21-years

If it seems like a long time ago, I guess it was. For me at least, it seems not.

As I do every year, this is how I saw it.

 

McMaster to Everyone: We Lack Basic Competence

People who have both friends and enemies on the political left and the political right are, for me at least, some of the most interesting in the public arena.

They are either doing something very right, or doing a lot very wrong - maybe both. What they usually are not are hyper-political random partisan talking point generators.

One of those people is LTG H.R. McMaster, USA (Ret.). At the end of September, he showed up at a conference with a blow torch in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other.

I have a few pull quotes and links to the full video from the 4th Great Power Competition Conference over at USNIBlog.

Come by and give it a read and listen. 

Twenty Years

It was just another hot, process filled day for a mid-grade LCDR in Bahrain when the brief flush of the post-Cold War peace ended and the world we know today was rebuilt from the rubble.

I would not have expected things to be where they are today, 20-yrs later. For the first few months in theater before I returned home to a very different America, we were focused on what a more direct culture would call a "punitive expedition" - not what it became.

In late 2001 and through 2002, we could see what was forming in DC, Brussels, think tanks, and faculty lounges in The West that became the complete disaster of pet theories and projects thrown on to the backs of the dead in New York City, The Pentagon, and that sad little field in Pennsylvania. 

They played off the rage of a nation to have us spend trillions of dollars to, what, exactly?

Multiples of the numbers of people killing on Sept. 11th died fighting the wars that followed from Afghanistan across Iraq, Syria, Libya, and various other dusty hell holes in Africa ... for what exactly? Orders of magnitude of civilians were killed by us in the process of creating ... what exactly?

We've discussed the above here before and this isn't a day for me to go on about it again.

I do think of my youngest daughter on that day, not even six months old at home with her mother and sister. I thought of them a lot that day and was hoping that we would help create a better world for them. Did we? Maybe, as we don't know what alternative futures would have looked like ... but did we do our best?

I don't know. Maybe, but I doubt it. The negative effects of our humiliation in Afghanistan on our nation and our place in the world will resonate through the rest of this decade and longer.

Though he is dead, Bin Laden did get something from his attack 20-yrs ago. I think part of what we need to do is acknowledge and accept that if you told him where things were in 2021, he may not be exceptionally happy, but he would feel much better today and the rest of us.

As I like to do, I want to pick a clip from AM TV that Americans watched. Watch it again just to remember the place and time.

A final note: those who mastermined 911? A few are dead, and many of those still alive are still in custody ... and only now going on trial. Think about that as well. Think about that and other parts of our government and leading institutions that created the state of play today. Think how we can change both to better serve our nation and the West.

Action is always better than anger.

Episode 599: American Generalship in the Long War, with Gray Connolly

For coming up on two decades, the United States military has been engaged - if you want to call it by the medal they give everyone for it - a Global War on Terrorism.

As we have invested two decades, trillions of dollars, and thousands dead across the globe in response to the attacks of September, 2001 - our best friends have been with us.

They do this of their own free will, and share the good fortune and bad with us in our contact of the war.

Today’s Midrats is a wide ranging discussion on the history, theory, and application of American leadership with our guest, Gray Connolly.

Gray Connolly (Graham Alfred Frederick Connolly) is an Honors graduate in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales. He is a graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College and holds the Queen's Commission in the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Australian Navy [Naval Intelligence].

Gray has served on operational Naval Intelligence deployments at sea and ashore in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, East Timor, and the Middle East. Gray served as a Naval Intelligence officer in the Iraq War (two deployments) and in the Afghanistan War.

These days, Gray is a Barrister in Sir Edmund Barton Chambers in Sydney. He has advised and represented the State of New South Wales and the Australian Government, including in national security matters. Gray was before that a Judge’s Associate in both the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia. Gray lectures in Australian Constitutional Law.

Gray is a frequent panelist for ABC radio and television, and he has been published in various newspapers and journals.

Gray is married, has had basset hounds named Churchill, and is a life-long supporter of the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Richmond Football Club. He still plays football/soccer and is a plodding midfielder.

This is a prerecorded show, so no chat room today, but you can get it right now here or at the embedded show banner below.

If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.

Are You Ready to Listen to me Now?

Over the July 4th weekend, we slipped out of the American fortress in Bagram. The way we left tells you all you need to know about Afghanistan – the conflict we lost in December 2009 when the Taliban were given the last indication they needed that we were not going to press the issue on our time and change Afghanistan our way, but we would let them win on their time and return Afghanistan their way.

It is all as clear now as it was when I wrote about our culmination at Obama’s West Point speech linked above. Regulars here know the story; the rest can follow the link above.

Good ideas are timeless, so I want to return to a topic that predates CDRSalamander and this is a decision point where we can decide to return our nation to its natural state.

My view of our place in the world started to gel in the mid-90s and by the late 90s had solidified into what in the 2020s has cured into a firm mass of resolve; we will destroy our republic by playing empire.

Generations of civilian and military leaders – and generations of citizens – had their view of America’s place in the world warped by WWII and the Cold War. In both cases, the world was faced with expansionist totalitarian secular confessions that required America to be the world power that it was. 

That world, thankfully, is gone. There are major threats in this world – Islamic fundamentalism is one, a renewed China is another – but neither of them have the combination of desire and ability that fascism and communism had. Neither are trying to expand their power by military means. 

