Jaipur Lit Festival, Jaipur, India

Jan 26

3:30 PM

92.Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Peter Bergen, Shiv Shankar Menon and Steve Coll in conversation with Jon Lee Anderson Preferred Seatings for Delegates

4:45 PM

97. Post American World:

Jon Lee Anderson, Navtej Sarna, Peter Bergen and Steve Coll in conversation with Katty Kay Presented by Aga Khan Foundation

SPEAKERS

AHDAF SOUEIF
Alexandar-McCall-Smith
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
AMBI PARAMESWARAN

AMITABHA BAGCHI

AMITAVA KUMAR

ANDRÉ ACIMAN

ANDREW SEAN GREER

ANISH KAPOOR

ANITA NAIR
ANURADHA ROY

ARUNA ROY

ASHOK CHAKRADHAR

ASHWIN SANGHI
ÅSNE SEIERSTAD

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

COLSON WHITEHEAD

DEVDUTT PATTANAIK
Germaine-Greer
GERMAINE GREER
Hari-Kunzru
HARI KUNZRU

JAMES CRABTREE

JAMES MALLINSON

JEREMY PAXMAN

JERRY PINTO

JON LEE ANDERSON

JUERGEN BOOS

KANISHK THAROOR

KIM A. WAGNER

KJ ALPHONS

MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE

MANISHA KOIRALA

MANORANJAN BYAPARI

MARC QUINN

MARKUS ZUSAK

MEGHNA GULZAR
MEGHNA PANT
MITRA PHUKAN

MOHAMMAD HASAN
MOHAN NARAYAN SAMANTH
MOHIT SATYANAND

MOIN MIR

MOLLY CRABAPPLE

MRIDULA RAMESH
N. KALYAN RAMAN

N.S. MADHAVAN

NAINA LAL KIDWAI
NAMITA BHANDARE
NAMITA DEVIDAYAL
NAMITA GOKHALE

NAMITA WAIKAR
NANDINI KRISHNAN

NARENDRA KOHLI

NASREEN MUNNI KABIR

NAVIN CHAWLA
NAVTEJ SARNA

NEELESH MISRA
NEERAJ GHEI

NIKESH SHUKLA
NIKHIL KUMAR

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO

OMAR EL AKKAD

OMAR ROBERT HAMILTON

ORNIT SHANI
PARO ANAND

PARVATI SHARMA
PATRICK FRENCH

PAUL MCVEIGH

PAVAN K. VARMA

PERUMAL MURUGAN

PETER BERGEN
PRADIP KRISHEN
PRAGYA TIWARI
PRASENJIT BASU

PRAVIN KUMAR

PRIYA SARUKKAI CHABRIA
PRIYA SETH

PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN
PUSHPESH PANT

RACHEL JOHNSON
RAJDEEP SARDESAI

RAKHSHANDA JALIL

RAMESH PATANGE
RAMITA NAVAI

RANA DASGUPTA

RANA SAFVI
RAVI AGRAWAL
RAVI PUROHIT
RAVI SHANKAR ETTETH
RAVINDER SINGH

RENI EDDO-LODGE
RESHMA QURESHI

RHIANNON JENKINS TSANG

RIA SHARMA
RICHARD EVANS
RIMA HOOJA
RITWIJ SHANDILYA
ROBIN JEFFREY
ROBYN MONRO-MILLER
ROHINI CHOWDHURY

ROM WHITAKER

ROY STRONG

RUBY LAL

RUBY WAX

RUPERT EVERETT

RUTH PADEL

SADHNA SHANKER
SAKET SUMAN

SAM KILEY

SANCHAITA GAJAPATI
SANDEEP UNNITHAN

SANDIP ROY

SANJEEV SANYAL
SANJOY HAZARIKA
SANJOY K. ROY
SATYAJIT SARNA
SATYANAND NIRUPAM
SAURABH DWIVEDI

SEBASTIAN BARRY

SHABRI PRASAD SINGH
SHANTANU RAY CHAUDHURI

SHARMILA SEN
SHASHI THAROOR
SHEORAJ SINGH BECHAIN
SHIVSHANKAR MENON

SHOBHAA DE

SHUBHANGI SWARUP
SIDDHARTH DHANVANT SHANGHVI

SIDDHARTH SINGH
SIMAR SINGH

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

SOHAILA ABDULALI

SOMNATH BATABYAL
SR FARUQI
SREENIVASAN JAIN
STEVE COLL

STEWART GORDON

SUBODH GUPTA
SUCHITA MALIK

SUDESHNA CHATTERJEE
SUHASINI HAIDAR

SUNIL S. AMRITH

SUNITA TOOR
SVEN BECKERT
SY QURAISHI

TAM BAILLIE

TANIA JAMES
TANIA SINGH

TANWI NANDINI ISLAM

TARUN KHANNA

TAWFIQ-E-ELAHI CHOWDHURY
TCA RAGHAVAN
TIMMIE KUMAR

TISHANI DOSHI

TOBY WALSH

TOVA REICH

UDAY PRAKASH

ULRIKE ALMUT SANDIG

UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE
URVASHI BUTALIA
USHA UTHUP
VARUN SIVARAM
VEENA VENUGOPAL

VENKI RAMAKRISHNAN

VIDYA SHAH
VIKAS JHA

VIKRAM CHANDRA
VISHNU SOM
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

WILLIAM SIEGHART


Described as the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is a sumptuous feast of ideas.

The past decade has seen it transform into a global literary phenomenon having hosted nearly 2000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe.

The Festival’s core values remain unchanged; to serve as a democratic, non-aligned platform offering free and fair access.

