Successes in Pakistan
Eli Lake reports that we’re managing to kill al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan faster than they can gain new recruits. It’s hard for me to assess whether or not that’s true, but for it to be true what you need is basically very accurate intelligence—you need to kill the people you want to kill, but not be blowing so much stuff up that your actions prove counterproductive:
Mr. Munoz, who is now an analyst at the Rand Corporation, added that one reason for the success of the attacks has been the CIA’s recruitment of local sources in the Pashtun border area.
“The reason why the Predator strikes are so precise is in part the technological means of espionage, but also the informants on the ground,” he said. “It is the combination of the two that allows us to do the Predator strikes, which is one of the most effective things we have done. We have decimated their leadership. It is the result of a systematic continuous campaign.”
Again, I don’t really know whether this is true or not. But if it is true, it seems to me to seriously cast doubt on the assertion that protecting the United States from al-Qaeda—or protecting the Pakistani state from collapse—requires us to establish effective physical control over 100 percent of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Pakistani officials appear to have captured one of the key Taliban figures in the Swat Valley. The moral of the Swat Valley story, it seems to me, is that insofar as the Pakistani state is motivated to take on radicals—as the incursion into Swat seems to have made them—it has the ability to beat them. But Pakistan’s perception of what Pakistani interests requires just doesn’t happen to be the same as what our perception of our interests requires.
Meanwhile, Senate Armed Forces Carl Levin is joining Nancy Pelosi in expressing serious skepticism about the wisdom of deploying more forces to Afghanistan. Pelosi never seems to get any credit from anyone over this, but before she was Speaker she was Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee and thus, like Levin, has the kind of background that normally gets you taken seriously as a national security policy thinker on the Hill. The problem, of course, is that both Levin and Pelosi have a record of taking “unserious” stands like “we shouldn’t invade Iraq.”
14 Responses to “Successes in Pakistan”
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September 11th, 2009 at 11:36 am
“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” – Donald Rumsfeld regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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Personally I find it difficult to believe anyone knows what the hell is going on in that region of the world. Every assertion, press release, testimony, leak or anything else is highly suspect. Or lies. More likely lies.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Eli Lake? Jesus, Matt.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Pelosi never seems to get any credit from anyone over this, but before she was Speaker she was Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee and thus, like Levin, has the kind of background that normally gets you taken seriously as a national security policy thinker on the Hill.
Normally, yes, but she IS a girl. And from San Francisco. Hence she is fundamentally unserious….
September 11th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
like Matt, I don’t know how seriously to take this stuff. On the other hand, if it is true, you do need intelligence to make it work. And if we withdraw, our intelligence on the ground will only get worse.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
“Eli Lake reports…”
Sorry, you lost me.
(Scroll over link, see washingtontimes.com)
Yeah, not even going to bother. If it’s a real phenomenon, then a real journalist will eventually pick up on it, and then we can talk about it.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Normally, The big problem with spies is arranging some means for them to communicate from the field without being detected. You can transmit to them without problem — but if they transmit back, they can be detected and located. Look, e,g, at how British spies in WWII were located by Gestapo radio direction finders.
However, Taliban and Al Qaeda don’t have much in the way of electronic countermeasures gear. (Hussein did not either –which is why Bush’s claim of him being a “hard target” and the reason CIA couldn’t infiltrate Iraq to find the WMDs was bullshit.)
So little Kim can sneak out into the bush, dig up a transmitter, and call in reports at relatively low risk — so long as the Russians cooperate and don’t tip off the Taliban. heh heh
September 11th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
George W Bush and Dick Cheney couldn’t subdue Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, of course, because they didn’t WANT to subdue Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were WONDERFUL EXCUSES to double the US military budget (Northrup Grumman says thank you via campaign donations) and to use the US military to do all kinds of useful favors for Big Oil.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I wonder if Bin Laden has been hiding out all this time at the same secure, undisclosed location that Dick Cheney used. Because –aside from Dick Cheney — I can’t think of anyone who has done more for Big Oil’s agenda than Bin Ladin.
Sure has fucked the rest of us, however.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Nothing new to add. Just trying to catch up with Don Williams on post quantity.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Done.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
The MIC/zionist partnership is pretty much invincible in DC.
They can get utter bullshit repeated in the media ad nauseum, e.g. Iran, appropriate mountains of money for their favorite charities and play war games all over the world.
And they enforce virtually complete silence from supposed liberal voices.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
ron- and I’m so old I can remember when subverting your country’s foreign policy in the interests of a foreign power was considered to be BAD thing. How times change.
September 12th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Are you kidding me? Killed over 800 civilians and how many Al-Qaida/Talibans you have killed less then 10, some criteria for success you have got there. This indiscriminate murder of civilians is only providing them with more recruits. Stop the BS.
September 14th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The new development here seems to be using sources on the ground near the targets. Lack of this directly resulted in the large number of civilian deaths. So this is a significant improvement.
However, the ability to recruit such sources depends on our looking like we are in control (at least as much in control as anyone else). The quality of such sources is also dependent on our control; we won’t know who are the credible sources unless we have people on the ground who get to know the locals.
Of course, if we are seen as just propping up the corrupt central government, then we get no cooperation and no good intelligence.