Islamism has a bleeding edge, but its center of gravity is religious, and it has natural boundaries (unless stupid migrant policies succeed in letting it expand). 

China’s military growth is based on primarily ensuring access to resources to keep its population’s standard of living improving and as such, protect the domestic power of the Chinese Communist Party. 

We do not have a land border with either.

How do we mitigate risk against these two primary and lesser constellations of threats? Generally speaking, it doesn’t take a large standing army … which in a time of limited resources, that is a good thing.  Specifically: 

- Islamic fundamentalism: simple; contain and modernize. Contain Islamic fundamentalism to where is it now, and on the bleeding edge of the territory where it has reached critical mass, support local forces and governments to modernize along moderate lines. We cannot want a modern existence more than the people of those nations. We cannot force it on them. In nations where there is not a critical mass, aggressively eliminate small cells as you find them. The Cold War campaigns against the Red Army Faction, Weather Underground etc are a good template here. A deadly nuisance, but in time will fade through impotence and attrition.

- China: not so simple. China is primarily an economic and diplomatic challenge. She wants to use her economic power to back her diplomatic efforts to ensure that nations do not get in the way of her economic growth and future prosperity. From those two items, she will take was she sees as her natural place for a nation of 1.3 billion souls: the global leader by mid-century. 

China is not advancing primarily through military means. No, she is advancing by a clear national vision, economics, diplomacy, and an evolutionary, iterative advancement of her priorities for her people supporting her national greatness. Her military strength is to underline to others her larger national will; it is supporting, not supported.

While there are some nations such as India, Taiwan, Japan, and the nations around the South China Sea that have some territorial issues, unless you are a very paranoid Russian or Mongolian, China is not otherwise a military threat around her present borders. Where she is – specifically India – they have the land forces they need to counter China if so needed. Though accidents happen, China has no need for a land war on the Asian landmass. Her other conflicts are either at sea or are connected to her access and ability to secure her sea lines of communication to resources. 

That is the key; we do not need a large standing army to mitigate the most likely Chinese threats to us or our friends. We can best address the Chinese challenge through our economic strength and smart diplomacy. We have the advantage there if we choose to use it. Militarily, we also have the comparative advantage at sea, in the air, and space … if we choose to accept that.

How does this tie into what I started the post with? Easy.

We were enabled to think we could change Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc etc because we thought we could do it on the cheap. Sure, a few National Guard forces would have to be activated, but mostly we had a large standing army to pull the effort from. Like former SECSTATE Albright said, “what is the use of a large army if you aren’t going to use it.”

That was the theory. In practice, especially in 2005-7, it turned out different especially in the reliance on National Guard forces, but we just managed to get through it only because we were one standard deviation away in 2003 from General Shinseki’s center point.

No big national discussion was needed. No large sacrifice. No great national mobilization. We went in half-ass, and our results were half-ass. In Iraq, it was a near run thing it was not a worse disaster than it turned out.

Wars of choice need to demand an understanding that wars are a dark room. You don’t know what is in it when you step in, but you will have to deal with it.

If wars are hard to get in to, you do not fall easily in to tar pits of whimsy.

Take that temptation away. Make it hard. Make it a national effort. 

We are a large nation with large responsibilities, but we are also a republic, not an empire.

Give our friends more warning than we did the Afghans last weekend but let them know we have a new strategy. They need to up their land game. We will be there to help, especially in the air and from the sea, but we will not do their work for them.

We plan to move 2/3 of our active ground forces to our National Guard. Except for a few combined logistics, maintenance, and training facilities, all our forward deployed land forces, and most of our air and sea forward deployed forces, need to come home.

WWII and the Cold War are over. Again, we are a republic, not an empire.

We will mitigate risk by ensuring that while we reset our ground forces, we maintain and improve our posture as the world’s premier maritime and aerospace power – including space. 

We will maintain a large and robust ground combat capability, but any large conflict will require mobilization of our National Guard and reserve forces. We will have a standing army, but our friends will need to plan to defend their territory with their ground forces primarily – at least at the start.

That is external … but the real benefit here is internal. Remember, the military did not get us in these long running small land wars in Asia this century nor initiate them.

Politicians and the civilians they appointed did. They provided the Direction and Guidance that drove Initial Planning Guidance. They pointed the military in a certain direction. 

A large standing army makes things too easy for people who have a short-term focus, especially politicians. Wars should never be easy for those who don’t have to fight them. 

Politicians do understand hard work as well as risk/reward. When silky smooth, feel good ideas ooze out of think tanks and faculty lounges into politician’s ears, when those politicians bring those ideas to their military staff, there needs to be a higher bar for yes-men … and more opportunities to deliver the hard truth that the politicians will need to ask more from the American people. No so much money, but the blood of their constituents living in their towns, working in their businesses, friends with their patrons and supporters.

The American people have a good, if imperfect, track record of supporting the expenditure of significant amounts of blood and treasure when needed. American politicians have a rather imperfect, rarely good, track record of convincing themselves they can fight wars of choice on the cheap.

The greatest threat to our nation’s future security and place in the world is not an unrestrained China, it is a US political elite’s inclination to empire.

Put up the guardrails. 

