RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the Trump administration considering how to break the stalemate between Taliban-allied groups and the government of Afghanistan, terrorists detonated a car bomb in Kabul on May 31, killing more than 150. Afghan intelligence blamed the violence on Haqqani, a terror network with close ties to the Taliban, al Qaeda and Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. The attack demonstrates that Washington needs to focus on the threat from Haqqani, which has also consolidated militant factions across strategic regions of the war zone.

Haqqani’s ties to Pakistan make political solutions essential. Islamabad has shown no sign it is genuinely willing to end its support of terror proxies and reconcile with the Kabul regime. Yet the success of the administration’s recent decision to deepen U.S. involvement in the Afghan war will depend on whether Haqqani can be defeated, co-opted, or separated from the ISI, which for decades has relied on militant proxies to further Pakistani interests in Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, Haqqani has evolved from a relatively small, tribal-based jihadist network into one of the most influential terrorist organizations in South Asia. It is largely responsible for the violence in Kabul and the most notorious attacks against the coalition. It masterminded the 19-hour siege on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in 2011, and allegedly facilitated an assault on a U.S. Consulate near the Iran border in 2013 and a 2009 suicide bombing of a U.S. base in Khost province, which killed seven CIA operatives. The group also holds five American hostages in Pakistan. Since the 2013 death of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Haqqani has become the only group with the cohesion, influence and geographic reach to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth”—a territorial buffer on its western border.

Pakistan denies sponsoring terror proxies and continues to work with the U.S. in counterterrorism against certain anti-Pakistan groups. But Western and Afghan officials say Islamabad also sponsors terrorism in order to undermine Afghanistan and India. In 2011 Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Haqqani a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

Haqqani is a central element of the strategic challenge that faces the U.S. and its allies. The network’s expanding operations in northern and southeastern Afghanistan, and especially in Kabul, over the past decade have enabled its Taliban affiliates to “control or contest” territory accounting for about one-third of the Afghan population, or nearly 10 million. That’s a higher proportion of the population than Islamic State controlled in Syria and Iraq at the height of its power in 2014, according to CNN’s Peter Bergen. The militants’ wide reach makes it hard for NATO forces to build enduring partnerships with Afghan civilians.

As the debate intensifies over how the U.S. should respond in Afghanistan, Washington must also change its approach to Pakistan. As a first step, the president should appoint an envoy who would lead diplomatic and intelligence efforts to buttress the Kabul regime against terrorism. The envoy would also sharpen the focus on Pakistan in bilateral diplomacy with countries that have good relations with Islamabad, such as China, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.

The envoy would also oversee relations among Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India, focusing on the formulation of political solutions. A U.S. alignment with India would more effectively check Pakistan, while improved U.S. relations with China, cemented over shared concerns about escalating violence and economic security, could pressure Islamabad and its proxies into a political settlement.

The U.S. should also press Pakistan to stop providing sanctuary to terrorists. That would require Washington to consider publicly exposing the extent to which officials at the highest levels of the Pakistan military and ISI support terror. Such moves against an ostensible ally would be unusual and would require advanced measures to protect intelligence sources and methods. But the U.S. has tolerated Pakistan’s duplicity for 16 years, and it hasn’t worked.

Equally important, the Afghan National Security Forces are unequipped for infiltration by Haqqani factions. The U.S. and NATO allies should increase political intelligence and military resources to ease into a strengthened combat-support role, training and mentoring the Afghan forces. A more adaptive political-military NATO campaign would help reduce the threat from Haqqani, eventually enabling Afghan troops to move from defense to offense against increasingly capable adversaries. CONTINUE AT SITE

OTTAWA—Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended the apology and financial compensation his government issued to Omar Khadr, saying Saturday they were the price for violating Mr. Khadr’s constitutional rights while he was held at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade.

Canada’s constitution “protects all Canadians, even when it’s uncomfortable,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters at the end of the Group of 20 leaders’ summit in Hamburg, Germany. “This is not about the details or the merits of the Khadr case. When the government violates any Canadians’ [constitutional] rights, we all end up paying for it.”

Negative reaction to the formal settlement unveiled Friday has been swift, with former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper weighing in, saying the deal is “simply wrong.”

The formal settlement with Mr. Khadr, a Canadian held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade following the death of a U.S. Army medic, marked an attempt to bring closure to a case that fueled a bitter debate on how to handle national security threats.

Canada’s Liberal government said it wished to “apologize to Mr. Khadr for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to his ordeal abroad and any resulting harm.”

Settlement details, such as a payment for damages, weren’t publicly disclosed. A person familiar with the details said the payment was about 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.75 million).

