Misguided. Well-meaning, but still misguided.
5,000 al-Qaeda killed or captured? Ok, but this ignores the other 117,000
trainees who went through the Afghan training camps prior to our invasion
and does not count the untold new trainees in camps across North Africa,
Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Thailand, Indonesia,
the Philippines and etc.
Fact that al-Qaeda has or has not made attacks, or attacks beyond a certain
scale does not mean that they do not have the capability to or that they
will not.
He is correct about the need to restrict Muslims, Mosques, and Saudi
funding.
-Bruce
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article4519.html
America Is Winning the War on Terror
by Paul Belien
09 August 2005
An interview with Richard Miniter on the War on Terror, the media's role in
promoting terrorism, and the role of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
According to <http://www.richardminiter.com/> Richard Miniter, an American
investigative journalist who is an expert on Islamic terrorism, the West is
capable of winning the war on terror. In fact, he thinks it is winning.
Miniter, who is a weekly guest on Fox News, has traveled extensively all
over the globe and was in Brussels last month on his way to Afghanistan.
<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/> The Brussels Journal interviewed him.
Paul Belien: Rich, you have written two bestselling books about terrorism so
far. The first one, Losing Bin Laden, is a chronicle of what happened under
Bill Clinton's presidency and the second one, Shadow War, is about the war
on terror during the first term of George W. Bush. In this last book you
argue that America is winning the war on terror. Europeans find this hard to
believe. Given the London bombing early this month, do you still think that
we are winning the war on terror?
Rich Miniter: Yes, I think that on balance we are winning, I think this for
several reasons. Since 9/11 more than 5,000 al Qaeda members have been
killed or captured in 102 countries. The war on terror is a lot larger than
the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It occurs on a global stage. A tremendous
number of terrorist plots by al Qaeda and its organizations against Western
targets have been foiled. A plan to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris was
prevented, as well as an attempt to sink U.S. and British war ships in the
Strait of Gibraltar by ramming zodiac inflated rafts loaded with bombs into
the hulk of these ships. In fact, the intelligence that led to the
unraveling of these plots came from prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That alone, I think, justifies holding those prisoners.
PB: Some people, however, say that we have called terrorism upon ourselves
by the invasion of Iraq. It seems that the threat of terrorism is worse now
than ever before.
RM: I don't think that is true. I have a minority contrarian view, but here
it is: The death toll on September 11, 2001 of the attacks on New York, the
Pentagon and Pennsylvania was more than 3,000 people. The Bali bombing on
October 12, 2002 killed 202 people. In the Madrid bombing of March 11, 2004,
191 people perished. That is one order of magnitude less than on 9/11. In
London earlier this month 53 people died. That is a second order of
magnitude less than on 9/11. If anything, the lethality of al Qaeda is
decreasing over time. The terrorists are losing their ability to carry out
large, complicated operations, where they need perfect surprise in order to
succeed and perfect coordination in order to have mass casualties. With the
exception of the bombings in 2003 in Turkey, no al Qaeda cell has been able
to strike twice in quick succession in the same country. American, European
and Allied governments have been very successful in breaking up these cells.
As for this idea that Iraq has brought terrorism onto Europe and onto
America, do not forget that 9/11 occurred before the Iraq war. Let us also
remember what happened in the 1990s when we had a series of al Qaeda attacks
on American, British and French interests from 1992 onwards. In one of these
attacks, on August 7, 1988, two U.S. embassies were hit, one in Kenya, the
other in Tanzania, killing hundreds of people, mostly Muslim Africans. That
certainly was not brought on by the Iraq war. The November 13, 1995 attack
in Riyadh which killed five Americans, two Indian nationals and an unknown
number of Saudis, that was not brought on by Iraq either. Nor was the attack
on U.S. forces in Somalia on October 3, 1993, which we now know was
organized by elements of al Qaeda, the 1993 WTC bombing, which killed seven
people (I say seven because I also count the unborn son of Monica Smith),
the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, the attempt to destroy the
Eiffel Tower by driving a plane into it in 1994, and the attempt to kill the
Pope in the Philippines in 1994.
PB: Some people say we have exacerbated the hostile feelings among Muslims
by invading Iraq.
RM: How do we measure public opinion in Muslim lands when these are all but
one, Iraq, dictatorships?
PB: They mean Muslim populations in Western Europe.
RM: This is simply asserted but not proven. How can they possibly know?
There has never been a scientific series of polls which has measured Muslim
public opinion in Europe over time, using the same methods. I do not know
whether to believe or disbelieve this assertion because I do not think there
is enough evidence one way or another to know for sure. What is amazing to
me is that people make assertions without feeling the obligation to bring
forth some kind of evidence that muslim public opinion in Europe or America
or anywhere has changed.