Come home. 

The Perfidy of Pakistan

One aspect of the Afghanistan conflict that I think will stick in time's craw the hardest is what we allowed Pakistan to do. I was lucky enough to be at the table at C5F when this all kicked off - one of the many quiet O4s in the back of the room watching and listening as the big guys got us ready for what was to come. 

From almost day-1, a regular refrain - besides looking for sidearms and chem gear for all the terrorists with mustard gas mortar shells that intel told us could show up any day from Iraq ... ahem ... - was how we could not let Pakistan be for Afghanistan what Cambodia and Laos was for the North Vietnamese. 

"No safe havens!" we told ourselves literally over and over as Task Force K-Bar was put together ... but then the folks in DC and Tampa had different ideas, and almost immediately Pakistan was allowed to be a safe haven. 

There were all sorts of reasons, but we did what we did - ground convoys and airspace don't become permissive on their own dontchaknow. Of course we had to go in a decade ago down the street from Pakistan's West Point to kill Osama. 

Of course.

Pakistan has played on both sides of the field in Afghanistan, contributing to the Taliban's success, a senior US senator has reminded his colleagues, a day after Washington announced plans to withdraw all troops from the war-torn Asian country by September 11.

Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed, on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, said "a crucial factor contributing immensely to the Taliban's success" has been the inability of the US to "eliminate the "eliminate the sanctuary the Taliban was granted in Pakistan." 

Referring to a recent study, Reed said the Taliban sanctuary in Pakistan and state support from organisations, like Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have been essential to their war effort and the US' failure to undermine this safe haven may be Washington's most significant mistake of the war.

Senator Reed (D-RI) was and is one of the good guys. I know he's seen the same intel I've seen ... and a lot more.

With time, the larger American public will find out more that game Pakistan played. We should not be forgiving. We should not forget. 

Is Mozambique on Your Hot List?

 

Well, it should be. 

My thoughts, updates, and observations over at USNIBlog.

Come on by and get a peek at a possible future imperfect.

France's National Antibodies Wake - but too Late?

The story of Europe's growing struggle with its intentional own-goal of importing a critical mass of people who will not simply, "become European," will be an ongoing story this century.

Especially in France.

Outsiders also misunderstand the situation on the ground in France as it deals with radical Islamism. After the recent attacks, the government chose to close a mosque and an NGO suspected of ties with radical groups. But more consequential legislative action was initiated this fall, when the French government proposed a bill seeking to fight “separatism.” Building on months of dialogue with religious organizations like the French Council of the Muslim Faith, Macron suggested stemming foreign funding for mosques and the training of imams, aiming to instead privilege domestic training of religious scholars in accordance with democratic values.

The term “separatism” was chosen concertedly. Scholars such as Gilles Kepel, who has been influential in Macron’s thinking, have documented that France faces a struggle with Islamism that extends beyond terrorism. The deeper societal challenge involves the growing influence of radical groups in certain neighborhoods that exist outside the state’s purview, a countersociety that operates at the expense of women, LGBT people, Jews, and many others. Kepel’s book Terror in France recounts the trajectory of figures like Mohammed Merah, the terrorist who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, in Toulouse in 2012. At the time, Merah was seen as the ultimate “lone wolf,” a former petty criminal-turned-radical, acting on his own, without receiving orders from an organized terrorist network such as al Qaeda or the Islamic State. But years of investigations showed a different picture from the convenient lone-wolf narrative. Merah was socialized in a radical ideology that was the norm in his direct environment. From his family to his friends to his mosque (that Islamic State leaders Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain also attended), Merah’s ideological surroundings laid the groundwork for his radicalism. Rather than look at individual profiles and the psychological underpinnings of radicalism, the French government wants to tackle the ecosystems that have allowed them to prosper.

All this adds to many reports over the years of growing pressure on teachers trying to teach about the Holocaust, sex education, or even basic biology. In 2002, a book written by a collective of high school professors, The Lost Territories of the Republic, warned of alarming sexism and anti-Semitism in the French banlieues. A female professor interviewed by the Financial Times last month reported: “I don’t feel safe. If I have to show a film with a nude scene or a couple embracing, there’d be shouting, and not just the normal teenage stuff, real aggression, kids saying, ‘This is not OK. It’s not allowed.’” Male physicians have been put under pressure to avoid attending to female patients alone. Mayors have come under criticism for acceding to demands from religious groups for separate hours for women in public swimming pools. More recently, a group of Sorbonne scholars (a university not known for its far-right activism to say the least) led by Bernard Rougier published a series of empirical studies titled Territories Conquered by Islamism, warning that “Islamist networks have managed to build enclaves at the heart of popular neighborhoods.” Jews, who represent 1 percent of the French population but are disproportionally targeted by hate crimes (about 40 percent of attacks most years), have largely deserted these areas in the last decade.

This was, of course, avoidable ... but for decades politicians and cultural leaders - for reasons best explained by them - refused to clearly see the problem. They were more interested in being called nice things by all the right people. To accrue personal virtue today at the expense of the security and national unity of their children's future.

