July 10, 2009

Boldness of Qaeda Affiliate in Africa Raises Fears in West

By ERIC SCHMITT and SOUAD MEKHENNET

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa has carried out a string of slayings, bombings and other lethal attacks against Westerners and African security forces in recent weeks that have raised fears the terrorist group may be turning a more deadly corner.

American and European security counterterrorism officials say that the attacks may signal the return of foreign fighters from the battlefields of Iraq, where they honed their bomb-making skills. The attacks also reflect Al Qaeda’s growing tentacles in the northern tier of Africa, outside the group’s main sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the officials say.

In just the past month, the group has claimed credit for killing a kidnapped British hostage in Mali, killing an American aid worker in Mauritania, murdering a senior Malian army officer in his home and ambushing a convoy of nearly two dozen Algerian paramilitary forces.

Last weekend, fighters from the Algeria-based affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, ambushed a Malian army patrol in Mali’s northern desert, killing nearly a dozen soldiers and capturing several others, American military officials said. Several militants were also killed.

Assessing the militant threat in North Africa is complicated. Some security and counterterrorism officials say the group is more a criminal gang — ransoming kidnapped Westerners for millions of dollars to finance their operations — than ideologically committed terrorists. Other terrorism officials point to the attacks as evidence of the group’s intent to expand its longtime antigovernment insurgency in Algeria to other North African countries and possibly Europe, where the group has financial and logistical supporters.

“AQIM has become much stronger in Algeria and Mauritania, and the killing of the British hostage and the American is a message they are not only concentrating on Maghreb issues, they are now part of the global jihad,” said a senior French counterterrorism official, using the acronym for the group’s name.

Last week, the leader of the Qaeda wing, Abdelmalek Droukdal, threatened a “flagrant war” against France in retaliation for an effort by France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to ban burqas, the head-to-toe garments, in the republic, calling them a symbol of “enslavement.”

The recent surge in violence has been less audacious than the group’s attack in December 2007, in which suicide bombers struck the United Nations and court offices in Algiers, killing 41 people and wounding 170 others. But some American intelligence analysts say there are initial signs that small numbers of foreign fighters from North Africa who fought in Iraq are returning home.

“Is there a threat? There sure is a threat,” Gen. William E. Ward, the head of the United States Africa Command, told reporters in Dakar, Senegal, recently.

Still other officials say the mayhem may be partly the result of an increasingly vicious rivalry between two Qaeda subcommanders in Mali — Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abu Zeid — a clash that underscores the kind of autonomous jihad cells that counterterrorism officials say are particularly hard to combat.

Lauren C. Ploch, an Africa specialist with the Congressional Research Service, said that the extremist Islamist ideology of Al Qaeda was unlikely to garner much sympathy or traction with the populations in the states of the Sahel belt, the southern boundary of the Sahara.

“Nevertheless,” Ms. Ploch said, “the vast spaces in northern Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and southern Algeria are extremely difficult to police, so it’s quite possible that we may see surges in extremist activity in certain countries depending on how well their neighbors are able to control their own territories.”

The group originated in the 1990s to fight Algeria’s secular government, and in 2007 it renamed itself from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It singled out Western targets even before the name change. In December 2006, militants in Algeria bombed a bus carrying workers with an affiliate of Halliburton, the American oil services company. A year later, gunmen wielding AK-47 rifles killed four French tourists in Mauritania.

The latest spate of violence began when the Qaeda group killed a Briton, Edwin Dyer, on May 31, one day after the expiration of its second deadline for its demand to be met. He had been taken hostage on Jan. 22 along with a Swiss citizen and two other tourists in Niger, close to the border with Mali, and was held in Mali.

The group demanded the release of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born Palestinian cleric held in Britain whom a Spanish judge has called the leading Qaeda lieutenant in Europe, as well as $14 million for Mr. Dyer and the Swiss national.

About two weeks later, gunmen in northern Mali killed a senior Malian army intelligence officer who had arrested several members of the Qaeda group, which uses the vast northern Malian desert as a staging area and support base.

