Category Archives: Analysis

Cutting off ISIS’ cash flow

Charles Lister writes: The Islamic State (or ISIS) is “the best-funded terrorist organization we’ve confronted,” but “we have no silver bullet, no secret weapon to empty ISIS’ coffers overnight.” These were the words of David Cohen, the undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in a speech yesterday, in which he outlined the U.S. government’s assessment of ISIS finance and a strategy to counter it.

According to Cohen, ISIS’ principal source of finance is still derived from its control and sale of oil, which he assessed was still bringing in $1 million a day. Additional funds come from kidnap for ransom, extortion networks, criminal activities, and donations from external individuals, the latter being of least significance in terms of scale. In order to counter this broad base of financial incomes, Cohen explained that U.S. strategy is focused on disrupting ISIS revenue streams, restricting ISIS access to the international financial system, and targeting ISIS leaders, facilitators and supporters with sanctions.

Despite vastly underestimating ISIS’ potential in the months and years leading up to the organization’s 2014 offensives in Syria and Iraq, the Treasury’s, and by extension the U.S. government’s assessment of ISIS finance and how to combat it does seem largely in tune. It is indeed right that external financial donations are of minimal significance to ISIS. Since as early as 2005, ISIS predecessor organizations Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen, and the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) all consistently sought to develop internal structures dedicated to maintaining financial self-sufficiency and an independence from potentially vulnerable external donors. In the current climate, however, a diminished capacity to earn from the sale of oil may elevate the importance of external sources of funding for ISIS to sustain its internal durability. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS ascent in Syria and Iraq weakening Pakistani Taliban

The Guardian reports: The dramatic rise of Islamic State (Isis) in Syria and Iraq is helping to tear apart the Pakistani Taliban, the beleaguered militant group beset by infighting and splits.

Once the country’s largest and most feared militant coalition, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been on the ropes since a US drone strike killed its charismatic leader Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013, a blow followed this summer by the launch of a military onslaught against the group’s sanctuaries.

But the latest challenge to the TTP has come from the startling military successes of Isis and its demand that all Muslims pledge allegiance to the new caliphate it announced in June.

The claim to global Islamic leadership by the self-styled caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi threatens to undermine the TTP, which draws considerable authority from the fact that its symbolic figurehead is Mullah Omar, the one-eyed village preacher who ruled the original Taliban “emirate” in Afghanistan prior to the US-led invasion of 2001.

This week the TTP’s beleaguered leadership announced it had sacked its spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, after the high profile militant announced he had pledged his personal allegiance to Baghdadi.

The statement published on the movement’s Facebook page said the spokesman had left the group some time before and reiterated that the TTP’s leader, Mullah Fazlullah, continued to back Mullah Omar, “the emir of believers”. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. cooperated secretly with Syrian Kurds in battle against ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. has conferred newfound legitimacy on the Syrian Kurdish militia fighting in Kobani, which is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in neighboring Turkey. The U.S. and Turkey both list the PKK as a terrorist group.

Washington’s decision to send in supplies by air to fighters loyal to the Democratic Union Party, known by its Kurdish acronym PYD, followed a U.S. assessment that the Syrian Kurdish defenders would run out of ammunition in as little as three days.

Iraqi Kurdish leaders told American officials they were considering sending reinforcements from their region to Kobani. To reach the town, they would have to pass through other parts of Syria. U.S. defense officials looked at the route and told the Kurds it would be a suicide mission.

The U.S. asked the Turkish government to let Iraqi Kurdish fighters cross through Turkish territory to reinforce Kobani. U.S. officials said Turkey agreed in principal and that Massoud Barzani, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, proposed sending a specially trained force of Syrian Kurdish refugees.

But events on the ground forced Washington’s hand. U.S. contacts in Kobani sent out an urgent SOS.

“We needed weaponry and fast,” said Idris Nassan, the deputy foreign minister of the Kobani regional government.

To tide the Kurds over until Turkey opens a land corridor, U.S. Gen. Lloyd Austin, who runs the air campaign against Islamic State, decided on a delicate plan: dropping supplies using C-130 cargo planes.

The U.S. didn’t think Islamic State fighters had sophisticated antiaircraft weapons, but the Pentagon decided out of caution to fly under cover of darkness.

