Maj. Steve Coughlin for Beginners by Jeffrey Breinholt

Family Security Matters ^ | 30 January 2008 | Jeffrey Breinholt

[K-oneTexas]

Published: January 30, 2008

Maj. Steve Coughlin for Beginners
Jeffrey Breinholt

Maj. Steve Coughlin has been in the news lately. Little of the attention has focused on his ideas – rather, it’s the intrigue surrounding the non-renewal of his contact as a briefer for the Joint Chiefs of Staffs that has been the focus, supposedly because he violated the sensibilities of the current climate. Meanwhile, his 300-page master's thesis is posted on the website of the International Strategy and Assessment Center, where Maj. Coughlin and I are fellows. What does his thesis say?

My goal here is to summarize Coughlin’s main ideas. As in my “Muslim Brotherhood for Beginners” article from a few months ago, I am going to fight the temptation here to offer my own opinions, and instead just offer the facts, free of analysis, except on one issue. Coughlin has been characterized by some as a "Christian zealot with a pen." I know Steve Coughlin. I occasionally have a drink with him. I know Christian zealots. Hell, I was born in Provo, Utah. He is not one.

Maj. Couglin’s thesis, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” was written in partial satisfaction for the requirements of his master’s degree. Coughlin is also a lawyer, though the thesis was written in the language of military strategy. To understand his argument, I find it helpful to view it through an American legal analogy.

Let’s say someone in the U.S. is accused of a serious crime. In addition to being innocent of the charges, the defendant also believes the crime itself is unconstitutional. This would raise the prospect of a two-pronged defense, and – because American law is so specialized – perhaps two types of lawyers on the defense team: (1) a trial lawyer who can mount a good defense on the factual allegations, and (2) a constitutional lawyer, who could prepare the appropriate motion to dismiss based on the theory that the crime violates the U.S. Constitution.

Each lawyer will focus on a different thing. Success by either could emancipate their client. Nothing stops the defendant from using both skill sets. If the defendant cares about his freedom and has adequate financial means, he would be remiss not to try both strategies.

Let’s now assume that the prosecutor, at the arraignment, assures defendant that the crime he is charged with is indeed constitutional. Should the defendant neglect to hire the constitutional lawyer? Clearly, the defendant should not take the prosecutor’s word for it. Instead, he would find someone more credible who understands the U.S. Constitution – not just what it says, but how it has been interpreted, to determine whether he has a constitutional defense.

Coughlin’s thesis makes a similar argument about Islamic doctrine, as it relates to how the U.S. military should fight the War on Terror. It is based on the notion that we must understand what motivates Islamic terrorists, in doctrinal terms. He describes this need through what is known as the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB): the systematic, continuous process of analyzing the threat and environment in a specific geographic area. The IPB is designed to support the military staff estimates and decision-making.

The key step in the IPB is to align the enemy’s courses of action (COA) to its doctrine – that is, what motivates the enemy. Knowing the enemy’s doctrine is not the entire answer, because enemy COAs can be constrained by environmental factors. To predict how the enemy will act sufficiently for proper military planning, its pure doctrine needs to be “templated” (evaluated in light of constraining environmental factors). It is only through this IPB process of sizing up the enemy, and discerning between its pure doctrine and what is likely to do through “templating” to account for environmental factors, can proper military action – a collection of “friendly COAs” – be undertaken. It all starts, however, will knowledge of the enemy’s doctrine.

To Coughlin, the IPB in the War on Terror is being thrown off by what he describes as the “Current Approach”: the view that Islamic-based extremism is aberrant and that Islam has become a “religion hijacked.” To Coughlin, this view is pernicious in part because it is being pushed by those who claim that Westerners should rely solely on Muslims to tell us what Islam is, much like how the late Professor Edward Said attacked the notion that Westerners could ever understand what people in the “Orient” thought and how they behaved. Coughlin argues that the Current Approach represents an outsourcing of the information requirements that the IPB process is not structured to answer, much like a defendant taking the prosecutor’s word that the statute is constitutional. In American litigation, the resulting strategy will be based on input from people not aligned with the interests of the defendant. Applying this problem to the military challenge and the IPB, “Inputs into the decision-making process from the Current Approach are the product of borrowed knowledge from individuals and entities that may be either unknown or unbeholden to American national security interests.”

