AQAP was said to have declared the province an “Islamic Emirate” that would henceforth be governed by Islamic law.Buy nike running shoes online Also, AQAP and other Islamic militants in the area were said to have surrounded a smaller military company that had to withdraw because the Yemeni Army was unable to send them reinforcements.
Christopher Boucek, an expert on Islamic movements at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, called President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s decision to reposition counterterrorism units fighting AQAP back to the capital in Sana to protect his regime a major setback for U.S./Yemeni counterterrorism efforts.
So, too, he said in an interview, was the prospect not only of Saleh’s ouster, which U.S. officials are said to now consider inevitable, but also that of his son, nephews, and many of the counterterrorism officials with whom Americans have been working to fight AQAP and other jihadis.
“They’ll have to build all new relationships,” said Boucek. “Under-governed space in Yemen is increasing by the day. Chatter among terrorists is reportedly growing, and it’s about time for them to try to mount another operation,” he said.
Last winter, AQAP sent two sophisticated mail bombs in American cargo planes that were intercepted and disarmed. Boucek is equally gloomy about counterterrorism efforts throughout the region.
“The Islamists are among the most patient and most disciplined of the political players,” he said. “A couple of years down the road, victory will go to the opposition that is the best organized.”
In Egypt, he said, “we focused on Tahrir Square and not on the back-street mosques. But they are likely to be best at capitalizing on the political opening,” Boucek asserted.
Although the army, traditionally a bulwark of anti-Islamist fervor, is in charge of the political transition in Egypt, attacks have recently increased on Christians and other minorities, allegedly conducted by ultra-conservative “Salafis,” or Muslim militants focused on religion rather than politics.
Deposed President Hosni Mubarak permitted them to flourish as a counter-weight to the equally conservative Muslim Brotherhood, believed to be the largest and best organized Muslim opposition group in the country.
The Salafis have denied carrying out the attacks, but analysts say they have become increasingly assertive in demanding that Egypt remain an “Islamic” nation and in fighting efforts to reduce the role of Islam in the public arena.
Recently, Islamists cut off the ear of a Christian in the southern city of Qana because he was said to have had a relationship with a Muslim woman, which Muslim fundamentalists consider “haram,” or forbidden by the Koran. Last week, according to IPT News, run by Islamic expert Steven Emerson, one man was killed and eight others injured in the village of Kasr el-Bassil when Salafists attacked the owner of a liquor store, which the most observant Muslims also shun.
In the city of Monufiya, Emerson reported, dozens of Salafis stormed the house of a woman who was accused of being a prostitute. Her furniture was reportedly burned in the street. In Libya, where NATO-backed rebels have been battling the 40-year regime of leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, the situation is even more complex, with each side accusing the other of ties to Islamic terrorists and radicals.
According to Emerson and the Wall Street Journal, Libyan rebel leader Abdel-hakim al-Hasidi has said that around two dozen of his troops had fought American troops in Iraq. nike mens acg sandals 2011 But he called them “patriots and good Muslims,” not “terrorists.” So, too, he insisted were members of Al Qaeda, since they had also “resisted foreign invasion.” Nor is Al-Hasidi, an influential Islamic preacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, the only militant within rebel ranks. His field commander is Salah al-Barrani, a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was formed in the 1990s by jihadis returning from Afghanistan and who continued fighting the Qaddafi regime until a truce was arranged between them.
Spokesmen for the Libyan rebel national transition council deny that these militant Islamists play a leadership role in the rebellion. They are supported by French activist Bernard-Henri Levy, among others, who helped persuade French President Nicolas Sarkozy to recognize the rebels rather than Qaddafi’s government in Tripoli. There was “no evidence,” Henri Levy said this week, that Al Qaeda or militant Islamists had a “significant presence” in rebel ranks.
American military officials, too, have downplayed the Islamist threat from the rebels, saying in recent testimony on Capitol Hill that they detected only “flickers” of an Al Qaeda presence in eastern Libya where the rebellion is based.
In interviews, other intelligence officials maintained that Qaddafi’s regime has long-standing connections to secular and Islamic terrorist groups that continue to threaten western interests. One official who asked not to be quoted said there was evidence that Qaddafi was paying Tuaregs, nomadic Berbers who live in Libya and roam throughout North Africa, as mercenaries, and that they were selling anti-aircraft missiles, machine guns and other weapons to Al Qaeda.
