US Rethinks Af-Pak Strategy As Strikes Widen

Andrew Exum (also known as Abu Muqawama) offered a good analysis earlier this week in The New Republic of what was right and what was wrong with Obama's counter-terrorism strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica followed up with a couple more useful observations. But events have once more overtaken strategy in the region. On Wednesday a US drone struck in the Orakzai Tribal Area, an area which had not previously been targetted- some fear that this widening of strikes will serve only to push those that the US is targetting into more populated areas deeper inside Pakistan.

Today, meanwhile, is the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, where it looks likely that America's European allies will resist calls to back any Afghan 'surge'. The UK has denied reports that it will send another 2000 troops to Afghanistan, with a senior official explaining that, "What the UK brings to the table is the civil side, the development side, not the military side". Is the Obama Af-Pak strategy, just days old, already out of date?

Bagram Inmates To Challenge Detention

Josh Mull points us to this story, which suggests that inmates at the Bagram Internment Facility may soon be able to follow Guantánamo detainees in challenging their detention in US courts:

Although the Supreme Court has ruled that detainees at the US naval base in Cuba have the right to challenge their detention, the government had argued that inmates held at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan did not have such a constitutional right.

Judge John Bates, however, ruled the Bagram detainees faced essentially the same situation as the Guantanamo detainees, being held indefinitely without due process.

"Bagram detainees who are not Afghan citizens, who were not captured in Afghanistan, and who have been held for an unreasonable amount of time" may invoke the right to habeas corpus, Bates wrote, referring to the legal right dating back centuries.

If it stands, the ruling could have far-reaching implications for how the US government handles terror suspects and for its operations at Bagram, where about 600 detainees are held.

Full article here.

EA's Canuckistan in The Guardian: State-sanctioned Snitching

Canuckistan, aka Steve Hewitt, has become the second Enduring America in the past few days to be featured in The Guardian's Comment Is Free with this piece on how the UK government is encouraging its citizens to become stake-holders in counter-terrorism. If you weren't feeling inspired about Bruce Schneier's contest, this might help:

State-sanctioned snitching

The UK's new counter-terrorism strategy of neighbour spying on neighbour echoes proposals that caused outrage in the US

Steve Hewitt

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

With much fanfare, the government of Gordon Brown unveiled Contest 2, its sequel to the UK's previous counter-terrorism strategy. In the lead-up to its emergence, bits of the programme were leaked to the media, including that approximately 60,000 people such as security guards and shop clerks would receive training on what to watch for in terms of suspicious behaviour and how to react in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

That aspect of the strategy was preceded by a new anti-terrorist campaign launched by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan police involving advertisements appearing at tube stations, on billboards in London and elsewhere, and even on the radio. These ads raise the spectre of terrorism and the reward for action by diligent citizens who in the tube and billboard ads notice suspicious behaviour, such as chemical containers in a skip or an individual studying CCTV cameras, and report the incidents via a confidential anti-terrorism hotline. The radio commercial provides the alternative to citizens failing to act with the sound of a devastating explosion.

In a UK context these campaigns represent an effort to widen public participation in counter-terrorism, essentially turning citizens into stakeholders in the effort. They also reflect a continued government concern about the risk of terrorism, particularly through low-level attacks carried out by so-called "self starters" who exist outside those groups and individuals already known to the police and security service.

Encouraging suspicion through counter-terrorism training of ordinary citizens or public advertising campaigns is not, however, without its own risks. There is the potential for certain citizens to be demonised and stigmatised when their activities receive excessive scrutiny and, through calls to the hotline, to unwarranted attention from the police. Indeed, this point plus the wider implications for civil liberties of state-sanctioned snitching were the issues that emerged when a similar effort was proposed in the US in 2002.

