The arrest by Pakistan of Abu Faraj al-Libbi is the first significant piece of good news we’ve had for a while in the struggle against Al Qaeda. Suspicious soul that I am, I checked on the possibility that his importance was being overstated, but there are plenty of sources (presumably predating his capture, since they go back to 2004), describing him as the Al Qaeda 3rd in command.
As the European struggle with terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s showed, terrorists can be beaten. Despite the fact that most of the policies our own leaders have pursued in the last few years have been either bothced (the failure to pursue bin Laden properly in Afghanistan) or actively counterproductive (Iraq), Al Qaeda is still losing ground on most fronts.
The only serious danger is that AQ will get its hands on nuclear weapons, and the most likely sources of such weapons are Pakistan and North Korea . The kid-glove treatment that’s been given to the Musharraf government is understandable in the light of this threat, and the network of jihadist sympathisers inside the Pakistani military and intelligence systems. On the other hand, dealings with North Korea have been botched horribly. Still, I think the odds are in our favour on this.
John Quiggin 
As the foundation of the USA, Eire and Israel showed, terrorists are not always beaten. Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? If it doth, none dare call it treason.
John, it’s interesting you don’t list Russia as a potential source of nuclear weapons (or at least material for such) given the reports of the internal decay of the Russian military, their huge arsenal, and the lack of progress in the joint American-Russian program to get their nuclear material secured.
I guess that the files of intelligence agencies might have some interesting tales to tell on this topic whenever they get declassified.
Isn’t it interesting that AQ people are captured in cities not in the unfriendly hills of West Pakistan.
mind as john Bolton wil tell you it was only ONE scientist that sold nuke secrets to other countries and terrorists.
Funny how the US lapped up such rubbish!
Robert, I agree Russia is the biggest worry. This is especially so of the danger of terrorists getting hold of sufficient amounts of HEU to produce a crude gun type nuclear bomb. Though, Pakistan is also a big problem. What is the best strategy to deal with them though I don’t know.
The Global War on Terrorism is a civil war within Islamic civilization, rather than between Islamia and Christendom. The jihadists use terror against the Western targets to prevent aid and trade civilizing these jurisdictions.
At the source, dont give them the motive: stay out of the direct fray and help the secular moderates against sectarian militants, which tends to delegitimate the former and provoke the latter.
At the target, dont give them the means: constrain the jihadists from gaining access to civilization threatening nucleo- and bio-weapons.
The policy implication are to:
– withdraw Western martial forces from Islamia and replace them with civil resources.
– get a global agency to maintain a general inventory of nuclear weapons and materials.
The Bush admin has generally moved backwards in both these areas. Other, deeper, forces seem to be spreading a secular moderate civilization throughout Islamia in spite, not because, of the Bush admins efforts.
Yeah. I can’t believe that the Russians still reportedly have several hundred tonnes of HEU stockpiled, given that Russia doesn’t need it to make nuclear weapons (they can do it with plutonium perfectly well).
The reason I don’t put Russia at the top of my list is that I don’t think AQ has the capacity to manufacture nuclear bombs. Radioactive material can also be used to make a ‘dirty bomb’, but my reading suggests that the threat from such a bomb has been overestimated in popular discussion.
I’m not sure why you think dirty bomb threats are overestimated. Presumably one of AQs goals is not just to kill a lot of people, but to do spectacular things that frighten people.
In the latter case, it seems reasonable to think that if AQ blasted a bit of radioactive material taken from medical waste around (which is presumably very easy to get), it would cause a huge amount of fear, panic and disorder (especially if they did it in a few cities at the same time), since whilst it might not kill a lot of people, no-one wants to get exposed to radiation.
If HEU is available, making a bomb is pretty damned easy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Gun_method
According to widely accepted accounts, all you need is to shape the HEU into two subcritical bits, have one bit at the far end of a “gun” barrel and fire the other bit into it. That’s the kind of thing your average bush engineer could probably build in a shed – if enough HEU is available.
Plutonium weapons, by contrast, require very precisely shaped plutonium, explosive charges triggered by synchronized electric detonators, a supplementary neutron source, and much more complex mathematical modelling.
That’s why having surplus HEU lying around is such a bad idea. It’s dangerous, dangerous stuff if it gets into the wrong hands. Lucky it’s so hard to make.
A fuller account of the South African nuclear program, which involved the building of a gun-type bomb, is here:
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja94albright
Not quite a bush mechanic’s job, but remember South Africa was trying to build something highly reliable, with a predicatble yield, that could be dropped by a bomber. Remember also that computer-controlled machine tools are much more common than they were in the 1980’s.