Within days, Malian army forces retaliated, capturing a militant base near the Algerian border and killing more than two dozen fighters, according to Malian media reports.

At about the same time in neighboring Algeria, militants using roadside bombs and automatic rifles ambushed a convoy of paramilitary police about 110 miles east of Algiers, killing 18 members of the security forces.

Algerian security forces have long battled the Islamist militants, but security officials they are also now offering military and intelligence support to poorer neighboring countries like Mali, where the insurgents have sought refuge.

“With the kidnappings impacting on Mali’s tourism industry, the country seems to be taking the situation more seriously and the Algerians are offering more support,” said Jeremy Binnie, a senior analyst at Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Center.

General Ward, the American commander in Africa, said in response to the killings that Army Green Berets would redouble training efforts under way with several regional militaries to improve their counterterrorism abilities.

In Europe, the authorities are eyeing Al Qaeda’s North African wing warily, expressing concern about its threats to attack European countries that have deployed troops to Afghanistan.

“What we see here is indeed a lot of logistic support from people who are active in Maghreb,” one Belgian security official said. “They are collecting money, faking papers and giving safe haven. They are active in indoctrination and radicalization of people and sending them for training.”

But these officials have mixed views on whether the group can strike outside Africa.

“We don’t rule out that Al Qaeda will try to attack us and then AQIM would play probably an important role,” said August Hanning, state secretary of the German Interior Ministry. “But we see an increase of danger for German interests in North Africa and the Sahel.”

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt and Barcelona, Spain.

Charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. (www.charitywater.org)

For more information, please contact Jared Peterson at jmp1782@gmail.com or at 508.284.5660.

The best global strategy for the US may be the one that won the Cold War

By Commander Philip Kapusta and Captain Donovan Campbell  |  July 27, 2008

A recent piece published by The Boston Globe points out the similarities between the United States’ fight against communism during the Cold War and the current struggle against radical Islam . The article, by Commander Philip Kapusta and Captain Donovan Campbell, is titled “How to Contain Radical Islam: The best global strategy for the US may be the one that won the Cold War”. Kapusta and Campbell base their assessment of the global setbacks currently experienced by the US military in the War on Terror on one underlying problem: the US has yet to formulate a holistic strategy to guide the prosecution of the war. Their new policy, dubbed “neocontainment” focuses on the war of ideas, and further, isolation of the most dangerous ideas from main stream Islam. They propose a strategy based on the Cold War era NSC-68, a National Security Council report which encourages the building of “stable, moderate nations on the periphery of the arc of instability”, as opposed to (arguably) self-defeating military confrontations.

While Kapusta and Campbell emphasize the strategic importance of stabilizing Lebanon and Pakistan, the fundementals of Neocontainment, namely development of economic infrastructure, are exactly what The Neutral Development Project stands for. Sinse we were founded in 2006, we have advocated a policy of providing constructive alternatives to those most at risk of being dragged into harmful political or religious conflict. 

Here is an exerpt from the article:

…The path dictated by NSC-68 was not a straight line to the collapse of the USSR, but the strategy proved remarkably effective. Communism expanded outside of its containment zone in a few instances, but, for the most part, the United States and its allies successfully implemented the indirect approach recommended by NSC-68. When the once mighty Soviet empire imploded in 1991, it was almost precisely as NSC-68 had predicted.

Strikingly, if one replaces “communism” with “Islamic extremism” and “the Kremlin” with “Al-Qaeda,” NSC-68 could have been written in 2002, not 1950. Like communism, Islamic extremism lusts for political power, in this case through the restoration of the caliphate and the imposition of Sharia law on all peoples. Indeed, language from NSC-68 rings eerily true today - it described the Soviets as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own.” Al Qaeda and its ilk are the latest in a long line of narrow ideologies that claim to provide the only true answer to life’s existential questions. And as with Soviet communism, the idea has a geographic nucleus.

