As far as I can tell the Khorasan Group is a jihadist group in Syria with ties to al-Qaeda. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khorasan_(Islamic_group) The al-nusra front is the official Syrian cell of al-Qaeda http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nusra_Front And the Islamic State is an offshoot of what was once al-Qaeda in Iraq and has a substantial presence in Syria http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant So my question is who is the bigger threat and who should the US focus it's attacks on?
Granny says, "Dat's right - is all dem Mooslamics doin' all the killin'... 4 Sunni Muslim Groups Responsible for 66% of All 17,958 Terror Killings in 2013 November 19, 2014 The number of people killed by terrorists worldwide in 2013 rose by 60 percent compared to the previous year from 11,133 to 17,958 with four Sunni Muslim extremist groups responsible for two-thirds of all fatalities, according to a comprehensive annual study.
Stop speaking about the threat of a vast variety of terrorist organization!!! Just try to find the answer to these questions: " Who finance this military organization? Who train them? Where do they get the US weapons?" We don't even know where is Khorasan situated, while our taxes are spending for unclear purposes.
Why are any of these our problem? The groups you name haven't carried out any attacks in the US. We don't seem to have a dog in this fight. Who asked us to be the world cops? Since we don't seem to be threatened, perhaps we should at least get a mandate from the UN or permission from some country threatened before we go spending money and lives like drunken sailors.
Neither did the Taliban for over a decade. As far as being "world cops", why did we go to war with Hitler? He did nothing to us, and had little to no capability to do anything to us, so why did we attack him? How about being world cops for basic human decency? How about to stop the murder of huge numbers of civilians, no matter where they are? Or do you only give a damn about yourself and nobody else? Some of us actually care about others. And seeing what happens in places like Darfur, Cambodia, the Middle East, and a great many other places in the world makes our blood boil and we want to do something about it. If you do not want to do anything about it, feel free to sit at home in your chair and do nothing. That is all the majority of those who whine and complain do anyways.
Well if I were to rank them as most dangerous to the US, it would be: 1. Khorasan Group 2. Islamic State 3. Al-Nusra Front. The Khorasan group, from what I've read, isn't really a separate group so much as it's a working group of Al Qaeda composed of experienced terrorists working on putting together terrorist operations. The Islamic State controls real estate, lots of money, and an actual military, and they want to commit or encourage terrorist attacks, so those two need to be taken out. Al-Nusra is probably more of an immediate threat to al-Assad than us at the moment.
Terrorist groups are often in a symbiotic relationship with some form of state, either factual (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc). In one of the most famous, Al-Qaeda was essentially the "Intelligence-Counter-Intelligence-Assassination" arm of the Taliban, in addition to training their special operatives. This was a symbiotic agreement that benefits both organizations. Taliban gave AQ manpower, access to weapons, training locations, and access to some state sources. AQ gave the Taliban a kind of International Espionage Organization that let them gather intelligence throughout much of the world, in addition to deniable assets for attacks and assassinations (most spectacularly Ahmad Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001). In this case, Islamic State has become the "State Sponsor", and AQ and Khorasan are fulfilling the same kinds of roles they did in pre-911 Afghanistan (although with a larger ground force). Al-Nusra is more in the form of a "Fellow Traveler" organization which is "self-proclaimed" AQ but actually has little to no true affiliation with the organization. Militant Islamic fighters throughout the world have largely adopted the "AQ Brand" as a kind of generic label, even if they have no connection to the group or it's goals. Releases by Bin Laden in his final months even show how frustrated he was by groups he had never heard of suddenly adopting "the AQ name" and he was trying to find ways to stop this from happening. And it is not unlike the alphabet soup of organizations in the 1960's through 1990's that added "Palestinian" and "Liberation" onto their names, even if they had not a damned thing to do with Palestine or the PLO. Kind of like how Pepsi-Cola is to Coca-Cola, is the relation between the PLO and the PLAF, PFLP, PIJ, PPSF, and another couple of dozen similar organizations. The Achille Lauro hijacking was done by the Palestinian Liberation Front for example, or PLF. Venezuelan Ilich "Carlos the Jackal" Sanchez worked for the PLFP, even though he was from Venezuela of Spanish descent and from all indications could not have cared less about Palestine. He was a radical Marxist who was doing attacks for his own goals, they just happened to also be goals thought to advance the Palestinian cause.
The Taliban never attacked the US. They refused to hand over bin Laden. That was our casus bellum As I recall, Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around. It was the decision of the Allies at the time that the situation in Europe was to be given priority over the situation in the Pacific. What? Haven't you read American history? How can we claim to be world cops for human decency when we supported Pinochet, installed the Shah of Iran over a popularly elected gov't and supported his brutality, ignore repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and historically use our military to further our economic interests (check the history of United Fruit). Given that we cause things like those as well kinda means we should clean our own house first. For instance, we supported the Taliban when they were still the Mujahedeen because they were fighting the Soviets. We supported Saddam Hussein When he fought the Iranians: not only did we ignore his use of chemical weapons at that time, but we supplied him with them. When we do things like that, we make our claim to the moral high ground laughable. Objecting to spending money to no good purpose is not whining. Thinking we do not have the moral standing to pass judgement on another country is not a complaint. It seems to me you are doing the whining and complaining about things that aren't even happening to you! Shall I take that to mean you're going to sit in your chair and do nothing, or perhaps send someone else to do something?
AQ was essentially the Intelligence and Special Operations segment of the Taliban. And the 9-11 attack was only one of many attacks carried out by AQ for a major offensive underway by the Taliban at the time. And what did that matter to us? What could Germany do to the US? Could it carry out any kind of attack? Could it bomb our cities or send an invasion force? No and no. It was no threat, we could simply have ignored them. But we did not, did we? Yea, based on this I can see your only interest is political. First of all, we did not support the Taliban, the Taliban was not the Mujahedeen. The Taliban was primarily formed around a core of primarily mercenary forces known as the "Afghan Arabs", primarily from the Persian Gulf region. They and their backers were primarily from other nations and the Taliban formed after the conflict ended as a core of fundamentalist fanatics. Pakistan (officially) and Saudi Arabia (unofficially) were the main backers of this faction. Those we supported would eventually band together and form what is now known as the Northern Alliance. These were bitter enemies of the Taliban, and these were the two factions involved in a civil war in 2001 when we got involved. Let me know when you actually want to learn something about the factions involved in the Soviet-Afghan War, who backed who, and which became which. Because you are simply throwing them all into a single box and not making any differences between groups and support. I guess Afghans and Iranians are simply more Arabs to you though.
Show documentation for this claim. It seems the Taliban would have been foolish to pick a needless fight with the US, given the way they collapsed in front of our invasion. There were weapons platforms Germany had called U-boats. They attacked our shipping with these U-boats. This harmed the US by harming its trade. So yes, Germany could and did harm the US even prior to their declaration of war by harming US trade. Not really. I am questioning the judgement of our leadership. Look up the history of the Taliban. The mujahideen is where they got their start. Are you trying to claim no US aid went to the mujahideen? Because that would be a false statement. The Taliban movement started with the mujahideen. We got involved in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. We were pro-Islam at the time. This was because of our anti-communist stance. In essence we did not see the danger in allying ourselves to terrorists against what we thought was a greater foe. I will not accuse you of ignorance, but I feel you are ignoring key facts in forming your opinion.
Why focus? To me it depends on the proximity of our aircraft carriers to the enemy du jour. We don't spend $700,000,000,000/year to focus on individual bands of camel jockeys.
