It is almost two years since terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba traveled to Mumbai, India, and carried out a string of attacks on hotels, cafes, a Jewish center and other civilian targets. The horrific footage of those attacks spread around the world and raised obvious questions: Would it happen again -- and if so, where?
In the past week that question appears to have been answered. Increasingly credible reports have emerged claiming that Predator drone attacks in Pakistan have killed a number of people planning Mumbai-style attacks in Western European cities. This fits with the increased number of alerts and heightened threat levels across Europe in recent weeks. Last weekend the British Foreign Office changed its threat level to "high" from "general."
And there is another element of the story that suggests its authenticity: Two British citizens are among those reportedly killed in the Pakistan drone strikes, along with several German nationals.
Lashkar-e-Taiba certainly has links to the United Kingdom, the Western center of jihad. A comprehensive report published in July by the Centre for Social Cohesion, "Islamist Terrorism: the British Connections," revealed that 5% of the Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain over the past 10 years have links to the group. What is striking is the ambition of the plots they have been involved with.
Shehzad Tanweer, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system in July 2005, was associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba. So were British-born Omar Sheikh, convicted in a Pakistani court for his role in the killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and Rashid Rauf, the suspected ringleader of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airline plot (himself reportedly killed in a missile strike in Pakistan two years ago).
A further five men with links to Lashkar-e-Taiba have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the U.K. They include Dhiren Barot, the head of a U.K.-based terror cell that planned a series of attacks against major targets including financial buildings, and Omar Khyam,
whose parents clearly were poetry lovers...
convicted in 2007 for heading a cell that aimed to use fertilizer bombs to attack targets including a shopping center in Kent and a nightclub in London.
It is also significant that once again the source of this latest plan appears to have been Pakistan. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown said three-quarters of the serious terror plots being aimed at Britain originated in Pakistan. The head of MI5 said last month that this figure now stands at 50%, but this reflects the troubling rise in activity in Somalia and Yemen, not a decreased threat from Pakistan.
Pakistan's ability to export security problems around the world -- as the Times Square car bomb reminded us -- continues to grow. The man who placed that bomb set the timing device at "7:00," but it was a 24-hour timer that should have been set at 19:00 hours (which was when he wanted it to blow). Only that mistake stopped the killing and wounding of countless people.
This is why MBAs are management, and not labour. One really doesn't want someone with that lack of attention to detail putting together one's car, or one's toothpaste.
The United States has, like the U.K. and Europe, been exceptionally lucky in avoiding recent attacks. But the paucity of recent attacks on Western cities has also been the product of exceptional work by our intelligence and security agencies.
Hear, hear!
As events in Pakistan remind us, our forces have repeatedly proved highly capable at infiltrating and eavesdropping, often allowing them to kill the terrorists before they can kill us. This is good and important work. But it must not make us think that we can always be entirely free from risk.
Announcements from American and British authorities are of questionable usefulness.
I disagree. When Mr. Wife travels abroad, I feel better knowing that he knows what situations to be aware of.
Telling tourists in Europe to be wary of public places may actually play into the terrorist game plan better than anything else. What are such tourists meant to do? Stay in their hotels? Not travel in the first place?
Being wary means being ready to recognize the problem and act to fix it, or at least to get out of the way while others do. A pack, not a herd, and all that.
Islamist groups aspire to carry out attacks like those in Mumbai precisely in order to trigger such fear. Civilian targets are attractive to terrorists because they are weak targets, with generally poor security unable to fight off attackers armed (like those in Mumbai) with rifles and grenades.
The policemen in Mumbai didn't have bullets for their guns, and their range time could be measured in single-digit days over their entire career. It's a bit different in Europe and America. Yes, the jihadis will kill some people, should they pull off an attack; but they won't be able to run free for four days like they did in Mumbai. Civilians on cell phones will take care of locating the problems, I should think.
But there is another reason that weak civilian targets constitute such an attraction: They produce terror in its purest form. Even leaving aside any devastation caused by the attacks themselves, any Mumbai-style assault in a city such as Paris or London could have an effect on the way in which the public approaches day-to-day life.
Or not. London seems to have recovered from the subway attack pretty well.
In 1996, the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb in the heart of Canary Wharf, London's financial district. The explosion killed two people and wounded dozens, but the financial cost came to an estimated $135 million. It requires very little money to pack a truck full of fertilizer and place it in a civilian area. And as the IRA famously said after attempting to wipe out the British cabinet in 1984, the terrorists only have to be lucky once, while we have to be lucky all the time.
And vice versa, when it's our guys who're doing the hunting, which they've been doing quite successfully lately. That's why the smart jihadis have moved to the soft jihad of the law -- it's less risky.