Every year, the Festival brings together a diverse mix of the world’s greatest writers, thinkers, humanitarians, politicians, business leaders, sports people and entertainers on one stage to champion the freedom to express and engage in thoughtful debate and dialogue.

Writers and Festival Directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple invite speakers to take part in the five-day programme set against the backdrop of Rajasthan’s stunning cultural heritage and the Diggi Palace in the state capital Jaipur.
A Range of Voices from India And Abroad

Past speakers have ranged from Nobel Laureates J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka, Man Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Paul Beatty, Sahitya Akademi winners Girish Karnad, Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, M.T. Vasudevan Nair as well as the late Mahasweta Devi and U.R. Ananthamurthy along with literary superstars including Amish Tripathi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Vikram Seth. An annual event that goes beyond literature, the Festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry and Thomas Piketty.

The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is a flagship event of Teamwork Arts, which produces it along with over 25 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across more than 40 cities globally.
Directors and Producer

Sanjoy K. Roy
Festival Producer

Sanjoy K. Roy, an entrepreneur of the arts, is the Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 25 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across 40 cities in countries such as Australia, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Israel, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, UK and USA, and includes the world’s largest free literary gathering — the annual ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. Roy has received the National Award for Excellence and Best Director for the film Shahjahanabad: The Twilight Years. He is a founder trustee of Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT) working to provide support services for street and working children in the inner city of Delhi where over 55,000 children have benefitted from education, training and residential services. In 2011 the White House presented SBT the US President’s Committee of Arts and Humanities Award for an International Organisation.

The 1988 meeting that shaped the world we live in, CNN.com

The 1988 meeting that shaped the world we live in
Posted: Sep 10, 2018 7:47 AM EDT
Updated: Sep 10, 2018 12:17 PM EDT
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst and David Sterman

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” David Sterman is a policy analyst at New America’s International Security Program.

(CNN) — In August 1988, nine men met in Osama Bin Laden’s house in Peshawar, Pakistan, to start a group that would end up playing a dramatic role in shaping the United States of the early 21st century. They called the group al-Qaeda, which means “the base” in Arabic.

As a result of its terrorist activities, the US would see the most lethal attack ever on its homeland, would embark on a war that has already lasted for 17 years, would spend an estimated $2.8 trillion to protect itself from attack, according to a recent Stimson Center report, and would see its politics changed in fundamental ways that endure today.

In the wake of that founding meeting, al Qaeda records show, the “work of al-Qaeda commenced on September 10, 1988,” 30 years ago Monday.

Twenty years ago last month, al-Qaeda made its intent to wage global war on the United States unmistakable when it bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 224 people.