Jack Strocchi is correct.
Terrorists cost nothing to create and an enormous sum to destroy.
Terrorists are never beaten. They simply discover more constructive things to do.
Bush’s failure is that through his military policies he has ensured that terrorism remains a relatively constructive pursuit for Islamic fanatics.
Katz ‘says’: (when in fact he/she writes!) “Bush’s failure is that through his military policies he has ensured that terrorism remains a relatively constructive pursuit for Islamic fanatics”.
Well, it was Clinton’s inaction over 8 years that resulted/lead to September 11. So according to Katz’s (ill)logic, doing nothing is more effective!
Correlation is pretty clear: do nothing, get masacred; do something, and suffer the wrath of the ‘tired’, apologist left.
Katz, I should also point out that Islamic violence was widespread prior to Sept 11, it was mainly against non-westerners (moderate Muslims and non-Muslims) in countries such as Sudan, Algeria, Iran etc etc. Israel has, of course, suffered for many years from terrorism. Roberto, while I agree with you on Clinton’s inaction, the right side of politics also has a lot to answer for – support for the Taliban and SH in the past etc.
Roberto’s back for another dose of baiting. Excellent!
Can I recommend him/her/it/them the following easy-to-understand article on the “fallacy of the excluded middle”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Many other readers, meanwhile, will recognise that my comment above was designed to be an endorsement of the extra-military solutions suggested by Jack Strocchi.
MB, I’m not aware of how anything Jack S or I have said in this thread (although I don’t claim to speak for Jack S) in any way denies your point about the long history of Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism.
Bill Clinton is ‘left’? Classic.
Katz, my point (though a couple of words got left out) was that islamic terrorism was widespread prior to Sept 11 or Bush’s intervention. It tended to get ignored because non-westerners and Jews were mainly bearing the brunt of it. So this constant blaming of Howard, Bush Blair is rather naive.
One thing I do agree with critics of Bush though is that it is madness too spend so much money on Iraq and yet be only willing to spend a franction of the amount securing potential sources of nuclear material or sources for other potential WMDs.
MB, Islamicist, anti-western sentiment predated the rise of terrorist organisations.
Islamicist terror arose after Muslims identified their governments (Saudi Arabia, the Shah’s Iran, post-Nasser Egypt, and perhaps even Saddam’s Iraq) as puppets of the West, more particularly the United States. Anti-western sentiment mutated into Islamicism only after citizens of these countries were denied democratic rights of free speech and free assembly.
The two counter examples to this generalisation are perhaps Libya and Palestine. But I would argue that Libyan and Palestinian terrorism had less to do with Islamicism than with Arab nationalism.
There was a moment when the United States ceased to be perceived as an agent of liberation in the Islamic world and came to be perceived as an the major driver of repression. The rot began with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, continued with the destruction of Mossadeqh in Iran in the early 1950s, and became almost irreversible with the identification of US oil interests with the survival of the Saudi regime.
Bush isn’t responsible at all for the first two, and he is only partially responsible for the third. Bush’s failing is that he is utterly blind to how his military policies seem to reinforce and bring to completion the dark purposes perceived to lie behind the creation of Israel and the creation of puppets in the oil-rich Iraq and Iran.
But mostly, Bush is responsible for talking big, provoking resistence and then proving to be incapable of following through on his threats. He’s all hat and no horse and a lame-duck loser.
Katz you refer to the dark purposes perceived to lie behind the creation of Israel. Why don’t you be at least honest and say ‘that lie’ rather than perceived. Bush might be fucking things up at times. However, his critics are generally so blinded by their hatred of him and Blair etc that they have little useful to say – and at times side with the real dark forces in the world today.
MB, I’m more interested in attempting to analyse the perceptions and sentiments of others on the issues that you mention than in boring readers with my opinion about Israel.
I have my own opinions about Israel. Suffice to say that they are ambivalent but in no way approach rejectionist. But those opinions are irrelevant to the discussion in this thread.
To the matter at hand: Terrorism will continue to be a method of statecraft and resistence regardless of what I think about it. My beef with Bush, Blair and Howard is that they endorse terrorism on the one hand, and provoke it and establish the conditions for its success on the other hand. Their crimes are hypocrisy, arrogance and self-righteousness. Their methods are counter-productive to their own ambitions.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1602568,00.html
Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’
THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror�. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam� of the organisation.