An uptick in attacks by Afghan National army soldiers against foreign troops would seem a worrisome trend ahead of the deployment of another 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan in the latest attempt by Washington to turn around the protracted war against insurgents. Two so-called insider attacks, in which a soldier in an Afghan National Army uniform turns his weapon on foreign troops, in as many weeks have killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded another seven. Insider attacks have been occurring with deadly regularity since 2011. According to an April report by the Modern War Institute at America’s West Point it was in 2011 that “insider attacks became the preferred war-fighting tactic of the Taliban, an organization that understood well how to apply limited resources for maximum effect.” The report says since 2007, insider attacks have killed 157 NATO personnel and 557 members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. But it also blames many attacks against foreign troops on what it calls cultural friction, where Afghans become infuriated by a perceived insult. In June alone there were two separate attacks on U.S. soldiers by Afghans wearing an Afghan army uniform. In March another insider attack killed three U.S. soldiers. In April, Taliban fighters dressed in Afghan army uniforms passed through several security rings to enter a base in northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province and kill as many as 140 Afghan soldiers. The attacks come as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to bolster Washington’s presence in Afghanistan to stem the violence and the Taliban’s military advances, particularly in rural areas of the country, and largely in the south and the east. But the emergence of an affiliate of the Islamic State group has created a sense of urgency to turn the war around. WHAT HAVE THE LATEST INSIDER ATTACKS LOOKED LIKE AND WHAT DO THEY SAY ABOUT INSURGENTS’ ABILITY TO INFILTRATE? The diverse locations of the two most recent insider attacks shows the depth of...

An uptick in attacks by Afghan National army soldiers against foreign troops would seem a worrisome trend ahead of the deployment of another 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan in the latest attempt by Washington to turn around the protracted war against insurgents. Two so-called insider attacks, in which a soldier in an Afghan National Army uniform turns his weapon on foreign troops, in as many weeks have killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded another seven. Insider attacks have been occurring with deadly regularity since 2011. According to an April report by the Modern War Institute at America’s West Point it was in 2011 that “insider attacks became the preferred war-fighting tactic of the Taliban, an organization that understood well how to apply limited resources for maximum effect.” The report says since 2007, insider attacks have killed 157 NATO personnel and 557 members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. But it also blames many attacks against foreign troops on what it calls cultural friction, where Afghans become infuriated by a perceived insult. In June alone there were two separate attacks on U.S. soldiers by Afghans wearing an Afghan army uniform. In March another insider attack killed three U.S. soldiers. In April, Taliban fighters dressed in Afghan army uniforms passed through several security rings to enter a base in northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province and kill as many as 140 Afghan soldiers. The attacks come as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to bolster Washington’s presence in Afghanistan to stem the violence and the Taliban’s military advances, particularly in rural areas of the country, and largely in the south and the east. But the emergence of an affiliate of the Islamic State group has created a sense of urgency to turn the war around. WHAT HAVE THE LATEST INSIDER ATTACKS LOOKED LIKE AND WHAT DO THEY SAY ABOUT INSURGENTS’ ABILITY TO INFILTRATE? The diverse locations of the two most recent insider attacks shows the depth of...

In her soon-to-be released memoir, I Was Told to Come Alone, Souad Mekhennet, a young Washington Post security correspondent who grew up as a Muslim in Germany recounts her work exploring the roots of Islamic radicalism. Born in Germany to a Turkish mother and a Moroccan father, Souad Mekhennet’s unique cultural identity granted her access to some of the most wanted terrorist operatives in the world where she has attempted to discover “what is in the minds of these young jihadists, and how can we understand and defuse it?” Her travels take her from the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and the Iraqi neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, all the way to the Turkish-Syrian border, encountering with intelligence agents, and secretive meetings with members of the inner circles of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS all along. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her terrifying run-ins with various intelligence services and reveals why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. Returning to Europe, she uncovers the identity of the notorious ISIS executioner “Jihadi John” a British Arab living in London who had been shown on gruesome videos of radicals beheading captives. In France, Belgium, and her native Germany, she reveals how terror has infiltrated the heart of the Western civilization. Based on copious interviews with members of jihadi groups, torture victims, families of men drawn into terrorism, refugees, and desperate citizens, Mekhennet exposes the sources of rage against the West. She is as frustrated with the West’s insistence that all Muslims are terrorists as she is with the horrific image of the West held by indoctrinated jihadi militants, who watch videos of atrocities carried out by Western-backed regimes as part of the recruitment process. Mekhennet is also frustrated by the Western media’s glossing over reality: she wonders, for example, why the uprisings known as...