Seventeen years ago on Tuesday, al-Qaeda killed 2,977 people in the United States.

Against the backdrop of this history of violence, what is the threat to the United States today from jihadist terrorists?

In a new report, New America finds that since the 9/11 attacks, the jihadist threat has changed substantially.

Avoiding further attacks

Al-Qaeda has not successfully directed a deadly attack inside the United States since that day 17 years ago. Nor has any other jihadist foreign terrorist organization.

That represents a major success for the United States’ counterterrorism effort since 9/11. Few analysts in the months and years after the attacks would have predicted that the United States would be so successful in avoiding attacks.

Thanks to the hard work of law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the military, as well as the public’s greater awareness, the threat to the homeland today is far more limited than it was on 9/11. This has certainly come at a price — trillions in spending, unprecedented security measures at airports and public venues, and roiling public debate over immigration and law enforcement.

Yet, the United States still faces a new and different jihadist threat: individuals motivated by jihadist ideology, but with no operational direction from a foreign terrorist organization. Such individuals have carried out 13 lethal attacks and killed 104 people in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, according to research by New America.

The rise of al-Qaeda’s breakaway faction, ISIS, took this threat to a new level. Three-quarters of the people killed by jihadist extremists in the United States since 9/11 have been killed since 2014, the year ISIS declared its caliphate. Eight of the 13 lethal attacks in the US since 9/11 occurred in that time period, and seven were motivated in part by ISIS’ propaganda. In 2015, an unprecedented 80 Americans were accused of jihadist-terrorism-related crimes, almost all inspired in some way by ISIS, according to New America’s research.

Yet even at its height of power in Iraq and Syria, ISIS did not direct a lethal attack inside the United States.

With the territorial collapse of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the threat to the United States has waned further. The number of jihadist terrorism cases involving Americans has declined every year since its peak of the 80 cases in 2015. As of the end of August, only eight Americans had been charged with jihadist-terrorism-related crimes in 2018.

Foreign fighters

Despite much fear over the threat posed by “foreign fighters” — those Westerners who joined ISIS and other militant groups abroad — few Americans succeeded in joining ISIS. Fewer still returned. There is only one known case of an American who fought in Syria or Iraq plotting violence after returning to the United States, and no returnee has actually conducted an attack.

However, Americans should not expect the threat to disappear with the collapse of the territorial caliphate. This lesson was illustrated when Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old US permanent resident from Uzbekistan, killed eight people in a truck attack on a Manhattan bike path in October 2017, the same month ISIS’ self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa was liberated by the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

Indeed, the jihadist terrorism challenge the United States faces may not be entirely propelled by jihadist ideology. Many of the jihadist attackers had personal issues including histories of nonpolitical violence and mental health problems, and some appear to have been influenced by multiple ideologies and not just jihadism.

The United States also faces the threat of public violence motivated by ideologies other than jihadism including far-right violence, which has killed 73 people since 9/11.

What to do — and what not to do

So what should the United States do?

One thing it should not do is embrace the immigration-centric counterterrorism approach promoted by the Trump administration and encapsulated by the travel ban, which the President should end. The threat today is “homegrown” and not the result of foreign infiltration.

Nineteen foreign hijackers who entered the United States on non-immigrant visas, carried out the 9/11 attacks. That image of the threat has colored threat perceptions since. Yet since 9/11 just under half of 449 jihadist extremists charged in the US were born citizens and 84% are citizens or legal permanent residents. About three in 10 are converts to Islam.

The travel ban would not have prevented a single deadly attack since 9/11 nor would it have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

What the United States should do is take the respite provided by ISIS’ territorial collapse in Syria and Iraq to reassess and answer fundamental questions regarding its counterterrorism approach.

The Trump administration has not publicly released a strategy for countering terrorism, and the United States continues to wage war based on a now 17-year-old Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), whose relevance to ISIS, a group that split off from al-Qaeda and many of whose members were not born or were young children at the time of the 9/11 attacks, is questionable. The Trump administration should release a counterterrorism strategy, and Congress should pass an updated authorization for the use of military force.