For their part, the French seem to be a victim of our garbage mainstream press and are misreading the USA; 

An op-ed in Le Monde denounced a “disconcerting American blindness when it comes to jihadism in France.” Macron’s measures have frequently been analyzed through the prism of domestic electoral politics as allegedly trying to co-opt the far-right. But this analysis represents a gross misunderstanding of the French political reality. A recent poll on the upcoming French presidential election in 2022 shows a situation eerily similar to the one that prevailed in 2017, when Macron roundly defeated Marine Le Pen in the second round. The vast majority of French citizens feel deep concern over the situation. According to a IFOP survey last month, 89 percent of respondents considered the terrorist threat to be “high,” 87 percent that “secularism is in danger,” and 79 percent that “Islamism has declared war on the nation and the Republic.” Are these all National Rally voters?

While pointing to a “crisis” within Islam, Macron was careful to distinguish the majority of French Muslims living and observing peacefully from the radical minority that poses a threat. The comparisons with far-right rhetoric, which precisely refuses to make such distinctions, thus completely miss the point. For many French liberals, this fight is not easily separable from the one against the far-right—both are a defense of liberal democratic values against illiberal ideologies. French Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti thus dismissed calls for emergency measures coming from the National Rally, insisting that the rule of law was the only possible solution.

There is a large mass of Americans who fully understand the challenge that France faces, and support the French people's efforts to preserve their culture from a hostile import. 

The problem is that they won't hear it from the French language press that mostly copies what it reads from NYT and WaPo. They think that is the USA, and as we know - it isn't.

As I've mentioned over the years here, in the years I lived in Europe, this topic came up not infrequently over beers with my European military colleagues.

The most sobering was one long evening in Norway at a table full of Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Finns, me and a Brit. At a dark moment, a Swedish Field Grade army officer coldly stated, "Our politicians will wait too long and things will get too bad and then they will call on us and the police to do what we have done before in Europe. It will not be pleasant."

I didn't ask for more - we all knew what he was saying.

I wish Macron success. If the political center will not take care of the security and cultural concerns of the people, the people will seek champions on the fringes. If they cannot find a responsible way to take care of this systemic problem - through incompetence or prolonged inaction - then Europe will force itself to become something it does not want to become, or accepts its transformation in to something their ancestors fought a thousand years to prevent. 

Read all of Benjamin Haddad's article over at FP. Very well done. 

A Beheading in France

 

Another chapter in Islam's slow war on France.

You need to take time today to read a critically important article by John Lichfield. Below I will pull extensively from it, but you need to read the whole thing.

On October 6, Mr Paty, 47, a much-liked history and geography teacher in a dull Paris suburb, produced for his middle school civics class a pair of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which provoked the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine five years ago.

Cartoons. History. A significance moment in their nation’s history. That is the job of a teacher. A secular teacher in a secular republic.

What happens when that republic allows, and indeed encourages, the growth of an imported culture that is contrary to those same values?

How can publishing such cartoons be justified, he asked the teenagers, if they offend people of the Islamic faith? Where does the freedom of expression end and respect for others’ feelings begin?

These questions are not easy, Mr Paty explained. That is why fundamental principles exist in democratic states such as France to help people of different faiths and opinions to get along without murdering one another (as they have in not-so-distant parts of French history). The complexities are the lesson. But this lesson cost Mr Paty his life. Ten days later he was dead – decapitated by a 19-year-old Chechen refugee to France as he walked home from school.

One of the pupils, a 13-year-old Muslim girl, had given her father a misleadingly lurid account of the lesson – from which she was absent. The father, with the help of a radical imam, started a campaign on the internet to have the teacher sacked. The lesson – or a false and inflammatory account of the lesson – became a cause celèbre on radical Islamic sites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Parents at the school received as many as 10 messages day, some from Algeria and other Islamic countries, calling Mr Paty a “criminal”, a “thug” and a “paedophile” and demanding that he should be sacked.

The murderer, Abdullakh Anzorov, was a Chechen Muslim, born in Moscow 19 years ago. He did not know Mr Paty or the school. He lived in Evreux in Normandy, 60 miles away.  It is likely — but not certain — that he acted alone, enraged by the lies that he had read on the web.

Anzorov followed Mr Paty as he left the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north west of Paris last Friday evening. He attacked him with a 12-inch butcher’s knife, stabbing him in the arms and abdomen and then beheading him. Anzorov was shot dead by police a few minutes later.

Twelve people have been arrested, including his father, grandfather and brother and the parent and imam (apparently unknown to Anzorov) who started the hysterical hue and cry online.

France once again starts to protest … but besides talk, what does their ruling class do?

In the grim litany of islamist terror attacks in France in recent years, the killing of one teacher may seem relatively unimportant. It will soon be the five-year anniversary of the Bataclan and associated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 which killed 130 people. Nine months earlier, in February 2015, 17 people died in the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket – for which 12 alleged associates of the terrorists are currently on trial.

But forget the numbers. Mr Paty’s lone murder has struck a raw and angry nerve in France – and not just because of the appalling manner of his death. Tens of thousands of people turned out to mourn and honour the teacher in demonstrations in Paris and other French cities on Sunday.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The French ruling class and its people spoke this after every attack … and yet, what happens?

Secularism is France’s state religion, the soil in which French democracy grows. The state guarantees a freedom to believe, and a freedom not to believe. It must otherwise be neutral on all religious questions. Teachers in state schools, though poorly paid and often criticised, are regarded as a front-line infantry, or secular priesthood, which passes on these Republican values of tolerance, freedom of expression and secularism to new generations.

