So said Pat Robertson during a speech in Israel in which he declared his opposition to a Palestinian state and threatened to form his own political party if Bush backed the establishement of Jerusalem as the capital thereof.

(link via Brian Ulrich, who needs to get himself an RSS feed)

Speaking of Israel, I was going to post about this yesterday, but couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. Sarah Wildman wistfully linked to a snippet about the then somewhat-operative Israeli-Palestinian peace process from the 2000 vice-presidential debate. Although she acknowledged that the situation had changed since 2000, she appeared to think that some kind of resumption of negotiations is possible at this point. It isn't. Arafat is persona non grata, and there is nobody else.

While I disagree with much of what is going on in Israel on moral grounds, something that was drilled into my head by reading The Missing Peace was that political timing is everything in this highly dynamic conflict. What is possible on Monday may be out of the question on Tuesday. Therefore events and statements that seem routine or unconnected to the casual observer are usually carefully calibrated towards some end, and end up imposing either temporary constraints or creating new opportunities for peace. Right now, although Israel has pretty much shut off the intifada, there are basically no opportunities aside from Ariel Sharon's unilateral pullout from Gaza, which is why you get inflammatory interviews like this one which aren't really statements of policy so much as attempts to give Sharon maneuvering room with the hard right. Of course, as the Head Heeb rightly warns, actions aimed at short-term objectives may pose problems down the road.

Matthew Yglesias--yes, the Matthew Yglesias, discovers that Condi Rice is unaware of the actual numbers behind the "75% of known leadership" figure. Pressed by Wolf Blitzer to explain how the percentage was derived, Condi stammers "I would suspect that that's in the tens to hundreds -- tens to 100."

To borrow a phrase from the Bush administration, let me be clear: the CIA's clandestine service has done an amazing job in tracking down and finding Al Qaeda leaders. The CIA has taken a beating for its failure to prevent the September 11 attacks and its poor intelligence on weapons of mass destruction Iraq, and deservedly so. But despite years of neglect, the Directorate of Operations has been able to swing into action with remarkable agility, and despite a rising global tide of violence the intelligence and law enforcement community generally has done a good job of cooperating with their partners around the globe. Additionally, a good number of top Al Qaeda people have been killed in military action in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it is somewhat disquieting that the National Security Advisor, the President's personal foreign policy expert, is either underbriefed, forgetful, or uninterested in details. Clearly, the CIA via someone on the NSC staff fed her the 75% figure and she didn't delve any further. Good enough for the campaign trail, good enough for Condi!

As for me, I'm not sure exactly which definition of "known leadership" the CIA is using here. Dan Darling put together his own list from memory here, but I have no idea what the criteria were or how accurate and comprehensive it is. A little over a year ago, the CIA released a report saying that it had killed "two-thirds" of top Al Qaeda leaders, which in my understanding meant about 20 out of 30. Not "hundreds." But an achievement nonetheless.

In any case, here is how Ronan Gunaratna described Al Qaeda's "known leadership" in his 2002 book, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror:

Immediately below the emir-general in Al Qaeda's structure stands the shura majlis, or consultative council, which consists of very experienced members. Among the first to join were Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Aby Ayoub al-Iraqi, al-Banshiri, Abu Hafs el-Khabir, Abu Ibrahim al-Iraqi, Dr. Fadhl el-Masry, Aby Faraj al-Yemeni, Abu Fadhlal-Makkee (from Mecca), Sheikh Sayyid al-Masry, a Qaricept al-Jizaeri (an Algerian Koranic scholar), Khalifa al-Muscat Omani, Saif al-Liby, Abu Burhan al-Iraqi and Abu Muhammad al-Masry Saad al-Sharif. Periodically shura members leave and new members are appointed. To ensure legitimacy and loyalty, Osama appoints prominent personalities and trusted personal followers to key positions. Although Al Qaeda is a political group driven by an interpretive religious ideology, it operates on the basis of a cultural network, recruiting known persons, yet there is no formal procedure for recruitment, appointment or promotion. While it considers merit, ability and performance, Al Qaeda determines its promotions and appointments on the basis of ties of family, friendship and nationality.

