Fort Hood: Reaction, Response, and Rejoinder
Commentary on the Fort Hood incident can be categorized three ways: reaction, response, and rejoinder (commentary on the commentary).
Reactions generally consist of pundits pouring their preconceptions over what is known of the facts. These are the least worthy of our time, and rejoinders like this one from Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University in the Fort Hood section of The Politico’s Arena blog dispense with them well:
Of course [Fort Hood] is being politicized; there is no issue that is immune to exploitation by politicians and media commentators. The problem is that there are an infinite number of “lessons” one can draw from a tragic event like this — the strain on our troops from a foolish war, the impact of hateful ideas from the fringe of a great religion (and most religions have them), the individual demons that drove one individual to a violent and senseless act, etc., — and so no limits to the ways it can be used by irresponsible politicians (is that redundant?) and pundits.
My favorite response—by “response,” I mean careful, productive analysis—was written last year as a general admonition about events like this (which at least has terrorist connotations):
Above all else is the imperative to think beyond the passions of those who are hurt, frightened or angry. Policymakers who become caught up in the short-term goals and spectacle of terrorist attacks relinquish the broader historical perspective and phlegmatic approach that is crucial to the reassertion of state power. Their goal must be to think strategically and avoid falling into the trap of reacting narrowly and directly to the violent initiatives taken by these groups.
That’s Audrey Kurth Cronin, Professor of Strategy at the U.S. National War College in her monograph, Ending Terrorism: Lessons for Defeating al-Qaeda.
But I want to turn to a critique leveled against my recent post, ”The Search for Answers in Fort Hood,” which discussed how little Fort Hood positions us to prevent similar incidents in the future. (I hope it was response and not reaction, but readers can judge for themselves.)
A thoughtful Cato colleague emailed me suggesting that there may have been enough indication in Nidal Hasan’s behavior—in particular, correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaki—to stop him before his shooting spree.
There may have been. Current reporting has it that his communications with al-Awlaki were picked up and examined, but because they were about a research paper that he was in fact writing, he was deemed not to merit any further investigation.
This can only be called error with the benefit of hindsight. And it tells us nothing about what might prevent a future attack, which was my subject.
If humans were inert objects, investigators could simply tweak the filter that caused this false negative to occur. They could not only investigate the people who contact known terrorists as they did Nidal Hassan, they could know to disregard claimed academic interests. Poof! The next Nidal Hassan would be thwarted at a small cost to actual researchers.
But future attacks are not like past attacks. Tweaking the filter to eliminate this source of false negatives would simply increase false positives without homing in on the next attacker. Terrorists and terrorist wannabes will change their behavior based on known and imagined measures to thwart them. Nobody’s going to be emailing this al-Awlaki guy for a while.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Obama’s (In)Decision on Afghanistan
According to CBS News, President Barack Obama will send most, if not all, of the 40,000 additional troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested and reportedly plans to keep those troops in Afghanistan for the long-term.
If the CBS report turns out to be true—the White House has backed away, and other news outlets are leaving the story alone for the moment—the president’s decision is disappointing, but expected. Last month, the administration ruled out the notion of a near-term U.S. exit from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States. But if avoiding a perception of weakness is the rationale that the administration is operating under then we have already lost by allowing our enemies to dictate the terms of the war.
Gen. McChrystal’s ambitious strategy hopes to integrate U.S. troops into the Afghan population. These additional troops might reduce violence in the short- to medium-term. But this strategy rests on the presumption that Afghans in heavily contested areas want the protection of foreign troops. The reality might be very different; western forces might instead be perceived as a magnet for violence.
McChrystal’s strategy also presumes that an additional 40,000 troops will be enough. But proponents of an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy need to come clean on the total bill that would be required. For a country the size of Afghanistan, with roughly 31 million people, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine advises between 620,000 to 775,000 counterinsurgents—whether native or foreign. Furthermore, typical counterinsurgency missions require such concentrations of forces for a decade or more. Given these realities, we could soon hear cries of “surge,” “if only,” and “not enough.”
Even if the United States and its allies committed themselves to decades of armed nation building, success against al Qaeda would hardly be guaranteed. After all, in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda would simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.
