Matt Yglesias

Counterinsurgency Needs Civilian Cabilities

Steve Metz has an excellent TNR piece making the case that pious talk aside, we’ve done nothing to actually build the civilian capabilities that all our defense policy planners and political leaders say we need in order to conduct the sort of counterinsurgency operations it’s claimed that we need to do. What to do about it. I’m going, however, to quote the very end of the article where I think he doesn’t lay the conclusions out just right:

There are only two solutions. We could belly up and provide the resources for a serious expeditionary civilian corps. But a few hundred or even a couple of thousand people is not enough. We would need many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of advisers with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge willing to leave home and live under risky conditions for years at a time. And we are not talking about 20-somethings paid a pittance and fueled by idealism, but skilled professionals demanding serious pay for their expertise and sacrifice. (The difficulty that the State department had convincing even its hardened professionals to volunteer for duty in Iraq showed what a challenge this is.) Of course, if the pay is high enough, the experts will come. But, at a time of massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis, this is simply not in the cards.

What, then, is Plan B? If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability–and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea–the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

I think the situation is actually much less bleak than Metz makes it out to be. For one thing, the massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis really shouldn’t be a barrier to doing this. If the things that leading Pentagon officials claim to believe about American national security are true, what we ought to do is draw up a bill of what it would cost to properly finance the civilian side of things and cut that much money from the Defense Department budget in order to pay for it. But of course the Pentagon won’t actually agree to that, which sets up the more realistic option of the Pentagon paying lip service to the need for civilian capabilities while in practice building those capabilities in-house.

That’s not a great idea, but it’ll probably work out okay anyway because there’s really very little reason to believe that “thwart[ing] Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states” is really all that hard. Al-Qaeda is a very small number of people with what appears to be an extremely limited capacity to damage western interests. What’s more, even on the rare occasions when al-Qaeda achieves tactical success at murdering westerners, there’s no sign these murders do any real damage on a strategic level. It’s not as if the July 2005 bombings in London have displaced the U.K. from its ranks as wealthy, medium-sized country with highly competent armed forces.

CERN Worker Arrested on Terrorism Charges

It seems like another case of foiling what was at best a half-baked plot:

France has arrested a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) for suspected links with al-Qaeda, officials have said. [...] “He was not a Cern employee and performed his research under a contract with an outside institute. His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism,” it said. [...] The physicist had exchanged messages over the internet with people known to be close to the organisation al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had “not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation”, one said.

When we’re debating Afghanistan, I think it’s important to keep in mind that to undertake a terrorist attack in France you have to be in France. To undertake a terrorist attack in the United States, you have to be in the United States. Anyone in a “safe haven” in Central Asia is, by definition, not nearly as dangerous as someone working at CERN. So in terms of short-term terrorism prevention, domestic law enforcement is always going to be the most important priority. And in the long term, the key issues relate to motivation and recruitment; decreasing the number of people who feel that it makes sense to engage in violent attacks against western targets to advance a political agenda. What happens in the “AfPak” area is important, but not really the most important thing.

State-Building in Afghanistan to What End?

Marc Lynch is asking good questions about what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan:

Suppose the U.S. succeeded beyond all its wildest expectations, and turned Afghanistan into Nirvana on Earth, an orderly, high GDP nirvana with universal health care and a robust wireless network (and even suppose that it did this without the expense depriving Americans of the same things). So what? Al-Qaeda (or what we call al-Qaeda) could easily migrate to Somalia, to Yemen, deeper into Pakistan, into the Caucasas, into Africa — into a near infinite potential pool of ungoverned or semi-governed spaces with potentially supportive environments. Are we to commit the United States to bringing effective governance and free wireless to the entire world? On whose budget? To his credit, McChrystal adviser Steve Biddle raises all of these questions in his excellent American Interest article from last month — but in my view goes wrong by limiting the policy options to either full withdrawal or full commitment to COIN.

I think this is right on. You sometimes hear things said about Afghanistan that appear to imply that the safety of the United States of America requires us to secure effective physical control over 100 percent of the land area on earth. After all, anyplace that’s not perpetually under the control of the U.S. military or an allied military “could” become a “safe haven” for terrorists. This is when you need to reach for your modus tollens and conclude that the strategic objectives are being framed poorly. The United States cannot secure effective physical control over 100 percent of the land area on earth and no country on earth has ever done this. Any reasonable definition of national security just can’t lead to this conclusion.

