The rise of Egypt’s fundamentalist Salafis
By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - 0 Comments
How a little-known group of ultra-orthodox Muslims are shaking up Mideast politics
Shawn Baldwin/Corbis
If 2011 was the year the Arab street rose up in defiance of dictatorship, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of the Islamist. That may sound scary. Over at least the past decade, the term has come to represent fanatics around the world obsessed with sharia law, Allah-bent on destroying Israel and the West in a frenzy of religiously inspired payback. Egypt is the latest former Western ally to fall under the so-called Islamist spell, and the most important one to date. At the end of its first free and open parliamentary elections that concluded on Jan. 11, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) stood atop a rubble heap of liberal secularist parties, winning a plurality of seats and poised to become the powerbroker in a country literally sitting at the nexus of the West’s interests in the Middle East.
In the aftermath, Western diplomats and right-leaning political pundits have been wringing their hands over possible futures: that Egypt will abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, that other Islamist movements will take inspiration from the MB example and increase their political activities, raising the spectre of Islamist politics threatening the world’s oil supply. Stoking the fears was who came second: a little-known group of ultra-orthodox Muslims, the Salafis. Their electoral success came as a shock to most observers, though not so much to Muslims themselves.
For years, moderate Muslims have been struggling against a rising wave of fundamentalist thought within their communities. Salafism is on the rise globally, posing a bigger threat to the West than groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, who occupy a comparatively moderate zone in the Islamic spectrum. And the problem is not restricted to Muslim nations. In a series of interviews with Maclean’s in December 2010, Muslim leaders in Amsterdam complained of the rising influence of Salafism. “It’s the fundamentalists, the Salafis, who are the real problem,” Muhammad Sajjad Barkati, the imam at Amsterdam’s Ghoussia mosque, said at the time. “The Salafis are trying to convert everyone to their way of thinking. They are dividing the Muslim community.”
-
New face, same old concerns
By Erica Alini - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
If Pakistan wanted an image makeover, Sherry Rehman is the right pick as ambassador to the U.S.
Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images
Exit the wheeler-dealer; enter a pretty human-rights activist. If Pakistan wanted an image makeover, Sherry Rehman was the right pick to replace Husain Haqqani, the former ambassador to Washington and notorious smooth operator. Rehman, an MP for the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, is currently living under police protection after uttering the same kind of criticism of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws that resulted in two other high-profile politicians being killed by Islamists. Her Hollywood-heroine credentials also include a career in journalism and picking a fierce fight with President Asif Ali Zardari in 2009 over media restrictions.
Rehman’s new job, though, will be tough as well. She lands in Washington at a time when U.S.-Pakistan relations are at a historic low. Her country’s military and spy agencies have such a reputation for shady links with jihadist groups—a topic on which Haqqani wrote an entire book—that Washington carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May without a word to Pakistani generals. To make matters worse, shortly after the U.S.’s deadly attack, Haqqani reportedly secretly asked the U.S. to back an attempt to rein in his country’s military by creating a new, civilian-led security team. The awkward proposal, news of which later leaked to the press, infuriated the generals and cost him the job.
The Americans will likely be suspicious of Rehman too. She’s already under scrutiny for appearing to share some of the Pakistani military’s foreign policy fixations. According to the Financial Times, for example, she is worried about India’s growing influence in Afghanistan, a long-standing concern for the Pakistani army. It will take all her charm to win over Washington.
-
Washington scrambling over Pakistan crisis
By macleans.ca - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:38 AM - 0 Comments
Islamabad threatens to draw down cooperation on Afghanistan after soldiers killed by NATO drone
Pakistan has closed its borders to NATO supplies, and gave the U.S. 15 days to vacate an air base used for drone strikes, after a NATO attack reportedly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on Saturday, the Financial Times reports. U.S. officials profusely apologized for the accident, which they said was “highly likely” caused by a NATO aircraft. But the deaths of Pakistani troops, who may have been mistaken for Taliban militants along the ill-marked border, threw a new wedge between Washington and Islamabad at a time when the U.S. needs Pakistan’s cooperation to ensure an orderly withdraw from Afghanistan and to pressure the Taliban into negotiations. The diplomatic rift also gave China an opportunity to play up its strategic posturing as Pakistan’s ally, Reuters reports. “China believes that Pakistan’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected and the incident should be thoroughly investigated and be handled properly,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement.
