Los Angeles- The AfPak Channel has an incredible photo essay that Messr. Mohammed Qayoumi, president of Cal State East Bay, gave them after he scanned a 1950′s era image book published by the Afghan Ministry of Planning in the now relatively very quaint days of the Zahir Shah monarchy’s Cold War zenith. Obviously the book is strictly representative of Kabul in that era though one must know that modernization was the order of the day in neighboring Iran under the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and to a lesser degree under the dizzying, revolving door of Pakistani regimes of PM’s Khawaja Nazimuddin, Mohammed Ali Bogra, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar and Ayub Khan to Afghanistan’s east and south when pro-Western foreign and domestic policies were in vogue throughout the post-colonial realm. Afghanistan, which had virtually no imperialistic baggage to shed, was attempting to move forward wedged, as always, betwixt and between “great” powers of the twentieth century. These so-called great powers of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, and Eisenhower Doctrine-era America among others, saw Afghanistan as a barren polo ground where Cold War manoeuvring was in play. “What an unlucky country.”
A photo from John Kiriakou's The Reluctant Spy showing the theft of diplomatic documents by American agents in Peshawar, Pakistan in early 2002. My Afghan visa application is somewhere in there.
New York- In October of 2004, I received a strange call from an FBI agent at their Manhattan headquarters named Teresa Meehan. Agent Meehan has apparently been tailing me and clipped her business card to a piece of my mail in Brooklyn at the time to let me know she was on the case. What case that was, I had no idea at the time.
The other week I was browsing the new non-fiction releases at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and I picked what looked like another ex-CIA tell all. The Reluctant Spy by former Agency man John Kiriakou caught my attention for some reason and I started flipping through it looking for nuggets until I saw a strange photo in the center. I was of a van packed with files in Peshawar, Pakistan in February of March of 2002 claiming to be from the “Taliban Embassy” (actually the Afghan consulate but I won’t split hairs). It looks like I finally got my answer to how agent Meehan was trying to find me five and a half years back. Of course then I had to skim the entire book to find the corresponding entry. According to Kiriakou, an enterprising NY/NJ Port Authority Detective named Thomas “Tommy” McHale who was, for some reason, working for the FBI in Pakistan after 9/11, asked permission from the Pakistan authorities to break into the building under the cover of night and abscond with everything inside which must’ve included my application for an Afghan tourist visa in November of 2000. The documents were brought to Islamabad and then flown to the Washington area where they were not examined until the spring of 2004 (which would explain the gap in time I had been trying to figure out) because bureaucrats claimed they did not have people to translate the documents (though many innocent visa applications like mine and my accompanying Swiss backpacker friend were obviously in English) from Pashto and Dari into English which is apparently the sole language U.S. government officials are capable of reading. Kiriakou says the documents sit today in a warehouse in suburban Maryland like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be reexamined.
When I was called by agent Meehan, she asked me, preposterously, if I had ever attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. I practically laughed her off the phone back in October of 2004, imagining her sitting in her cubicle in lower Manhattan with a grimacing, simplistic picture of George Walker Bush somewhere in the vicinity. Then I quickly reflected on how pathetic it was that my government could be this bumbling. While staying in Lahore in March 2007, I took a quick side trip to Peshawar and barged into the Afghan consulate there to interview the sitting Consul General. I was told the Consul was busy and was pointed in the direction of the office of the Vice Consul. He was a youngish Tajik that claimed he had no answers for me and was incapable of speculating when asked. Kiriakou’s book seemed to answer one burning question: how long was the Peshawar Afghan consulate in control of the Taliban after they had been ejected from Kabul? I found it peculiar that no one seemed to have any clue to what I thought to be a fairly straightforward question. According to The Reluctant Spy, Agent McHale and his men broke into the compound several months after the Taliban had been overthrown and the Bonn conference had installed a new government with Hamid Karzai as its head. From the book’s description, it sounds like the place was manned by a chowkidar (caretaker) who was arrested at the time by local police for questioning. So there was definitely a period of months between the fall of the Taliban and when the post-Bonn government gained control of this ever so important consulate. Interesting…at least to me. One of the most heavily covered events, at least in terms if the sheer number of journalists on the ground at the time, and no one, including local Peshawaris, could give me an answer to this simple question. Eight years on, I think I have found most of the answer.
MLM's third issue.