Gen. Austin presented the proposal to the White House on Friday. President Barack Obama approved it immediately, U.S. officials said.

Until recently, the White House wouldn’t even acknowledge U.S. contacts with the PYD because of its close ties to the PKK and the diplomatic sensitivities over that in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Young Tunisians think ISIS offers better life and reports on mass killings are ‘made up’

The New York Times reports: In interviews at cafes in and around Ettadhamen [a district in Tunis], dozens of young unemployed or working-class men expressed support for the extremists or saw the appeal of joining their ranks — convinced that it could offer a higher standard of living, a chance to erase arbitrary borders that have divided the Arab world for a century, or perhaps even the fulfillment of Quranic prophecies that Armageddon will begin with a battle in Syria.

“There are lots of signs that the end will be soon, according to the Quran,” said Aymen, 24, who was relaxing with friends at another cafe.

Bilal, an office worker who was at another cafe, applauded the Islamic State as the divine vehicle that would finally undo the Arab borders drawn by Britain and France at the end of World War I. “The division of the countries is European,” said Bilal, 27. “We want to make the region a proper Islamic state, and Syria is where it will start.”

Mourad, 28, who said he held a master’s degree in technology but could find work only in construction, called the Islamic State the only hope for “social justice,” because he said it would absorb the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies and redistribute their wealth. “It is the only way to give the people back their true rights, by giving the natural resources back to the people,” he said. “It is an obligation for every Muslim.”

Many insisted that friends who had joined the Islamic State had sent back reports over the Internet of their homes, salaries and even wives. “They live better than us!” said Walid, 24.

Wissam, 22, said a friend who left four months ago had told him that he was “leading a truly nice, comfortable life” under the Islamic State.

“I said: ‘Are there some pretty girls? Maybe I will go there and settle down,’ ” he recalled.

Leaders of Ennahda, the mainstream Islamist party that leads the Tunisian Parliament, said they had overestimated the power of democracy alone to tame violent extremism. Said Ferjani, an Ennahda leader who has often cited his own evolution from youthful militancy to peaceful politics, said in an interview that he now believed economic development would be just as important. “Without social development, I don’t think the democracy could survive,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Has ISIS peaked as a military power?

Jacob Siegel writes: For a few months, the marauding jihadis of ISIS might have looked like an unstoppable army. That’s when they were moving at high speeds, their power blurred by hype and velocity. Slowed down by real resistance, a clearer picture takes shape and the limits of ISIS’s military power come into focus.

At the so-called caliphate’s edges, in areas like the Syrian border town of Kobani, ISIS’s march has stalled and its armor is starting to crack. We may be reaching the limits of ISIS as a conventional military force.

Facing a small Kurdish resistance and Western airpower, ISIS has been unable to take Kobani, despite surrounding and besieging it for months. That doesn’t mean the group is giving up, though, or anywhere close to defeat. The façade of ISIS’s power as a conquering army may be wearing off, but they can still revert to terrorist form and continue killing even if they can’t take ground.

Early on, ISIS leaders committed to a risky gambit: They decided to form a state, which put them in open conflict with other world powers. The group could have survived as a terrorist organization or a local insurgency as it had for years, but instead wagered on the caliphate. That decision provided an aura of authority that attracted new recruits and seemed to pay off in the short term. But it also transformed a regional threat into a global enemy that was easier to target in the areas it controlled. [Continue reading…]

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America’s failure in Afghanistan

Edward Girardet writes: The American-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is proving to be a failure. Against the advice of experienced diplomats, aid workers, journalists, and other analysts at the time, Washington’s decision to invade the country in October 2001 in a “war on terrorism” ignored basic realities as well as history. A top-down military approach exhibiting often astounding hubris hindered efforts to implement a more modest—and savvy—long-term development strategy that could have ameliorated a conflict that was already in its twenty-second year when U.S. and coalition forces intervened. It has been a costly thirteen-year involvement in lives and resources, with very little to show in the way of resolving Afghanistan’s problems. America’s war in Afghanistan may be as undistinguished as the failed Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989. Everything now depends on the ability of the Afghan army, police, and militia to hold their own—and whether the country will succeed in producing a thriving economy based on its own sweat and with a credible, broad-based political system.

