kill bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in December 2001. The ferocious assault by Afghan tribal militias, backed by U.S. and British war planes, killed more than 100 al-Qaeda fighters, including 18 commanders. Foreign troops, Canadians among them, returned to the scene several times over the following months, looking in vain for the corpses of Osama and Zawahiri. Eventually the CIA obtained a videotape of Osama hiking through the mountains into Pakistan and realized just how close they had come. It showed a U.S. plane dropping a bomb on the caves. “We were there last night,” remarks bin Laden.

Audio tapes from the al-Qaeda leader would surface occasionally. (By 2010 there were more than 40 authenticated messages.) In October 2004, he appeared in a video, looking disturbingly robust and well-groomed. After George W. Bush won re-election, nothing was heard from bin Laden for more than three years. Many speculated that he had been killed in a drone attack, or died from a medical condition, like his supposed kidney diseases. All the time, the hunt—and the wars that flowed out of it—went on.

The secret U.S. commando organization responsible for the terrorist’s assassination, the Joint Special Operations Command, has a budget of more than $1 billion a year. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to an Afghan campaign that has cost more than $450 billion since 2001, and a loosely related invasion and occupation of Iraq that is closing in on $800 billion. Still, in the afterglow of bin Laden’s killing, which sent euphoric crowds into the streets of Washington, New York and other cities, many will say the expense and effort were worth it.

However, eliminating the face of terror doesn’t rid any of us of the problem. Footage of the Abbottabad compound show a large satellite dish which surely enabled bin Laden to follow the deadly exploits of his followers, clones and imitators around the world.

One can only hope that he found channel surfing much less pleasurable in his final months, as Arabs throughout the Middle East took to the streets to rise up against their dictators. Not in violent jihad, as bin Laden has envisioned, but in largely peaceful protests demanding rights, reform and democracy.

History will record that when revolution finally came to the region it was inspired by a simple Tunisian fruit-seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself ablaze to protest government corruption and indifference—an unwanted man who may end up having far more influence than the world’s foremost fugitive.

Why did it take so long to get Osama?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Darren McCollester/New York Times/Getty Images

In the end, Osama bin Laden was hardly the righteous martyr he claimed to be. The same terrorist mastermind who murdered thousands of people in a single morning—and urged his followers to “kill Americans wherever they are found,” even if that meant their own demise—was not exactly toughing out the jihad in a dusty cave or secluded mud hut. He was holed up in a Pakistani mansion, in a third-floor bedroom with a king-size mattress, red-and-yellow curtains, and a closet.

John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, summed it up best: “Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound,” he told reporters. “It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Snippets continue to emerge about the top-secret mission that finally claimed al-Qaeda’s elusive leader, 10 long years after the 9/11 attacks. The tips from Guantánamo Bay. Months and months of tedious surveillance. The dangerous midnight raid, carried out by an elite unit of Navy Seals—and relayed, blow by blow, to nervous officials back in the White House situation room, including President Barack Obama.

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How did Pakistan not know bin Laden was hiding there?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 10 Comments

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The discovery of Osama bin Laden, not in some desolate cave in a lawless tribal borderland, but ensconced comfortably in a suburban neighbourhood in the heart of Pakistan, has led to a single burning question in Washington: how could the Pakistani government, recipient of billions of dollars of American aid, not know that for possibly five years America’s most wanted fugitive was living in plain sight, a short walk from a military academy, no less?

For years, Pakistan denied knowledge of his whereabouts, even while the Pakistani intelligence services stood accused of tipping off al-Qaeda’s leaders about American efforts to find them. Anybody who thought that Pakistan was protecting bin Laden was “smoking something they shouldn’t be smoking,” Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, told CNN in 2010.

But those suspicions about Islamabad turned to outrage this week. Relations had already been sharply deteriorating, with the U.S. accusing Pakistan of not being serious in fighting terror—and Pakistanis outraged over U.S. drone attacks against suspected Pakistani terrorist targets. Now, with the news that bin Laden had been living openly in Pakistan, there were calls in Washington for Congress to limit an aid program that has allotted US$7.5 billion over five years to help strengthen the Pakistani government and win the support of Pakistan’s people. “I think this tells us once again that unfortunately Pakistan, at times, is playing a double game, and that’s very troubling to me,” said Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “We clearly need to keep the pressure on Pakistan, and one way to do that is to put more strings attached to the tremendous amount of military aid that we give the country,” she said.

