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[Inkstick] Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, US officials have issued several warnings about the threat of transnational attacks by the self-declared Islamic State’s Afghan chapter, commonly known as Islamic State Khorasan or ISK.
On May 10, 2022, the US Defense Intelligence Agency director, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier, assessed that ISK might establish external attack capabilities within "probably a year [or] slightly longer." He said he is "more concerned" about ISK than al-Qaeda regarding Afghanistan. In October 2021, in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl stated that it would take between six and 12 months for ISK to establish an external threat capability. And in March 2022, General Kenneth McKenzie, Commander of US Central Command, testified that the group could establish such capabilities in about 12 to 18 months. The basis for these assessments was not made public.
In view of this, on Apr. 17, 2022, when ISK claimed to have hit Uzbek security forces in the Uzbek border town of Termez with ten rockets launched from across the Afghan-Uzbek border river, alarm bells began to ring. Less than a month later, on May 7, 2022, ISK took responsibility for another rocket barrage, fired from the northeastern Afghan province of Takhar, targeting a Tajik base just across the Afghan-Tajik border river.
Since then, these rocket attacks have regularly been cited as proof of ISK’s transnational threat. A foiled plot of an ISK-linked cell of five Tajik citizens arrested in Germany in March 2019 and April 2020 is also sometimes referenced as an example of ISK’s alleged transnational capabilities. Yet, when scrutinized, these attacks and plots present a different picture of ISK’s capabilities.
ISK’S FAILED ROCKET BARRAGES
Regarding the ISK-claimed rocket attack allegedly hitting Uzbek soil on Apr. 17, 2022, the Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... , after an initial denial, acknowledged the firing of rockets from Hairatan, a place at the Afghan-Uzbek border, and videos subsequently showed the launching of the missiles. However, corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds... it remained doubtful that any rocket reached Uzbekistan. Indeed, there has been no information on anything hitting the Uzbek side of the border, as Abror Kurbonmuratov, a local journalist in Termez, the allegedly struck area, told Inkstick.
As in previous similar attacks inside Afghanistan, ISK used a homemade rocket launcher. And as such launchers have proven anything but accurate, it is well conceivable that the rockets went astray and did not reach Uzbekistan.
In a second, unclaimed firing of rockets from Afghan soil against Uzbekistan that happened on Jul. 5, 2022, projectiles did land on Uzbek soil. However, corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds... footage shared on social media only showed minor damage to some civilian houses, and Uzbek authorities asserted that none of the five impacting rockets went kaboom! and that no one was injured.
Similarly, the cross-border rocket attack against Tajikistan on May 7, 2022, hit nothing of relevance. ISK published a photo of the allegedly targeted facility of Tajik security forces, but the picture only shows mundane houses, and one cannot make out any notable damage. Tajik authorities asserted that there had been a firefight between the Taliban and ISK across the border and that some unspecified projectiles had coincidentally entered Tajikistan. That said, a Tajik official confirmed to Inkstick that, apart from insignificant minor damage to the walls of a border post, no other damage was caused.
Given the availability of rockets in the war-ravaged country and the use of improvised launchers, acquiring and launching rockets in Afghanistan is comparatively easy and, thus, not proof of significant capabilities. Therefore, these attacks are more failures than successes, which might be why there have, as of the time of writing, been no further such incidents. Indeed, the cited incidents arguably rather show the limits of ISK’s transnational capabilities.
QUESTIONABLE PLOT IN GERMANY
The plot of the arrested ISK-cell, consisting of Tajik nationals, in Germany to stage attacks there is also far from conclusive proof of the group’s transnational capabilities as the link is much weaker than regularly suggested.
In a 46-page German court sentence against Ravsan B., one of the cell members, "Khorasan" is only mentioned five times (the sentence against other cell members was, as of the time of writing, not publicly available). And while German authorities were able to prove that Ravsan B. and other cell members were in touch with an ISK commander in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country.. via Zello, a communication app, the extensive court sentence does not indicate that this was of high relevance. Indeed, the only elaboration with respect to this contact is that the ISK commander, who was also a Tajik national, "strengthened the ideological basis of [Ravsan B.] and the other group members and trained them in the jihadist ideology of IS."
