Fred Kaplan: Downsizing our dominance. Another piece on the shrinking of American hegemony abroad. Kaplan sees this as the inevitable result of losing a common threat with the collapse of the Soviet Union. I suspect that most former allies never took the military parrying all that seriously, but sought to curry favor with the US to tap into economic power and technological prowess. That position has been eroding for some time now, even if it's only become obvious since Bush took office. Even now nations suck up to us much more than seems warranted, probably because it's cheap to be deferential and our egos demand it. The real fall is still to come. As Kaplan notes, presidential candidates prefer to skirt the issue: the American people would rather hear about dawn than decline and fall. That actually leaves an opportunity open, if anyone is smart enough to take advantage of it. All we'd have to do is ditch the sole-superpower horseshit and take a lead in pushing for multilateral, shared solutions to real problems: to pursue peace and justice through the UN, to seriously tackle global warming and other environmental issues, to restructure free trade along lines that benefit poorer countries most. Didn't Gandhi say something to the effect that he has to follow wherever the people go because he's their leader? The US can't lead selfishly because the world won't follow. An alternative would be to just get out of the way, but that might be even more unpalatably ego-deflating.

William Astore: In the Military We Trust. A former Air Force Lt. Colonel, Astore gives two reasons why the military is still regarded by most Americans as an honorable and trustworthy organization. One is that demographically it is much more like America as a whole than most other organizations -- he picks on Ivy League colleges in particular -- so many Americans find it easy to see themselves in the military. The other is that the notion of public service is engrained and catered to in the military, especially for males who find it a particularly helpful way to define their masculinity:

In response, what we're seeing is a romantic yearning among young men for the very hardness, the brutality even, epitomized by military service and warfare.

Astore further argues that antiwar people need to understand these points before they can possibly, well, do what? That part isn't clear. It seems to me that the military is trusted mostly because people are very ignorant about its real skills and liabilities in today's world. That actually has very little to do with the character or discipline of those in the military, even if the romance of atavistic war is what draws them in. Still, the problem isn't how to "engage" the military to make them less harmful and more useful. The whole function needs to be rethought from the policy end down. Maybe that involves building different organizations that tap into the qualities Astore recognizes. But it starts with recognizing what is dysfunctional about the military we have, and that's bound to hurt some egos both in and near to the armed forces.

Robert Kuttner: The Recovery Plan America Needs. Argues that the stimulus package Congress is working on falls way too short of what is needed:

Worse, this downturn comes on top of three decades of stagnant or declining real living standards for about two thirds of Americans, and increasing insecurity of employment, health insurance, and retirement, as well as rising costs of housing, education, and energy. [ . . . ] We need to reclaim the managed form of capitalism that produced an economy of shared prosperity during the long postwar boom. That will require progressive taxation, re-regulation, and public outlay on a much larger scale.

Kuttner's solution to the "Housing Mess" makes a lot of sense. So does more public sector spending on things like infrastructure, although by looking at all government spending as stimulus he fails to note how dysfunctional US war spending really is. As for reversing long-term trends toward inequality, his heart's in the right place, but I wonder whether letting the recession do its damage might not be more effective. Much of that inequality is in the form of bubbled up real estate prices, stock prices, dollars even, and one effect of the recession will be to bring that inflation back toward reality. The poor may suffer more, but the rich have a lot more to lose (which is why they've only started panicking now as stock prices started to fall).

Senator John McCain's tenure as the de facto GOP presidential nominee ran into a little stormy weather in Kansas on Saturday. Huckabee won 60 percent of the vote, to McCain's 24, with Ron Paul third at 11. McCain had the support of both Kansas senators, and had ex-Senator Bob Dole lobbying for him in the national press. One thing the news reports didn't dwell on is the raw numbers: the Republican caucuses drew about half as many voters as the Democratic caucuses did. Weather? The Republicans met on a Saturday morning of a 60-degree day. The Democrats met in the middle of a blizzard. I suppose McCain can take some solace in the thought that it wasn't just him: nobody much gave a shit about any of the Republican candidates. They just cared a lot less about him than the others. But it's also true that the GOP regulars in Kansas have grown so dependent on the Christian right for their grass roots support they don't know how to get their old crowd out. Part of the problem is that the right have been calling any and all Republicans with anything resembling moderate views RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). It's gotten so annoying a lot of them aren't even that any more.

McCain also lost in Louisiana to Huckabee. And he was losing Washington until the GOP honchos rounded up enough McCain votes to squeeze into a temporary lead, then decided to stop counting and go home. Last known margin there was 26% to 24%, which itself smells pretty funny. Talk about buyer remorse.

