Why France’s most famous writer is predicting a Muslim president

Kabir Chibber

January 10, 2015

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On Sunday, in an unprecedented move, French president Francois Hollande will join with the rightwing opposition, unions, and human rights organizations in a national unity march in Paris (link in French) in the wake of massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this week.

The only group not invited tomorrow? The Front National, the popular anti-European, anti-immigration party that has now become France’s biggest party in Europe. “This is a total abuse of the concept of national unity,” its leader, Marine Le Pen, said (link in French). “They will assume the consequences with voters.”

Sunday’s march echoes the central prophecy of the most talked about book in France right now—Submission, by France’s most famous living writer, Michel Houellebecq, which was released on Wednesday with an unusually-large 150,000-copy run. In the novel, he imagines the year 2022, when the French left and right are rejected by voters. The election looks like it’s going to Le Pen and in an unprecedented move, the left and right join to throw their support behind a man named Mohammed Ben Abbes. Thus, a Muslim is elected president of France.

It was, in fact, a parody of Houellebecq and his novel that was on the last cover of Charlie Hebdo before the attack:

La une de la semaine est encore mieux qu'un horoscope.pic.twitter.com/8DJj8PTNGC

Russia’s Waning Soft Power in Central Asia

By Stephen Blank

January 09, 2015

The Russian language is fading in the region, and there seems little Moscow can do about it. 

Allegedly, Russia invaded Ukraine because Russians and Russian speakers there were in danger of losing their cultural-political rights to a supposedly neo-Nazi, Fascist government there. Of course, these charges were wholly mendacious. But they do highlight the salience of Russian language use in the countries of the Russian diaspora of the former Soviet Union as having a direct bearing on the security of those states. Indeed, a 2009 Russian law that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly invoked to justify the invasion of Crimeapermits the Russian president to order troops into other countries to uphold the “honor and dignity” of Russians and Russian speakers if it is being violated. Given that, it should be clear that linguistic policy in Central Asian countries is a matter of the utmost importance, requiring considerable subtlety on the part of Central Asian leaders.

Nevertheless it has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language issteadily losing ground in Central Asia in educational institutions and in much of the media throughout Central Asia. To be sure, Moscow is trying to counter this, for instance with recent attempts to saturate the Kazakh media. Yet this trend towards establishing the primacy of national cultures and languages at the expense of Russian builds on twenty years of steady nationalization of the culture of these states as a matter of deliberate policy, on their deliberate efforts to maintain an openness to the larger globalizing trends in the world economy, and on a generation of growing restrictions on Russian language use in broadcasting and other media.

Of course, Central Asian leaders will not publicly attack the use of Russian language or create situations that could tempt Moscow to intervene in Central Asia on the same pretexts as it employed in Ukraine. But while the invasion of Ukraine created and still generates considerable anxiety in Central Asia, the crisis that Russia faces as a result of its action makes intervention in Central Asia a less likely prospect for the foreseeable future. Given the steep economic decline Russia has experienced following its Ukrainian adventure a third front on top of Ukraine and the North Caucasus is the last thing Moscow seeks. Nonetheless, leaders like Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev point with pride to the growth of Kazakh as the native language and more younger students are preferring English or Chinese to Russian.

Intel Source Says One of Paris Terrorist Suspects Met With Al Qaeda Official Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen

January 9, 2015

Exclusive: Paris attack suspect met prominent al Qaeda preacher in Yemen - intelligence source

A call for witnesses released by the Paris Prefecture de Police January 8, 2015 shows the photos of two brothers Cherif Kouachi (L) and Said Kouachi, who are considered armed and dangerous, and are actively being sought in the investigation of the shooting at the Paris offices of satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

(Reuters) - One of two brothers suspected of carrying out the deadly shooting at a French satirical weekly met leading al Qaeda preacher Anwar al Awlaki during a stay in Yemen in 2011, a senior Yemeni intelligence source told Reuters on Friday.

U.S.-born Awlaki was prominent in spreading al Qaeda’s militant message to European and English-speaking audiences and was an influential leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s most active affiliate. He was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike widely attributed to the CIA.

U.S. and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the suspects in the French attack, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen for several months training with AQAP.

The Yemeni source said Kouachi, 34, was among a number of foreigners who entered the country for religious studies.

"We do not have confirmed information that he was trained by al Qaeda but what was confirmed was that he has met with Awlaki in Shabwa," the source said, noting that he could have been trained in one of the large parts of Yemen not under the control of the authorities back in 2011.

Cherif Kouachi: From Dope Smoking Pizza Delivery Guy to Most Wanted Man in France

By Alexandria Sage

January 9, 2015

Suspect’s journey from Pizza delivery to French police’s most wanted

* Suspect moved from pizza and petty crime to terrorism

* The “pipsqueak turned beefy” in prison, says lawyer

* Arrested again in 2010, case dropped for lack of evidence

PARIS, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Twelve years ago, one of the two brothers suspected of the shootings at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was a young man like many others in France, more interested in girls and smoking dope than defending the Prophet Mohammad.

But between 2003, when Cherif Kouachi delivered pizzas and dreamed of being a rap star, and Wednesday, when he and his brother were named chief suspects in the killing of 12 people in Paris, the French national went from punk to most wanted.

