Home › Monthly Archive › April 2010
 

Abu Muqawama: April 2010

Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS. Abu Muqawama retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don't be a jerk.

  • Traveling and Reading and Travel Reading
    April 29, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 8:54am | 42 Comments

    I have been tying up some loose ends here at CNAS, putting the final touches on my new Afghanistan paper as well as finishing up a research proposal with LTG (Ret.) Dave Barno, a longtime mentor of mine who starts work at CNAS next week. Starting this weekend, though, I will be gone for about 10 days on a trip to the Persian Gulf, which is a) the one area of the Arabic-speaking world in which I have not spent a lot of time and b) the area of the Arabic-speaking world in which the United States arguably has the most interests. So this research trip is long overdue.

    I have bought a new Kindle for this trip and thought you guys might be interested in what I'll be taking with me to read while traveling:

    1. Someone sent me a complimentary paper copy of Greg Gause's new book on the international relations of the Persian Gulf states, and I cannot think of a better introduction to the region. I have only met Gause once, back in 2007, and thought him both really smart and also kind of a smart-ass. So naturally, I liked him. I also have a reading packet prepared by the CSIS, which is leading this trip, crammed full with useful CRS reports and such.

    2. I convinced the team here at CNAS to buy me a paper copy of Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home, which readers of this blog will remember I'm excited about. Cindy Williams and Gordon Adams are both really smart and write about something -- the national security budgeting process -- that is rarely understood by policy geeks like me but really important.

    3. I'm also about halfway through an advance copy of Megan Stack's beautifully written new memoir, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War. More on this book later.

    4. On the Kindle, I have two new books on Lebanon written by two journalists I very much respect. Both David Hirst and Michael Young have taken the time to tutor me on occassion during my time in Lebanon, and I answered a few technical military questions for David when he was writing his book. Their two books are, respectively, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East and The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle. You can read a glowing review of the former here and a glowing review of the latter here.

    5. Also on the Kindle are two books that have nothing to do with the Middle East: Louis Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

    6. Finally, I downloaded the ESV Study Bible and Phil Ryken's commentaries on Ecclesiastes alongside Tarif Khalidi's new translation of the Qur'an. That may seem like an odd combination of books, but both Ryken and Khalidi have been mentors* of sorts through the years: Ryken was a pastor at the church I attended in college, and Khalidi is, well, my scholarly hero. Despite his wicked sense of humor and light-hearted spirit, Khalidi is the most intimidating intellectual I have ever met. His command of English, Arabic, Greek and Latin is simply awe-inspiring, especially for someone like me who struggles with all four, and his new translation of the Qur'an is a remarkable achievement. I'm not about to get into the different ways in which Protestant Christians and Muslims approach their respective holy texts, but I will say that I someday hope to approach at least the New Testament with the erudition with which Khalidi tackles the Qur'an. Really impressive. Khalidi's humility** and interest in younger scholars also sets an example for others to follow.

    *One of this blog's readers noted how many "mentors" I seem to have. It's true, I collect them. Some are those to whom I have consistently turned for advice through the years, and some are those from whom I have sought advice only a few times. I tend to seek out smart, older people, though, who seem to have figured things out that I have not. (It's worth noting, though, as my friend N.S. always does, that the first "Mentor" kinda sucked at his job.)

    **Just to give you a few examples, Khalidi had this habit, during my two stints at AUB as both a master's student and as a visiting researcher, of periodically seeking my opinion on obscure points of Arabic or Greek grammar. Tarif Khalidi asking you a question about Arabic grammar is a little like Paul Krugman asking for your opinion on macroeconomics, and Khalidi's Greek is, I am 90% sure, far superior to mine. But I think it was just his way of engaging with me, in a remarkably self-effacing way, and it left a mark on me with respect to proper ways to treat students and younger scholars. What an incredible man.

    Books, Middle East

  • Tribal Engagement in Afghanistan: Tactical Lessons Learned
    April 26, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:44am | 37 Comments

    As many of this blog's readers know, I helped facilitate the Tribal Engagement Workshop run by the crew at Small Wars Journal. I was put in charge of collecting lessons learned from those who have done tribal engagement at the local level in Afghanistan -- mostly Special Forces officers -- and wrote this with Jason Fritz, a former armor officer and Iraq veteran (and "Gunslinger" over at the Ink Spots blog). This will be really dry reading for 98% of the blog's readership but might be of interest to junior officers about to deploy to Afghanistan.