It is well past time for the United States to adapt means to ends. The choice for President Obama is not between counterterrorism or counterinsurgency; but between counterterrorism and counterterrorism combined with counterinsurgency. Protecting the United States from terrorism does not require U.S. troops to police Afghan villages. Where terrorists do appear, we hardly need to tinker with their communal identities. We can target our enemies with allies on the ground or, if that fails, by relying on timely intelligence for use in targeted airstrikes or small-unit raids.
President Obama’s decision on Afghanistan could define his presidency. If an escalating military strategy leads only to thousands of more deaths, and at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, then that is a bitter legacy indeed.
Bloggingheads on Afghanistan
Last night, CBS reported that President Obama has decided to send “four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops” giving Gen. Stanley McChystal “most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.”
If the story is accurate (and the White House, via National Security Advisor James Jones, says it is not), the bloggingheads diavlog that I recorded with Peter Beinart late Friday, and that went live yesterday afternoon, could be safely filed under “Day Late, Dollar Short.”
But I hope that is not the case for two reasons. First, I continue to hold out hope that President Obama will choose instead to focus our counterterrorism efforts in other ways, and in other places, instead of deepening our involvement in what is already the longest war in our history. And if he hasn’t made up his mind, perhaps my arguments (which build on those of my colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter, and many others) might still have an impact.
Second, if the president has decided to follow the advice of those who called for more troops (most of whom — it is worth noting — were also leading advocates for the disastrous Iraq war), it is important for those of us who harbored doubts to have publicly registered our concerns.
A similar willingness to speak out on the part of some Iraq war skeptics within the foreign policy community was sorely lacking in 2002 and 2003. Perhaps that unhappy experience has reminded people that the time for raising concerns is before, not after, a decision is made to escalate a war.
Report to DoD: Data Mining Won’t Catch Terrorism
Via Secrecy News, “JASON”—a unit of defense contractor the MITRE Corporation—has reported to the Department of Defense on the weakness of data mining for predicting or discovering inchoate terrorist attacks.
“[I]t is simply not possible to validate (evaluate) predictive models of rare events that have not occurred, and unvalidated models cannot be relied upon,” says the report.
In December 2006, Jeff Jonas and I published a paper making the case that predictive modeling won’t discover rare events like terrorism. The paper, Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining, was featured prominently in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing early the next year.
Privacy gives way to appropriate security measures, as the Fourth Amendment suggests where it approves “reasonable” searches and seizures. Given the incapacity of data mining to catch terrorism and the massive data collection required to “mine” for terrorism, data mining for terrorism is a wrongful invasion of Americans’ privacy—and a waste of time.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
1,000 Troops = $1 Billion/Year
There is a useful math lesson buried near the end of Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung’s widely discussed story on an Afghan war game that the Obama administration is using to weigh the costs and risks of competing strategies.
One question being debated is whether more U.S. troops would improve the performance of the Afghan government by providing an important check on corruption and the drug trade, or would they stunt the growth of the Afghan government as U.S. troops and civilians take on more tasks that Afghans might better perform themselves. Another factor is cost. The Pentagon has budgeted about $65 billion to maintain a force of about 68,000 troops, meaning that each additional 1,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan would cost about $1 billion a year.
I haven’t seen this figure before, and it is based upon a back-of-the-envelope calculation that might be undone by economies of scale. It is not obvious, for example, that the first 1,000 troops would cost the same as the last 1,000. Still, it is a reasonable estimate that is apparently being used inside of the Obama administration.
Accepting the number as basically accurate, the question then turns to “Is it worth it?” That can only be answered by weighing the opportunity costs.
If the Obama administration goes along with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops, and therefore chooses to spend additional money on this mission, the administration is saying, in effect, that an expanded troop presence will do more to prevent a repeat of 9/11 than if the money had been spent on countless other missions and programs ostensibly directed to the same purpose.
Count me a skeptic. There is considerable evidence that a large-scale and open-ended troop presence is counterproductive to fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, there have been a number of highly effective counterterrorism programs that cost far, far less than even $1 billion a year. The proponents of a huge troop increase in Afghanistan obviously disagree, and thus implicitly claim that $40 billion is money well spent (for reference, the entire Dept. of Homeland Security budget for FY 2010 will total $42.8 billion).