Kouachi, 32, is being sought along with his older brother Said, 34, in a manhunt following what President Francois Hollande called a terrorist attack of “exceptional barbarism” against journalists and two police officers.

How Kouachi - described as a “pipsqueak” by his lawyer during a 2005 trial for involvement in a cell sending young French volunteer fighters to Iraq - started down the road to radicalism is a story becoming increasingly familiar in France and elsewhere in the West.

Questions are already being raised over how an ex-convict known to intelligence services for his radical leanings could have been able to carry out Wednesday’s massacre.

Born in eastern Paris to Algerian parents who died when the brothers were still children, Kouachi grew up in an orphanage in the western city of Rennes. Armed with a sports teacher diploma, Kouachi returned to Paris and delivered pizzas to get by.

"He was part of a group of young people who were a little lost, confused, not really fanatics in the proper sense of the word," his ex-lawyer Vincent Ollivier, told Liberation daily. "He hadn’t really given any great thought to Islam and didn’t seem all that determined."

In a 2005 France 3 documentary, which includes footage taken by a Paris community centre, Kouachi is seen rapping in English, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, a baseball hat worn backwards on his head.

Despite a record for selling drugs and minor theft, he is described as someone more interested in pretty girls and music than the Koran. But that was before he met Farid Benyettou.

AMATEUR TRAINING

The Paris Hostage Situations

January 8, 2015 

As I am sure many of you know, there are two hostage situations taking place outside Paris involving at least three terrorists involving in the attack two days ago on the Paris editorial offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the killing a few hours later of a French policewoman in a southern suburb of Paris. 

According to the latest reporting from the scene, the two suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack, Cherif Kouachi, 32, and his brother Said Kouachi, 34, are currently holed up in the office of a family-owned commercial printing company in the town of in the town Dammartin-en-Goële 26 miles northeaewst of Paris near Charles de Gaulle airport. Press reporting indicates that they are holding at least one male hostage, although it is entirely possible that they are holding more. 

FRENCH POLICE/AFP/Getty Images Suspects Cherif Kouachi (left), aged 32, and his brother Said Kouachi (right), aged 34, are wanted in connection with an attack at a satirical weekly in the French capital that killed at least 12 people. The pair took a hostage in a printing company’s warehouse Friday. 

Was There an Intelligence Failure Leading Up to Charlie Hebdo Terror Attack?

January 9, 2014

As Trauma Grips France, Government Faces Questions Over Intelligence Lapses

PARIS — With twin hostage dramas at different ends of Paris by armed jihadists who have killed at least 13 people and traumatized France, the government faced gaping questions on Friday over the failure to thwart such brazen attacks, especially on a well-known target like the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The French intelligence services knew that striking the newspaper and its editor, for their vulgar treatment of the Prophet Muhammad, had been a stated goal of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, through its propaganda journal, Inspire. And they had the Kouachi brothers, Saïd, 34, and Chérif, 32, on their radar aspreviously involved in jihad-related activities, for which Chérif went to jail in 2008.

The French apparently also knew, or presumably should have known, either on their own or through close intelligence cooperation with the United States, that Saïd had traveled in 2011 to Yemen, where news reports on Friday said he had met with the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a member and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was later killed by an American drone strike.

But Yemen has been an American, not a French priority, intelligence analysts said on Friday. And with French security concentrating on the 1,000 to 2,000 French citizens who have traveled to fight in Iraq and Syria against the Syrian regime or with the Islamic State, it was likely that the Kouachi brothers and their friends — including Amedy Coulibaly, the man said to be involved in the second hostage taking — were put lower on the priority list, the analysts said.

But such reasoning did not answer the basic questions about why the French had not monitored the Kouachi brothers more aggressively, what the brothers were doing between 2011 and now, and why Charlie Hebdo was not better protected. And it raised the question of whether there had been a spectacular failure in American-French intelligence cooperation.

In New Humiliation for Nigeria’s Hapless Military, Boko Haram Fighters Capture 16 More Towns in Northern Nigeria

Aminu Abubakar and Robyn Dixon

January 9, 2015

Hundreds said killed by Boko Haram in attacks in northeastern Nigeria

Nigerian soldiers were in control in Baga in the northeastern part of the country in April 2013. The militant group Boko Haram has taken over the area this week in a series of bloody attacks. (Pius Utomi Ekpei / AFP/Getty Images)

Hundreds reportedly killed by Boko Haram in attacks in northeastern Nigeria

Another humiliation for Nigeria’s military as 16 villages fall to Boko Haram and hundreds are killed

7,500 Nigerians flee latest bloody Boko Haram attacks in the country’s northeast

Hundreds of people have been killed in northeastern Nigeria in terror attacks in the last week, local officials say, as Boko Haram militants took control of 16 towns in a new humiliation for the country’s struggling armed forces.

Boko Haram gunmen stormed the town of Baga on Saturday, killing about 100, district head Baba Abba Hassan said. In all, hundreds appear to have died in attacks across the region, local officials said. But Hassan dismissed reports circulated on Internet social media sites that 2,000 people had been killed.

Russia Had Some Major Diplomatic Wins Last Year

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Since Russia invaded Crimea last summer, the West has relied on a strategy of economic sanctions and international isolation to compel the Kremlin to withdraw its support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine. But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent series of diplomatic successes – in particular, with Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan – has all but negated the effectiveness of this strategy.