In January 2002, the Bush administration introduced the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Tips) with the goal of increasing public participation in domestic counter-terrorism. The goal of Tips was to "enable millions of America transportation workers, postal workers, and public utility employees to identify and report suspicious activities linked to terrorism and crime". It was to do so by setting up a special hotline, similar to the one in the British advertising, that these workers could call to report suspicious behaviour. The US deputy attorney general hailed the programme as providing "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others, whose routines allow them to be the 'eyes and ears' of police, a formal way to report suspicious or potential terrorist activity".

The programme largely escaped wider public attention until a story in an Australian newspaper compared it to something that could have emerged from the former German Democratic Republic. Very quickly a maelstrom of criticism erupted that ran across the American political spectrum from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Village Voice on the left to the New York Times in the centre to Republican congressmen Dick Armey and Bob Barr on the right, the latter who called it a "snitch system", that appeared to typify "the very type of fascist or communist government we fought so hard to eradicate in other countries in decades past". The New York Times ran interviews with some workers who potentially might be called upon to report information. A delivery driver remarked on the increased number of satellite dishes he had delivered to "Arabs" after 11 September while another driver complained that "[i]mmigrants stare more than anybody else". In an editorial the paper decried the new version of the programme: "Even if it is limited to public places, the programme is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes."

By then, Tips had made a host of enemies, including Armey, the then Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives. With little fanfare, Armey inserted a clause into the Homeland Security Act that prohibited any efforts to implement Tips. The programme died when Bush signed the act into law in November 2002.

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

Bruce Schneier's Fourth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest

Something to keep you out of trouble (you hope!) this weekend:

Let's face it, the War on Terror is a tired brand. There just isn't enough action out there to scare people. If this keeps up, people will forget to be scared. And then both the terrorists and the terror-industrial complex lose. We can't have that.

We're going to help revive the fear. There's plenty to be scared about, if only people would just think about it in the right way. In this Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest, the object is to find an existing event somewhere in the industrialized world—Third World events are just too easy—and provide a conspiracy theory to explain how the terrorists were really responsible.

The goal here is to be outlandish but plausible, ridiculous but possible, and—if it were only true—terrifying. (An example from The Onion: Fowl Qaeda.) Entries should be formatted as a news story, and are limited to 150 words (I'm going to check this time) because fear needs to be instilled in a population with short attention spans. Submit your entry, by the end of the month, in comments.

If you send Schneier an entry, be sure to let us know!

Michael Cohen on The Trouble with Counter-Insurgency

"Now I could offer you plenty of reasons why I think a counter-insurgency doctrine is a bad idea; it doesn't fit with the comparative advantage of the US military; its not applicable to the threats America will face in the future; its an example of fighting the last war and as Andrew Bacevich brilliantly and pithily puts it, 'If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn't be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda's game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?'"

Michael Cohen had an excellent guest piece in the Washington Note yesterday which considers the political impossibility of the US entering into another COIN conflict. Read it below.

As I've written before, I'm not much of a fan of counter-insurgency doctrine and two events over the past several days lend compelling evidence as to why. Quite simply, it's the politics, stupid.

First comes word from Baghdad of an outbreak of fighting between US-supported Sunni "Awakening" fighters and the Iraqi government. According to Brian Katulis, "This weekend's incident was the first crack in a shaky foundation constructed by the 2007 surge of U.S. troops--a foundation that largely glossed over long-standing political rivalries." This is not meant to criticize the "surge" but simply it is a recognition that for a counter-insurgency effort to succeed it requires not only a significant number of troops, it needs a long-standing time commitment to ensure that this type of violence doesn't turn into a larger conflict. And it also relies on genuine political reconciliation, which can of course take generations.

Next we have President Obama's recent announcement of his Administration's new policy for Afghanistan, which Fred Kaplan calls "CT-plus." The focus on counter-terrorism versus the broad counter-insurgency strategy advocated by the so-called COIN-dinastas is as Kaplan argues a reflection that following the latter course "could require too many troops, too much money, and way too much time--more of all three than the United States and NATO could muster--and that the insurgents might still win anyway. Better to focus U.S. efforts more narrowly on simply fighting the insurgents themselves, especially in the border areas with Pakistan."

