For Obama, Peace in the Morning, War in the Afternoon
Hours after thanking the world for the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, President Obama will gather with his war advisers to ponder sending 60,000 more troops into a country where our national security objectives are unclear at best.
Instead of embracing General McChrystal’s proposal for a substantial increase in the U.S. military presence — or even adopting a “McChrystal-Light” strategy — the Obama administration should begin a phased withdrawal of troops over the next 18 months, retaining only a small military footprint relying on special forces personnel. Otherwise, America will be entangled for years — or decades — in pursuit of unattainable goals.
We need to “define success down” in Afghanistan. That means abandoning any notion of transforming ethnically fractured, pre-industrial Afghanistan into a modern, cohesive nation state. It also means reversing the drift in Washington’s strategy over the past eight years that has gradually made the Taliban (a parochial Pashtun insurgent movement), rather than al Qaeda, America’s primary enemy in Afghanistan. A more modest and realistic strategy means even abandoning the goal of a definitive victory over al Qaeda itself.
Instead, we need to treat the terrorist threat that al Qaeda poses as a chronic, but manageable, security problem. Foreign policy, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Containing and weakening al Qaeda may be possible, but sustaining a large-scale, long-term occupation of Afghanistan and creating a modern, democratic country is not.
More here:
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.)
Rory Stewart on the Deep Confusion Underpinning Our Afghanistan Strategy
Rory Stewart has a terrific piece in the London Review of Books arguing that Beltway foreign-policy thinkers are “minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals” when it comes to Afghanistan:
Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’
These connections are global: in Obama’s words, ‘our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others.’ Or, as a British foreign minister recently rephrased it, ‘our security depends on their development.’ Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.’
This policy rests on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state…
Stewart’s prognosis is at once dispiriting and fortifying. On the one hand, “it is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.” More sharply, “30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.” On the other, “the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole.” Why not?
It would require far fewer international troops and planes than we have today to make it very difficult for the Taliban to gather a conventional army as they did in 1996 and drive tanks and artillery up the main road to Kabul.
Even if – as seems most unlikely – the Taliban were to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security. Would they repeat their error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaida? And how safe would this safe haven be? They could give al-Qaida land for a camp but how would they defend it against predators or US special forces? And does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?
So what on earth are we doing? “No politician wants to be perceived to have underestimated, or failed to address, a terrorist threat; or to write off the ‘blood and treasure’ that we have sunk into Afghanistan; or to admit defeat. Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble; Obama’s motto is not ‘no we can’t;’ soldiers are not trained to admit defeat or to say a mission is impossible.”
Mike German on ‘Intelligence’ Reports
On the ACLU blog (”because freedom can’t blog itself”), Mike German has a great write-up that captures the depth of error in recent DHS “intelligence” reports on ideological groups.
German shows that any ideology can be targeted if the national security bureaucracy comes to use activism as a proxy or precursor for crime and terrorism:
A Texas fusion center warned about a terrorist threat from “the international far Left,” the Department of Homeland Security and a Missouri fusion center warned of threats posed by right-wing ideologues, and a Virginia fusion center saw threats from across the political spectrum and called certain colleges and religious groups “nodes of radicalization.” These are all examples of domestic security gone wrong.
“Gone wrong” means weak in theory, threatening to liberty, and not helpful to law enforcement:
If these “intelligence” reports described recent crimes and the people who perpetrated them, there would be little problem from a civil rights perspective, and it could actually be helpful to the average police officer. Instead, they have followed a “radicalization” theory popularized by the NYPD (PDF). That theory postulates that there is a “path” to terrorism that includes the adoption of certain beliefs, and political, religious, or social activism is viewed as another step toward violence. Actual empirical studies of terrorism conducted in the Netherlands and Britain refute this theory, but the idea that hard-to-find terrorists can be caught by spying on easy-to-find activists appears too hard to resist to U.S. law enforcement.
The takeaway: “Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties and a wholly ineffective use of federal security resources.”
Mike German was a participant in our January conference on counterterrorism strategy.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Getting the Opponent to React in Foolish and Self-Defeating Ways Is One of the Primary Goals of Most Terror Campaigns
Stephen Walt has a great blog post up at ForeignPolicy.com.
I particularly appreciate how he recognizes that terrorists seek and profit from overreaction on the part of the victim state:
If our leaders react to every terrorist incident as if it’s a monumental disaster, and if they hype the terrorist threat for political advantage — as George Bush and Dick Cheney did — the public will surely respond by demanding that we throw more resources at the problem than is prudent. Getting the opponent to react in foolish and self-defeating ways is one of the primary goals of most terror campaigns, of course, because these blunders can help the terrorists win victories that they could not achieve otherwise. We did more damage to ourselves when we invaded Iraq than Osama bin Laden accomplished on 9/11, and an open-ended commitment in Central Asia could easily compound that error.
You don’t have to believe that the Bush Administration wrongly sought political advantage – they may have believed the hype or believed that hyping threats was good policy – to recognize that hyping terror threats advances terrorists’ goals and damages our own interests.
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