To be sure, Putin was shunned at last month’s G-20 summit in Brisbane, with the Australian hosts and Western leaders berating him in bilateral meetings for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and creating a rift with its Western economic partners. Putin left early, proclaiming that Western sanctions were harming European economies more than Russia anyway.

But Putin was not deterred, proceeding to launch major initiatives with countries of vital security concern to the West, boosting Russia’s diplomatic leverage and enhancing its value to its most important, albeit still coy, partner: China. As Putin declared in a recent interview, his government is committed to ensuring that Russia does not become internationally isolated behind a new Iron Curtain.

With Iran, the Kremlin has launched a joint bank that will enable Russian companies to expand bilateral trade without using Western currencies or worrying about Western financial sanctions. The deal builds on this summer’s “oil-for-goods” agreement, whereby Russia will exchange its own goods for as many as 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil daily.

REUTERS/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti/Kremlin Russia's President Vladimir Putin (2nd L) shakes hands with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani (L) during a meeting at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek.

Bilateral security cooperation also progressed, with the Russian Navy holding a three-day maritime exercise with Iran’s Caspian fleet. So far, efforts to weaken Russia’s relationship with Iran – not to mention its other major Middle Eastern ally, Syria – have repeatedly failed. In October, Russia’s United Nations ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, faulted the US-led initiative against the Islamic State for its failure to involve Iran and Syria, which he called “logical allies in the fight against terrorism in the region.”

Moreover, Russia has signed an agreement that will ensure that its own firms remain the dominant foreign players in Iran’s civil nuclear-energy sector, even if a nuclear deal leads Western powers to ease sanctions on Iran. Under the terms of the deal, Russia will help Iran construct at least two more nuclear reactors – and as many as eight.

Religion Is Not the Enemy

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL

JANUARY 9, 2015 

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It was entirely appropriate that one of the first people to weigh in after the Charlie Hebdo massacre was Salman Rushdie, the man who spent years of his life defying a state-sponsored death threat prompted by a presumed act of blasphemy. Though Rushdie isn’t one of my favorite novelists, I’ve always admired his firm stand in defense of the freedom of speech — and I’m glad that the British government had the guts to defend his rights.

By the same token, I don’t in any way dispute his right to make the statement that he issued yesterday — even though I find myself in rather strong disagreement with it. Here’s what he said:

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. “Respect for religion” has become a code phrase meaning “fear of religion.” Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

I don’t have any problem at all with the last sentence. I don’t see how you can possibly have a free society unless you allow for the possibility of disrespect. If any of us can shut down a conversation by claiming that we’re “offended” or “hurt” by something someone else has said, there won’t be any conversation. So we’re fine there.

No, it’s the first words of Rushdie’s statement that bother me. “Religion.” Allreligion. Not a particular faith (which would already be a huge generalization in itself), but, essentially, anyone who believes. I guess some would argue that this vastly overarching claim is qualified by that oddly tacked-on phrase “when combined with modern weaponry,” but I’m not sure I’d buy that. The appositive about “a mediaeval form of unreason” suggests that it’s the very notion of religious belief that lies at the core of the problem for Rushdie. If you’re convinced that all religions are a form of unreason, you certainly can’t expect to have a rational conversation with them.

Believers of any sort, in this view, are quite simply crazy people.

Believers of any sort, in this view, are quite simply crazy people.

It’s possible that Rushdie intended “religion” as a diplomatic synonym for “Islam.” After all, the attackers, who claimed allegiance to al Qaeda, clearly singled outCharlie Hebdo for its disrespectful cartoons about Islam. Yet to blame the attack on all the adherents of an entire religious community of more than 1.7 billion people seems like a stretch. Many Muslims around the world have quickly denounced the killing. The Arab League and a whole range of governments with Muslim majorities have condemned it. Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most senior institution of learning, called the attack “a criminal act.” (The photo above shows Muslim men praying outside a mosque in the French town of Saint-Etienne next to signs denouncing the killing.)

This doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of problems in various parts of today’s Islamic world. Intolerance toward dissenting views — as manifested, for example, in bigoted and deplorable blasphemy laws — is a big one. (Just try building a synagogue in Riyadh.) But it is too easy to blame all of this on an allegedly monolithic “Islam.” I’ve just read a commentary piece by one American conservative who argues that “intolerance for free expression is rooted in classical Islam” — though I guess his definition of “classical” doesn’t cover the periods when the Islamic world boasted more cultural ferment and free inquiry than its Christian counterparts.

Indeed, one can just as easily argue that the pathologies entrenched in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran have just as much to do with eminently modern politics as they do with the Quran — a book that, as Fareed Zakaria rightly notes, doesn’t use the word “blasphemy.” 

This may come as a shock, but in my life I’ve met a lot of Muslims, and none of them expressed any interest in killing me for my beliefs.

This may come as a shock, but in my life I’ve met a lot of Muslims, and none of them expressed any interest in killing me for my beliefs. I guess they just didn’t get “classical Islam.”

