Did we beat the enemy or the errorists? I think you must have a strange mind-set if you say we did. Oh yes we got some of the top brass like bin Laden, but will that stop more younger ones joining their ranks? You have a stange mind-set if you think so.
You do not win wars against the fanatical Muslim mind-set by going over there and fighting kinda hand-tohand combat. They know how to live in those dry dusty mountains (been doing it for decades) and they are pretty darn good at ambush, and road side bombs, and hit and run, as well as suicide ..... how do you win against suicide, ones willing to deliberately blow themselves up along with those around them?
Oh I guess the day will come when all the USA troops come home (well maybe that day will come) and the troops from the USA allies also, but do you really think the Taliban and whoever else are of their mental attitude, will just "go away" - you have to have a strange mind-set if you think so, is all I can say.
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YEMEN is more in the news lately. Here from the recent book "Decade of Fear" by Michelle Shephard, is a little on Yemen:
Beneath hats and behind sunglasses, U.S. and British military trainers put Yemeni security forces through their paces - teaching them how to fight al Qaeda. At the training grounds in the mountains surrounding the ancient city, they were finishing up classes for the day. Such classes are secretive. They are acknowledged by the governments involved but rarely openly discussed. The trainers were less than keen on publicity and CNN was ordered to stop filming despite having rarely granted official permission to visit the base. Their numbers have not been confirmed. Over the course of a few days I spotted around ten. Their responses to a Western journalist ranged from cordial chats to passive aggressive. Most skulked off when they saw me.
Guess they still weren't up to showing journalists something "sick."
THERE WERE NO good options for Guantanamo's Yemeni detainees. The country did not have a credible justice system or the political will to keep tabs on them, nor social programs to ease the transition from prison back into society. Even well-funded programs, like those the Saudis provided, did not guarantee success.
But what were the possibilities? Indefinite detention? Aside from the civil rights implications of holding people without trial, there was a dangerous ripple effect. Every detained man had brothers, cousins, neighbours or close tribal relations, who every year grew increasingly enraged about the United States' handling of Guantanamo. It fed anti-Western sentiments for a generation nurtured by the grievances of their elders. Yemenis loved to talk. Every afternoon was devoted to qat chew discussions. When Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush and immediately promised to close Guantanamo, there was a chance to chip away at some of the well-entrenched biases against the West.
"Both options are bad," Greg Johnsen said one night in Sanaa when Lucas and I met him for dinner. "You can continue to keep these guys and allow al Qaeda to score rhetorical points and gain more and more recruits as younger and younger people get radicalized and continue to tell about the abuses allegedly going on in Guantanamo. Or you can release them and face the potential of having some of them carry out attacks and, worst case scenario, having some of them carry out attacks that take the lives of innocent civilians and maybe Western civilians. The potential for disaster is quite great, without much of an inverse payoff."
As Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, Yemen's foreign minister, noted during a meeting with me in his office, "We have to be realistic, that sometimes injustice is one of the factors that leads to terrorism." Then there are those, he said, "who will always find a reason to fight" and need to be stopped. "This is the dilemma we face fighting terrorism."
In Obama's speech at the National Archives in Washington in May 2009, he said, "the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained. So the record is clear: rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies ... by any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it."
Obama had not dismissed the prospect of indefinite detentions of Guantanamo detainees (or "long-term" detention, as the White House prefers). "I have to be honest here - this is the toughest single issue that we will face," he said. "We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States." He vowed to seek the "strongest and most sustainable legal framework" rather than make decisions that would "service immediate politics." But six months after that speech and shortly after we returned home, everyone was talking about Yemen. And despite his promise otherwise, politics would play a role in Obama's actions concerning the Guantanamo detainees and Yemen.
In November 2009, U.S. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a disturbed army major, went on a shooting rampage on his base at Fort Hood, Texas, killing twelve soldiers and one civilian. A month later, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while on board Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day.
American online orator Anwar al Awlaki, whom we had tried to find during our summer visit to Sanaa, was hiding by late 2009 in Yemen's Shabwa region, where his tribe held sway. In online postings, Awlaki publicly praised Hasan and Abdulmutallab. Reports later claimed that Hasan, who is Muslim, had emailed Awlaki before the shootings, asking if it was permissible under Islam to kill his fellow soldiers. Awlaki told him it was, and they continued their conversation in more than a dozen emails. Abdulmutallab reportedly told the FBI that he had been instructed by Awlaki to carry out the airplane bombing (he has not yet been tried or spoken publicly).
Our hunt for Awlaki in the summer of 2009 had ultimately failed. At the time we went looking for him, he hardly seemed like the American-born Yemeni boogeyman he would become. His online videos were only a footnote at the Toronto 18 trial, and I vaguely remembered his name from the 9/11 Commission Report. After watching his videos on YouTube, I could understand how he would appeal to young, frustrated Muslim kids looking for a cause. He was unique in his understanding of both the Western and Arab worlds, which made his preaching seem credible and also easily understood by a Western audience. He even seemed to take a cue from U.S. president hopeful Sarah Palin in his I'm-just-like-you approach, sprinkling his speeches with glib references to "Joe Sixpack." But there was so much jihadi noise on the Internet, I wondered if his preaching was any more powerful than other voices.