The settlement brings an end to a drawn-out lawsuit Mr. Khadr’s lawyers launched against the Canadian government. It sought C$20 million in damages over his detention in Guantanamo Bay and what it claimed were a violation of his constitutional rights by Canadian officials, who interviewed Mr. Khadr while he was in custody. Canada’s top court ruled in 2010 that Mr. Khadr’s rights under Canada’s Charter of Rights were infringed.

Mr. Khadr, now 30 years old, was born in Canada and later brought to Afghanistan, where at age 15 he was captured by the U.S. Army in July 2002 and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. In October 2010, he pleaded guilty to a series of charges including murder, attempted murder, providing support for terrorism and spying. He came to Canada years later to serve the remainder of his eight-year sentence. He was released on bail in 2015, and has lived in western Canada since. CONTINUE AT SITE

In his magnificent speech in Poland, President Trump asked whether the west “still has the will to survive”.http://www.melaniephillips.com/trump-in-poland/

If he’d listened to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (approx 0840), he might have lost his own.

The issue that seemed to have startled the BBC was the suggestion that there were now threats to western bonds of culture, faith and tradition. (The fact that some of us have been writing about this for years has of course totally passed the BBC by). Two guests were invited to discuss this question: Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford university where she is also Warden of St Anthony’s college, and Lord Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff.

The interviewer’s loaded question about Trump’s speech, “Is he in any sense right?” invited them to agree that no, there could be no sense in which he was. Both duly agreed. Three against Trump, then. But if anything illustrated precisely what he was talking about, this conversation could scarcely have been bettered.

Opined Professor MacMillan: “There are bonds that hold us together and there are often bonds of history, but the idea there is something called ‘the west’ seems to me very dubious indeed. There are many wests, there are many different ways of looking at who we are, and I’m worried by the whole tenor of his speech. The talk of the ‘will’, the family, traditional values, what does that all mean?”

Lord Dannatt was equally perplexed. “What threat does he have in mind? From Russia? Islamic State? From climate change? Well he ruled that one out by pulling out of the Paris agreement. Or is it the nuclear threat from North Korea?”

Helpfully, the interviewer observed that what Trump had meant was a waning of cultural self confidence; he further ventured to suggest, with appropriate BBC diffidence, that “the project that we’ve all been involved in for centuries is a decent one”.

Professor MacMillan agreed there was a “decent side to what the west has done”. But just in case anyone might have thought she believed it to be better than other societies, she added there were many sides that weren’t decent at all “when you think of some of the things we’ve unleashed on the world” (presumably as opposed to the unlimited decencies that countries which don’t subscribe to respect for human life, freedom and democracy have bequeathed to humanity).

She conceded that the west had built a “liberal intentional order since the first and second world wars”. She agreed that respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions were very important and that these should be defended. “But if you talk about defending the power of the west and the dominance of the west that’s very different and I’m not sure that does make the world more stable… What worries me is that part of the enemy is seen as those who live among us… Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, is [as presented by Trump] in some way a threat, and that means not just from outside but inside and that to me is really troubling”,

This professor of history, who teaches the young and thus transmits the culture down through the generations, didn’t even seem to know what that culture was. She implied that the will to survive was something out of Nietzsche or fascist ideology rather than the impulse to defend a society and a civilisation. She seemed to find incomprehensible the very idea that certain values defined western civilisation at all, or that it had a coherent identity.

She found something frightening or sinister about traditional values or the emphasis on the family: the very things that keep any society together. The one good thing she conceded was associated with the west – the “liberal international order” – had developed only after the two world wars. So much for the 18th century western Enlightenment, the development of political liberty and the rise of science.

The idea of the west having power filled her with horror; but without power the west can’t defend itself. And she thought the idea the west was threatened from within as well as from without was “troubling”. In other words, she doesn’t believe home-grown radicalised Islamists pose a threat to western countries. Now that really is troubling.

As for Lord Dannatt complaining Trump wasn’t specific about the threats he had in mind – well, talk about missing the point! Russia, Isis and North Korea are all threats to the west. The question was whether the west actually wanted to defeat any or all of these and more.

And Lord Dannatt’s reference to climate change was unintentionally revealing – about himself. Climate change supposedly threatens the survival of the planet. No-one suggests it poses a threat to the west alone! So it was irrelevant to the issue under discussion. Its inclusion implies that Lord Dannatt knows one thing: that Trump is wrong about EVERYTHING. So he just threw in climate change for good measure to show how wrong about everything Trump is.

So what exactly did Trump say to produce such finger-wagging disdain? Well, he produced an astonishing, passionate and moving declaration of belief in the west, its values of freedom and sovereignty and his determination to defend them.

