Although history books say that the Arab Spring ended five years ago, Stimson Center Middle East Fellow Ellen Laipson recently cautioned that the uprising’s revolutionary wave of demonstrations is in no way over. “There is enduring debate going on in the Arab world about the individual citizen’s thinking about their relationship to the government,” she said, during an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Laipson then yielded the floor to leading pollster James Zogby, who presented results from recent Middle East opinion surveys that documented the region’s unfulfilled desire for peace and prosperity.
It’s too late for “tough” and as demonstrated by Hungary, the same plays to the fascist nationalism and medievalism promoted by Putin and Khamenei.
The way to handle waves of immigrants is simply to program ahead, determined to filter criminals and criminal jihadists from the ranks and produce a path for “acculturation, acclimatization, and assimilation.”
The other part is to go back to the “stink” that’s driving immigration and quell it. That too in Syria and Iraq needs must be done.
Will the west “hold off” on Syria? For how long? — And at what price?
Ours is a culture of guilty eschatology: hereafter is real, and here is fake, but we are more here-bound than hereafter-bound; we are not genuine Muslims because we are not Arab. We live in Pakistan, but we belong to the holy lands in the Middle East. Our political-economy is borrowed, stolen, and fake.
We gave those camels [a derogatory Afghan term for Arabs] free run of our country, and they brought us face to face with disaster. We knew the Americans would attack us in revenge.
Their base of operations logically became FATA, and they began to establish (or re-establish keeping in mind the 1980s) training camps in Pakistan. These camps included not only Afghans, but also constituted many new Pakistani recruits, and the Pakistani militant groups were actively involved, especially in South Waziristan. The organizing effort also brought an influx of money to the region, coming from various international sources hoping to help the resistance (Yousafzai & Moreau, 2009). Fighting against the foreign troops in Afghanistan and re-establishing Taliban rule served as the primary motivations, as well as profiting from control of drug routes out of Afghanistan (Acharya, 2009)
The reading, whether for background, retrospective analysis, or, frankly, pleasure proves illuminating.
If you are a BackChannels irregular, 20/20 hindsight rehashes of the Lal Masjid tragedy (2007) and more recent battles in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theaters may summon old memories, directly experienced or mediated.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
Afghanistan supplies 90% of the opium and heroin global markets.
The Afghan farmer who grows opium poppies could earn as much as $230 for a kilo to opium. Processing the opium into heroin turns it into one of the world’s most profitable commodities, fetching between $175,000 and $850,000 wholesale depending on the level of purity and availability.
Middle East Policy Council | Protecting Jihad: The Sharia Council of the Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad – 2013. “This article analyses al-Maqdisi’s efforts to protect jihad by looking at his actual criticism of certain jihadi militants and, conversely, at his attempts to support and praise “good” jihadis in several countries. The article then focuses on the successful attempt by al-Maqdisi to set up a council of like-minded scholars in order to provide guidance and advice to youngsters dealing with religious questions about a host of issues, including jihad, and what advice this council has actually given. Using mostly Arabic primary sources taken from the internet,11 including the collections of fatwas published by the council, this article argues that these radical scholars may well have an important impact on the future of jihad and as such are worthy of both scholars’ and policy makers’ attention.”
Malhot, Aditi. “Understanding the Ghazi Force.” Center for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), November 15, 2012: “Pakistan’s once feared terrorist group, the Ghazi Force is back in the limelight. This time for the reported revival of their funding sources and its resurrection to inflict greater damage on the Pakistani state. a recent report from the Pakistani intelligence agency obtained by BBC urdu states that banned jihadi groups are reviving their local and international funding sources, after their affiliates started opening local and foreign currency accounts under pseudonyms.”
Related: ▶ Narcotics and Corruption in Afghanistan – YouTube – video (40:56), Posted by U.S. Army War College, posted 6/24/2012. Col. Lou Jordan asks, “What is the relationship between the poppy and the money?”
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Cannabis was found to be the most commonly used drug in Pakistan, with by 3.6 per cent of the adult population, or four million people, listed as users. Opiates, namely opium and heroin, are used by almost one per cent of overall drugs users, and the highest levels of use are seen in the provinces which border principal poppy-cultivating areas in neighbouring Afghanistan.
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