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Monday, July 23, 2012
Ethiopia: Police Arrest Muslim Protesters As Clashes Continue
Addis Ababa — Ethiopian police on Sunday said that they had arrested several people after violent clashes between police and Muslim protesters continued on Saturday in the capital, Addis Ababa.
The clash occurred at Anawar Mosque following noon prayers.
"Protesters blocked worshipers from leaving the Mosque compound. They hold them hostage until riot police forces took situation under control" Deputy Police commissioner Girma Kassa said.
Kassa said police has arrested several stone-throwing protesters who also attacked private buildings and government institutions but didn't specify a figure.
Eye witnesses told Sudan Tribune that many people have suffered injuries during the clashes which continued on the third day of fasting for the month-long festival of Ramadan. There are no reports of fatalities.
A police official said protesters have a political mission and are using the question of religion as a cover to meet own political agenda.
Government spokesperson Shimels Kemal dismissed reports that the police used tear gas.
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There were similar clashes last week when an Africa Union summit was taking place in Addis Ababa. Police then arrested 71 people including people alleged to organize and fund the "extremist group".
Ethiopia's police accuse them of deliberately inciting violence to disrupt the Union's Assembly.
Addis Ababa has for months been a scene of Muslim protests who accuse government of interference in religious affairs. An allegation Addis Ababa denies.
Ethiopian Muslims are estimated to account around 40 percent of the country's 81 million predominantly-Christian population.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Insurgency and the Protracted War | Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
In recent weeks, insurgent forces in several countries have been forced to withdraw from territories they once held. Somalia's al Shabaab, which was pushed out of Mogadishu in October 2011, was ejected from Afmadow on May 30. The group now runs the risk of losing its hold once again on the port city of Kismayo, an important logistical and financial hub for al Shabaab.
In Syria, the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups were forced out of the city of Idlib and Homs' Baba Amr district in March. They also withdrew from Al-Haffah on June 13.
Meanwhile in Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been forced to retreat from towns it took control of last year in southern Abyan province, including Jaar, Shaqra and Zinjibar. The organization controlled the area it seized from the government through its Ansar al-Sharia front organization. AQAP was able to capitalize on the infighting that began in Yemen in 2011 and successfully diverted the government's focus away from AQAP and other militant groups. But in February, the election of new Yemeni President Abd Rabboh Mansour Hadi allowed the rift created by the infighting to be slowly healed. As a result, a combination of Yemeni soldiers and local tribesmen, backed by U.S. intelligence and fire support, have been able to push back AQAP and Ansar al-Sharia in recent weeks.
Losing these cities will immediately and significantly affect AQAP's ability to reach its goal of establishing an emirate based on Sharia law in southern Yemen. However, the loss of this territory will not mean an end to the group, just as losses of territory by militants in Somalia and Syria do not mean those insurgent groups have been defeated definitively. The reason for this rests in the very nature of insurgent warfare. To insurgent groups, the loss of territory is a setback, but is only one episode in what they intend to be a very long war.
Ebbs and Flows
One of the basic tenets of modern Western warfare, as articulated by theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz, is the desire to destroy the enemy in quick, decisive battles that break the enemy's ability -- and will -- to fight. In contrast, one of the basic doctrines of insurgent warfare, as articulated by theorists such as Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap, is to decline decisive battle when the odds are not favorable and to live to fight another day. The insurgent wants to prolong the battle and create a drawn-out, grinding war that will gradually wear down the stronger enemy while insurgent forces build up enough strength to fight a conventional war and defeat their opponents. Western military leaders, then, seek to quickly resolve a war, while insurgents seek to prolong it by any means -- even if this means ceding control of territory until they can amass the strength to take it back.
In the modern jihadist context, this strategy was seen clearly in Afghanistan. The Taliban, when faced with overwhelming U.S. airpower in 2001, declined combat and permitted Northern Alliance ground forces to take control of Afghanistan's cities, rather than stand and fight until they were destroyed. The Taliban then launched a classic rural-based insurgency from the mountains using Pakistan as a haven for logistics and training. Iraqi government forces also took this approach when confronted by U.S. forces during the 2003 invasion.
Similarly, following the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, Islamist militants from the Supreme Islamic Courts Council -- many of whom would later go on to form al Shabaab -- declined to fight decisive battles and instead took to harassing the Ethiopian army's extended supply lines. This forced the Ethiopians to pull back from key cities they had captured, like Kismayo, and allowed the militants to regain control of large portions of southern Somalia. It is not unusual, then, for insurgent forces to take territory, only to surrender it and reclaim it again later.