Immediately below the shura majlis and reporting to it are four operational committess: military; finance and business; fatwa and Islamic study; and media and publicity, which ensure the smooth day-to-day running of Al Qaeda, each headed by an emir. While the emir and deputy emir have responsibility for each committee, its members also form compartmentalized working groups for special assignments. At times handpicked members of these committees, especially the military, conduct special assignments for Osama or for his designated operational commanders. Some members serve in more than one committee or are rotated between them.

And so on and so forth. But Gunaratna also notes:

As a fluid and dynamic, goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented organization, Al Qaeda is always liable to change its structure, according to circumstances. That structure has evolved considerably since the East Africa bombings, but that of the shura majlis and the four committees persists. Although Osama has felt the need to expand his operations, security threats to it curbed many of its overt activities, and he and Al Qaeda became increasingly clandestine, chossing to operate through front, cover and sympathetic organizations, the exception being it activities in Afghanistan.

So there you have it.

Parts 1b through 3 of "The Single Most Serious Threat to the National Security of the United States" will be forthcoming as time permits, but since I spent seven hours today getting myself certified in Basic First Aid, I haven't had a chance to research up anything sufficiently detailed for what I imagine for my future posts.

I did get a chance to finish up the book I was currently reading through, Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God. I picked this one up off the shelves of the BPL to tide me over until my booklist order arrived for my South Asia course, and while it kept my attention, in the end it proved more valuable for visual and anecdotal texture than anything else. Kaplan makes some interesting observations and has a nice talent for describing the lands and some of the characters that populate Afghanistan, but offers no systemic analysis of the muj and not much in the way of a coherent narrative - befitting the nature of the conflict, perhaps, but his choppy chapter layouts, which weave in and out of multiple fronts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, multiple historical eras, and multiple trips in and out of Afghanistan -- make it hard to tell what, if anything, he's getting at in any particular chapter of the book.

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Of all the classes I'm taking this year, I think my Islam in South Asia course has the potential to be the most interesting -- in part because it is all very much new frontiers for me personally in my studies, in part because of the increased profile of South and Central Asia in our post-9/11 security conceptions, and also in large part because of the professor himself. A former reporter in Afghanistan during the jihad (he briefly met bin Laden "back when he was nobody"), a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, and an expert on political Islam in its various permutations, Professor Haqqani leavens his considerable personal experience (he's recently mentioned his friend former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a possible guest speaker at some point in class) by engaging readily with his students; a diplomat's skills at personability, no doubt.

In any case, my having come to the class already familiar with (and with plenty more questions about) the broad outlines of the Afghan conflict and the twin roles of Pakistan and the US in shaping the anti-Soviet jihad through having read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars has given me a bit of a rapport with him, but not so much that I wasn't rather startled when out of the blue in class last Thursday he asked me if I'd be willing to comb through the book for some quotes he would be using in a book he's working on. Well... sure, why not? I've certainly never been asked to be a research assistant before (if you could call it that) but hey, I'm not about to pass up the opportunity. So last weekend, borrowing his copy of the book (Amazon just delivered mine yesterday), I set about skimming over the pages again looking for quotes (which, having compiled and handed on to him last Monday, I've now got burning a hole in my hardrive waiting to be put to use in some blog posts; I've attached the complete list I found at the end of this post for others' use, and there are a lot of them -- the one in this post's title on page 166 definitely being my personal favorite) on the liasons between the US CIA and the Pakistani ISI and how the Americans were initially content to a great extent to sit back and allow the Pakistanis control where US money would be funnelled. This lax oversight of American money and materiel is a dominant theme in the early parts of Coll's book, -- having set the CIA to the goal of bleeding the Soviets, the Americans in Islamabad and Washington, D.C. left questions of who would be undertaking that task (and thus gaining training and support) and what kind of political future might follow to Pakistan's ISI and ruling junta under the political Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.    more »