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Originally Posted by CoLawman
Terrorists ply their trade without consideration of geographical borders. However their actions can be attributed to definable "command and control" entities. A recent example is the homegrown terrorists of Britain. At first blush this example would seem to support your premise. But upon closer examination one learns that orders were coming from Pakistan with a connection to Al Queda.
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Yes and it appears that because AQ leadership played too much of a central role the plot was broken up. They have and will learn from these mistakes. Cells will continue more and more to be homegrown and self-organizing, inspired by bin Laden’s movement but not under its control.
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Originally Posted by CoLawman
Ayatollahs, Imams, and State sponsors of terror are the Command and Control.
They provide the training, funding, technology, documents, etc. to the Islamic terrorists throughout the world.
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What state actively sponsors AQ? The Iranian’s support Hezbollah as do the Syrians (some would say that after Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon ’04 they lost influence to restrain Hez and this explains Hezbollah’s recent belligerence), Libya cut ties with terrorists for foreign investment, and Saddam supported Hamas but not AQ.
Refusing to distinguish between AQ and Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups only benefit them. It does them the benefit of aggregating them all together, this allows them to constitute themselves as a global jihad and only validates this to the Islamic world. This is inherently counterproductive to any wise strategy designed to disaggregate a global insurgency. (See LTC. Killcullen’s
Countering Global Insurgency)
I have in PDF (too big to attach) James Fallows recent article in
The Atlantic,
We Win.: A New Strategy For The Fight Against Terror. It is very thought provoking and I think a good assessment of where we are and where we are headed. It draws from Brian Michael Jenkins at RAND (I believe a QP also), LTC Killcullen, Michael Scheuer, Peter Bergen, Martin van Crevald, Bruce Hoffman, Daniel Benjamin, and James Woosley among others. I would be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on it. I could make a summary of it as well as find a host for it if there is interest for a thread.