Much of the think-tank community in Washington seems divided between optimists and pessimists over whether Al Qaeda and the most dogmatic Muslim militants will ultimately benefit from the Arab upheavals.
Pessimists believe that the protests and reform movements that have ousted longstanding dictators who were nonetheless staunch American allies and partners in counter-terrorism efforts are inevitably destined to be hijacked by the more disciplined, ruthless Islamists, especially given the lack of civil institutions, the rule of law, or culture of tolerance in so many Arabs states.
Others remain cautiously optimistic.
James Dobbins, a former ambassador who runs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand, concedes that the upheavals will inevitably disrupt some intelligence cooperation and links among security services in the short run. But he argues that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are likely to be undermined by the political opening of autocratic states in which political dissent was routinely crushed.
“As peaceful and legal outlets for dissent and the pursuit of Islamic programs open up,” he said, “it will diminish the perceived need to engage in violent activity.” Polls show that support among Arabs for Al Qaeda and such militants has been steadily declining for several years, he added. Their popularity was likely to fall further, he said, “if you have a shot at achieving your goals without violence.”
While Washington and its allies had to remain vigilant about terrorist threats, he said, there was reason to believe that the Arab Spring protests would eventually work to Al Qaeda’s disadvantage.
“Their narrative has been utterly disrupted,” he said. “The dictators they sought to replace have been ousted, and not by them or their violence.”
While representative governments would most probably reflect the will of a majority of their citizens for a more “Islamic” government, such policies would not necessarily jeopardize good relations with Washington, he asserted.
“The most Islamist state in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia,” said Dobbins, “and they’ve been a strong ally of America’s.”
But Saudi Arabia, the pessimists counter, is also the country of origin of most of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attack. Reebok ZigTech While many Israelis have expressed concern about whether militant anti-Israeli Islamist forces would be the ultimate beneficiaries of the Arab spring rebellions, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, who resigned late last year as head of Israelis military intelligence, was also more optimistic than many of his peers.
In a lecture last week at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he argued that “a democratic Middle East” was “good for Israel.”
“Democracies rarely go to war,” he said. Israel could not remain indifferent to the values that had brought the Egyptian people to Tahrir Square -- a desire for “freedom, justice, rule of law and democracy,” he added.
“Even if, in the short run, it may be more dangerous,” he said, “in the long run I believe it’s a very, very positive process that we should support.”
A senior New York Police Department intelligence analyst pointed to at least one short-term benefit of the upheavals: Home-grown Islamic radicals in America, too, had been stunned and shaken by the protests and the loss of what he called their “narrative of oppression.”
Like their counterparts in the Middle East, he said, they have been distracted and, for the moment, paralyzed by shock.
Esraa Abdel Fattah, Egypt's "Facebook Girl." Buy nike running shoes online
During the pro-democracy demonstrations that ultimately brought down the dictatorial reigns of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, you couldn’t help noticing that these events were distinctly unisex, still a surprising development in the Middle East.
As a leading Egyptian feminist, Nawal El Saadawi, put it: “Women and girls are beside boys in the streets. They are — and we are calling for justice, freedom and equality, and real democracy and a new constitution, no discrimination between men and women, no discrimination between Muslims and Christians.”
There are hundreds of similar examples: Women of all ages, who have devoted themselves to securing equal rights and freedom from religious as well as political discrimination.
And in Egypt and Tunisia, women in the demonstrations didn’t just make the tea. They participated in –and sometimes led – virtually every facet of the protests. For that time, at least, they were treated more as equals than is usually the case in male-dominated Arab societies.
One of them is a young Egyptian activisnamed Esraa Abdel Fattah. Esraa has come to be known as “Facebook Girl” for her role in organizing what became known as the April 6th Facebook Protests, a mobilization of thousands of young people demanding political change.
Esraa is a leading Egyptian democracy and human rights activist. In April 2008 she was imprisoned for her Facebook organizing work, She played a leading role in the mass protests in Tahrir Square and is a prominent spokesperson for the youth protest movement in Egypt. Last month she was among a group of activists who met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Cairo.
During the January 2011 nationwide protests in Egypt, Esraa was active on the Internet, on the ground in Tahrir Square, and in media—including on Al Jazeera TV, regularly updating the news on the opposition. Esraa is a prominent spokesperson for the youth protest movement in Egypt. On March 15, she was among a group of activists who met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Cairo.