He summoned up Poland’s resistance against two terrible tyrannies, Nazism and the Soviet Union, to make a broader point about western civilisation. Most strikingly, he identified Christianity as the core of that civilisation, that it was Christianity that was crucial in Poland’s stand against Soviet oppression – and that, in an echo of Pope Benedict’s warning years ago, the west has to reaffirm its Christian values in order to survive.

“And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: ‘We Want God.’

“In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future. They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.

“As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”

“Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God. And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls. And you won.”

“Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are. And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten. Americans will never forget. The nations of Europe will never forget. We are the fastest and the greatest community. There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”

“We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

“We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

“We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

“And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

“What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.”

But the danger is that we might do just that.

“We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

“We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive”.

President Trump’s speech in Warsaw was a remarkable statement from a western leader in the 21st century – which is why the enforcers of our public discourse have gone bananas over it and denounced it as “blood and soil” “nativism” (The New Republic), “racial and religious paranoia” (The Atlantic), and “tinpot dictator sh*t” (some comedian having a meltdown on Twitter). Much of the speech was just the usual boosterish boilerplate that one foreign leader sloughs off while visiting the capital of another. But that wasn’t what caused the mass pearl-clutching. This was the offending passage:

There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

I’m not certain we do put “faith and family” ahead of “government and bureaucracy”, not in Germany or even Ireland, but we did once upon a time. Nor am I sure we still “write symphonies”, or at any rate good ones. But Trump’s right: “The world has never known anything like our community of nations” – and great symphonies are a part of that. I’m not sure what’s “nativist” or “racial” about such a statement of the obvious, but I note it’s confirmed by the traffic, which is all one way: There are plenty of Somalis who’ve moved to Minnesota, but you can count on one hand Minnesotans who’ve moved to Somalia. As an old-school imperialist, I make exceptions for sundry places from Barbados to Singapore, which I regard as part of the community of the greater west, and for India, which is somewhat more ambiguously so, but let’s face it, 90 per cent of everything in the country that works derives from England.

But otherwise Trump’s statement that “the world has never known anything like our community of nations” ought to be unexceptional. It’s certainly more robust than Theresa May’s and David Cameron’s vague appeals to “our values” or “our way of life”, which can never quite be spelled out – shopping, telly, pop songs, a bit of Shakespeare if you have to mention a dead bloke, whatever… For his part, The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart preferred the way Trump’s predecessor expressed it:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West.” He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization.” But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal.”

I wish that were true. It would be easier if it were. But it’s not. These values are not “universal”: They arise from a relatively narrow political and cultural tradition, and insofar as they took root elsewhere across the globe it was as part of (stand well back, Peter Beinart!) the west’s – gulp – “civilizing mission”. Alas, left to fend for themselves, those supposedly universal values have minimal purchase on millions upon millions of people around the planet – including those who live in the heart of the west. Bush’s bromide is easier to swallow because it’s a delusion – as we should surely know by now, after a decade and a half of encouraging Pushtun warlords to adopt Take Your Child Bride To Work Day. In contrast to Bush’s happy talk, Trump concluded his laundry list of western achievement on a sobering note:

What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

These barbarians are called “militants” ….?????? rsk

NAIROBI, Kenya—Al-Shabaab extremists from neighboring Somalia beheaded nine civilians in an early-morning attack on a village in southeast Kenya, local officials said Saturday, as concerns grew that the group had taken up a bloody new strategy.

The attack occurred in Jima village in Lamu County, said James Ole Serian, who leads a task force of security agencies combating al-Shabaab.

Beheadings by al-Shabaab have been rare in Kenya, where the extremist group has carried out dozens of deadly attacks over the years.

The al Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab has vowed retribution on Kenya for sending troops in 2011 to Somalia to fight the group.

Saturday’s attack occurred in the Pandaguo area, where al-Shabaab fighters engaged security agencies in a day-long battle three days ago.

A police report says about 15 al-Shabaab fighters on Saturday attacked Jima village and seized men, killing them with knives.

Al-Shabaab in recent months also has increased attacks with homemade bombs, killing at least 46 in Lamu and Mandera counties.

The increase in attacks presents a huge problem for Kenya’s security agencies ahead of the Aug. 8 presidential election, said security analyst and former U.S. Marine Andrew Franklin. On election day, security agencies will be strained while attempting stop any possible violence and al-Shabaab could take advantage, he said.

Kenya is among five countries contributing troops to an African Union force that is bolstering Somalia’s fragile central government against al-Shabaab’s insurgency. Of the troop-contributing countries, Kenya has borne the brunt of retaliatory attacks from al-Shabaab.