-
These days, no news is good. Period.
By Paul Wells - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments
Paul Wells on how everywhere the news is the same: bad
Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP
The other day, Martin Scorsese screened his new 3-D children’s movie, Hugo, for his daughter Francesca, who was turning 12, and 50 of her friends. Two thoughts occur:
It’s probably a good thing Scorsese didn’t have a daughter turning 12 the year he made Taxi Driver.
It’s official: you’re an inadequate parent.
“What? A pinata?! Daddy, I wanted 3-D Jude Law! Francesca’s dad gave her 3-D Jude Law!”
-
Musharraf must have known where Osama bin Laden was hiding: MP Chris Alexander
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:10 PM - 0 Comments
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf surely knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a compound a short walk from a Pakistani military academy, says Conservative MP Chris Alexander, who previously served as Canada’s first resident ambassador in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.
“I can’t prove Musharraf’ knowledge, but everything I know about Pakistan’s system would tell me that he as chief of the army staff and he as president would have known,” Alexander said during a speech today at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. Continue…
-
Obama the hawk
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments
Sure, he’s pulling troops out of Iraq, but he’s found lethal new ways to flex America’s military muscle
Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Barack Obama used U.S. air power to prevent a massacre and facilitate the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. He sent a team of Navy SEALS to conduct a secret surgical strike in Pakistan that took out Osama bin Laden, America’s public enemy number one. He sent a Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, whose extremist preaching was linked to several attempted terrorist attacks against the U.S. All three objectives were achieved without invasion, occupation, or the loss of American lives.The last decade was dominated by the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” display of U.S. military might, a swagger that descended into a “long war” of occupation and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq that left thousands of Americans dead and wounded, and cost upward of a trillion dollars. But cold, calculating and nimble, Obama has turned a new page on the projection of American power. His emphasis on technology, intelligence, and leaning on allies is leaving a smaller and less costly U.S. military footprint on the globe, but one that is proving to be just as lethal to its adversaries.
In his first days as President, Obama ordered interrogation techniques cleaned up and the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed within a year. Congress objected, and Guantánamo has remained open, but the President has added zero detainees to the inmate population. Indeed, he’s barely taken any prisoners—instead, he has presided over many more drone strikes against terrorist suspects than George W. Bush. He is not waterboarding enemy prisoners who have been removed from the battlefield; he is killing them where they stand. (The administration denies frequent accusations that it is killing militants when capturing them would have been feasible.)
-
Danger zone: satire ahead
By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments
The Beygairat Brigade has struck a chord among disillusioned Pakistanis.
Youtube
The Beygairat Brigade, or Shameless Brigade, has struck a chord among disillusioned Pakistanis. The band from Lahore recently uploaded a video to YouTube for a satirical song called Aalu Anday, named after a frequently served potato and egg curry. It’s highly critical of the state, implying it offers the people the same corruption and lack of accountability day after day. The video closes with band member Ali Aftaab Saeed holding a placard that reads: “If you want a bullet through my head, like this song.” It has more than 200,000 views on YouTube. “We really wanted to become a voice of the silent majority, which never gets to say what they really want to say,” Saeed told Public Radio International’s The World.
It’s the latest iteration of Pakistani satire to gain attention of late. The government recently banned a play called Burqavaganza, which is critical of the burka as well as bureaucratic secrecy. According to the New York Times, the Ministry of Culture said the play “pollutes young minds.” One wonders what the Beygairat Brigade thinks of that.
-
With friends like Pakistan, the U.S. doesn’t need enemies
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 66 Comments
Pakistan is helping insurgents. Could that be seen as an act of war?
Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images
The United States has never directly attacked Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), despite the ISI’s long-standing ties to Islamist militias and terrorist groups opposed to the U.S. and its allies. Yet Pakistani spies occasionally still die from American bombs.
In 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles at jihadist training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. The missiles missed Osama bin Laden but killed a team of ISI agents training militants at the camps.
In November 2001, as many as 1,000 ISI agents and Pakistani soldiers from the Frontier Corps found themselves trapped in the Afghan city of Kunduz—along with their Taliban allies and members of al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Pakistanis had been ordered to leave Afghanistan after 9/11 and had had two months to do so, but they decided to stay and fight with the Taliban instead. The Pakistanis might have reasonably expected to share the fate of their compatriots who died as collateral damage in the American cruise missile attacks three years earlier. Instead, Pakistan asked for and received U.S. permission to send rescue planes. Along with the airlifted ISI agents and Pakistani soldiers were Taliban commanders and international jihadists, including al-Qaeda.
