• Editorial
• The Guardian, Monday 28 December 2009
• Article history

• AP Islamabad
• guardian.co.uk,
• Article history

Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington DC area, were arrested in Pakistan earlier this month. Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory claims about the men's intentions. US officials have been far more cautious, but they, too, are looking at charging the men.

A Pakistani government official alleged on Saturday that the men had established contact with Taliban commanders and had planned to attack sites in Pakistan. Earlier, however, local police accused the five of intending to fight in Afghanistan after meeting militant leaders.

The men allegedly had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province where the men were arrested.

He stressed that they were not carrying a specific map of a nuclear power plant, but a map of the whole Chashma Barrage. The detained men had also exchanged emails about the area, Islam claimed. "We are also working to retrieve the deleted material in their computers," he said.

Pakistan has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, but also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.

Any nuclear activity in Pakistan tends to come under US scrutiny after the main architect of its atomic weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was accused of leaking sensitive nuclear secrets. But, as militancy has spread in Pakistan, officials have repeatedly insisted that the nuclear weapons programme is secure.

A Pakistani police official, Nazir Ahmad, told the Associated Press that the force would ask the courts to charge the five men with collecting and attempting to collect material to carry out terrorist activities in the country. If convicted, the charges carry a sentence of from seven years to life in prison, he said.

Officials in Pakistan and America say they expect the suspects eventually to be deported back to the US, but charging the men in Pakistan could delay that process. The country's legal system can be slow and opaque.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Saturday, Punjab province's law minister, Rana Sanaullah, claimed the men had established contact with Taliban commanders. He said they planned to meet the Pakistani Taliban chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, and his deputy, Qari Hussain, in the tribal region before going on to attack sites inside Pakistan. The nuclear power plant "might have been" one of the targets, Sanaullah alleged.

FBI agents have been granted some access to the men, who are being held in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and are looking into what potential charges they could face in the US. Possibilities include conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.

The five were arrested in Sargodha earlier this month, but are being held in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.

• 
• • Olivia Hampton
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 December 2009 13.00 GMT
  • Article history

Once again, President Obama has managed to anger both the right and the left. This time, it's not his contentious plans to overhaul the US healthcare system, a new costly economic stimulus or the deployment of yet more troops to Afghanistan that has Washington up in arms. This time it is his decision to send some 100 Guantánamo detainees to an empty prison in his home state of Illinois that has unleashed a political firestorm.

In bringing dozens of terror suspects from Guantánamo Bay – that US naval base in Cuba now infamous around the world – to a town 150 miles west of Chicago, Obama has made a provisional solution become a permanent one.

Liberals and rights groups denounced the news, blasting the president for creating "Gitmo North," a place where prisoners could still, in some cases, be held indefinitely without charge or trial. That's according to war powers George Bush and now Obama claim Congress granted the commander in chief after the September 11 attacks, for detainees considered ineligible for prosecution or too dangerous to release. Some could still be tried using the planned military commissions first crafted under Bush – and while Obama has revised the commissions, they still allow coerced and hearsay evidence, and fail to amount to the fair trial proceedings of courts martial and US federal courts.

"The only thing that President Obama is doing with this announcement is changing the zip code of Guantánamo," said Amnesty International's US policy director, Tom Parker. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents some of Guantánamo prisoners, warned: "The proceedings will achieve neither reliable justice nor a restoration of America's credibility around the world."

Conservatives were equally unforgiving, saying the transfers would hamper US national security and allow the detainees to secure new legal rights. Senator John Cornyn of Texas called the decision "deeply troubling," adding that it "will put our citizens in unnecessary danger, and that is unjustifiable and unacceptable."

With congressional midterm elections now less than a year away, it comes perhaps as no surprise that many lawmakers would seek to distance themselves from what, so far, remains a deeply unpopular decision. Just last week, a Gallup poll found that most Americans (64%) oppose the plans. That may become a significant roadblock for Obama down the road, as he will inevitably have to go through Congress both to secure the necessary funding and to change current legal parameters that only allow Guantánamo detainees to be brought to US soil for prosecution. Time is of the essence for Obama – the closer he gets to the November 2010 ballots that will see many Senate and all House seats up for grabs, the more hardened politicians will become. And the price tag is a hefty one, with the shift from Cuba to Illinois estimated to cost up to one billion dollars over four years.

