Climate Change and Osama bin Laden’s Appeal

I thought I should let the hype behind climate change take its course. After all, it is just that – a fad, courtesy of environmentalists and tree-huggers who, for lack of a cause to rally around, have decided to take on the cause of Mother Nature. In time, I thought it would fade away. For it is absurd, all around. Scientific evidence seems insufficient, or confusing, at best. If there is a body of evidence about global warming out there, it gets refuted the following day. Meanwhile, the UN is poised to punish rich industrialized countries for emitting too much carbon dioxide for being, well, productive by asking them to give money to poor non-industrialized countries, and, hopefully, prevent them from becoming gas emitters themselves. Where is the sense in all this?

But when Osama bin Laden raised this issue and added it to his list of grievances against the US, in a tape released by al Jazeera last week that is yet to be verified, that’s another matter. It’s time we take it seriously. Not in the way you think it should be taken seriously, however. We should view it as a sinister plot in the making, involving nothing less than an attempted shift in thinking and strategy on the part of jihadists and communists. In climate change, these extremists find common cause against the West, a way to hurt its economy. By pitting rich nations against poor nations, they have found an issue to exploit. Consider what this article has to say:

Mr. bin Laden veered away from his traditional vows to inflict death and destruction on the United States, and instead discussed climate change, globalization and monetary policy in a message that he said was directed to "the whole world."

He called for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the dollar. He faulted the United States for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which sought to curb global warming by restricting greenhouse gas emissions. And he offered a word of praise for Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and liberal political activist.

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists, and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”

By directing his message to “the whole world,” bin Laden is adopting the strategy of the communists, which is to go mainstream in order to appear legitimate in the eyes of the world. In the Philippines and in other European countries, communists have become convinced that the goals of communism are best achieved not by underground efforts but by becoming mainstream. That is, by forming political parties and participating in elections, communists seek to legitimize their existence acquiring political power the traditional way. They now call themselves “mainstream parliamentarians.”

Bin Laden is seeking to do the same. By transcending his radical Islamist agenda and capitalizing on issues that can appeal to wider audiences, he is seeking to win worldwide approval and legitimacy.

Climate change is a victory for the Left, in all its stripes.

Pakistan’s Public Schooling: Miseducating the Young

Education reform advocates in Pakistan lament that any effort to improve the country’s public school system seems futile as the institutional pressures they have to surmount come from nothing less than powerful forces in the country, including the army, the religious establishment, and the feudal landlords. What reforms are they trying to introduce, and why are they meeting resistance? This article, Poor schooling slows anti-terrorism effort in Pakistan, says that the current curriculum of Pakistan’s public school system centers on the teaching of the glorification of violence in the name of Islam, as it ignores the teaching of basic courses on history, science, and math.

If Pakistani students get the kind of education that would equip them with basic knowledge and marketable skills, ‘the elite would be threatened,’ said Khadim Hussain, coordinator of the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy and a professor at Islamabad's Bahria University. He said that if they make education available, ‘the security establishment's ideology may be at risk.’ And that ideology “involves the belief that non-Muslim nations are out to destroy Pakistan and that the army is the only protection Pakistanis have from certain annihilation. Those notions are emphasized at every level in the schools, with students focused on memorizing the names of Pakistan's military heroes and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad, but not learning the basics of algebra or biology, he said.”

The article continues, "The nature of the education system is reflected in popular attitudes toward the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups that in recent months have carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Pakistan, many of them targeting civilians."

This is outrageous, to say the least. Pakistan is doing itself a disservice by withholding from its own people education in the sciences and the humanities. It is raising generations of unskilled and ignorant young people who will not be able to compete in the global market. It is jeopardizing its future as it prevents the flourishing of its human capital. More important, it is depriving generations of young Pakistanis a truly liberating education, the kind that enlightens and sustains the life of the mind that is free from the darkness of sophistry and superstitions. Knowledge-for-its-own-sake is a fundamental goal of every educational system anywhere in the world. Not to pursue it goes against the very nature of education, which is to enlighten, and its purpose, to empower. Knowledge is power. If Pakistan wants to move forward, it must educate its citizenry. To use schools as propaganda machines is self-defeating and cowardly.