One of the most common taunts of Islamists is, "We love death more than you love life." At some point they will find another opportunity to demonstrate this. In the meantime, if death is so attractive, then we should do what we can to bring it to them.
DOUGLAS MURRAY is director of the London-based Centre for Social Cohesion.
President Obama was correct, if tactless, when he said we can absorb a hit if we have to. After all, we have before, mourned our dead, and taken the battle to the enemy's strongholds. That's not what will defeat us. Only submission to the desires of Caliphatists for special treatment will defeat us.
One of the most remarkable things I learned in writing about GM was that Ron Gettlefinger was totally blindsided by GM's financial collapse. The UAW had so often convinced itself that the company's dire warnings were simply strategic bargaining claims that it didn't understand how parlous the underlying finances were--and in fairness, in the past, management had often made exaggerated claims when it was bargaining. One former auto analyst I talked to said that the company would routinely claim that anything it didn't want to do was being blocked by the union--but when the rare equity researcher actually talked to the UAW, they'd often find that the union had never heard of the issue where it was allegedly the sole obstacle to change.
That said, by the mid-1950s the Big Three had settled into a relatively stable relationship with the UAW. When contract time came around, the UAW picked off the company it perceived as the least able to survive a strike; used the threat of a strike to get a good contract; and then demanded the same from the other two. Those companies were now in a bad position, because if they risked a strike, their competitor, who already had a contract, would take all their customers.
This relationship essentially meant that the Big Three simply didn't compete on labor cost, work processes, or any of the other labor-side innovations that have enhanced productivity over the last forty years. It's not that contracts didn't vary by company or plant, but the outlines were broadly similar across the industry. This was good for the UAW and good for the auto manufacturers, because arguably it actually helped cement their cosy oligopoly by removing one of the major competitive pressures. And in many ways, the voter base and political clout of the UAW was helpful to securing Detroit favors from Washington. During that period, union peace was very valuable, and management bought that union peace with concessions that seemed cheap at the time: tax-favored pension and health care benefits.
In hindsight, this was stupid for many reasons. Automation made it possible to produce more cars with fewer workers. Meanwhile, competition cut into market share--the Big Three had about 90% of the US market at the end of World War II, versus about 45% today. And workers lived a lot longer than they were expected to. Those factors mean that the ratio between retirees and workforce became extremely lopsided; at the moment, GM has a little over 50,000 hourly employees--and about a half a million retirees. That left the pension badly underfunded, and meant that either the company or the workers were going to have to dramatically increase contributions. Meanwhile, soaring health care costs were making the health care benefits even more of a problem than the pensions.
#1
The UAW had so often convinced itself that the company's dire warnings were simply strategic bargaining claims that it didn't understand how parlous the underlying finances were....
If they'd only showed up for work sober, lined up all the parts correctly, and torqued everything down to spec,....
Posted by: Mike ||
10/06/2010 8:14 Comments ||
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UAW members at Oldsmobile, Hudson, Nash, Studebaker, Willys, Packard, LaSalle, Crosley, Henry J, Oakland, Desoto, Edsel.....what say you?
#3
I say if we could have stripped the unions from this company, we would have 5 good automobile companies right now under normal bankruptcy procedure.
Since this particular union held America hostage, I will never buy their product again.
Anyone who buys stock in GM now is a fool. See how they treated their last shareholders.
#1
Our NATO allies aren't spending enough to be credible security partners anymore.
They never did. Since the late 70s, early 80s Europe was on par with a GDP and population of the US, but just did 'show and paper' work when it came to their own defense. Forty plus friggin years of military welfare carried on the back of the American taxpayer. All most of them can barely do is deploy small forces to show the flag while relying upon American projection capabilities to be there in the first place.
The former prime minister said that there had been a failure to challenge the ''narrative'' that Islam was oppressed by the West which was fuelling extremism around the world.
He said too many people accepted the extremists' analysis that the military actions taken by the West following the 9/11 attacks were directed at countries because they were Muslim and that it supported Israel because Israelis were Jews while Palestinians were Muslims.
''We should wake up to the absurdity of our surprise at the prevalence of this extremism,'' Mr Blair said
''Look at the funds it receives. Examine the education systems that succour it. And then measure, over the years, the paucity of our counter-attack in the name of peaceful co-existence. We have been outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised.''
Speaking on Tuesday night in New York to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mr Blair warned that it was impossible to defeat extremism ''without defeating the narrative that nurtures it''.
Moderate Muslims who believed in co-existence and tolerance were, he said, being undermined by the unwillingness of the West to take on the extremists' arguments.
''We think if we sympathise with the narrative - that essentially this extremism has arisen as a result, partly, of our actions - we meet it halfway, we help the modernisers to be more persuasive,'' he said.
''We don't. We indulge it and we weaken them. Worse, a reaction springs up amongst our people that we are pandering to this narrative and they start to resent Muslims as a whole.''