The fact that Mr Paty was brutally murdered precisely for trying to explain these principles has made him into a kind of Republican martyr. There is talk of him being buried in the Panthéon, the secular cathedral on the Paris left bank which is the last resting place of great French men and women.

This is the challenge.

Mr Paty, though, was not the only target of last Friday’s attack. Anzorov also left a garbled message for the President, posted moments after the murder: “To Macron, leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your dogs of hell…Calm down others like him or we will inflict on you a severe punishment.”

Is freedom of speech worth it? That is the wrong question. To even ask it is to advertise you don’t understand the challenge. Freedom of speech is the fundamental liberty that allows all the others to freely exist. It is a concept not just worth civil war, but general war on a global scale. 

Embedded deep in the West, and not just France, are those who have other plans than enjoying the fruits of The Enlightenment.

They see the game in full.

Don’t forget, modern day Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, much of Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were once Christian areas. There is a history here. Know it as they do. Act on it as they do. Spain was once part of an Islamic empire and wars were fought to hold off further invasion deep in to France and modern Austria. 

As I am wont to say; history is sticky.

Back to today’s challenge. The policies of previous decades have not been successful, and things have gotten worse. To continue to do the same but expect a different result is just folly. Fixing the problem will be more challenging now than earlier, but the French Republic must stand up firm to the challenge of its own creation.

This was obviously influenced by the furious response in parts of the Islamic world to a speech Macron had given in Les Mureaux two weeks ago. Les Mureaux is a more troubled, multi-racial, outer suburb of Paris in the Seine valley 20 kilometres west of Conflans. In the speech, the President proposed new action to prevent French Muslims from becoming a separate community who give their allegiance wholly to the Koran rather than French laws or values.

He promised a law on “secularity and liberty” to combat extremist Islamist indoctrination by forbidding the teaching of children at home after the age of three and by ending the “importation” of foreign-financed imams. Mosques will be placed under greater surveillance. State funding will be available to mosques which sign a charter on secularism and democracy.

Does anyone here think this will fix anything? Does this point you down the narrow path, or simply delay the inevitable off ramp to a deeper and more dangerous abyss? 

Islam is not structured like Christianity and Judaism. To pretend it is only plays in to the ignorance that got you here. There are some Islamic sects that are not a threat to a free republic, but the sects that are driving the violence in France are on the rise and are not of that confession.

Sad it is here, but this is the natural result of decades of clearly self-destructive policies of mass immigration without assimilation from cultures that are now fully embedded and well pass the critical mass to be self-sustaining. 

Again, just look at what started this latest skirmish.

One of the pupils, a 13-year-old Muslim girl, had given her father a misleadingly lurid account of the lesson – from which she was absent. The father, with the help of a radical imam, started a campaign on the internet to have the teacher sacked. The lesson – or a false and inflammatory account of the lesson – became a cause celèbre on radical Islamic sites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Parents at the school received as many as 10 messages day, some from Algeria and other Islamic countries, calling Mr Paty a “criminal”, a “thug” and a “paedophile” and demanding that he should be sacked.

That is home grown.

The present situation is not sustainable and yet, as the murderer of the teacher shows, the present policies are doing nothing to stop it from getting worse.

France has, proportionally, the largest Muslim population in Europe – between five and six million, or just under tenth of its people. Many – probably as many as a half – are non-practising. The great majority are law-abiding and accept the primacy of national laws. But there has been a shift in the last 20 years, even among moderate muslims, towards a more overt expression of their faith and sense of Islamic identity.

I’ll repeat myself to emphasize the critical points; this was all known for decades. The path to today was well marked out and visible, but the ruling class pretended they did not see it. I have been warning in this venue for a decade and a half – but it has been obvious since the last few decades of the 20th Century that this crisis was coming. 

As previous generations of the ruling class failed to do their job, it is up to the present-day leaders and citizenship to fix the problem. As we are well past critical mass, the best path is now a narrow one – surrounded on one side by a gapping maw of the destruction of their nations as founded, and on the other being forced to become something they don’t want to be to defend it.

If the ruling classes won’t fix it, then the people will rise up – that is stepping through a door in to a dark room no well meaning person would like to see, but that is where it is heading.

Macron’s speech, clumsily worded in places, offered no snap solution. It offered a long-term strategy to create a barrier between the majority of the French Muslim population and a minority of extremists. This approach has been attacked, in the wake of Paty’s murder, by the Right and Far Right in France as a feeble response to the Islamist threat. Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement National called for a “real war against the poison of radical Islam…a real war to eradicate it finally”. Bruno Retailleau of the centre right Les Républicains said that “Islamism” must be “thrown out of the country by force”.

These are largely meaningless words. What sort of force exactly? What kind of real war? Most of France’s muslims are French and French born. They are not going anywhere. Any violent attempt to isolate an extremist but often submerged minority could prove disastrous.

...

But simple-sounding responses and explanations, whether offered by French politicians or by radical Muslim intellectuals, are not the solution. They are part of the problem. We should heed Mr Paty’s lecture to the 13 and 14-year-olds of Collège du Bois d’Aulne at Conflans-Saint Honorine.We should cling to the principles of tolerance and freedom which western societies have evolved from their own dark centuries of intolerance and violence. The principles are often muddled and confusing. But that is the lesson. Complexity is the lesson.

