Brown Pundits

This is what the Pankajists must have in mind when they speak eloquently about the (spiritual) nature of the (spiritual) descendants of Sayyid Jamal-ad-din al-Afghani. As expected, these Gandhians with guns are full of contempt towards silly things that are dear to the bourgeois, such as showing the world your purple voting finger. Cutting off the fingers help prove that noble savages are exactly as advertised. If there is any (little bit of) fault to be dished out it must be laid at the feet of the evil westerners who were irresponsible enough to breed such genetically modified organisms in the first place…

 ….
Officials
said more than 50 people were killed in separate Taliban strikes on
Saturday, when more than 7 million voters cast their ballot in the
contest between former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and ex-World
Bank economist Ashraf Ghani.


…

The deaths included five election
workers killed when their bus was hit by a roadside bomb in Samangan
province, and five members of one family who died when a Taliban rocket
hit a house near a polling station.

The White House praised voters’ courage and called the elections “a
significant step forward on Afghanistan’s democratic path”, after the
turnout topped 50 percent.. ……..
Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/Taliban-target-voters-in-Afghanistan-kill-50-mutilate-11/articleshow/36614278.cms
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regards

The lead fellow seems quite charming and his boys are a bunch of alpha males with really sexy black gear, still, why do we suspect that most americans will not be very happy when (not if) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi makes good on his promise?

….
Militants
from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria boasted on Twitter that they
had executed 1,700 Iraqi government soldiers, posting gruesome photos to
support their claim.

The
latest attack, if proved, would also raise the spectre of the war in
Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that
their victims were all Shias. 
……
…
The Islamist extremist some are now calling the most dangerous man in
the world had a few parting words to his captors as he was released from
the biggest U.S.  detention camp in Iraq in 2009.   
“He said, ‘I’ll see you guys in New York,’” recalls Army Col. Kenneth King, then the commanding officer of Camp Bucca. King
didn’t take these words from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a threat. 

Al-Baghdadi knew that many of his captors were from New York, reservists
with the 306 Military Police Battalion, a unit based on Long Island
that includes numerous numerous members of the NYPD and the FDNY. The
camp itself was named after FDNY Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca, who was
killed at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

King
figured that al-Baghdadi was just saying that he had known all along
that it was all essentially a joke, that he had only to wait and he
would be freed to go back to what he had been doing.
“Like, ‘This is no big thing, I’ll see you on the block,’” King says.

King had not imagined that in less that five years he would be seeing news reports that al-Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS, the ultra-extremist army that was sweeping through Iraq toward Baghdad.
“I’m
not surprised that it was someone who spent time in Bucca but I’m a
little surprised it was him,” King says. “He was a bad dude, but he
wasn’t the worst of the worst.”

King allows that along with being surprised he was frustrated on a very personal level.
“We spent how many missions and how many soldiers were put at risk when we caught this guy and we just released him,” King says.
During
the four years that al-Baghdadi was in custody, there had been no way
for the Americans to predict what a danger he would become. Al-Baghdadi
hadn’t even been assigned to Compound 14, which was reserved for the
most virulently extremist Sunnis.

“The worst of the worst were kept in one area,” King says. “I don’t recall him being in that group.”

The guards would seek
to disrupt the courts along with and any nascent organizations and
hierarchies by moving inmates to different compounds, though keeping the
Sunnis and the Shiites separate.
“The Bloods with the Bloods and the Crips with the Crips, that kind of thing,” King says.
The
guards would then move the prisoners again and again. That would also
keep the prisoners from spotting any possible weaknesses in security.
“The
detainees have nothing but time,” King says. “They’re looking at
patterns, they’re looking at routines, they’re looking for
opportunities.”

As al-Baghdadi and the 26,000 other prisoners were
learning the need for patience in studying the enemy, the guards would
be constantly searching for homemade weapons fashioned from what the
prisoners dug up, the camp having been built on a former junkyard.
“People think of a detainee operation, they think it’s a sleepy Hogan’s Heroes-type camp,” the other officer says. “And it’s nothing of the sort.”