#1
Blair is like Churchill in that he recognizes the threat and tries to wake the oblivious people, but as with the Nazis, I fear that nothing can shake the people awake until it is either too late or nearly so.
#5
As our British correspondents pointed out at the time, Mr. Blair got it right on the War on Terror. However, he got it wrong domestically and with the EU.
...Obama's refusal in 2007 and 2008 to admit that there was even a smidgen of success to George W. Bush's surge strategy in Iraq -- even today he will only hint that the surge worked -- cannot be chalked up to an intellectual incapacity to assimilate the facts. Don't be too sure of that, but go on.
It can only be explained as an unwillingness to rile the base of the Democratic Party whose concerns, as we know from Bob Woodward's account of the president's conduct of deliberations over what to do in Afghanistan, are never far from his mind.
Nevertheless, he has left these Democrats disappointed. They hoped to see an abject and abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within weeks of the Obama inauguration. They hoped to see a beginning of withdrawal from Afghanistan not in July 2011 but in the early months of 2009. They hoped to see the detention facility at Guantanamo closed and shuttered and the detainees tried in civilian courts or freed to regale the media with tales of torture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many -- not most, but many -- Democratic politicians and Democratic voters saw political benefit in an American defeat in Iraq. Many, including Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, then boss of Obama's new chief of staff Pete Rouse, thronged to the Washington premiere of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." They tried to give every appearance of agreeing with the "Bush-lied-people-died" crowd and with those who charged that high-ranking officials colluded in systematic torture.
It was a lot of fun while it lasted, up to election night 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009. But then Obama had to govern. Knowing little of military affairs, he retained Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has loyally served presidents of both parties. Understanding even if not admitting the great headway Americans had made in Iraq, Obama declined to throw it all away....
In so doing, Obama implicitly confessed that the view of the world held with quasi-religious fervor by the Democratic left was delusional all along. Bush didn't lie, we didn't go into Afghanistan and Iraq without allies and against their wishes, we didn't carry out policies of torture, etc. The effort to cast Iraq as another Vietnam and America under Bush as an oppressive rogue power were perhaps emotionally satisfying but unconnected to reality.
Without saying so, Obama has found himself having to teach this lesson to the Adam Serwers of the world. They don't like hearing it. They're keeping their ears plugged up and their eyes defiantly shut. Their MyObama Web pages are inactive and their checkbooks are closed. They've tuned out of the campaign and many of them won't even vote. The president they helped elect -- and the world -- have turned out not to be what they thought.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/06/2010 06:20 ||
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He will be safe in the bunker with his dog and his dvd's of Mendelssohn and Offenbach.
What kind of people blow up children? White supremacists, for one example....Islamic supremacists, for another example....
There's a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven't blown up any children--not in real life. But they've been thinking about it.
A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut "carbon emissions." The result, titled "No Pressure," struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London's Daily Telegraph, as "deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful." He's being too kind....
The video has, unsurprisingly, drawn lots of criticism, much of which to our mind is not strong enough. Delingpole calls it a "massive, epic fail!" Blogger Ed Morrissey calls it "the dumbest, most self-defeating ad campaign ever." Even climate-change extremist Bill McKibben calls it "the kind of stupidity that hurts our side."
But it's evil, not just stupid. Some critics, such as Don Surber and The American Spectator, describe the video's message as, in the words of Surber's headline, "Just Blow Up Global Warming Skeptics." Even this is an understatement. The "crime" for which the children in the video are "executed" is one of omission, not commission. They are murdered not even for dissenting against 10:10's political crusade, but merely for being indifferent to it. This is the essence of totalitarianism.
...this video was made by green supremacists themselves, and with a high degree of technical proficiency. As 10:10 itself observed in a statement (since removed from its website), the video required the efforts of "50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras." Blogger David Burge notes that "somehow, throughout this entire process, not one of the hundreds of people involved seemed to have questioned the wisdom of an advertising message advocating the violent, sudden death of people who disagree with it."
Posted by: Mike ||
10/06/2010 08:02 ||
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..and Janet Reno. Oh, wait, that's burned. Never mind.
#3
Yeah, well, that's pretty much it. They really do believe this stuff and would happily implement it if they held sufficient power. "The kind of stupidity that hurts our side," indeed, because it shows exactly what they are thinking but won't say in public.
#4
I don't know, it's easy enough to slip into this sort of mindset. Be honest, would you giggle at the thought of a biker gang literally curbstomping the Phelps clan at their next picketing of a military funeral? Once you let your head get into a place where seditious picketing (or pick your object of outrage, maybe for you it's book-burning) = not separating your recyclables, it's amazing the things you might find yourself thinking.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
10/06/2010 15:22 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
