An Inconvenient Question

Helen Thomas, the 90 year old dean of the Washington press corps, has been a thorn in the side of US administrations for the 50 years since the administration of John F. Kennedy. Her penetrating questions and aggressive follow-up have been something that officials have wished that they could avoid. Avoiding her is just not possible. As the “Dean”, she sits in the front row and by protocol officials must call on her.

Her latest confrontation was with Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan at a press briefing about the Christmas attack on a Detroit bound airliner. (A clip is here.) Ms Thomas wanted to know, “What is the administration’s conclusion about the motivation of those who want to attack us?” Mr. Brennan tried twice to answer a different question and then ignored the question altogether.

One doesn’t have to speculate about the answer. Those have been involved in the attacks have been very public about their motivation. Everyone from Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood attacker, to Human al Balawi, the attacker of the CIA in Afghanistan, to the young Virginian men apprehended in Pakistan on their way to fight NATO in Afghanistan, to the young Minnesota men fighting the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia have said the same thing.

They have said that they were motivated by western occupation of Muslim countries in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, by the torture and degradation of Muslims in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and by western attacks on Muslims in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza. They heard George Bush say that this a “Crusade” and Bernard Lewis say that this is a “clash of civilizations” and they believe them.

When John Brennan was in the private sector, he likened terrorism to pollution with the terrorists being “particles in the air”. When you want to stop pollution you don’t deal with the “particles in the air”, you deal with the smoke stack. If the administration were to answer Helen Thomas’ question honestly, the answer would raise at lot of inconvenient issues concerning US policies in the Middle East and around the world that would be politically difficult to deal with. Better for them to chase the particles, but not better for American security.

Jihad 2.0

Over the last few weeks, President Obama has been both Commander in Chief and Consoler in Chief. As Commander in Chief, he has grappled with the thorny questions of what does victory in Afghanistan look like, what is a proper strategy and what are appropriate troop levels. As Consoler in Chief he has tried to help the nation deal with the murder of 13 people by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas. The media has covered these two events in depth, but has not addressed the linkage between them.

Obama is taking his time considering the proper goals and strategy. In February he said that his goal was to “make sure that it (Afghanistan) is not a safe haven for al Qaida”. If this is the definition of victory, then we “won” in 2002 when the Taliban was overthrown and al Qaida was driven into Pakistan. Since then drone attacks in Pakistan have devastated their leadership and destroyed their ability to organize and implement major attacks such as 9/11. Even if the Taliban returned to power, it is unlikely that they would make themselves a target again by inviting al Qaida back.

In response al Qaida has changed from a strategy of training fighters for a conventional battle to a media and internet based strategy targeted at angry and disaffected Muslims in western countries. Sophisticated websites (Examples are here and here.) call on Muslims around the world to conduct a “holy war” against the “Western Zionist crusaders”. The message resonates with some Muslims who watch innocent Muslims killed and wounded by “Western Zionist crusaders” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. The strategy has proven successful in motivating attacks from the sophisticated bombings in London and Madrid to the free lance shootings at Fort Hood.

As long as the US continues to be seen as part of the “Western Zionist crusade”, we will continue to face this type of attack. For democracies these are extremely difficult to prevent. Sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan is, in my opinion, fighting the “last war”. It will only give credibility to the al Qaida message that the US is waging a war on Islam.