At least for Ravsan B., this contact was also short-lived. According to the sentence, the referenced contact started on Jan. 1, 2019, only 2.5 months before Ravsan B.’s arrest on Mar. 15, 2019. Assuming a significant ISK link to this arrested German cell is, at best, speculative.
Furthermore, the arrested members of this Tajik cell in Germany were apparently anything but adept professionals. This is arguably best exemplified by the episode where the cell took on a hitman job to assassinate a local businessman in the Albanian capital Tirana in February 2019, which was meant to finance their jihadist plans in Germany. While they managed to travel to Tirana and acquire a pistol, they eventually aborted the liquidation because they suddenly had doubts about whether the man they had been following for three days was actually the man they were meant to kill. This rather draws the picture of blundering would-be jihadists than hard-boiled terrorists.
ATTACKING THE TALIBAN
Despite its propaganda displaying transnational ambitions (see here, here, and here), the group’s main focus is attacking the Taliban. Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, 2022, ISK claimed 188 attacks, of which 123 directly or indirectly targeted the Taliban (111 attacks directly targeted Taliban members, another ten alleged spies for the Taliban, and two civilian employees of the Taliban government). In other words, approximately two-thirds of all claimed ISK attacks targeted the Taliban. About three-quarters of the remaining attacks (50 out of 65) were aimed at Pak security forces or spies for Pak security forces (35 of the mentioned 50 attacks, all conducted in Pakistain) and against Shiites (15 of the mentioned 50 attacks, 14 of which were conducted in Afghanistan and only one in Pakistain). As ISK has an apparent presence in Pak tribal areas, these cannot be counted as transnational incidents. Apart from the above-discussed questionable examples, ISK claimed no other transnational attack.
This, as well as ISK’s consistent deriding of the Taliban on every occasion, strongly suggests that ISK currently focuses first and foremost on directly hitting the Taliban — not transnational targets. This is likely at least partly due to a still ongoing bloody Taliban campaign against ISK that has dealt significant blows to the group, meaning that ISK is likely looking for Dire Revenge and does anyway not have much of another choice than to try to strike the Taliban before they can arrest or kill them.
GROUND REALITY
All the above heavily qualifies the significance of incidents that are often cited as alleged proof of ISK’s transnational capabilities. Indeed, a closer look reveals that such attacks and plots are almost singular exceptions that have been more failures than successes. As such, they are more indicative of the limits — not the dangers — of ISK’s external attack capabilities.
This is not to say that ISK is no transnational threat at all. The group seemingly aspires to expand and launch external attacks. However, corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds... in assessing the transnational capabilities of ISK, a sober scrutinizing of facts on the ground would be more helpful than the uncritical citing of ISK claims and reliance on their inflated propaganda. This is all the more the case as the hyping of the threat posed by ISK obfuscates arguably more tangible transnational threats emanating from Afghanistan, as, for example, posed by groups like the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistain or Ansorullah Tajikistan.
Franz J. Marty has been living and working in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist since December 2014 and is also a fellow of the Swiss Institute for Global Affairs. While he writes on a broad range of topics, he focuses on security issues.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
12/18/2022 02:01 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
The same sort of stuff was reported from Al Qaeda quarters in Afghanistan in 1998.
#2
I would write a longer comment but not in this device. Anyway, the ISK are currently purely mercenary and desperate for money. Unlike the Jamaat-e-Islami supported HizbMs and LeTs, the ISK is not a state player and cannot source funds directly from the billions in aid sent to the Taliban and 'slamabad. It is trying to establish territories which it can hold for ransom, and strongholds where the host nations' forces cannot hit them easily. Just as the African daesh factions do. Transnational abilities would require transnational aspirations. The ISK are goons trying to establish local fiefdoms and hope to one day create their own little shithole, whoring themselves out to anyone who needs muscle, terror for hire, assassination, big booms, anything.