So what about Rushdie’s larger claim — that religion per se is a kind of mental illness that can become “a real threat to our freedoms” at just about any moment? That’s a view that seems to be growing increasingly popular among the followers of atheist thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who pride themselves on their clear-eyed honesty and their heroic willingness to cast away the crutches of irrational belief. (Dawkins predictably took to social media yesterday to blame the attack on all Muslims, everywhere.)

The problem with such arguments is that the ranks of the religious inconveniently include people who have done great good for humankind. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent campaign for justice is unimaginable without his background as a Baptist preacher. The Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis because he denounced the Holocaust and bemoaned the criminality of Hitler’s regime. Fervent Buddhists like Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama have devoted their lives to the defense of human rights. The Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel believed himself to be doing God’s work as he laid the foundations of modern genetics.

Recent Nobel Prize winners like Iran’s Shirin Ebadi and Yemen’s Tawakkol Karman remind us that believing Muslims also make excellent civic activists. It wasn’t that long ago that the deeply religious Pashtuns of what is today Pakistan produced Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a pacifist and thoroughly Muslim anti-colonialist whose views were comparable to Ghandi’s.

Nor is being an atheist any guarantee of good behavior. Jihadi crimes are hideous, but even al Qaeda and the Islamic State have a long way to go before they reach the astonishing death toll of 20th-century secularists like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, whose combined record of slaughter runs into the many tens of millions. (Hitler, it should be noted, dreamed fondly of the day when he could hang the Pope on St. Peter’s Square.) The most intolerant regime in the world today is almost certainly North Korea, where any citizen who reveals a hint of faith in anything other than the Kims can expect a death sentence or a long term in a concentration camp.

The real problem isn’t religion. It’s a deeper psychological failure that afflicts humans of all varieties, religious and not.

The real problem isn’t religion. It’s a deeper psychological failure that afflicts humans of all varieties, religious and not. It’s called “fanaticism” — that eerie quality of single-mindedness that can lead even the intelligent and the educated to believe that the views they hold excuse any form of savagery. Yes, many of these people gravitate to absolutist versions of religion — but history shows they’re equally attracted to secular forms of political extremism. I doubt that this is something we’ll ever completely manage to uproot from the human experience; I suspect that the struggle against it will continue as long as human beings exist.

But that doesn’t mean that we should give up. And this week in particular that means standing up for the values that the killers in the Rue Nicolas-Appert were trying to destroy. Blaming religion probably isn’t the best place to start.

American Public Attitudes Toward ISIS and Syria

By: Shibley Telhami

Although the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS, found broad support in Congress and amongst a growing international coalition, questions remain about America’s commitment to a mission to “degrade and ultimately destroy” this terrorist organization, and about the efficacy of the current military strategy in stopping ISIS from seizing territory and massacring civilians. Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami conducted a survey on American public attitudes toward the rise of the Islamic State and the U.S. campaign against the group in Syria and Iraq; below are several key findings and a download to the survey's full results.

Operation Helicopter: Could Free Money Help the Euro Zone?

By Anne Seith

The European Central Bank has run out of ammunition to defend itself from deflation.

Fears that the euro zone is heading for deflation refuse to abate. Now, many economists are demanding that the European Central Bank hand out money to consumers to stimulate the economy. But would it work?

It sounds at first like a crazy thought experiment: One morning, every resident of the euro zone comes home to find a check in their mailbox worth over €500 euros ($597) and possibly as much as €3,000. A gift, just like that, sent by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt.

The scenario is less absurd than it may sound. Indeed, many serious academics and financial experts are demanding exactly that. They want ECB chief Mario Draghi to fire up the printing presses and hand out money directly to the people.

The logic behind the idea is that recipients of the money will head to the shops, helping to turn around a paralyzed economy in the common currency area. In response, companies would have to increase production and hire more workers, leading to both economic growth and a needed increase in prices because of the surge in demand.

Cumulative Warfare: War by Statistics

By James R. Holmes

January 10, 2015

The Naval Diplomat reflects on the cumulative/sequential dichotomy of understanding warfare. 

Life is cumulative — usually. War may unfold sequentially, but that’s the exception to the rule.

Or at least that’s the basic idea behind a lecture the Naval Diplomat delivered this week on “cumulative” operations such as air power, certain modes of naval operations, and insurgency and counterinsurgency. In keeping with the nonlinear nature of the subject matter, I wrote the lecture first before superimposing a thesis on it afterward. Admittedly, this inverts the customary pattern in social-science research. Standard practice has you write the conclusion first and retrofit the evidence and arguments to it!!!

But I digress, as usual. Used in this context, of course, the term cumulative comes from Admiral J. C. Wylie, a fellow NWC alumnus and one of my predecessors on the Newport faculty. Wylie distinguishes cumulative endeavors from sequential ones, in which each tactical action occurs after and depends on the one that came before. It’s a linear approach to strategy. Sequential enterprises can be plotted on the map using vectors or curves leading to some geographic objective. But, notes the author,

[T]here is another way to prosecute a war. There is a type of warfare in which the entire pattern is made up of a collection of lesser actions, but these lesser or individual actions are not sequentially interdependent. Each individual one is no more than a single statistic, an isolated plus or minus, in arriving at the final result.