Let the advocates for a larger troop presence attempt to make that case. At least now we have a tangible measure for weighing competing options. Thanks to Jaffe and DeYoung for shedding some light on a previously under-reported statistic.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Gun Control Masquerading as Counterterrorism
I was unimpressed with the security arguments made by the chairman and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee in a letter to appropriators the other week. Citing the “commando-style” terrorist raid on a train station in Mumbai last year, the letter objected to language in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that would require Amtrak to allow firearms in checked luggage.
But the risk of a commando-style raid does not support—in fact it undermines—the authors’ argument that weapons should be banned on passenger trains. With law-abiding citizens fully disarmed, any terrorist raiders would know that they are more free to cut a deadly swath through an innocent population.
It was counterattack by civilians that prevented a fourth plane from being used as a guided bomb on September 11, 2001. Disarming the law-abiding citizen is contrary to the lesson of that day.
Exiting the Afghan Quagmire
Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, and Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College London, discuss in the Financial Times how we can exit the Afghan quagmire:
The west should therefore pursue a political solution, open negotiations with the Taliban and offer a timetable for a phased withdrawal in return for a ceasefire. This should begin with the military pulling out of specific areas in return for Taliban guarantees not to attack western bases and Afghan authorities in those areas. If the Taliban refuses such terms, then military pressure should continue. The point should not be to eliminate the Taliban – which is impossible – but to persuade it to agree to a deal.
Lodhi and Lieven’s argument echoes one that David Axe, Jason Reich, and I made yesterday on ForeignPolicy.com.
… regime change, and democracy, are not necessary for counterterrorism. Propping up President Hamid Karzai’s Western-style government in Kabul does not make operations against al Qaeda any easier or more successful. If anything, it distracts from the conceptually simpler task of finding and killing terrorists. Without U.S. and NATO protection, Karzai’s regime would, sooner or later, probably fall to the Taliban. But U.S. observers should not equate that eventuality with “losing” the war. The war is against terrorists, not Islamist governments. The United States should be prepared to make peace, and amends, with a resurgent Taliban — and to encourage the group to excise its more extreme elements.
I admit talking to the Taliban sounds weird and scary. But my contention is that there is no shortage of Pashtun militants willing to fight against what they perceive to be a foreign occupation of their region. Certainly the Taliban does not enjoy support among the majority of Pashtuns—as Lodhi and Lieven point out—but neither did the IRA in Northern Ireland or the FLN in Algeria. The point is not exclusively about popularity (although that’s a critical component, along with local legitimacy), but the fact that these indigenous groups are willing to fight the United States and NATO indefinitely. Indeed, it is the western military presence that is driving support for the Taliban both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
Moreover, the notion that we must protect Pakistan from the Taliban is ludicrous. Pakistan’s intelligence service helped create the Taliban and they continue to protect the Afghan Taliban to keep India at bay. From this point of view, deploying more troops would be irrelevant to the fight against al Qaeda and counterproductive in our attempts to pacify the region. For more on what we should do, check this out.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
NYT Columnist, Meet NYT Reporter
In the New York Times this weekend, columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “[W]e may be tired of this ‘war on terrorism,’ but the bad guys are not. They are getting even more ‘creative.’”
On September 26th, the New York Times reported in a story by Scott Shane:
Many students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.
Who’s right? Should we be more concerned or less?
Well, the statements are not inconsistent. But unlike the analysts cited in the news story, columnist Friedman uses loaded terms and broad generalizations like “war on terror”, “bad guys”, and “creative” to misconstrue the nature of the terrorist threat.
Friedman says “war” a dizzying seventeen times in his short column, misdescribing the many different efforts that go into suppressing terrorism, dissuading terrorist recruits, and capturing or killing terrorists.
He lumps all terrorists together as “bad guys” despite expert counsel against assuming they have similar aims and motives, or that they collaborate.
And “creative”?—well, putting a bomb in your keister is creative, but it is not an effective way to harm anyone other than yourself.
