Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Here are two salutary descriptions of reality in the Global War Against Caliphism:

By David Kilcullen in Small War Journals: Understanding Current Operations in Iraq.

And by Hassan Butt in the Daily Mail: I Was A Fanatic … I Know Their Thinking

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While the essay by Hassan Butt may be pseudonymous, its content and import are accurate and refreshing. Both essays are reproduced below against the day their links might go bad.

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On the Daily Mail Website I commented on the Butt essay in these terms:

What is said here is true and the deepest truth of the situation. The question is theological and its answer is theological. No other decisive solution to the problem of “terrorism” is possible or available. Islam is in need of a theological reformation analagous to that undergone in Europe between the 16th and the 20th Centuries: get the clerical hierarchies out of the affairs of state. Not a separation of church and state or of religion and state — both absurdities as well as impossibilities — but a separation of clerical hierarchies from involvement in civil affairs is required, worldwide.

As this man says, reasons for doing that must be found in the scriptures of Islam. They are present there, just as they are present, and were rediscovered at last, in the scriptures of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.

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The Butt essay is so clear as to be revelatory, as regards both its diagnosis of terrorist ideology as a demonic theology and the treatment regime it commends for dispelling that ideology.

The author accurately sources the jihadi network in the writings of Qutb and identifies the ultimate dispelling of that ideology as a theological reformation WITHIN Islam that shall find in Muslim SCRIPTURES the basis for separating clerical hierarchies from affairs of state.

Although Butt does not name him, it was Qutb who declared the whole world the Land of Unbelief and thereby freed individual Muslims to attack any government and eschew traditional Muslim religious authorities, the Schools of Jurists, which are not the same as clerics and which have condemned “clerics” as alien to Islam.

Butt remarks that Christian theology separates religion and state, but that remark, while accurate in principle, is inaccurate with respect to details and consistent practice. Religion cannot be separated from any aspect of life because the question of man is intrinsic and irrepressible in man and God is the only answer to the question. Furthermore, Christian theology, when demoniacally distorted, identifies religious authority with civil authority (religion with state, meaning practically, clergy ruling all realms of life), thus placing the penal, taxing, educational, military, etc., instruments of the state at the behest of clerical hierarchies.

To their galling bitterness, peoples of Europe and the Americas are not unfamiliar with that situation: Cromwellian England, Bourbon France, Vatican Italy, Vatican machinations in other areas of Europe and portions of the New World, and, finally, Communist Europe, Russia and Asia, because Communism is essentially a Christian heretical movement.

Officially, the Vatican still claims to constitute sole legitimate religious and civil authority — with the religious authority preeminent — in the world, although since 1918 they have been bereft of means, the Holy Roman Empire, to compel that pretense even in Europe. They tried to enlist a proxy between the wars, the Nazis, but were unsuccessful insofar as the Nazis were.

Now come Muslim ideologues eager to conjoin religion (themselves) with state (themselves), and upon the entire planet, Qutb in hand, to reestablish the Caliphate and Muslim Ummah and with global hegemony. Qutb, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, studied at the Sorbonne and commended insurgency concepts and implementations developed by Marx and Lenin. We hear these concepts in the propaganda of every terrorist on earth, Muslim and otherwise. The Iranian Pope Khomeini, too, studied at the Sorbonne and used Communist concepts and implementations in his propaganda.

Ultimately, the jihadis’ (actually, gang lords’) pretense of promoting justice — Dharma in Sanskrit, Zedekah in Hebrew, Righteousness or Proper Conduct in English — must be shown to the world as promoting injustice, and their theology of identifying religion (themselves) and state (themselves) must be shown to the world as self-destructive ideology, an antithesis of theology, which is salutary and therefore both freeing and restful.

Happily, the gang lords (aka jihadis) themselves do that. They show the world who they really are and what they really do, and the world finds both unattractive and reprehensivle once it brushes off their propaganda and observes their actuality. The “jihadis” are their own worst enemy. That is one point of Kilcullen’s essay.

Note, please, in the essay by Hassan Butt reference to the phenomenon of Utopianism. He calls the jihidis Utopians. This description is accurate and importantly so. Utopianism of some form is the root of every tyranny foisted on life.

The word means no place. A Utopian idea or plan is one which has no place to settle, no place at which it can be actualized or at which it can actualize itself. This is because a Utopian idea or plan is based on misunderstanding of the nature and the processes of life, on the one hand, and their relation to the ground of their being, on the other.

While there are an infinite number of ways to misunderstand the nature and processes of life and their relation to being-itself, all of those ways have the same existential face: someone says they now know what everyone else needs to know and needs to do. That is the gist of Utopianism. Utopianism by any name is tyranny.

Culture developed in the constellation of the Latinate Church, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, includes a characteristic Utopianism: the reductionist philosophy called humanism.

While humanism yields a range of emphases, mostly pitched to the tenors of time and clime, its core assertion is disregard of the vertical component of life and elevation of the horizontal component to exclusive interest. Humanism has no ultimate concern that is ultimate.

In the United States, Western cultural humanism, which is reductionist, or as they say, “deconstructionist,” has long carried the names of Unitarianism and Quakerism. Unitarians and Quakers, both Utopian from inception, most opposed and almost prevented the foundation of the United States of America and the development and adoption of her Constitution. Years on, they most agitated the civil war that is still the most violent war the nation has sustained.

The near-prevention of her founding and the sundering of her unity are tangible and monitory fruits of humanism in the United States of America. Unitarianism and Quakerism are Utopian cultural forms characteristic of humanism developed in the constellation of the Christian Church.