-
Bringing Afghanistan’s democrats out of the shadows
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 5 Comments
It is fitting that Terry Glavin begins his book Come from the Shadows: the Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan with a quote from George Orwell — who once said it is not enough to oppose fascism; one must stand against totalitarianism in all its forms.
Orwell, a far-left anti-fascist who took a bullet in the throat while fighting Franco’s brutes during the Spanish Civil War, was angered by the inability of too many of his fellow leftists to counter dictatorial thuggery in those with whom they shared a common enemy. Stalinists got a free pass because, ostensibly, they opposed fascism; they didn’t deserve it.
Glavin, also of the left, is frustrated by the limits of his supposed comrades’ solidarity and internationalism. Afghanistan’s democrats — its students, human rights activists, women, socialists and secularists — should, by rights, be championed and supported by the western left. They are, after all, fighting for the same things liberals in Canada struggled for and earned over the last century. What’s more, they’re fighting for these rights against an explicitly fascistic strain of religious and ethnic extremism embodied in the Taliban. Continue…
-
Good news, bad news: Sept. 22-29
By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Saudi Arabia grants women the right to vote, U.S.-Pakistani relations deteriorate further
Good news
No longer for scholars' eyes only, the Dead Sea Scrolls are posted online. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
Steps in the right direction
The king of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote, acknowledging they can make “correct opinions.” This in a place where females can’t travel without a male’s permission, and where one woman who drove, despite a ban, was sentenced to 10 lashes. King Abdullah’s decision also permits females to run for Shura Council. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has approved draft regulations allowing women’s shelters to remain independent from government, and receive donations without state intermediation.
Weird science
It was an exciting week in space news: NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, deployed by the space shuttle in 1991, fell from orbit. A troublemaker on Twitter, armed with some Orson Welles quotes, managed to spread rumours worldwide that UARS had fallen near Okotoks, Alta. Fortunately, it appears the satellite crashed harmlessly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A few days earlier, space geeks were titillated with another report: physicists think they saw neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which, if confirmed, would disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
-
Pakistan warns U.S. it may lose key ally
By macleans.ca - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 12:22 PM - 4 Comments
Comments come after accusation that Pakistan supports Afghan insurgent attacks
Pakistan is warning the U.S. that it may lose an important ally if it continues to wield accusations of Pakistani support for insurgents in Afghanistan. Speaking to Geo TV in New York, Pakistani Foreign Minister Rabbini Khar addressed the U.S. directly. “You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan, you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people,” she said. “If you are choosing to do so and if they are choosing to do so it will be at [the United States’] own cost.” The statements come a day after Mike Mullen, the top officer for the U.S. military, accused the Pakistani intelligence agency of supporting Afghanistan’s insurgent Haqqani network in several attacks in recent months, including last week’s attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. He called the Haqqani network a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service.
-
Pakistan’s weapon of mass distraction
By Cynthia Reynolds - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments
The new foreign minister is young, female and stylish—cause for celebration and controversy
Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP
The appointment of Pakistan’s new foreign minister is dividing opinion across the conservative nation. Hina Rabbani Khar is the first woman to ever hold the position in that country and, at 34, she’s also the youngest. While some argue her selection is a sign of hope for a new, more moderate direction for the hardline nation, others see the appointment of the wealthy businesswoman—and a member of a powerful Punjabi family—as business as usual. Some also consider her vastly inexperienced. Khar, who’s held mostly junior portfolios, slipped into government after a 2002 ruling required politicians to have a college degree; she ran for office after the rule disqualified her veteran politician father. Pakistan’s archrival India, meanwhile, is offering its own take on Khar: for the moment, it appears to have settled on style icon.
During her first official visit to Delhi last month, part of the new efforts to revive relations between the long-time foes, the press had little to say about Khar’s political skills. Instead, the media gushed over her black Hermès Birkin bag, Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, and classic strand of pearls, comparing her to Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni, even Kate Middleton. One columnist referred to her as Pakistan’s “weapon of mass distraction.” It’s not the first time the press has seized upon her image; pictures of her in trendy slim-fitting jeans have raised eyebrows throughout Pakistan, prompting traditionalists to question whether the co-owner of Polo Lounge, a trendy restaurant on downtown Lahore’s polo grounds, is out of touch with the conservative—and poor—country. Regardless, she now helms one of the most volatile relationships in world politics.