Meanwhile, al-Baghdadi’s four years at Camp Bucca would have been a perpetual lesson in the importance of avoiding notice.
“A
lot of times, the really bad guys tended to operate behind the scenes
because they wanted to be invisible,”  the other officer says.

King had every
reason to think he had seen the last of al-Baghdadi in the late summer
of 2009, when this seemingly unremarkable prisoner departed with a group
of others on one of the C-17 cargo-plane flights that ferried them to a
smaller facility near Baghdad. Camp Bucca closed not along afterward.

Al-Baghdadi
clearly remembered some of the lessons of his time there. He has made
no videos, unlike Osama bin Laden and many of the other extremist
leaders. The news reports might not have had a photo of him at all were
it not for the one taken by the Americans when he was first captured in
2005.

That is the face that King was so surprised to see this week as the man who had become the absolute worst of the worst,
so bad that even al Qaeda had disowned him. The whole world was stunned
as al-Baghdadi now told his enemies “I’ll see you in Baghdad.”

…….

Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/isis-leader-see-you-in-new-york.html

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regards

It would be useful to ask the “atheist boy-friend in your family” question in other countries, and especially so in South Asia. In India, it may be meaningful to substitute “atheist” with “communist” (it would be equally interesting to ask Americans the “communist boy-friend” question). Finally, it would be nice to know the man/woman split on these questions.

It may be the case (as we have seen before) that Americans equate atheism with lack of morality. An interesting what-if for the Pew people- what if the question set was re-phrased/updated to clarify that an atheist boy-friend can have high morals (or a believer boy-friend may lack morals).
……………
One of the questions Pew
asks to gauge how seriously people are taking their identity politics
these days is how upset would you be if an immediate family member—say, a
child or a sibling—married someone outside of your identity parameters. 

The good news: Americans are okay with their family members marrying
someone who isn’t in their “tribe.”

There’s one group, however, that continues to cause fear and loathing across the land: atheists.
………..
Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/06/shun-the-atheist-boyfriend/372709/
…….

regards

…………………………
A century ago, the Middle-East was artificially carved up into states by the British and the French. Now it appears (as a result of nationalist movements everywhere, ho ho ho) the real states will finally take shape via numerous partitions. 

We are clear as to our own preferences: partitions are bad for the minority and also for the majority– once the genie of bad blood is poured out the bottle it will bleed the new nations dry for a long long time.

Normally it would be a straight-forward division: Sunnis and the rest, but there are a few local complications such as Bahrain which is Shia majority but ruled by Sunnis (with 5th Fleet support from Americans). Also Sunni Kurdistan seems more progressive than most and may even support the co-existence of minorities (such as Christians and Shias).

Everywhere else we can look forward to (not really) brutal ethnic cleansing and the coming-to-life of larger-than-life Sharia states. The left-liberal brigade can indicate disagreement from a distance but this much is probably true- populations everywhere are fed-up with the status quo and do not really mind the social upheavals. After all the benefits are to be measured in the long run and in the next life.
……….
WHOEVER chose the Twitter handle “Jihadi Spring” was prescient. Three
years of turmoil in the region, on the back of unpopular American-led
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have benefited extreme Islamists, none
more so than the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a group
that outdoes even al-Qaeda in brutality and fanaticism. In the past
year or so, as borders and government control have frayed across the
region, ISIS has made gains across a swathe of territory encompassing
much of eastern and northern Syria and western and northern Iraq. 

On
June 10th it achieved its biggest prize to date by capturing Mosul,
Iraq’s second city, and most of the surrounding province of Nineveh. The
next day it advanced south towards Baghdad, the capital, taking several
towns on the way. Ministers in Iraq’s government admitted that a
catastrophe was in the making. A decade after the American invasion, the
country looks as fragile, bloody and pitiful as ever.


…
After four days of fighting, Iraq’s security forces abandoned their
posts in Mosul as ISIS militiamen took over army bases, banks and
government offices. The jihadists seized huge stores of
American-supplied arms, ammunition and vehicles, apparently including
six Black Hawk helicopters and 500 billion dinars ($430m) in freshly
printed cash. Some 500,000 people fled in terror to areas beyond ISIS’s
sway.