Our task now is to envelop this nucleus with prosperous, stable countries whose inhabitants are free to choose their own beliefs. Working from the outside in, the United States must partner with nations on the periphery to help them build a stronger middle class, enhance their education systems, improve basic health, and lower government corruption. We must help elected and unelected governments to allow greater empowerment of their citizens, whether through a slow march toward representative government or expanded economic opportunity for all classes.

Lebanon in the Middle East and Pakistan in Central Asia are some of the best countries in which to begin and expand this work. In Lebanon’s complex political landscape, Iran and Syria support the Islamist Hezbollah party-cum-militia, while the United States backs the secular Lebanese government. Another Islamist movement, Fatah al Islam, enjoys a nebulous connection to Al Qaeda. We should be using our country’s massive financial resources to allow the Lebanese government to outspend its competitors by a factor of 10, showering much-needed aid on the Lebanese people, and thus de-legitimizing their opponents and debunking their ideology. Instead, the government cannot meet its basic responsibilities, and extremist movements are increasingly seen as the only institutions capable of bettering lives.

In Pakistan, the extremist cancer in the northwestern provinces continues to grow despite $5.5 billion in direct US military aid. Pakistan’s dangerously unstable new civilian government lacks the capability and will to challenge Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the region. Instead of focusing exclusively on military operations along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, America must broaden its scope to encompass other priorities: tension with India over Kashmir and education reform. Only after a comprehensive Indo/Pakistani border settlement will Pakistan shift its military energy from south to north. In the interim, it will placate us with occasional forays into the frontier provinces, but such adventures will never be decisive. We must also help Pakistan provide a counterweight to the hundreds of Wahabi madrassas spreading virulent extremism. As long as these fundamentalist institutions remain the only option for much of the country’s poor, Islamic extremists in the tribal areas will enjoy a virtually inexhaustible manpower pool. In the long run, 5,000 secular teachers for Pakistan’s middle schools will do more for America’s national security than will 50,000 AK-47s for the country’s army.

A clear new containment strategy will help us recognize the importance of engaging with such nations at pivotal points before they slide into repressive autocracy (Pakistan in 2001) or all-out chaos (Afghanistan in 1989).

It is popular to blame these failings on the attention and resource deficits created by the Iraq war. But they are just as much the result of the black-and-white mentality that governs our approach to foreign affairs - liberal democracy or nothing. In working with periphery states, we must be willing to accept outcomes that are less than perfect. Indeed, we must be willing to accept ruling regimes that may not like us at all. We are not trying to create mini-Americas scattered across the globe; we are looking to foster stable, free countries whose people will have little interest in the repressive ideology of our enemies.

On occasion, extremist governments hostile to the existence of the United States (Hamas in the Gaza Strip) will enjoy broad popular support, but preemptive wars must become a thing of the past. We cannot say that we value freedom and then seek political change through force when the choice of the people produces regimes not to our liking. However, the military can, and must, be used to target individuals bent on terror aimed at American interests. Furthermore, if a nation enables attacks on our homeland, as Afghanistan did under the Taliban, then we must use all necessary means to defend ourselves. On rare occasions, this will require full-out war and post-invasion reconstruction….

Read the entire article here.

Link to the Article

Playing the Rice Card 

by G. Pascal Zachary

 For years, Western experts promised Africans that free-market ideology would save them from poverty and famine. Now, one African country is showing that sometimes, a little protectionism can work wonders

Farming has suddenly become fashionable again. Once a largely ignored corner of the development business, agriculture is now a hot field among experts more versed in structural adjustments than crop rotations. Record prices for cereal crops such as wheat, corn, and rice have many of them viewing farmers as a key component of economic growth in poor countries and as a supply-side solution to the political instability those high prices have caused everywhere from West Africa to Bangladesh. Researchers should be careful, however, to learn the right lessons from the countries that are already harvesting success.