A crucial issue related to this is that people always seem to forget that the 9/11 plot was substantially hatched in Germany. The train station bombings in London and Madrid didn’t have anything to do with Afghanistan or Pakistan. There’s no reason to think that constructing an effective terror plot requires control over an expansive geographic region. And by definition, to carry out an act of anti-western terrorism you need to be in the West. You can’t hijack a civilian jetliner in the Hindu Kush and you can’t blow up a European train station from Mogadishu.

Heritage Slams Mythical Defense Cuts

The Heritage Foundation has a blog post complete with chart claiming to demonstrate that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels”. As Benjamin Friedman lays out this is nonsense:

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

Since economic growth causes real wages to rise over time, there is some reason for thinking that a military sized appropriately to the strategic environment would need real increases in spending to maintain its level of capabilities. But one way or another, the crucial issue is that the appropriate level of defense spending is determined by the nature of the strategic environment, not by the pace of economic growth. The US economy grew rapidly during the 1990s but the level of military threats facing the country didn’t—thus, a decline in defense expenditures relative to GDP was appropriate.

One interesting trope both in the substance and rhetoric of this argument from Heritage is the idea that 9/11 ought to have touched off a large and sustained increase in defense spending. On the merits, this is a little hard to figure out. It’s difficult to make the case that the 9/11 plot succeeded because the gap in financial expenditures between the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden was not big enough. Would an extra aircraft carrier have helped? A more advanced fighter plane? A larger Marine Corps? Additional nuclear weapons? One of the most realistic ways an organization like al-Qaeda can damage the United States is to provoke us into wasting resources on a far larger scale than they could ever destroy. The mentality Heritage is expressing here is right in line with that path.

Terror Bust in NYC

It appears that this home grown terrorist cell in New York City was never particularly close to seeing their plans come to fruition since they were well-surveilled by law enforcement for quite some time. Which is how it should be. It’s good work by the FBI and the NYPD.

Among other things, I think this is a reminder that while international issues should of course be of some concern to the U.S. government, it’s very difficult to draw a straight line between events in Afghanistan and America’s vulnerability to terrorism. The reason this plot was a danger at all was that the plotters were in the United States of America and the reason it was never that big a danger was that law enforcement was doing a good job and had the situation under control. It’s hard to see how the existence or non-existence of a “safe haven” of some kind on another continent could have made a difference.

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.

OMB Un-Disavows “War on Terror”

One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

Remember That Time When Bush Killed Osama?

Fred Barnes explains the glories of George W. Bush:

President Bush had strong nerves. President Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not.

Once again, from reading this homages to the genius of Bush-era counterterrorism you would never know that an order of magnitude more Americans were killed by transnational Islamist terrorists under George W. Bush’s watch than under all previous presidents combined. Barnes here seems to think that Bush’s nerves of steel are what allowed to him finally nail Osama bin Laden, but the missing part of the picture here is when Bush let bin Laden get away and he’s still at large years later with no real prospects for the U.S. killing or capturing him. It’s a disgrace.

The Bush Legacy

Ed Gillespie’s RealClearPolitics article on “Myths and Facts About the Real Bush Record” is about as stupid and dishonest as you’d expect. But after “debunking” five perfectly accurate alleged myths, Gillespie gets into the whopper that really gets my goat:

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. The vast majority of Americans to have ever been killed by foreign terrorists were killed under George W. Bush’s watch. As Gillespie says, whether or not a president succeeds in preventing foreign terrorists from murdering thousands of American citizens is an important part of that president’s record. And Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.

