P. Buchanan: Fresh Thinking Before Military Spending

Once again, Pat Buchanan nails it. Instead of throwing more money at our military, let's re-examine what it should be used for in the first place, and what it can, and cannot, do.

Fresh Troops -- or Fresh Thinking?

by Patrick J. Buchanan
HumanEvents.com
Posted 03/02/2007

Six years after Donald Rumsfeld agreed to a second tour of duty as secretary of defense, to rebuild the military, Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker told Congress his Army "will break" if not relieved of the present burdens. Colin Powell says the Army is "almost broken." This week, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there is a significant risk that the United States today may be unable to respond quickly and fully to another crisis should it arise.

Howls erupted across the spectrum for more billions for more men for the Army and Marine Corps. What these revelations ought to trigger, however, are hard questions of our leaders and fresh thinking among our elites about the limits of American power and the extent of American commitments.

For, by any measure, Iraq and Afghanistan are not major wars. The United States had twice as many troops in Korea, resisting a million-man Chinese Army, and took 10 times the casualties we have taken in Iran and Afghanistan, and America was not overstretched.

We put three times as many troops in Vietnam, fought longer and took nearly 20 times the casualties we have taken in these two insurgencies, while maintaining 300,000 troops in Europe and 40,000 in Korea. Yet, though we are spending today as much on defense as the next 10 nations combined, the U.S. Army is "about broken."

In a National Review essay, "The Crying Need for a Bigger U.S. Military," ex-Sen. James Talent details what happened to the armed forces that were Ronald Reagan's great legacy to the nation.

"The active-duty Army was cut from 18 divisions during Desert Storm to 10 by 1994 -- its size today. The Navy, which counted 569 ships in the late 1980s, struggles today to sustain a fleet of only 276. And the number of tactical air wings in the Air Force was reduced from 37 at the time of Desert Storm to 20 by the mid-1990s."

Inheriting Reagan's estate, Bill Clinton sold off much of it for the big party of the 1990s. But bemoaning what Clinton did yesterday does not address today's crisis.

What Desert Storm and the Iraq war should teach us is a simple lesson: The U.S. Army and Marines are capable of winning a small war in weeks against a middle-sized power. They are not large enough to wage a long war against a middle-sized power on the Asian continent. While they can defeat an enemy army and seize a capital, they cannot rebuild a nation. Nor are the marginal increases in the U.S. Army now being proposed going to create such a capacity.

Gen. Eric Shinseki said that to defeat and occupy Iraq would have required two to three times the force we sent in. Yet even that would not have prevented or defeated the insurgency we face.

Most Americans realize that our mistake was not just in how the occupation was botched by Paul Bremer -- failure to stop the looting, disbanding the Iraqi Army. The blunder was in attacking a nation that did not attack or threaten us, or any U.S. ally.

Before Congress decides on the enhanced size and new weaponry of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, we need a bottom-up review of U.S. commitments and to begin shedding them rather than adding to them, as we have done, willy-nilly, since the end of the Cold War.

Why, for example, when Congress is demanding that Iraqis take responsibility for defending their own democracy, are we not also demanding that South Korea take responsibility for defending its own democracy? Cannot the South, with twice the North's population and an economy 40 times as large, defend it self?

And as we are not going to fight yet another land war in Asia, why not move all our forces offshore, as Gen. MacArthur urged in 1951?

And as Europe is richer and more populous than we, why not shift responsibility for Europe's defense to the Europeans, and bring the U.S. troops home? This is what Eisenhower urged Kennedy to do -- in 1960.

In the War Party, many wish to confront Russia and extend NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. Are Americans really going to fight Russia in the Black Sea over the Crimea, or to prevent secession of Abkhazia or South Ossetia from Georgia? What concern is that of ours?

Americans welcomed as a godsend the liberation of Eastern Europe. Yet, no president -- not Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Reagan -- ever broke relations with Moscow when Soviets blockaded Berlin, effected the 1948 coup in Prague, crushed the Hungarian Revolution, built the Berlin Wall, snuffed out the Prague Spring or crushed Solidarity.

Now, we are willing to go to war with a Russia with thousands of atomic weapons -- over Estonia. Have we lost our minds?