Esraa and her colleagues are known for their innovative use of social networking sites as an organizing tool.
And then there were Egyptian activists Mona El Seif and Salma al-Tarzi. These two courageous women, camped out in Tahrir Square during all the days of the protests, were the world’s eyes and ears. Western media reps had a tough time getting into Tahrir Square. So these two intrepids undertook to spend hours on the phone with CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and many other international networks. Without them, we would all have known a lot less about the details of what was going on in real time in Tahrir Square.
And these three women are far from alone; there is a virtual army of intrepids in Egypt, in Tunisia and throughout the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. The question is: What roles will these women be able to play after the demonstrations – when the hard work of nation-building really gets underway?
Will they occupy senior posts in new political parties? Will they join the men as political strategists? Or head up the ‘get out the vote’ programs? Will they lead the political parties’ new legal teams? Will they be welcomed as equals by the men who would customarily comprise the parties’ internal think-tanks to develop public policies for a new democracy?
The Public Record posed that question to a number of authorities who have reason to know.
Nadya Khalife, a Researcher in the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, told us: “ As things stand right now in Egypt, women were unfortunately left out of the Constitutional Committee tasked with amending the Constitution [in Egypt]. Also, there were no women ministers in the newly appointed cabinet. In Tunisia, one female judge sits on the investigative committee to inquire and investigate abuses during the Tunisian revolution. nike mens acg sandals 2011 There are also two female ministers (minister for women, and minister for health) in Tunisia’s government. Although there is some presence of women in Tunisia’s transitional government, this does not necessarily reflect the capacity of female politicians in Tunisia.”
Chip Pitts, a longtime human rights advocate and lecturer in law at Stanford and Oxford Universities, told us: “My survey population is a bit skewed, as my female friends and former students there tend to be human rights literate and conscious. But although it varies a bit by country, certainly in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and even Syria, I don’t see a lot of satisfaction with the traditional role of women so much as a recognition that it could take some time and lots of persistent effort to overcome stereotypes and what is, ultimately, a cultural issue (even more than a religious issue).”
Pitts added, “In the meantime, I hear lots of frustration but continued determination and optimism to work for change. In Saudi Arabia and Yemen, there’s more ambivalence, but even there I see repressed desires for political involvement and leadership roles beginning to be asserted in some quarters.”
Professor Nathan A. Brown, International Affairs Director for the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and a senior associate the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has a somewhat different viewpoint. He told The Public Record:
“There certainly were some women involved in the various opposition movements in leadership roles, but gender issues did not figure prominently in the demonstrations or the revolution. I don’t see any sign that changing gender relations is prominent in any way for any of the groups in question. If there is an effect on gender relations, it may be indirect. For instance, deteriorating public security may make public space even more male dominated than it has been — though I did not see that happening in Egypt when I was there last month, it could be an indirect effect.”
“Should the salafis gain cultural influence, that will probably have some effect as well — and salafis are certainly more visible now, but I don’t know if they are having much effect on social practice outside their own circles,” he said, adding:
“The groups involved are certainly mobilizing women voters. But in leadership roles? I don’t see any signs that special efforts are being made in that regard, though some women have emerged as leaders.”
Frida Ghitis, an independent journalist, recently wrote in the Miami Herald, “As far as I can see, the new reform structures are not making any provisions to ensure women’s rights. In fact, reformists in Egypt were deeply disappointed by the outcome of a constitutional reform referendum a couple of weeks ago, which maintained Sharia as the basis of law. That could prove damaging for women’s standing. The Muslim Brotherhood was very happy with the results.”
In Yemen, she added, “where a woman is one of the early leaders of the uprising, the movement is being taken over by the Islamists, who are no friends of women’s rights.”
That women were every bit as able to be full partners in the history-making demonstrations that are still continuing in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in many other countries throughout the region, has been proven. That there is an enormous reservoir of skills among the women of MENA is perhaps less known but no less true.
But integrating these women as equal partners in the post-demonstration phase of democracy-building is going to be tough on Arab men. To achieve that partnership, most Arab males are going to have to take on a really hard job: Changing their attitudes toward women.
Arab men are often heard saying that Sharia law treats women equally (it doesn’t). But if they really believe that, they’re going to have to shed some of the stereotypes that have plagued Arab women for centuries.