Given the overwhelmingly artificial nature of Afghanistan’s post-2001 economy, which has enriched more than a few U.S. security companies plus various Afghan politicians, warlords, and other members of the privileged elite, military downsizing is bound to be devastating to Afghan pocketbooks. In 2011, at the height of Operation Enduring Freedom, as Washington dubbed its involvement, the military occupation of Afghanistan, run by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), stood at over 140,000 troops operating out of 800-odd bases throughout the country. Kandahar in the southeast, Bagram north of Kabul, and Camp Bastion in Helmand had become three of the world’s busiest military airfields: they handled hundreds of daily transport flights to Europe, the Middle East, and offshore aircraft carriers, as well as helicopter sorties against the Taliban and other insurgents.

By the end of 2013, the departure of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) incorporating forty-eight foreign armies, mainly from NATO, but also from countries such as Australia, Tonga, and Jordan, was well under way. Troops and equipment were being flown out daily, while ISAF and related military organizations had terminated most logistical contracts with private local and foreign companies. An indication of just how dependent Afghanistan had become on outside funding, this put more than 100,000 Afghans out of work and eliminated crucial income for up to two million dependents. [Continue reading…]

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Syria tribal revolt against ISIS in August resulting in civilian massacre was ignored by U.S.

The Washington Post reports: The cost of turning against the Islamic State was made brutally apparent in the streets of a dusty backwater town in eastern Syria in early August. Over a three-day period, vengeful fighters shelled, beheaded, crucified and shot hundreds of members of the Shaitat tribe after they dared to rise up against the extremists.

By the time the killing stopped, 700 people were dead, activists and survivors say, making this the bloodiest single atrocity committed by the Islamic State in Syria since it declared its existence 18 months ago.

The little-publicized story of this failed tribal revolt in Abu Hamam, in Syria’s eastern Deir al-Zour province, illuminates the challenges that will confront efforts to persuade those living under Islamic State rule — in Iraq as well as Syria — to join the fight against the jihadist group, something U.S. officials say is essential if the campaign against the militants is to succeed.

The Abu Hamam area has now been abandoned, and many of the bodies remain uncollected, offering a chilling reminder to residents elsewhere of the fate that awaits those who dare rebel.

Just as powerful a message for those living under the militants’ iron fist was the almost complete international silence on the bloodbath. [Continue reading…]

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The West made lots of promises to Afghan girls and now it’s breaking them

Heather Barr writes: The girls of Afghanistan have been betrayed. When Taliban rule ended almost 13 years ago, international donors rushed in to promise that young women would no longer be denied an education. Western governments spent a decade patting themselves on the back for what they touted as exceptional work supporting schools for the beleaguered girls of Afghanistan. They talked about bringing women out of purdah, literally as well as figuratively, so they could help their families and their country to prosper.

But the closing of one school after another exposes the hollowness of those promises. In fact, the state of education in Afghanistan is still so shaky that only about half of Afghan girls manage to go to school, and those numbers are set to decline.

In the volatile southern province of Kandahar, for instance, an innovative school for teenage girls will soon close its doors. The Kandahar Institute for Modern Studies, established in 2006 with funding and encouragement from the Canadian government, has run out of donors. And it is only one of a number of Afghan schools to face the budget axe swung by distant governments and cost-cutting politicians.

Other schools have been shuttered because of attacks and threats stemming from the war that continues to engulf the country. In July, girls’ schools closed in one entire district, depriving 40,000 girls of education.

The website of the U.S. development agency proudly proclaims, “In 2013, one million Afghan learners are enrolled in schools with USAID assistance, and over 5 million primary grade students benefitted from USAID assistance.” But in January 2014, the U.S. Congress cut the U.S. government’s allocation of development aid for Afghanistan by half. [Continue reading…]

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Iran offers ‘compromises’ in nuclear talks, West unmoved

Reuters reports: Iran is pushing what it portrays as a new compromise proposal in nuclear talks, but Western negotiators say it offers no viable concessions, underscoring how far apart the two sides are as they enter crunch time before a Nov. 24 deadline.

In the negotiations with six major powers, the Iranians say they are no longer demanding a total end to economic sanctions in return for curbing their nuclear program and would accept initially lifting just the latest, most damaging, sanctions.

