Matt Yglesias

New Bin Laden Tape

Osama bin Laden seems to have dropped a new audiotape. The early highlights:

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden described President Barack Obama as “powerless” to stop the war in Afghanistan and threatened to step up guerrilla warfare there in a new audiotape released to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

In the 11-minute tape, addressed to the American people, bin Laden said Obama is only following the warlike policies of his predecessor George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and he urged Americans to “liberate” themselves from the influence of “neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

Two noteworthy points here. One is that the odd framing of Obama as “powerless”—rather than simply unwilling—to stop the war in Afghanistan highlights the extent to which Obama is a PR asset for the United States. It’s difficult for bin Laden to take him on directly, so instead he suggests he’s not really running things. Also a reminder here that the war in Afghanistan is viewed skeptically by most Muslims and that a really prolonged US engagement there runs the risk of inflaming broader sentiment against us.

Second, is that OBL didn’t used to lean very heavily on the Israel issue in his rhetoric. After all, there are lots of militant anti-Israel groups out there. The key conceit of al-Qaeda is that those groups are thinking way too small, and people need to join into a much more grandiose war than an effort to destroy a very small country. I think this reflects al-Qaeda’s recent difficulty recruiting, as you can think of this as bin Laden shifting to a kind of lowest common denominator appeal. We see here that the indifference to Palestinian suffering that’s considered de rigeur by many in American politics is a key strategic vulnerability of the United States; when the well is running dry, this is something people looking to rally recruits against us turn to.

Good News on Al-Qaeda

Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian say AQ Central in Pakistan is actually not in such hot shape:

Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow’s eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to “affiliates” or “franchises” in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

That’s via Andrew Exum, who highlights the fact that contrary to some skepticism that he and I share about the drone attacks, that the article says they’ve played a role in this. I’ll take the overall picture they paint as evidence that we need to avoid doing anything too panicky in the region and certainly that we shouldn’t take too seriously the idea that somehow the Taliban is one step away from taking over in Islamabad. But as long as the Pakistani government actually wants to clamp down on radical groups, which has been the case in recent months, then it seems that we can help them be reasonably effective in doing so.

The Trouble With Air Strikes in Pakistan

Via Robert Farley, a good concise explanation from David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum about the problem with these drone strikes against targets in Pakistan:

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

In my mind, this is one of the big problems with using the phrase “war on terror.” It gets people in a frame of mind where they’re thinking of analogies like “what would I do to a Nazi tank column?” rather than “what would I do to a crime-plagued neighborhood?” And when trying to figure out the right approach here, the right thing to do isn’t to ask yourself whether international terrorism is “really” a kind of warfare or “really” a kind of crime. The right thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of strategic goals you have and what kind of tactics are likely to achieve them. What we want is for Muslim communities around the world to cooperate with various governments around the world to smoke out and apprehend would-be violent extremists. That’s more like a crime-fighting mission.

How Much Space Do You Need to Plot?

All else being equal, I feel better when Islamic militants control less territory rather than more territory. That said, when I read this from Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt I wonder about the logic:

It remains unlikely that Islamic militants could seize power in Pakistan, given the strength of Pakistan’s military, according to American intelligence analysts. But a senior American intelligence official expressed concern that recent successes by the Taliban in extending territorial gains could foreshadow the creation of “mini-Afghanistans” around Pakistan that would allow militants even more freedom to plot attacks.

I’m not sure I understand the relationship between “territorial gains” and “freedom to plot attacks.” You need a lot of territory to raise cattle or build a parking lot. But plotting doesn’t strike me as a particularly space-intensive activity. When the ThinkProgress team gets together to plot, we usually do it in a small confined space. More generally, the entire safe haven concept strikes me as overrated. The 9/11 attacks were primarily plotted in Hamburg. A terrorist in the Swat Valley is, by definition, not in a position to blow something up in a western city.

The Importance of “GWOT”

Yesterday, the Obama administration’s never-ending back and forth over whether or not they’ve stopped talking about a “global war on terror” took a new twist as Hillary Clinton said there’s no policy against “war on terror” but the administration isn’t saying “war on terror.” To which Chris Bowers had a sober-minded, sensible reply:

Now, a different question is, does it really matter that much? The answer in this case is probably not. Not only had the term become a bit of a bankrupt joke that holds little currency with people either in this country or abroad, but the real question is whether President Obama will continue the various policies associated with the GWOT. Secret prisons, declaring people “enemy combatants,” torture, vastly increased defense spending, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, Iraq and Afghanistan troop deployments, etc. Beyond a name, the “war on terror” was a series of horrific policies. To end the “war on terror,” you can’t just drop the name. The administration must drop the policies, too.

This makes sense, but I don’t think we should underplay the importance of words in shaping these kind of policies. If you’re fighting a “war on terror” then of course the Department of Defense is going to be the lead agency and getting serious about the “war on terror” will imply large increases in defense spending. By contrast, it’s easy to make the argument that a government that believes that “terrorism” is its most important security problem shouldn’t be spending lavishly on advanced fighter aircraft. It’s obvious that you can’t stop a terrorist with a nuclear attack submarine, and it’s equally obvious that if you want to fight and win a “war” you need to spend more on the military. Similarly, everyone understands that you can’t hold people indefinitely without trial or evidence. And everyone also understands that the president has special “war powers” that let him do stuff that would normally be illegal. The FBI catches terrorists, the Army fights wars.