Continue… -
Good news, bad news: July 8 – July 14, 2011
By macleans.ca - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments
South Sudan celebrates the birth of a nation, while Ontario struggles to contain a C. difficile outbreak
Good news
Citizens wave the flag of the newly formed Republic of South Sudan. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times/Polaris)
Tough love
The U.S. finally took a firm stand on Pakistan by suspending $800 million of the more than $2 billion in aid it offers the country each year. Pakistan has been, at best, an unreliable ally in the war on terror. It recently arrested a number of CIA informants who helped locate Osama bin Laden within its borders and cut visas for U.S. personnel operating near the Afghan border. Pakistan may not always see eye to eye with the U.S., but the fact is that American aid is what keeps its military and, lately, economy afloat. This warning shot should provide a crucial dose of reality.
Happy days, here again
A new quarterly Bank of Canada survey suggests a record 57 per cent of businesses “across all regions and sectors” will hire new employees over the next year (the highest level reported since 2005), while only four per cent expect to reduce staff. This coincides with a Statistics Canada report showing solid job growth for the third straight month, with a net gain of 28,000 jobs in June. That’s in sharp contrast to the U.S., where only 18,000 jobs were gained last month.
-
U.S. partially cuts off Pakistan
By macleans.ca - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 6 Comments
Pentagon announces decision to withhold $800 million in military aid
Pakistan’s balance sheet will be short $800 million after the U.S. decided to suspend military aid payments to the country. The relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. has been steadily deteriorating for months, reaching a new low point after the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Over the past 10 weeks, Pakistani authorities have arrested an army major on charges he helped the CIA find bin Laden and expelled more than 100 U.S. military personnel. According to the New York Times, the deferred money represents more than a third of the $2 billion in miltary aid the U.S. sends Pakistan. About $300 million of the funds were earmarked to pay for patrols along the Afghan border.
-
Pakistan arrests 'CIA informants’ who helped bin Laden raid
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 12:58 PM - 0 Comments
Media reports say five arrested by Pakistani intelligence agency
Pakistan’s intelligence agency has arrested five alleged CIA informants who helped execute the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, according to media reports from the U.S. The New York Times reported that the owner of the safe house rented by the CIA to spy on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad was among those arrested. While Pakistan denied the reports, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations told the BBC that people had been arrested for interrogation. Among those targeted were people suspected of throwing flares into bin Laden’s compound to guide approaching U.S. helicopters on the night of the raid, as well as those who allegedly helped the helicopters refuel in Pakistani territory. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been strained since the operation was carried out in May. There has been speculation that high-level Pakistani authorities were aware of bin Laden’s presence in the country.
-
Missing journalist found dead in Pakistan
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 2 Comments
Local news reports signs of torture on his body
Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad was found dead near his abandoned car in Islamabad after he went missing on Sunday night. Soon after his disappearance, Human Rights Watch made a statement saying they believed Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, had arrested him. According to local news reports, there were signs of torture on his body. Two days before his disappearance, Shahzad wrote a story about al-Qaeda attacked a naval base in Karachi because of the arrest of two naval officers with alleged ties to the terrorist group. Pakistan is a notoriously dangerous place to work as a journalist, and Reporters Without Borders claims media freedom has been eroding there for years. In 2010, 11 journalists were killed in Pakistan, according to the organization.
-
Clinton has tense visit with Pakistani leaders
By macleans.ca - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 2 Comments
Acknowledges strained relationship after bin Laden raid
Tension was apparent when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Pakistan’s leaders in Islamabad on Friday. Pakistani-U.S. relations have been notably shaky since May 1, when U.S. Navy Seals stormed a compound and killed Osama bin Laden. There has been speculation that Pakistan was aware that bin Laden was hiding out in their country. U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen accompanied Clinton during the visit as she met with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and the chief of Pakistan’s army. The New York Times reported that the meeting was noticeably “awkward and unsmiling.” Speaking afterwards, Clinton acknowledged the strained relationship, but said the talks were open and constructive. Mullen said trust between the two countries’ militaries must be rebuilt.