Western officials dismiss the proposal as nothing new and say the Iranians have always known that the sanctions could only end gradually – with each measure being suspended and later terminated only after Iranian compliance had been proven.

The officials say that in talks in Vienna they too have offered what they call compromises over demands that Iran limit its nuclear program, but they have been rejected by Tehran. [Continue reading…]

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Obama sees an Iran deal that could avoid Congress

The New York Time reports: No one knows if the Obama administration will manage in the next five weeks to strike what many in the White House consider the most important foreign policy deal of his presidency: an accord with Iran that would forestall its ability to make a nuclear weapon. But the White House has made one significant decision: If agreement is reached, President Obama will do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it.

Even while negotiators argue over the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to spin and where inspectors could roam, the Iranians have signaled that they would accept, at least temporarily, a “suspension” of the stringent sanctions that have drastically cut their oil revenues and terminated their banking relationships with the West, according to American and Iranian officials. The Treasury Department, in a detailed study it declined to make public, has concluded Mr. Obama has the authority to suspend the vast majority of those sanctions without seeking a vote by Congress, officials say.

But Mr. Obama cannot permanently terminate those sanctions. Only Congress can take that step. And even if Democrats held on to the Senate next month, Mr. Obama’s advisers have concluded they would probably lose such a vote. [Continue reading…]

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Victims of ISIS: Non-western journalists who don’t make the headlines

The Guardian reports: Last week, Islamic State militants released a fifth video of the British freelance journalist John Cantlie, wearing a Guantánamo Bay-style orange jumpsuit and appearing to read from a script.

The film’s release was widely reported. Unsurprisingly: since August, Isis has released videos showing its beheading of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning. All have been huge news events.

Less widely covered were reports that, on 13 October, Isis shot and killed the Mosul correspondent of Iraq’s Sada news agency in the city’s al-Ghazlani camp. Several local sources, as well as a Kurdish Democratic party spokesman and a medical centre, confirmed Mohanad al-Aqidi’s death to numerous NGOs (members of his family have since disputed the reports, and al-Aqidi’s fate is currently unclear.)

There are no doubts about the public beheading on 10 October, in Samarra, 50km south-east of Tikrit, of Raad Mohamed al-Azaoui , an Iraqi cameraman and photographer for Sama Salah Aldeen TV. Azaoui, a 37-year-old father of three, was killed with his brother after Friday prayers. [Continue reading…]

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How to cover the ISIS — and survive

Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, writes: Sometime in 2013, as Islamic State militants expanded the territory under their control, an order came down to the local brigades: Grab any non-Muslim foreigner you can find. Western journalists became prime targets, and over the next few months dozens were captured by local fighters.

International news organizations purposely avoided covering the kidnappings. Such blackouts are intended to create space for hostage negotiations to move forward discreetly, undisturbed by the media spotlight. Yet this voluntary censorship also had unintended consequences: In late 2013, when 30 journalists were missing in Syria, there was virtually no coverage of the problem, little public awareness that Islamic State fighters were actively searching for journalists and humanitarian workers to abduct, and less recognition of the rise of a group that has now emerged as a serious international security threat.

The Islamic State’s approach to news media, meanwhile, has reaped huge benefits for the group. Ransom payments by European governments have generated millions of dollars in revenue, with the going price per hostage estimated to be north of $2 million. Its grisly videos showing the beheadings of journalists such as James Foley and Steven Sotloff have reinforced the militants’ message of terror and served as valuable recruiting tools. And the group has managed its global image through its deft use of social media and its ability to restrict access to independent journalists.

In the battle over information between the Islamic State and journalists, the terrorists are winning. [Continue reading…]

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The impact of airstrikes on the battle for Kobane

The Telegraph reports: The first signs that things could change came when planes appeared in the sky, circling for hours, but not attacking. The first strikes came on October 7 when US-made vehicles driven by Isil fighters to resupply the city were hit outside the town.

Scorched metal skeletons were all that remained of the jihadist’s prized Humvees.

“We had a walkie-talkie tuned on the Isil radio system, that we had taken from a jihadist that we killed,” said Mr Kharaba.

“When the first air strikes hit, we heard them on the radio screaming in panic.

