Arnaud de Borchgrave

DE BORCHGAVE: Massacres past - and future?

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions staged hit-and-run attacks against government buildings and officials in the early 1980s and almost succeeded in killing the president of a country that has remained eerily quiet during the geopolitical tsunami that is still sweeping the Arab world. You're supposed to guess which country.

March 8, 2011

‘Mad Max’ redux

Anwar al-Awlaki is the same expert in Islamist brainwashing that captivated (via the Internet) Fort Hood's Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan. As a result, Yemen will now be getting $140 million, if Congress approves. This still can't compete with the $2 billion Saudi Arabia gives Yemen in budgetary support. To deploy another 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan is budgeted at $30 billion.

January 7, 2010

Unholy war in cyberspace

For America's 16 intelligence agencies, employing some 100,000 spies and analysts, with a budget of $50 billion, it is almost mission impossible to figure out what terrorists and would-be terrorists are up to in cyberspace.

December 31, 2009

Friend or foe today?

In a satirical piece on Pakistan's "New Media Dictionary," Nadeem F. Paracha described "conspiracy theory" as "a theory that is not a theory at all but a hard fact on Pakistan's TV channels," where anything goes and where 90 percent of Pakistanis get their news.

December 24, 2009

President Petraeus?

President Obama has scaled back the scope of the Afghan war, now about to enter its ninth year, to a limited military objective: Deny al Qaeda a safe haven. And since we are now told there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan - the rest are in Pakistan's tribal areas - a three-way deal between the Karzai government, powerful warlords and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar would seem to be the better part of valor. After Iraq, we cannot afford another trillion-dollar war.

December 15, 2009

Gulled by Hamid Gul

From his former incarnation as strategic adviser to Pakistan's politico-religious parties, the one-time Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul has resurfaced as de facto minister of propaganda and disinformation for the Taliban insurgents.

December 4, 2009

Switzerland bans minarets

Ask Google a question - one of the hundreds of millions it receives every day from all over the world - and in 2.8 seconds, it has scanned about 30 billion Web pages and a couple billion images and produced scores of possible answers. Pity the cub reporter who has yet to develop what Ernest Hemingway called an essential tool of the trade - a bullfeathers detector.

December 1, 2009

Finance mavens gloomy

Reputable financial houses, as they are described online, are telling their clients how to prepare for potential "global collapse" over the next two years. France's Societe Generale, according to the London Daily Telegraph's chief investigative reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is such a house that is now "mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction."

November 27, 2009

Biting the nuclear bullet

"It will be just like Syria," said the strategic scholar just back from Israel and speculating about the much debated question whether Israel will eventually bomb Iran's nuclear installations.

November 20, 2009

The world according to Gorbachev

Did Mikhail Gorbachev launch glasnost and perestroika in the mid-1980s with the aim of bringing about genuine democratic change in the Soviet Union? That's what he says in two interviews on both sides of the Atlantic - with Euronews' Maria Pineiro and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel - to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

November 17, 2009

Rampage of extremism

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the proverbial canary in the mine. Gunning down 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounding 31 was not a random act of violence by an army psychiatrist who was slated to deploy to Afghanistan, an evil war in his mind, where American infidels are killing good Muslims.

November 10, 2009

Warlords R Us

If we are successful beyond President Obama's wildest dreams - e.g., Taliban is wiped out and a tough new Afghan government does not allow al Qaeda or other terrorists to conspire against us on their territory - would that make us safer from radical Islam?

November 6, 2009

Nation-state nonstarter

A wise veteran Arab intelligence hand said Afghanistan is now tailor-made for deals with the principal tribal chiefs designed to detach them from the Taliban they fear more than U.S. and NATO troops.

November 2, 2009

No fix soon on Palestinian question

Unless former Sen. George J. Mitchell, President Obama's special Middle Eastern envoy, is prepared to commute by government executive jet for the next five to 10 years, this isn't a bad time to turn in his badge.

October 26, 2009

Ground shifting under nuclear arsenal

Talib is a male student who is attending or who has graduated from a madrassa and can recite the Koran in Arabic by heart. To learn Arabic and use the language of the prophet to recite in rhythmic tones the entire Koran's 114 chapters and 6,236 verses takes about 10 years.

October 20, 2009

Trust quotient needle near zero

Before we throw caution to the wind and build a new embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan - a la Baghdad - fit for 1,000 employees, let's first acquire a proper understanding of the nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. A majority of Pakistanis believe that Sept. 11 was a CIA-Mossad conspiracy designed to enlist the world in a giant push-back against Islam's growing popularity. Think I'm kidding?

October 9, 2009

Unraveling at the seams

"The American dream fell apart at the seams," Willie Nelson sang on CNN as he described the plight of small farmers going bust.

October 6, 2009

Defeat is now conceivable

President Obama the juggler has been spinning too many plates. From unemployment at 15 million, to health care reform, God knows how or when; to the Middle East where the peace process has fizzled yet again; to Iran where the options are narrowing to what hawks say are "an Israeli or U.S. military strike now, or a nuclear Tehran soon"; to Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have heard their commander trigger a verbal bombshell to a worldwide television audience: Defeat is conceivable.

October 1, 2009

Rank appeasement?

For some armchair strategists, President Obama's decision to scrap President George W. Bush's plan to deploy ballistic-missile-defense hardware in Poland and the Czech Republic was rank appeasement that would merely sharpen the Russian bear's appetite for more unilateral concessions that could only weaken America's defense posture. That was sound Cold War thinking. For some, the Cold War's villains continue in sheep's clothing. Moscow still craves recognition as the dominant power in the former Soviet Union.

September 28, 2009

Mideast accord calculus

The only bank this Rothschild ever owned was the West Bank. Danny Rothschild, an Israeli general and one-time coordinator of all government activities in the occupied territories, is one of 1,200 former intelligence officers in Israel's Council for Peace and Security -- and he says the Palestinians should be allowed to have their capital in Arab East Jerusalem. The very thought of allowing Palestinians to set up a government where 200,000 Israeli settlers have moved since the 1967 war, when Israeli forces "liberated" East Jerusalem from Jordanian rule, is sacrilegious. But Gen. Rothschild, speaking at the New America Foundation, was not afraid of geopolitical apostasy.

September 21, 2009