New York- The new issue of Militant Leadership Monitor is online. In this issue we have two pieces from two of Yemen’s three fronts. A profile of Adel al-Abbab of AQAP by Murad Batal al-Shishani and a bio of Abdulmalik al-Houthi leading the Zaidi rebellion in the country’s north by Michael Horton. Moving across the Arabian Sea up to Pakistan, Syed Adnan Shah Ali Bukhari tells us of the brutality of Ibn-e-Amin in the strife-torn Swat Valley. Heading west, we have a profile of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, a hard bitten Tuareg rebel leader hailing from the Mali-Algeria border. Additionally, I have briefs on the arrest in Karachi of Mullah Omar’s son-in-law and the death of JI’s Bali bomber, Dulmatin, in a suburb of Jakarta last month.
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Categories: Insurgency, Pakistan, Pashtunistan, Sahel, Yemen Tags: Abdulmalik Houthi, Adel al-Abbab, Agha Jan, Andrew McGregor, AQAP, Dulmatin, Houthi, Houthi rebellion, Ibn e Amin, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, Jamestown Foundation, Michael Horton, Militant Leadership Monitor, Murad Batal al-Shishani, Syed Adnan Shah Ali Bukhari, Taureg rebellion
New York- I have a new report out with the Jamestown Foundation from our December 9th, 2009 conference.
“While the Arab Middle East is political Islam’s ideological and historical core, South Asia and Southeast Asia, concentrated in the Indonesian archipelago, make up the modern demographic core of the Muslim world. Advocates of political jihadism have been adept at exploiting pre-existing territorial and ethnic grievances, both perceived and real, in these highly complex and fragmented states. Terror networks in these tumultuous mega-regions have also been cleverly calculating in their agitation of simmering disputes that have arisen from the communal tensions of religious difference that have existed in varying degrees since the region’s violent Cold War-era decolonization.
To better understand the social fabric of terrorism in South and Southeast Asia, The Jamestown Foundation held a panel entitled, “Terrorist Trends in South Asia,” as a component of its annual terrorism conference on December 9th, 2009 at the National Press Club, “The Changing Strategic Gravity of al-Qaeda”. The contents of that panel, including full transcripts, question and answer sessions, executive summaries, slide presentations, panelist biographies and the full transcript of keynote speaker Bruce Riedel’s presentation.”
New York- The new issue of Militant Leadership Monitor is online over at the Jamestown site. In our 2nd issue, I have another article on a recently killed Abu Sayyaf leader named Albader Parad who was recently taken down in a firefight in Jolo with Philippine marines. The death of Parad may yield the eventual decline of the ASG and could be significant to the future of U.S. involvement in the southern Philippines.
Other articles in this issue include:
• A profile of AQAP leader Said al-Shihri by Murad Batal al-Shishani
• A profile of AQIM leader Abedelmalek Droukdel by Camille Tawil
• A profile of radical Jamaican cleric Sheikh al-Faisal by Chris Zambelis
• Briefs by me on the capture by Iran of Jundullah leader Abdolmalek Rigi and capture by Pakistan of Afghan Taleban leader Mullah Abdul Salam
Categories: Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan Tags: Abdelmalek Droukdel, Abdelmalek Rigi, Abu Sayyaf, Albader Parad, AQAP, AQIM, Jamestown Foundation, Mullah Abdul Salam, Rigi capture, Said al-Shihri
The Hazrat Bal shrine on Dal lake in Srinagar. According to Shadow War by Arif Jamal, a temporary theft of the Prophet's hair relic from Hazrat Bal is what helped to ignite the still ongoing insurgency in the Kashmir Valley. ©2007 Derek Henry Flood
New York- I attended an event at Asia Society in New York last Thursday called India and Pakistan: Back from the Brink? that dealt largely with the never ending fight over Kashmir. From India was C. Raja Mohan, author of Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy and current Kissenger Chair at the Library of Congress. From Pakistan was Dr. Adil Najam, professor of International Relations at Boston University. No one from the other major stakeholder, China (with its own slice of occupied Kashmir called Aksai Chin) was present nor was there a Kashmiri to represent the people of Kashmir save for an audience member who spoke up. The event was moderated by Briton Robert Templer from the International Crisis Group. Raja Mohan explained to the audience that the Musharraf years between 2004-2007 were more productive toward a modicum of Indo-Pak peace than the sum of foreign relations in the previous four decades. All of this was derailed by the end of Musharraf’s one-man, rather unipolar military-civilian government, and of course the vile Mumbai terror attack in late November of 2008. Mohan said that the post-Musharraf power structure in Islamabad had complicated things in that the Singh government was now dealing with a Kayani-Zardari-Gilani troika rather than just talking to and dealing with one man as it had done for years with General Pervez Musharraf.