Scheunemann: Obama Was Palling Around With Terrorists

Marc Ambinder reported this morning that there’s an anti-Palin faction developing within the McCain campaign composed, I suppose, of people who think that Mitt Romney’s deep pockets are the way to go for 2012:

This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign’s message of the day in ways that damage McCain. (”palling around with terrorists” was a line that escaped HQ’s vetting… Palin’s criticism of the campaign for pulling out of Michigan was greeted by anger internally… Palin’s expressed opinion that Rev. Wright is a legitimate issue — which subtly knocks McCain for not raising it — was perceived as an attempt to preemptively blame McCain’s wobbliness for his loss, which would theoretically enhance Palin’s standing with the base.) The complaints extend all the back to Palin’s vice presidential vetting. Major disclosures, issue positions and associations did not come up, and the campaign was so overwhelmed with new information early on, it largely abandoned an effort to defend them individually. This is the claim, anyway. For the record, senior adviser Mark Salter, accurately identified everywhere as the aide who is closest to McCain, calls this scenario “bullshit.”

By contrast, Randy Scheunemann, chief McCain foreign policy adviser, C-List neocon, and lobbyist for foreign powers, writes in to Ambinder to clarify that he agrees with me and Salter that Palin is likely to be the 2012 nominee:

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

I think the claim that having a passing acquaintanceship with Bill Ayers is well-described as “palling around with [multiple] terrorists” is hard to defend. Of course it would be interesting to compare the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of Ayers’ actions with the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of George W. Bush’s policies. We can even restrict the Bush analysis to the number of people tortured to death in contravention of international law (“[o]ver a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions”) and I’m still pretty sure Ayers comes out ahead.

Conference Calling

Dave Weigel and Sargent & Kleefeld both report on a McCain campaign conference call featuring Randy Scheunemann and Jim Woolsey to discuss al-Qaeda’s preference for a McCain victory. They seem to have taken a two pronged approach:

1. Other “bad guy” types have said nice things about Obama.
2. Al-Qaeda saying they’re hoping for a McCain win is obviously a bankshot effort to help McCain

Of course these arguments contradict each other.

On a more substantive note, in a world that wasn’t totally insane a major party presidential candidate using a guy like Woolsey who believes in crazy, discredited conspiracy theories about al-Qaeda would, on its own, be a devastating blow. But in our actual United States of Ludicrousness, advocating for wars is per se serious no matter how badly they turn out, so Woolsey the conspiracy theorist will always be taken more seriously than some DFHs.

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 Terror Effect

John Sides directs our attention to a new paper from Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor called “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate”. Key findings:

This article relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on the preferences of the Israeli electorate. We find that the occurrence of a terror attack in a given locality within three months of the elections causes an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality’s support for the right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect is of a significant political magnitude because of the high level of terrorism in Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the right and left blocs. Moreover, a terror fatality has important electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated, and its electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections it occurs. Interestingly, in left-leaning localities, local terror fatalities cause an increase in the support for the right bloc, whereas terror fatalities outside the locality increase the support for the left bloc of parties. Given that a relatively small number of localities suffer terror attacks, we demonstrate that terrorism does cause the ideological polarization of the electorate. Overall, our analysis provides strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly sensitive reaction to terrorism.

They conclude that the “terror effect” was enough to put Likud over the top in 1988 and in 1996.

To state what’s obvious to me, but apparently not to a majority of voters, what you’re see here is the dysfunctional codependence of competing nationalisms. Terrorist attacks lead to right-wing political policies that lead to repressive policies that lead to more terrorist attacks. This is good for violence-friendly leaders on both sides of the green line but makes both the Israeli and the Palestinian populations worse off than they would have been had the Palestinians eschewed violence and the Israelis elected dovish politicians. It’s particularly maddening to see how this played out in 1996 which was a real turning-point election.

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.

Attack in Yemen

Pretty daring attack on the US Embassy in Yemen today involving not only a car bombing but also followup gunfire. I guess I don’t have a grand point to make about this, but it’s a reminder that if you want to curb radicalism it makes more sense to focus on ways to reduce its appeal in the places where radical movements are already strong (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc.) rather than, say, by invading Iraq.

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.

9/11/08

If you’d told me on the morning of September 12 that seven years later the country would have gone without an additional al-Qaeda attack on US soil, I’m not sure I would have believed you. If you’d told me that more Americans wound wind up dying in Iraq than died in the World Trade Center, I’m almost positive I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you’d told me that seven years later Osama bin Laden would still be at large, I’m sure I wouldn’t have believed you.