For insurgents, the operational concept is that if the enemy attacks in force, they retreat; if the enemy stays in place, they conduct harassing attacks; if the enemy tires, the insurgents press the attack; and if the enemy retreats, the insurgents pursue. The idea is to apply prolonged pressure, both physical and psychological, and to create a mounting number of casualties over time. At the same time, the insurgent organization works to strengthen its own organizational support base and military capability. The basic doctrine of counterinsurgency is to deny insurgents the ability to establish and strengthen their support base and improve their capability.
The support base is a critical element for any insurgency. By gaining the sympathy of the population -- the human terrain -- the insurgents can rely on the population not only for material support, recruits and shelter, but also for intelligence. It blurs the human terrain, making it more difficult to distinguish insurgents from the population. This is why the political element of the insurgent effort was stressed so heavily in the theories of men like Mao and Giap, who viewed their actions in terms of the people's war. They also believed that a population's long-standing grievances give the people the ability to endure suffering and heavy losses. The people therefore have a stronger will to fight than the privileged government combatant or the foreign imperialist invader. Having favorable human terrain also permits insurgents to apply pressure to the enemy by using unconventional warfare in rear areas with operations like sniper attacks, improvised explosive device attacks, assassinations and kidnappings.
Controlling Territory
It requires far more resources and effort to control and govern populated cities and towns than it does to conduct an insurgent campaign from the jungles or mountains. Maintaining control of a city requires many people to provide security while meeting the population's need for food, water, electricity and medical care. Such demands would use up many of the resources an insurgent organization would require to fight a protracted war of attrition, so it is not unusual for insurgents to abandon cities and foist the responsibility of caring for their populations upon the government. The goal in this approach is to force the government to expend its resources in order to meet the needs of the population, including security.
The insurgents can then come back to the cities with a small force to conduct harassing attacks on security forces or those cooperating with security forces, thus causing the government to invest even more resources in protecting the cities and reducing the number of forces available to pursue and fight insurgents in the countryside. Simply put, conducting insurgent attacks or terrorist attacks against the government's power center takes far less resources and manpower than it does to secure a town or city. Because of this, withdrawing from a city or town allows a militant group to actually increase the resources it has available to conduct attacks. But though there are benefits to harassing attacks, insurgents must be careful to avoid too many civilian casualties, because a high civilian death count can turn the population against the group, as happened with the umbrella militant organization Islamic State of Iraq in 2007.
Although there have been numerous urban guerilla movements -- and indeed, there is an entirely separate doctrine for urban guerilla organizations -- most insurgencies are based in rugged, ungoverned spaces. In such areas, fighters can seek refuge, build bases and train. Such ungoverned spaces have played an important role in the current insurgencies in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mali. Another important consideration in many insurgent refuge spaces is the insurgents' ability to use an international border to keep the government from attacking them. This use of the borders was famously evidenced by the Viet Cong's use of Cambodia and Laos. More recently, this tactic has been utilized in the Taliban's use of Pakistan, the Iraqis' use of Syria and Iran, the Tuaregs' use of Libya and other Sahel countries, and the Syrian rebels' use of Turkey and Lebanon.
State sponsors can also provide significant help to insurgents. This was seen in the Soviet and Chinese help given to the Viet Cong and Viet Minh; and in more modern examples like the Iranian support for Iraqi insurgents, the Eritrean support for al Shabaab or the U.S., Turkish and Arab support for Syrian insurgents.
The real key in counterinsurgency is drying up the insurgents' base of support. Once that happens, the insurgents lose their ability to use the population as camouflage and as a source of recruits and material support, and the intelligence advantage is tipped toward the government. It is also helpful when the terrain available for insurgents to operate in is limited because it can allow counterinsurgents to systematically maneuver their armed forces in a way that forces the insurgents into open conflict. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for example, waged an insurgency against the Sri Lankan government from 1983 to 2009. The Sri Lankan government defeated the insurgents after India and then China provided material, money and advisers to government forces. That Sri Lanka is an island also served to constrict the Tigers' movements and forced them to try to hold territory, which ultimately led to their failure. Another successful suppression of insurgency occurred in Malaya from 1948 to 1960, when the British army used forced migration to separate the insurgents from their population and economic base. This eventually forced the Malayan Races Liberation Army to fight in order to attain necessary resources that are usually provided by the local population. This alienated the insurgents from the population and eventually led to British success.