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What's on bin Laden's Hard Drive?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 6 Comments

“The mother lode of intelligence.”

That’s how a U.S. official, speaking anonymously with Politico, described the cache of computers and thumb drives Navy SEALS seized from Osama Bin Laden’s Abbotabad crib. Former State Department official Richard Haas told the Toronto Star that this “intelligence harvest” could be “as important if not more important than the actual killing of bin Laden.”

He may be speaking too soon. Remember—OBL was careful enough to forego both phone lines and an Internet hookup to his compound. Assuming he was still active in al-Qaeda communications over the past few years, he would have had to physically hustle USB keys and hard drives in and out of his bunker. If he was that careful, wouldn’t he take the precaution of encrypting his communications as well?

As The Register speculates, such encryption might nevertheless be cracked by the US military—especially if Bin Laden used al-Qaeda’s homebrew scrambler “Mojahedeen Secrets” (no joke).

As tantalizing as the data seizure may be to the hundreds of intelligence agents poring over the drives right now, all involved may want to temper their expectations. We’ve yet to receive any indication that bin Laden has been doing anything but cowering in recent years, and it’s entirely possible that he’s completely out of the jihadi loop.

Given the recent discovery of pungent weed crops by the Abbotabad compound and reports of frequent munchie-runs by OBL’s cronies, America’s best data-crackers may find nothing on the drives but a copy of Super Smash Brothers PC and a badly dubbed torrent of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Hypothetical commitments

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

As referenced by John earlier, here is Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon’s exchange with reporters on the subject of child soldiers and Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. Continue…

The Layton doctrine

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 9:07 AM - 0 Comments

Four years after the NDP leader was mocked by nearly everyone for suggesting as much, the makings of a comprehensive peace process in Afghanistan are now being facilitated by NATO.

Talks to end the war in Afghanistan involve extensive, face-to-face discussions with Taliban commanders from the highest levels of the group’s leadership, who are secretly leaving their sanctuaries in Pakistan with the help of NATO troops, officials here say…

The Taliban leaders coming into Afghanistan for talks have left their havens in Pakistan on the explicit assurance that they will not be attacked or arrested by NATO forces, Afghans familiar with the talks say. Many top Taliban leaders reside in Pakistan, where they are believed to enjoy at least some official protection.

In at least one case, Taliban leaders crossed the border and boarded a NATO aircraft bound for Kabul, according to an Afghan with knowledge of the talks. In other cases, NATO troops have secured roads to allow Taliban officials to reach Afghan- and NATO-controlled areas so they can take part in discussions.

The coordinator of the UN’s Al-Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team considers the way forward.

Why are terrorists getting off easy?

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 4:10 PM - 10 Comments

Canadian Press/ REUTERS

When he wasn’t busy with his day job—fixing computers at the Department of Foreign Affairs—Momin Khawaja was toiling away in his Ottawa basement, building a remote-controlled detonator for aspiring terrorists in the United Kingdom. (He dubbed his deadly creation the “Hi-fi Digimonster.”) Convicted of multiple charges in 2008, Khawaja was staring at a potentially monumental sentence: two life terms, plus an additional 44 years behind bars. The judge gave him 15 years instead. He will be eligible for parole in 2014.

Saad Khalid could be a free man much sooner. A core member of the so-called “Toronto 18,” he confessed to his role in a conspiracy to detonate three simultaneous truck bombs in Ontario, a crime that also carried a maximum life sentence. He got 14 years—minus seven for time already served while awaiting trial. If Khalid behaves himself, parole is a possibility in 2012.

