Al-qaeda, the World's foremost Masters of Force Multiplication

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Sandman

To be fair, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are now almost one and the same organisation, operating from their statelet within Pakistan.

My thoughts on this matter are that it's not so much Islamist competance as American incompetance that has led us to this point.

The Bush administration is American so I guess it is fair to say American incompetance but I do wish you'd be more percise and say the Bush Administration's incompetance or if you must paint with a broad brush then Republican incompetance (for indeed they pushed through the laws allowing Bush to invade Iraq on a very weak pretext).

The invasion of Iraq took virtually all of the resources out of Afganistan and sent them to Iraq. Not much reconstruction has occured in Afghanistan but the Afghans seemed to understand no one was going to seriously help rebuild their country. Iraqis were indeed told reconstruction would occur then got pissed off when Bush tried to ignore them like he ignored Afganistan. This is 100% the fault of the Bush Administration. They were just to arrogant and short sighted.

[Sandman]

Tell me with a straight face that there's no chance of another similarly incompetent president in the next twenty years. As far as I can see, the social structures which propelled this simple fool to the world's most powerful job are still in place.

[Whoha]

what about differently incompetent presidents?

[MOBIUS]

An interesting article today that appears to bear out my original premise...

How the war on terror made the world a more terrifying place
New figures show dramatic rise in terror attacks worldwide since the invasion of Iraq
By Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn
Published: 28 February 2007

Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the repeated denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found that the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The study compared the period between 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq with the period since the invasion. The count - excluding the Arab-Israel conflict - shows the number of deaths due to terrorism rose from 729 to 5,420. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine.

Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam [Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week - raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq - the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war an unravelling of security elsewhere.

Last month John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa'ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that " the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa'ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. The research has been based on the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database.

The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5) said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan", he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

The effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts has been influenced according to a number of factors, said the report. Countries with troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the country, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.

Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa'ida and their associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.

* The US is joining the Iraqi government in a diplomatic initiative inviting Iran and Syria to a "neighbours meeting" on stabilising Iraq, the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday. The move reflects a change of approach by the Bush administration, which previously had resisted calls to include Iran and Syria in such talks.

So basically a rag-tag bunch of extremists pushed the buttons of the US and they did all the rest...

So I say again surely Al-Qaeda are the most successful terrorist organisation the World has yet seen, simply because such a relatively small number of people have successfully fomented so much destruction and discord through proxies who are doing their fighting for them...

Utter genius I'd say! If Bin laden posted on Poly and asked to be rated on KH's thread...

[Berzerker]

Having the protection of the local government is a huge boon

Certainly Osama's role in funding the Afghan resistance to Russia created ties to the incoming Taliban, but AQ is a foreign merc force while the Taliban are Pashtun. Thats why Musharref is reluctant to crackdown on the Taliban for fear it will become a Pashtun movement. AQ was allowed to exist, I dont know if the Taliban knew what they were planning. There may have been a few people in the know.

Taliban denied US the access to OBL. They said OBL is a guest of the country, and it is against their way to give up their guest like that.

US was had a LOT of patience, trying to negotiate them to give OBL to their hands, so they could maul that SOB. This is a legit request.

According to what I've seen, the Taliban were negotiating with Clinton to get AQ. The Taliban were getting hit by sanctions and wanted our help, we wanted AQ and they were talking to us. According to one guy in the know, a running joke in Afghanistan was how the Taliban was willing to show us where AQ was AND pay for the fuel for our missiles because we weren't doing squat. The negotiations were near the end of Clinton's term and left to the incoming Bush administration to finalize... I've seen a clip of a guy with a ME accent asking Ari Fleischer in Feb of 2001 if the incoming Bush administration would continue negotiations with the Taliban, Ari said he would get back to the guy.

You cant go on public pronouncements, obviously the Taliban leaders weren't about to publicly help us get AQ. They were trying to drop a dime, not conspire with the Great Satan for all Muslims to see.

[RGBVideo]

Here's a mission for you MOBIUS: Define "Al-qaeda".

[MrFun]

Re: Al-qaeda, the World's foremost Masters of Force Multiplication

Originally posted by MOBIUS
A thought occurred to me . . . . .

holy sh!t

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Berzerker


Certainly Osama's role in funding the Afghan resistance to Russia created ties to the incoming Taliban, but AQ is a foreign merc force while the Taliban are Pashtun. Thats why Musharref is reluctant to crackdown on the Taliban for fear it will become a Pashtun movement. AQ was allowed to exist, I dont know if the Taliban knew what they were planning. There may have been a few people in the know.

According to what I've seen, the Taliban were negotiating with Clinton to get AQ. The Taliban were getting hit by sanctions and wanted our help, we wanted AQ and they were talking to us. According to one guy in the know, a running joke in Afghanistan was how the Taliban was willing to show us where AQ was AND pay for the fuel for our missiles because we weren't doing squat. The negotiations were near the end of Clinton's term and left to the incoming Bush administration to finalize... I've seen a clip of a guy with a ME accent asking Ari Fleischer in Feb of 2001 if the incoming Bush administration would continue negotiations with the Taliban, Ari said he would get back to the guy.

You cant go on public pronouncements, obviously the Taliban leaders weren't about to publicly help us get AQ. They were trying to drop a dime, not conspire with the Great Satan for all Muslims to see.

However true that might be, the Taliban were certainly willing to give up Bin Laden to a neutral country for trial in the 9/11 bombings...

The US demanding the Taliban hand Bin Laden over backed them into a corner and played right into Al-Qaeda's hands.

You know, maybe I've got this wrong all along, maybe it's the US who are the World's foremost Masters of Force Multiplication - against themselves!

Because at every turn their plans seem to backfire - they have followed the worst possible policies, exacerbated the situation and vastly increased their enemies with regards to dealing with the Islamic World, bringing things well and truly into the open with 9/11 (they must have been doing something wrong to justify such an attack against them!), and continuing to unravel ever since. What boggles the mind is that the US seems to be actively encouraging action against them, and indeed investing hundreds of billions of dollars into strengthening their enemies against them!!!

When the World's foremost superpower can't even control 0.4% of the World's population through force, perhaps it is time to wake up and actually start listening to people...

[Patroklos]

However true that might be, the Taliban were certainly willing to give up Bin Laden to a neutral country for trial in the 9/11 bombings...

ha....haha.....hahahaha.....HAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Though the OP had a sliver of a good point, things like this serve to remind us of the pit of self serving ignorance it came from.

Please do tell what neutral country (what country could possibly be neutral to internation terrorism?) the Taliban was willing to cruxify their muslim street credit for.

[MrFun]

MOBIUS has never made much sense, and he probably never will. The poor guy.

[MOBIUS]

Mr Fun, although I'm not gay, I obviously gave you a good ass-raping on this forum - which must explain why you have such a raving hardon for me!

[MrFun]

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Patroklos


ha....haha.....hahahaha.....HAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Though the OP had a sliver of a good point, things like this serve to remind us of the pit of self serving ignorance it came from.

Oh I'm sorry, apparently you've conveniently forgotten that little offer by the Taliban...

Please do tell what neutral country (what country could possibly be neutral to internation terrorism?) the Taliban was willing to cruxify their muslim street credit for.

America dismissed the offer out of hand, so no country was agreed. And actually this would have been the get out clause for Al-Qaeda to avoid crucifying their muslim street cred, you impressively dense individual...

[Cort Haus]

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006.

Is that from 10th September 2001 or from 12th September 2001. Why is that the only date they are not explicit on?

[MOBIUS]

Own goal.