Now I could offer you plenty of reasons why I think a counter-insurgency doctrine is a bad idea; it doesn't fit with the comparative advantage of the US military; its not applicable to the threats America will face in the future; its an example of fighting the last war and as Andrew Bacevich brilliantly and pithily puts it, "If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn't be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda's game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?"

But let me offer another reason why counter-insurgency is the wrong approach; and its one borne out by the experience in Iraq and now Afghanistan - there is simply no domestic political support for the sort of long-standing political, military and financial commitments that are required for counter-insurgency to succeed. There wasn't that type of commitment in 2003 (and I'll get to that issue in a second) but after 7 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is absolutely no desire among policymakers to go down this road today.

One of the architects of the military's COIN strategy in Iraq, David Kilcullen, argues that counter-insurgency in Afghanistan means a five to ten year commitment aimed at "building a resilient Afghan state and civil society" and extending "an effective, legitimate government presence into Afghanistan's 40,020 villages." That is the sort of commitment that very few US politicians are going to be willing to countenance. So not only are the COIN-dinastas preparing for war that we are unlikely to face, but they are preparing for one that the country is unlikely to be willing to fight.

It's worth remembering that the adoption of COIN strategy in Iraq was not a willful choice by US policymakers; it was a move of desperation by an Administration and a military caught flat-footed by a vibrant insurgency in Iraq. Indeed, it is worth also remembering that the Bush Administration assiduously avoided any discussion of a long commitment to Iraq and aggressively pushed back on anyone who asserted that more not less troops would be needed to pacify the country. The reason was clear: the American people and Congress would never have gone along with such a commitment.

Counter-insurgency only made sense as a strategy once, to paraphrase Bacevich, we had dug a very big hole in Iraq. And as we are seeing in Iraq right now, the surge has been only temporarily effective. We are still in that hole and even with the outbreak in violence one is hard pressed to find any US political leaders calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq. What happens in Iraq, going forward, will be determined by Iraqis, which by the way is the other flaw in COIN strategy - it presupposes a sovereign government is willing to go along with the long-term stationing of US troops in their country. Even if US troops wanted to stay in Iraq, the Iraqi government is not going to go along . . no matter what Tom Ricks says. (This is not to mention the fact that it's hard to see why it is in the national interest for the US to get in the middle of a civil war between rival Iraqi militias).

With that in mind, it should hardly be surprising that the Obama Administration rejected the COIN approach. And while there are elements of counter-insurgency strategy in the President's Afghanistan plan this is primarily a counter-terrorism effort. Let's put it this way, if Afghan security services are up to speed in two years and Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been sufficiently degraded the United States will not be sticking around to make sure Afghanistan's democracy is vibrant and robust. We're just going to go home. If you don't believe me; ask the Iraqis.

The choice made by President Obama represents the fundamental flaw being made by COIN-advocates. It's a fundamental flaw made also by supporters of bank nationalization; or those who would push for a single-payer health bill - a failure to reflect domestic political constraints. If the Obama Administration can't convince the American people to go along with a broad counter-insurgency strategy (and won't even try) in a country where we already have troops and where the 9/11 attacks were hatched what makes people think that this or any other Administration will be able to convince Americans that they should go along with a COIN-strategy in a country we haven't even invaded and occupied yet? And a military strategy that has no relation to domestic politics isn't going to be of much use.

Now I realize my example is sort of a straw man, but then not really.

The fact is, COIN-strategy is presupposed on the notion that the US will be getting into intractable conflicts that will necessitate the same sort of tactics used in Iraq over the past 5 years. As an observer of the American political scene, something tells me that simply ain't going to happen.

What has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past week is only further evidence that COIN is simply not a realistic or easily applicable military doctrine.

-- Michael Cohen