Before we decide how many ships, planes, guns or troops we need, let us first decide what is so vital to us that we are willing to continue having the planes come in to Dover, and the ambulances rolling in from Andrews to Walter Reed, to defend it.

And there are not many things that can justify that.

Privatization to blame for Walter Reed scandal

We should wait for all the facts to come in, but... Right now, this looks like a classic example of privatization gone wrong. When you outsource/privatize a gov't service to save money, you better be darn sure you get the same or better quality in return -- especially when it comes to services for our active duty soldiers and veterans.

You can bet I'll be following this story... Stay tuned!

Privatization Behind Disaster at Walter Reed Hospital

By Joel Wendland

PoliticalAffairs.net

3-03-07, 9:27 am

The Bush administration's drive to privatize government services and its push to reduce veterans' benefits may be the cause of the disaster at Walter Reed Hospital.

Media reports last week exposed conditions in the VA hospital system. Wounded or sick soldiers are often forced to wait months for much needed services. Patients at Walter Reed Hospital have been forced to live in crumbling rooms with rodent feces and mold, according to one story in the Washington Post.

The Army Times is reporting that Rep. Henry A. Waxman, who chairs the House Government Oversight Committee, has subpoenaed the former commander of Walter Reed, Major General George Weightman, to ask him about a leaked memo that points to the privatization of the hospital as the source of many of the problems.

According to the Army Times, the memo described how privatization caused as many as 250 members of the staff to leave in what appears to be a cost-cutting measure.

A company called IAP Worldwide Service, run by a former Halliburton executive, took a $120 million contract to run portions of the hospital's services called facilities management. Immediately after, facilities management staff was reduced to 50 privately employed workers.

The memo further indicates that Army and Defense Department officials at the highest levels had been made aware of the wretched living conditions at Walter Reed.

Waxman's committee states that the Pentagon under the Bush administration's orders has shown "an ideological commitment to privatize government services" and has consistently sought to replace federal workers with less-skilled, non-unionized, under-trained private staff.

The drive to reduce or gut veterans' service dates from the beginning of the Bush administration but received a public airing in January 2005 when Pentagon official David Chu ironically told the Wall Street Journal (1-25-05) that the cost of veterans' benefits was "hurtful" to national security.

It has long been the policy of the Pentagon to reduce access to services and to mandate that various departments withhold information from veterans about which benefits they may be eligible for. Additionally, the Bush administration has ordered increases in fees for the use of medical benefits to veterans.

So far Gen. Weightman has been fired as head of Walter Reed and the exposure of the scandal has forced Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to pressure Army Secretary Francis Harvey to resign.

Privatization has immeasurably damaged thousands of lives of veterans, many returning from the war in Iraq many others having served over the past decades.

Rep. Waxman's committee needs to expose this situation fully and root out the responsible parties, both in the private sector and the government, no matter how high up the investigation goes.

Without a doubt, the tragedy at Walter Reed and in many VA hospitals mirrors, both ideologically and practically, the administration's drive to gut funding for disaster preparedness that played a large role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its failure to properly respond to the disaster.

We need the full truth about the effect of privatization on veterans' benefits and the VA hospital system, and can't afford to hide behind ideological smokescreens or partisan politics. We also need to know what business or personal relationships motivated the awarding of the Walter Reed facilities management contract to IAP Worldwide Services.

--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net

Intel analysts' new caution post-Iraq

News Analysis: New caution among U.S. intelligence analysts

By Mark Mazzetti

March 2, 2007 | International Herald Tribune

For more than three years, American intelligence officials have insisted that they learned from their mistakes in the months leading to the Iraq war, when murky information about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs was presented as fact and inconclusive judgments were hardened into statements of near certainty.

The more calibrated intelligence assessments that have come to light in recent weeks, particularly on Iran and North Korea, appear to show a new willingness by American spy agencies to concede the limits of their knowledge.

The new caution reflects adherence to what some officials now call "the Powell Rule." That rule is intended to avoid a repetition of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's humiliation after the satellite photos and intercepted communications he presented to the United Nations Security Council as proof that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons turned out to be nothing of the sort.

