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Tonight I watched a documentary interviewing six former Shin Bet Directors. Shin Bet is Israel's Security Agency. To a man they thought the fight against Palestinian terrorism had made Israel an uglier nation and one even predicted another assassination of an Israeli prime minister. They all seemed to have a dour outlook regarding Israel's future in terms of disengaging.
Since they live and breath the problem and I see it from a distance I cannot challenge their assessment but I would offer these few thoughts.
The mall bombing in Kenya will spread and eventually engulf the world. I wrote several years ago it is only a matter of time before we experience more attacks on our homeland and one could be in a mall setting, another in a hospital and/or school or other such vulnerable venues, ie. The Boston Marathon. The goal of terrorists is not to defeat our nation because they cannot militarily. What they can do is visit pain and suffering upon us, increase the financial burden we pay to protect ourselves, cause more loss of personal freedom and spread fear. As they accomplish this that will be their victory.
Another facet of their victory goal is through infiltration. By taking advantage of our free and open society they are quietly burrowing their way into our institutions such as school boards, public radio and TV stations and of course, government positions. Obama has appointed hundred of Muslims to sensitive government posts and we have seen recently the vetting process is flawed. We also know more and more candidates for public office are Muslim and large cities in Michigan are virtually Muslim enclaves.
I am not suggesting Muslims are disloyal but there are bad apples in their barrels and these bad apples intimidate and otherwise cause voices to be stilled and silent. The same was true in the South when the Klan and White Citizen Councils reigned. We also know money flows from Saudi Arabia into our university campuses and for the building of Madrases with the sole intent of spreading sympathetic propaganda.
The point I am making is that eventually Israel's plight of dealing with its surrounding neighbors will become the plight of Western Society and eventually the world at large. When that happens, and it will take time, the field will be leveled and Israel will no longer be seen as Carterites falsely portray Israel, ie. the apartheid state.
Obama's Muslim background blinds him from being able to acknowledge terrorism. He has whitewashed various government agencies and departments from ascribing terrorism to such acts. They are deemed work place disturbances or some other benign characterization. By imposing this mind set we are more likely to experience terrorist violence that might otherwise be prevented because mind set is a vital part of a successful investigation etc. Long after Obama has left office his appointees will still be in government and their impact will be felt in terms of shaping policy etc.
I doubt I have said anything new because history is on my side. I am simply suggesting the problem Israel has faced and continues to will become worldwide and as it does the attitude towards Israel's handling of these matters will modify because when you stand in the other person's shoes it can effect your thinking and understanding.
The phrase: 'a terrorist is simply another name for a freedom fighter' has cache among liberals and, media and , press elites and the bleeding heart Hollywood crowd when it is the other guy having to cope. However,when it becomes your own problem a certain clarity begins to define and reshape your thinking and the public will become less willing to tolerate whitewashes. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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More Stratfor analysis. (See 2 below.)
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More humor:
When you give your parents an iPad, This could happen to you!
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1)Obama Has Dismantled America
By Pamela Geller
Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness? Ask the huddled masses who are yearning to be free. America was once thought of as a light unto nations. Obama has single-handedly extinguished that light.
I saw it all coming. In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: "He sounds just like a European." That is, not like an American president who loves his country. And he doesn't: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
In other words, he didn't believe in American exceptionalism at all. In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria's American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn't dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.
The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now -- a world in which the United States would "no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures." He asserts that the "rise of the rest" is the "great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems."
Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria's vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria's wishful thinking about America's decline a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world's only remaining superpower. He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on. He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe. He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.
Obama vowed to make America just another nation -- unexceptional -- and he has. It's not that other nations have risen. They haven't. It's that Obama has dismantled American hegemony and diminished our standing in the world.
And so, during the Muslim massacre at a Nairobi mall, whom did Kenyan officials call for help? They called Israel. Obama is Kenyan, with close relatives in the country. It is his native land, the country where his father was born. So you might think he would have sent help, but his father (and stepfather) were Muslim; perhaps that is why he always comes down on the side of the jihad.
Where is the media coverage? This is Obama's native land -- where is his condemnation of the vicious sharia? His silence is sanction and support.
And in general, the U.S. is glaringly absent in this worldwide fight for freedom against Islamic jihad killers. Here is where America should be leading from the front, or the side, but at least from somewhere. I am ashamed for my country.
Kenya has been a beacon for democracy in Africa. But Africa has come under the boot of Islam under a post-American U.S. president who is aiding and abetting the global jihad. Obama aided Islamic supremacists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. And Islamic supremacists have been waging a vicious jihad in Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania...the whole continent. This is the horror of Islamic supremacism.