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Here is the essay by David Kilcullen in Small Wars Journal, dated 26JUN07:

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

I’ve spent much of the last six weeks out on the ground, working with Iraqi and U.S. combat units, civilian reconstruction teams, Iraqi administrators and tribal and community leaders. I’ve been away from e-mail a lot, so unable to post here at SWJ: but I’d like to make up for that now by providing colleagues with a basic understanding of what’s happening, right now, in Iraq.

This post is not about whether current ops are “working” — for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I’m not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen—sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations.

Ten days ago, speaking with Austin Bay, I made the following comment:

“I know some people in the media are already starting to sort of write off the “surge” and say ‘Hey, hang on: we’ve been going since January, we haven’t seen a massive turnaround; it mustn’t be working’. What we’ve been doing to date is putting forces into position. We haven’t actually started what I would call the “surge” yet. All we’ve been doing is building up forces and trying to secure the population. And what I would say to people who say that it’s already failed is “watch this space”. Because you’re going to see, in fairly short order, some changes in the way we’re operating that will make what’s been happening over the past few months look like what it is—just a preliminary build up.”

The meaning of that comment should be clear by now to anyone tracking what is happening in Iraq. On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual “surge of operations”. I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.

These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we’re doing in Baghdad and what’s happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don’t plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have “gone quiet” as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

When we speak of “clearing” an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don’t get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that’s OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The “terrain” we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that “80% of AQ leadership have fled” don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

This is not some sort of kind-hearted, soft approach, as some fire-breathing polemicists have claimed (funnily enough, those who urge us to “just kill more bad guys” usually do so from a safe distance). It is not about being “nice” to the population and hoping they will somehow see us as the “good guys” and stop supporting insurgents. On the contrary, it is based on a hard-headed recognition of certain basic facts, to wit:

(a.) The enemy needs the people to act in certain ways (sympathy, acquiescence, silence, reaction to provocation) in order to survive and further his strategy. Unless the population acts in these ways, both insurgents and terrorists will wither, and the cycle of provocation and backlash that drives the sectarian conflict in Iraq will fail.

(b.) The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby “hard-wire” the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction. We played the enemy’s game for too long: not any more. Now it is time for him to play our game.

(c.) Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore can never be eradicated by purely enemy-centric means: he can just go to ground if the pressure becomes too much. BUT, because he needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people. And he can’t just “go quiet” to avoid that threat. He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base. That puts him on the horns of a lethal dilemma (which warms my heart, quite frankly, after the cynical obscenities these irhabi gang members have inflicted on the innocent Iraqi non-combatant population). That’s the intent here.

(d.) The enemy may not be identifiable, but the population is. In any given area in Iraq, there are multiple threat groups but only one, or sometimes two main local population groups. We could do (and have done, in the past) enormous damage to potential supporters, “destroying the haystack to find the needle”, but we don’t need to: we know who the population is that we need to protect, we know where they live, and we can protect them without unbearable disruption to their lives. And more to the point, we can help them protect themselves, with our forces and ISF in overwatch.

Of course, we still go after all the terrorist and extremist leaders we can target and find, and life has become increasingly “nasty, brutish, and short” for this crowd. But we realize that this is just a shaping activity in support of the main effort, which is securing the Iraqi people from the terrorists, extremist militias, and insurgents who need them to survive.

Is there a strategic risk involved in this series of operations? Absolutely. Nothing in war is risk-free. We have chosen to accept and manage this risk, primarily because a low-risk option simply will not get us the operational effects that the strategic situation demands. We have to play the hand we have been dealt as intelligently as possible, so we’re doing what has to be done. It still might not work, but “it is what it is” at this point.

So much for theory. The practice, as always, has been mixed. Personally, I think we are doing reasonably well and casualties have been lower so far than I feared. Every single loss is a tragedy. But so far, thank God, the loss rate has not been too terrible: casualties are up in absolute terms, but down as a proportion of troops deployed (in the fourth quarter of 2006 we had about 100,000 troops in country and casualties averaged 90 deaths a month; now we have almost 160,000 troops in country but deaths are under 120 per month, much less than a proportionate increase, which would have been around 150 a month). And last year we patrolled rarely, mainly in vehicles, and got hit almost every time we went out. Now we patrol all the time, on foot, by day and night with Iraqi units normally present as partners, and the chances of getting hit are much lower on each patrol. We are finally coming out of the “defensive crouch” with which we used to approach the environment, and it is starting to pay off.

It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way. But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing. The politics of the matter then can be decisive, provided the Iraqis use the time we have bought for them to reach the essential accommodation. The Embassy and MNF-I continue to work on these issues at the highest levels but fundamentally, this is something that only Iraqis can resolve: our role is to provide an environment in which it becomes possible.

All this may change. These are long-term operations: the enemy will adapt and we’ll have to adjust what we’re doing over time. Baq’ubah, Arab Jabour and the western operations are progressing well, and additional security measures in place in Baghdad have successfully tamped down some of the spill-over of violence from other places. The relatively muted response (so far) to the second Samarra bombing is evidence of this. Time will tell, though….

Once again, none of this is intended to tell you “what to think” or “whether it’s working”. We’re all professional adults, and you can work that out for yourself. But this does, I hope, explain some of the thinking behind what we are doing, and it may therefore make it easier for people to come to their own judgment.

David Kilcullen is Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force—Iraq. These are his personal views only.
Posted by Dave Kilcullen on June 26, 2007 7:11 AM

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Here is the essay by Hassan Butt in the Daily Mail, dated 02JUL07:

I Was A Fanatic … I Know Their Thinking

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network – a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology – I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: “What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.”

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.

Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network – I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn’t enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state – typically by starting debate with the question: “Are you British or Muslim?”

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don’t want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever – and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don’t have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don’t actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we’ll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn’t enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I’d like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

Update 1: Peggy Noonan: Mr. Trump goes to Washington: No one at this point needs your snotty potshots and your supposedly withering one-liners.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA