In the world of media management, Baroness Kinnock’s timing couldn’t have been less fortunate. To admit, just two hours after Gordon Brown had made a series of policy announcements on tackling the terrorist threat, that counter-terror funding in Pakistan and counter-narcotics work in Afghanistan was being cut was a gift to the opposition.
While the scale and significance in the impact of the exchange rates shouldn’t be overblown, it raises an interesting question about how we can most effectively deliver a counter-terrorism strategy at a time when resources are stretched.
The problem of terrorism is often seen by many on the left as being one purely of ideology and poverty. While it’s true that there is a clash of beliefs that needs to be fought, we also need to understand the enablers of terrorism – the networks of capital and information that allow jihadist structures to operate. Poverty is a moot point as well – the Bin Laden family was one of the richest construction magnates in the Arab world, and those involved in 7/7 were radicalised not because of poverty (they were were mainly middle class, educated university graduates) but partly because of a cultural isolation, driven from a disjunct between their generation and the previous one which was far more conservative. Ironically, the traditional communities pushed a younger more progressive generation into the arms of the radicals (for more on this, read Shiv Malik’s fascinating account of the lead-up to the attacks).
While much has been written about the process of radicalisation, and how terrorist groups begin, less research has been done into how terrorist groups end, and what implications this might have for tackling Al Qa’ida.
The independent research organisation RAND has produced an interesting analysis of the ways in which terrorist groups ceased to exist between 1968 and 2006. The evidence suggests that most groups are rarely defeated as the result of a military campaign – this only happened in 7% of cases according to their data. In fact, the research suggests that most groups ended because of operations carried out by the police or intelligence agencies – for religion-inspired terrorists this was true in 73% of cases (the good news is religious terrorists are never victorious).
This has an impact on our semantics of course. For many years, along with its counterparts in France, Australia and elsewhere the British government has not labelled our counter-terror strategies a ‘war on terror,’ with Hilary Benn notably criticising the phrase. The point is not only that terrorism cannot be defeated by a purely military strategy, but by labelling terrorists as ‘holy warriors’ rather than simple ‘criminals’ is to play into their misguided agenda. That is something that was notable in Gordon Brown’s response to the failed London attacks in 2007.
That is not to say military force is not one element of the strategy. The weaponry and manpower being deployed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Yemen are important tools. But our tactics need to be wide-ranging and flexible. Some of the greatest successes of military campaigns come when they make the most of local forces – look at the way in which tribal sheikhs were effectively brought in to support the Iraqi police and security forces to tackle Al Qa’ida in Iraq from 2007 onwards.
Similarly, the US agencies have had their greatest successes in Pakistan when conducting joint policing and intelligence work with their local counterparts. This is the stuff of James Bond-style operations – the dark and shadowy world of counter-terror work that we rarely hear about. In 2005 Pakistani intelligence officers dressed in burkas tackled Abu Farraj al-Libbi – Bin Laden’s number three – when he visited a graveyard in the north west frontier province one night in 2005. It is effective operations such as those to capture Abu Zubeida in 2001, which snared not just Al Qa’ida’s main operational head but 27 of his closest commanders. Partnership is key – the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded 9/11, was only possible thanks to the work of local intelligence, leading the head of the CIA to personally thank those involved and issue many Pakistani security officials with CIA medals. Effective and rapid intelligence sharing must be improved – we have to understand how it was that our co-operation with European and American agencies allowed someone on a terror watch list to travel from Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit.
Al Qa’ida may be an unprecedented terrorist network in terms of its global reach and organisational structure, which allows a degree of flexibility and autonomy in the establishment of cells. However, its modus operandi is not totally unprecedented. It still needs to raise money, communicate between members and plan attacks. It is particularly difficult to disrupt the networks that allow these actions given they are spread over a number of different countries, but they are still vulnerable to effective penetration by police and intelligence operations.
One element of the strategy that often goes under-reported is that of terrorist financing. The Henry Jackson Society recently noted that ‘one of the key drivers of the merger between Osama Bin Laden and his now-deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998 was the fact that Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad had run out of money and Bin Laden still had plenty to spare. Whether its proceeds be from oil, opium, extortion, or old-fashioned state sponsorship, dealing with terror finance is central to winning the war on terror.’
This is a challenge not just for governments alone. Businesses in the financial sector, whether banks, bureaux de change or money transfer organisations need to take a lead in identifying and partnering with police and intelligence agencies to ensure they can identify their customers and ensure that the sources of terrorist funding are cut off.
