Page | 1 CBRNE-TERRORISM NEWSLETTER – October 2016 www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com Page | 2 CBRNE-TERRORISM NEWSLETTER – October 2016 Two Afghan Soldiers Kill 12 Colleagues at Post Outside Kunduz Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/two-afghan-soldiers-kill-12-colleagues-at-post-outside-kunduz- 1474995982 Sep 27 – Two Afghan soldiers shot and killed 12 colleagues at a post outside of Kunduz before defecting to the Taliban, the Defense Ministry said, in one of the country’s deadliest insider attacks this year. Both men fled the scene to join the insurgency, according to a provincial police commander. The militant group, which has been fighting to unseat the Afghan government since being ousted from power about 15 years ago, took responsibility for the attack. The ministry said the attack was under investigation. The northern city last year fell briefly to the Taliban, being the first to come under militant control since 2001. U.S. and Afghan special forces drove the insurgents from the city within days, but Afghan and foreign officials in the country are increasingly concerned it could be overrun again, as the militants control the city’s outskirts and most of Kunduz province. Security has deteriorated across Afghanistan since most foreign troops pulled out in 2014. Army and police casualties are at a record high in 2016, despite increased U.S. military efforts this year—including airstrikes—to support local forces on the ground. Still, insider attacks happen sporadically in Afghanistan. In January, a policeman in the country’s second-largest city, Kandahar, killed 10 colleagues before joining the Taliban. Two Romanian soldiers were killed by Afghan troops in May. Such attacks peaked in 2012, when rogue Afghan soldiers killed dozens of coalition troops, severely eroding the trust between them. The incidents prompted Afghan and U.S. military leaders to introduce measures limiting their soldiers’ interaction and requiring coalition forces to be armed at all times while on base. Tuesday’s attack came as elite Afghan special operations units arrived in southern Uruzgan province to reinforce beleaguered troops who have for weeks struggled to prevent its capital, Tarin Kot, from falling to the Taliban. “Heavy fighting is ongoing right now in Tarin Kot,” provincial council chief Abdul Karim Khadimzai said. “The Taliban haven’t been pushed back, and the city is still under attack.” The Taliban had called in backup fighters from neighboring province, he added. The Defense Ministry said the arrival of senior military officials in the province would keep the city from falling to the militants. “Our forces are pushing the Taliban out of the city,” ministry spokesman, General Dawlat Waziri, said. The U.S. military has in recent weeks stepped up its support of Afghan forces in Uruzgan with airstrikes. An errant strike, however, killed eight Afghan policemen at a checkpoint last week. The interior ministry said it was investigating the incident. Militants Dressed as Doctors Attack a Kandahar Hospital Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/militants-dressed-as-doctors-attack-a-kandahar-hospital-1473699923 Sep 12 – Two militants dressed as doctors raided a hospital in Kandahar supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday, killing at least one emergency room patient in an hourlong fire fight, Afghans officials said. EDITOR’S COMMENT: Just a reminder that this approach can be implemented in a Western hospital as well – especially when the term security has only to do with where to park legally inside the hospital and time to leave visiting patients. www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com Page | 3 CBRNE-TERRORISM NEWSLETTER – October 2016 Is Terrorism Effective? It doesn't usually achieve its objectives—and the perpetrators know it. By Philip Giraldi Source: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-terrorism-effective/ Sep 21 – There might well be thousands of counterterrorism officer began in the mid- books on terrorism, which means that it is 1970s, when terrorism was still pretty much extremely difficult to imagine something new. Western European. I know quite a bit about the But Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work? A groups that English discusses, and I am also History, due to be released next month, differs intimately familiar with the countermeasures that were employed to combat and eventually defeat them. English basically accepts the United Nations language on what constitutes terrorism, which is: an action “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non- combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a Government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.” He observes that the threat of terror is greatly exaggerated for political reasons, and he notes that efforts to confront it through a global crusade like the U.S.