It was in large part because of the Iraq intelligence debacle that top intelligence officials over the past year have overhauled the way in which they pass judgments about some of the world's most difficult spying targets, including Iran and North Korea. The new operating approach is intended to ensure that intelligence is solid before it is publicly presented, and even then, that clear distinctions are made between facts and inferences.

Intelligence professionals have several motivations for the new approach. Those include protecting their own credibility and ensuring that assessments can stand up to careful scrutiny in the wake of multiple government investigations condemning the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. Officials also said that greater caution had become ever more necessary because of increasing inexperience in the work force; about 50 percent of current intelligence analysts have less than five years of experience.

At the same time, the use of specific, careful language is seen by intelligence professionals as a barrier that can help to prevent intelligence assessments from being exaggerated, twisted or otherwise misused by policy makers to advance specific agendas.

Under the new guidelines, the assessments produced by intelligence agencies must include detailed descriptions of the subjects on which analysts disagree, and analysts must now "show their work" by including in their judgments the chain of logic that led them to their conclusions.

Intelligence analysis has always been more art than science, and in recent statements, American intelligence officials have laid bare the limits of what they believe they know about Iran and North Korea. Officials have said they are certain that Iranian paramilitary groups are providing lethal bomb material to Iraqi Shiite groups, but they do not know whether this support has been approved at the highest levels of government in Tehran.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, Mike McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said that it was possible Iran could produce a nuclear weapon by the beginning of the next decade, but that it was also possible Iran would not develop a weapon until 2015. At the same hearing, another top official acknowledged publicly that the American intelligence agencies were less certain today than they were five years ago about whether North Korea was pursuing a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

John D. Negroponte formalized the new analytical procedures in a directive issued in January, one of his last acts as director of national intelligence. The directive stated that "the analytic process must be as transparent as possible" and that "analysis must be objective and independent of political considerations."

The pre-emptive war doctrine that President Bush has articulated since the Sept. 11 attacks holds that the United States has an obligation take action against security threats before they fully materialize. A corollary embraced by the White House has held that policy makers must assume the worst about the intentions of adversaries, even with imperfect intelligence about their intentions and capabilities.

That worst-case approach was very much on display when Bush said with certainty in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. On North Korea, Bush said in November 2002 that "contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with the desire of developing a weapon."

As intelligence agencies have backed away from those views, some former officials worry that the Iraq experience may cause the pendulum to swing too far in the direction of circumspection. They say that they hope the administration does not accept at face value the denials from North Korea and Iran about their banned weapons programs.

"I worry about that, but I am not willing to accept that doomsday is upon us," said John R. Bolton, who stepped down in December as ambassador to the United Nations after it was clear he would not win Senate confirmation. Bolton said he still believed that policy makers would not allow intelligence analysts' new caution to soften the United States' policies toward its enemies too much.

The intelligence community's renewed emphasis on debate and dissent has been reflected in decisions about which officials earned promotions in the aftermath of the Iraq intelligence failures.

Thomas Fingar, who once ran the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, is now in charge of all analysis for the director of national intelligence.

It was Fingar's State Department office in 2002 that produced one of the most significant dissents to that year's National Intelligence Estimate, now discredited, challenging the majority view that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes to build up its nuclear weapons program.

During an interview late last year, Fingar said it was now his job to ensure there was as much competitive analysis as possible before intelligence reports were completed, if only to avoid a repeat of the 2002 N.I.E. findings, which were pivotal to the Senate vote that authorized the Iraq war.

"The basic idea is to avoid a premature rush to an artificial consensus," Fingar said. "The interesting thing is not when analysts agree. It's when they disagree."

Military chiefs: U.S. has 6 months to win

How many times have we heard from politicians, analysts, and the media "the next 6 months will be critical in Iraq"? Answer: Every month for the past 3 years. These "deadlines" for progress have ceased to mean anything; they're just a way to keep stringing us along.