The Jihadi Elite and the Communist Elite

Like Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post journalist who recently wrote an article about international jihadi elite, I have not read Defne Bayrak’s book, Bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East. And like Applebaum, I could also see what she meant when she said: “Both Osama and Che have claimed to fight in the name of the poor and oppressed, while simultaneously appealing very deeply to the wealthy and disgruntled.”

Bayrak, a Turkish journalist, is the wife of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the suicide bomber who killed eight CIA personnel in Afghanistan two weeks ago. She is proud of being an anti-American and of her husband’s martyrdom. Applebaum categorizes her, together with her husband, the Nigerian would-be bomber of Flight 253, and other jihadists who went to elite schools in Europe as typifying an international jihadi elite: educated, eloquent, have connections across the Islamic world; certainly not “the wretched of the Earth.”

They remind me of the communist elite in the Philippines, sons and daughters of the wealthy class who are products of the country’s premier university, the University of the Philippines, where the best and the brightest get their education. They come to UP innocent and fresh from their Catholic high school education only to come out four years later as idealistic revolutionaries ready to take up arms against the establishment.

What do these elites have in common? Both pursue an other-worldly ideology, an abstract vision of something that requires changing and reforming human nature. Communists dream of a utopian society of total classlessness while jihadists want to build a city of God on earth. Both also consider themselves defenders of the common men. Because of their education, class stature, social background, and, in the case of the international jihadis, a deeper sense of religious piety, they think of themselves as intellectually and morally superior over the rest of us. Hence, they deem it their duty to take up our cause, think for us, and tell us what is good for us. Because they think their intentions for the rest of us are higher and nobler, they are ennobled by what they do. In truth, however, what they do is condescending, patronizing, and self-righteous.

Consider Mr. Mohammad Ali Salih, a Washington-based correspondent for Arabic newspapers and magazines in the Middle East. In today’s Washington Post op-ed piece, “My jihad at the White House,” Salih is in a crusade, holding a one-man demonstration in front of the White House, an act of jihad, he says, but not of terrorism, he quickly points out, because he has felt sadness, anger and frustration over America’s wars on Muslims. Angry at Bush back then and at Obama now for not having the “courage to peacefully engage the Muslim world or to end the injustice the United States inflicts on Muslims in the name of its ‘war on terrorism,’" he enumerates America’s sins:

some [Muslims] continue to resist U.S. occupation of two Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), resent U.S. bombardment of two Muslim countries (Pakistan and Somalia), resent U.S. threats to bombard two Muslim countries (Syria and Iran) and resent U.S. military intervention in another Muslim country (Yemen).

I believe Obama's basic problem with the Muslim world is his inability to understand -- or perhaps his denial -- that the Koran tells Muslims to stand up against injustice, particularly if they are treated unfairly by non-Muslims, which stands out in the form of blatant military occupations.

As to why America launched these attacks in these countries, Mr. Salih did not say. There was also no mention of the atrocities committed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban against their own people. And how does Mr. Salih know what the general Muslim populations think and want? Do they share his notion of injustice by non-Muslims against Muslims? In what sense? From some of my readings, I understand that the locals living in villages and towns of Afghanistan and Iraq would like the US troops to stay.

In reality, these self-appointed messiahs -- jihadists and communists alike -- have only an abstract notion of the “people” they claim to serve. They love the people only from afar and view them only in terms of a collective whole. For if one takes a closer look, the “people” they claim to defend are composed largely of simplistic, impoverished, and undignified ordinary folks and villagers who simply work hard to earn a living. Understanding life and its daily requirements, their common sense understanding of things is dismissed by the elites as unsophisticated. They do not have respect for the common man's ability to think and decide for himself.

This premise is central in Marxist-Leninist thought: the herd must be led by a party, the vanguards of “enlightened ones,” towards the right path of the revolution. It is also central in jihadist thinking: it is their duty even to the point of martyrdom to preserve and defend the pure teachings of their religion and wage violence against those who oppose it.