“They were shouting ’Allah Akbhar’ (God is great) and listing the leaders who were killed: Abu Anas, Abu Hamza and many others.” Within a week, the air strikes had escalated from a few every day, to several every hour and by Tuesday the US and allies launched 21 air strikes on Isil positions in and around Kobane.

They bombed Tel Shair, a hill at the edge of Kobani, from which Isil had boastfully erected its black flag, and which it had used as a position to shell the town from.

Kurdish forces stormed the hill after the air strikes and cleaned it of their enemy.

“After we took the hill, I knew that Isil was on the back foot,” said Mr Kharaba.

“I knew it would be hard for them to keep Kobane.” The next day the strikes were hitting inside Kobane itself and the tide began to turn.

Pilots overhead grew in confidence and began to strike positions in the centre of Kobane, hitting Isil on their front lines.

Mr Kharaba described to the Telegraph being just metres from the air strike’s targets, and knowing he was safe: “They are incredibly accurate. If the Americans wanted to put a rocket in someone’s eye, even from hundreds of meters in the air, they could.”

The Syrian rebels and their Kurdish allies claimed they worked closely with the US planners to help set up the coordinates for the laser guided bombs.

Idris Nassan, 40, a senior spokesman for the Kurdish fighters told the Telegraph: “There is close co-ordination. We have a member of YPG who works directly with the Americans.”

Officially, the US government has shied away from directly admitting coordinating its attacks through the YPG, whose affiliate, the PKK, is on America’s terrorist list.

But John Allen, the US special envoy in charge of building the international coalition against Islamic State, admitted that Washington was open to receiving information on targets from all sources.

“Obviously, information comes in from all different sources associated with providing local information or potentially targeting information.

“And we’ll take it all when it comes in. It’s ultimately evaluated for its value,” Allen told reporters in Washington.

One fighter who asked not to be named recalled a battle on the eastern front of Kobane where his men were about to be forced into a retreat: “We called a Kurdish commander for help. He told us to move back a few meters. Then, minutes after, an air strike hit the men we had been fighting.”

The results have been increasingly effective. [Continue reading…]

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Humiliation replaces fear for the women kidnapped by ISIS

The Guardian reports: They sold Amsha for $12. Other girls and women went for more, much more. But Amsha had a small son and was pregnant with her second child. She had already seen Islamic State (Isis) militants execute her husband in front of her. Now the terror of that crime and the fear of captivity was to be replaced by the indignity and humiliation of being traded like cattle.

“A 50-year-old man with a dark beard came to buy me,” she recalls. “From that day on, I didn’t want to live any more.”

Amsha is one of hundreds of Yazidi women from northern Iraq captured during Islamic State’s rapid advance this year. Interviews with women who escaped reveal that Isis corralled the women into halls and other detention centres and gradually sold them off to fighters as the spoils of war.

Isis said in an online article that it was reviving an ancient custom of enslaving enemies and forcing the women to become wives of victorious fighters.

“One should remember that enslaving the families of the [non-believers] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the sharia, that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’an and the narrations of the prophet,” the article said, adding that mothers were not separated from their young children. [Continue reading…]

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Denmark tries a progressive approach to fighters returning from Syria

The Washington Post reports: The rush of morning shoppers parted to make way for Talha, a lanky 21-year-old in desert camouflage and a long, religious beard. He strode through the local mall with a fighter’s gait picked up on the battlefields of Syria. Streams of young Muslim men greeted him like a returning king.

As-salamu alaykum.

Wa alaikum assalaam.

In other countries, Talha — one of hundreds of young jihadists from the West who has fought in Syria and Iraq — might be barred from return or thrown in jail. But in Denmark, a country that has spawned more foreign fighters per capita than almost anywhere else, the port city of Aarhus is taking a novel approach by rolling out a welcome mat.

In Denmark, not one returned fighter has been locked up. Instead, taking the view that discrimination at home is as criminal as Islamic State recruiting, officials here are providing free psychological counseling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with stanching the flow of recruits.

Some progressives say Aarhus should become a model for other communities in the United States and Europe that are trying to cope with the question of what to do when the jihad generation comes back to town. [Continue reading…]

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At birthplace of the Arab Spring, discontent opens a door to the past

The New York Times reports: Chaima Issa, a poet and the daughter of a former political prisoner, is determined to keep Tunisia’s revolution alive.