Not an easy task. But the incentive is huge. Because this is a time, arguably more than any other in recent history, when embryonic democracies need all the smart, motivated players they can recruit, regardless of gender.
And speaking of motivation, some of the most thoughtful, poetic, heart-wrenching descriptions of what the pro-democracy movement means, have come from women.
One that strikes me as particularly poignant comes from Egyptian-born columnist and speaker Mona Eltahawy. Writing in The Guardian, she said:
“To understand the importance of what’s going in Egypt, take the barricades of 1968 (for a good youthful zing), throw them into a mixer with 1989 and blend to produce the potent brew that the popular uprising in Egypt is preparing to offer the entire region.buy Reebok ZigTech It’s the most exciting time of my life. Watching the uprising from New York City exhilarates me and makes me so proud to be an Egyptian. I cry when I see video footage of Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, filled with thousands upon thousands chanting: ‘The people want to topple the president.’
“Tahrir means liberation in Arabic, and it gives me goosebumps as I watch my country people demand liberty,” she said.
For Mona, and women throughout the region, democracy is not something the women want the men to achieve for them. It is something they want to achieve with them. Together.
And if the guys in the Middle East are as smart as they’re going to have to be, they’ll figure out how to make that happen.
Throughout the day, nike running shoes members of both parties played a game of chicken, seeking to force the other to give in as the deadline of midnight Friday approached. Boehner in particular faced a tricky calculation about how much he could compromise without losing support not just from his large contingent of tea-party-inspired fiscal conservatives, but also from social conservatives who were eager for a victory on abortion and other issues.
As Reid returned from the White House and briefly took the Senate floor, he said that the issues dividing the Senate and House were "extremely narrow," but that it was far from certain they could be worked out in time.
"I am not really confident, but I am very, very hopeful," he said.
Given the uncertainty and the short time remaining, federal agencies prepared to furlough employees and cut off most services. Workers, contractors and consumers scrambled to understand how a shutdown would affect them, and Democrats warned of harm to the economy. The two parties also maneuvered to assign blame to each other in the event that no deal could be reached, and neither side was certain that it could predict the political repercussions of a shutdown.
The policy disputes involved a handful of provisions. One would greatly limit financing for Planned Parenthood and other family-planning providers, in the United States and overseas, and prevent the District of Columbia from using its tax dollars to help poor women pay for abortions.
Also at issue were measures that would restrict the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, a favorite target of Republicans since they took over the House this year, by preventing the agency from enforcing significant portions of the Clean Air Act.
The House voted 255-172 on Thursday to halt the Obama administration's program to regulate industrial air emissions linked to climate change, delivering a rebuke to a central tenet of the president's energy and environmental policy.
Nineteen Democrats joined in approving a bill that, were it to become law, would bar the EPA from acting to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the agency has declared a threat to human health and the environment.
The measure would also nullify a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that gave the agency the authority to issue regulations to curb those emissions.
The bill stands little chance of becoming law because a similar measure voted on in the Senate on Wednesday came up 10 votes short of the 60 votes needed to avert a filibuster. nike mens acg sandals 2011 Obama this week threatened to veto any measure that would hinder the administration's efforts to restrict emissions.
The parties continued to spar over spending levels as well, although they were not that far apart in the context of a $3.5 trillion federal budget. According to congressional officials, Boehner had proposed $39 billion in cuts to the current year's budget Wednesday after his bid for $40 billion was rejected the day before. Democrats took the new offer under review.
Top budget staff, after working through the night, returned Thursday morning with a proposed $34.5 billion in cuts, with $3 billion of that to come from the Pentagon. Democrats said they believed that plan put the two sides close to an agreement, with just a few billion dollars separating them.
Democrats said Boehner insisted that any deal also include some so-called policy riders, which they argued injected conservative ideology into what should be a numbers battle.
Boehner rejected assertions by the top Democrats that the policy divide was all that was holding up a deal.
"There are a number of issues that are on the table, and any attempt to try to narrow this down to one or two just would not be accurate," Boehner said.
Despite Obama's threat to veto the measure, the House passed a Republican plan to keep federal agencies open another week, to cut $12 billion in spending and to provide the Pentagon with money through Sept. 30. Republicans hoped the legislation, which passed 247 to 181, would show that they had made a serious effort to avert a shutdown and leave Senate Democrats and the buy Fivefingers Kso-Vibram fivefingers Kso onlineadministration facing criticism for cutting off money to members of the military serving overseas.