The Trump administration has reportedly made substantial changes to policy regarding counterterrorism strikes, devolving authority to commanders and removing the requirement that targets pose an “imminent threat” to Americans. The administration should release its new guidance regarding strikes, as the Obama administration eventually did by releasing its Presidential Policy Guidance on counterterrorism strikes.

The United States has spent $2.8 trillion on counterterrorism efforts, including for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, since 9/11 — almost 15% of the government’s discretionary spending over the same period — and has no unified accounting of its expenditures, as documented by the Stimson Center. The US should conduct an assessment and audit of the amount of money spent on counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks.

Addressing these fundamental issues will be essential as — despite its territorial losses — ISIS and even al-Qaeda demonstrate resiliency, in large part buoyed by persistent instability in the Middle East and North Africa.

ISIS managed to direct five attacks in Europe since 2014, killing more people in those five attacks than jihadists have killed in the US since 9/11.

Aviation remains a key target. ISIS killed 224 people when it snuck a bomb aboard a flight from Egypt to Russia in October 2015.

The increasing use of drones by terrorist groups and the effective adoption of vehicular ramming by a variety of groups point to the innovative potential of America’s terrorist adversaries.

More than a quarter of Americans are too young to remember the 9/11 attacks and one in five were not even born at the time, as the Washington Post reported, but the attacks continue to define much of how the US military, intelligence community and law enforcement do business. And they continue to influence American politics in fundamental ways.

IDEX conf, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Suli Forum, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq

“Al Qa’ida’s Contested Relationship With Iran: The View from Abottabad.” New America, DC

September 7, 2018

New America holds a discussion on a report titled “Al Qa’ida’s Contested Relationship With Iran: The View from Abottabad.”

SECTION: DISCUSSION; ||IRAN/SECURITY|| Foreign Affairs

LENGTH: 81 words

TIME: 12:15 p.m.

PARTICIPANTS: Nelly Lahoud, senior fellow at the New America International Security Program and author of “Iran and Al Qa’ida”; and Peter Bergen, vice president of New America and director of the New America International Security Program

LOCATION: New America, 740 15th Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, D.C.

It’s Trump’s war … and it’s not going well, CNN.com

It’s Trump’s war … and it’s not going well

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is writing a book about the Trump administration’s national security decision-making.

(CNN)One year ago, President Donald Trump announced what he said was his new strategy for the Afghan war.

He said he had become convinced that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan was pulling out.

In a rare admission that he had changed his mind, Trump said: “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

Trump said he was making an indefinite commitment to remain in Afghanistan, and would not replicate what he said was the Obama administration’s mistake in prematurely pulling out of Iraq at the end of 2011, which helped create a vacuum that led to the rise of ISIS.

Trump also said he would not do what Obama had done in announcing withdrawal dates even as he surged troops into Afghanistan. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,” Trump said.

This was the right call, but now the Afghan war is truly Trump’s war. It is not going well.

The US Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that in early 2018 the Afghan government controlled more than half of the districts in the country, while the Taliban controlled around 15%.

The remaining third of Afghanistan was contested between government forces and the Taliban.

After 17 years of war, the fact that the Taliban controls or contests almost half of the districts in the country is sobering. This month the Taliban launched a large-scale attack on the strategically important city of Ghazni and held it for five days. Ghazni sits on the Kabul-to-Kandahar road, the most important highway in the country.

ISIS has also established itself in Afghanistan, and now routinely attacks the Shia minority, like the attack on a Shia educational facility in Kabul that killed 34 students on Wednesday.

A year ago Trump promised a tougher line against Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, which has long supported elements of the Taliban. He said, “No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target US service members and officials.”

According to Shamila Chaudhary, a fellow at the think tank New America who worked as director for Pakistan on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, “The primary action Trump has taken in his effort to get tougher on Pakistan was to cut most US security assistance to Pakistan earlier this year. That being said, the levels of security assistance were going down anyway since the Obama administration.”

So far there hasn’t been much evidence that the US is really going to get tough on Pakistan, which would involve sanctioning specific Pakistani officials or even designating it as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The reason is pretty simple: Afghanistan is a landlocked country surrounded by countries that are not well-disposed to the US such as Iran, and some former Soviet republics that remain aligned with Russia, and China.