Born in New Mexico in April 1971, Awlaki had returned with his family to Yemen as a child. At the age of twenty, he moved back to the United States to complete his university studies, beginning at Colorado State University. In the decade he remained in the United States he earned a master's degree in education in San Diego and started a PhD in human resource development at The George Washington University in D.C. While studying, he also served as an imam in California and Virginia.
Awlaki had been on the FBI's radar before 9/11, but agents questioned him directly when it was discovered that two of the hijackers had prayed at the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Northern Virginia, where Awlaki had been an imam. The 9/11 Commission Report later concluded that the hijackers - Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar - respected Awlaki as a religious figure, but that there was not enough evidence about Awlaki's relationship to the men to "reach a conclusion." Awlaki moved to Britain in 2002 and two years later was back in Sanaa, lecturing at Al-Imam University.
The university had acquired a nefarious reputation thanks to its high-profile graduates, such as the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. The school was run by one of Yemen's most controversial public figures, Shaikh Abdul Majeed al Zindani, a reputed former spiritual advisor to bin Laden. Zindani was listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a "specially designated global terrorist" in 2004, and the UN classified him as an associate of al Qaeda. Lucas and I managed to run into him inside a vin lounge at the airport in Sanaa. Zindani did not give interviews, but Khaled spoke to his aides, explaining that we were Canadian (i.e., not American) and wanted to hear his views about the closure of Guantanamo. He reluctantly agreed.
The lounge was packed with people, and to get close I had to crouch at his feet with my tape recorder raised while his men formed a semicircle around me and Lucas took pictures from above. "First, what is required is that those who imprisoned these innocent people - the jailers who kidnapped many innocent people and treated them in the worst ways possible and reminded us of medieval times and the times of the Inquisition and the injustice and oppression that befell Muslims then-be held accountable. It is a stain of shame on the face of the West that always claims to uphold human rights," he said. "We consider that we have begun a new era and the U.S. under the leadership of Obama has begun to rectify these aggressive policies against Islam and Muslims that were declared by Bush and that has planted hatred between Muslims and Bush and those who stood by him ... the oppression of one detainee is the oppression of the entire nation."
Zindani did not often pay the United States lip service, so his praise of Obama was significant. But as I tried to press further or ask him about his status on the U.S. terrorism list, or Awlaki, he rapped my shins with his cane. My time was up.
Chances are that, like everyone, he would have had little to say about Awlaki. The most common reaction we got in the summer of 2009 when asking about the online orator was: "Awlaki who?" No one we spoke to with knowledge of AQAP, inside Yemen anyway, believed he was a major player within the organization. By early 2011, however, he had surpassed Osama bin Laden as "Terrorist Number One" - according to the label given him by U.S. congresswoman Jane Harman-and made history as the first American citizen included on the CIA's list of approved killings. Obama authorized the use of lethal force against him.
There was little doubt that Awlaki was dangerous. But even critics of the Obama administration who considered the president "soft" on terrorism questioned the legal and ethical implications of the CIA's kill order of an American citizen. "I hate to play the squish, but am I the only one who is just a little bit queasy over the fact that the president of the United States is authorizing the assassination of American citizens?" online National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson asked. "Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent."
The Terrorist Number One label elevated Awlaki to near mythical status. Greg Johnsen had told me he believed Awlaki was a mid-level player, noting that in the first twelve editions of an Arabic online magazine AQAP published, Awlaki had been mentioned only onceand only in disputing media reports that he had been killed. "I personally don't think that he's even one of the top ten most dangerous figures in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, let alone al Qaeda worldwide," Greg told me in early 2010. "It seems that people in the U.S. government and people outside put a lot more importance on his role than he actually seems to have in the organization."
Maybe a newly emboldened Awlaki felt the same way, for later that year, AQAP started publishing an English magazine as well. Called Inspire, it read like Cosmo for al Qaeda. Awlaki was one of its editorial stars. AQAP was a serious group, of course, but the magazine was part of the tragicomedy terrorist mosaic. There were tips on how to be a better jihadist and one of the features was titled: "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."
Yemen's prominence in the news because of Awlaki and AQAP forced Obama's hand in the Guantanamo question and he bowed to political pressure. Eleven days after the failed bombing of the Detroit-bound flight, Obama suspended the release of any Guantanamo detainees to Yemen.
In Sanaa, supporters and relatives of the men were outraged.
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YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE WORLD OF THIS WAR AGAINST TERRORISTS? THEN YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK "DECADE OF FEAR."
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