The consequences of uncritically accepting the Current Approach is the unstated corollary that because extremists do not represent “true” Islam, Islamic law itself should be excluded from analytical processes that support threat development. This tendency is culturally enticing to us, for we come from a tradition where arguments over the merits of particular religions are considered impolite (and impolitic) dinner party conversation. This tradition undoubtedly reinforces our inability to look closely at Islamic religious doctrine, and to look elsewhere for help. To add to this, we have Muslim intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan telling us (as he wrote a few weeks ago in the New York Times Book Review) that one cannot truly understand the Koran unless one goes at it with faith (“the language of the heart”). For this task, we must trust people like him. No wonder Ramadan is in such high demand.

Coughlin uses the IPB methodology to ask why we are not bothering to ask, “What if?” It is a powerful argument, if one accepts the IPB process itself, since there is no harm in asking the question – just as there is no harm in the criminal defendant considering the constitutionality of the crime while simultaneously planning a full defense on the factual merits. If, in planning military action, intelligence analysts limit their focus to factors that contribute to understanding the enemy’s doctrine, then the result of a rigorous inquiry that supports the Current Approach would ultimately be neutral to the threat assessment. If, on the other hand, the result is a finding against the Current Approach, we ignore the result at our peril since the IPB-driven process will not based on the proper inputs.

Coughlin’s thesis would be powerful if he just ended there, but he it does not. Instead, he searches through the prevailing views of all major schools of Islamic thought to argue “true” Islam – the type taught in the U.S. to 7th grade Muslim-Americans – requires its adherents to engage in violent struggle for worldwide domination, a state of affairs that cannot be adequately explained by the Current Approach. To get there, Coughlin considers the most definitive sources of Islamic law, including what they say about how Islamic doctrine is to be interpreted. It seems that much is settled in Islam, including what the faithful are required to do in the face of non-Muslims with whom they interact. He concludes that the purveyors of the Current Approach are selling us a bill of goods.

No wonder Maj. Coughlin found himself a disliked character in the halls of the Pentagon among the Muslim advisors who have the monopoly on telling us what Islam represents. He threatens their authority, as well as their livelihood.

Coughlin’s arguments about Islamic mandates make up the bulk of his thesis, but are ultimately unnecessary if one accepts his premise – that we owe it to the system to question whether the Current Approach is supported in Islamic law. What are the stakes? Even if the “true” Islam is a religion of peace, we would still need to know the doctrinal basis for the actions of those who have hijacked it, as long as they in fact exist and are able to motivate fellow Muslims to act at their direction. Consider this argument:

For the “extremist” argument to succeed, it simply has to assert a claim that has some doctrinal basis that survives the ideological screen because any surviving portion of the claim still leaves the “extremist” with a validated argument in support of the jihadis’ agenda. Hence, exclusivity is not an essential requirement for the “extremists.” The Current Approach, however, must be able to demonstrate exclusive correctness to the exclusion of the “extremist” position because the success of their argument can only be measured by the extent to which it constrains the “extremist” doctrine.

 

The problem, as Coughlin describes it, is that when the purveyors of the Current Approach respond to inconvenient Islamic law doctrines by claiming that there are “thousands of different interpretations to Islamic law,” they are saying there is no point to looking to Islamic law for solutions. In their oft-repeated claims that “Islam does not stand for this,” they are necessarily agreeing with Coughlin that there exists such a thing as Islamic doctrine, which necessitates our rigorous examination of it. For Current Approach arguments to succeed at neutralizing “extremist” positions, they must establish that “Islam does not stand for this” in every situation ranging through all interpretations. What are the prospects of that?

So in the end, it does not matter whether Coughlin is right about Islamic doctrine, as much as that the questions are being asked by people who are practicing the appropriate professional standards (another one of Coughlin’s key points). The U.S. government needs to ask these questions, rather than blithely concluding that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by al Qaeda. Even if Coughlin is wrong about the big issues of Islam, he is certainly correct that military planners should be asking about the religious basis for al Qaeda’s actions, so we can better predict how the adherents of “radical Islam” can be expected to act. That is really what matters.