That leaves only Pakistan as a somewhat reliable ally, which means that resupplying the 15,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan requires Pakistani roads and airspace. If the American presence remains substantial in Afghanistan, Pakistan will always be a necessary partner. Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan expert at the Wilson Center, observes, “The main U.S. fear has been that Pakistan could shut down the NATO supply routes on its soil.”

The United States has sent some of its most capable military leaders to oversee the Afghan war, such as the generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. The commander of Joint Special Operation Command who oversees US commando operations, Lt. General Scott Miller, will soon take the helm in Afghanistan, replacing the equally capable John “Mick” Nicholson, who has arguably spent more time in Afghanistan than any other US military officer.

The Afghan war is unlikely to be won on the battlefield. The Taliban haven’t been defeated in 17 years despite enormous pressure, including Obama’s “surge” of troops into Afghanistan during his first term. There were around 100,000 US troops in the country in the early years of Obama first term and they didn’t defeat the Taliban. Today, there are some 15,000 troops.

As of July, the Trump administration is reportedly talking to the Taliban directly, seemingly because there is an understanding that decisive battlefield success will continue to be elusive. These talks happened without Afghan government representation, which has long been a Taliban demand: To speak directly with the American government.

There is little to lose by such talks; even if they yield nothing they allow the US to gather intelligence on the Taliban and perhaps even create splits in the movement between potential doves and hawks.
That said, expectations for these talks should be low; the Taliban are hardly going to put down their arms when they are doing relatively well on the battlefield, nor have they articulated a concrete vision of what they really want for Afghanistan, beyond the expulsion of foreign troops.

On Sunday Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced a ceasefire to mark the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, a several-day truce that the Taliban have provisionally agreed to. The Ghani government hopes that the ceasefire might run for as long as three months.

Which brings us to politics. In 2019 there will be another Afghan presidential election. The past two such elections were fiascos with innumerable, credible accounts of fraud by all sides. This must not happen again, as a badly flawed presidential election damages the credibility of all Afghan institutions.

The Trump administration should be clear with all the key political players in Afghanistan that it will not tolerate another botched presidential election and such a result might end any American support to Afghanistan.

At the same time the US government and its NATO allies in Afghanistan must invest enormous effort in ensuring that the elections are free enough and fair enough to ensure a credible Afghan government emerges in 2019.

Without that, everything else that the US does in Afghanistan is mostly a waste of time.

Trump is picking on the wrong guy, CNN.com

Trump is picking on the wrong guy
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 12:21 PM ET, Thu August 16, 2018

“Peter Bergen, is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.””

(CNN)President Trump is picking on the wrong guy if he thinks the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearances is going to intimidate or silence him. The man who is in many ways the architect of the war on militant jihadists is not going to be easily bullied.

Former CIA director Brennan is not just any critic of Trump: unlike many others, he doesn’t come from the left. In fact, Brennan is the engineer of some of the most aggressive American efforts to eliminate jihadist terrorists.

In person, Brennan, who grew up in a devout Catholic working class family in New Jersey, is serious, even stern, not big on small talk and intolerant of BS.

President Barack Obama trusted Brennan deeply on counterterrorism issues and Brennan played an important role in the decision to carry out the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

Key Obama Cabinet officials, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden, advocated against authorizing a US Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan because of all the risks involved in such an operation, which were compounded by only circumstantial evidence that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.

By contrast, Brennan urged a go on the raid. He told the Obama that the CIA officials who had developed the intelligence on Abbottabad were, as he recalled in an interview with me later, “the people that have been following bin Laden for 15 years. This has been their life’s work, this has been their life’s journey, and they feel it very much in their gut that bin Laden is at that compound. I feel pretty good, if not certain, that bin Laden is at that compound.”

On the morning of April 29, 2011 at the White House Brennan again strongly recommended the SEAL operation, just before Obama gave the final order to authorize the raid.

A fluent Arabic speaker who was CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia before 9/11, Brennan was tapped in 2003 by George W. Bush to run the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which was the first post-9/11 effort to “connect the dots” of all American intelligence flows. TTIC was set up to avoid what happened on 9/11 when information about two of the hijackers that was known to the CIA was not shared with the FBI in a timely fashion.