    Tribal Engagement at the Tactical Level

    This short paper is intended to supplement the Tribal Engagement Workshop (TEW) Summary Report by addressing those findings at the tactical level.  The information provided here was drawn from the experiences of the members of the tactical working group at the TEW to create a planning framework for community engagement at the tactical level – specifically at the team or company/platoon level – in Afghanistan. 

    At the tactical level, tribal engagement would best be leveraged as community engagement for reasons outlined in the TEW Summary Report. Community engagement at the tactical level is something that can be done by both special operations forces and general purpose forces – but it depends on what you define as community engagement and where you attempt to do it. Significant time and effort must be devoted to determining which areas and communities are ripe for engagement (and when) while also determining how engaging those communities would benefit the overarching regional or theater campaign plan. Some communities do not readily lend themselves to engagement, and other communities do not lend themselves to engagement at all times – as any kind of engagement depends first and foremost on buy-in from local authorities.

    The resources organic to a Special Forces “A Team” are different from those organic to a light infantry company. In order to do community engagement, though, both require specialist language, cultural, medical, and intelligence assets as well as dedicated air assets and, when possible, a detachment of female soldiers or civilians capable of interacting with the local female population.  Without the necessary enablers, either organization would have difficulty in effectively engaging communities.

    Like all other military operations, community engagement proceeds by phase. The first phase, at the tactical level, involves a careful reconnaissance of a potential community to determine whether or not local buy-in makes the community ripe for engagement.  This phase also includes supporting operations such as allocating the assets identified above, determining the engaging unit’s logistics plans, and initiating the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration plan for any local forces mustered through community engagement.

    The second phase can be described as either the “clear” or “secure” phase, dependent on whether or not it takes place in a permissive or non-permissive environment. It must be Afghan-led and tied to existing political structures in the village. Conditions for moving onto the next phase include the establishment of security, the establishment of relationships with community leaders, some semblance of government, an information operation campaign begun, and the community purged of anti-Afghan forces.

    The third phase of the operation – “hold” and “build” – should end with security and governance firmly established, mid-term development projects begun and long-term projects identified, and ongoing shaping operations – to include information operations, key leader engagement, and direct action as necessary. The provision of essential services should be established as necessary to meet critical needs of the population, and security forces should be spread out among the population so as not to be a drain on local markets and resources.

    The fourth and final phase of the operation is contingent on locals feeling confident they can provide security and govern on their own. As such, U.S. and allied forces should “test” the ability of local forces to do both. At this phase, there exists a huge risk that U.S. and allied forces will withdraw too early, leading to a collapse in relations between the people and security and the people and their government.

    Success in engagement is defined by capable, responsible, and autonomous security and governance apparatuses perceived as legitimate by locals. Security and governance are both linked to higher echelons, and space exists for a peaceful political process to take place.

    Afghanistan

  • Subordinates, How Not to Treat Your
    April 26, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 8:12am | 38 Comments

    As regular readers know, I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times every morning because I secretly find the world of finance to be as fascinating as defense policy. And every once in a while, something I read in the business pages has relevance to what is discussed on this blog.

    As people smarter than me have already pointed out, it does not appear the SEC has much of a case against Goldman Sachs. The investigation into potential wrong-doing, though, has shed a less than flattering light on Goldman's organizational culture and business practices. And something I read on Page C5 of the Journal this morning struck me.

    On Saturday, Goldman released batches of emails by Mr. Tourre to girlfriends that revealed doubts about some mortgage securities issued by the company and an occasionally dismissive attitude toward the investors buying them.

     

    Goldman also released translations of portions of emails that originally were in French, including some messages with details about Mr. Tourre's personal life.

     

    The scope of the released documents led to widespread speculation that Goldman was seeking to make more-senior executives who also are caught in an uncomfortable political and public-relations spotlight look better by comparison to the 31-year-old trader.

    This is the kind of thing that makes me thank the Lord that I go to work every morning and answer to a retired U.S. Army officer and a former Marine Corps officer as my supervisors. Because I know that neither John nor Nate will ever throw me under the bus in the way that it appears some of Goldman's executives are throwing this French bond trader under the bus. In fact, on multiple occassions over the past year, I have either offended someone or written something outrageous on this blog, and John and Nate have had my back every time, earning my loyalty in the process. Where did they learn to protect their subordinates? 