Parsing Wylie’s somewhat arcane language, what he means is that individual actions are dispersed from one another in space, and in all likelihood in time as well. Plotting cumulative campaigns on the map or nautical chart is like dipping your fingers in paint and splattering it on the paper. No action is connected to another. Few yield massive effects. Over time, though, a cumulative campaign can wear down an enemy if prosecuted zealously, employing sufficient resources, and if directed against something that enemy holds dear.

Think about it. Strength is a product of material resources and resolve. Cumulative campaigns chip away at both factors. Drive either to zero and strength is zero. If Clausewitz has war-by-algebra, it seems Wylie has war-by-statistics.

How Satellite Imagery Is Being Used in the Battle Against Ebola in West Africa

January 9, 2015

DigitalGlobe products used in fight against Ebola

LONGMONT, Colo., Jan. 8 (UPI) — DigitalGlobe, an Earth observation and geospatial solutions company, says its products are playing an important role in the international effort to combat Ebola in West Africa.

A series of Image City Map products recently released to government and non-governmental organizations by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for use in the anti-Ebola effort were derived from DigitalGlobe satellite imagery and human geography data sets, it said.

The products will be used in the support of disease response operations and for predicting the spread of the contagion.

"This proactive and forward-leaning government-industry partnership is crucial when it comes to preparing for and responding to humanitarian crises of all kinds," said William Arras, DigitalGlobe’s Vice President of U.S. Government Customer Experience. "Analysts may utilize this data to better understand where infrastructure is located, where the disease has the greatest risk of transmission, and what populations are most at risk."

The company said the data is available through the NGA’s EnhancedView program, which has also released country-scale DigitalGlobe human geography data layers. The data includes information on demographics in West Africa, critical infrastructure, economies, ethnicities, education levels, environment and medical facilities.

"Our partnership with DigitalGlobe to provide geospatial information and mapping products to the largest audience possible is crucial in supporting the international community and health care personnel in West Africa as they respond to the Ebola crisis," said Martin Cox, National Geospatial-Intelligence Officer for Africa and Mission Manager for the Ebola GEOINT Response.

Denmark Has Established an Offensive Cyber Warfare Unit

Gerard O’Dwyer

January 9, 2015

Denmark To Develop Offensive Cyber Capability

HELSINKI — Denmark has responded to a series of cyber attacks against private and state defense organizations by establishing an Offensive Cyber Warfare (OCW) unit to repel assaults and launch counter-strikes.

A $74 million capital provision has been added to the Defense Ministry’s budget in 2015-2017 to cover the OCW’s formation and operational costs.

The task of establishing and operating the OCW will fall to the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS). The DDIS operates as a department of the MoD and is Denmark’s chief agency for military and foreign intelligence.

The OCW project was spun from a recommendation by the Danish Defense Commission (DDC) in 2012 that advocated the reinforcement of Danish cyberwarfare technologies and capacities under the government’s coordinated national cyber defense strategy plan.

The DDC’s recommendation was followed in 2013 by the Danish government’s National Plan for Cyber Security. This included a proposal to add a more dynamic offensive capability to the existing defensive-based approach to cyber.

Denmark’s current cyberwarfare apparatus is primarily equipped to protect military computer systems from hacking and disruption. The infrastructure does not have a specific focus on developing offensive responses against malefactors bent on infiltrating defense or industrial IT platforms.

Significantly, the DDIS’s upgraded role means the organization will become Denmark’s front-line gatekeeper to thwart foreign and domestic cyberwarfare threats. Moreover, the agency will be responsible for operating defensive and offensive “weaponry” against hostile actors or organizations.

The $74 million allocation is being arranged by the Ministry of Finance. Apart from the OCW’s initial set-up and equipment costs, around 50 percent of the capital sum will go to developing advanced offensive cyberwarfare technologies, skills and “counter-strike weaponry.” Some of this niche work will be carried out in collaboration with Danish universities and defense research organizations.

"It is fundamental that we strengthen in the area of managing information security across the board, both at the state level and our distributors. To achieve this, we need to have a highly capable, determined and ambitious national cyber defense strategy," said Bjarne Corydon, Denmark’s finance minister.

Denmark’s aggressive approach to offensive cyber capability comes after a series of cyber attacks against indigenous defense companies believed to have included Terma, key government ministries, among them defense and industry departments.

Other organizations, such as the Danish Maritime Authority and Statens IT, the Danish state organization responsible for providing IT services to many government authorities and departments, also came under cyber attack.

The United States Will Never Win the Propaganda War Against the Islamic State

BY MANAL OMAR

JANUARY 9, 2015

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When Ndugwa Hassan joined his friends on July 11, 2010, at the Kyadondo Rugby Club in Kampala, Uganda, he did not know his life was about to change forever. He was there to watch the World Cup final between the Netherlands and Spain, which was being broadcast from Johannesburg; white chairs covered the rugby pitch where the crowd viewed the two teams on a giant screen. But as the game closed on the 90th minute, two explosions rocked the field in quick succession, killing dozens. The militant Islamist group al-Shabab had targeted the gathering, along with a restaurant elsewhere in the Ugandan capital, in a coordinated suicide bombing. It was the group’s first attack outside its home base of Somalia. At final count, 74 people were dead.

Hassan walked away from the carnage feeling numb. It was not until he saw news reports on television two days after the incident, and al-Shabab’s claim to be acting based on Islamic values, that he realized what he wanted to do: combat the people who had hijacked the religion he loved in order to justify violence.