Meanwhile, Obama's won five of five states since Super Tuesday. Won a Grammy too. Maybe it is his year.

John Burgess wrote in to make the following comment on my notes on Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower:

I'd like to note, though, that Wright makes a serious error in painting the origins of Al-Qaeda. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (and offshoots) and the Saudi Salafists are certainly at the core. What's missing, though, is the South Asian Deobandi influence. The Taleban, declared themselves a Deobandi organization, so that's a rather important factor to be missing.

I'm sure you can Google or Wiki the Deobandi movement, which started in Raj India in the 19th C. It combined a highly politicized form of Islam with terrorism. It is the inspiration for the intra-Islamic bombings of mosques in India and Pakistan today. It is also the thread of Islamist thought that is playing a corrupting role in the UK and much of Europe today.

It is my belief that only through the combination of the three elements, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, and Deobandi, did the witch's brew of the unthinkable violence of Al-Qaeda come to fruition.

I recommended Gilles Kepel's book Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam for its broader and deeper coverage of Islamism, including the Deobandis. Especially since 1980 Saudia Arabia has spent a lot of money on promoting their Wahhabi brand of fundamentalism abroad, and they've found a receptive audience among the Deobandis, who share their belief in the righteousness and completeness of the earliest followers of Muhammad. On the other hand, there are differences -- e.g., the Deobandis follow Hanafi sharia where the Wahhabis follow Hanbali -- and I'm far from competent to sort them out. But it does seem fair to say that both movements are salafist -- a term that embodies much of the same generalizations as fundamentalist does for Christians who nonetheless continue to disagree on sectarian details -- and that both have small subsets that are jihadist. The Deobandis may count for as many as 40% of Pakistani Sunnis. They have an extensive network of madrassas, which are significant given the generally poor state of education in Pakistan. The Taliban is based on and allegedly adheres to Deobandism, although it's also quite possible that some of their more repressive tenets come from Pashtun tribal traditions, and it's likely that whatever their source they've degenerated further due to the brutality of more than 25-years of foreign-engineered war. Holy war has been invoked by adherents of so many varied doctrines that it seems likely to me that its real motivation lies elsewhere.

I'm not sure how this works out. Clearly, Pakistan has been a fertile ground for anti-US jihad, rivaling the Arabs and much more so than any other Islamic countries, and Deobandism may have much to do with that. But also the Afghan mujahideen, especially the Taliban, were actually doing the sorts of things that Al-Qaeda aspired to, setting a practical example in their use of violence both within and against foreign enemies. So it's not surprising that they proved simbiotic. But I'm less sure about who influenced whom and how. This is what Kepel has to say (pp. 222-226):

Apart from a clear doctrinal affiliation, the jihadist-salafists had affinities with another movement that appeard at the same time, in the same region and Islamic context -- the Taliban. They had in common an attachment to the literal aspect of the holy texts and the use of jihad to attain their objectives. But the Taliban, who belonged to the Hanafi Deobandi school, did not have the same doctrinal training as the Arab salafists; moreover, they came exclusively from the traditional madrassas, unlike the salafists. Their jihad was primarily directed against their own society, on which they sought to impose a rigorous moral code: they had no taste for the state or for international politics. The cross-fertilization between the two movements, their simultaneous emergence, the hospitality offered by the Taliban within Afghanistan to the principal jihadists, the fact that some of the latter spoke in their name -- all these factors begged the question of whether the one had some kind of ascendancy over the other.

Both, then, were among the unexpected progeny of the Afghan jihad and the rsult of its hybridization with the Deobandi tradition, for which jihad had never been a priority since its birth in 1867. The Deobandi school had been created to permit the Muslims of India, who had yielded their power to the British in 1857 and immediately found themselves a minority within a population of Hindus, to survive as a community under difficult circumstances. The Deobandi ulemas had issued fatwa after fatwa whereby their disciples were enabled to follow the prescriptionf of the sharia meticulously, within a state that would not apply them. They developed the guidelines for a modus vivendi within a non-Muslim society, in which neither jihad nor emigration to a Muslim nation was possible. At the creation of Pakistan, the Deobandi ulemas who were already resident in the territory of the new state or who chose to come there from India had created a political party, the Association of Ulemas of Islam (JUI), intended to protect their sacred way of life within the then highly secularized Muslim Pakistan and to negotiate for funds to support their madrassas. Within the field of Islam proper, this allowed them to defend their specific identity against the Jamaat-e-Islami founded by Mawdudi -- whose modernism and tendency to confuse religion and politics they roundly condemned -- and against their rivals, the Barelwi ulemas, who had created the Association of Ulemas of Pakistan (JUP). By the sheer weight of the pressure group they formed, which included tens of thousands of pupils and graduates of their madrassas, they were now able to intervene directly in political life and to contest everything that apepared to compromise their view of the Islamic world order.