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Robert Fowler wakes up the Liberals in Montreal

By John Geddes - Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 12:05 PM - 107 Comments

Given that Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler was kidnapped in Niger and held in Al Qaeda’s rough hands for four months before being released last spring, his speech at the Liberal thinkers’ conference in Montreal this morning might well have been entirely coloured by his recent ordeal.

Instead, Fowler delivered a fierce, proud address anchored, not in that personal drama, but in his professional experience through three decades as a federal public servant, a diplomat-mandarin. When he did remind his audience of the kidnapping, it was to deftly accent his broader point.

And that point was barbed. Fowler charged the Liberals in the room with standing for little or nothing when it comes to foreign policy. He was even harder on the absent Conservatives, accusing their government of abandoning a Canadian legacy in the world, and, more specifically, of adopting an “Israel, right or wrong” policy that has undermined Ottawa’s credibility abroad. He asserted that there’s an “iron-clad link” between a failure to push for a fair resolution the Israel-Palestine problem and the rise of Islamist terrorism.

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Al-Qaeda: the world’s new pushers

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:48 AM - 16 Comments

In a partnership that U.S. authorities are referring to as an “unholy alliance,” Islamist extremists are helping Colombian guerrillas smuggle cocaine into Europe through unstable West Africa to increase their funding.

Marxist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have started collaborating with al-Qaeda in the wake of interdiction efforts on the part of American and European forces aimed at curtailing the amount of cocaine travelling straight from Colombia and other Andean nations to the United States and Europe. “In the mid- to late-1990s when the Europeans became better at maritime interdiction, off the coasts of Portugal and Spain, for example, traffickers started moving their routes southward,” says Jay Bergman, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for the Andean region of South America. “So the next progression was to Western Africa.” Indeed, according to the DEA, drug flights from South America to West Africa have greatly increased over the past three years, and officials have seized “ton-sized quantities of cocaine.” Interpol also estimates that two-thirds of drugs sold in Europe in 2009 were trafficked through West Africa.

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Egyptian women like their niqabs

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 2:31 PM - 9 Comments

Egypt has long championed a moderate interpretation of Islam, but some Egyptian women are rebelling against government-promoted secularism. More and more of them are choosing to wear the niqab—a veil that covers the face—in addition to the traditional hijab, which only covers the hair, spreading fear among government officials that some Egyptians are embracing hardline Islamic values.

The controversy surrounding the niqab boiled over in October when Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, Egypt’s top cleric and head of the Islamic Al-Azhar University, walked into a high school classroom in Cairo and told a female student to remove her veil. Soon after, Tantawi banned niqabs in classrooms and dorms at his campus, on the grounds that it “has nothing to do with Islam” and that it was unnecessary since the university is gender-segregated.

Egypt’s state-run media have backed Tantawi’s ban by encouraging females to show their faces, citing the “damaging” effects of the niqab on society, while the ministry of religious endowments has gone so far as to distribute booklets that suggest the niqab is un-Islamic. But despite the government campaign, analysts say increasing numbers of women have taken to wearing the niqab, which was almost never seen in Egypt just a decade ago.

Some women are wearing the niqab as a form of rebellion against a government that is widely viewed by the masses to be autocratic, corrupt and uncaring—they feel they should be able to choose their own dress. For others, the decision is based on the belief that wearing the niqab will bring them closer to God, a notion inspired by Salafism, an ultra-conservative school of thought practised in Saudi Arabia that places an emphasis on orthodox Muslim doctrines.
Although most followers of Salafism shun politics, the movement has much in common with the ideology of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, giving the government even more ammunition in its quest to quell the movement.

You be the geopolitician

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 28, 2009 at 2:44 PM - 8 Comments

From an AP story in today’s Globe and Mail:

Anwar Eshki, the head of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, said al-Qaeda in Yemen “is stronger than it was a year ago and is turning Yemen into its base for operations against the West.” Mr. Eshki’s centre closely follows al-Qaeda in Yemen.

“Yemen is al-Qaeda’s last resort,” Mr. Eshki said. “There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda’s presence in Yemen is more dangerous than its presence in Afghanistan.”

