“You’ve got the watches, but we’ve got the time” – sounds like a terrifying phrase Duzsl
could utilise.

The Taliban goal is to use violent intimidation to reconquer Afghanistan and regain and retain power there. They want to use that power to create a “pure” Islamic state, and, frankly, a sanctuary and/or base of operations for your global motley crew of Islamist militants who want to hook up with the Jihad, or maybe just get trained and organize their own offshoot. North Pakistan serves that purpose today, mainly for Sunnis, and there’s a reason you’ll find Chechens there too.

Now, obviously the Taliban are under a lot of pressure that is preventing them from presently accomplishing their goal. Especially the kind of pressure that emanates from the blast wave emerging from that drone-launched hellfire missile. But, as they themselves like to say, “You’ve got the watches, but we’ve got the time”.

Now, after the first few months of the Afghan campaign and the decision to stop hot pursuit (well, mostly, more or less) at the Durand Line, the Taliban could have taken a few moments to think and realized that the Americans don’t really want to be there a minute longer than they think they have to. And that their assessment of “have to” is basically the metric of number of current attacks. They want to declare victory and go home, and if things are quiet for just long enough, they will! The strategically right answer for the Taliban (and I haven’t met a single veteran that disputes this point in any degree), would have been to do nothing, recover, recruit, rearm, and …wait the Americans out.

No more than two years without a single incident and the Americans would have abandoned the hell-hole to the Devil. Meanwhile, the Afghan government, and most definitely their pathetic, inexperienced, cowardly, and corrupt military and police units, would have been easy pickings, what without years of training and hundreds of billions of free armaments and gear from ISAF.

But, I’m telling you, these guys are impatient and impractical. They’re not strategic or pragmatic. All they know how to do is fight and die, and it’s all they want to do. They think it terrifies us, and they live for that. Their thinking – when projected to long time horizons – is fuzzy at best. I’m even willing to believe that the way their whole system operated relies upon constant action – that they wouldn’t be able to recruit and retain members just to wait for the Yankees to go home. Perpetual Focoism.

On the other hand, the constant stream of harassment, killings, and bombings, also keeps the population constantly aware of what’s going to go down when the infidels leave. It’s going to be ugly, and the Taliban wants and needs to send a constant message that, when the revolution comes, they can and will put anybody in their way against the wall. It’s a Psychological Operation that needs constant refreshment or the effect with depreciate and degrade.

Their reasons—the motives of all terrorists—are inscrutable and legion. “Political agency” (or lack thereof) is, in my opinion, a convenient cover. Terrorism is simply the random manifestation of the violence and tribalism that we in the neoreaction accept as part of the human condition. Western Society has advanced so far, of course, that such violence and tribalism has been mitigated to a great extent. (When it spills over, we’re shocked! There are places in the world where such a bomb blast is as newsworthy as taking a shit.)

The question “who benefits?” is largely divorced from the raw fact of violent outbursts masked in ideological garb. Hence why I ignore the conspiracy theorists. A better question, perhaps, is “who can make the most of it?”

However, the Terror Planner, who creates the cause and puts them there does look at the problem on a larger scale. This is where we need to look for a (warped) rationale. I propose the reason they encourage terrorist acts is that without them, they have no presence in the Cathedralist media – so abstractly, their choice isn’t between being seen as a ‘good cause’ or as ‘violent, partisan criminals’ but between having no recognition or some. The Chechens, through their violence, at least have gained acknowledgement of their struggle and are the most celebrated repressed-statelet in Central Asia. Sure, many more people despise what they have done than support it, but at least it has some kind of recognition. In the west, the same would go for AQ after 9-11.

False flag claims become useful to those groups who have some voice in the Cathedral, albeit a very marginal one – they can hijack the event and promote their own position through the prism of their re-imagining without having to suffer the enmity that the perpetrator receives. This is especially true in the moments just after the attack, when there is a huge media space to fill, and very little content beyond a simple narrative how-it-happened.

Driven to kill by brutalist architecture

It could be a motivating factor.