But don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. The point is not to dismiss terrorism as a threat. It’s to know that terrorists are fallible, al Qaeda is on the wane, and law enforcement is on the case. In terrorism, we are not confronted by anything close to an existential threat.
Friedman’s column is a reach, and it does a distinctly bad job of working with any of these subtleties. (The only reason I feel compelled to call them “subtleties,” I suppose, is because they seem to remain beyond the grasp of an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful New York Times columnist.)
Is the U.S. Government Behaving Strategically With Regard to Al Qaeda?
To its credit, the Department of Homeland Security distributes important documents via email. (Subscribe on their home page by scrolling down to find the “Subscribe to E-mail Updates:” box in the right column, then select your preferences.)
Yesterday DHS sent me a copy of the written testimony by Michael E. Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing titled: “Eight Years After 9/11: Confronting the Terrorist Threat to the Homeland.”
As I read Leiter’s (relatively brief) testimony, I wondered how well it squares with the strategic counsel offered by Audrey Kurth Cronin, Professor of Strategy at the U.S. National War College, Senior Research Associate in the Changing Character of War Programme at Oxford University, and a participant in Cato’s January counterterrorism strategy conference.
In her Institute for International Strategic Studies paper, “Ending Terrorism: Lessons for Defeating Al-Qaeda,” she offered several counterterrorism strategy pointers:
The first prong of a successful strategy to counter al-Qaeda’s terrorism is to clarify to audiences around the globe exactly what al-Qaeda is and what it is not. This is not just of academic interest. It is partly because there is so much vague use of the name ‘al-Qaeda’ that it seems superhuman and ubiquitious. . . . When politicians and experts employ the term ‘al-Qaeda’ loosely, they help its propagandists to construct and perpetuate their desired image and to mobilise support.
. . .
Violent internal cleavages and bickering are endemic to the al-Qaeda movement, and have been from the outset, and the second prong in a successful strategy against al-Qaeda is consciously to exploit them.
. . .
The third element in a successful strategy against al-Qaeda is to disaggregate the many elements of the movement and develop more sophisticated, targeted counter-terrorism policies tailored to its constituent parts. The aim must be to enlarge the movement’s internal inconsistencies and differences . . . .
At our counterterrorism conference, terrorism expert Marc Sageman similarly said, “We often unify our enemies needlessly. . . . Let’s not unify our enemy and give it strength that way.” (If you don’t watch all of panel III, you can start at minute 66.)
Read Michael E. Leiter’s testimony for yourself and see how well it reflects the counsel of these experts.
PATRIOT Act Provision Used for Drug Cases
The PATRIOT Act contained a number of tools that expanded the power of federal law enforcement officials. One of these, the “sneak and peak” warrant, allows investigators to break into the home or business of the warrant’s target and delay notification of the intrusion until 30 days after the warrant’s expiration. This capability was sold to the American people as a necessary tool to fight terrorism.
In Fiscal Year 2008, federal courts issued 763 “sneak and peak” warrants. Only three were for terrorism cases. Sixty-five percent were drug cases. The report is available here.
Ryan Grim has more on this, including video of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) grilling Assistant Attorney General David Kris.
The Zazi Case: Spread the Good News!
As has been widely reported, federal authorities believe an Aurora, Colorado man named Najibullah Zazi was preparing to commit acts of terrorism in the United States. Ben Friedman has provided some insight into the charge against him.
I don’t know how the case will come out, of course. I take it for what it is: an alleged terror plot. Terrorism is an acute security challenge because people who look like nincompoops to us might be activated by a capable leader and used as “muscle” in a real attack. If authorities act too early, it looks like there was never a threat. If they act too late, they might fail to prevent an attack.
Putting aside the merits, the press reaction to this case seems different from many past cases. Take this story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Along with reporting the possibility of this being the first Al Qaeda cell in the United States since 9/11, it says:
Hundreds of terrorism-related prosecutions, many for far more serious charges than lying to investigators, have been filed by U.S. authorities since the 9/11 attacks. On numerous occasions, U.S. officials have made startling allegations about terrorism suspects, only to later significantly dial back their rhetoric.