“That is when I became angry,” he told me in Amman, Jordan, this past June. Five months after the attack, Hassan and his friends founded the Uganda Muslim Youth Development Forum (UMYDF), which works to connect Muslim youth to the political processes that shape their lives. Through UMYDF, Hassan is able to directly reach 10,000 Ugandan youth through direct training and online platforms.

Telling Hassan’s story is my response whenever I am asked a common question about the Islamic State, another extremist group that operates much like al-Shabab: How can the United States counter the group’s violent narrative? The reality is that it can’t. And perhaps even more importantly, it is possible that it shouldn’t try to — at least not directly. As the United States tries to craft a strategy to counter the propaganda war overlapping the military one it is waging against the Islamic State, it should think of people like Hassan, and support them, because they are the ones who can credibly deflate extremists’ messages, providing peaceful alternatives to the problems that inflame potential recruits.

North Korea Wants To Buy Russia's Super Advanced Su-35 Fighter Jet

Zachary Keck

January 9, 2015

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un sent a special envoy to Moscow to ask Russia to sell him its most advanced fighter jets, South Korean and Russian media are reporting.

On Thursday, a senior South Korean military official told JoongAng Ilbo, a conservative South Korean daily newspaper, that North Korea officially asked Russia to sell it the Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jet. Notably, the Russian state-ownedITAR-TASS news agency picked up the JoongAng Ilbo report on its website on Friday.

According to the original report, the request was made in November when Choe Ryong-hae, North Korea’s number two, traveled to Russia as Kim Jong-un’s special envoy. During the trip, Choe met with Vladimir Putin and gave the Russian president a letter from Kim.

“Choe Ryong-hae, who visited Moscow as a special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in November last year, asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets,” JoongAng Ilbo quoted the military source as saying. The source added that he didn’t believe Russia would consent to the sale because of international sanctions against North Korea.

As Dave Majumdar wrote in The National Interest last month, the Su-35 “is the most potent fighter currently in operation with the Russian Air Force. The powerful twin-engine fighter, which is an advanced derivative of the original Soviet-era Su-27, is high flying, fast and carries an enormous payload. That, combined with its advanced suite of avionics, makes the Su-35 an extremely dangerous foe to any U.S. fighter, with the exception of the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.”

The Main Battle Tanks of Asia: Junk or Still Useful?

By Franz-Stefan Gady

January 10, 2015

The main battle tank will remain part of Asian-Pacific military arsenals for some time to come. 

A Washington Post headline from January 2014 succinctly summarizes a widely held belief about the utility of tanks in modern warfare: “The end of the tank? The Army says it doesn’t need it, but industry wants to keep building it.” The article goes on to state that, “The manufacturing of tanks — powerful but cumbersome — is no longer essential, the military says. In modern warfare, forces must deploy quickly and ‘project power over great distances.’ Submarines and long-range bombers are needed. Weapons such as drones — nimble and tactical — are the future.”

While this assertion may hold true for militaries worldwide in the long-run, for now it appears to apply uniquely to the United States, which like no other nation on earth has a history of expeditionary warfare and enjoys a high degree of security from invasion by a conventional foe. Consequently, with the U.S. tank force numbering around 6000 main battle tanks (MBTs), it makes sense for the United States military to allocate resources to other weapons programs.

However, looking to the Asia-Pacific the story is different. There, the majority of countries are in the process of upgrading their tank forces.

In a recent article, the Asian Military Review has listed the major procurement and upgrade programs in the region. Almost every regional power is investing in new tank forces.

For example, China currently fields approximately 8000 MBTs, 5000 of which are of the obsolete Type 59 – a Chinese produced version of the Soviet T-54, 55 series. However, the People’s Liberation Army has acquired around 700 of the advanced Type-99 MBTs. China is also working on a cost-efficient modern MBT, the MBT-3000, specifically designed for export to developing countries.

By 2020, India plans to procure 1657 Russian T-90 tanks (1000 of which will be build domestically under a technology agreement with Russia), enough for 59 tank regiments. In addition, India will upgrade its 1900 strong T-72 MBT force, and will continue to build indigenous third generation MBTs (the Arjun MKI and MKII).

Japan is currently downsizing its tank fleet of Mitsubishi Type 90 MBTs to 400, but it will add 68 new Mitsubishi Type 10 MBTs – a lighter and more agile tank better suitable for urban combat, the type of warfare that the Japan Self-Defense Forces are most likely to face in the defense of Japan.

Inside the mind of the Pentagon’s “Yoda”

By Carlos Lozada 

THE LAST WARRIOR: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy 

By Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts. Basic. 305 pp. $29.99 

“The Last Warrior” is an important book that should not have been written. 

It’s important because its subject, 93-year-old Andrew Marshall, spent four decades running a Pentagon think tank with a direct line to America’s defense secretaries. Credited with anticipating the Soviet economic collapse and criticized for treating a future conflict with China as nearly inevitable, Marshall has long been a mysterious Washington presence, nicknamed “Yoda” for his cryptic pronouncements and fanatical followers. With Marshall’s retirement this month, a look inside his Office of Net Assessment — a perfect name for an opaque bureaucratic outfit — is certainly worthwhile. 