Egypt, in a fierce rebuke of Obama and his patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood, on Monday banned the Brotherhood. Here in America the Muslim Brotherhood should be designated a terrorist organization like Hamas (an MB group), along with its proxies in the U.S. such as CAIR, ISNA, MSA, and MAS. Despite Egypt's massive rejection of Islamic supremacism, and despite the recent rash of Muslim on non-Muslim attacks, the jihad-aligned media is digging in and whitewashing Islam and jihad, while doing everything they can to make Obama look good.
But despite their best efforts, that task is getting harder and harder. And the absence of America acting in the defense of freedom across the world is proof that Ayn Rand was right when she said that "the spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
And the Obama presidency is an epic moral failure.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance
1a)
Daniel Henninger: Let ObamaCare Collapse
Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can.
What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.
As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.
If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.
No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die. It would return another day in some other incarnation. The Democrats would argue, rightly, that the ideas inside ObamaCare weren't defeated. What the Democrats would lose is a vote in Congress, nothing more.
A political idea, once it becomes a national program, achieves legitimacy with the public. Over time, that legitimacy deepens. So it has been with the idea of national social insurance.
German Chancellor Otto von Bismark's creation of a social insurance system in the 19th century spread through Europe. After the devastation of World War I, few questioned its need. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security system was seen as an antidote to the Depression. The public's three-decade support for the idea allowed Lyndon Johnson to pass the Medicare and Medicaid entitlements even in the absence of an economic crisis.
Going back at least to the Breaux-Thomas Medicare Commission in 1999, endless learned bodies have warned that the U.S. entitlement scheme of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is financially unsupportable. Of Medicare, Rep. Bill Thomas said at the time, "One of the biggest problems is that the government tries to administer 10,000 prices in 3,000 counties, and it gets it wrong most of the time." But change never comes.
Medicaid is the worst medicine in the United States. It grinds on. Doctors in droves are withdrawing from Medicare. No matter. It all lives on.
An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.
But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.
Six months ago, that didn't seem likely. Now it does.
The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.
Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBMIBM -0.26% are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.
But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.
Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems.
Recalling Rep. Thomas's 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare's insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states.
The odds of ObamaCare's eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say.
Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats' belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein. The Democrats in 2014 should by all means be asked relentlessly to defend their monster.
Republicans and conservatives, instead of tilting at the defunding windmill, should be working now to present the American people with the policy ideas that will emerge inevitably when ObamaCare's declines. The system of private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.
If Republicans feel they must "do something" now, they could get behind Sen. David Vitter's measure to force Congress to enter the burning ObamaCare castle along with the rest of the American people. Come 2017, they can repeal the ruins.
The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.
2) Central Asia and Afghanistan: A Tumultuous History
Summary
Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a two-part series on the relationship between Central Asia and Afghanistan and the expected effects of the U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan on Central Asian security.
Contrary to popular perception, Central Asia is not likely to see an immediate explosion of violence and militancy after the U.S. and NATO drawdown from Afghanistan in 2014. However, Central Asia's internal issues and the region's many links with Afghanistan -- including a web of relationships among militant groups -- will add to the volatility in the region.
Analysis
Central Asia has numerous important links to Afghanistan that will open the region to significant effects after the upcoming U.S. and NATO drawdown. First and foremost, Central Asia is linked to Afghanistan geographically; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan share borders with Afghanistan that collectively span more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles). The Afghan border with Tajikistan, along the eastern edge of Afghanistan, makes up more than half of that distance, at 1,344 kilometers. The borders with Turkmenistan (744 kilometers) and Uzbekistan (137 kilometers) run along Afghanistan's western edge. Most of the Tajik-Afghan border is mountainous and therefore poorly demarcated, and the topography of Afghanistan's frontiers with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is largely desert.
Central Asia and Afghanistan also have important demographic ties. Afghanistan is an ethnically diverse country, with more than a dozen ethno-linguistic groups represented substantially in the country's population of slightly more than 31 million. The Pashtuns are the largest such group (42 percent), with Tajiks (27 percent), Hazaras (9 percent), Uzbeks (9 percent) and Turkmen (3 percent) constituting significant cohorts as well. The Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen populations are concentrated primarily in northern Afghanistan and are largely contiguous to their ethnic brethren across the borders in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Cross-Border Cultures
Historically, Afghanistan's borders with the Central Asian states did not exist in a modern sense; rather, they consisted of frontier areas that constantly shifted hands, given that warfare in the region was the norm. Indeed, the area comprising these states and northern Afghanistan was, at various times, part of a single state or empire. This changed with the coming of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires in the beginning of the 19th century. Russia's imperial expansion into Central Asia coincided with the growth of the British domain over India, and the result was the establishment of a buffer zone in what is now Afghanistan. This set the borders of Afghanistan as we know them and -- with the transition from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union in the early 20th century -- led to a closing off of the borders between Central Asia and Afghanistan for the first time in history. The ensuing 70 years of Soviet rule in Central Asia created significantly different political and cultural identities among the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen in the Soviet Union and those within Afghanistan, given the vastly different governing structures.