I know why these 'experts' are harping about so called transnational abilities of the ISK. These are simply tactics to suck America into this fucked up Sunni calvinball again and to give the MICs and Islamist embeds an excuse for it. Nobody is being honest. A rocket flying across a border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan is not really a transnational threat. It doesn't mean they will hit Delaware if not stopped! As for the arrest of ISK affiliates in western nations, we really don't know the story of that. In India, Mauritius, Srilanka we are easily dealing with the undernourished sasquatches trying to be ISK.
If these experts were honest and loyal to their own national interests, they would leave the ISK to fight the Taliban and the Taliban to fight the Pakis and local State forces to take care of it all. However, there's probably great grift to be made in supplying the state actors against the non state actors.
[AfghanistanAnalysts] On 15 August 2021, the Afghan government and large parts of the state, primarily the army and police, came tumbling down like a house of cards, leaving serious questions about the sudden melting away of Afghanistan’s security forces. Many factors contributed to the collapse of the security forces, including widespread corruption, lack of a combat strategy, poor war planning, the withdrawal of US-funded logistics and maintenance contractors and how the United States’ ’peace’ strategy and then its decision to withdraw rapidly, completely and unconditionally had undermined morale. In this report, guest author Timor Sharan scrutinises the impact of domestic politics on the crumbling of the Afghanistan National Security Forces, particularly in the final months of Afghanistan’s ill-fated Republic. The report shines a light on how the politicisation and ethnicisation of the security forces by President Ashraf Ghani ...former chancellor of Kabul University, ex-president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. When Biden abandoned the country left with a helicopter, four cars, and part of the national treasury... and his inner circle drove military failure and ultimately helped push the collapse of the ANSF and the Afghan state.
Drawing on interviews with key informants before and after the fall of Kabul and Sharan’s previous research on the role and power dynamics of Afghanistan’s political networks, this report examines the following:
The impact of the wholesale, 11th-hour restructuring of the top leadership at the Ministry of Interior and other security institutions at a time when the country faced formidable armed opposition, and the US was withdrawing, on the weakening, if not full breakdown, of chains of command and trust;
How Ghani and his inner circle further politicised and ethnicised security institutions to their advantage. The ’restructuring’ was couched as involving much-needed reforms to deal with very real problems of corruption and nepotism. However, some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves... it seems that changes to the big shotship appeared to be driven by a desire to ’clean’ the security sector of non-Pashtuns and promote Pashtuns, especially Ghilzai easterners, to shift the balance in favour of Ghani and his inner circle;
Examines the strategic calculations and incentives of President Ghani and his inner circle for this last-minute restructuring and how others attempted to understand them;
And finally, how the Palace’s decisions and actions undermined the ANSF’s capability and morale to counter Taliban ...Arabic for students... offensives, as senior personnel were consumed by internal politics and job security rather than providing logistical and planning support to those fighting.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the link here..
#1
We chose to stop being the strong horse. What came next was almost assuredly known to be the outcome, so it must have been desired.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
12/18/2022 9:26 Comments ||
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#2
#1 We chose to stop being the strong horse. What came next was almost assuredly known to be the outcome, so it must have been desired.