"There is absolutely no policy reason for the Senate to not follow the House in taking these responsible steps to support our troops and to keep our government open," Boehner said.
With the prospect that much of the government would cease to operate after midnight Friday, preparations for a shutdown began in earnest Thursday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Brazil has stepped up its “currency war”, a day after the International Monetary Fund tacitly endorsed the use of capital controls, with the announcement of the fourth set of measures within a month to help control its exchange rate.nike running shoes online,
Guido Mantega, the finance minister, said the government would extend a 6 per cent tax on repatriated foreign borrowings to loans or bonds with a maturity of up to 720 days, compared with the previous limit of up to 360 days.
The IMF proposed its first guidelines this week on the use of measures to control inflows of speculative capital, in a move seen as legitimising a tool it had once staunchly opposed.
The IMF framework follows a series of measures adopted by Brazil and other fast-growing emerging markets aimed at stemming a flood of money from foreign investors keen to cash in on their strong economies and high interest rates.
Brazil has been fighting to keep its currency, the real, trading at about 1.65 to the US dollar – a level that is almost 40 per cent higher than two years ago. But in recent weeks, the currency has strengthened further.
The real went below 1.60 for the first time since August 2008 on Wednesday but later reversed track to trade at about 1.613 after the government said it was poised to act.online, buy Reebok ZigTech online
Latin America’s largest economy fears a strong currency will lead to a hollowing out of its industrial base by undermining the competitiveness of its manufactured exports and encouraging cheap imports.
Analysts said Mr Mantega’s comments indicated Brasília was willing to tolerate a stronger currency while limiting the volatility of any shifts in its value.
The minister said the real would have touched 1.50 had he not acted. He also reassured the market that the government would not tax more desirable inflows from abroad, such as foreign direct investment, considered crucial to Brazil’s infrastructure programme.
“He said the appreciation of the currency is inevitable because of the economic situation,” said Marcelo Salomon of Barclays.
The latest measure is aimed at preventing Brazilian companies from borrowing dollars on short-term maturities at low interest rates on international markets and then exchanging the money for local currency and lending this at Brazil’s high rates.online, buy Reebok ZigTech online
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
The younger rebel almost spat with disgust. “I have been fighting for 37 days!” he shouted. “Nobody can tell me what to do!” nike running shoes online
The outburst midfight — and the ensuing argument between a determined young man who seemed to have almost no understanding of modern war and an older man who wisely counseled caution — underscored a fact that is self-evident almost everywhere on Libya’s eastern front. The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.
What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.
With throaty cries and weapons they have looted and scrounged, the rebels gather along Libya ‘s main coastal highway each day, ready to fight. Many of them are brave, even extraordinarily so. Some of them are selfless, swept along by a sense of common purpose and brotherhood that accompanies their revolution.
“Freedom!” they shout, as they pair a yearning to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with appeals for divine help. “God is great!”
But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.
With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, Buy cheap nike mens acg sandals 2011 or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.
Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces’ rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists’ machine guns.
And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.
But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.
For the nations that have supported the uprising, the state of the rebels’ armed wing — known as the Forces of Free Libya — raises many questions. It seems unlikely that such a force can carry the war westward, through dug-in Qaddafi units toward the stronghold of Surt, much less beyond, toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And a sustained war of attrition could quickly bleed their ranks dry.
Unlike many antigovernment militias in other countries, the rebel-armed column has not had the benefit of years of guerrilla fighting, which could have winnowed and seasoned its leaders and given them a skeletal field structure to build on.
Instead, Libya’s rebels have entered the grim work of waging war almost spontaneously, and would need time, training, equipment and leadership to develop into even a reasonably competent force. nike cheap mens acg sandals
For now, their ranks have three elements: a so-called “special forces” detachment of former soldiers and police officers; a main column organized into self-led cells of fighters built around a few weapons and pickup trucks; and a sort of home guard that is undergoing quick training to man checkpoints and serve as a civil defense force.
There is also the “shabab,” milling groups of youngsters who arrive at the front each day hoping to pitch in, but with scant idea of how. Officially, the shabab are not part of the fight.