Assume this is true. What effect, if any, should it have on Obama’s decision to send 30 000 more troops to Afghanistan? What effect, if any, should this have on Canada’s determination to end our combat mission in Afghanistan in 2011? What effect, if any, should this have on our ongoing mission in Afghanistan which — according to the most recent quarterly report, is “to leave Afghanistan to Afghans as a country that is democratic, self-sufficient and stable”?

These are not rhetorical questions. Some might not be relevant at all; but given the original rationale for going in to Afghanistan was to deny al-Qaeda a base from which to launch attacks against the West, it might be worth talking them through.

In Iraq, new challenges for women

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

For years, sectarian fighting in the “Triangle of Death,” the cluster of towns surrounding southern Baghdad, was so intense that hundreds died every day. Sunnis and Shiites, embroiled in a civil war, were killing each other and U.S. and Iraqi forces, summary executions were carried out on the street, and bounties were offered for anyone who killed police, National Guardsmen, and Shiite pilgrims.

As of last year, however, bloodshed in the Triangle had plummeted by as much as 89 per cent, according to the U.S. military. That was thanks in part to new counterinsurgency techniques, but the violence also diminished because Sunni insurgents who had been working with al-Qaeda turned against the terrorist organization. Plus, warring factions have simply “exhausted themselves,” adds the University of British Columbia’s Michael Byers, an expert in global politics. The region has become one of the safest in the country, a showcase for what the U.S. hopes to achieve in Iraq.

Yet new challenges have cropped up. Survivors of the war, many of them women, are now struggling to feed their families, while their husbands, often former supporters of the Saddam Hussein regime, have been detained or left jobless, says Byers. Although the Shiite-led al-Maliki government has promised amnesty to Sunni fighters who renounce al-Qaeda, it remains highly suspicious of them. The underlying tensions that caused violence to spike have not been resolved, and Sunnis may return to violence if they cannot find employment. “This is not a happy society,” says Byers. “We are now seeing the very deep consequences of not planning for the post-invasion phase.”

Across Iraq, the war has laid waste to infrastructure, put ethnic tensions at a boil, and left behind a scarred, displaced civilian population. “Ending conflict,” Byers adds, “is not the only goal.”

Gen. Rick Hillier on his biggest strategic error, the Taliban, and Canada's future in Afghanistan

By Kate Fillion - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 8 Comments

Gen. Rick Hillier was chief of defence staff from February 2005 to July 2008. As he explains in A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, the Canadian Forces have long been underfunded, under-trained, underappreciated and overextended. The most visible and outspoken CDS in recent history, Hillier sought to reverse those trends while fighting a war in Afghanistan—and, as it turned out, Ottawa.

Q:In A Soldier First, you write that most Canadians do not know what the rationale behind the Afghanistan mission is. What’s the biggest misperception?

A: That everything is dark and gloomy. What Canadians hear about the mission is that Canadian soldiers have been killed, and they hear about improvised explosive devices and corruption in the government. There are some very bright spots, from the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, to the development of the Afghan national army, to the fact that two-thirds of the country now essentially runs as normal. Canadians hear not a single thing about any of that.

Q: Whose fault is that?

A: I start with average Canadians. They should demand that kind of information from their government when they’ve got their sons and daughters participating in a war. Secondly, the Afghanistan task force has a strategic communications policy, but I wonder where the communications is being done because hundreds of thousands of Canadians don’t know what’s happening. Thirdly, our media have not done a very good job. Very few journalists have actually been outside the wire, because their editors are very concerned about the risks and their insurance policies almost always prohibit them from going out.

Q: Why did we first send troops to Afghanistan, in your opinion?

A: We were going somewhere in 2003, just as a way to relieve the pressure of saying no to the Americans on Iraq, and it ended up being Afghanistan. But I think now we view the world through a more strategic lens: we have to bring stability to places where there’s chaos, to help those areas develop.

Q: Does Canada have a coherent strategic plan for what’s going to happen post-July 2011, when our troops are scheduled to pull out of Afghanistan?

