The Philadelphia Bulletin: US to Review Military Police after Attack

by David Bedein

Jerusalem - The Middle East Newsline has confirmed that the U.S. military plans to begin a review of its increased Muslim presence in the armed forces.

The U.S. Defense Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to discuss an examination of the Muslim presence in the U.S. military and the threat of Al Qaida influence. They said Congress was pressing for such a review in wake of the Nov. 5 killing of 13 U.S. troops by a Muslim officer.

“We have to go back and look at ourselves and ask ourselves the hard questions," U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said. "Are we doing the right things? We will learn from this."

The review will focus on the exact number of Muslims in the U.S. military, which has encouraged such enrollment.

The U.S. Defense Department reported 3,409 Muslims on active military duty as of April 2008, but officials said the number could be at least three times higher.

"We believe there are many more Muslims who, when recruited, did not list their religion," an official said. "Some of these people simply wanted to avoid harassment; others might have had a sinister agenda."

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, born in the United States and alleged to have killed 13 soldiers in the army base at Fort Hood, Texas, did not identify himself as a Muslim when he enlisted.

Mr. Hasan was, however, recruited as part of a U.S. military drive to reach out to the Muslim community. Over the last decade, the military has intensified its recruitment of Arabic-, Farsi- and Pashtun-speaking soldiers for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pentagon has been receiving reports of Muslim soldiers who expressed opposition to the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. They said the opposition was encouraged by Islamic clerics as well as Muslim officers such as Mr. Hasan, who warned Muslims against harming co-religionists.

In 2003, U.S. Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, said to have opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, killed two officers and injured 14 others in a grenade attack. Mr. Akbar, a convert to Islam, was sentenced to death.

The U.S. military has sought to shield Muslims from retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq. In many cases, they said, Muslim soldiers were ordered to use fake family names to prevent reprisals against their families abroad.

Some in Congress have called for clear guidelines on allowing soldiers to express political views in the military. They said Mr. Hasan's pro-jihad views were tolerated by officers concerned over charges of discrimination.

"I want to say very quickly we don't know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Mr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," Sen. Joseph Liberman, a Connecticut independent and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said.

Senator Lieberman said his committee would investigate the Hasan shooting, particularly the motive for the attack. He said a focus would be whether the U.S. Army ignored warning signs that Mr. Hasan was heading for an attack.

Mr. Hasan underwent an investigation in April on suspicion that he had adopted Al Qaida doctrine of holy war against the West. They said Mr. Hasan was suspected of trying to contact Al Qaida via the Internet.

"I am intending to begin a congressional investigation of my homeland security committee into what were the motives of Mr. Hasan in carrying out this brutal mass murder and to ask whether the Army missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him," Mr. Lieberman said. "If Mr. Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance. He should have been gone."

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The Philadelphia Bulletin: Baghdad Cannot Destroy Al-Aqeda

by David Bedein

Jerusalem - A report submitted the week for the U.S. Defense Department has determined that Al Qaida in Iraq would resist any offensive by Baghdad over the next few years.

The report by the Rand Corp. asserted that Iraq, even with U.S. help, would fail to eliminate the Al Qaida (AQI) terror network.

"Eradicating AQI may exceed ISF capabilities, even with U.S. help, but the AQI threat is more likely to grow weaker rather than stronger," the report said.

Titled, "Withdrawing from Iraq: Alternative Schedules, Associated Risks, and Mitigating Strategies," the report provided a bleak picture of Iraq's capability to destroy the Al Qaida terror network. Rand said Al Qaida would remain viable in Iraq despite a decline in financing and recruitment.

"AQI is hampered by a lack of popular support, by restricted movement, and by a dearth of financing," the report said. "It is now largely confined to Mosul, the Tigris River Valley, and Diyala province. One of its principal causes, and a source of recruiting and fund-raising -- the U.S. occupation -- is ending."

The report was released in late July 2009 amid a resurgence of Al Qaida in Iraq's largest province, Anbar. Al Qaida, after a lull of nearly two years, was said to have renewed operations in such Sunni cities as Faluja and Samara.

Rand said AQI has been hampered by the sharp drop in the flow of foreign volunteers to Iraq. As a result, the report said Al Qaida has been increasingly relying on Iraqi women for suicide and other operations.

Syria has been deemed as the way station for at least 90 percent of Al Qaida volunteers to Iraq. The report said Syria has hosted a range of Sunni insurgency groups exiled from Iraq and seeking to destabilize the Baghdad government.

A U.S. combat troop withdrawal was expected to renew the ethnic war in Iraq, another report said.

The Institute of National Security Studies asserted that the 130,000 American troops have largely succeeded in preventing civil war in Iraq. In a report by U.S. Air Force Maj. Clint ZumBrunnen, the institute warned that any reconciliation effort by Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds must be backed by American force.

"The correlation between fragile stability in Iraq and the presence of U.S. combat forces is difficult to ignore, even if it is true that US forces do not control the country," said the report by Zum Brunnen, a U.S. Air Force scholar.

The report dismissed U.S. claims of a military victory in the insurgency war in Iraq. Instead, ZumBrunnen asserted that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq abated when the United States provided massive financing to Sunni tribes in central and western Iraq.

"Any precipitous withdrawal of US combat power will greatly reduce U.S. leverage in Iraq and risk a return to the sectarian strife of 2006 simply because few of Iraq's serious internal conflicts have been resolved," the report said.

President Obama has pledged to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by August 2010, leaving an estimated 50,000 advisers and support personnel.

But the report warned that Sunnis and Kurds, the biggest supporters of a U.S. military presence, would harden their positions toward the dominate Shi'ite community once the Americans begin to withdraw. For its part, the Shi'ite community has been split by a power struggle led by the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army, commanded by Moqtada Sadr.

Meanwhile, ZumBrunnen said, the United States has been led into a potential war in northern Iraq regarding the authority and size of the autonomous Kurdish region. The focus of the confrontation has been the oil-rich area of Kirkuk.

"Both sides are now edgier because there is less certainty that the U.S. will intervene to prevent one side or the other from exploiting an advantage," the report said. "And since any grand bargain between Arabs and Kurds mediated by the United Nations will likely require a powerful military force for enforcement, knowledge that U.S. forces will withdraw completely by 2011 lessens the chance for a nonviolent solution to the dispute.

Accordingly, both the [Kurdish] peshmerga and the ISF [Iraqi security forces] continue to prepare for eventual conflict."

The report said the United States must now focus on helping determine control over Iraq's crude oil reserves, deemed the most explosive of ethnic disputes. Since October 2008, no progress has been reported in talks between the government and major ethnic groups.

"This is where the additional role U.S. combat forces fill in Iraq comes into play," the report said. "Not only are these forces the guardians of a tense peace; they are also the instrument of power that lends credibility to other U.S. levers at the negotiating table.

Degrading their capability before any long term agreement exists on an issue so vital to Iraq's future weakens U.S. ability to shepherd all sides into a compromise, and more ominously, invites a return to the sectarianism of 2006 and 2007."

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