The move does bring Obama closer to fulfilling his landmark promise to shutter the controversial detention facility, although he has already acknowledged he will likely not meet his self-imposed January 22 deadline. The closure would be an important step, but none of the problems Guantánamo has created – shredding the US's image abroad and becoming a symbol of oppression – will be alleviated if the detainees are simply shipped to the US without resolving a series of troubling legal issues. Obama may have inherited the legal mess that is Guantánamo, but by recreating the same conditions, he is essentially adopting Bush policies, using the same justifications to eschew legal jurisprudence, the principle of innocent until proven guilty and the right to confront the accuser, that ancient writ of habeas corpus. Sugarcoating the issue is not enough.

After months-long deliberations, it is neither political will nor public support but the economic downturn that led to a major breakthrough for Obama's plans to close Guantánamo. Why was the Thomson Correctional Centre chosen? The site was chosen, it seems, mainly for financial reasons, bringing much-needed cash and jobs – some 3,000, administration officials say – to a depressed part of the Midwest. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and close Obama ally, called it a "great opportunity." But that argument could disappear as quickly as the region's economy recovers.

The White House says the transfer will rob al-Qaida of what it calls a "clarion call" to rally extremists and likely supporters. But so long as the same legal limbo remains, the mere detention of the terror suspects will continue to fan the flames. Al-Qaida and groups like it will never run out of recruiting tools, manipulating any perceived injustice to justify the unjustifiable.

Some 198 prisoners still linger at the site in southern Cuba. Obama's deadline has slipped out of his reach for several reasons, chief among them the reluctance of allies to take in the terror suspects and opposition at home to house them on US soil. Local politicians roundly rejected earlier plans to house them in Kansas, Michigan or South Carolina.

Despite the goodwill still prevailing toward Obama around the world, he only received tepid and ultimately insufficient support to close Guantánamo for good. Only a trickle of detainees – around 42 – have been repatriated or resettled in third countries. Administration officials hope to prosecute around 40 of those remaining in military tribunals or, in a major departure from the Bush era, in US civilian courts.

Five of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are set to be tried in civilian courts, including the self-proclaimed mastermind, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Another five are slated to face military commissions. One detainee has already been brought to New York, where he awaits trial. Some 30 "law of war" detainees could be held in that third grey area of indefinite detention without trial. The remainder, officials hope, would be shipped out to third countries.

Obama insists he will release none of the men on US soil. Ultimately, the decision will not be up him but will rest in the judge's gavel and shrewd lawyers who have proved they can overturn Guantánamo rulings. Those cases that do make it to courts could go all the way to the Supreme Court, as they have before. And the nation's court has repeatedly ruled in favour of granting certain rights to the detainees. Long after the last detainees leaves Guantánamo, its name will continue to be heard.

• Peter Walker, Xan Rice and Richard Norton-Taylor
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 December 2009 19.17 GMT
• Article history

 Lost boys at war with modernity

What is striking about these Islamists is that they are educated and very middle class

Much as I dislike long flights, it has never occurred to me to board a plane with 80 grams of Semtex- derivative sewn into my knickers. Like most passengers, I read paperbacks, walk up and down the aisle a few times, and pick unenthusiastic- ally at the in-flight meals; I'm not sure how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab chose to pass his nine-hour flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, but he must have been conscious that if he succeeded in his alleged purpose, none of the passengers around him was going to survive.

As the world now knows, the previously obscure Abdulmutallab was removed from Northwest Airlines flight 253 with third-degree burns to his legs and groin after passengers spotted flames and dragged him from his seat.

Although it has been reported that he shouted slogans about Afghanistan as he tried to trigger the device, 23-year-old Abdulmutallab does not fit the stereotype of a poverty-stricken jihadi; he is the son of a former chairman of First Bank of Nigeria and lived in an up-market flat in London while he studied for an engineering degree at University College. Yet again, an alleged terrorist has turned out to come from a background lacking in the commonly assumed triggers for Islamist radicalisation: poor family, lack of education, the grinding frustration of growing up with too few choices.

That is the situation of millions of young men (and women) in the Middle East and Africa, but the vast majority don't become bombers. Indeed what is striking about the recruits attracted by the Islamist ideology of al-Qa'ida and its offshoots is that so many of them come from the educated middle class.

Mohamed Atta, who piloted one of the planes which flew into the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, was a trained architect, while Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed, who launched the failed attacks in London and Glasgow in the summer of 2007, were a doctor and an engineer respectively. Omar Khyam, one of five men jailed after Operation Crevice uncovered plots to blow up Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub, came from Crawley, West Sussex, where he captained his school cricket team; much later he travelled to Pakistan to train in the camps where two of the 7/7 bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were taught to make bombs.