The objective of any effective counter-terrorism strategy is to remove the safe havens that exist for terrorism. While US, UK and alliance forces have been increasing their presence on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the recent thwarted attack on Detroit raised the prospect of attending to the safe havens that exist within Yemen. Many column inches were printed on the subject of tackling Yemen’s ‘empty quarter’ along with other potential terrorist havens in Somalia and the borders shared between Mali, Niger, Algeria and Mauritania.
That will require greater cooperation, resources and effective working from our agencies. Counter-terrorism is an expensive and painstaking piece of work and it may be worth considering the effectiveness of the cooperation between the home office, foreign office and DFID on this issue, and the fact that much of the emphasis and resources of our foreign policy have shifted in recent years away from the FCO and DFID.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget the increases this government has put into the security services and our assistance for countries like Pakistan, but it’s important we redouble our efforts to fight on every front.
As Daniel Byman, a leading academic, put it ‘there is not single strategy that can successfully defeat the jihadists. All heads of the hydra of terrorism must be attacked.’
It might appear that men‘s equality sits on a mountaintop too high to reach in our lifetime. Feminist hegemony seems to reign like the Catholic Church in the age of Copernicus. Academics, government, media and the judicial system look like little more than extensions of feminist dogma. The workplace and even the social strata appear to have become feminist property. For a number of years, average men have been acting as though they lived in 1936 Berlin or 1970 Moscow, measuring their words carefully and casting a quick, vigilant glance over their shoulder before speaking. Others extol the virtues of feminism with sincerity that can only be properly expressed with help from a straw hat, a cane and some Vaudeville piano. And Some men are the real deal, born again believers in feminism, dancing though the socio-political morass like Hare Krishna’s in an airport, complete with dirty faces and donation baskets. Meanwhile, many Men’s Rights Activists, genuinely passionate about the cause, work under assumed names because of the very real danger of personal and professional retaliation if they are “discovered.” Vee know vaht you haff been dooink. It’s a sad testament to the reality that the thought police are not just imagined characters in some novelists dystopian fantasies. Men who mix the truth with their identities can be hurt by it, and have been. But there is trouble brewing for feminists. Not just annoyances from the cacophony of uppity MRA’s that plague their online comment threads, but real trouble of the catastrophic variety. In fact, feminism as we know it is going to unravel sooner than you might think. The First Great Wave of masculism is on its way. It isn’t a revolutionary tsunami, but it is happening fast, like flood waters rising with deceptive speed and force. And in the end, it will drown the feminist orthodoxy before they even notice the waterline is over their nostrils. If you think this is wishful thinking, keep reading. MRA’s are already influencing and shaping a new Zeitgeist. The evidence of that is clear and measurable and is already changing the collective consciousness of the western world. In little more than the past year we have witnessed events in the Men’s Rights Movement that range from relatively impressive to significant…to groundbreaking. There were two major court decisions in California and West Virginia that were very real, judicial cuts at the corrupt, feminist controlled domestic violence industry. Very recently the European Court of Human Rights dealt a severe blow to anti-father laws in Germany. In the last year we witnessed fathers rights protests in the presumably unlikely country of Mexico and the emergence of the movement in India. Men in Missouri recently won the right to use paternity testing in child support cases. And as just reported on Men’s News Daily, The On Step Institute issued a press release announcing a convention on creating men’s studies programs at the university level. This is not just more of what we have seen in the past in men’s studies, which amounted to nothing more than a women’s studies program dressed up with a fake beard and a pair of plastic, pin-on cajones. It’s an effort that will ultimately produce a tectonic shift in the academic landscape with lasting, positive effects for men in western culture. All these things leave one wondering what precisely has happened in recent times to spark such a flurry of events, seemingly unrelated, yet all bound to the common theme of positive changes on behalf of men. Why, after decades of trying, are things finally starting to happen, and why so fast? The answer isn’t complicated. The idea of speaking up for men is finally gaining acceptance. And that acceptance is all the culture ever needed to effect positive changes, the first of which was unclenching the vitriolic stranglehold that feminism had taken on our common sense. Feminists are no longer The Untouchables of western politics, and once that reality spreads some more, and it certainly will, the proverbial gig will be up. For this it is easy to credit to people like Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers; Kathleen Parker and Stephen Baskerville. Or the handful of others published and well known within the men’s rights community. And no doubt they have done much good. But there is something else afoot here; something even more powerful. It is rooted in the collective consciousness of the society we live in, and it is much more dynamic than any given handful of writers or activists. Forty years ago feminists steamrolled their way into the limelight of our attentions. Riding on the coat tails of the civil rights movement, they forced, with a less than legitimate agenda, a