A: That’s very difficult to say. I think Canadians have heard very little about it and are therefore reasonably asking, “What is the plan and what is our strategy there?” When I was chief of defence staff, our view of what we were doing was to try to help Afghans determine, with some assistance, just what it was they wanted as a country and how they wanted to live their lives. We were very, very clear on that. As President [Hamid] Karzai told me the first time I met him, “The number one threat to Afghanistan is our lack of capacity to govern ourselves, to provide jobs for the people and provide for their basic needs, and to provide for their security. The sooner we can be helped to provide those capacities, the sooner we can get going on our own.”

Q: How can you help Afghans do all that after 2011 without troops?

A: You cannot, so the troops, if they’re not Canadian, will have to come from somewhere else. Make no doubt about it: the security mission and therefore the need for forces will not be finished in southern Afghanistan in 2011. You can come up with all kinds of schemes to hide away in a camp and train people for the Afghan army or police, but they lack credibility. If you try to help train and develop the Afghan army or police in southern Afghanistan, you are going to be in combat.

Q: Should our troops stay in Afghanistan after July 2011?

A: Whether they should stay or not will be a decision the government of Canada will make. What I would actually like to see is a strategic discussion, not just about what we do in Afghanistan but about Canada’s place in the world. But in this constant minority government, always in election campaign mode, with a very vitriolic Parliament, it’s impossible to have that sort of strategic discussion. Do I think that if Canadian troops stayed on the ground we could help foster a more stable Afghanistan that would in turn be a stabilizing force in Southwest Asia and help reduce terrorists’ ability to hide? Yes I do.

Q: Do you agree with de Gaulle, that “genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop”?

A: I teach that as one of my leadership points. But also, you don’t achieve anything by stopping at the first sign of difficulty. If we’d stopped after Dieppe in World War II, where would we be right now as a nation? If we’d stopped before Vimy Ridge, we wouldn’t have been a nation at all. So yes, you’ve got to know when to say “stop” as a leader, you sure do, but you’ve also got to know when to push for the final thing that’s going to give you the full benefit.

Q: You write that when you were chief of defence staff, some of the toughest battles were fought not in Kandahar but against the bureaucracy in Ottawa.

A: I liken it to a boa constrictor. We were at war in Afghanistan, with young men and women laying their lives on the line on a daily basis, and we were trying to move at lightning speed to give them the capabilities to reduce risks and ensure they were set up for success. What we did not see, from the vast majority of the bureaucracy back in Ottawa, was the same sense of urgency. Everything became difficult, really moved slowly, projects were often parcelled into very little bits and pieces. We had to fight a war in Ottawa to get things done, from getting the tanks upgraded to getting helicopters. We should’ve had those things from the time the need was identified, in weeks if not days. It took months, and in several cases years.

Q: You once said, famously, that the Taliban are “detestable murderers and scumbags.” Do you still believe that?

A: Absolutely. I spoke about people who were trying to kill Canadians’ sons and daughters. I would also challenge people to come up with any other description for those who, as part of their policy, want to murder defenceless Afghan men and women.

'A negotiated release of the hostages was preferable to just about every other conceivable option'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 11, 2009 at 2:10 AM - 59 Comments

With confirmation that four al-Qaeda prisoners and several million dollars were exchanged for Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, here again is the transcript from the Prime Minister’s press conference on the afternoon of April 22, announcing Fowler and Guay’s release.

Continue…

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Afghanistan and Pakistan

By Michael Petrou - Friday, September 4, 2009 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

The text of his speech, delivered this morning, is posted here.

Oops, redux

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 11:55 AM - 10 Comments

Canadian Press explains Le Devoir’s scoop for we anglophones.

The misplaced documents that got Maxime Bernier booted from cabinet last year contained a treasure trove of sensitive information, according to a newspaper report today. Details of the documents were revealed in a report by Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper titled: “A mine of crucial information for the enemy”…

The newspaper says it received heavily redacted copies of the material through the Access to Information Act. Still, in the parts that weren’t blacked out, the newspaper says the documents contain information about — among other things — missile-defence systems, NATO’s expansion to the Balkans, Afghan prisoners, arms control in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the presence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

Is Pakistan winning?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 6 Comments

In November 2001, as the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and their American allies closed a net around the collapsing Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Pakistani planes flew into the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz and evacuated hundreds of Pakistani intelligence officers, Taliban commanders, and al-Qaeda personnel.