This improved intelligence-sharing was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

In January 2009, Obama made Brennan his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

From a windowless office with low ceilings in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, Brennan oversaw a vast expansion of the covert US drone program, which put significant pressure on al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen.

In 2008, during President George W. Bush’s final year in office, there were 36 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. In 2010, during Obama’s second year in office, there were 122 drone strikes in Pakistan, according to New America data.

During Bush’s two terms, there was only one CIA drone strike in Yemen, while in 2012, there were 56, according to the New America data.

Obama subsequently made Brennan director of the CIA in 2013, and he served for four years. Today, Brennan is back at Fordham as a senior fellow where he once studied as an undergraduate. (I am also a fellow at Fordham’s Center on National Security.)

Brennan is already firing back at Trump in the New York Times, writing, “Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion [with the Russians] are, in a word, hogwash.” This is a serious charge coming from a former director of the CIA.

Trump just picked on the wrong guy.

Attack of the assassin drones, CNN.com

Attack of the assassin drones

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Melissa Salyk-Virk

Source: CNN

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the co-editor of “Drone Wars.” Melissa Salyk-Virk is a policy analyst at New America. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors. View more opinion articles on CNN.”

(CNN)On Saturday, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela was giving a speech in Caracas when two armed drones exploded nearby — one detonating in the air and another inside an apartment building, authorities said.

President Maduro blamed far-right political opponents for what he called an attempted assassination. Six people have been arrested.
The apparent attack raises the question: Could a drone assassination work? This would certainly change the way governments handle security for heads of state in public events. It also has implications for the security of overseas military bases and embassies.

The global proliferation of drones

New America tracks the proliferation of armed drones in a “World of Drones” database. Ten countries are known to have used drones in combat.
Video appears to show drone in alleged attack

The United States was the first to use armed drones after the 9/11 attacks. Since then, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom have all used armed drones in combat.

It was President Barack Obama who dramatically increased the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists in countries that the United States is not at war with, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

A number of countries have used drones to assassinate their own citizens. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have conducted strikes against their own citizens overseas, while Israel has done so in the Palestinian territories. Countries such as Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iraq have conducted drone strikes within their own borders.
Another 19 countries have armed drones but have not used them in combat.

Several terrorist and rebel groups have also used drones both for surveillance and to carry out attacks, including ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Lebanese group Hezbollah was the first nonstate actor to use military-grade drones for surveillance, and has also used armed drones in Syria.

The Palestinian group Hamas has also acquired military-grade unmanned aircrafts, while ISIS has created improvised weapons by attaching explosives to over-the-counter drone models. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have used unmanned vessels to attack Saudi Arabian ships.

Which countries produce armed drones?

Because of human rights concerns, until this year the United States sold its armed drones only to close allies, such as Britain, France and Italy.
This has helped enable China to become a top armed drone supplier. Israel is another leading exporter of armed drones.

China is not a party of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which was created to limit the proliferation of missiles, missile technology, and other weapons of mass destruction. Because China has not ratified this agreement, it does not have as many restrictions for its exports, thus Chinese drone sales have boomed.

In April, the Trump administration announced a new policy to allow the sale of armed drones to more countries.

President Donald Trump said that this new policy was meant to boost sales for the American defense industry. But it will also likely mean that regulators give less scrutiny to the risk of buyers committing human rights abuses with these weapons.

The tipping point

The rapid proliferation of armed drones poses novel questions for national security.

The Chinese are testing “swarms” of drones working together powered by artificial intelligence. This kind of technology will help to reshape conventional warfare between states.
At the same time, as truck and car bombs reshaped terrorism in the 20th century, armed, crude drones in the hands of terrorist groups and even lone actors are likely to reshape terrorism in the 21st century.

The man who tried to stop 9/11, CNN.com

The man who tried to stop 9/11

By Peter Bergen CNN National Security Analyst

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, the chairman of the Global Special Operations Foundation and the author of five books about terrorism.

(CNN) — At a time when our public life is full of acrimony and there is scant discussion of the common good and the merits of service, the life of Michael Sheehan reminds us of these virtues.