pendulum swing of such momentum that it literally swung out of sight. It moved so far away so fast that it appeared primacy in the gender dialogue belonged to feminists, and always would. That pendulum is swinging back Recently a fellow MRA pointed me to some very interesting statistics regarding the internet and gender activism. And what they reflect is that MRA’s are taking over the online world. Fact is, we already have. In 2007 if you did a google search on both men’s rights and women’s rights you would have gotten the following results. Women’s rights: 4,270,000 hits Men’s rights: 511,000 hits Exactly two years later you can do the same search with these results: Women’s rights: 48,300,000 hits Men’s rights: 70,600,000 hits In other words, we went from lagging by over 400% to a very substantial lead in two years flat. You may wonder why the internet matters considering the feminist influence in the mainstream media. It matters very much. Some elements of the mainstream media, largely as a result of the internet, are on the decline. Print media is clamoring against ever narrowing profit margins, cutting costs as much as possible but still falling behind the curve. Cable and network news outlets have been forced to integrate the internet into standard operations to reach the increasingly valued demographic of consumers who blend traditional and online sources for news. Political discussion forums and online campaigning are growing astronomically. Even political fledglings are using social networking sites like Facebook to launch their ambitions. It all points in the same direction. The internet is the mainstream media of the future, and it’s nature doesn’t allow the traditional gags to be placed on alternative ideas. In other words, in the online world, when the media talks, we get to talk back. And that fact makes it impossible to ignore any group with sufficient numbers and the will to voice their ideas. MRA’s have the drive and will, and the exponentially growing numbers. We are literally changing the way people think each and every day. And feminists are hardly in a place any more to stand in the way. Their dominance in so many areas has been long taken for granted, standard operating procedure if you will. But it is highly vulnerable for a variety of reasons. After a generation of debunked assertions, bad science and overtly sexist propaganda, their legacy of lies is finally making it’s karmic return to the source. Keeping a grip on power at some point hinges on having a grip on reality. Failing at this, modern feminism has become a paper tiger, caged in it’s own hypocrisy, subsisting on a diet of delusion and hubris. Which is another way of saying they are eating their own excrement. A once almost unassailable socio-political fortress, the gynocracy is now gimcrack on it‘s way to rubble, and feminism’s no longer a sustainable movement, but just a profoundly neurotic hitch in social evolution that is in the early stages of being corrected. Going though demographic information provided by sites like Alexa.com and others, you get a pretty clear picture of average people keeping abreast of gender issues. When you compare feminist websites like Feministing.com to sites like mensnewsdaily.com® it paints a pretty embarrassing contrast for feminists, assuming they can be embarrassed. Their demographics, particularly in education, look to be drawn from a mosh pit in an urban hell hole. Intelligent, informed people seldom stay with shaky logic and false premises. As feminism continues to exceed the average life expectancy of bad ideas, those that cling to it are often the only ones dumbed-down enough for the job, or those so hopelessly brainwashed that they no longer can tell reality apart from deified victimhood. So while men’s rights activism is on a steamroll and will soon be barreling like a locomotive right at the feminist power structure, the gate keepers won’t mount much of defense. The worm has already turned; consciousness of the truth is already being instilled into the culture on a growing scale. And truth is the ultimately terminal blow at any bogus ideology. We won’t know about this from picketing, shrill demonstrations or flaming effigies on the streets. There won’t be a trumpet call or a celebratory parade. We can simply see that the tide is turning each time a court inflicts justice on the tainted domestic violence industry. Our evidence will be the demise, one by one, of rape shield laws, the prosecution of paternity fraud and lying for the purpose of a restraining order. Or crying rape when sex was consensual to cover guilt, or simply to cover the “victims” reputation with the person to which they were supposedly committed, but betrayed. We will witness it in the eventual end of Title IV-D funding to corrupt family courts and the enforcement of shared parenting. The groundwork, and more importantly, the consciousness, for all this is being laid out as we live and breathe. This movement will find it’s way into social circles where statements like “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them,” are met with stone cold glares and the righteous indignation they deserve. And we will know how real it all is as we hear the increased wailing of feminists who claim MRA’s are about misogyny and denying equal rights, followed by the dull thud as it falls flat on ears that grow more and more weary of histrionics and crying wolf. Feminism will die from a synergistic overdose of stupidity, smugness and sexism. And the men’s rights agenda will prevail because it is one of justice and equality under the law. That agenda isn’t just carried by those in the limelight. It is a groundswell of outrage that has been corked up for nearly a half a century. It is legions of men and women who are finally waking up and deciding that enough is enough. We have reached the time that if you want to get on the train, you will have to get a move on for a good seat. But it will be worth the effort. Or, as I recently read from another MRA, “This train is the only one that knows where it’s going.” All aboard.