So, yes, to change the policies you need to change the policies. But it’ll be much easier to make progressive arguments about specific policies if we can get out of the “war on terror” concept and return to talking about terrorists and terrorism with normal language. “War” is a word, not a policy, but it’s a word with specific legal and policy implications. It’s one thing to say that counterterrorism considerations led the United States to get involved in a war in Afghanistan, but another thing to say that the war in Afghanistan is actually one “front” in a larger “war on terror.”

How Important Are “Safe Havens”?

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with a terrorist attack. But while everyone takes Massoud’s threat to the stability of the Greater Hindu Kush area seriously, nobody seems to take his threat to do this very seriously. As Spencer Ackerman says “It’s difficult to see how Beitullah Massoud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has the capability to launch attacks against the U.S.”

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that this points to what I think is a serious conceptual flaw in the administration’s thinking—this heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to deny al-Qaeda a “safe haven” in Afghanistan or Pakistan. As Andrew Exum observes, it’s not at all clear that a “safe haven” is necessary to carry out a terrorist attack:

Thus, [European governments] are wary of their Afghanistan operations leading to greater unrest in their own immigrant communities, being as likely to look to the suburbs of Paris and London for terror plots in utero as they are to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The foiled 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, for example, was allegedly plotted almost entirely within the confines of my old neighborhood in East London. And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–traveled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”

And as per Spencer’s point, not only is a safe haven not necessary, it’s not sufficient either. A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for. And as Exum explains, it could easily lead to dangerous overreach:

The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?

I think that’s right. You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.

Airstrikes in Pakistan

If you want something a bit under the radar to worry about, consider Greg Miller’s LA Times article on the increasing use of airstrikes in Pakistan against alleged al-Qaeda targets.

I can’t imagine that an American president ever would or should completely disavow the right to launch this sort of attack. But still, I think people should be concerned about our government’s growing enthusiasm for this tactic and the possibility that the Obama administration will start to rely on it even more heavily. Simply put, there’s little evidence to suggest that this kind of thing can achieve a strategic victory over al-Qaeda, though it may or may not reduce short-term vulnerabilities. In his analysis for CAP of the airstrikes, Colin Cookman observed:

While these strikes may bear some meaningful short- and medium-term successes, as a long-term strategy their value is less clear. Research from the RAND Corporation into the case histories of 648 terrorist organizations that carried out attacks between 1968 and 2006 found that only 7 percent were successfully eliminated through direct military force. This is in contrast to 43 percent who dropped their violent activities after some form of political accommodation and 40 percent who were broken up successfully through some combination of local policing, infiltration, and prosecution.

The impact of these strikes on public opinion in the Muslim world writ large, and specifically on political dynamics inside Pakistan, can easily outweigh the gains from killing even a bona fide bad guy. The fact that Miller’s intelligence sources deem the program an unqualified success based on what look to be pure body count considerations is disturbing. There’s no use in killing a terrorist if in the course of doing so you accidentally kill a civilian whose two sons grow up dreaming of avenging their father’s murder, or if it makes it impossible to stay politically viable in Pakistan while publicly cooperating with the United States. This is a delicate balance in which all the considerations need to be taken seriously.

Al-Qaeda’s New Problem

For years now, liberals have had to put up with basic points about the value of not doing stuff that’s hugely unpopular around the world caricatured as the idea that if we just act nicer, al-Qaeda leaders will lay down their arms. The reality, as Joby Warrick reports for The Washington Post is that when American leadership is popular and respect, al-Qaeda keeps on keeping on. But they have a much harder time getting anyone to follow them:

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
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With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

The post quotes Paul Pillar, formerly a CIA counterterrorism analyst, as saying that “For al-Qaeda, as a matter of image and tone, George W. Bush had been a near-perfect foil.” With Obama, things are different. Or, more to the point, with Obama we get a chance to make things different. Absent the right policies, Obama’s appeal will fade. But moving back toward the rule of law, and appointing George Mitchell were steps in the right direction. Moving forward with plans to take our troops out of Iraq will do more.

The Risk of Catastrophic Success In Gaza

It seems that Hamas was hoping to bait Israel into launching a ground operation in Gaza, operating on the belief that they’d be able to fight a successful insurgent campaign against the Israelis along the lines of what Hezbollah’s been able to do in Southern Lebanon. My guess is that history will show that calculation to be folly — the geography’s not the same, Hamas is a much more raggedy outfit, and if there’s anything the past 30 years have shown it’s that Israel can, in fact, exert effective (albeit imperfect) control over the Palestinian territories when it wants to. The human cost of land fighting will be large, but I think it’s fairly likely that Israel will be able to create a situation whereby Hamas is dislodged from formal control over Gaza.

Of course, Hamas running Gaza is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s not as if Israel was completely unconcerned with Hamas back then. On the contrary.