I was interested also by the tone of this USA Today story which focused as much on the U.S. government’s issuance of terror alerts as on their number and validity. “Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI and DHS have issued hundreds of similar bulletins,” the story said. It’s easy to see a reporter’s skepticism in that sentence, and his signal to readers that they shouldn’t get too agitated.
My sense — and it is only impressionistic — is that the media are starting to get their feet under them. After eight years of parroting official fear-mongering, serious reporters (I say mostly to exclude cable “news”) are prepared to question what officials tell them. That can only be good. The press plays an important role in digesting information and equipping society to address terrorism along many dimensions, including girding against unnecessary fear and overreaction.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
McCarthy’s World
The NYC/Denver terrorism investigation has Andy McCarthy all riled up.
In this article at National Review, McCarthy says that the risks associated with terrorism require a domestic preventive detention regime where investigators can go to a court with something less than probable cause and detain individuals without charge until they can gather the evidence for an indictment.
This is a pretty bold proposition, given the fact that he lays out in this post on The Corner the power that investigators already have to detain material witnesses while gathering evidence. Not to mention the power to detain allegedly dangerous individuals picked up on relatively minor charges such as lying to federal agents, the current disposition of the NYC/Denver suspects.
Then McCarthy comes full circle in this post, claiming that if this is the fault of a “law enforcement” mindset in counterterrorism, it may be time to consider a domestic intelligence agency akin to Britain’s MI-5. He also blasts the use of non-coercive interrogation “that the Left insists are just as reliable in a ticking-bomb situation as the CIA’s coercive methods.”
There are several problems with this take on domestic counterterrorism.
The first is that the decision to involve a New York imam in the investigation, a step that compromised the operation and forced investigators to make early arrests before all of the co-conspirators could be identified, was made by an intelligence organization, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. This is not the cops of the Counterterrorism Bureau, the law enforcement officers that work with the FBI in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, but a separate intelligence department run by a former CIA official who is openly hostile to the Bureau. The same type of folks that McCarthy wants to put in charge of domestic counterterrorism.
Second, McCarthy’s plug for coercive interrogation is the path advocated in the early years of the Bush administration. This has the deleterious effect (beyond statutory bans on torture and constitutional rights prohibiting the same) of making anything you get from the “third degree” inadmissible in court. To get around this you would have to ask courts to generate a doctrine that allows for evidence collected as a result of coercive interrogation to be admitted in spite of clear constitutional violations. I don’t see any way that this does not seep into general law enforcement, where any potential future crime justifies beating information or confessions out of suspects. This is rolling back civil liberties a hundred years or so.
Third, a domestic prevention regime is destined to run into the problems that the British encountered in Northern Ireland. IRA detainees that were subjected to “special interrogation techniques” and held without charge staged a hunger strike to protest being treated as criminals instead of detainees; their jailers had taken away their civilian clothes and made them wear prison uniforms. As former FBI Agent and counterterrorism expert Mike German says in his book, Thinking Like a Terrorist:
The reasons for the hunger strike reveal much about the IRA and about terrorists in general. They didn’t strike over the anti-Catholic discrimination that led to the civil rights movement. They didn’t strike over the RUC’s police abuse or the stationing of British troops in Northern Ireland. They didn’t strike over being arrested without charges, interned, and tortured. They didn’t strike over indefinite detentions or even over Bloody Sunday. They knew all those things helped their cause. They went on hunger strike because the British government was going to make them look like criminals.
If you fear Islamic terrorists, let investigators do their job and find the people who would harm the public. This is a problem that will be solved over decades of diligent investigation, sitting on wiretaps, infiltrating cells, and prosecuting dangerous people. Distorting the domestic criminal justice system out of hysteria over potential attacks will make martyrs out of detainees and torture victims and encourage a broader spectrum of people to violence.
Bagram, Habeas, and the Rule of Law
Andrew C. McCarthy has an article up at National Review criticizing a recent decision by Obama administration officials to improve the detention procedures in Bagram, Afghanistan.
McCarthy calls the decision an example of pandering to a “despotic” judiciary that is imposing its will on a war that should be run by the political branches. McCarthy’s essay is factually misleading, ignores the history of wartime detention in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and encourages the President to ignore national security decisions coming out of the federal courts.