PB: Some people fear that if our secret services are going to control the
Muslim populations in Europe, then our civil liberties will have to be
limited and restricted. There was an
<http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2764> article recently by Daniel Pipes
in the NY Sun in which he says that France is doing a
<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/73> better job in fighting terrorism
than Britain because the British allow too many liberties to Muslim groups.
What do you think about that?
RM: I think it is fairly well established that the French have the most
restrictive counterterrorist policies in Europe and perhaps in the Western
world.
PB: And is it a good thing to have such restrictive policies?
RM: There are two questions here: one, does it work, and two, is it morally
justified? I do not know if it works. Certainly the French have stopped a
great number of plots, and France has not seen a widespread attack like
London, like Madrid, and like New York. So, is it because they are very good
or is it because they are lucky? I don't know. However, France is a
wonderful case for those who say we have to diminish civil liberties in
order to crack down on terrorism. France has the most restrictive and
perhaps the most effective counterterrorism policy, but France is still by
and large a free country. The biggest threat journalists face in France is
not censorship by the government but lawsuits by interested parties that do
not like what they have to say, and that is, of course, a problem in other
European countries, too, but is unrelated to the counterterrorism policies.
If Britain, Germany, America and other countries were to pursue a more
aggressive counterterrorism strategy it would probably look a lot like
France, which is not a nightmare scenario. France, for better or worse, is
not Nazi Germany, it is not Egypt, it is not Saudi Arabia, it is not Poland
in 1981, it is a state with a strong instinct for the survival of its people
and, so far, it seems to have been pretty effective.
PB: You are working on a third terrorism book: Misinformation. By this, I
think, you mean how the Western media are helping the terrorists in certain
ways.
RM: I think that is actually overstating my case a little bit. I do not
think the media are actively helping, with a few exceptions, the terrorists.
However, they have created an environment of poisonous skepticism, raising
questions about things where the truth is very easily known and is exactly
the opposite of what they are saying. Newsweek recently ran the story of the
Quran being flushed down the toilet to intimidate Muslims in the U.S. prison
at Guantanamo. Newsweek had this story from what it considered to be a
reliable source but the magazine failed to do some basic investigation.
Here are the questions that it did not ask: How many Qurans were distributed
by the U.S. military to prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere, how many do
they have now, are any missing? What are the dimensions of those Qurans?
This is important to know whether it is physically possible to flush such a
book down the toilet. In fact, the toilets they use at Guantanamo are not
flush toilets but chemical toilets. The Qurans could not have been flushed,
and even if they were put in a toilet they could not have gone down because
the access pipe is too small. If a journalist is given information by
sources he has an obligation to check out the facts that are knowable and
see whether the assertions are physically possible.
PB: But that is just an example of sloppy journalism. We also had that
during the Cold War. Can you give us another example of misinformation?
RM: A classic example is the assertion that Osama bin Laden is on dialysis.
This was misinformation put out by the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence
service, in late 1998. The Pakistanis were getting a lot of pressure from
the Clinton administration to turn over bin Laden for the attacks on the
embassies in Africa. Bin Laden was probably in Afghanistan, but the Taliban
government in Kabul had been set up by the Pakistanis. In fact, if you talk
with Pakistani officials they will very rarely refer to the border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead they refer to the Durand Line. They
consider Afghanistan to be an extension of Pakistan. So Pakistan set up the
Taliban in order to control that territory. It was a government created and
funded by the ISI. The Pakistanis did not want bin Laden to be handed over,
because he would reveal the degree of collusion between the Taliban, bin
Laden and the Pakistanis themselves. Moreover, they had future uses for him.
The Pakistanis were very shrewd. They figured out that if they could give
the Clinton administration a plausible excuse not to act, then it would not
act. They told the Americans: "Bin Laden is on dialysis and he will probably
die anyway."
This myth has continued long after 9/11 in the absence of any evidence. In
fact, there is lots of evidence to the contrary. After Bin Laden's personal
doctor, who was captured in Pakistan and held in U.S. custody for more than
three months, was released he gave a number of interviews. He said that bin
Laden had a bad back and other health problems but he certainly was not on
dialysis and had no kidney problems. Bin Laden himself has said to a
Pakistani journalist that he has no health problems at all. Doctors and
intelligence agents with medical backgrounds, who study bin Laden on his
tapes, point out that people who are on dialysis for years acquire a
discoloration of the skin and certain features none of which bin Laden
displays.
PB: You are going to Afghanistan. Do you think Afghanistan is the place
where bin Laden is hanging around nowadays?
RM: It is certainly possible. The Pakistanis say that he is in Afghanistan.