The consequences are failing to do so is illustrated by my legal analogy. The prosecutor has assured the defendant that the crime he is charged with violating is constitutional, presumably because he wants to focus on the facts of the case. For the defendant to not suffer a lost opportunity by taking the prosecutor’s word for it, the prosecutor must be legally correct about what the constitution says. Just as many prosecutors are not constitutional law experts, many Muslims are not experts in Islamic law. Even if the prosecutor is fortuitously correct on this particular constitutional question, few people would argue that the defendant should not hire someone to undertake the necessary research for him, since that is the essence of the adversarial process.

By the same token, for the IPB to deny the need for close examination of the religious doctrinal basis for al Qaeda’s actions is to throw the process itself off. The cost of this decision likely exceeds the benefits of claiming that Islam has been hijacked to win over those who may be susceptible to embracing a more extreme version of the religion. Even by articulating this benefit of the Current Approach, we acknowledge the existence of a radical strain of Islam that can get a hold of people and cause them to act in ways that threaten innocent lives. For us not to then consider the doctrinal basis for this view of Islamic law, and to take it on faith that Islam does not drive their actions, would be malpractice.

# #

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt is a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (www.strategycenter.net.)  Jeff blogs on the Counterterrorism Blog. 
read full author bio here

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[Chgogal]

Stephen Coughlin ((((PING))))!

[Cindy]

Thanks for the ping Chgogal.

#

http://truthusa.com/a/index.php?topic=1595.0

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Ping for later

[Cindy]

ADDING FR-TM link:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1947527/posts?page=1234#1234

[PGalt]

Thanks very much for the ping. Thanks for posting, K-oneTexas. Great article by Jeffrey Breinholt.

Major Steve Coughlin’s thesis is a MUST READ! Thank you Major Coughlin. America’s finest.

[Eagles6]

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[K-oneTexas]

Counterterrorism

Stephen Coughlin’s Treatise on Jihad Available Online

January 12th, 2008 by Andrew Bostom |
No Comments
744 Views

“To Our Great Detriment” Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad

by Stephen C. Coughlin, Esq.  

Published on July 2nd, 2007 From the Summary Introduction:   In comments made at the National Defense University on 1 December 2005, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace explained to his audience the importance of “understand[ing] the nature of the enemy” if we hope to defeat jihadi extremists.  Comparing our situation today, with that faced by an earlier generation who had to deal with the reality of the Nazi threat, General Pace suggested a simple solution to complying with his injunction:  “read what our enemies have said.  Remember Hitler….  He said in writing exactly what his plan was that we collectively ignored to our great detriment (emphasis added).”  Just as we ignored Hitler’s articulation of his strategic doctrine in Mein Kampf, so too are we on the verge of suffering a similar fate today, if we fail to seriously assess the extremist threat based on jihadi strategic doctrine.   

Please download his full analysis as a pdf file available at this link, and disseminate widely:   

All Articles Copyright © 2007-2008 Dr. Andrew Bostom | All Rights Reserved

 

Also at Wolf Pangloss [http://wolfpangloss.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/stephen-coughlin-and-jihad-terror-doctrine-in-the-real-world/]

Stephen Coughlin and Jihad Terror Doctrine in the real world

Monday, January 21, 2008

Stephen Coughlin is a lawyer, a Reserve Military Intellgence officer, an Arabic speaker, and a scholar of Islamic law. He is also soon to be a former advisor to the Pentagon, who was fired after ruffling the feathers of “Hasham Islam, an aide to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England,” by “being too critical of Islamic law.” [1, 2]

While looking through Stephen Coughlin’s master’s thesis I was impressed less by Coughlin’s own writing, which was stodgy and academic as is only to be expected from the fact that it is found in an academic thesis, than by his command of the material. Appendix G, on real world Jihad doctrine, is a real eye-opener. The following is quoted from the Quranic Concept of War by Brigadier S. K. Malik of the Pakistani Army. This book is state sanctioned military doctrine for Pakistan.

