Is he or isn't he?

Yesterday afternoon Twitter was buzzing with news that the tubby American traitor Adam Gadahn, aka Abu Al-Babee Fhat (OK, not really, but I like the name) among other aliases, had been captured in Karachi, Pakistan. Then came the buzz-killing news that maybe it wasn't Gadahn who'd been captured, after all.

This morning, ABC is carrying an article that seems to claim conclusively that the captured terrorist isn't Gadahn. Well, sort of.

A Taliban leader who goes by the name Abu Yahya, just like American-turned-al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, was picked up in Karachi in recent days, but that person is not Gadahn, a senior Pakistani government official told ABC News.

But there are conflicting reports about whether it is notorious Adam Gadahn.

Reports of the capture of an American-born al-Qaeda member by Pakistani authorities gave rise to speculation over whether it was Gadahn, the 31-year-old California-born Muslim convert who has been wanted since 2004.

The official told ABC News the leader who was arrested was possibly Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam, said to be another American member of al Qaeda, but the Pakistanis have yet to make that identification positive, the official said.

Dawn, an English-language newspaper, reports that Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam is an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen from Pennsylvania who helps command foreign militants fighting in Afghanistan and coordinates activities from Dubai.

I dunno...seems fishy. Granted, these guys claim more names than they do wives so there's sure to be some overlap. But to have two upper-echelon guys so similarly named? Possible, I guess.

Still, this is exactly the way I'd play it if I were the US intel guy on the spot and the captured figure was Adam Gadahn, given that Gadahn is a US citizen with a federal treason indictment.

He was captured by the Pakistanis and is in their custody subject to their interrogation, and Pakistani intelligence can squeeze the guy in ways we can't. So the US and Pakistan can play the yes-he-is, no-he-isn't game for a while and let Pakistani authorities get whatever intel they can, and then turn him over to US officials. At that point, as a wanted US citizen, he'd rightfully be turned over to the federal criminal justice system and have the right to shut up and get a lawyer.

Well, here's to hoping, anyway.

Senate Tora Bora report: A politically-timed hit piece

The Democrat-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to release a report [PDF format] tomorrow on the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001. The report aims to place blame for the failure directly on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and theater commander at the time, Gen. Tommy Franks. Indirectly, the clear intent is to implicate former President George Bush in the failure.

The report details events and command decisions made during the December 2001 battle at Tora Bora during which "...it was clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp" and criticizes the decision not to insert a massive force in the area to capture or kill bin Laden. I agree, to a large extent, with those criticisms, more for the psychological message killing or capturing Bin Laden would have sent than for the long-term strategic importance of doing so. I disagree completely with the reports conclusions of the consequences of that failure.

The final section of the report beginning on page 19, titled The Price of Failure claims that failing to close the book on bin Laden is the reason we're still in Afghanistan today.

Osama bin Laden’s demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.

Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the Al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda’s continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection that threatens the stability of the government and the region. Its training camps also have spawned new attacks outside the region—militants trained in Pakistan were tied to the July 2005 transit system bombings in London and several aborted plots elsewhere in Europe.

This is complete and utter hogwash. Islamist extremists of the Al Qaeda ilk don't need bin Laden to be alive in order to propagate their violent ideology within and outside their region. In fact, as much as I'd have liked to see bin Laden's head on a pike (and still would), I'll go so far as to say that bin Laden's current disposition is preferable to having him dead or in US custody.

There's no shortage of charismatic ideologues in the ranks of the Islamist jihad movement. A dead or captured bin Laden would clear the way for one of them to replace bin Laden, which hasn't happened yet. In death, bin Laden would be a martyr revered above his own idol, Sayyed Qutb, whose writings to this day inspires Islamist extremists all over the world long after his death in 1966.

This report, timed to coincide with President Obama's unveiling of his long-delayed Afghanistan strategy, is nothing more than a politically-timed hit piece on the previous administration designed to give Obama cover with the political left, which opposes continued involvement in Afghanistan. Look for Obama to cite this report extensively when he gives his inevitable speech on his Afghanistan strategy.