Exactly. What the ruling class needs to do is, as we say in NASCARistan, turn in to the skid. 

- Macron should publicly display the cartoons the teacher died for.

- All schools should do the same and while they are at it, pick a few scenes from “Life of Brian” that equally poke fun at Christianity and Judaism.

- Every newspaper should publish the cartoons.

- Saturate the intellectual marketplace to make a point.

You will be called names – but isn’t Paris worth a few idiots calling you names? Muslims and Islam can live just fine in the West, but not the kind that is causing the trouble in France.

Cowardice in the face of name calling and extremism brought on this crisis. If the French Republic, and the West for that matter, is a culture worth defending – then defend it.

Do that or lose it and accept what replaces it. What are you afraid of - being called names? 

Knives and Kalashnikovs may kill you, but words will never hurt you.

Stand or submit. Those are your options, and because of the errors of previous generations, you/we are running out of time to do it the easy way. 

The Islamic State Was Defeated; Long Live the Islamic State

 

If you haven't clued in yet, the Islamic State may have lost its caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but it is far from done. A solid comparison would be to call it a franchise, like its Al Qaeda forerunner.

As we will continue to remind everyone here, you need to keep and eye on Africa - the Islamic States more active franchise. 

Great article from Critical Threats. 

Maj. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the commander of US Special Operations Command Africa, gave a sobering assessment of the increasing security threats posed by al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their ilk in Africa in an AEI webinar on September 9 (see the video and transcript here). He warned of African al Qaeda affiliates’ growing responsiveness to their parent organization and highlighted al Qaeda’s “methodical” playbook for coercing and controlling local populations in West Africa while remaining under the US policy radar. Maj. Gen. Anderson acknowledged the US military’s small footprint in Africa and the centrality of non-military challenges in stoking Salafi-jihadi insurgencies, underscoring the need for a clear strategy and more coordination with international partners and the US interagency to combat the Salafi-jihadi threat.

The background problem is that Islamic fundamentalist organizations will take advantage of a continent soaked in poor governance, corruption, unsustainable demographics, environmental devastation, and economic systems that cannot support a modern standard of living for the surging masses.

There are islands of hope here and there in sub-Saharan Africa, but those trend lines are not outpacing the advance of the Islamic State.

The US needs a policy framework for Africa that enables prioritizing and scaling US responses to prevent local conflicts from spiraling into regional crises, as well as rolling back the crises that have already passed this threshold. US Africa Command (AFRICOM) is resource-constrained and likely to face further cuts. In any circumstance, AFRICOM should not be the sole or lead actor for a US approach to African security. The factors that underpin the Salafi-jihadi movement are political, not military. Addressing the fragility that feeds extremism requires a new holistic strategy, and preventing or reducing inflammatory proxy interventions requires both diplomatic leadership and leverage. The US needs to rethink its engagement in Africa — quickly — before the continent’s developing threats are more immediate and more difficult to address.

The USA military cannot "fix" this area of the world, only help. Ultimately, those nations will have to fix themselves. Unfortunately, many of their best and brightest are not staying and working to build a better future, but are moving to Europe and the Americas. The brain drain is a challenge no one really has good metrics on, but it is there.

That too is part of the problem - and a much harder one to fix.

Fullbore Friday

 

Yes, you have to watch it as I watched it. I was on deployment in the C5F AOR at the time, and we had Fox on in the in the corner of the room.

I had a four year old and an eight month old daughter, a wife on the other side of the world, and less than halfway through what would be one hell of a deployment - and a world forever changed.
 

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Long War in Africa is Tomorrow's War Too

Let's stick with the long war in Africa today, as last night I came across this jewel from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, The Islamic State’s Strategic Trajectory in Africa: Key Takeaways from its Attack Claims. 

This heat map is superb and shows that the issue in northern Mozambique is a side show.

From the IS point of view, their main effort is Nigeria and the Sinai.

The Sinai is almost an, "of course..." but everyone should remember that it is the Egyptian military is the only thing keeping Egypt from falling to the Muslim Brotherhood again. As we've seen in Turkey, the West putting faith in modernizing military leadership can only get you so far.  

Nigeria is where the prize is, and not just for oil. Are you up to speed in Nigerian demographics? Let's start with just religion. 

In 2010, the population was 49% Christian and 48% Muslim.  Now?

Where will that stand at 2050?

Now let's look at numbers.

Where will that be by 2050?

~410 million - larger than the United States.

History is far from over and the future has all sorts of horrors it will visit on the planet.

Know the intersection of demographics, economics, and religion and how they relate to future conflict ... and they will all lead you back to Africa.

The Islamic State Terrorists Expand a New Front in Africa

Well, perhaps there should be quotes around "new" because this has been going on - in fits and starts - for over 1,300 years. All that being said, The Long War isn't going anywhere. The question remains where it is flaring up and who is fighting it. 

The "Islamic State's" franchises will continue to pop up all across the bleeding edge of Dar al-Islam. This won't end in any time soon. 