From Left: C. Raja Mohan, moderator Robert Templer, and Adil Najam. ©2010 Derek Henry Flood
With the prospect of a getting a peace process back on track, Mohan said that such a process must be able withstand pressure from the spoilers. That is to say if Lashkar-e-Tayyba or another Pakistani terror group launches a large scale attack on the Indian heartland, that peace talks will not automatically be turned off at the tap in response. Doing so would hand another victory to those waging asymmetrical warfare/mass murder in South Asia. Adil Najam stated that he was more of an optimist than a realist when considering territorial disputes between India and Pakistan in a broader context. Najam is hopeful that by working on the Sir Creek dispute on the Arabian Sea and the Siachen glacier dispute on the Chinese frontier abutting the Chinese-controlled Shaksgam valley, the larger Kashmir dispute can be talked about more amicably if the less ideologically and emotionally-based conflicts can be settled peacefully. Najam believes there is currently a viable window open for the two primary players to work on the Kashmir dispute but that this window will not last and must be taken advantage of in the near term. Mohan said the Indians were unclear if Musharraf’s policies on Kashmir had been grandfathered in by the current Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and were therefore not sure of some of the parameters for discussion with their Himalayan opponent. On the subject of cross border terrorism, often Delhi’s biggest contention, Najam said that Pakistan will reign in terror groups when it realizes it is in its own interest to do so rather than as a component of Indian demands (that may further bruise Pakistan’s battered ego). Mohan concluded that Kashmir and the other disputes between India and Pakistan (he left out poor Bangladesh) are more of a post-1947 South Asian civil war stemming from the massive internecine partition than a classic war in the international sense.
A martyr's cemetery on the outskirts of Srinagar where exhumed bodies from so-called "fake encounters" are reburied. Fake encounters amount to what local human rights groups claim are the killing of innocent Kashmiri civilians by Indian security forces and posthumously labeling them "Pakistani militants" in order to justify their ongoing military occupation of the region. ©2007 Derek Henry Flood
New York- On Friday evening, I launched the first issue of my new publication with the Jamestown Foundation called Militant Leadership Monitor. I have the free teaser article about the death of a Moro militant in Waziristan a few weeks ago. It’s a subscription-based site that we are doing for $150 a year for twelve issues ($300 for institutions). Our inaugural issue has profiles of Qais al-Khazali by Rafid Fadhil Ali, Dr. Khalil Ibrahim by Dr. Andrew McGregor, and Ilyas Kashmiri by Arif Jamal plus briefs by yours truly on the surrender of an Oromo Liberation Front leaders in Addis Ababa and the shoot up of Mullah Krekar’s flat in Oslo. I think we’re off to a good start…2010 is shaping up to be an interesting year.
Lt. General Abdul Hadi Khalid informs the audience in Washington of his decades long experience serving in various incarnations of Afghanistan's security forces and recommends on-the-ground solutions for the AfPak battlespace. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood
New York- The Jamestown Foundation is selling a jam-packed DVD of its third annual terrorism conference entitled “The Changing Strategic Gravity of al-Qaeda” that was held on December 9th at the National Press Club. This extensive series of presentations covers everything from more mainstream topics like counterinsurgency, de-radicalization and AfPak to far lesser understood topics ranging from Mindanao to the Houthi war in northern Yemen. Jamestown is providing some of the most extensive coverage on all subjects terror related and this DVD is a must for anyone looking to get (way) beyond today’s headlines.
Dr. Andrew McGregor paints a highly detailed picture of violent Islamist movements in the fractured Somalia region. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood
Jamestown brings together indigenous experts and former government officials from the troubled states in question along with top Western area experts in an attempt to present the widest picture of the global threat spectrum as possible. From ideology to insurgent logistics, this DVD has it all. No one who seeks to truly understand the dangers posed to the global community by non-state actors can settle for thinking they have a handle on all the necessary knowledge by focusing on one area such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater when the next attack is conceived in, and launched out of, Yemen or Somalia. The insight provided therein constantly seeks to enhance the intellectual agility of those trying to grapple with a globalized insurgency.
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