Afghanistan: No policy, no strategy, no decision

Barack Obama has left Gen. McChrystal and his troops in Afghanistan hanging for better than 70 days without a decision on the strategic direction in Afghanistan. Strategic decisions, though, can only be made once a coherent policy has been articulated, and while Candidate Obama was pretty unambiguous in his campaign rhetoric that victory in Afghanistan was essential, President Obama won't even use the word "victory" in the context of Afghanistan. He's failed thus far to even articulate a policy on Afghanistan, and without a policy, formulation of a strategy isn't possible.

The reason this is moving so slow is because he can't foist the policy and strategy decisions on Congress; they're his decisions to make, and his alone. So while Obama scurries about trying to rush Congress into passing health care reform, cap & trade and card check legislation, he agonizes over the political ramifications of his Afghanistan policy.

Happy Veteran's Day.

Update: In the immortal words of John McEnroe, "You can not be serious!"...Obama votes "present".

Update 2: Uncle Jimbo rang the bell on this back in February.

The clock is ticking

Karl Munchausen left a comment about this great blog widget he came up with. Unfortunately, it's too wide for the side bar of my blog template, so I'll just put it in a post until he can come up a smaller one (200 pixels wide would be just about right, Karl!).

Update: Karl e-mailed me to let me know he's got a second, narrower version of the widget up now. Run along now and get one for your blog, too!

Shocker: Dems never DID support Afghan war

This was all over the righty blogs yesterday, but worth noting. The liberal blog Hullabaloo notes:

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat [sic] the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

Well, duh. As if we should ever expect serious foreign policy from the Dems. As Jim Geraghty over at NRO noted:

The average Democrat doesn't like fighting wars. They don't like using military force. They don't just dislike collateral damage and civilian casualties and flag-draped coffins; they cringe at the concept of combat with citizens of another country, even when the president has declared:

Al Qaeda and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

That's not the last president; that's the current president, an entire six months ago.

I wanted to make some acerbic comment on the left's duplicity, but I can do no better than Ace:

You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?

You... um... voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?

Uh-oh: McChrystal may resign over Obama's "dithering"?

A pissing contest between General Stanley McChrystal and President Obama is about to become very public. McChrystal has had a report ready to go to the White House since late August in which he'll recommend a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, but the Obama administration doesn't want to see the report. Not yet, anyway.

According to Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal, McChrystal is prepared to resign his post if the administration won't listen to him:

Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan...

Roggio quotes a McClatchy article, which includes this bit from SecDef Robert Gates:

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal's request, which was completed in late August. "We're working through the process by which we want that submitted," he said.

Er...what? Working through the process of submitting a report? This ain't that hard, guys. The report's done, all you have to do is ask for it. Unless, that is, you're fully aware of what's in the report and you know the clock will start ticking on making a decision on the recommendations and they're decisions you don't really want to make because you campaigned on the premise that Afghanistan was the "good" war that must be won at all costs and now public sentiment is shifting away from that.

Yeah, that's intentionally a run-on sentence. Get over it.

War of choice

In President Obama's speech to "the Muslim world" in Cairo, he perpetuated the notion that Afghanistan was a just war while Iraq was a bad one because it was a "war of choice". Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this has been the term used by those who opposed the invasion to suggest that it wasn't justified or necessary.

But setting aside for now the question of which of the two wars were justified, aren't all wars wars of choice? President Bush could have chosen not to invade Afghanistan and drive out the Taliban just as he chose to invade Iraq and rid the world of one more despotic dictator. The fact that one choice may have been more evidently wise than the other is not relevant -- they were both wars of choice.

In the months preceding the invasion of Iraq, I wasn't convinced that the time was right for running Saddam out of town. The Bush administration, as well as that of Britain's then-PM Tony Blair, justified the action almost exclusively on the basis of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. I never doubted (and still don't) the existence of Iraq's WMD program at the time, but I also didn't doubt that, given the time allowed, Saddam had ample opportunity to erase the evidence. I gradually concluded by early 2003, though, that removing Saddam was necessary for a host of other reasons, not the least of which were his demonstrable ties to international Islamist terrorists*, even if those terrorists weren't directly connected to Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Ultimately, Iraq would have to be dealt with in the broader context of fighting and Bush appears to have asked the question "if not now, when?", to which one might add "at what cost of delay?". Bush knew he had a small window of opportunity to move against Saddam, the alternative being to leave the problem for his successor. Had Bush chosen to do so, what would his obsessive critics had to say if in the intervening years there'd been a terrorist attack on the US traced back to Saddam, or a situation forcing Barack Obama to deal with him?