The Afghans say that he is either in Pakistan or in Iran. Certainly the
Afghans have a reason to turn him over. The Karzai government is
continuously destabilized by elements of al Qaeda and by the Taliban. To
this day there is major fighting in the Paktia province and other eastern
and southeastern provinces along the border with Pakistan. I do not think
that there has been enough skepticism of Pakistan's role in the war on
terror. In one sense they have done a lot. They have captured more than 700
al Qaeda members since 9/11, more than any other nation including Iraq or
Afghanistan, but we should be far more critical, not just on the human
rights record of Pakistan, but their general behavior.
PB: Pakistan is not on the list of the rogue states of the United States. So
Washington considers it to be an ally.
RM: It is an ally, but it is a very two-sided ally. As in the Cold War, in
the war on terror you will have to choose your enemies and your allies, and
sometimes you are choosing from the same pool.
PB: That takes us to another traditional ally of the United States: Saudi
Arabia. It is said that a group of rich Saudis is actually funding Muslim
fundamentalists. This seems to be an ally that is not really an ally. What
do you think about the Saudi position regarding the fight against al Qaeda?
RM: They are technically our friends. I do not think the Saudi state has
funded al Qaeda since 9/11, but individual sheiks and Saudi princes have
continued to fund it.
PB: If the state knows it, it can crack down on them and try to stop the
funding of al Qaeda.
RM: Let us first try to understand a little bit about Saudi Arabia. I am not
making excuses for them but I am saying that if we are going to criticize
them let us do it in an informed way. Saudi Arabia is run by two clouts of
people -- and I say "clouts" because they are very loosely affiliated and
yet they all matter. There are the clerics, about 4,000 of them, and there
are the princes, also about 4,000 of them. For anything to get done you need
unanimity or near unanimity with these two groups of people. Any kind of
crackdown threatens not just that consensus but the legitimacy of the state.
What Saudi Arabia has to offer the residents of Arabia is order. That is
basic. They provide very little in terms of welfare, in terms of schooling,
there still are less than one hundred hospitals, very few universities, very
few education opportunities, despite the immense oil wealth. More than
one-third of the world's proven oil reserves are in Saudi Arabia, but the
per capita income when you take away the money that is used for the princes,
is low.
PB: They use the money to fund fundamentalist mosques in Europe.
RM: Yes, but of course the European governments are complicit in that. If
Europe was serious about counterterrorism it would say that no religious
institution, church, mosque, synagogue, or whatever can receive funding from
outside the country, and it would further stipulate that the congregation
must provide at least half of the funds necessary before the state could
provide any funds. In a more radical view I do not think that the state
should finance religion at all. I think state funding of religion is
ultimately bad for religion as well as bad for the state. I think the
promotion of religion is healthy for a state because something beyond
economic self-interest has to hold the country together. There has to be
something higher, intangible, mystical, metaphysical, but nonetheless
present and real. Religion has traditionally in every society known to man
provided some of that connecting tissue that makes a group of people into a
nation and a nation into a country. When you finance religion, however, you
necessarily change it and warp it to serve the politicians.
PB: In Western Europe it is the state that finances religion. In the United
States it is not. If you are a Muslim in the US you can ask the Saudi
princes for subsidies.
RM: I think there have to be some restrictions. I think that the money
should not be able to come from abroad. I do not think that would be a
problem if you extend this restriction to the Catholics. In our countries
the church money goes to Rome, it does not come from Rome. Hence applying
that restriction here would not have deleterious effects. But you have to
stop the overseas funding.
I am prepared to believe that most of the Muslims are moderate. They have
left a more fundamentalist society to come to the West. If they wanted to be
fundamentalist they would find more opportunity and scope to do that in
their home countries. They are interested in economic opportunity, which
means that in some small way they are interested in changing. And maybe they
think they are going to change in small ways in terms of improving their
economic outlook and improving their education, but in the course of doing
these two things, things about you change. Europe has to think about how it
wants to make these people assimilate, because they must be made to
assimilate or they will become a mortal threat to our societies over time.
When I want to frighten Europeans I say: who is going to pay your social
security when the average European prays five times a day?
<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/user/2> Paul Belien founded the
Brussels-based think tank <http://www.cne.org/index.htm> Centre for the New
Europe, and acted as CNE's first managing director and research director
from 1994 to 2000, when he left to write his Ph.D. dissertation and
homeschool his five children. He is the editor of the Flemish quarterly
<http://www.secessie.nu/> Secessie and the editor-in-chief of
<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/> The Brussels Journal. His most recent
book is <http://www.secessie.nu/?tekst=toonhtml&artikel=900-29> A Throne in
Brussels. Republished with permission of The Brussels
<http://www.brusselsjournal.com/> Journal.
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Email Paul Belien
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