This was after then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had pledged support for America’s efforts to destroy al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban. The United States knew about the airlift and allowed it to happen. Reasoning that it was better to maintain the fiction that Pakistan was wholly on its side and to cajole whatever assistance it could from Islamabad, Washington declined even to monitor who disembarked from the plane when it landed safely in Pakistan. “It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his 2008 book Descent Into Chaos, referring to Osama bin Laden’s mountain stronghold from which he safely fled in December 2001. Continue…

The many implications of Omar Khadr

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 1:10 PM - 55 Comments

Tonda MacCharles tries to read Stephen Harper’s mind.

Even some Conservatives privately admit they have been taken aback by Harper’s utter indifference to pleas about Khadr’s plight. There’s no clear explanation for it. Is it good foreign policy? Good politics? Or simple ideological stubborness?

There are hints, but no explicit statements, that the Americans still want to prosecute Khadr. The government denies any knowledge of the Obama administration’s plans for the only Westerner left in Guantanamo….

The Khadrs carry political baggage here. Harper may simply want to avoid getting stung the way former prime minister Jean Chretien was. Chretien in 1996 asked Pakistani authorities to release Ahmed Said Khadr, Omar’s father, who later turned out key to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fundraising efforts in Afghanistan. Photos of him at the hospitalized Khadr’s bedside loom large still.

It could be that Harper, having given up so much conservative political ground on fiscal and social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, does not want to risk further angering his base of supporters by appearing to be anything less than “tough on terror.”

Pawns in a fatal game

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

The eerie silence along the narrow laneway of Karim Pura Bazaar, in Peshawar’s old city, is deafening. Something is missing, and the absence weighs on the few shopkeepers brave enough to open for business. On any other Friday, after the obligatory afternoon prayers, the rows of tailor shops here would be doing a brisk business. But not today. A few laneways over, in Kabari Bazaar, one of dozens of electronics districts in the capital of Pakistan’s restive North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the charred and mangled remains of shops offer a glimpse into what has happened: a day earlier, two bombs hidden in motorcycles exploded there, killing five and injuring dozens more. In the aftermath, much of the old city’s famous bazaar district has remained closed.

A few hundred kilometres to the north in Swat, the Pakistani army is proving to the world that it has what it takes to defeat the Taliban threat. They have retaken Mingora, Swat’s formerly picturesque main city, after a massive offensive lasting more than a week. The few reports coming out of there, even through the filters of military-guided media tours, show a city in ruins, virtually cleared of its residents and lacking any of the basic necessities: food, water, electricity, medical facilities. For the millions of people displaced by the fighting, there is nothing to return to—like the Kabari Bazaar, their world is in ruins.

Continue…

What price our pseudo-empathy?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 131 Comments

Empathy. You either got it or you ain’t. Sonia Sotomayor’s got it, which is why she’s just been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama said that what he’s looking for in a big-time judge is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion chums at Planned Parenthood, “We need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. Alright?”

Er, well, alright. But what does it boil down to in practice? Then-senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts because the nominee said he saw the judge’s role as that of “umpire.” The President wants someone less hung up on the rule book. He likes to cite the case of Lilly Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire for discrimination but ran up against the pesky old statute of limitations. An “empathetic” judge would presumably say, “Screw the statute of limitations.” Strange to hear the same folks who complain that Bush disregarded the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution at Gitmo (both charges untrue, by the way) simultaneously hailing the ability to disregard inconvenient laws as the indispensable attribute of a Supreme Court justice.

Continue…

The Commons: A terribly serious discussion

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 7:05 PM - 35 Comments

The Scene. In the absence of the Liberal leader, Bob Rae rose to ask the first question, receiving sincere applause from his side and a mocking ovation from the other. The Speaker called for order.

“I appreciate the expressions of support, Mr. Speaker,” Rae grinned, “as late in the day as they may be.”