HAMBURG—A riot that raged for hours just a mile from the Group of 20 meeting site left German officials struggling to explain Saturday how protests that had long been predicted spiraled out of control.

Only after SWAT teams, riot police and water cannons swept block by block were authorities able to end the overnight riots in the left-leaning Schanzenviertel neighborhood, a 20-minute walk from the venue where leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies continued their two-day meeting Saturday.

Stores were looted, barricades and cars set on fire, and officers attacked with rocks, bottles and slingshots, Hamburg police said. Authorities moved to quell the riots only after they had raged for hours, according to several shopkeepers in one of the hardest-hit streets.
A police spokesman said intelligence suggesting some of the roughly 1,500 rioters were preparing to pelt authorities from buildings with cobblestones and Molotov cocktails had caused the delay. “We had prepared for the G-20 summit to be attacked, not the people of Hamburg,” Hamburg police spokesman Timo Zill told ZDF public television.

The Schanzenviertel riot appeared to be the most violent flare-up as tens of thousands of people protested across the city. By Saturday morning, 265 people had been detained and 213 officers injured, according to the police. An unspecified number of protesters were also injured.

Officials from the host government have said they needed to hold the annual summit in a metropolitan area to ensure there were enough hotel rooms, and that they wanted to show off one of Germany’s most international cities.

But critics claiming the government had miscalculated intensified their attacks Saturday. The conservative opposition leader in the Hamburg legislature, André Trepoll, slammed center-left Mayor Olaf Scholz for going easy on left-wing extremism. The Bild tabloid, Germany’s top-selling paper, said both Mr. Scholz and German Chancellor Angela Merkel —who is up for re-election in September—bore responsibility for the events.

“The feeling of general security, which the state must guarantee, has ceased to exist in Hamburg in the last 48 hours,” Julian Reichelt, a top Bild editor, wrote in Saturday’s edition. “The horrific message of Hamburg is: if the mob wants to rule, it will rule.”

After the summit ended Mr. Scholz and Ms. Merkel together met with several dozen police officers and thanked them for their work.

“Some people exercised unimaginable violence,” Mr. Scholz said. “I thank those who say that it must nevertheless be possible for such summit meetings to take place in cities such as Hamburg and in a democratic country such as Germany.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Most of all, the Islamist leaders fear that as a former Muslim, you have true knowledge of what Islam actually is, and you may disclose that information to others.

“Not only has [Maryam Naghash Zargaran] been detained unjustly because of her Christian faith, but the Iranian authorities have denied her urgently needed medical care.” — U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

“For more than four years, Maryam Naghash Zargaran has suffered in an Iranian prison, falsely charged with ‘propagating against the Islamic regime and collusion intended to harm national security.’ The Iranian government must cease its targeting of Christians and release Maryam and other religious prisoners of conscience.” — Clifford D. May, Commissioner, USCIRF.

It is currently being spouted through all forms of media — impossible to ignore — you will hear claims over and over again by many radical Imams, Muslim scholars, and preachers that Islam is a religion of inclusiveness, that anyone can become a Muslim just by muttering a few words. It seems quite simple, right?

This is not new. I grew up hearing all these claims in Iran, under Islamic laws. To uninformed ears, this can sound almost magical. What is important, however, are the many more significant requirements the imams conveniently leave out. Above all, once you become a Muslim, there is no way to turn back. Your faith is under the control of the extremist imams, sheikhs, governments, or simply the community. You cannot just decide to abandon Islam and go back to how you were living. The penalty of attempting this is death.

Additionally, those imams and sheikhs who will have you believe how easy it is to join Islam, claim that Islam accepts Christianity and Judaism (“people of the book”), and that there is absolutely no difference between the Abrahamic religions. Sounds nice to most ears. But it is absolutely false. Let us take a quick look at some people who left Islam for other “Abrahamic” religions, particularly Christianity.

Maryam Naghash Zargaran, a 38 year-old Christian convert from Islam, is currently facing serious health issues in one of the world’s most vicious jails; Evin prison in Tehran.

A former children’s music teacher, Zargaran became acquainted with teachings of Christianity at young age. Even though she grew up in a Muslim family and under Sharia, she found Christianity to be her true faith. She made a decision to convert, and dedicated her life to helping children, and ended up at an orphanage. She did her best to care for the children, and provide them with the stability and love they had been missing.

What harm was Zargaran doing to the society? She was contributing the society doing charity work and privately practicing her faith. But, if you live under Islamic laws, your faith is neither private nor personal. Your faith is directly controlled by Islamist authorities or the state.