Which seems an odd claim to make, given that al Qaeda has had relatively little success in killing Infidels (other than on 9/11) but has instead contented itself with killing Moslems. Ralph Peters notes a baby step in our information war to actually point this out to Moslems:
AL Qaeda does one thing ex tremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational's victims were Westerners.
The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda claims to be their defender.
I've long complained that we fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's blood thirst in our information operations. Al Qaeda (as well as the Taliban and other insurgent groups) slaughters Muslims -- yet we let the media flip the blame to us.
Last weekend, a Pentagon insider passed me a no-nonsense study recently released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al Qaeda's Violence Against Muslims" is exactly the kind of work our analysts should produce -- but rarely do.
Moslems should be furious at al Qaeda for this little problem in their strategy to defend Islam from the West. Indeed, Moslems should be furious taht al Qaeda excuses their body count in the Moslem world by reserving to themselves the authority to determine who is a "real" Moslem or who is lucky enough to be an "involuntary martyr."
We worry so much about collateral damage that we risk our own troops' lives and restrict killing enemies to avoid killing innocents. Jihadis don't even admit that there is collateral damage--kill them all, let Allah sort them out, is their attitude.
You'd think we could exploit that fact.
UPDATE: The reverse issue has been the protests by many in the Islamic world that Moslems shouldn't fight Moslems when the issue is fighting the jihadis. Why it is apparently OK for jihadis to slaughter Moslems but forbidden for Moslems to fight jihadis who kill Moslems? That has always been very puzzling to me, and a sign that we have a long way to go in helping Islamic moderates win their own civil war for the sould of Islam.
We seem to be making some progress there, as Bahrain admitted that it has 125 troops in Afghanistan after Jordan revealed the big secret:
Until quite recently, Moslem, particularly Arab, nations had sent troops to Afghanistan, but had kept it quiet. But the December 30th suicide bombing of a U.S. base in Afghanistan, revealed that one of the eight people killed was Ali bin Zeid, an agent for Jordanian intelligence. The fact that Zeid was identified was unusual. But Zeid was a cousin of the king of Jordan, and it was apparently thought better to just announce his "martyrdom" and avoid all the rumors that would appear otherwise. There was no uproar in the Arab world over this Jordanian presence in Afghanistan. Apparently, Islamic terrorists have become so unpopular in the Moslem world, that it is no longer considered scandalous for Moslem troops to work with non-Moslem troops to kill the common enemy.
When we see more fatwahs against the jihadis, we'll know the war on terror has made it over the hump.