-
U.S. to decrease military presence in Pakistan
By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:27 AM - 2 Comments
Military has begun pulling troops following government request
The U.S. military has begun pulling its troops out of Pakistan. Earlier this month, Islamabad asked the U.S. to scale back its military presence, following rising tensions between the two countries after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Pentagon spokesman Dave Lapan did not say how many troops would be removed.
-
'The greatest threat to Islam'
By Adnan R. Khan - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 23 Comments
How bin Laden’s murder strengthened anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan
Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images
In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, Pakistanis are gearing up for a fight. But contrary to what many people might think, it’s not in defence of the world’s late King of Terror. In fact, Pakistanis have been remarkably silent about his death. Protests reported in the world’s media have been small—a few hundred diehard extremists ushered onto the streets by Islamic fundamentalist parties, the odd prayer session with a few dozen souls to help guide bin Laden into heaven.
Bin Laden was a hopeless cause to most. “He never really gave Muslims anything to believe in,” says Ali Ibrahim, a shopkeeper in Islamabad. “Except violence. But violence and jihad, where has that gotten us?” Dozens of other Pakistanis who spoke to Maclean’s echo Ibrahim’s sentiments. But what even they admit is that the driving force behind bin Laden’s murderous campaign was valid. “Millions of Muslims believe the U.S. is the greatest threat to Islam,” says Omer Malik, a lawyer in Islamabad. “Osama went about it all wrong, but he did prove to Pakistanis that America is the problem.”
The death of bin Laden has only strengthened that view. In the months leading up to his killing, Pakistanis—many fuelled by Islamic extremism—were already building up a solid foundation of anti-Americanism, premised on a decade of violence (which they blame on the U.S., for bringing it to their doorstep), CIA covert operations inside Pakistan, and a barrage of missile strikes from unmanned drones in the country’s Tribal Areas targeting al-Qaeda-linked militants. Now, the daring, dead-of-night operation carried out by U.S. commandos against bin Laden on May 2, apparently without Pakistani knowledge or consent, has hit at the heart of what many Pakistanis fear: the U.S. is willing—and able—to operate in their country with impunity.
-
Bombing in Pakistan kills 80
By macleans.ca - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 1 Comment
Taliban claims attacks were revenge for bin Laden killing
The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for two suicide bomb attacks on a paramilitary academy in northwest Pakistan on Friday that killed 80 people and wounded at least 120. The attacks took place at a training centre for the Frontier Constabulary in the city of Shabqadar, in the district of Charsadda, as newly trained cadets were preparing to go on leave after completing their course. “The first suicide bomber came on a motorcycle and detonated his vest among the Frontier Constabulary men,” said Charsadda district police chief Nisar Khan Marwat. “When the other [Frontier Constabulary] people came to the rescue to help their colleagues, the second bomber came on another motorcycle and blew himself up.” The Pakistani Taliban have claimed that the bombings were revenge attacks for the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs on May 1. “It’s the first revenge for the martyrdom of…bin Laden. There will be more,” said Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told Reuters.
-
What Pakistan would have gained by protecting bin Laden
By Adnan R. Khan - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:15 AM - 1 Comment
Former Pakistani military officers don’t believe the ISI had no idea bin Laden was at the Abbottabad compound
Vincent Laforet; The New York Times; Redux
In the prologue to his 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, journalist Steve Coll wrote, “In history’s long inventory of surprise attacks, September 11 is distinguished in part because of the role played by intelligence agencies and informal secret networks in the preceding events. As bin Laden and his aides endorsed the September 11 attacks from their Afghan sanctuary, they were pursued secretly by salaried officers from the CIA. At the same time, bin Laden and his closest allies received protection, via the Taliban, from salaried officers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. This was a pattern for two decades. Strand after strand of official covert action, unofficial covert action, clandestine terrorism, and clandestine counterterrorism wove one upon the other to create the matrix of undeclared war that burst into plain sight in 2001.”
On May 1, that same “matrix of undeclared war” was evident once again after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison city 50 km north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Its military installations, including Pakistan’s top military academy, make it about as sensitive a place as exists in a country ruled by generals. Finding bin Laden there, and not somewhere in an obscure cave, suggests what Coll already made clear in his seminal book: despite repeated denials, elements within the ISI, the intelligence branch of the military, had continued to provide protection for bin Laden.