Their first victims were the Ahmadis, a sect whose disciples they denounced as apostates; several members occupied key government posts. Later, under Zia's 1977-1988 presidency, the dictator's determination to impose Sunni Hanafi Islam as the national norm, the levying of alms (zakat) directly on bank accounts, and the subsequent revolt of the 15-20 percent of Pakistanis who happened to be Shiites in July 1980 gave a new vocation to Deobandi militantism -- the struggle against Shiism. This conflict was encouraged by the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. [ . . . ]

Unlike the Jamaat-e-Islami founded by Mawdudi, which in general remained an elitist party of devout middle-class people with no grassroots support, the Deobandis embraced impoverished young people with no hope of climbing the social ladder, for whom violence was the main form of expression within a society that was profoundly non-egalitarian and obstructionist. The madrassas sheltered their pupils -- their Taliban -- from all these tensions for as long as their education lasted; they were also able to rationalize their charges' potential for violence by transforming it into a jihad against anyone designated kafir by the master -- whether he was a Shiite neighbor, an "impious" Indian soldier, or anyone else -- even a Sunni Muslim who was held to be a "miscreant." The Taliban became extremely devoted to their ulemas, after many years of education by them under conditions of intense intimacy. They had little or no contact with the outside world; much of their time was spent mumbling texts that they were taught to revere and apply even though they did not understand their meaning, and this experience left them with an esprit de corps that extinguished even the smallest expression of free thought or individual will. In the doctrinaire madrassas, it was a simple matter to turn pupils conditioned in this way into full-blown fanatics.

After the Gulf War, the radicalized Deobandi movement profited from two coincidences that allowed it to increase its influence and, when added to the violence in the Punjab and Kashmir, opened the way to the final victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Saudi Wahhabism had been badly damaged by the decision of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami and the Afghan Hezb-e-Islami to support Iraq, despite the fact that both had been heavily funded by the kingdom for a full decade. The Deobandi party (the JUI) had also demonstrated against the presence of impious soldiers in Arabia but had shown much less enmity to the Riyadh monarchy. Furthermore, the Deobandi ulemas were the sworn enemies of the pirs, or guides, of the Barelwi brotherhoods, who belonged to the other religious party, the JUP. The patron saint of these brotherhoods was buried close to Baghdad, and they were traditional recipients of aid from Iraq. During the war, their leader attended meetings of support for Iraq, at which he declared his "love" for Saddam; he also set up recruiting centers for volunteers to serve the Iraqi cause, which, according to him, enrolled upwards of 110,000 men.

Riyadh, which had to maintain some kind of contact with religious developments in Pakistan, chose the lesser of two evils and switched its support from the now-mistrusted Jamaat-e-Islami to the JUI. In the JUI's favor were these facts: that it was not linked to the international networks of the Muslim Brothers; that it hated Shiites, Iraq, and the brotherhoods; that its strict religious orthodoxy had many affinities with Wahhabite practice. Likewise, in Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb, which had declared for Iraq, was steadily losing ground to Ahmed Shah Massoud and was unpopular in Riyadh. The way was now open for Saudi backing of the Afghan pupils of the Deobandi madrassas, the Taliban.

The Taliban also proved to be attractive to Pakistani politicians including Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who alternated power in the early 1990s. As the Taliban gained ground in Afghanistan, their imposition of harsh sharia was largely consistent and compatible with Saudia Arabia's own practice, certainly no cause for alarm. The Taliban only crossed a Saudi line with the harboring of Saudi dissidents like Osama bin Laden. There's much more in the book on the rise of the Taliban, but little on their relationship with Al-Qaeda. Kepel's book was originally published in France in 2000 and translated in the US in 2002. It is likely that there has been considerable hybridization between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban since the US drove them into their mountain retreats in 2001-02, and that at least the old core of Al-Qaeda has become ever more dependent on Deobandi good will within Pakistan's Frontier Territories. I doubt that anyone really knows what's going on there, let alone what it may wind up meaning. One thing for sure is that the Deobandis form an awfully large pool for recruiting by jihadists.

Burgess has a blog called Crossroads Arabia which provides a lot of detail on Saudi Arabia ranging from geopolitics to everyday life.