Consider the case of Uganda. The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade. Rice production is expected to reach an astonishing 180,000 metric tons this year, up from 135,000 in 2006 and 102,000 in 2005. Consumption of imported rice, meanwhile, fell by half from 2004 to 2005 alone, and by half again from 2005 to 2007.

Uganda’s importers, seeing the shift, have invested in new mills in the country, expanding employment and creating competition for farmer output, thereby improving prices. New mills, meanwhile, lowered the cost of bringing domestic rice to market. While people in developing countries across the globe are clamoring about the sharp rise in food prices, Ugandans are still paying about the same for rice as they always have. And Uganda is poised to start exporting rice within East Africa—and beyond.

The secret of Uganda’s homegrown success? Ignoring decades of bad Western advice.

In the 1990s, African governments sharply reduced or eliminated duties on imported rice, urged on by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and some influential free-market economists. The assumption was that richer countries would reciprocate by curtailing subsidies to their own farmers. That never happened. In response, a few African countries have raised duties on rice, violating a key tenet of neoliberal trade philosophy. Protectionism is supposed to be bad—so bad that international advisors have spent decades convincing African governments to open their markets as wide as possible to imports.

One of the leaders of Uganda’s rice revolution is Gilbert Bukenya, the country’s vice president and its leading advocate for the commercialization of agriculture. I first met Bukenya at his home on the shores of Lake Victoria, where he laid out the basic philosophy. “By farming smarter, Ugandans not only can grow more, they can earn more money,” he told me. An advocate of food self-sufficiency, Bukenya wants Ugandans to eat more homegrown rice, boosting local farmers and rice millers while at the same time freeing hard cash for other uses. Bukenya has long promoted a new African rice that grows in “uplands” (as opposed to wetland “paddies”) and requires less water.

Embracing a new variety is only part of the working-smarter formula. Once rice output began to expand, Bukenya and other Ugandan politicians played another card: They stumped for a duty of 75 percent to be imposed on foreign rice. The legislature passed the duty, which stimulated domestic rice production further.

Uganda’s success in expanding its rice production is especially interesting because the people of sub-Saharan Africa spend nearly $2 billion a year on rice grown outside Africa. The amount Africans spend on rice alone equals the national budgets of the governments of Ghana and Senegal combined. With the help of wise policies, African farmers could grow much more rice on their own, maybe even enough to eliminate virtually all imported rice. Eliminating rice imports would benefit Uganda by ensuring a local supply as Asian rice is becoming less available and more expensive.

What Uganda recognized is that the world’s major rice exporters actually practice the opposite of what the World Bank and IMF preach. Much of the rice grown in Pakistan, Vietnam, and especially the United States is stimulated by subsidy payments to farmers. Then the rice is “dumped” into African markets at low prices—sometimes below the cost of production. These producers also maintain stiff duties against imported rice, contradicting free-market ideology but helping protect domestic farmers against global competition. And for good reason: Virtually every successful Asian economy was built on selective trade barriers—and in China and India, the world’s two fastest growing economies, such barriers remain in force. Even South Korea and Japan maintain massive duties on imported rice simply to protect the livelihoods of their own rice farmers. Rice duties are working in Uganda—and also in Nigeria, where rice output is also soaring. In both countries, the value of imported rice is declining and locally produced rice is winning the hearts and minds of ordinary consumers.

Rice is just one example. African governments might wish to repeat Uganda’s success with other crops (which ones depends on specific trade flows and the agricultural strengths of the particular country). But African governments should be encouraged to rely on a mix of economic tools, including farm protectionism, aimed at helping indigenous producers.

Uganda and other African countries need to be careful that protectionism doesn’t become a cover for inefficiency or corruption. And selective protectionism is no panacea for Africa even when such policies effectively aid local producers. But, after decades of hardship, economic self-reliance is a worthy goal for most African countries. Uganda’s rice experiment deserves wider attention, if only because it shows that Africans aren’t passive victims of global economic forces. They are fighting back.