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means; it is an end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him. Psychological and physical dislocation is, at best, a mean, though, by no means, conclusive for striking terror into the hearts of the enemies. Its effects are related to the physical and spiritual stamina of the opponent but are seldom of a permanent and lasting nature. An army that practices the Quranic philosophy of war in its totality is immune to psychological pressures. When Liddell Hart talks of imposing a direct decision upon the enemy through psychological dislocation alone, he is taking too much for granted.

The role of terror in Jihad warfare is bad enough. What is truly alarming is that the Quranic Concept of War sees terror as the proper strategy for the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Terror cannot be struck into the hearts of an army by merely cutting its lines of communications or depriving it of its routes or withdrawal. It is basically related only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed. Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent. Psychological dislocation can be produced by a physical act but this does not hold good of the spiritual dislocation. To instill terror into the hearts of the enemy, it is essential, in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate his Faith. An invincible Faith is immune to terror. A weak Faith offers inroads to terror. The Faith conferred upon us by the Holy Qur’an has an inherent strength to ward off terror from us and enable us to strike terror into the enemy. Whatever the form or type of strategy directed against the enemy, it must, in order to be effective, be capable of striking terror into the hearts of the enemy. A strategy that fails to attain this condition suffers from inherent drawbacks and weaknesses; and should be reviewed and modified. This rule is fully applicable to nuclear as well as conventional wars. It is equally true of the strategy of nuclear deterrence in fashion today. To be credible and effective, the strategy of deterrence must be capable of striking terror into the hearts of the enemy.

Coughlin’s contract is set to be terminated in March so it is possible that the decision could be reversed. Let us pray and hope that it is. Stupid about the Jihad and how nuclear weapons would be used in it is no way to go through life, especially not for the US Military.

 

 

[K-oneTexas]

By the same author at Counterterrorism Blog [http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/07/the_mulsim_brotherhood_for_beg.php]

 

The Muslim Brotherhood for Beginners

By Jeffrey Breinholt

Those who follow counterterrorism commentary over the last several months have noticed a number articles and media treatments dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood. Much of this commentary assumed familiarity with the Brotherhood and the issues raised by its presence in Western countries. Consequently, those unfamiliar with issues might feel lost, like sports fans who enter the stadium at halftime. My goal in this article is to give primer on the Muslim Brotherhood and the recent debates surrounding it. I am going to avoid the temptation to provide my own opinions on the merits of these debates. This decision does not imply that I have no opinions about the group and its worthiness for our embrace. Those opinions, however, will have to await another day.

The Muslim Brotherhood was created in Egypt in 1928, out a desire to bring about a more pure form of Islam and to gather enough popular support to force it on the Egyptian government. Today, the Brotherhood is considered the world’s most influential Islamist organization, and there are Brotherhood franchises throughout the Middle East and in many Western countries, including the United States. Its age means that the Brotherhood has spanned across four generations. Although its founder, Hassan al Banna, has been dead since 1949, some of his contemporaries are alive. Although a relatively young social movement, its 80-year existence means that the Muslim Brotherhood has had a long time to perfect is message and its mode of communication. This message has attributes that jibe with liberal sensibilities; the Brotherhood preaches that Islam enjoins man to strive for social justice, the eradication of poverty and corruption, and political freedom.

The Muslim Brotherhood's charter describes its goal as the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate - an empire stretching from Spain to Indonesia. Although it claims to be non-violent, its charter describes “dying in the way of Allah” as the group’s highest hope. Its most infamous alumnus is undoubtedly Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the number two leader of Al Qaida. This does not mean that the Brotherhood is synonymous with Usama Bin Laden, for Zawahiri views himself as a Al Qaida member. The Brotherhood and Al Qaida are both Sunni groups, although they are distinct, with Al Qaida considered far more militant.

Assessing the Muslim Brotherhood as a single entity is difficult, because its attributes vary from country to country. These differences are used by its supporters to argue that the Brotherhood is worthy of official recognition (even encouragement) by Western governments. Those who argue that the Brotherhood is monolithic tend to argue that its manifestations reflect the host country's attributes: the Brotherhood is more free to be open in Europe and the U.S. than in, say, Egypt and Syria, where it has been fighting repression since the 1930s. Those subscribing to the “monolithic Brotherhood” view believe that the face it shows to the West arises from the fact that it does not have to spend resources living underground, and can instead perfect the communication skills of its members and pass them off as mainstream and moderate.