Military chiefs give US six months to win Iraq war

· Violence expected to rise after UK withdrawal · Troop numbers too low · Coalition is 'disintegrating'
Simon Tisdall
Wednesday February 28, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

An elite team of officers advising US commander General David Petraeus in Baghdad has concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

The officers - combat veterans who are leading experts in counter-insurgency - are charged with implementing the "new way forward" strategy announced by president George Bush on January 10. The plan includes a controversial "surge" of 21,500 additional American troops to establish security in the Iraqi capital and Anbar province.

But the team, known as the "Baghdad brains trust" and ensconced in the heavily fortified Green Zone around the US embassy, is struggling to overcome a range of entrenched problems in what has become a race against time, said a former senior administration official familiar with their deliberations. "They know they are operating under a clock. They know they are going to hear a lot more talk in Washington about 'Plan B' by the autumn - meaning withdrawal. They know the next six-month period is their opportunity. And they say it's getting harder every day," the former official said.

By improving security, the plan's short-term aim is to create time and space for the Iraqi government to bring rival Shia, Sunni and Kurd factions together in a process of national reconciliation, us officials say. If that works within the stipulated timeframe, longer-term schemes for rebuilding Iraq under the so-called "go long" strategy will be set in motion. But the next six months are make-or-break for both the US military and the Iraqi government.

The main obstacles confronting Gen Petraeus's team are:

· Insufficent numbers of troops on the ground
· A "disintegrating" international coalition
· An anticipated upsurge in violence in the south as the British leave
· Morale problems as casualties rise
· A failure of political will in Washington and/or Baghdad

"The scene is very tense. They are working round the clock . Endless cups of tea with the Iraqis," the former senior administration official said. "But they're still trying to figure out what's the plan. The president is expecting progress. But they're thinking, what does he mean? The plan is changing every minute, as all plans do."

The team comprises an unusual mix of combat experience and high academic achievement. It includes Colonel Peter Mansoor, Gen Petraeus's executive officer and a former armoured division commander who holds a PhD in the history of infantry; Col H R McMaster, author of a well-known critique of Vietnam and a seasoned counter-insurgency operations chief; Lt-Col David Kilcullen, a seconded Australian army officer and expert on Islamism; and Col Michael Meese, son of the former US attorney-general, Edwin Meese, who was a member of the ill-fated Iraq Study Group.

Their biggest headache was insufficient numbers of troops on the ground despite the increase ordered by Mr Bush, the former official said. "We don't have the numbers for the counter-insurgency job even with the surge. The word 'surge' is a misnomer. Strategically, tactically, it's not a surge," an American officer said.

According to the US military's revised counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24, authored by Gen Petraeus, the optimum "troop-to-task" ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 US and allied troops in the city alone. Current totals, even including often unreliable Iraqi units, fall short of that number. The deficit is even greater in conflict areas outside Baghdad.

"Additional troops are essential if we are to win," said Lt-Col John Nagel, another Petraeus confidant and co-author of the manual, in an address at the US Naval Institute in San Diego last month. One soldier for every 50 civilians in the most intense conflict areas was key to successful counter-insurgency work . Compounding the manpower problems is an apparently insurmountable shortage of civilian volunteers from the Pentagon, state department and treasury. They are needed to staff the additional provincial reconstruction teams and other aid projects promised by Mr Bush.

The recent British decision to reduced troop levels in southern Iraq, coupled with the actual or anticipated departure of other allies, has heightened the Petraeus team's worries that the international coalition is "disintegrating" even as the US strives to regain the initiative in Iraq, the former official said. Increased violence in the south is now expected, caused in part by the "displacement" of Shia militias forced out of Baghdad by the US crackdown. American and Iraqi forces entered the militant Shia stronghold of Sadr City today for the first time since the surge began. No more major operation have yet been attempted there but "we or the Iraqis are going to have to fight them", one American officer said.

According to a British source, plans are in hand for the possible southwards deployment of 6,000 US troops to compensate for Britain's phased withdrawal and any concomitant upsurge in unrest.

Morale is another key concern in the Green Zone headquarters as US forces prepare for a rise in casualties as the security crackdown gathers pace. In a message to the troops after he assumed overall command last month, Gen Petraeus heaped praise on their sacrifices while warning of more "difficult times" in the months to come.