-led War on Terror do little other than create more terrorists. He counsels a restrained response. In coming to those conclusions he is far from alone. But English also shares his historian’s insights into how groups develop and are motivated, in part to help readers understand how public policy might respond to the actual threat that these groups constitute. As his title indicates, one of the central questions relating to terrorism—and one that oddly has received from most discussions of the terror little attention—is whether it’s effective in phenomenon. achieving what terrorists seek to achieve. English is not a former intelligence officer or English grades terrorist groups based on national-security official, nor a self-styled whether they achieved their objectives—a foreign-policy expert. He is instead process that Thomas Nagel, writing a distinguished historian, born in in the London Review of Books, Northern Ireland and currently a describes as a “report card.” Along professor at the University of St. the way he makes some Andrews in Scotland. He has assumptions. For example, he written four books on the Irish posits that terrorist leaders are not Republican Army and is very as a rule crazy. They are rational knowledgeable of the history and players in that they have well- development of terrorist groups, defined political objectives that they primarily European ones. He is seek to attain and that they explicitly prone not only to ask questions, but lay out in their manifestos. Terror is also to try to answer them, having consequently best written in 2009 Terrorism: How to seen as a tool in a Respond. political process. I found Does Terrorism Work? particularly English focuses on four terrorist interesting, as my own career as a entities—the Irish Republican www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter.com Page | 4 CBRNE-TERRORISM NEWSLETTER – October 2016 Army (IRA), Euskadi Ta Akatasuna (ETA), and Arabs. Netanyahu might not even exist Hamas, and al-Qaeda—though he discusses a without Hamas. number of other groups in passing. Three of his One might also mention Hezbollah. The group four groups have clearly demonstrated scored a major tactical success when it blew nationalist aspirations; they seek the union of up the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland Beirut, but the bombings did not translate into (IRA), Basque independence from Spain any larger political role until the group became (ETA), and restoration of Arab-Muslim more conventional. hegemony in Palestine (Hamas). Al-Qaeda is Indeed, the book describes in detail only two defined by English as a “religio-political” terrorist movements that plausibly were driving movement that is transnational, but it too forces in bringing about real political change. embraces territorial objectives, including The first was 1945-47 Palestine, where removing the United States from the Middle Jewish terrorists (primarily associated with the East and overthrowing and replacing most of Stern Gang, Irgun, and Haganah) eventually the “corrupt” Muslim regimes that are compelled the British to hand over the problem universally in power both in the region as well to the United Nations, resulting in the creation as in the remainder of the Islamic Ummah. of the state of Israel. The second was the The book examines in considerable detail the campaign by the Front de Liberation Nationale histories of these groups. It notes that an (FLN) to drive the French out of Algeria from overwhelming percentage of Irishmen and 1954 until 1962. But even in those cases, Basques do not and never have embraced the English plausibly makes the case that the violent agenda promoted by the IRA and ETA, British or French could easily have crushed the meaning that any kind of terrorist political terrorists, but were not motivated to make the ascendancy would never have popular support. effort, because both countries were retrenching And the groups have understood from the get- militarily and politically post-World War II. go that they would never defeat, say, the There was also very little popular support back British Army or the Guardia Civil. at home for either war, which means that while English also observes that the existence of terror may have accelerated the timetable for terrorist groups actually hampered the moves withdrawal, it was not a major factor in bringing toward greater regional autonomy, as terrorism it about. hardened existing government positions and All of which leads English to conclude that tended to undermine the efforts being made by terrorism has never “worked”—that it has failed more moderate reformers. In other words, to succeed in achieving its principal objectives Basque and Northern Irish autonomy would in strategic terms—a judgment that I would have come sooner without the distraction share based on my own experience. And that provided by the IRA and ETA—and change, point is where the book really becomes when it did come, came in spite of the interesting, as English goes on to argue that presence of these hostile armed groups, not terror is unsuccessful not because it employs because of it.