War and Morality. Al Qaeda v USA

Can you show us that evidence. It is a bit of a sensitive issue for us north of the border because we often hear stories about how the 9/11 terrorists came through Canada when discussions of border security come up. It just ain't true.

Then in your next post you say..... I just want to be clear that there is no Canadian connection with the 9/11 attacks.By the way, the incident that you mentioned where an alert border guard picked up some one trying to cross from here was on a ferry that I watch sail out every day from the front of my home.

Al Qaeda is essentially an Islamic sect with an ideology that is a threat to not just the west but even more so to more traditional Muslims.I think the trouble with our actions in both Iraq and Afghanistan is that we too often view the enemy in strictly human terms, so that killing bin Laden seems like a major victory. IMHO the enemy isn't the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but the ideology they espouse. The war then, in my view is about competing ideologies. We in the west want our ideology to be embraced by the majority of citizens of the countries we have become involved with.The method that they use to spread their ideology is one of intimidation and fear. I maintain that if we use intimidation and fear, (such as shock and awe), the we are going to be viewed in no better light than Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Hussein's regime for that matter.Sure we have the best weapons and just possibly we might win a physical war, (the jury is definitely out on that), but that will never defeat the real enemy. The only way to win this war is to challenge their ideology with our own in the real battle which is for the hearts and minds of the citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya and even some in the west.With this in mind, I’m not convinced that the military actions that we’ve embarked are actually going to make us safer in the long run. As long as we can be easily portrayed as a military force that threatens their homeland there will be no shortage of new recruits.I remember in the early seventies in Prague talking to a Czechoslovakian taxi driver who told me about the experience of the Russian soldiers in his city. He told me that they now stayed outside the city because they kept having accidents from things like falling bricks. The Czechs knew that there was a better ideology available than what the Russians had to offer. I think that there are a couple of things to take from that. One would be that occupiers are resented and will never be safe, so obviously we want Al Qaeda and the Taliban to be seen as the occupiers and not us, and secondly when the local population is able to understand and desire another ideology they will bit by bit take matters into their own hands.Ideologies aren’t changed overnight. If we are going to win this war we are going to have to realize that it will take a lot longer than we in the west are presently willing to wait. Each President or Prime Minister wants the results to be manifested in his or her term of office. This will have to be a generational thing and there will be no final military solution, or at least not one that will be to our liking.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

This column was in this morning's paper. It presents a perspective on how the military aspect can be combined with the battle for the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan.

quote:

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Jonathan Kay, National Post
In March, 2004, Israeli soldiers manning the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus witnessed a shocking sight: An adolescent Palestinian boy named Abdu lifted up his shirt to reveal a large suicide vest. Everyone braced for an explosion. But instead, the boy froze, and declared to the Israelis that he didn’t want to blow himself up.
Abdu (who later turned out to have developmental problems, according to his parents) kneeled on the ground and appeared terrified. He removed the vest and then was taken into Israeli custody. The entire pathetic spectacle was captured on video. His picture appeared on the front page of the next day’s Israeli newspapers, with headlines such as I wanted virgins in paradise.
In the long campaign to defeat and discredit Palestinian terrorism, this was a decisive moment. The fact that the terrorists would use a mentally disabled boy as their bomber showed that they’d become desperate for recruits. Worse, from their own propaganda perspective, it showed that they would resort to any tactic -even killing a Palestinian child -to further their campaign.
I thought of Abdu this week when I saw news that an eightyear-old Afghan girl had been tricked into blowing herself up near a police station in Uruzgan Province. (She died, but no one else was hurt.) The case is not isolated: In Pakistan, terrorists recently strapped a suicide vest to a nine-year-old girl they’d abducted and drugged (the girl was saved and returned to her family). Neither plot is likely to have originated with the Taliban itself, which tries to avoid using children. But both incidents will help discredit the instrument of terrorism upon which the Taliban rely.
The killing of Osama bin Laden in May captivated the world’s attention, and some Western leaders have cited the al-Qaeda leader’s death as evidence that we can draw down troops in the region. But the death of that eight-year-old girl likely will do as much to bring about the jihadis’ defeat than any American commando raid or battlefield victory.
In a fascinating new book, How Terrorism Ends, U.S. National War College professor Audrey Kurth Cronin catalogues the many different ways in which terrorist groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda collapse. Simply killing or capturing the leader, she emphasizes, can only work in cases where the group operates as a rigid top-down hierarchy (such as Peru’s Shining Path or Turkey’s PKK). Nor do broad military campaigns usually work -because exterminating an entire terrorist group typically requires more brutal methods than democratic governments feel comfortable using. (There are exceptions, however, as Sri Lanka’s brutal victory over the Tamil Tigers attests.)
In the case of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a more promising strategy comes under the heading that Cronin describes as Targeting errors and backlash -an abstract label that described the horror and revulsion that locals feel when terrorists use brainwashed recruits, and even children, to engage in mass slaughter. Terrorist groups generally are effect-ive at building popular support when they limit their targets to occupying soldiers or their allied local police assets. But when those military and police targets become hardened, as has happened in Afghanistan thanks to the presence of NATO soldiers, the terrorists go after softer targets. And that’s when the backlash starts.
Cronin lists plenty of precedents in the targeting errors and backlash category: The Real Irish Republican Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/ General Command, Quebec’s own FLQ, the Sikh separatists who bombed Air India Flight 182, Shamil Basayev’s Chechen terrorist group (which was responsible for the Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia, one of the most unconscionable single terrorism-related incidents in modern history), Spain’s ETA, the Red Brigades, and Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (responsible for the Luxor Massacre of 1997, among other bloody attacks). In all of these cases, the terrorists used methods that went far beyond the tolerance of the local population on whose behalf they professed to be fighting. The resulting popular backlash either destroyed the group outright, or served to legitimize the more aggressive methods used successfully by the state.
In the case of modern Muslim terrorist groups, the red line is very clear: Local populations turn against terrorism when it results in the death of innocent Muslims. That’s why victims such as the eight-year-old girl killed in Uruzgan resonate so strongly, and negatively, against the terrorists’ cause.
In the second-tolast chapter of How Terrorism Ends, Cronin supplies an interest-ing parallel between the war against terrorism in central Asia and the more successful campaign in Iraq.
In 2005, at a time when it appeared that Iraq might be descending into an all-out civil war, the tribes of western Iraq suddenly began to turn against al-Qaeda and its local proxies. Their brutal methods, such as assassinations of opponents, enforced suicide bombings, forced marriages and imposition of sharia law, repelled Iraqi Sunnis, Cronin writes. The result was bloody internecine fighting among jihadis, some of whom followed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s strategy of slaughtering fellow Muslims (and especially Shiites) in a bid to sow chaos, while others adhered to a well-publicized directive from al-Qaeda’s thendeputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, imploring an end to Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed.
The campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan is more complicated than the situation in Iraq for a few reasons. First, the Taliban get support from a foreign power (Pakistan) in a way that Iraqi terrorists never did. Second, the Taliban campaign is wrapped up in a larger, generations-old struggle to unify Pashtuns on both sides of the border into a greater Pahstunistan. And third, the forbid-ding terrain of the Hindu Kush region makes it difficult for NATO to launch the sort of conventional military campaigns that resulted in, say, the clearing of Iraq’s Anbar province. But in broad strokes, the end of the Taliban and al-Qaeda likely will look like the end of Iraq’s terrorist groups: a building backlash caused by indiscriminate attacks against Muslim civilians.
What does this mean for NATO nations, including Canada, which are reducing their troop strength in Afghanistan?
First, it means that we should stop treating every terrorist attack against Afghan civilians -such as the truck bomb that exploded near a maternity hospital in Logar province on Sunday -as a military failure in the war on terrorism. These attacks are humanitarian tragedies, but history shows that their cumulative military effect is to weaken the enemy, not strengthen him. The Taliban themselves know this, which is why they desperately try to disavow responsibility when an attack like this occurs.
Second, it means that NATO military commanders have been correct to adopt a military strategy that minimizes civilian casualties. It does us little good for the Taliban to be regarded as murderers if the same label can be credibly attached to us.
Third, it means that we have to carefully consider whether we should withdraw from Afghanistan. Cronin argues convincingly in her book that democratic countries cannot defeat terrorist groups through strictly military strategies. But one thing that a strong military presence can do is force terrorists to avoid the most politically appealing targets -legislature buildings, military outposts, presidential convoys, major commercial hubs, airports -which have been hardened by our troops. Once those troops are gone, these are the targets that the Taliban will go back to targeting.
The result of this will be that a terrorist group that had been destroying its reputation and local support base with indiscriminate attacks will once again be able to get back into the more reputable business of real insurgency. Our best strategy, I would argue, would be to stick around and watch the Taliban self-destruct.

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Here is the link to the article. How the Taliban EndsEdited by GDR, : No reason given.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.