Communicating Arts - Main Web SitePost Start: 070711-1250H EDT; Updated:
Writing for BBC News from Islamabad, Kahn M. Ilyas posts the two paragraphs that should be and will be read around the world:
On the domestic front, his move against the militants appears to have the support of Pakistan's largest political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which recently frustrated efforts by the opposition groups to form a united front against him.
Troop movements in the sensitive north-western parts of the country during the last four days indicate that the government is willing to take the Red Mosque campaign to the doorstep of the militants. [1]
One cannot image the Palestinians encamped at Nahr al-Bared nor the upwards of 5 million Iraqi refugees cheering on those who have brought the roofs crashing down on their heads or with cruelty and self-righteous menace intimidated, threatened, and murdered them.
This morning, in informal violation of a pact it has kept for 38 years, the Lebanese Army has positioned to assault Nahr al-Bared [2].
Quite independent from President Musharraf's government in Pakistan, the Lebanese government has reached similar conclusions about its version of an Al Qaeda-like invasion force: it will not tolerate the provision of sanctuary to those who defy the will of God in the citizens of the state at large.
The western or contemporary "open society" view of Islam is that the fundamentalist movement within it represents but a fraction of its worldwide population, but as this site has made clear, conservatism, at least, in Islam is far more the rule than exception.
Still, we should all be so good.
Without question, the vast majority of Islam seems to prefer peace to war--not one Islamic army, and there are many, has focused its attention against the west: those prosecuting the war have been doing so at the guerrilla level; those defending with popular support have all been state-based organizations drawing their recruitments directly from their constituencies.
In one country only has a fundamentalist Islamic movement experienced substantial success: Somalia. In that country, the Islamic Courts Council administration of the southern portion could have become a permanent establishment, but as the nature of the fundamentalist firebrand is to look toward the next challenge, the same government in power, collecting taxes and running courts of a sort, prodded Ethiopia with its spear and thereby reduced itself back to lobbing grenades in the odd market place and movie house, effectively returning the beleaguered citizens of Somalia to anarchy and mayhem and the loss of life through violence at a steady weekly clip.
It's a hackneyed thought in the anals of guerrilla warfare study that the "guerrilla needs only to survive to win his war; the state cannot win unless it eliminates the guerrilla."
The assault on Lal Masjid and its aftermath make clear just how difficult it is for the state to both watch and then defend itself and secure with finality a single small urban location. Robert Birsel's piece in Reuters on the "mopping up" at Lal Masjil makes that much clear:
Three militants were killed overnight and several militants and soldiers were wounded in a morning clash. A wounded man was found in a basement bathroom in the evening, Arshad said.
Occasional explosions rang out from the fortified mosque-school complex as troops destroyed booby-traps and mines. [3]
Creating countermeasures for guerrilla warfare has been, I believe, largely a state internal security matter--something for the CIA, FBI, KGB and every other secrets-penetrating, state-run intelligence operation. The idea there: guerrilla operations rely on logistical and personal networks and relationships to launch and sustain operations, and the state-based organizations work to map such networks and dismantle them.
However, I am starting to wonder whether the field isn't the thing, after all.
Positioning and hiding small state-sponsored units may start to address the invisibility issue common to all guerrilla units.
How Presidents Abbas, Karzai, Lahoud, Musharraf, Talabani and Yusuf, every one of them a Muslim, and their people have come to similar conclusions about people who leave bombs in cars, also kidnap police, murder foreign nationals, threaten their neighbors, blow up mosques, and brutalize the population at large may turn out a part of the history of current events overlooked.
The end at Lal Masjid: beyond the dead and injured and the shattered survivors of the event, widespread home and international military and political sympathy and support for President Musharraf.
1. Kahn, M. Ilyas. "Siege consequences for Musharraf." BBC News, Islamabad, July 11, 2007, 11:41 GMT.
3. Birsel, Robert. "Pakistani forces secure mosque complex." Reuters, July 11, 2007, 11:05 a.m. EDT.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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