* See, for example, Abu Nidal, killed in Baghdad in August 2002 by Iraqi agents, and Abu Abbas, captured by US troops in Baghdad in April 2003, right after the invasion.

Map The Fallen

Sorry for the lack of posting lately, but work's been hell. So even this past three-day weekend I mostly ignored the computer, except to goof off on Twitter.

It would have been nice to have stumbled across this before Memorial Day as it would have made a good post for yesterday, but better late than never.

Google employee Sean Askay embarked on a Google Earth project to map the fallen servicemen and women from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be honest, when I first saw this my initial thought was that it might be an anti-war propaganda thing. But that definitely does NOT appear to be the case. If Mr. Askay has an agenda besides his stated one of simply honoring the fallen, it's not at all apparent.

The project is a Google Earth map overlay which represents the home of record (not always the same as hometown) of a service member and the location of their death. Clicking on one of the icons brings up information about the fallen soldier and in most cases a link to their obituary.

I haven't lost any friends or acquaintances in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I did find out that an old classmate of mine lost a son. Whether you've lost a friend or relative there or not, it's worth checking out.

A few pointers since some in the comments at the site seemed to have difficulty figuring it out...make sure you have Google Earth 5.0 or later installed, then just click on the download link at the top right of the page. It worked fine for me, but some folks in the comments say they had issues, probably related to having an older version of Google Earth.

Smart power: You're doing it wrong

When Barack Obama went hat in hand to his European pals this week, I'll bet he was sure he'd get nothing but eager agreement to his requests for European countries to contribute more to the effort in Afghanistan. He found out pretty quickly that while Europeans might love him and hate Bush, they still don't like us very much. And, collectively speaking, I don't think a plurality of Europeans ever have.

The above cartoon, which I lifted from Theo's place, refers to the economic issues but can just as easily be applied to any other global problem Obama might ask for help with.

Which reminded me of some lyrics from that old George Thorogood song, One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer:

So I go down the streets,
down to my good friend's house
I said "Look man I'm outdoors you know,
can I stay with you maybe a couple days?"
He said "Uh, Let me go and ask my wife"
He come out of the house,
I could see in his face
I know that was no
He said "I don't know man, ah she kinda funny, you know"
I said "I know, everybody funny, now you funny too"

Stupid affectations

Every time I hear Barack Obama or some other poseur say "PAHK-ee-stahn" I cringe a little bit. If you speak American English, it's "PACK-ih-stan". But in an effort to sound like someone with a broader worldview, these idjits can't resist saying "PAHK-ee-stahn" in a herniated effort to sound more culturally aware by pronouncing the country's name the way a Pakistani would say it.

You never hear these phonies pronounce "Afghanistan" the way an English-speaking Afghani or Pakistani would say it. They'll say "Afghanistan" the way you or I would say it because to pronounce it as an Afghan or Pakistani would say it would sound too contrived: "Ahf-GWAN-ee-stahn".

Gawd, I can't stand poseurs.

Update: I rest my case...

Awww...

A great story out of North Carolina involving soldiers and dogs.

A U.S. soldier returning to Fayetteville, N.C., from Afghanistan got a surprise welcome from two dogs he saved from starvation while stationed in the war-torn country.

WRAL.com, a FOX affiliate in Raleigh, reports that a charity animal-rescue program run by Internet search engine Dogpile.com reunited Staff Sgt. Daniel Barker with two dogs reportedly rescued by Barker and his fellow soldier, Adam Krause, during their 2008 deployment to Afghanistan.

Way to go, Sarge, and kudos to dogpile.com for their efforts.

No good deed shall go unpunished

Six Afghans are in prison and two of them face death for the high crime of translating the Quran into a language spoken in parts of Afghanistan.

The pocket-size translation of the Quran has already landed six men in prison in Afghanistan and left two of them begging judges to spare their lives. They're accused of modifying the Quran and their fate could be decided Sunday in court.

[ ... ]

The book appeared among gifts left for the cleric at a major Kabul mosque after Friday prayers in September 2007. It was a translation of the Quran into one of Afghanistan's languages, with a note giving permission to reprint the text as long as it was distributed for free.

Some of the men of the mosque said the book would be useful to Afghans who didn't know Arabic, so they took up a collection for printing. The mosque's cleric asked Ahmad Ghaws Zalmai, a longtime friend, to get the books printed.