Undercutting an insurgent group's support is normally quite difficult, especially when the group has access to large areas of rugged terrain. In Yemen, AQAP has been able to pull back from the towns it controlled to the harsh and desolate hinterlands where it was born. In the wild, tribally controlled areas of Yemen, the combination of hostile physical and human terrain will make it difficult to find and kill insurgents. There have been jihadists in Yemen since the late 1980s. They have long found shelter with the conservative tribes from which many of the jihadists originally hailed and to which they returned after fighting in places like Afghanistan. Many of the foreign jihadists in Yemen and Pakistan have married into influential tribes to increase their local support.
Syria's demographic situation and its long history as an Alawite-dominated police state have cultivated a great deal of hostility against the regime. It will be very difficult for the government to undercut foreign or domestic support for the insurgents. As with Syria's past insurgencies, Damascus will have to threaten and coerce the Sunni population into submission to maintain its grip on power.
Somalia is a confusing jumble of competing clans that have withstood attempts to govern them since the early 1990s. Even if al Shabaab becomes severely damaged as an organization, clan-based Islamist militancy of one form or another will persist in the region for the foreseeable future.
The insurgent strategy of fighting a long, protracted war means that insurgents' recent withdrawals from cities and towns in Yemen, Syria and Somalia do not necessarily mean that the wars in those regions will end anytime soon.
Read more: Insurgency and the Protracted War | Stratfor
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Why Syrian rebels are on their own: Worthington | World | News | Toronto Sun
TORONTO - Last week. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the world on the crisis in Syria, and basically said it is up to Syrians to solve their problem with the Assad regime.
It wasn’t that she was striking a neutral, non-interventionist pose, but that she was being pragmatic and reassuringly blunt.
She said the brutality being exercised for more than a year against Syrians by their government and its military cannot go on indefinitely and that “there will be increasingly capable opposition forces … that will find the means to defend themselves as well as begin offensive measures … I have absolutely no doubt there will be a breaking point.”
She was speaking to representatives of Arab and Western countries who are to attend a “Friends of Syria” gathering of some 70 nations in Tunis, with the goal of trying to persuade the Assad regime to stop killing its own people.
What’s interesting in this U.S. approach, is that it’s registering disapproval and opposition — but no military ultimatums or threats.
Pity the U.S. doesn’t try this approach more often.
Once military action is involved, the dynamics of any crisis change, and consequences are invariably unpredictable. And usually disappointing.
Of course, Russia and China supporting Syria is an inhibiting factor. Well, if not exactly supporting, at least warning outsiders not to interfere.
When U.S. or Western countries get involved in a rebellion, they inevitably must assume some responsibility for the outcome. By taking a hands-off approach to the Syrian rebellion, there is little baggage or responsibility of Western countries.
Not like Libya, where the rebellion caught Western countries by surprise. While we didn’t send ground troops, we did wage an air war against the Gadhafi regime that was like shooting fish in a barrel. Western allies have been congratulating themselves ever since.
As a consequence we now have some responsibility for the regime that replaces Gadhafi, and fervently hope it is more democratic than it looks at present. The same goes for the Egyptian rebellion that ousted Mubarak who, until he fell, was America’s ally and then forgotten.
Western countries intruded militarily in the affairs of Kosovo and Serbia, on grounds that we were preventing genocide — which turn out to be a myth. No mass graves, and casualties and atrocities roughly equal by both sides.
A consequence is that Bosnia and Kosovo are now havens for Islamic extremists.
One civil war that succeeded without Western involvement was Eritrea’s 30-year war against Ethiopia’s occupation. Ethiopia was at first supported by U.S, weaponry and then by Soviet Union. No country supported, or gave military aid to Eritrea.
I was there during the last battles, when Eritrean fighters were capturing Soviet equipment used by the Ethiopians, and turning captured tanks and guns against their enemy. They won independence, thanks only to themselves.
Today Eritrea is judged one of the world’s poorest nations, at the bottom of the freedom scale. Yet Eritreans overseas loyally send money to relatives.
America’s war in Vietnam was a misjudgment that cost 50,000 American lives, and solved nothing. The North won, and life goes on. By invading Iraq, the country is now on a razor’s edge. If only the American had eliminate Saddam Hussein, as they did Osama bin Laden, that whole area might be different today.
The moral being — don’t start a war unless you’re going to win quickly, as President Reagan did in Grenada and against Noriega in Panama. One hopes Hillary is right about Syria.
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