A SMALL event is sometimes more revealing than a cataclysmic one that grabs headlines. Last month, the government-run Indian Institute of Mass Communication in Delhi became the venue for a distasteful display of the ruling BJP’s ideology. The chief speaker at the provocatively titled conclave, ‘Nationalist Journalism in Today’s Context’ was a police officer notorious for his human rights violations in Chhattisgarh state where a Maoist insurgency is under way. As a pointer possibly to how media is expected to behave in these changed times, the event started with a yagna (ritual worship conducted before a fire). The point of this exercise was simply to cock a snook at the media in general and the liberals in particular. As the institute’s director general said dismissively to outraged students, “If you can listen to the Hurriyat, why can’t we listen to Kalluri [the discredited police from Chhattisgarh]?” To be deliberatively provocative is the leitmotif of the Narendra Modi regime which is constantly testing the limits of outrage. The new normal is scary. Attacks on cow traders and dairy farmers have grown bolder by the day and become routine. Demonetisation of last November, unprecedented in its scale, was another such operation. It was not with any idea of unearthing black money or weeding out corruption as Modi initially claimed while withdrawing 86 per cent of the currency in use but a ruthless exercise in social engineering wrapped in the flag of nationalism. The insane measure inflicted untold hardship on the poor and put the opposition politicians and economists on the back foot while the prime minister mocked them for their lack of patriotism for daring to criticise the policy. As the nation muddled its way through the chaos of a policy that changed daily and sometimes several times in a day, Modi used his minister for information and broadcasting M. Venkaiah Naidu to tell Indians that demonetisation was actually aimed at “ushering in a behavioural change at...

A Chinese state-run newspaper blamed the Indian and Western media on Tuesday for exaggerating the impact of the abduction of two Chinese nationals in Quetta last month. “Some Indian and Western media intend to exaggerate the impacts of the incident,” the Global Times wrote in its editorial. Lee Zing Yang, 24, and Meng Li Si, 26, were abducted in Jinnah Town of the provincial capital on May 24. Later, the Islamic State terrorist group claimed it had killed the abductees. However, the claim could not be verified as yet. “They aim at badmouthing and disrupting China-Pakistan economic cooperation by linking the terror act caused by religious conflict to the political and economic cooperation between the two countries,” the editorial read. According to the paper, South Korea missionaries misguided the two Chinese nationals into preaching Christianity. “Apart from recruiting young people in China, South Korean missionaries send teenagers to conduct missionary activities in Muslim countries,” it said. “Compared to Chinese, more South Koreans have been killed abroad due to risky missionary activities in conservative regions,” it maintained. “The atrocity committed by the Islamic State is appalling,” the editorial read. “But it cannot drive a wedge between China and Pakistan, nor will the construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) be disrupted.” On Monday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was told that the couple belonged to a group of Chinese people who had obtained a business visa for Pakistan but were engaged in “preaching”. However, instead of carrying out any business activity they went to Quetta where they were engaged in evangelical activities under the garb of learning Urdu from a Korean national, Juan Won Seo, who owns the ARK Info Tech Institute. The minister said it was highly unfortunate that a misuse of the terms of business visa contributed to the unfortunate incident of the abduction. He directed secretary interior to investigate...