However, ties were far from severed. Because of the geography of the border areas, interaction and movement between the peoples of Central Asia and Afghanistan was difficult to stop. Furthermore, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 created direct interaction between the Soviet Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen and their ethnic cohorts in Afghanistan, with many of the former participating in Soviet military operations (in large part because of their ethno-linguistic ties). The Soviet Central Asians' exposure to their more tribal and religious Afghan counterparts (with certain groups becoming increasingly radicalized as a result of the invasion and the growing presence and strength of the mujahideen) also created a lasting impression among many Central Asians.
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union only two years later created a dramatically new environment both within Central Asia and within Afghanistan. In 1991, the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (along with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan farther north) became independent states for the first time in modern history. Despite official Soviet policy to suppress religious activity, many Central Asians were practicing Muslims and even Islamists, which explains how Islamism took root in the region shortly after the Soviet collapse. Meanwhile, Afghanistan descended into internal conflict with the withdrawal of the Soviets and the declining assistance from the United States for the mujahideen. The eventual result was the rise of an Islamist group, deriving from the Pashtuns based in southern Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.
Security and Militancy Links
Beginning in 1994 and starting from their stronghold in Kandahar, the Taliban were able to spread their influence and control over much of Afghanistan. It took the movement only months to take control of most southern provinces from various Pashtun warlords, and they quickly made progress in capturing regional centers in the west and east of the country like Herat and Jalalabad. In 1996, the Taliban were able to wrest control of Kabul from the central government led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani and Defense Minister Ahmed Shah Massoud, both ethnic Tajiks. Then, in the late 1990s, the Taliban went after the last bastion of resistance in northern Afghanistan, coming into conflict with the concentration of relatively moderate Tajiks and Uzbeks, as well as the Shiite Hazaras, who all opposed the Taliban's brand of Sunni Islamism and aims for territorial control.
The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan coincided with a number of significant developments in Central Asia. The post-Soviet regimes in the region had no experience of ruling their territories directly. Moreover, Central Asia faced immense economic and political challenges as Russia withdrew subsidies and the Soviet military-industrial complex with which the Central Asians were so integrated collapsed. Tajikistan descended into civil war almost immediately, when groups from the Kulyabi and Khujand regions known as the Popular Front were pitted against an array of opposition elements including Islamists, democrats and the Pamiri clan from the east collectively known as the United Tajik Opposition. Outside groups got involved in the civil war, supporting the different sides along political and ideological lines. Russia and Uzbekistan supported the secular and neo-communist Popular Front, while many Tajiks in Afghanistan supported the United Tajik Opposition, particularly the Islamist elements of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.
One of the groups that joined in the fighting alongside the United Tajik Opposition and the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan would eventually become known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, led by Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev. Namangani -- a seasoned military commander who had previously served in the Soviet army -- and Yuldashev were Uzbeks from the Fergana region of the country, traditionally home to some of the most pious Muslims within Uzbekistan and Central Asia. Yuldashev and Namangani led a protest against the new Uzbek President Islam Karimov in the republic's early days of independence, calling for Karimov to establish Sharia in Uzbekistan. When Karimov refused, the two leaders led several attacks, including bombings, armed assaults and kidnappings, against government and security targets in Uzbekistan. The two then fled into Tajikistan to escape Uzbek forces and join the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan against the Uzbek-supported Popular Front. While the Popular Front -- led by current Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon -- eventually won the civil war and the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan was incorporated into the government in a power-sharing deal, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan continued operations against the Uzbek regime from its base in the remote and mountainous Tavildara Valley in eastern Tajikistan.
From 1999 to 2001, the Uzbek militant movement conducted a series of attacks in Uzbekistan and in Uzbek enclaves in southern Kyrgyzstan in the Fergana Valley. During this time, the Tajik government periodically pressured Namangani to leave Tajikistan and seek refuge in Afghanistan. It was at this point that Namangani linked up with Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, to which Mullah Omar had given sanctuary in Afghanistan. The Taliban gave refuge to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in exchange for the Uzbek group's participation in Taliban offensives against the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras in northern Afghanistan.
At that point, elements in northern Afghanistan led by Rabbani, Massoud, Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and Hazara leader Abdul Karim Khalili had created an anti-Taliban front known as the Northern Alliance. This created an amalgam of groups vying for power in northern Afghanistan but traveling and operating across borders. On one side was the Northern Alliance, supported by Uzbekistan, Russia and Iran, and on the other was the Taliban with support from al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The result was violence, lawlessness and a web of militancy and transnational linkages that made the borders between Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries wide open from a logistical and operational standpoint, harking back to the chaos of the pre-Soviet era.
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