    The U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, of course. It's true that we have all seen field grade officers allow a junior officer to take the fall for something, and I know some guys at Goldman who seem to be top-flight men of character. (Some of them, not surprisingly, are former military officers themselves.) But reading this article in the Journal this morning made my stomach turn on the Green Line into work, because it goes completely against the ethic we learned as young officers. Protect and mentor your subordinates. They will, in turn, reward you with their loyalty and hard work. This is smart advice that applies as equally to business as it does to military organizations, and you wonder if management at Goldman couldn't use some remedial training from the gang at MCB Quantico.

    Finance, General Military, Officership

  • Courtesy of the NYT - A peek into Pakistan's politics of extremism
    April 25, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 6:58am | 14 Comments

    Despite what Pakistani politicians might say, extremism isn't all cut and dried in a hugely diverse (and equally stratified) country of 170-odd million people. This article by Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT lays it out nicely.

    In a country where whisky-happy politicians ban alcohol and bribe-taking lawyers confront military dictators, pretty much everything comes down to politics.

    "The university's plight encapsulates Pakistan's predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors."

    Well worth a read.

    extremism, Pakistan, Politics

  • ANZAC Day
    April 25, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 3:48am | 27 Comments

    Abu Muqawama salutes our allies in Australia and New Zealand.

    Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

                                                 -- Ataturk

    Australia, New Zealand

  • Linkage to some Readage
    April 21, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 8:35am | 103 Comments

    I have been crashing on a new paper on Afghanistan, which just went to the copy editor last night, and have not been blogging (or answering phone calls or emails) as a result. I have, though, been reading in my spare time, and if you are not one of the nearly 1,000 people who subscribe to this blog's Twitter feed, here's the best of what I have read recently:

    1. Yesterday, CNAS released a new report that I edited. The team we put together explored several international peace operations in order to determine some of the risks of a peace operation in a future Palestinian state. This was a really fun project, because it was think-tankery at its best: a bunch of people with a variety of experiences gathered in a room to discuss something that might never happen but which is worth sorting through anyway because it might very much concern U.S. policy in the future. I learned a lot from reading and editing the chapters written by the other contributors, and I think you will especially enjoy Marc Lynch's concluding chapter, but Lebanon geeks should read what Kyle Flynn and I wrote about UNIFIL. (Kyle, by the way, is perhaps the most kick-ass intern in the history of interns. He served two tours in Afghanistan in 3rd SFG as an 18E before matriculating to Georgetown. I don't mean to brag, but how many other think tanks in this town enlist Green Berets to assist with their research, do you think?) Initial reaction to our report can be found here and here.

    2. Just when CNAS takes up the cross, a very broken Aaron David Miller puts it down. It's not hard to see how a good guy like Miller could have grown so discouraged by U.S. peacemaking efforts in the Middle East given the many disappointments of his career. But mine his essay in Foreign Policy, and you'll actually find quite a few good warnings for any U.S. policy-maker who wades in the mess that is Israel and the Palestinians. (ex. "Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price.")

    3. Joe Klein has written a wonderful article on the trials and tribulations of Captain Jeremiah Ellis in southern Afghanistan. So many questions popped into my head while reading this article, like how the hell a general officer could, at this stage in the war in Afghanistan, convince a unit of soldiers that they would not be doing COIN but would instead serve as "storm troopers," thus sending units into Afghanistan better prepared mentally to kick ass kinetically than to do all the other things one has to do to be successful. Regardless, Joe's excellent piece is also a reminder to advocates of COIN that doing it on the ground is significantly more difficult than advocating for it from Washington or explaining it on CNN.

    4. What the hell is Holman Jenkins going on about in this public relations memorandum for Goldman Sachs disguised as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal? If the SEC was really trying to wage war on shorts, as Jenkins alleges, would they not have sued John Paulson rather than Goldman Sachs? That said, Jenkins is probably correct when he argues that the SEC has a tough case to prove, as my friend Binya (C'01) helpfully explained yesterday in the New York Times. This is a blog on counterinsurgency, national security, and security issues in the Middle East, not finance, but the most readable three books I have read on the financial crisis over the past several months are:

    1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
    2. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves
    3. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

    That last book isn't about the current crisis at all, actually, but just won the Pulitzer for non-fiction and sheds some light on a previous generation of central bankers and their financial crisis. Anyway, now you know way too much about what I read when I'm not reading Flashman novels or books about Afghanistan. On the positive side of things, I was able to explain, in English, what a collateralized debt obligation was to Lady Muqawama over the weekend. (It helped that she has a math-oriented brain as well as an advanced degree in engineering. And is way smarter than me.)