Posted by: Rex Mundi 2022-12-18 09:26
...I firmly believe that the Trump administration knew damned well that their withdrawal plan would have at best allowed for a Vietnam-type 'Decent Interval', but at least there was a PLAN. The Biden Administration threw it away because of who signed off on it, and we saw the result.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
12/18/2022 13:48 Comments ||
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#3
Afghan fighters are renowned for their fierceness. It looks like all those type of fighters joined the other side against the invaders - us. The only truly capable people we were training were plants. We were honing the sharp edge of our enemy. Overcoming that system requires making a long term commitment and being willing to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trails from Pakistan and Iraq. That long term commitment works has been demonstrated by Japan, NATO, South Korea and other places. After Tet VN was on the same trajectory, until our commies cut the funding setting a new template for failure. Iraq and Afghanistan are on the new template. With the understanding that we have an enemy inside our wire, trying to export freedom makes little sense. It just becomes a mint for the military industrial complex.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/18/2022 19:04 Comments ||
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[NY Post] As a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer specializing in Russia, I often am asked why the United States doesn’t just take out Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s president is clearly a bad dude. So far, in his barbaric 10-month war against Ukraine, Putin’s forces have bombed maternity wards, tortured civilians and abducted their children, shipping them to Russia by force. His missiles have pounded vital infrastructure, leaving Ukrainians without electricity or drinking water amid freezing winter temperatures.
His illegal invasion has also led to a global energy crisis and exacerbated skyrocketing inflation across the West. US leaders watch the conflict nervously, worried it could spiral into World War III.
For many, getting rid of Putin seems like an easy fix. But while the United States maintains a doctrine — albeit a secret one — that permits, in exceptional cases, targeted killings of foreigners, Washington will almost certainly not order the assassination of Russia’s strongman. Here are three reasons why.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/18/2022 07:21 ||
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[3 views]
Top|| File under: Commies
#13
/\ The line of potential domestically grown Putin assassins reaches twice around the Kremlin. If he could have been terminated, it would have happened long before now.
#14
The Russian or Putin challenge is one of yes, lack of control. A short primer of the Kennedy-Bush era follows:
The CIA was backing the leaders of eleven Latin American nations -- Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela.Once a friendly government was in power, a CIA station chief had five paths to maintain American influence over foreign leaders. "You become their foreign intelligence service." Polgar said. "They don't know what's going on in the world. So you give them a weekly briefing--doctored to meet their sensibilities. Money, definitely--that's always welcome. Procurement--toys, games, weapons, Training. And you can always take a group of officers to Fort Bragg or Washington--a wonderful holiday.
The MO has changed little, if at all in 60+ years.
Tim Weimer, 'Legacy of Ashes' the history of the CIA, Anchor Books, Copyright 2007, page 323.
#15
Before assassinating Putin you need to assure that the replacement isn't worse. Their seems to be a deep well of Russian xenophobia that could bubble up a leader far less pragmatic.
[Gateway] As reported earlier — On Thursday the National Archives released thousands of the never disclosed JFK documents.
But the FBI-CIA would not allow the release of all of the documents. Around 3% of the JFK documents are still being withheld from release by the government to the public — more than 50 years after the assassination.
What are they hiding?
They are "hiding" the true mechanisms of shadow governance. They have been attempting to hide it for nearly 70 years.
#1
The FBI-CIA are the 'Deep State' the 'shadow gov't' and they are in control. Please someone, show me evidence that POTUS or the Congress are actually in 'control' of anything? The idea of a Republic, a government by the people - for the people, has become mythical. Gov't is now a Kabuki theater of the absurd.
#2
FBI-CIA could not do it alone. Without an army of bureaucrats who know exactly who butters their bread, all the desk sitters at Langley and the 7th floor of the Hoover building could do nothing with the paltry number of "agents" at their disposal.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/18/2022 7:17 Comments ||
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#3
/\ Without an army of bureaucrats who know exactly who butters their bread
Exactly correct. Everyone in Veneto knows the Mala del Brenta family of Veneto. Ask any cab driver. On second thought, DON'T ask any cab driver.