The scale of the attack on Mosul was particularly audacious. But it
did not come out of the blue. In the past six months ISIS has captured
and held Falluja, less than an hour’s drive west of Baghdad; taken over
parts of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province; and has battled for Samarra,
a city north of Baghdad that boasts one of Shia Islam’s holiest
shrines. Virtually every day its fighters set off bombs in Baghdad,
keeping people in a state of terror.


….
As The Economist went to press, it was
reported to have taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town, only 140km
(87 miles) north-west of Baghdad. The speed of ISIS’s advance suggested
that it was co-operating with a network of Sunni remnants from Saddam’s
underground resistance who opposed the Americans after 2003 and have
continued to fight against the Shia-dominated regime of Nuri al-Maliki
since the Americans left at the end of 2011.

It was barely a year ago, in April 2013, that ISIS announced the
expansion of its operations from Iraq into Syria. By changing its name
from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) by adding the words “and al-Sham”,
translated as “the Levant” or “Greater Syria”, it signified its quest to
conquer a wider area than present-day Syria.


…
Run by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi jihadist, ISIS may have up to
6,000 fighters in Iraq and 3,000-5,000 in Syria, including perhaps 3,000
foreigners; nearly a thousand are reported to hail from Chechnya and
perhaps 500 or so more from France, Britain and elsewhere in Europe.


…
It is ruthless, slaughtering Shia and other minorities, including
Christians and Alawites, the offshoot to which Syria’s president, Bashar
Assad, belongs. It sacks churches and Shia shrines, dispatches
suicide-bombers to market-places, and has no regard for civilian
casualties.


….
Its recent advances would have been impossible without ISIS’s control
since January of the eastern Syrian town of Raqqa, a testing ground and
stronghold from which it has made forays farther afield. It has seized
and exploited Syrian oilfields in the area and raised cash by ransoming
foreign hostages.


Rather than fight simply as a branch of al-Qaeda (“the base” in
Arabic), as it did before 2011, it has aimed to control territory,
dispensing its own brand of justice and imposing its own moral code: no
smoking, football, music, or unveiled women, for example. And it imposes
taxes in the parts of Syria and Iraq it has conquered.


…
In other words, it is creating a proto-state on the ungoverned
territory straddling the borderlands between Syria and Iraq. “This is a
new, more dangerous strategy since 2011,” says Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a
Jordanian expert on jihadist movements. If ISIS manages to hold onto its
turf in Iraq, it will control an area the size of Jordan with roughly
the same population (6m or so), stretching 500km from the countryside
east of Aleppo in Syria into western Iraq.


…
It holds three border posts between Syria and Turkey and several more
on Syria’s border with Iraq. Raqqa’s residents say Moroccan and
Tunisian jihadists have brought their wives and children to settle in
the city. Foreign preachers have been appointed to mosques. ISIS has
also set up an intelligence service.


…
Whether in Iraq or Syria, ISIS has sought to terrify people into
submission. On June 8th, as a typical warning to others, it crucified
three young men in a town near Aleppo for co-operating with rival
rebels. It has kidnapped scores of Kurdish students, journalists, aid
workers and, more recently, some Turkish diplomats.


…
Even al-Qaeda has deemed ISIS too violent. Ayman Zawahiri, leader of
the core group, has long disagreed with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s
leader, warning him that ISIS’s habit of beheading its opponents and
posting such atrocities on video was giving al-Qaeda a bad name.


…
The forces best equipped to face down ISIS may be Kurdish ones: the
Peshmerga guerrillas, who have protected Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish
region for the past two decades, and the People’s Protection Units,
better known as the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party,
which dominates north-eastern Syria. The Kurds’ regional government in
Iraq has mobilised its forces on the east side of the Tigris river,
which runs through Mosul, and may well block ISIS from heading east and
north into Kurdish territory; on June 12th the Kurds captured all of
Kirkuk city from fleeing Iraqi forces.

……

Link: http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21604230-extreme-islamist-group-seeks-create-caliphate-and-spread-jihad-across

……

regards