So why wish it away? I’ll let the authors, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, explain. “We have endeavored to be as unbiased and objective as we could,” they write. “Yet neither of us can claim to be disinterested observers. We both have a long history with Marshall.” That history includes serving on Marshall’s staff, participating in subsequent studies sponsored by Marshall and currently leading an outside think tank that receives funding from Marshall’s office. “Once a member of Marshall’s coterie of trusted former net assessors and outside defense experts — ‘St. Andrew’s Prep’ — always a member,” they write with unabashed chumminess. 

Kudos for the full disclosure. But when the authors lionize Marshall as “one of America’s most influential and enduring strategic thinkers,” who is talking — the respected analysts or the devoted acolytes who dedicated this very book to him? It’s a question that hangs over every page, making it hard to take the book’s arguments at face value. 

Military service can combat inequality

By Benjamin Luxenberg 

January 8, 2015

Source Link

A student at my alma mater, Brandeis University, recently asked me to speak to her school group about my post-college experiences, specifically my time studying in China and Germany and now at Harvard University. There was one major problem with this request: I’d graduated five years ago, and she skipped most of what has defined my adult life — the four years I served in the Marine Corps.

A large swath of America shares this student’s disinterest in military service. Among elected officials, prior military service is at 20 percent, an all-time low. Fewer than 1 percent of these leaders have children who grew up to don a uniform. Similarly, fewer than 1 percent of Ivy League graduates choose to serve, according to the book “AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service — and How It Hurts Our Country.”

Many leaders of tomorrow will be found among the children of our elected officials and Ivy League alumni. Yet we, as a society, expect so few of them to join the military. Instead, those most likely to serve are the children of those who have already done so. Inadvertently, America is forging a military caste, separate from the larger electorate and distinct from its future leaders. This growing civil-military gap is both a byproduct of and contributor to increased social stratification. But the divide in military service is only one of many symptoms.

Social and economic inequality in America has risen to heights not seen in almost a century. Economic gains are largely captured by the wealthy, while the middle class stagnates and economic mobility dwindles, economist Thomas Piketty writes in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The Pew Research Center has shown that American communities are increasingly segregated not only by wealth but also by political affiliation.

With decreased exposure to opposing political views, tolerance shrinks. A once fluid and freewheeling American society is petrifying as opportunity evaporates and people exist in political echo chambers of their own creation. While the government searches for policies to staunch the middle class’ decline and to rebuild trust among Americans, the solution may be simpler: foster and incentivize increased military service.

The military is perhaps America’s last bastion of social and economic equality. The salaries of those at the top are much closer to those at the bottom, relative to the corporate world. Senior officers live on the same bases — in the same communities — as junior enlisted personnel, and their children go to school together.

It’s the dawn of a new kind of war

By Kelsey D. Atherton 

January 9, 2015

The terrifying specter of a future of cyberattacks is that someday, a malicious actor will reach through the internet and cause real, tangible, physical harm. It sounds like a Hollywood plot: a computer is compromised, and suddenly the machinery of a factory is broken. Yet despite the panic, until recently there's only been one such confirmed case. That was Stuxnet, an American-made virus which disrupted an Iranian centrifuge used to enrich uranium in the late 2000s. Then, last month, Germany published a report of another cyberattack turned physical: a furnace at a steel mill that wouldn’t shut down.

From Wired:

It’s not clear when the attack in Germany took place. The report, issued by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (or BSI), indicates the attackers gained access to the steel mill through the plant’s business network, then successively worked their way into production networks to access systems controlling plant equipment. The attackers infiltrated the corporate network using a spear-phishing attack—sending targeted email that appears to come from a trusted source in order to trick the recipient into opening a malicious attachment or visiting a malicious web site where malware is downloaded to their computer. Once the attackers got a foothold on one system, they were able to explore the company’s networks, eventually compromising a “multitude” of systems, including industrial components on the production network.

The attack caused physical damage, though the report doesn’t clarify if the damage was intentional or a by-product of the malicious access of the steel mill’s computers. And the physical damage is significant. Most of what is labeled cyberwar, like the Sony hack is information theft or involves damage to files, which is certainly harmful but falls under norms governing espionage, theft, and intelligence collection. Damage like this is sabotage, and is more clearly a kind of harm that justifies a use of force.

In the future, if there are attacks through the internet that reach anything like the level of war, it will be viruses like Stuxnet or hacks like the German steel mill that count as cyber war.

Identifying the REAL enemy

By MANOJ JOSHI

11 January 2015

In the past few days, terrorists have killed 17 people in Paris and 2,000 in Nigeria, while more than 30 have died in bomb blasts in Yemen and seven in Rawalpindi. 

In terms of geography, the incidents were as widely distributed across the globe, as they were in the ethnicity of the victims. But there is one thing in common in all the acts of violence—they were done in the name of Islam. 

A lazy person’s analysis would argue that there is something inherent in the faith that persuades its adherents to such acts of violence. But a closer analysis would suggest that this is no clash of civilisations pitting Islam against the rest, but a civil war within Islam, a battle for its soul. 