#5
military defense intelligence operations, law enforcement, and conduct of foreign relations
AKA "Our thing."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/18/2022 8:19 Comments ||
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#6
After the last 6 years, we're forced to stare into that abiss. Perhaps that is the goal here, to finally dispense with in everyone's eyes all that came before. Now we wait for Big Mike and Year One.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
12/18/2022 9:29 Comments ||
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#7
“What are they hiding?” Is a dumb question. That is kind of like wanting to know what Madonna looks like naked. We CIA’s malignant nature was revealed to us long ago. There is zero chance that the shape of things has improved. Ask for revaluation if you want, I have seen enough and am more interested in how we kill it and how we perform the intelligence function without building something so awful again.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/18/2022 18:22 Comments ||
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#8
what other gov, dod, state, "agencies" have been up close and personal with the CIA for years? I think alot of them...
[ZERO] The heavy perils we face today include centralized governments micromanaging society, the growing prospect of global war, the growing prospect of forced surrender, and the replacement of reasoned debate and free speech with state-sanctioned "narratives" and censorship: totalitarian governance seems not far behind. This is a new kind of war against civilians for control of their minds.
The torrents engulfing us appear to be potentially catastrophic. In a few short years, the world has endured the COVID-19 pandemic, forced government lockdowns, extreme economic volatility, commodity shortages, and the World Economic Forum's attempts to exploit this cascade of crises as an excuse to usher in a structural "Great Reset" in which global food and energy consumption can be strictly regulated according to the "climate change" goals of an unelected cabal. Governments are relying increasingly on controlling public "narratives" and vilifying dissent.
While health bureaucrats and politicians claimed to be "following the science," mandatory compliance with unilateral rule-making precluded reasoned, good-faith debate. The predictable result: the lethal consequences of the Wuhan Virus were exacerbated by the lethal consequences of misguided public policies imposed to fight the virus. Students whose schools were shuttered now suffer the lifelong effects of learning loss. Patients whose timely diagnoses and preventative care were forestalled now suffer the debilitating outcomes of untreated disease. Small businesses unable to endure prolonged closures are gone for good. Middle class savings once reserved for unexpected "rainy day" funds or children's future educations have dried up. Credit card debt is on the rise, while more and more people struggle to survive on less. The "safety nets" of government welfare programs have ballooned to leave nation states more indebted than ever but have also proved too perforated with leaky holes (often draining needed resources straight into the bank accounts of corporate campaign donors, interest group lobbyists, and foreign hackers) to keep society's most vulnerable afloat.
Governments' justifications for reckless fiscal, monetary, and credit policies during short-term emergencies have weakened nations' prospects for long-term solvency and the likelihood that they will be capable of preserving stable currencies. Still, for all the harms their actions have caused, governments have issued no apologies for enforcing such life-altering policies while silencing critics. It is as if "narrative engineers" have adopted an official position that they are incapable of being wrong.
#1
They must be convinced they need is a brain-computer interface such as Synchron Switch or Neuralink. At least 75m of the poor bastids voted for Trump. They must be controlled or this could potentially happen again. Effective population control is the key.
#5
^^ He'd better watch his step in there, Skidmark. Some of those ladies could pulverize and gut you faster than you think.
Child rapists are still despised in prison populations, no matter what Disney tells you.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
12/18/2022 9:14 Comments ||
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#6
Greg Gutfeld has been covering this. He's not sure if it started out as trolling the school officials and they called his bluff or if he became derainged.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
12/18/2022 10:58 Comments ||
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#7
I meant covering the guy with the fake breasts. He is a shop teacher who was sanctioned several times for his attitudes toward women. He is still teaching because the officials made a statement some time ago that everyone would be treated equally regardless of their preferred gender. The students are barred from taking pictures on promise of suspension. Imagine if another teacher showed up with a giant Johnson in his pants.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
12/18/2022 11:04 Comments ||
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[Free Beacon H/T Insty] Israel’s decades-long peace with Jordan is unraveling, a development that threatens to upset a fragile regional stability that is being challenged by countries like Iran, Russia, and China, a think tank report warns.
"Since 2020, if not before then, the Jordanian peace has turned decidedly cold," according to Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department who now works at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. While the relationship has been breaking down behind the scenes for some time, Jordan also began to publicly war with Israel in recent years, by refusing to sign the Abraham Accords peace agreements, attacking incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and threatening to fully abrogate the peace deal it signed with Israel in 1994.