"We serve in Iraq at a critical time... A decisive moment approaches. Shoulder to shoulder with our Iraqi comrades we will conduct a pivotal campaign to improve security for the Iraqi people. The stakes could not be higher," Gen Petraeus said.

"It's amazing how well morale has held up so far," the former official said. "But the guys know what's being said back home. There is no question morale is gradually being sapped by political debates in Washington."

The advisers are also said to be struggling to prevent the "politicisation" of the surge by the Shia-dominiated government of Nuri al-Maliki. The fear is that any security advances may be exploited to further weaken the position of Baghdad's Sunni minority.

Despite progress this week on a new law sharing Iraq's oil wealth, continuing Shia and Kurdish opposition to measures to ease the post-invasion de-Ba'athification policy that excludes Sunnis from many senior posts is proving intractable. The Petraeus team believes the government is failing to work hard enough to meet other national reconciliation "benchmarks" set by Mr Bush.

Yet it is accepted that the US is asking the Iraqi prime minister to do what most politicians in normal circumstances would refuse to contemplate. "What we're doing is asking Maliki to confront his own powerbase," one officer said.

Possibly the biggest longer-term concern of Gen Petraeus's team is that political will in Washington may collapse just as the military is on the point of making a decisive counter-insurgency breakthrough. According to a senior administration official, speaking this week, this is precisely what happened in the final year of the Vietnam war.

Steven Simon, the national security council's senior director for transnational threats during the Clinton administration, said a final meltdown in political and public backing was likely if the new strategy was not quickly seen to be working. "The implosion of domestic support for the war will compel the disengagement of US forces. It is now just a matter of time," Mr Simon said in a paper written for the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Better to withdraw as a coherent and at least somewhat volitional act than withdraw later in hectic response to public opposition... or to a series of unexpectedly sharp reverses on the ground," he said.

"If it gets really tough in the next few months, it will throw fuel on the fire in Washington," the former official said. "Congress will be emboldened in direct proportion to the trouble in Iraq." If the policy was not judged to be working by Labour Day (the first Monday in September, which marks the start of the new political year), Mr Bush could lose control of the policy to Congress and be forced to begin a phased pull-out, he suggested.

Despite the problems identified by Gen Petraeus and his advisers, a senior Pentagon official said this week that it was too early to gauge the strategy's chances of success - but that preliminary reports were encouraging.

"There are some promising signs. There is a new overall Iraqi commander in Baghdad. A number of joint operations have just begun. The number of political murders has fallen. Iraqi forces are showing up as promised, admittedly a little bit under strength, and are taking up some of the responsibilities that Maliki said he would," the Pentagon official said.

"We have to be realistic. We're not going to stop the suicide bombers and the roadside explosive devices for some time. And the military alone are certainly not going to solve the problem. Maliki has to meet the benchmarks. A civilian surge is needed, too. The Iraqis have to do it themselves."

American officials say they also have rising hopes of a breakthrough in Sunni-dominated Anbar province where tribal chiefs are increasingly hostile to al-Qaida terrorists and foreign jihadis - and are looking for ways to build bridges to moderate Shias. But this week's US decision to join a dialogue on Iraq with Iran and Syria, after previously refusing to do so, is neverhteless seen as an indication of growing administration alarm over the possibility of an historic strategic failure.

Case closed: Iraq war made us less safe

No WMD found. No gains in homeland security. Loss of international credibility, even among our allies. Muslim world inflamed and hateful of America. Tell me again why we invaded Iraq??

How the war on terror made the world a more terrifying place

New figures show dramatic rise in terror attacks worldwide since the invasion of Iraq

By Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn

28 February 2007 | The Independent Online

Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the repeated denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found that the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The study compared the period between 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq with the period since the invasion. The count - excluding the Arab-Israel conflict - shows the number of deaths due to terrorism rose from 729 to 5,420. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine.

Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam [Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week - raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq - the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war an unravelling of security elsewhere.

Last month John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa'ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that " the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa'ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. The research has been based on the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database.

The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5) said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan", he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

The effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts has been influenced according to a number of factors, said the report. Countries with troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the country, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.

Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa'ida and their associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.