More details after the jump.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Another Day, Another Tranche of Afghanistan Reading Material
Item: The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of concerned scholars and authors who work on international security and U.S. foreign policy, have issued an open letter to President Obama warning him not to expand U.S. involvement in that country. (Full disclosure: I was a signatory.) The list of signatories includes many of the scholars who urged President Bush not to invade Iraq. Politico was the first to run the story: see here.
Item: Via Michael Cohen, former CIA counterterrorism honcho Paul Pillar takes to the pages of the Washington Post to think through the concept of “safe havens” in Afghanistan. His conclusion?
Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them. But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key — and flawed — assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.
The Obama administration and other participants in the debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that horror. It would instead mean presenting a convincing case about how such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the United States. That case has not yet been made.
Item: Michael Crowley offers a piece in the New Republic that strongly implies but doesn’t quite come out and say that President Obama should ignore the skeptics and the political risks and wade deeper into Afghanistan. The piece swallows whole the conventional wisdom narrative on Iraq–that the Surge amounted not to a combination of defining down “victory” and appeasement of Sunni tribes but rather a borderline miracle whereby Gen. Petraeus loosed his wonder-working COIN doctrine on the maelstrom of violence in that country and produced a strategic victory. Crowley then uses this narrative to frame the decision before President Obama. Still, he writes
[I]f the definition of success isn’t clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become “the central front in the war on terror” and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don’t publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. “The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” Riedel said. “[T]he stakes are enormous.”
Obama may have one last thing in common with Bush: personal pride. Bush was determined to prevail in Iraq because he had invaded it. And, while Obama, of course, had nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan, he has long supported the campaign there–including during the presidential campaign as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq war. Speaking before a group of veterans last month, Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity”–a phrase which politically invests him deeper in the fight. “The president has boxed himself in,” says one person who has advised the administration on military strategy. “The worst possible place to be is that our justification for being in a war is that we’re in a war.”
Lots to chew on.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
The Coast Guard Kerfuffle: Normalcy Breeds Overreaction
Terrorists are weak actors who use violence to induce overreaction on the part of their stronger victims. That lesson was on display today when someone overhearing radio traffic from a routine Potomac River Coast Guard exercise misinterpreted it and alerted the media. Among the results was a 20-minute grounding of planes at Reagan Airport.
The good news is that the country is relatively safe. Americans and the national security establishment are tuned to the threat of terrorism. No attack to rival 9/11 ever occurred, and it’s unlikely that one ever will.
But the 9/11 attacks had a dastardly effect. To match the results of those attacks, we imagined that terrorists had outsized technical skills, support networks, and insights. Vigilance and continued antiterror efforts will ensure that they never do.
The bad news is that the government has never issued any reassuring signals. American society remains on edge and predisposed to overreact when something happens and — in this case — when nothing happened. The “scare” produced by the Coast Guard exercise illustrates how sensitive the country remains to terror fears.
Despite improved rhetoric and the promise of sensible, strategic counterterrorism, the Obama administration has yet to give the country confidence in its security. It has not articulated its counterterrorism plan and it has not created or implemented a terrorism communications plan. Unlike health care and education, these are responsibilities of the federal chief executive.
Without a strategy and communications plan in place, the administration will be at a loss to keep the nation on an even keel if and when any real terror incident occurs. The Obama administration must plan, and must be seen as having planned, if it is to prevent any future terrorism event from needlessly harming the country with panicky overreaction.
Based on what I’ve read, I see no fault in what the Coast Guard did, and I hope their review of the incident produces no changes in their procedures other than perhaps better preparation to quell overreaction.
How Much for a Schlub?
Over at The Corner, Rich Lowry put up a post on detainee interrogations that I responded to. Follow-up posts are available here and here.
Jay Nordlinger steps in to offer the view that, with terrorists, the difference between a “schlub” and a “monster” isn’t much. A pathetic radical can cause a lot of damage with just a little bit of luck.
This may be true, but there is a valuable ends-means calculation that must be considered (also addressed in Julian Sanchez’s post here).