But as some of the 1,000 copies made their way to conservative Muslim clerics in Kabul, whispers began, then an outcry.

Many clerics rejected the book because it did not include the original Arabic verses alongside the translation. It's a particularly sensitive detail for Muslims, who regard the Arabic Quran as words given directly by God. A translation is not considered a Quran itself, and a mistranslation could warp God's word.

[ ... ]

Police arrested Zalmai as he was fleeing to Pakistan, along with three other men the government says were trying to help him escape. [You KNOW you're in deep shit when you're fleeing TO Pakistan. --ed.] The publisher and the mosque's cleric, who signed a letter endorsing the book, were also jailed.

Consider this Exhibit "A" of why we'll never succeed in Afghanistan the way we clearly did in Iraq. After we kicked the Taliban's shit to the curb, we allowed the new Afghan government to establish a court system of which the Taliban would be proud.

Is Kyrgyzstan base closure a big deal?

I pose this question because I really want to know...why is Kyrgyzstan's decision to close our airbase there such a big deal? The Reuters article describes the airlift hub as "vital for supplying U.S.-led troops fighting in Afghanistan". Despite 27 years in the Air Force, I'm not an expert on such matters, so maybe that's why I can't figure out what's so "vital" about the airbase.

Take a look at the map (click it if you need a larger version). Kyrgyzstan is land-locked and isn't significantly closer to Afghanistan than any US or allied airbase in Europe or the Middle East from where supplies and troops headed for Afghanistan might originate. OK, so it makes sense to have a nearby staging area outside the theater of operations IF the theater of operations is so hot you don't dare risk staging troops and equipment within it, say at Bagram Air Base. While Afghanistan is far from peachy, I'd say the Kyrgyzstan airbase is more convenient than vital. I just don't see why troops and equipment can't be flown directly into Afghanistan rather than first stopping in Kyrgyzstan.

I suspect what this is really about is the symbolism of a regional ally, an alliance which Russia has chafed at from the start. Russia paid Kyrgyzstan a paltry $2 billion and in return the Kyrgyz government is giving us the boot. The symbolism was important to the US as a display of broad consensus in the war on terror, but a constant rock in Russia's shoe.

Like I said...I'm not an expert on this stuff, so if anyone reading this has other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Guantanamo domino effect?

With an order now in place to close Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama may come under pressure to follow suit with in-country detention facilities in Afghanistan.

As President Barack Obama declared with a fanfare his intention to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp last week, he made no mention of another growing US-run prison - with more than twice as many inmates and an even murkier legal status.

More than 600 detainees are held at the US Bagram Theatre Internment Facility - known by campaigners as "the other Guantanamo". Not only are there no plans to close it, but it is in the process of being expanded to hold 1,100 illegal enemy combatants; prisoners who cannot see lawyers, have no trials and never see any evidence there may be against them.

[ ... ]

"If they close Guantanamo and they expand the one in Bagram, it's the same - there will be no difference," said Lal Gul, chairman of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation.

"If Barack Obama wants to close Guantanamo he should also set out to close not just Bagram, but detention centres in Khost, Kandahar and Jalalabad."

The article describes some detainees who were allegedly "snitched" on by members of rival clans or tribes with an axe to grind, and those cases are surely worthy of review to make sure we're actually holding someone for cause. But just as surely, those detainees are very few compared with the number of prisoners caught firing an AK or RPG at coalition forces in combat.

But, yeah, what the hell. Let's just engage in a perpetual game of catch and release in Afghanistan. After all, our eight years of pure, delicious crazy have just begun.

Dude looks like a lady

A little Aerosmith in honor of this guy:

Six women and 12 children left the building, but while soldiers were questioning the women they discovered one was actually a man dressed in a burqa, the traditional all-encompassing dress that most Afghan women wear. The man, later identified as the targeted commander Haji Yakub, tried to attack the soldiers and was killed, the military said.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Black Knight

*yawn* The al-Qaeda number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released another tedious diatribe-on-tape proclaiming that a Muslim victory is near, American gains in Iraq are temporary, al-Qaeda caused the global financial meltdown, the West will accept Islam, and zzzzzz...oh, sorry...where was I?

Every time this goat-raping tool opens his mouth, I'm reminded of the Black Knight from Monty Python And The Holy Grail:




"It's just a flesh wound!"