It’s hard to think of a public servant who fought the war against al Qaeda and other jihadist groups for longer and with greater tenacity than Sheehan.

Over the course of the past two decades, Sheehan worked in senior national security positions at the State Department, the Pentagon, the United Nations, the New York Police Department and at West Point.

Sheehan died last Monday at age 63 after many years of battling multiple myeloma.

In December 1998, just months after al Qaeda had launched suicide bombings at two US embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people, Sheehan was tapped for the job of counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department. (It was during this period that I first came to know and admire Sheehan.)

His job as ambassador for counterterrorism put Sheehan at the center of the fight against al Qaeda. The Taliban were then hosting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Sheehan was given wide latitude by his boss, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to confront them.

Sheehan, an intense, blunt, wiry former Special Forces officer universally known as Mike, dispatched a strongly worded cable to Taliban leaders that said they would “be held fully accountable” for another attack by al Qaeda.

In early 2000, Sheehan followed that up with a 45-minute phone call with the Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, during which he read him a unambiguous statement: “We will hold the Taliban leadership responsible for any attacks against US interests by al Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups.”

Sheehan later recalled that Muttawakil “went through his long list of talking points, which I’d heard all before. Number one was: ‘We have bin Laden under control. He’s not going to do anything else.'”

Sheehan pushed back against the Taliban foreign minister, telling him a story to illustrate the American position: “If we’re neighbors on a block, and you have bin Laden in your basement, and at night he’s coming out and setting fire to the other houses on the block and then going back into your basement, you are accountable now, because you are harboring that guy.”

After the 9/11 attacks, this was the doctrine the Bush administration would use when it launched a war against the Taliban because they were harboring bin Laden.

In the years before 9/11, Sheehan was also battling the Air Force and the CIA over Predator drones that he wanted to deploy to hunt for bin Laden. Sheehan recalled, “This was another huge frustration. They had more Predators flying around in the Balkans than they had over Afghanistan at that time, which really frustrated me because I was working on both programs and, quite frankly, I thought bin Laden was a much higher priority.”

On October 12, 2000, al Qaeda dispatched two suicide bombers to attack the USS Cole, anchored off the port of Aden in Yemen. 17 American sailors were killed in the blast, which almost sunk the warship.

The Clinton administration, which was about to complete its second term in office, did nothing to respond to this act of war.

Sheehan was enormously frustrated, exclaiming to his close friend Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, “Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

This would prove to be a prescient observation since the Bush administration also did nothing to respond to the Cole attack after it assumed office, and it was only after al Qaeda attacked both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11 that the Bush administration responded.

After the 9/11 attacks, Sheehan worked for two years as an assistant secretary general at the United Nations, where he oversaw more than 40,000 military and police peacekeepers.

In 2003, Sheehan joined the New York Police Department as the deputy commissioner in charge of counterterrorism, which was in many ways one of the most important national security jobs in the country, because Manhattan remained a key target for terrorists.

After three years managing counterterrorism in New York, in 2006 Sheehan retired from government service. An enormously energetic man, Sheehan took on several jobs, working as an analyst for NBC News, as a fellow both at NYU’s Center for Law and Security and at West Point’s Counterterrorism Center and as a partner in Torch Hill Equity.

Sheehan also wrote an important book about terrorism, “Crush The Cell,” which was published in 2008, seven years after the 9/11 attacks.

In the book, Sheehan pushed back against those politicians and commentators who were overplaying the threat posed by terrorists writing, “We must remember that they’re not everywhere and they’re not all-powerful. They have limitations — personal, organizational, and ideological — and they’ve proven their limits by their inability to attack the United States again since 9/11.”

The book was dedicated to his wife, Sita, his daughter, Alexandra, and his son, Michael.

In 2011 Sheehan returned to government service to take on what was in many ways his dream job as assistant secretary of defense for special operations. During his Army career, Sheehan had served as a Special Forces officer in Panama. Now he was in charge of all Special Operations Forces deployed around the world and their fight against al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

Even in this role, Sheehan remained a skeptic of those who wanted to inflate the threat posed by terrorists, telling a group of counterterrorism experts in New York in 2013: “If you allow the terrorists to be 10 feet tall and allow their small attacks to represent strategic threats to the US, you empower them. So it’s important to understand the nature of the threat and how dangerous it is, but not to exaggerate it, because that plays into their hands. That’s what they want you to do. So that requires some nuance, which is, of course, not a great quality of discourse in Washington.”