So where should we begin to look for an explanation of the mechanisms which draw these young men into a secretive world of intolerance, hatred and violence? It is a very obvious point but insufficient account is taken of the fact that they are young and male; female suicide-bombers are rare, not because women are inherently nicer but because Islamism is an ideology which isn't much interested in (and has very little to offer) the female half of the human race. But if you are a troubled teenage boy or twenty-something, it offers a "warrior" identity which is at once exciting and promises to obliterate the complexities of the modern world at a stroke.

This much is evident from the "martyrdom" videos made by the 7/7 bombers and other British-born jihadists. The whole business would be risible if the intended consequences weren't so deadly. These young men are desperately searching for an identity and they think they've found it in an ideology which reinforces their loathing for everything they find threatening. In that sense, Islamism resembles other extreme sects, religious or secular, in that it creates an "in" group whose members are encouraged to feel antagonistic to anyone who doesn't belong.

In the 20th century, communist organisations were notoriously (and lethally, as Trotsky found out) fissiparous, while the enmity of competing groups within religions leaves outsiders baffled. The Islamist "club" excludes aspects of the modern world which are troubling for young men who feel torn between two cultures. Time after time, bombers display a similar set of characteristics: they take advantage of what modernity has to offer, becoming engineers or doctors, but reject great swathes of modern ideas.

Osama bin Laden's pitch is a return to "traditional" values in which women and gay people disappear, along with anyone who doesn't subscribe to the Islamist's totalitarian world view. One of the mistakes that 21st-century commentators make is to treat Islamism as a new phenomenon, when there are instructive examples in history of a resort to hyper-masculine identities; in the Sixties, the leadership of the Black Panthers in the US created the paradox of a "liberation" movement that was a response to genuine grievances but disfigured by disgusting misogyny and homophobia.

Mohamed Atta's misogyny emerged in his will, which stipulated that his corpse should not be touched by women. One of the would-be bombers caught in Operation Crevice suggested bombing the Ministry of Sound because it was full of "slags" enjoying themselves. Abdulla and Ahmed parked a car full of explosives outside a venue popular with hen nights. In the case of Abdulmutallab, friends could not recall ever seeing him with a girlfriend and one said he was "not a party boy. He'd never go to the disco". Of course no one has to like parties, but hatred and fear of women is one of the defining characteristics of Islamism.

What's so depressing about the profile of these young would-be jihadists is that they exist at a moment of unparalleled opportunity, but they have been manipulated and turned against it. Abdulmutallab's father was so worried by his son's growing radicalisation that he reported his fears to the US embassy in Nigeria, but clearly the family had no idea how to counter it. No doubt the same conundrum is vexing millions of people who have read about the alleged attempt to kill almost 300 people on a transatlantic flight on Christmas Day.

Terrorism is protean, changing its form as the security services struggle to use their knowledge of the last attack to predict where the next will come from. But some things are clear: Islamism is a symptom, not a remedy, and any programme to counter it needs to focus on making insecure individuals feel more at ease with themselves. Islamism has no coherent alternative to equality, free speech and democracy, and its offer is a literal dead end: a pantomimic version of masculinity perfectly symbolised by a young man boarding a plane in exploding knickers.

• 
• • Jason Burke
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 December 2009
  • Article history

Almost before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was being led down the steps of Northwest Airlines flight 253 he had been linked to al-Qaida. He himself has apparently claimed he was trained and commissioned by an al‑Qaida master bomb-maker in Yemen. Whatever the eventual conclusion about his alleged international mission – a Nigerian living in London, trained in Yemen to blow up US planes – his case should not distract us from the fact that modern Islamic militancy is primarily a local phenomenon, not a global one.

The tension between these two is the unresolved flaw at the heart of the international militant project. Al-Qaida was set up by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and a handful of others, many Egyptian, to overcome the disunity among the foreign volunteers who fought with the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s. The global call to arms that Bin Laden issued in the 1990s was only partially effective. In a letter I found in an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan in 2001, a Jordanian volunteer complained that his Algerian, Moroccan and Saudi counterparts kept to themselves even at prayer times.

This parochialism was obscured through the first years of the 9/11 era as bombs exploded from Bali to London and, more recently, as new al-Qaida offshoots were formed. However, beneath this apparent internationalism other elements were present. In many of the major actions, bombers struck within the country – and sometimes within the town – of their birth. Many targets were selected with an international dimension in mind, but many others were not.