The question of whether Western governments should embrace or eschew the Muslim Brotherhood is a hot topic right now in foreign policy circles, as a result of several articles and at least one televised documentary. This issue is also informed by some geopolitical developments.

The recent debates became heated when Robert Leiken and Steve Brooke published an article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood," in which they argue that the Brotherhood has evolved into an entity that legitimately desires to participate in democratic politics, to the point where it represents an effective counterweight to violent Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, and one worthy of embrace by Western governments. This view apparently carried some resonance. On June 20, 2007, Eli Lake of the New York Sun reported that Leikin has been asked to brief the U.S. State Department on his views.

The Leikin/Brooke article set off a firestorm. Critics argued that the authors had been duped, and were relying on poor scholarship. Doug Farah of the Counterterrorism Blog took issue with Leikin and Brook’s claim that Milestones - the book by Sayyid Qutb, long thought to be the vital source for Muslim Brotherhood’s violent tradition - had been officially abandoned by the Brotherhood in favor of Hassan al-Huyabi’s Preachers, Not Judges, which, as Farah notes, has never been published in English and has not been available in the Arab world since 1985. Patrick Poole was even more damning. In a June 21, 2007 American Thinker piece, he noted that Leikin had been wrong about the Soviet influence over the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and he was just as wrong about the Muslim Brotherhood today. To both Farah and Poole, the Brotherhood should not be trusted, since it is saying things for Western consumption that belies its true embrace of violent methods.

Around the time of the Leikin/Brooks piece, PBS aired a series “America at a Crossroads,” which explored the challenges confronting the post-9/11 world. The series included a 60-minute segment, entitled “The Brotherhood,” in which journalists Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff told the story of Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the most famous American member of the organization to be convicted in a U.S. court. They traveled to Europe to talk to Yousef Nada, one of al Banna’s proteges, and hinted at an Al Qaida-Muslim Brotherhood connection. Although the film included statements by current and former U.S. government officials critical of the Brotherhood, it left open the question of the appropriate U.S. policy towards it.

On June 4, 2007, The New Republic published a remarkable 28,000 word essay by Paul Berman, entitled "Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan." Ramadan, an Swiss academic, is the popular English-speaking grandson of Hassan Al Banna. Berman considered the mystery of Ramadan - who has been denied a U.S. visa to accept a teaching appointment at Notre Dame - and ultimately concluded that his smooth rhetoric was a mask hiding enthusiasm for a worldwide Islamic domination. Berman attacked Ramadan’s refusal, in a televised French debate, to condemn the stoning of female adulters, ultimately concluding that he is a fraud who had successfully conned several Western liberals. The French debate was perhaps the most stinging part of the Berman article, since it raised the issue most Western intellectuals have the greatest difficulty - the role of women in society if the Brotherhood succeeded in coming to power.

Responses to Berman’s article were varied. Some argued that Ramadan was a classic Muslim Brotherhood member who disingenuously gives the Western world what they want to hear while secretly harboring a desire for Muslim conquest in contravention of democratic values. To some, it does not matter whether Ramadan sincerely opposes violence, as long as his goal is domination of non-Muslims, in which case “outreach” is unproductive. One commentator, for example, wrote “What exactly do you plan to dialog [sic] about? Can we decide, after intense debate, that only half of the Qu’ran is infallible? That 16 and not 13 is the right age to sell your daughter to her Algerian cousin? That Europe’ free press should be vetted by a panel of mullahs rather than simply abolished?”

Others argued that Berman was wrong about Ramadan, insisting that he was the West’s best hope for a pluralistic Islam which embraces democracy and universal rights, even if they do not necessarily agree with the glowing attention he garners. As one writer put it, “It’s useful to have people like Ramadan around. His fascism is best dealt with by public engagement.”

The debate over Ramadan’s bona fides is an important one, if one accepts the method of assessing an organization through the behavior of its chosen leaders. In this case, Americans might want to bear in mind that a top Muslim Brotherhood leader in the U.S., Abdulrahman Alamoudi, is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence, after acknowledging his participation in a plot by Mohamar Qaddafi to kill King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in a case described on the PBS production.