Pakistani authorities will obviously not admit to that. But retreat into ignorance will not be enough to appease the world this time, especially the U.S., which has poured billions into Pakistan’s military and civilian coffers over the past decade. What Pakistani officials actually knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts has become a topic of intense scrutiny in Washington. Members of Congress are demanding answers, and threatening to cut funding to the country if solid evidence emerges that bin Laden received protection from elements within the security services.
-
Mellissa Fung and her captors
By Anne Kingston - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 3 Comments
The CBC reporter held in Afghanistan resisted, defied and then forgave them
Photograph by Jessica Darmanin
“Do you want to see where I was stabbed?” Mellissa Fung asks, pulling aside the strap of her sleeveless pink blouse and pointing to the back of her right shoulder. The CBC reporter is proud of the bruise-like wound: it marks the resistance she put up during her abduction outside of Kabul in 2008.
A similar spirit of refusal animates Under an Afghan Sky, Fung’s memoir of her kidnapping and 28-day captivity in an underground hole the size of a closet. The publicity tour has brought her to a Toronto hotel, where she’s politely, if reluctantly, discussing it. “I’m an old-school journalist,” the 38-year-old says. “I’d rather tell the story than be the story.”
She was a hesitant memoirist, too. “I wanted to move on.” Dredging it up again was “pretty horrible,” she says, but she needed to address “misinformation”—that money or Taliban members were exchanged for her release. A screenplay was rumoured to be in the works. “I wanted my own record, the way I remembered it,” says Fung, a self-described “control freak.”
-
The beginning of the end of al-Qaeda?
By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 4 Comments
With bin Laden’s death, the war on terror has lost its purpose, according to al-Qaeda expert Peter Bergen
Courtesy Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen began covering the rise of al-Qaeda long before the twin towers fell. One of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, and has written three books about the terrorist organization. In his latest, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda, he argues that 9/11 marked the climax of al-Qaeda’s power. Bin Laden’s organization, he writes, has been in decline ever since. Bergen spoke with Maclean’s from Washington.
Q: Al-Qaeda has now lost its best recruiter and fundraiser. Is this the beginning of the end?
A: Yes. When you joined the Nazi party, you didn’t swear an oath of allegiance to Naziism; you swore a personal oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. When you join al-Qaeda, you swear an oath of allegiance to bin Laden, not to al-Qaeda or al-Qaedism. Similarly, when groups join al-Qaeda in Iraq, they swear a personal fealty to bin Laden. He’s the grand fromage of al-Qaeda and the jihadi movement. No one can replace him.
-
The future of al-Qaeda
By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 7 Comments
The world’s first truly global terrorist organization suddenly faces an uncertain fate
Getty Images
In the spring of 2004, as investigators scoured mobile phone records for evidence in the Madrid train bombings, a disturbing truth about the killers began to emerge. Far from bloody-minded professionals carrying out Osama bin Laden’s orders, these suicide bombers appeared to be novices—self-radicalized warriors who believed themselves to be carrying out the al-Qaeda leader’s wishes. The closest many of them ever had come to the man was reading his polemics on a jihadist website.
This phenomenon wasn’t new. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cells of wannabes had popped up around the world; most showed all the acumen of Wile E. Coyote hunting the Road Runner. But the coordinated assault on Madrid’s commuter rail network marked a frightening new turn for the world’s first truly global terrorist organization. With its leaders in hiding or on the run, it had managed to outsource its work to self-styled “affiliates”—from the absurdist amateurs of the so-called “Toronto 18” to the homegrown jihadis who killed 52 people by bombing the London Underground. Just when Western intelligence agencies thought they had a handle on the threat, the threat had morphed into something almost as dangerous.
This quicksilver quality had long been al-Qaeda’s key to survival. Bin Laden had assembled his following in the late 1980s from remnants of Arab volunteer brigades who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who shared his outrage at the Saudi royal family’s decision to allow U.S. troops on their soil during the 1990 Gulf War. Though the scion of a construction dynasty in Saudi Arabia, he was expelled from the country the next year, and quickly shifted operations to Sudan, where his organization began to live up to its name (in Arabic, al-Qaeda means “the base”).
-
The life and times of Osama bin Laden
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 12 Comments
Profiling the world’s most hated terrorist
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.