Sheehan, a 1977 graduate of West Point, remained a senior fellow at West Point’s Counterterrorism Center until he died.

His final project was a gift to his beloved West Point. Sheehan recruited some of the nation’s leading counterterrorism practitioners and thinkers to contribute chapters to a book that will be given to all West Point cadets, titled “Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare: The Long War Against Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their Affiliates.”

The book will now be dedicated to Sheehan.

Osama bin Laden’s mother breaks her long silence, CNN.com

Osama bin Laden’s mother breaks her long silence
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 10:47 PM ET, Fri August 3, 2018

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of four books about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.”

(CNN)For the first time, Osama bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, has given an interview. Conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by Martin Chulov of The Guardian, the interview is noteworthy because bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and his mother were exceptionally close.

What Ghanem says in the interview is largely credible and tracks with the little that is publicly known about her relationship with her son. Ghanem recalls bin Laden as “a very good kid and he loved me so much.”

According to Ghanem, who is now in her mid-70s, she was divorced from Mohammed bin Laden, the enormously wealthy bin Laden family patriarch, when Osama was three. Osama was the only child of their union.

Mohammed bin Laden had 53 other children with some 20 wives. He died in a plane crash when Osama was 10.

After his parents’ divorce, Ghanem’s second husband, Mohammed al-Attas, raised Osama.

Ghanem and her family live in a well-to-do section of Jeddah, a testament to the fact that the bin Laden construction business is one of the largest in the Middle East.

According to The Guardian, Ghanem is speaking out for the first time because the Saudi government, led by the 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, allowed the interview. The Saudi interest in permitting the interview is clear: They want to make the argument that bin Laden received no Saudi state support, despite the claims in an ongoing lawsuit by some of the families of the 9/11 victims. And, the newspaper noted, a Saudi government minder sat in during the interview.

The case remains unresolved, but there is little hard evidence that the Saudi state supported bin Laden. After all, bin Laden’s principal goal was overthrowing the Saudi monarchy.

In the interview with The Guardian, bin Laden’s mother blames outsiders such as bin Laden’s Palestinian mentor, Abdullah Azzam, who purportedly “brainwashed” her son and converted him to jihadism when bin Laden was a young man in his 20s fighting in the “holy war” in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the mid-1980s.

Azzam was killed by an assassin in Pakistan in 1989. While he was certainly bin Laden’s mentor, he was not focused on attacking the United States.

Bin Laden’s mother confirmed to The Guardian that she is an Alawite from Syria. Alawism is a branch of Shia Islam. This had long been suspected, but this helps fill in a key aspect of bin Laden’s background. The fact that bin Laden’s beloved mother is an Alawite may help explain why bin Laden never advocated for or fought wars against the Shia, as have other Sunni jihadist groups, such as ISIS.

Ghanem says that within the first 48 hours of the 9/11 attacks, she learned her son Osama was responsible, and said she was “shocked. … We all felt ashamed of him. We knew all of us were going to face horrible consequences.” The bin Ladens were questioned by Saudi authorities and for a period could not leave the country.
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Ghanem is in regular touch with the three widows of bin Laden who survived the 2011 US Navy SEAL operation that killed al Qaeda’s leader in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They are now living in Saudi Arabia but cannot leave the country.

Bin Laden’s mother allowed herself to be photographed for The Guardian story, which is surprising because the photography of women’s faces in Saudi Arabia is still not common.
The last time that Ghanem said she saw her son was in the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 1999, the year after al Qaeda’s attacks on two US embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people.

Unmentioned in the Guardian interview is that, according to bin Laden’s chief bodyguard, Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s mother went to Kandahar at the behest of the Saudi government in an effort to persuade her son to abandon his life of terrorism.

Bin Laden’s bodyguard recalled that bin Laden treated his mother with great respect but told her he could not stop fighting his jihad: “This is a principle. I keep it in my heart and I have promised God not to abandon it.”