For all their self-righteous indignation, jihadists and communists are the ones causing enormous sufferings to their societies. And yet in their abstract, condescending worldview, they cannot see what is wrong with themselves and their message. Wrapped up in their messianic complex and believing in the rightness of their cause, they truly believe that the salvation of mankind lies in their hands.

As for Mr. Salih, I hope that his one-man jihad remains just that – a one-man jihad. For the rest of us toiling masses are too busy eking out a living, providing food and shelter for our families, sending our children to school, taking part in community projects, and, if we’re lucky, finding the time to dream of a better world.

Rebuilding Haiti

As Haitians and the rest of the bewildered world are still trying to make sense of the tragedy last week that took place in this Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, the policy establishment in Washington, DC is already seizing this crisis as an opportunity to rebuild a nation that for decades has seen nothing but misery and poverty. Given its long history of failed development efforts, dysfunctional and corrupt governments, high crime rates and poverty, the early thinking , according to this article, From Haiti’s ruins, a chance to rebuild a nation, “encompasses a broad swath of issues. Policymakers in Washington are considering whether to expand controversial trade provisions for Haiti and how to help fund the reconstruction for years into the future. The rule of law needs to be strengthened, particularly when it comes to immediate matters like addressing property rights, inheritance and guardianship in hard-hit neighborhoods.”

From a policy perspective, all this is good and promising. But rebuilding Haiti must begin with a proper principled grounding, the kind that entails breaking the habit of dependence and passivity that has enslaved its people, towards forming a liberal character that is the foundation of an energetic, vibrant population.

This grounding must be informed by principled individualism and enlightened self-interestedness. As Tocqueville puts it, “ The individual is the best judge of his own interest and that society has no right to direct his behavior unless it feels harmed by him or unless it needs concurrence” (Democracy in America, 66.) Haitians must understand that their rights as individuals, when consciously asserted, can limit the powers of government. This thinking translates to an active citizenry that participates in public debates, votes for leaders on the basis of merit, and gets involved in political associations. Such citizenry expects its political parties to run on a vision and on a principled agenda. It demands that the mass media allow themselves to be used as a vehicle for articulating opinions and criticisms. The principle of individualism grounded on enlightened self-interest gives rise to a political authority that governs in order to arbitrate competing interests of equally free and strong individuals rather than control the political destiny of a passive populace.

Enlightened self-interestedness, in turn, will make Haitians become creative and enterprising in their search for economic opportunities. Government does them harm by implementing top-down economic policies that will only make them depend for assistance and subsidies. Rather, any development program should adopt a bottom-up approach, where self-interestedness becomes the engine that spurs individuals to action. A Thai Foreign Affairs official argues that any socio-economic program sponsored by the government cannot be truly good, since it has the tendency to limit or separate the ties that bind a citizen’s individual freedom with his sense of social responsibility: “How can we expect any kind of “development” to grow out of a relation in which the government, taking a paternalistic position, treats the people not as its constituency to whom it is accountable, but rather as something to be patronized and thus controlled?” (Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 524.)

Haiti will recover from this tragedy, as it rebuilds its nation and its soul.

“Al-Qaeda has a plan . . . ”

Where’s ours?,” so asks the author of this Washington Post op-ed piece, Al-Qaeda’s New Grand Strategy. He proceeds to enumerate the core elements of the enemy’s strategy, winding down with a criticism of our own:

But while al-Qaeda is finding new ways to exploit our weaknesses, we are stuck in a pattern of belated responses, rather than anticipating its moves and developing preemptive strategies. The ‘systemic failure’ of intelligence analysis and airport security that Obama recently described was not just the product of a compartmentalized bureaucracy or analytical inattention, but a failure to recognize al-Qaeda’s new strategy.

I hope this is not true. I hope that we do have a strategy in place, a secret one that has escaped the open scrutiny of our overly zealous media. But assuming we really don’t have one, we should come up with a strategy that must, likewise, exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. For this, I would like President Obama to start a global campaign against al-Qaeda by appealing to all Muslims all over the world to deny, reject, and condemn the mission and purpose of al-Qaeda. Having proclaimed themselves as the true and pure defenders of the teachings of Islam, to be rejected by their own – both by ordinary Muslims and scholars and imams alike – is to strike a blow to their megalomaniac, messianic vision of themselves.