Africa continues to bubble up in any regular scan of trouble caused by Islamic extremism. This violence further handicaps a continent whose demographics and economic development are already setting the condition to create more conflict than can be consumed locally. That is why anyone concerned with global stability needs to keep an eye on Africa. 

Latest example, in a quasi-new front - Mozambique. From two weeks ago;

Militants linked to the Islamic State group have seized a heavily-defended port in Mozambique after days of fighting, according to reports. Local media say government forces that were in the far northern town of Mocimboa da Praia fled, many by boat, after Islamists stormed the port.

The town is near the site of natural gas projects worth $60bn (£46bn).

Where does the situation stand today?

Heavily armed insurgents who seized the strategic port city of Mocimboa da Praia, about 90km away from the commercial gas projects in the Palma district, remain entrenched in the northern Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. Since the first attack on the area by the Islamic insurgents in late 2017, an estimated 1,500 people have died and about 250,000 have been displaced after numerous attacks and clashes between them and security forces. ...

According to the Bishop of Pemba, Luiz Fernando Lisboa, people displaced from villages attacked by the insurgents do not have humanitarian support. “The entire province of Cabo Delgado — in districts where there are no armed conflicts, is full of displaced people. The most important [need] is food. But it's not just food, there are many types of help that these people need,” said Lisboa. 

... 

A source from a humanitarian aid organisation, said they could not travel to affected areas without the risk of being shot or beheaded. “We are neutral, we cannot be part of the military columns or enter it alone. 

On the one hand it may seem as if we are with the government and on the other hand with the terrorists. There may be this perception. Our aim is simply to support these people in need in various ways.” 

The Citizen Observatory for Health (OCS), a Mozambican NGO, earlier told the media that the closure of 37 health units in districts affected by armed violence in Cabo Delgado had left people there vulnerable.

In the Sahel, France and other European nations are doing what they can there ... but who will help Mozambique if they can't help themselves?

Fullbore Friday

Somewhere there was a 19-yr old mechanic that made sure it was up and ready for flight.

Somewhere there was a 20-yr old ordnanceman that made sure the weapons were loaded and ready.

Somewhere there was a 30-yr old pilot and 40-yr old copilot who were on their game.

Somewhere there was a large group of intelligence professionals who kept an unblinking eye on their target, giving decision makers real-time, actionable details.

Somewhere there was an entire ecosystem of communications, IT, and satellite professionals that maintained a lashed up of legacy and cutting edge technology enabling world-wide, real time observation of the target over an extended period.

Somewhere there were senior uniformed and civilian advisers providing the Principal the pros and cons of action.

Somewhere there was a Principal who gave the order.

After thousands of deaths and untold tens of thousands wounded … one of the most blood soaked enemies of our nation was eliminated.

Fullbore to everyone.

France's Long War

The Long War has a lot of fronts and many flavors ... an undertold one is what France is doing in North Africa.

Especially for Europeans, this can be seen as an existential threat. 

If some type of stability is not brought to Africa, then then inevitable pressures of war, famine, and poverty will drive migration north, flooding an already saturated ability of the Europeans to take in migrants ... and all the cultural and societal pressures that will bring with it.

Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly has called on fellow EU governments to despatch special forces to the Sahel, to help curb militant attacks that have killed more than 100 Malian troops in recent weeks.

But France, too, is paying a heavy price for its role in the struggle against Sahel jihadism, with the death of 13 soldiers when two helicopters collided on Monday.

Altogether, it has lost 38 troops in this almost seven-year campaign.

...since 2013 the EU has been retraining the Malian army, while the French anti-terrorism force, Operation Barkhane, deployed across the Sahel is supported by British helicopters, other European allies as well as US surveillance drones.

France and what few partners it can scrape together in Africa can only do so much when their nations invest so little in their military.

They can spend a bit more now, or be swamped later.

For those of us who worked the fight in Afghanistan, this will sound familiar;

Everyone is agreed that military action along cannot bring an end to the violence and restore stability.


Health, education, justice and basic administration are needed to build community support for the Malian state.

More jobs and livelihoods could reduce the risk of disenchanted young men being drawn into jihadist groups or criminal gangs offering money and the status that can come with carrying a weapon.

A wide range of donors have committed large aid budgets to the Sahel, motivated by concern over poverty and climate change in this fragile region so prone to drought - and also by fear of the knock-on impact of terrorism and a potential resurgence in the flow of migrants across the Sahara and Mediterranean.
...
The present military approach being pursued by the Sahel armies and their international partners is not working, at least not sufficiently - and France is well aware of the need for a fresh approach.

This is one of the world's poorest regions and a much greater focus on development is essential. But that still cannot happen without better security.

That is why - despite the shocking loss of 13 men in this week's helicopter crash - President Emmanuel Macron remains committed to the military campaign, in alliance with Sahelian governments.

But Paris is desperate for other European countries to do more to help share the burden.

In dark moments you have to wonder - can Western forces make these peoples and cultures fix themselves? Are we making things better in the short run, if at all, but in the long run it will account for nothing?

Is it worth the attempt? 

 I think so, as the alternative is something I don't think our modern sensibilities are ready for ... though our kids might have to.

Bye Baghdadi

Some people just need a good killing.

High up on that list is the late Caliph Baghdadi who it appears had his last moment on earth staring at the approaching teeth of an American military working dog … probably a Belgian Malinois. (NB: we still don’t have all the details we need, but it appears this canine hero will recover from its wounds).