Schanzer’s findings, published in a report last week, indicate the United States could be faced with a looming crisis in the Middle East that threatens to upset nearly 30 years of stability between the two former enemies. The fracture between Israel and Jordan could also empower American enemies like Russia, China, and Iran, which are all working in tandem to erode U.S. influence in the region.
"All of this should come as unwelcome news to the United States and to America’s Middle East allies. In anticipation of intensifying great power competition with China, and perhaps to a lesser extent Russia, it is crucial for Washington to project unity among allies in the Middle East," the report says. "This is especially the case amidst the continued havoc that the Islamic Republic of Iran is exporting across the region."
Other Middle East analysts agree that Jordan’s ties with Israel have become increasingly strained in recent years, particularly due to the stagnant peace process with the Palestinians.
"Israel perceives the creation of a Palestinian state to be a security threat, while King Abdullah [Jordan’s leader] sees frustrated Palestinians dismayed by lack of progress toward a Palestinian state as an even bigger security threat to his own hold on power," said Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The king seeks to appease Palestinians, who make up roughly half of Jordan’s population, because he faces additional challenges from Islamists who also demonize Israel."
Schanzer’s findings are likely to distress Jordanian officials, who have cultivated deep ties in Washington, D.C., since the Arab nation announced its peace with Israel in 1994. In many ways, Schanzer told the Washington Free Beacon, this latest analysis shatters long-standing taboos about Jordan’s fracturing peace with Israel that many in the U.S. foreign policy community have tried to ignore.
"I have observed a real reticence in this town to criticize Jordan in recent years," Schanzer said. "Many believe Amman is both too valuable and too weak to challenge. I refuse to be bound by those constraints. I support Jordan. But I think it can do better."
Evidence of the relationship’s breakdown spilled into public view after the election last month of conservative Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-leaning government. Following Netanyahu’s victory, "Jordan issued an unprovoked and blistering statement warning Israel not to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount, invoking its role as custodian of the Al-Aqsa Mosque," a holy site located in Jerusalem’s Old City that is often ground zero for hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians.
The statement, the report says, "signaled the likely renewal of acrimonious ties between the king and Israel’s longest-serving prime minister."
Nicole Robinson, also with the Davis Institute, said there remain "a lot of questions and concerns about what a future administration [and] the U.S. thinks about the Palestinian issue." With the Netanyahu government likely to consider annexing more portions of the West Bank, "there is a fear that this option could be put on the table again in this new government in Israel," she said.
Tension between Israel and Jordan has been brewing for much longer, however, with Amman abstaining from the Abraham Accords, the peace agreements brokered by the Trump administration between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. This move also created "regional friction."
While Jordan has leveraged its peace with Israel to become a top trading partner with the United States, significantly improving its economy, under the leadership of King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, who came to power in 1999, Jordan has been much more willing to lash out at the Jewish state.
"Driven by a combination of domestic political considerations, unrealistic expectations, and both legitimate and illegitimate grievances, Amman has pulled away from Israel in recent years," according to the report. "The official rhetoric about Israel has grown increasingly negative, if not vitriolic."
Though Israel and Jordan are still cooperating on security issues, "diplomatic ties are in a deep freeze. Israeli officials are keenly aware of this dynamic." Israeli government leaders have "shared their frustration in closed-door meetings," according to the report.
The mostly stagnant peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has exacerbated these tensions. "While Jordanian officials may not say so explicitly, the animosity harbored by Jordan’s Palestinian population toward Israel has a significant influence on the kingdom’s foreign policies," the report says.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/18/2022 08:28 ||
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Top|| File under:
#1
They already have a peace agreement, signed in 1994. Why should they sign another one?