As their influence overreaches far beyond the Middle East, we’ve got to stop the murderous influence of this fanatical group by asking reasonable and just Muslims to make an open and clear stance: that is, to proclaim publicly that al-Qaeda does not speak for them and cannot possibly represent them, and that it is nothing but a violent terrorist group.

To reasonable and just Muslims everywhere, this is your call as much as it is ours.

Horse Soldiers

Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan is a fascinating tale of soldiering, of cavalry warfare employing 21st century technological tools, of warlords and brave Afghan soldiers too willing to lay down their lives for the defeat of the Taliban, of the local population who, contrary to conventional wisdom, did view the Americans as liberators.

Right after the September 11th attack, a group of soldiers from the Fifth Special Forces were dropped off somewhere in Afghanistan, deep into the enemy territory, to join forces with local warlords and their soldiers in their fight against the Taliban. In a matter of two months, with aerial bombardment support, they succeeded in routing out the enemy. With a GPS tracking system on one hand and a grenade on the other, it is a story of courage and bravery, of honor and duty, of making do with almost nothing and adjusting to the unfamiliar terrain of a different kind of warfare -- the U.S. Army at its finest, indeed!

Their story offers important lessons worth revisiting – understanding the local conditions, co-opting warlords and local populations, employing sophisticated warfare tools and communication devices -- if only to remind us that the war in Afghanistan can be won again.

Local Operatives and Information-Gathering

As a nation, we grieve (and rightly so) for the loss of CIA personnel who died last week in Afghanistan, doing the work they were called to do. Indeed, they and those who work for intelligence agencies are our first line of defense; the information they provide is vital in mapping out good security and defense strategies against the enemy. This particular group, according to this article, is a big blow to US efforts in the area because it was composed of experienced field officers with “unique capabilities and attributes.” It is without doubt that they risked -- and ultimately sacrificed their lives -- for their country, for which we owe them sincere thanks.

As part of their regional mission, the group’s main objective, according to intelligence experts, was to recruit local operatives who could provide information from the field and identify targets. As Bruce Hoffman, professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service said, “The best intelligence is going to come from the field, and that means working closely with the Afghans.”

But what makes a good local operative? How can the intelligence community judge if a local is fit for the job? And when is it time to know if that person has the right character worthy of trust? Certainly, his language skills and familiarity with the local conditions are important. But those are not enough! More important are his cultural insight, his loyalty (both political and religious), his worldview. Against what standards the intelligence community should judge all these factors are the blanks that must be urgently filled in.

For more often than not, the culture of which a local operative is part does not possess the proper ingredients with which to produce a liberal character. His loyalty is to his community and religion, informed by a powerful sentiment called nationalism that emphasizes the ethnic and the particular at the expense of the universal. Hence, his worldview is often myopic and parochial.

But he, like everyone else, does possess reason that enables him to discern certain truths about the human condition.

Socrates teaches us in our meditation of the human condition that we should always begin with reality, wherever it takes us. But reality takes on different forms in different cultures, faiths, social living, etc. Yet, the human condition since the beginning of time has remained the same, constantly beset by the struggle between good and evil, the just and the unjust, the free and the unfree. Poverty and injustice faced by the ancients are the very same problems that we grapple with these days.

But we have also learned that there are principles of politics that transcend centuries and continents that inform the human condition, such as the principles of natural justice and natural rights. In modern democratic times, these principles are embodied in the Declaration of Independence: that all men, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are created equal; that it is the duty of the government to secure and maintain these rights; and if that government becomes abusive of its powers, it becomes a right of a people to overthrow that government. Power is not what is efficient and effective, but what is reasonable and just.

If a local operative is cognizant of the universal truth that is the human condition and the first principles that should inform it, he earns our trust.

If the intelligence community could hire foreign operatives bestowed with this understanding, men and women who possess an insight into the human soul and the environment it lives in, have knowledge of first principles outlined above, can appreciate the importance of the universal at the expense of the particular, the war on terror is half-won.