How many times must we use coercive interrogation and get nothing, suffering the inevitable backlash in public opinion and enemy recruiting, for each intelligence success? If you are willing to torture a dozen/hundred/thousand men for each schlub, you will motivate a sufficient number of monsters to make a small tactical victory a pyrrhic one at best, and a strategic debacle at worst.
The big picture trends against torture, or any use of force that crosses the line between mutual combat and violating human rights, or the use of indiscriminate force. The attack on September 11, 2001 crossed that line, and we justifiably responded with military action. The use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT’s) crossed that line, and the enemy used it as propaganda fodder.
The British faced a parallel situation in Northern Ireland in 1971. After employing mass arrests that stoked the fires behind the IRA, the Brits employed “special interrogation techniques.” Former FBI Special Agent and successful terrorist group infiltrator Mike German covers this in his book, Thinking Like a Terrorist (citing Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA):
Among the methods used on the internees were the “five techniques”: placing a hood over the head; forcing the internee to stand spreadeagled against a wall for long periods; denying regular sleep patterns; providing irregular and limited food and water; and subjecting people to white noise in the form of a constant humming sound.
Sound familiar? Violence in Northern Ireland increased as a result of these practices. The Brits crossed the line again on Bloody Sunday when they fired into a crowd of peaceful protestors (possibly a response to IRA gunfire at British paratroopers). The tide shifted in favor of the IRA until they broke the unwritten rules of the game on Bloody Friday, detonating twenty-two bombs in Belfast that killed nine people. Tactically masterful, but a political disaster.
The Bush administration changed tactics in its second term in office, discarding EIT’s and moving away from physical coercion of detainees. This was a sensible decision, and there is no reason for the Obama administration to change course.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Meghan Cox Gurdon: Doesn’t Understand Terrorism
In goading victim states to overreact, one of the things terrorists seek is confirmation of their ideological narrative. The story Islamist terrorists tell themselves and others is that the United States is a wicked power, an occupier, a Crusader, and an exploiter of Muslims. Terrorists are energized, and they have an easier time with recruiting and maintaining support, when the United States does things that make these charges look true.
Lacking this insight, Washington Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon interprets recent events wrongly in almost every respect. Her column is called “These are Good Times for Terrorists.”
Rather than scoring a terrorist “win,” the compassionate release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi doesn’t square with Western cruelty. Thus—to the extent it matters to terrorists—it confounds their version of events. Terrorists don’t really do a “how much time will I serve” calculation, so the release probably doesn’t matter much. In terms of individual justice, it may have been wrong, but not in terms of counterterrorism strategy.
Gurdon cites flagging U.S. will in Afghanistan as a sign of terrorist success, and it would provide short-term gains to the Taliban if the United States exited the field. But with lessened U.S. violence in the area, and with the recent election giving a stronger toehold to legitimate government, U.S. military caution stands to deal terrorism strategic setbacks.
Where Gurdon really gets it wrong—and purposefully so—is in her interpretation of Attorney General Holder’s move to investigate allegations of torture by U.S. authorities: “[M]ilitants now know that, should they be apprehended, American interrogators cannot so much as wave a loaded gun or blow cigar smoke in their faces lest they face the disciplinary wrath of their own authorities.”
These slights are not the gravamen of the torture allegations, and Gurdon undoubtedly knows that. What she may not know is that abuse of terror suspects is good for terrorism: It confirms the ideological narrative holding that the United States is an evil, abusive power. Meticulous fair treatment of terror suspects, on the other hand—as ordinary criminals—is the fate terrorists loathe. This robs them of their claim on moral authority and makes their struggle boring.
Recall that the first of the “five demands” in the 1981 IRA hunger strike was the right not to wear a prison uniform. Treating them as ordinary criminals would sap their legitimacy and the strength of their challenge to incumbent power in the eyes of key audiences.
It would have been far, far better for the United States and CIA interrogators not to have lost their cool after the 9/11 attacks. We handed terrorism many swords with our responses. But exposing error to light and punishing proven wrongdoing confirms our ideology: fealty to the rule of law.
Meghan Gurdon doesn’t understand terrorism. And she takes a real header with her flabby attempt to associate alleged CIA torture and other missteps with the constitution:
The Republic rests on the Constitution, but the reverse is also true; the Constitution and all the benign and enlightened principles it embodies rest on the continued strength and moral will of the Republic.