Wikipedia:
The Israel–Jordan peace treaty (formally the "Treaty of Peace Between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan"),[Note 1] sometimes referred to as the Wadi Araba Treaty,[1] is an agreement that ended the state of war that has existed between the two countries since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and established mutual diplomatic relations. In addition to establishing peace between the two countries, the treaty also settled land and water disputes, provided for broad cooperation in tourism and trade, and obligated both countries to prevent their territory being used as a staging ground for military strikes by a third country.
The signing ceremony took place at the southern border crossing of Arabah on 26 October 1994. Jordan was the second Arab country, after Egypt, to sign a peace accord with Israel.[2]
From the article:
While Jordan has leveraged its peace with Israel to become a top trading partner with the United States, significantly improving its economy, under the leadership of King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, who came to power in 1999, Jordan has been much more willing to lash out at the Jewish state.
"Driven by a combination of domestic political considerations, unrealistic expectations, and both legitimate and illegitimate grievances, Amman has pulled away from Israel in recent years," according to the report. "The official rhetoric about Israel has grown increasingly negative, if not vitriolic."
The problem is Jordan, not Israel. It sure looks like King Abdullah II wants to win the war against Israel by peaceful means. He and his father have refused to take over the West Bank because they don’t want more Palestinians causing more problems, but they also don’t want Israel to solve the problems.
[JPost] Wow. Not sure it's a path to pursue officially. Some things define the difference between the civilized and the Paleos
Channel 13's Arab affairs correspondent Zvi Yehezkeli suggested that Israel should kidnap Hamas officials' children in order to reach a deal to return Israeli hostages in Gaza in a 103FM interview on Friday.
At an event to celebrate 35 years after the forming of Hamas, the terror organization presented a Tavor rifle it claimed belonged to Hadar Goldin whose body was taken hostage in 2014. Yehezkeli opened the interview by discussing this move.
"It's psychological warfare," he said. "Changing the mentality is all Hamas has at hand when it's trapped in the Gaza Strip. Even though it exported terrorism to the West Bank, it's actually trapped."
When asked if Hamas believes it can get Israel to agree to another deal in which thousands of terrorists are released like the Gilad Shalit deal, Yehezkeli responded that "the Israeli population, the defense system and the leadership sobered up from that story. We see all the terrorism that has happened as a result of all those released terrorists, and we understand that it cannot happen again."
He claimed that the negotiations are stuck because Israel will not release thousands of terrorists for the hostages in Gaza. "The claims from the Goldin family that Israel hasn't done enough are correct. There are still many more things Israel can do. Israel hasn't tried to kidnap sons of Hamas officials."
WHAT WAS ISRAEL'S BIGGEST MISTAKE?
Yehezkeli added that "the Hamas of today is the Palestinian people's legitimate representative more so than the Palestinian Authority. It grew and bloomed after a good few Israeli mistakes.
He further claimed that Israel's first mistake was supporting Hamas.
"Between 1982 and 1987, until Hamas announced the Jihad as its own, Israel supported it and even built it mosques in Gaza because it thought that Hamas would be an opposing power to the Palestine Liberation Organization," he said. "After Hamas declared the Jihad as its own in 1987, we got a violent jihadic movement that doesn't accept our existence, and that's a success for Hamas."
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/18/2022 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Hamas
#1
Stupid asshole. What else can you expect from know-it-all journalists, sheesh. Giving the paleos and their BDS bitches fodder for their fire.
#4
That’s the type of input I would expect if I invited Bolton to participate in an Impact Difficulty Matrix exercise to brainstorm innovative solutions to the problem - a idea that would multiply the size of the problem by a factor of 10.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/18/2022 19:15 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
...former chancellor of Kabul University, ex-president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. When Biden abandoned the country left with a helicopter, four cars, and part of the national treasury...
[ZERO] The heavy perils we face today include centralized governments micromanaging society, the growing prospect of global war, the growing prospect of forced surrender, and the replacement of reasoned debate and free speech with state-sanctioned "narratives" and censorship: totalitarian governance seems not far behind. This is a new kind of war against civilians for control of their minds.
