President Zardari on OBL

Another article......Biru

	Inquirer Opinion/ Columns Osama bin Laden by Maria A Ressa OSAMA BIN Laden’s death is a moral victory, but it may turn out to be nothing more than that. Over the past decade, he has been isolated and the capabilities of his al-Qaida degraded, but the group has evolved into a social movement that continues to attract new groups and new recruits.

Studies on social networks of al-Qaida and its Southeast Asian arm, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), show that both organizations continue to spread violent jihadi ideology like a virus.

How does it spread? Aside from the crucible of the Afghan training camps in the late 1980s, the constant propaganda pumped out by al-Qaida’s media arm and the real and perceived injustice against Muslims used by radicals to recruit moderates, there are other, more imperceptible influences.

Social network theory offers the Three Degrees of Influence Rule defined in numerous academic studies. Everything we say or do ripples through our social network, creating an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). For example, if you’re feeling lonely, there’s a 54-percent chance your friend will feel lonely; a 25-percent chance your friend’s friend will feel lonely; and a 15-percent chance your friend’s friend’s friend will feel lonely. Emotions, like happiness and hope, as well as smoking, sexual diseases, even obesity can be traced and spread through social networks.

If these can spread through social networks, why not the volatile mix that leads to terrorism—anger, fear, hatred, religious fervor? Mapping the social networks of al-Qaida and JI show it does.

Both al-Qaida and JI operated the same way. They hijacked disparate groups, trained and funded them and infected them with the jihadi virus that targeted both the “near enemy” (their governments) and the “far enemy” (the United States).

Both groups used a top-down centralized command as well as bottom-up initiative to spread the ideology and carry out attacks. Their zeal came from a blood compact—an evolving network of family and friends.

After 9/11 triggered a fierce reaction from law enforcement agencies around the world, both al-Qaida and JI were affected the same way: their centralized command structures collapsed and their operational capabilities were degraded. Still, the old networks remain and continue to spread the jihadi virus. Smaller, more ad-hoc and less professional cells carry out attacks without central coordination.

In Southeast Asia, the possibility of retaliatory attacks from Bin Laden’s death may be highest in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. Since mid-March, a series of attacks (bombs planted inside book covers and sent to moderate Muslims, as well as a suicide bombing in a police mosque) and foiled plots (Easter weekend 150-kg bomb attached to a gas pipe near a church) show the JI network still at work.

“The organizational structure of these terrorists,” says Ansyaad M’bai, the chief of Indonesia’s National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT), “originally formed from the core members of JI, which broke into smaller units. This can be seen through the nature of bombs, the style of assembly of the explosives they use. This is the same group.”

Ten years after 9/11, the link between JI and al-Qaida continues. In January, Pakistani police arrested JI leader Umar Patek (who had operated in the Philippines since 2003) and his Filipino wife. They were arrested after police trailed a known al-Qaida operative.

“Umar Patek maintained links with al-Qaida,” says Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside Al Qaeda” and the head of Singapore’s International Center for Political Violence & Terrorism Research. “This is a clear indication of the continuing partnership between al-Qaida and JI.”

The Internet and mobile phone technology have helped to further decentralize terror networks and spread the jihadi virus. More jihadi content is spreading faster in the virtual world while police are finding online technical manuals on bomb-making in real-world terrorist safe-houses.

“More people are buying into the ideology of JI and its associated groups,” says Gunaratna. “More individuals are politicized, radicalized and mobilized, and a very small number of them will continue to carry out attacks.”

Add the potent amplifying effect of social media. In mid-April, a jihadist prepared a 23-page guide to “effectively post” on Facebook. (Indonesia is the second largest Facebook nation in the world; the Philippines ranks sixth globally).

What seems clear is that in both the virtual and real worlds, the jihadi virus is spreading into more moderate and mainstream communities.

Which brings us back to where we started: Osama bin Laden is dead, but the jihadi virus is here to stay. The question now is how to track its mutations and vaccinate the public against it.

Maria A. Ressa is former CNN Jakarta bureau chief and author of “Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia.” She has worked as a journalist in Southeast Asia for 25 years. She is author-in-residence at Singapore’s In

Pakistan did its part

By Asif Ali Zardari

Pakistan, perhaps the world’s greatest victim of terrorism, joins the other targets of al-Qaeda — the people of the United States, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria — in our satisfaction that the source of the greatest evil of the new millennium has been silenced, and his victims given justice. He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone.

Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world. And we in Pakistan take some satisfaction that our early assistance in identifying an al-Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day.

Let us be frank. Pakistan has paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism. More of our soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost. And for me, justice against bin Laden was not just political; it was also personal, as the terrorists murdered our greatest leader, the mother of my children. Twice he tried to assassinate my wife. In 1989 he poured $50 million into a no-confidence vote to topple her first government. She said that she was bin Laden’s worst nightmare — a democratically elected, progressive, moderate, pluralistic female leader. She was right, and she paid for it with her life.

Some in the U.S. press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact. Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as as it is America’s. And though it may have started with bin Laden, the forces of modernity and moderation remain under serious threat.

My government endorses the words of President Obama and appreciates the credit he gave us Sunday night for the successful operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. We also applaud and endorse the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we must “press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.” We have not yet won this war, but we now clearly can see the beginning of the end, and the kind of South and Central Asia that lies in our future.

Only hours after bin Laden’s death, the Taliban reacted by blaming the government of Pakistan and calling for retribution against its leaders, and specifically against me as the nation’s president. We will not be intimidated. Pakistan has never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media.

Radical religious parties have never received more than 11 percent of the vote. Recent polls showed that 85 percent of our people are strongly opposed to al-Qaeda. In 2009, when the Taliban briefly took over the Swat Valley, it demonstrated to the people of Pakistan what our future would look like under its rule — repressive politics, religious fanaticism, bigotry and discrimination against girls and women, closing of schools and burning of books. Those few months did more to unite the people of Pakistan around our moderate vision of the future than anything else possibly could.

A freely elected democratic government, with the support and mandate of the people, working with democracies all over the world, is determined to build a viable, economic prosperous Pakistan that is a model to the entire Islamic world on what can be accomplished in giving hope to our people and opportunity to our children. We can become everything that al-Qaeda and the Taliban most fear — a vision of a modern Islamic future. Our people, our government, our military, our intelligence agencies are very much united. Some abroad insist that this is not the case, but they are wrong. Pakistanis are united.

Together, our nations have suffered and sacrificed. We have fought bravely and with passion and commitment. Ultimately we will prevail. For, in the words of my martyred wife Benazir Bhutto, “truth, justice and the forces of history are on our side.”

The writer is the president of Pakistan.