Regarding Ramadan, the notion that he might be a person with whom Western governments should view as a White Knight was struck a blow when David Goodhart, editor of Prospect, took him to task in a recent public letter in the June 2007 issue of the magazine. Goodhart was one of Ramadan’s Western supporters, who defended him against claims that he was an extremist. What changed Goodhart’s position was a June 4, 2007 article by Ramadan in The Guardian, which left Goodhart agreeing with Berman’s assessment in The New Republic piece.

What enraged Goodhart’s was Ramadan’s suggestion that Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the London July 2005 bombers, acted in response to U.K.’s foreign policy and support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Noting that Khan had become radicalized well before the Iraq War, Goodhart argued:

To blame it all on British foreign policy and racism will simply not do. British Muslims are among the politically freest and richest in the world, which is why so many more Muslims are desperate to come and live here. Do some Muslims do less well than the average on educational and employment outcomes? Yes, of course, especially those from poor countries with traditional outlooks such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.. . . Britain has many structural flaws, and individual acts of unfairness or discrimination take place every day based on race and religion, and many other things too. ...But to assert that Britain is a kind of apartheid state where justice is "applied variably depending on whether one is black, Asian or Muslim" is such an absurd exaggeration that it undermines your credibility when you are pointing to real grievances.

If Muslims want to change British policy on Iraq or anything else, they should join with the larger number of non-Muslims who are unhappy about British foreign policy in political parties and pressure groups. If they win the argument, over time foreign policy will change. But it requires patience, and accepting that however strong your feelings, the democratic political process works slowly and over the long term.

Goodhart concluded:

You, I thought, were different. You were modern, confident, educated, in favour of Muslim integration against religious and ethnic balkanisation. You were favoured by the British government because, it seemed, you could transcend the often beleaguered, Muslim worldview. That worldview sees nothing but grievance and oppression, even for British Muslims like Mohammad Sidique Khan who enjoyed all the freedoms of a rich western society (to marry for love, to go to university, to never worry where his next meal was coming from or how he would pay for healthcare). It is also a worldview which sees the murder of 52 innocents two years ago in the name of Islam not as an opportunity to take a long, hard look at the pathologies inside some sections of British Muslim society but, rather, another opportunity to blame the government and complain about Islamophobia. Your Guardian piece suggests I was wrong about you—it is a depressingly typical expression of that beleaguered, paranoid worldview.

To people like Goodhart, Ramadan has a long way to guy before he succeeds in convincing those who want to believe in him and his Muslim Brotherhood movement.

In addition to the above commentary, the Western response to the Muslim Brotherhood should also be informed by recent geopolitical events. In January 2007, the Muslim Brotherhood scored a singular democratic victory, when Hamas, its branch in the Palestinian areas, became the first Brotherhood wing to succeed in taking over a government through the ballot box. This event proved to be controversial in radical Muslim circles. Al Qaeda leader Zahawahiri issued a statement taking the Brotherhood to task for even participating in democratic elections (“they abandoned the movement of resistance and accepted the government of bargaining... they abandoned the heroic stuggler movement and accepted the domesticated beggar government”). To Brotherhood enthusiasts like Leikin and Brooke, this event and Zawahiri’s reaction showed that the Brotherhood was well posed to thrive as a Western institution. After all, our most hardened enemies disapproved of its actions. Viewed this way, how could the Brotherhood be all that bad?

This view may ultimately be short-lived, as a result of Hamas’ recent decision to take up arms against Fatah, its partner in the Palestinian government. Following a few days of fighting during the week of June 11 - a week in which, ironically, the NEFA Foundation gathered some of the Western world’s foremost experts in Italy to discuss the Muslim Brotherhood - Hamas succeeded in driving Fatah forces from Gaza, which it now controls. The fragile Palestinian Authority government has been destroyed, with Fatah retreating to the West Bank. What was the democracy-spouting Ramadan’s reaction to this development? He issued a statement claiming that the Hamas’ actions were Israel's fault. Ramadan’s claim, however, failed to convince Al Qaida. Ayman Zawahiri issued a statement commending Hamas for its actions in Gaza and urging Muslims to support Hamas.

