Al-Qaeda Is Using the War with IS to Plan Its Next Move—in Pakistan

Al-Qaeda’s leadership may not have been happy about Islamic State’s declaration of a new caliphate, but it now wishes to use the current war between IS and the U.S.-led coalition as a smokescreen while it plans its next move. Fortunately for Israel, it is not (yet) al-Qaeda’s top priority. But al-Qaeda is particularly dangerous because it wants to reclaim its stolen thunder, contrary to what some U.S. officials have claimed.

[Al-Qaeda head Ayman al]-Zawahiri . . . is striving to leverage international focus on IS in order to divert attention from his organization’s preparations to take advantage of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of this year. Al-Qaeda . . . also used the Syrian theater to identify and recruit new volunteers with suitable credentials, in order to expand its manpower and train operatives for future operations. That was apparently, the purpose of the “Khorasan Army,” whose existence and objectives were recently unveiled, following the bombardment of its camp in Syria.

These preparations are also reflected in the establishment of the “Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent” (AQIS) organization, whose founding was announced by al-Zawahiri at the beginning of September this year. The declared purpose of the organization is to reinforce jihadist activity in Pakistan, India, Burma, and Bangladesh. According to both official reports from Pakistan and the organization’s own announcements . . . the new organization has already tried to carry out an ambitious and daring attack designed to damage a Pakistani warship and to attack an American destroyer. Action on this scale, had it succeeded as planned, would have caused great damage and cost many lives, in addition to harming the prestige of the fleets of the targeted countries. Furthermore, the planning of such attacks indicates that al-Qaeda is not resting on its laurels, and refutes the assessments by senior American administration officials that al-Qaeda is a spent force.

Read more at Institute for National Security Studies

More about: Al Qaeda, ISIS, Pakistan, War on Terror

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society