Forget those who are trying to diminish the importance of killing this medieval genocidal maniac, sit down; this is nothing but good news. First and primary; that this was an act of justice. No other nation has the ability or force of will to kill this guy – so as with OBL, it is up to us to do these things. We should do them gladly and without apology.

Our wheels of justice may grind slow, but when given the green light – they grind fine.

This will impact the Islamic State significantly. This was their Adolf Hitler. With him gone, so is much of the cult of personality. IS will get a new leader, but he will only be a fraction of the founder. In time, we will find and kill him too, and they will get a new leader.

We will mow the grass like that for years, because when it comes to fighting IS, we can only significantly address the tactical and operational level. Those Centers of Gravity we can undermine – but the strategic Center of Gravity? No. We can only be a supporting vice supported entity.

The strategic Center of Gravity of IS is the religious justification for their existence. Only the Muslim world can undermine that. IS will be with us in one form or another for a long time, just like AQ. At their core, they are a religious order. Once established, they are the hardest to eliminate.

So, celebrate and be thankful that the only concern Americans have right now is a wounded pooch.

A final point. The last two days have been very instructive and a good filtering mechanism for your natsec sources. There are good people in the natsec world from both left and right, but there are also a lot of bad players. Especially in an election year, they can soak up a lot of airtime and print space preventing the public from getting good info.

When listening to commentary about Baghdadi’s killing, keep a weather eye out. There is good commentary on both sides, but they are the wheat in a blizzard of chaff.

You can break the chaff in to four main breeds who you should tag for future use when evaluating the value of their input:

Grifters: true “pay for play” they will take whatever position that they feel will get them airtime, or for a few, make their sponsors and underwriters write more checks. Pro or anti-Trump … they are objects of scorn, not pity.

True Believers: sad little creatures, they really think that anything we do involving the military – especially aggressive killing kind of things – just are not “who we are” or create more problems. Well-meaning people, but just wrong.

Terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome: you know these types; anything associated with Trump that might make him look good must be attacked or if nothing else, ignored. The “that photo is fake” push early on was a classic tell. Some of these are cross-pollinated with the Grifter and True Believer types. I’m no Trump guy … but these TDS extremists make me defend him way more than I am comfortable doing.

Partisans First: these are simply party people. Those with an (R) next to their name will look you in the face and tell you that short hair on a (R) is great but on a (D) is bad. Those with a (D) next to their name will say just the opposite. I don’t think even they know what they really believe anymore – they just get high off their own fumes.

In the end, a very bad guy is dead. For now, that should be enough.

Transgenerational War

The 18th anniversary of 911 is more personal than usual for me. I'm still pondering it a bit.

I'm oversharing over at USNIBlog.

If you're interested, head on over and give it a read.

We Can't Leave the Long War - it Can't Quit Us

A sober reminder over at USNIBlog that regardless of how long we sit at tables with the Taliban and think of ways to leave the former lands of the Islamic State - our enemies may not let us.

The Bad Vacation Top-10 from ALCED

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)'s mid-year Top-10 conflicts to keep an eye on update is out.

Check out their #1, The Sehel.

The French and the USA is there along with a few other European nations in small numbers.

That graph is impressive.

Head on over to ACLED for the rest of their Top-10. More info there.

The Sahel: Most likely to be the geopolitical dilemma of 2019

Yemen: Most likely to induce 2019’s worst humanitarian crisis

Afghanistan: Most likely to suffer from international geopolitics

Iraq: Most at risk of returning to civil war

Myanmar: Most likely to see expanding ethnic armed conflict

South Sudan: Most likely to see second-order conflict problems

Philippines: Most likely to see an increase in authoritarianism

Syria: Most likely to see a shift to mass repression

Libya: Most likely to see non-state armed group fragmentation and alliances

Sudan: Most at risk of government collapse

Can you spot the common thread?

Come on ... you can do it.

Weak Knees and Clay Feet at the US Army War College

How can an organization full of people who engage in actual combat show so little spine in the face of the absolute worst organizations in out country? 

Why do we surrender to the heckler's veto?

Let's talk about an organization we have not discussed much lately - the German American Bund ... oh wait, I'm sorry - C.A.I.R. - the organization described as an an “unindicted co-conspirator" in the first World Trade Center attack by the Department of Justice.

Let's go to Raymond Ibrahim for his summary;

The US Army War College (USAWC) has just surrendered to the demands of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an “unindicted co-conspirator,” to quote the US Department of Justice, in the largest terror-funding case in American history, and a designated “terrorist organization” in nations such as the UAE.

The June 19, 2019 planned lecture on my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West at the US Army War College (USAWC) in Carlisle Barracks was canceled due to a CAIR-induced hysteria that focused on presenting me — a native Arabic speaker of Egyptian/Middle Eastern descent — as a “racist” and “white nationalist” who is out to incite American soldiers to murder Muslims.

Although the USAWC claims that the event has been “postponed” — and that CAIR’s smear campaign had nothing to do with its decision — what really happened, along with the troubling lessons learned along the way, follow.

You need to read the whole thing - especially C.A.I.R.'s offer to "help."

Hey new active SECDEF and former Army Secretary - get hold of your organization.