So there it is. The Muslim Brotherhood remains an open question, and its worthiness for Western acceptance is far from settled. There is no question that these debates will continue. In the meantime, those interested in this important national security issues should continue to take notice, and welcome the efforts of groups like the NEFA Foundation to advance a broader understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals and capabilities.

 

[brityank]

Thanks for the ping, Chgogal. Islam strikes me as being like a forest. Those inside only see the trees; some larger, some smaller, all heading in the same direction, but there's no compunction that prevents indiscriminate culling to allow one tree more space to grow.

We on the outside see the whole sweep of green across hill and dale. Some parts are stunted and mis-shapen, others large and stately. But all of it is standing on an undergrowth of decay and detritus that poisons and twists, and will eventually destroy the trees, the hills, and the dales, and everything it touches.

It seems that much is settled in Islam, including what the faithful are required to do in the face of non-Muslims with whom they interact. He concludes that the purveyors of the Current Approach are selling us a bill of goods.

No wonder Maj. Coughlin found himself a disliked character in the halls of the Pentagon among the Muslim advisors who have the monopoly on telling us what Islam represents. He threatens their authority, as well as their livelihood.

Coughlin’s arguments about Islamic mandates make up the bulk of his thesis, but are ultimately unnecessary if one accepts his premise – that we owe it to the system to question whether the Current Approach is supported in Islamic law. What are the stakes? Even if the “true” Islam is a religion of peace, we would still need to know the doctrinal basis for the actions of those who have hijacked it, as long as they in fact exist and are able to motivate fellow Muslims to act at their direction.

We need to keep our foresters in place.

[StarCMC]

What an excellent analogy, brityank!

[PGalt]

“The Muslim Brotherhood for Beginners” and commentary BUMP! Thanks. Thanks.

[jokar]

Must read later

[Credo]

Ping

[PGalt]

What’s your take on the Marathon terrorists in relation to “Sentinel TMS is the cutting edge platform for analyzing and managing threat networks. The system incorporates knowledge discovery, entity extraction, social network analysis, a secure entity knowledgebase, threat prediction, data sharing, reporting, data import/export, and collaboration tools.” - quote from your homepage.

[freds6girlies]

bookmark

[jokar]

Bookmark and Bump to a closed thread. January 2008 Front Page Magazines Threat Matrix link

[Cindy]

Thank you for the bump and bookmark, Jokar.

[tet68]

The following is quoted from the Quranic Concept of War by Brigadier S. K. Malik of the Pakistani Army. This book is state sanctioned military doctrine for Pakistan.

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means; it is an end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him. Psychological and physical dislocation is, at best, a mean, though, by no means, conclusive for striking terror into the hearts of the enemies. Its effects are related to the physical and spiritual stamina of the opponent but are seldom of a permanent and lasting nature. An army that practices the Quranic philosophy of war in its totality is immune to psychological pressures. When Liddell Hart talks of imposing a direct decision upon the enemy through psychological dislocation alone, he is taking too much for granted.

The role of terror in Jihad warfare is bad enough. What is truly alarming is that the Quranic Concept of War sees terror as the proper strategy for the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Terror cannot be struck into the hearts of an army by merely cutting its lines of communications or depriving it of its routes or withdrawal. It is basically related only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed. Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent. Psychological dislocation can be produced by a physical act but this does not hold good of the spiritual dislocation. To instill terror into the hearts of the enemy, it is essential, in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate his Faith. An invincible Faith is immune to terror. A weak Faith offers inroads to terror. The Faith conferred upon us by the Holy Qur’an has an inherent strength to ward off terror from us and enable us to strike terror into the enemy. Whatever the form or type of strategy directed against the enemy, it must, in order to be effective, be capable of striking terror into the hearts of the enemy. A strategy that fails to attain this condition suffers from inherent drawbacks and weaknesses; and should be reviewed and modified. This rule is fully applicable to nuclear as well as conventional wars. It is equally true of the strategy of nuclear deterrence in fashion today. To be credible and effective, the strategy of deterrence must be capable of striking terror into the hearts of the enemy.

If there was ever a cogent argument for the destruction
of ALL muslim holy sites, this is IT.
The pillars of their belief must come down before ours do.