Another round of applause from the government side. Then down to business. “I would like to ask the Minister of Foreign Affairs a question,” Rae began, proceeding to review the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik.

The story is roughly as follows. For the past year, Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, has been living in the Canadian embassy in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, unable to return home. He was arrested in Sudan in 2003 and claims to have been tortured during 19 months in prison there. Accused of having connections to terrorism, he was never charged and has since been cleared by both the RCMP and CSIS. He remains, courtesy of the Bush administration apparently, on a United Nations list that seeks to ban the travel of potential threats. The Canadian government has asked that Abdelrazik be removed from said list and, for a time it seems, offered to let him come home if he could secure a plane ticket. But last month, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon denied Abdelrazik’s request for an emergency passport on the grounds of national security and the government has since said that the Canadian’s presence on the UN list bars him from returning. The whole tale is now before the Federal Court.

It was the latest news—that an official with the UN says its list in no way bars Canada from flying Abdelrazik back—that sent Rae to his feet. Continue…

Al-Qaeda in North Africa

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 10:14 PM - 0 Comments

Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had high hopes for the African Islamist group that held Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay captive for months before releasing them along with two tourists last week. Earlier this decade, violent Islamism was floundering in North Africa. Government crackdowns and amnesty programs in Algeria had weakened the once-powerful Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an offshoot of the Armed Islamic Group, whose murder of civilians had already dried up much of its popular support.

And so, like a struggling independent business looking for ways to stay afloat, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat sought out the patronage of a wealthier and more powerful terrorist conglomerate: al-Qaeda. The first messages seeking an alliance were sent to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s deputy in Iraq. This was a natural partnership, as hundreds of North African Islamists were already joining the jihad against American forces there. In June 2005, U.S. Central Command claimed that up to 25 per cent of suicide bombers in Iraq were North Africans, mostly Algerians. But the North African Islamists in the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat were also looking to partner with al-Qaeda’s central branch, headed by bin Laden and likely located in Pakistan.

Continue…

The Taliban: local or international threat (IV)

By Michael Petrou - Friday, May 1, 2009 at 12:35 PM - 6 Comments

The issue of whether the Taliban are insurgents with strictly local grievances or an Islamist movement with international ambitions is one that I’ve addressed frequently in this space.

It’s an important question, because if the Taliban are concerned only with Afghanistan, then Canada, the United States, and other countries with troops and aid workers in the country can pull out without endangering themselves. Abandoning Afghanistan to thugs such as the Taliban, who have recently taken to shooting alleged adulterers in Pakistan, might be cruel it wouldn’t be risky for the West. (Why so many on the left who spent decades trumpeting their supposed internationalism are content with this option is something I’ll never understand, though Terry Glavin has some ideas.)

If, on the other hand, the Taliban are allied with al-Qaeda as part of an international jihadist movement, we can’t really afford to abandon our fight there. It’s a war of necessity rather than choice. Continue…

How Fowler's freedom was bought: letting other countries do our dirty work

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 12:29 PM - 5 Comments

I’ve just spoken with a source who is familiar with the negotiations that took place for the release of Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay from the Canadian and British side. He or she confirms they were sprung because of a ransom and prisoner exchange.

This information now comes from multiple different sources and cannot be discounted as speculative. J. Peter Pham, an Africa specialist at James Madison University, has it from senior officials in the government and security services of Mali and Niger that a prisoner swap was in the works, and he later spoke to an Algerian security source who said that Germany and Switzerland paid a ransom of about US$8 million. Al-Qaeda itself has confirmed in a statement that a prisoner exchange took place. Two separate Algerian newspapers, Ennahar and El Khabar, confirm aspects of the deal. Steven Edwards at Canwest News Service cites a “North African al-Qaeda observer with close links to people involved in the effort to free the Canadians,” who also confirmed the prisoner exchange and provided some details about the terror suspects Mali released.

All this raises an important question: If, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper claims, it is Canada’s policy not to pay a ransom or release prisoners in exchange for hostages, why is it okay for other countries to do so on our behalf?