Security: A French policeman stands in front of the entrance of Paris Mosque as French Muslims gather for Friday prayers in Paris

People hold a banner reading "Refugees welcome" as they take part in a protest against a rally by a mounting right-wing populist movement in Rostock, northeastern Germany

Human cost: An Iraqi girl displaced by fighting between government supporters and the Islamic State (IS) group, cries near a shelter built for pilgrims but now housing internally displaced people

Most of the victims in the incidents cited above were probably Muslim, but obviously there was something different in the way they professed their faith that persuaded their more radical co-religionists to murder them.

France asks: How did we miss them?

January 11, 2015 

The bloody denouement on Friday of two hostage crises at different ends of a traumatised Paris means attention will now shift to the gaping question facing the French government: how did several jihadists — and possibly a larger cell of co-conspirators — manage to evade surveillance and execute a bold attack despite being well known to the country’s police and intelligence services?

On its own, the Wednesday morning slaughter that left 12 people dead at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo represented a major breakdown for French security and intelligence forces, especially after the authorities confirmed that the two suspects, the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, had known links to the militant group Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Then on Friday, even as the police had cornered the Kouachi brothers inside a printing factory in the northeast suburbs, another militant, Amedy Coulibaly —who has since been linked to the Kouachis — stormed a kosher supermarket in Paris and threatened to kill hostages if the police captured the Kouachis.

“There is a clear failing,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said. “When 17 people die, it means there were cracks.”

Pak boat sank on Jan 1, but satellite phones remained active until Jan 4

Josy Joseph

Jan 11, 2015

NEW DELHI: For three days after a Pakistani boat went up in flames off the Gujarat coast on January 1 with four occupants onboard, the two satellite phones used by the suspected terrorists continued to be active, according to technical details with Indian agencies.

The two numbers had been under NTRO's (National Technical Research Organization) watch for months before it alerted the Coast Guard about a possible mid-sea transaction. According to sources, the phones were used to get in touch with a mobile number in Thailand during most of this period.

At least one more Indian agency other than NTRO had also been monitoring the two numbers. NTRO suspected throughout those months of monitoring that the two numbers were part of a smuggling racket. It alerted the Coast Guard on December 31 morning about their possible movement in seas near international maritime boundary of India, because the indication was that they were planning a major transaction.

On December 30 morning, the two numbers were about 8km apart in the Arabian Sea. By the evening of the same day, the two Thuraya satellite phone numbers had reached the same location.

Around the same time, the boat that probably came from near Sri Lanka moved the 'cargo' to the boat that came from Pakistan.

According to details available from technical monitoring, the two satellite phone numbers then drifted apart. In the months running up to the operation, the numbers were probably also in touch with a number in UAE.

Raising several questions, the two Thuraya phones continued to be operational as late as January 4, three days after one of of the boats went up in flames as the Coast Guard closed in on it. According to officials, the boat that blew up was located using the Thuraya phone on board.

Coast Guard spokesperson told TOI that he had no further comments other than the official statement issued after the operation on January 2.

France prepares for mass anti-terrorism rally

Jan 11, 2015

People hold bouquet of flowers as a French police officer tries to maintain the mob during a demonstration outside a kosher grocery store where four hostages were killed on Friday in Paris, Saturday, Jan. 10, 2015. (AP photo)

PARIS: France vowed to combat terrorism with ''a cry for freedom'' in a giant rally for unity Sunday after three days of bloodshed that horrified the world. Police searched for a woman linked to the three al-Qaida-inspired attackers, but a Turkish official said she appears to have already slipped into Syria. 

The rally Sunday is also a huge security challenge for a nation on alert for more violence, after 17 people and three gunmen were killed over three days of attacks on a satirical newspaper, a kosher supermarket and on police that have left France a changed land. 

Hundreds of thousands of people marched Saturday in cities from Toulouse in the south to Rennes in the west to honor the victims, and Paris expects hundreds of thousands more at Sunday's unity rally. More than 2,000 police are being deployed, in addition to tens of thousands already guarding synagogues, mosques, schools and other sites around France. 

Unity against extremism is the overriding message for Sunday's rally. Among the expected attendees are the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president. The Ukrainian president and Russian foreign minister, And the leaders of Britain, Germany, NATO, the Arab League and African nations. And the French masses, from across the political and religious spectrum. 

Top European and US security officials are also holding a special emergency meeting in Paris about fighting terrorism. 

The rally ''must show the power, the dignity of the French people who will be shouting out of love of freedom and tolerance,'' Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Saturday. 

''Journalists were killed because they defended freedom. Policemen were killed because they were protecting you. Jews were killed because they were Jewish,'' he said. ''The indignation must be absolute and total _ not for three days only, but permanently.'' 

Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen said it directed Wednesday's attack against the publication Charlie Hebdo to avenge the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, a frequent target of the weekly's satire. 

French radio RTL released audio Saturday of Amedy Coulibaly, speaking by phone from the kosher supermarket where he killed four hostages, in which he lashes out over Western military campaigns against extremists in Syria and Mali. He describes Osama bin Laden as an inspiration. 

The focus of the police hunt is on Coulibaly's widow, Hayat Boumeddiene. Police named her as an accomplice of her husband in the shooting of a policewoman and think she is armed. 

But a Turkish intelligence official told The Associated Press on Saturday that a woman by the same name flew into Sabiha Gokcen, which is Istanbul's secondary airport, on Jan. 2, and that she resembled a widely distributed photo of Boumeddiene.