Bill Gates Issues Call
For Kinder Capitalism

Famously Competitive, Billionaire Now Urges Business to Aid the Poor

By ROBERT A. GUTH
January 24, 2008; Page A1

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But later today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

“We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

In particular, he said, he’s troubled that advances in technology, health care and education tend to help the rich and bypass the poor. “The rate of improvement for the third that is better off is pretty rapid,” he said. “The part that’s unsatisfactory is for the bottom third — two billion of six billion.”

Three weeks ago, on a flight home from a New Zealand vacation, Mr. Gates took out a yellow pad of paper and listed ideas about why capitalism, while so good for so many, is failing much of the world. He refined those thoughts into the speech he will give today at the annual Davos conference of world leaders in business, politics and nonprofit organizations.

Among the fixes he plans to call for: Companies should create businesses that focus on building products and services for the poor. “Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces,” he plans to say.

 For the rest of the article, link to The Wall Street Journal.

Establishing this basic economic infrstructure is the first step toward ending the bloodshed in places like the Horn of Africa, and ultimately achieving sustainable peace.

“First, there has undoubtedly been a serious breach of Kenya’s electoral law. A result arrived at illegally is itself illegal. Second, the poorest, whether in the slums of Nairobi or in the rural areas, had all too little to lose in the recent violence. Most people living in the slums are inhabitants of shanties erected at the whim of rapacious landlords, who are themselves part of the political class. Some of  these residents have now had their votes stolen as well. Kenya requires a solution that restores social harmony and cohesion. A political understanding between party leaders is necessary, but not sufficient. Without sider social harmony, life for most of Kenya’s people will become even more intolerable. The poorest attack their equally poor neighbours and set fire to the little they have in common not because they hate these targets in themselves but because they see no other adequate way to express their grievances…”

Civil unrest stems from a desperation bred by a lack of basic necessities. Throughout history hungry, unemployed groups who lack the infrastructure necessary for self sustainment have been the most likely to violently rise up against political oppression. The events in Kenya should act as a reminder that the first and most important requisite for social harmony is a fair, healthy economy.

Taking the war on terror to Africa

The United States is planning a new strategic command to take the global War on Terror to the Horn of Africa

Sept. 17, 2007 issue - America is quietly expanding its fight against terror on the African front. Two years ago the United States set up the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with nine countries in central and western Africa. There is no permanent presence, but the hope is to generate support and suppress radicalism by both sharing U.S. weapons and tactics with friendly regimes and winning friends through a vast humanitarian program assembled by USAID, including well building and vocational training. In places like Chad, American Special Forces train and arm police or border guards using what it calls a “holistic approach to counterterrorism.” Sgt. Chris Rourke, a U.S. Army reservist in a 12-man American Civil Affairs unit living in Dire Dawa, in eastern Ethiopia, says it comes down to this: “It’s the Peace Corps with a weapon.”

Read on at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20657234/site/newsweek/

“When I realized that there is no education, no health services, no development, and children don’t go to school, I knew that there were problems.”

Here is a June 2007 New York Times video report on the ONLF by  Jeffrey Gettleman

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B2UsCzim6cc

Here is a key exerpt describing the project:

…This week sees the realisation of Mr. Negroponte’s five-year dream. After field testing in Nigeria and Brazil, the OLPC project’s first model, a rugged little green laptop called the XO that can run on batteries, solar power, a miniature windmill or hand- or foot-crank, goes into mass production. Schoolchildren in developing countries will start receiving the remarkable computer from October onwards.

The first batch is being supplied to some 30 of the world’s poorest countries for $176 apiece. As production builds up at Quanta, the huge Taiwanese laptop-maker that is producing the machine for OLPC, Mr Negroponte hopes to drive the unit cost down to $100.

It is no secret that the presence of education in a society is one of the most essential elements necessary for basic economic development. Thanks to the OLPC, “economically deprived children will have the chance to feel the exhilaration of computer-based learning”. To say that we at NDP are impressed would be an understatement.