One reason conspirators said they bombed the nightclub in Bali in 2002 was that it did not allow locals in. In Morocco, alongside the Jewish targets, a restaurant patronised by the local elite was hit. In Madrid, immigrants struck under a mile from where many of them lived or socialised. There was little international about the targets or the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings.

One key shift came in 2006. With its international global jihad increasingly rejected by the Sunni minority in Iraq, al-Qaida there tried to rebrand itself as "the Islamic state of Iraq". When the disparate factions of Pashtun tribesmen formed a coalition in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province in 2007, they called it Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan, the union of Pakistani Taliban, a title that insists on a primarily national identity.

In Yemen and Saudi Arabia in recent years, 90% of the efforts and rhetoric of local militants have been directed against local targets. Al-Qaida in the Maghreb is actually 90% Algerian in composition and agenda. In Indonesia, Jemaa Islamiya, responsible for the Bali bombing, has decided the local situation doesn't justify violent jihad, and it has ceased military operations in the country. Recent attacks in Jakarta were the work of a breakaway group.

Al-Qaida's project is often wrongly portrayed as having roots in the protection of local specificity against a rampant globalisation. In fact, al-Qaida's ideology is as disrespectful of local difference as any other global ideology.

Where the al-Qaida project does coincide with local concerns, the combination is potent. Yet such situations are rare. The problem with "joining the dots" between the countries any individual militant may have visited is that it falsifies the picture by over-emphasising the international dimension. Ultimately, all politics is local. And, whatever the story of Abdulmutallab, we should not let it blind us to the fact that Islamic militancy is no exception.

• Peter Beaumont
• The Observer, Sunday 27 December 2009
• Article history

A few months ago the story about al-Qaida was how, under pressure in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it had largely been unravelled and its operational abilities degraded. Now, after the attempted downing of a US jet bound for Detroit, the same sources – the US and UK intelligence agencies – say not only that al-Qaida is still a dangerous threat, but that it may have managed to export and reconstitute parts of its operations to Somalia and Yemen.

So what, precisely, should we believe? The reality is that there have always been Islamist groups in Africa who have described themselves as being al-Qaida. While some have been more closely associated with the core of Osama bin Laden's ideology and were involved in early al-Qaida spectaculars in Africa, others have used the name as a cover for criminality.

In the past two years, however, there have been a number of significant changes in Somalia and Yemen that have contributed to the emergence of a more widespread and cohesive jihadi ideology far more closely aligned to al- Qaida's aims and agendas.

In large part – at least in Somalia – US intervention has been responsible for the radicalisation. When the Islamic Courts Union emerged in Somalia in 2006 and brought a brief period of relative calm to the country it was America that encouraged its toppling. The consequence was a splitting away of a hardline faction of the courts' militia – known as the Shabaab – who the US defined as al-Qaida allies or proxies and have targeted, including with drones.

The emergence of the Shabaab, which controls large swaths of Somalia, has coincided – if the claims of the US intelligence agencies are to be believed – with events in the "Af-Pak" theatre. Seasoned Arab al-Qaida fighters have been replaced by Central Asians and transferred to Yemen and Somalia under the guidance of its chief of external operations, Saleh al-Somali, who was killed in a drone attack in Waziristan this month.

What has also been well documented in the past few months has been the existence of an active recruitment system targeting young Somalis with US, European and Australian passports to train in camps that have sprung up in Somalia in particular. Twenty, it is believed, travelled from Minneapolis alone. Twenty more from Stockholm are also thought to have attended training camps, along with dozens of young British Somalis. Last spring it emerged that some of the four Australian citizens arrested and charged with planning to attack an army barracks had trained in Somalia.

It is not only in Somalia that it is claimed al-Qaida is reconstituting itself. In Yemen an insurgency in the remote Shabwa region backed by groups claiming loyalty to al-Qaida has provided a second regional centre. It was there, four days ago, that an al-Qaida-supporting group said it had declared war on the US.

Large questions remain. A number of those who have gone back to fight – or be recruited for training – appear to have died fighting, particularly in Somalia. And while more than $1bn a year in remittances goes back to Somalia, suggesting that the Shabaab would not be short of money for operations, it is unclear how well al-Qaida operations in both Yemen and Somalia are organised.

Equally uncertain is the scope of their agenda: whether they are more focused for now on a local, rather than international, jihad. One thing, however, is quite clear. It is that the new al-Qaida has a very different face and a different base. If the threat is as real as suggested by the attempted attack on Northwest Airlines, the West's security services will be playing catch-up.