But as I wrote back on the 29th, something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed. Matt Duss goes into detail on this but suffice it to say that the years of fighting in Iraq have seeded the Middle East with Salfists possessing battlefield experience who are looking for new causes that people will rally behind.

After Hamas

Robert Farley writes about the strategic logic of the Gaza standoff:

The strategic aims seem clear; Hamas wished to provoke an Israeli attack in anticipation that the reaction will help Hamas seize control of the West Bank. Israel wants to damage Hamas’ state infrastructure, and thus apply enough pain to the Palestinians that they move back towards Abbas, and incidentally give Kadima a chance to win the upcoming elections. Although Egypt and Abbas seem to be on board with the Israeli plan, I know which way I’m betting; people rarely respond to bombing by picking the more moderate option. I’m guessing that Hamas comes out of this stronger than before, although of course the Egyptian reaction could change things a bit by affecting Hamas logistical situation. Even then, though, the policy of the Egyptian government can be quite different than the actual behavior of the Egyptian border guards and inspectors who monitor commerce with Gaza.

It’s important to recall that the rise of Hamas is, in part, the result of a very successful Israeli effort to undermine the authority and infrastructure of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Israel interpreted the collapse of the Camp David talks as indicating that Yasser Arafat and his movement were not reasonable negotiating partners and that the whole enterprise of trying to deal with them had been a mistake. So they spent years — with the support and at times encouragement of the Bush administration — trying to weaken their hold on the Palestinian people and the Palestinian territories in hopes that this would bring to power some kind of hazily defined quisling entity that would be more accommodating. And they succeeded in the undermining. Why, exactly, the Israeli and American governments thought the likely upshot of success would be a more accommodating alternative rather than Hamas I couldn’t quite say. But that’s what they thought and they were wrong.

Similarly, one has to contemplate the possibility that Israeli efforts at disempowering Hamas won’t so much fail as suffer “catastrophic success” as the area is taken over by a Palestinian branch of al-Qaeda. I’m not sure that would be worse for Israel (probably would) but it would definitely be worse for the United States of America.

Jihadists for McCain

Interesting Associated Press report on al-Qaeda’s thinking about the upcoming election:

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, “impetuous” Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier,” the message said. “Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush.”

Now of course it would be silly for a voter to base his decision on a desire to spite al-Qaeda. The right thing to do is for everyone to reach an independent judgment about whose policies would best advance the public interest. This musing is, however, interesting:

“If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American interests,” the message said, “this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it.”

There’s no telling what al-Qaeda is actually capable of doing at this point. But it’s well-known that al-Qaeda does try to influence western elections. We saw it with the Madrid bombings before the Spanish elections, and then we saw it with the October 2004 bin Laden tape that the CIA believes was designed to boost George W. Bush’s re-election fortunes. Al-Qaeda members will probably be able to come up with something to do between now and Election Day to help push things in the direction they prefer.

The Shadow Knows

Last night at the debate, John McCain kept insisting that he’ll get Osama bin Laden and he knows how to do it:

If McCain knows how to get Osama, I can understand his reluctance to describe the details of the plan to a globally televised audience. But couldn’t he have taken the opportunity sometime over the past seven years to tell George W. Bush?

Clarke: al-Qaeda May Try to Help McCain

Richard Clarke runs down the speculation that al-Qaeda may try to influence the US Presidential election, saying that “At the very least” we should “expect another Halloween video from the scary man in the cave.” Why intervene?

Even more likely is the possibility that al Qaeda would hope the attack would benefit John McCain. Opinion polls, which, as noted above, al Qaeda reads closely, suggest that an attack would help McCain. Polls in Europe and the Middle East also suggest an overwhelming popular support there for Barack Obama. Al Qaeda would not like it if there were a popular American president again.

Something to keep in mind.

Central Fronts

Colin Kahl did a good, pretty wonky post, about how the central front in the battle against al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan the other day. I hadn’t realized, however, that General Petraeus made some news yesterday by kinda sorta saying that Iraq is the central front.

It’s important to note that a more precise version of what he said is that Iraq is still the central front according to al-Qaeda’s leaders, though they may be shifting their rhetorical emphasis. Whether or not that’s the case, the question we need to ask ourselves as Americans is whether we should be letting al-Qaeda’s rhetoric define the battlefield? Progressives say we shouldn’t. The al-Qaeda central leadership, the people who plan and propagandize for violent jihad against the United States, are where they’ve been for years, Central Asia, and we want to take the fight to them. An al-Qaeda offshoot only arose in Iraq in the first place because we invaded there and created an appealing venue in which to try to kill American soldiers and bleed American resources. But our goal should be to seize the initiative and not continue down the bizarre path of Bush-Osama symbiosis that we’ve been on for the past seven years.

Attack in Pakistan

I read the news today: “Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.”

I wonder if John McCain will denounce this as an example of the Bush administration’s dangerous lack of preparation.

No One Could Have Predicted…

… that having the United States of America assist an Ethiopan invasion-and-occupation of Somalia in order to depose an Islamist government could further radicalize Somalis and push them into the arms of al-Qaeda. After all, most people welcome foreign invasions of their country.