She is running as a candidate for a small democratic party in parliamentary elections next weekend in one of the most populous constituencies of the capital. A 34-year-old who wears purple-frame glasses, a tight white T-shirt and jeans, she is an outsider but a passionate one as she crisscrosses the old quarter of Tunis reaching out to voters.

Almost four years after a popular uprising that overthrew President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and set off the Arab Spring in 2011, Tunisians are grappling with price increases, unemployment and rising terrorism — and roundly blame their politicians for the mess. The frustration is such that people often say they wish for a return of the Ben Ali era.

Tunisia has been torn by ideological divisions between Islamists who won the first elections after the revolution in 2011 and secularists who led a protest movement against the Islamist government last year after the assassination of two members of Parliament. Now riding on the wave of discontent, former officials from the Ben Ali government, who are free to run for office for the first time since the uprising, are attempting a comeback.

It is a prospect that incenses Ms. Issa.

“It is horrible, shameful,” she said. “They are profiting from our revolution; they are picking our flowers. It is they who spilled our blood.”

In the capital’s old city recently, Ms. Issa found voters in an angry mood and vowing not to vote at all for the politicians, whom they clearly distrust. “All they want is a position, and then they never let go!” shouted one market worker striding past a group of workers from Ms. Issa’s National Democratic Alliance party who were wearing white party T-shirts and handing out leaflets and waving flags. “Long live Ben Ali!” shouted a vendor when he saw her party flags. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s wrong: Arming rebels works

Christopher Dickey writes: The New York Times ran a story last week that suggested CIA covert operations failed again and again to achieve the policy objectives set for them.

Just about everyone I talked to afterward in the U.S. intelligence community saw this as a story put out by the administration. One retired high-ranking intelligence officer said the article “seems founded on the kind of leaks that are permissible when beneficial to folks in high places but prosecutable when done by others.”

Has the CIA failed repeatedly to meet its covert goals? Actually, the problem has been exactly the reverse. With the exception of the Bay of Pigs, the agency has succeeded repeatedly, sometimes spectacularly. In Afghanistan in the 1980s “the CIA arms for the mujahedin won the final and decisive battle of the Cold War, liberating Eastern Europe and destroying the USSR,” says CIA veteran Bruce Riedel, now at the Brookings Institute. “That’s victory by any measure. Of course the war had other long term consequences, but the CIA accomplished what the White House wanted, a Russian Vietnam.”

Long-term consequences indeed. What happened again and again after the agency eliminated or helped to neutralize the presumed bad guys was the spectacle of their replacements turning out to be as bad or worse. But for those tragic policy decisions one must blame every president dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. American commanders-in-chief and the people around them come to think they can reengineer countries around the world, whether to make them more anti-Communist in the old days, or less terrorist, or more humanitarian in the present. And in many cases the action is out in the open.

“A CIA study says arming rebels rarely works?” a senior veteran of the agency asked wryly. “You could say the same thing about the U.S. military. How many wars have we won since World War II?” Granada? Kosovo? One hardly wants to mention the continuing tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan: “mission accomplished” turns so quickly to “mission impossible.”

From 1983 to 2003 the United States waged what Rudyard Kipling called “savage wars of peace” to teach lessons and change regimes just about every year, sometimes secretly, more often openly, in Lebanon, Granada, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, against Iran in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and so on. Most Americans have forgotten these operations, of course, but the latter ones, especially the 1999 Kosovo war in which not a single allied soldier lost his or her life, started to make the whole business of war look just a little too easy—and laid the groundwork for the biggest disaster of all, the full scale invasion of Iraq.

By comparison with conventional military campaigns, the CIA ops were, in fact, pretty small beer, but most eventually left an acrid aftertaste. [Continue reading…]

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Joshua Landis: ‘Syria is locked into its grinding civil war’

Danny Postel in conversation with Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, former president of the Syrian Studies Association, and editor of the blog Syria Comment. This discussion is an elaboration of a short article, “The Great Sorting Out: Ethnicity & the Future of the Levant,” by Landis that Elias Muhanna published on his blog, Qifa Nabki.

(H/t Pulse)

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