Second, the way of life that grows under the aegis of the shari‘a is profoundly domestic, without any public or ceremonial character except in the matter of communal worship. The mosque and its school, or madrasah, together with the souq or bazaar, are the only genuine public spaces in traditional Muslim towns. The street is a lane among private houses, which lie along it and across it in a disorderly jumble of inward-turning courtyards. The Muslim city is a creation of the shari‘a—a hive of private spaces, built cell on cell. Above its rooftops the minarets point to God like outstretched fingers, resounding with the voice of the muezzin as he calls the faithful to prayer.

I mention these two features because they are often overlooked, despite their enormous importance in the psychology and the politics of the Islamic world. The Muslim city is explicitly a city for Muslims, a place of congregation in which individuals and their families live side-by-side in obedience to God, and where non-Muslims exist only on sufferance. The mosque is the link to God, and the pious believe that no building should overtop the minarets, or destroy their mastery of the skyline. The true city lies huddled under God’s protection, and even the finest palace is no more than a private chamber, ordered by family rituals and sanctified by prayer.

The image of such a city is familiar to all of us from the Thousand and One Nights, and also from the engravings and sketches of nineteenth-century travellers. And here and there the Muslim city still exists, ravaged by the modern styles of building and by the densely crowded jerry-built slums, but the image, for the ordinary believer, of a communal form of peace. Many a Muslim carries this image in his heart, and when he encounters the Western city, with its open spaces and public buildings, its wide streets, its visible interiors, its skyscrapers dwarfing the few religious buildings, he is apt to feel both wonder and rage at the God-defying arrogance that has so completely eclipsed the life of piety and prayer. It is not merely of anecdotal significance that, when the terrorist leader Mohammed Atta left his native Egypt for Hamburg to continue his studies in architecture, it was not to learn about the modernist buildings that disfigure German cities, but to write a thesis on the restoration of the ancient city of Aleppo, where the philosopher al-Farabi once resided in the court of a Hamdanid prince. When he led the attack against the World Trade Center, Atta was assaulting a symbol of economic, aesthetic, and spiritual paganism.

Putin’s sudden emergence from nowhere as the country’s future leader was astonishing. He was still virtually unknown in the country, and indeed to most of the political elite. But in the months that followed he became the new face of Russia – tough, energetic and ruthless in responding to ever more audacious Chechen terrorist attacks.

In the space of two weeks in September four bomb explosions destroyed apartment blocks in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow (twice) and Volgodonsk. Almost 300 people were killed. The attacks were blamed on Chechens and, together with the invasion of Dagestan, provided Putin with the excuse, if he needed one, to launch the second Chechen war. At a meeting with Bill Clinton on 12 September an agitated Putin drew a map of Chechnya and described his plan to annihilate the separatists. ‘These people are not human,’ he snarled to the press afterwards. ‘You can’t even call them animals – or if they’re animals, they’re rabid animals …’

The apartment bombings were so convenient in providing Putin with the pretext to go to war, and thereby to improve his ratings, that some Russians believe they were carried out by the FSB. Conspiracy theories are so rife – and so outlandish – in Russia that you would have to rewrite history if you believed them all. But real suspicions were raised by a fifth incident, in the city of Ryazan, where police acting on a tip-off foiled an apparent plot after discovering three sacks of white powder, which they identified as explosive, together with detonators, in the basement of a block of flats. Thousands of local residents were evacuated while the sacks were removed and made safe. Putin himself praised the vigilance of the people who had spotted the sacks being carried into the building. When men suspected of planting the bombs were arrested, however, they turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB chief then claimed it had all been an ‘exercise’ to test responses after the earlier explosions and that the bags only contained sugar. The local FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about such an exercise, however, and issued a statement expressing surprise.

Several other mysterious circumstances surround the apartment bombings. For example, the speaker of the State Duma announced to parliament that he had just received a report of the apartment bombing in Volgodonsk on 13 September – the day of one of the Moscow bombings, but three days before the Volgodonsk explosion. Had someone who knew in advance about all the planned attacks got the dates mixed up? But attempts to have the incidents properly investigated in Russia have been thwarted, and the Kremlin reacts with fury to questions on the subject. Moreover, two members of an independent commission that tried to establish the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in 2006.