No, Meghan. The republic, its strength, and its moral will all rest on the constitution.
The Zero Percent Doctrine
I was never a fan of Dick Cheney’s one percent doctrine.
According to Ron Suskind, after 9/11 Cheney explained to law enforcement and intelligence officials that they should treat even the one percent chance of a terrorist attack as a mathematical certainty. The particular case was of a Pakistani nuclear scientist helping al-Qaeda to acquire a nuclear bomb, but the standard became a shorthand for U.S. counterterror efforts generally. No scale of effort would be too great. Better to chase down 100 leads, 99 of which turn out to be bogus, because finding just that one nugget would have been worth the level of effort.
Now we have evidence that the federal government is chasing down far more than 99 blind alleys for just one lead. From today’s front-page story in the New York Times, Eric Schmitt explains how the FBI has adapted and evolved since 9/11:
The bureau now ranks fighting terrorism as its No. 1 priority. It has doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly 5,000 people, and has created new squads across the country that focus more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes.
But the manpower costs of this focus are steep, and the benefits not always clear. Of the 5,500 leads that the squad has pursued since it was formed five years ago, only 5 percent have been found credible enough to be sent to permanent F.B.I. squads for longer-term investigations, said Supervisory Special Agent Kristen von KleinSmid, head of the squad. Only a handful of those cases have resulted in criminal prosecutions or other law enforcement action, and none have foiled a specific terrorist plot, the authorities acknowledge. (Emphasis mine.)
So, just to review:
- 5,500 leads over 5 years
- 5 percent deemed credible
- “A handful” technically would mean five or less, but charitably might total a few dozen. Still, that translates to far less than 1 percent of leads investigated resulting in a criminal prosecution.
But, and here’s the kicker,
- None – zero, zip, nada – foiled a specific terrorist plot.
On the face of it, this seems like a waste of time and resources that should be spent elsewhere.
Bringing the States Back In
It’s an annoying, hackneyed trope of foreign policy types to say “if you want to understand X, you have to understand Y.” That said, let me engage in a little bit of it.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, we’re supposed to believe, is about terrorism, failed states, economic development, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human rights, and some other stuff. And to an extent, it is about each of those things. But to my mind, if you want to get a handle on what’s driving events over there, and on its historical status as a plaything of regional and extraregional powers, you ought to read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The themes that permeate the article are familiar: States as the primary actors in international politics, their uncertainty about other states’ intentions, the fundamental zero-sumness of security competition…somebody should cook up a theory or two on this stuff.
Eventually–although in fairness, God only knows when–we’re going to leave Afghanistan. When that happens, India and Pakistan are still going to live in the neighborhood. They’d each prefer to have lots of influence in Afghanistan, and to preclude the other from having too much. Accordingly, they’re both trying to set up structures and relationships that would, in the ideal scenario, let them control Afghanistan. In a less-than-ideal scenario, they’d like enough influence to undermine the other’s control of the country. Until you grasp that nettle, you’re really just fumbling around in the dark.
Find a solution for that in your COIN manual.
TSA Search Overturned
A federal judge just threw out three fake passports discovered by a Transportation Security Agency (TSA) screener, holding that the search exceeded the TSA’s aviation security mission. (H/T Bruce Schneier)
This is long overdue; the TSA has moved beyond its original mandate and is now conducting searches for “contraband.” The search for anything that seems suspicious can quickly turn into an inquisition at the security checkpoint. Campaign for Liberty staffer Steven Bierfeldt experienced this at the St. Louis airport, and is now suing to prevent future searches beyond what is necessary for aviation security.
The invasive searches don’t add much to airline security anyway. Just as GAO investigators consistently defeat security at federal buildings, TSA screeners often fail to find fake explosives on security test teams.
As Bruce Schneier points out in his excellent book, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, the two effective changes in airline security since September 11, 2001 have been (1) hardening of cockpit doors; and (2) airline passengers will resist because they know that their hijackers are playing for keeps.
Schneier spoke at Cato’s two-day conference on counterterrorism in January. Video at the link.
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