    Books

  • On Drone Strikes
    April 16, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 3:26pm | 23 Comments

    Tom Ricks is the one who usually gets the interns at CNAS to do the spade work on his blog, but I was talking with intern Matt Irvine about an event he attended on drone strikes recently and, struck by some of the things Bruce Riedel in particular said (like the fact that he was sceptical of any and all figures produced by the U.S. government on the strikes), I asked Matt to write up a synopsis for the blog (since it also nicely dovetails with another good debate we had this week).

    Is there a better place to discuss human intelligence, covert action and targeted assassination than the International Spy Museum? Probably not.

     

    So it was fitting for the museum to host a discussion of the CIA’s Predator drone program in Pakistan on Wednesday. The panel of Tom Parker, Peter Bergen and Bruce Riedel, offered some of the best commentary and analysis of the Predator program to date.

     

    Parker, from Amnesty International, started off with a healthy dose of skepticism about U.S. government data, citing frequent inaccurate battlefield reporting. Riedel concurred by saying, "I am skeptical of numbers ... I am skeptical of people who claim they have found the solution -- I see a lot of hubris right now."

     

    Commenting on recent trends in Pakistan, Bergen argued that U.S. and Pakistani interests are aligned now more than ever and that the program has compromised the safe haven in the FATA. Nonetheless, only 9% of Pakistanis have a favorable view of the program. Later on, Riedel made the point clear, “Are the Pakistanis comfortable with this? Hell no.” But the program goes on.

     

    The program “only operates because of old fashion spying,” leading targeted groups to worry about “traitors in their midst,” says Riedel. This is a legacy of a “human intelligence infrastructure” established during the late Bush administration.

     

    Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, took issue with Leon Panetta’s 2009 claim that the drone strikes are “the only game in town.” They aren’t, and that’s a good thing. The strikes, according to Riedel, are part of a broader global strategy to fight al Qaeda.

     

    The drone program, as analyzed by Bergen at the New America Foundation, is not just targeting al Qaeda. Instead, it is attacking a larger Pakistani Taliban network. According to Riedel, “al Qaeda operates in a syndicate of groups with no single leader, no single agenda.”

     

    Citing the cases of abu Dujanah al Khorasani, who carried out the December 30th suicide attack at a CIA base in Khost, and Ilyas Kashmiri, the organizer of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Riedel argued that individuals operate between one group and another…“This is a multilayered, intricate and operationally driven syndicate.”

     

    The drone program is just part of Obama’s broader strategy against al Qaeda, which is four parted: First, aggressively pursue al Qaeda and its allies in the safe haven. Second, go after al Qaeda’s financing in new ways. Third, diplomatically engage the world to isolate al Qaeda and its supporters. Tellingly, this week’s nuclear summit’s punch-line was the al Qaeda threat. Third, attack the al Qaeda narrative and ideology. According to Riedel, President Obama’s Cairo speech was a point for point refutation of the bin Laden-Zawahiri narrative. This is one of the reasons why the President is pushing heavily on the Israel-Palestine peace process.

     

    Al Qaeda and its allies have adapted to counter the drone program in the last year. Recent plots, including Ft. Hood and the Christmas Day demonstrate that al Qaeda has realized they “don’t need a home run, they’ll single, they’ll take a bunt.” The counter-attack in Khost and the Mumbai attacks are two additional responses to the drone program. The first struck at the human intelligence networks feeding the targeting operation and the CIA personnel closest to it. The second was a harbinger for the future, an attempt to inflame India-Pakistan tensions and divert attention from the FATA. Riedel predicted another major terrorist operation in India in the next six months.

     

    Metrics for success are often blurry but Riedel tried to offer some. First, post-mortem tributes to killed jihadists offer measures of effectiveness. Second, al Qaeda propaganda can be measured. Most interestingly, Ayman al Zawahiri, who used to be al Qaeda’s “Chatty Cathy” has been silent since December 2009 (notably before the CIA base attack). “He may have left the FATA,” speculates Riedel. Third, the sophistication and frequency of al Qaeda and affiliate operations. And fourth, the presence of al Qaeda operatives in Pakistani cities. Are leaders leaving the FATA?

     

    No matter their merits, the use of drones is unlikely to expand beyond the tribal areas, says Riedel. FATA is unique, “you couldn’t do what we’re doing here in other parts of the world.” The FATA has a 5th century infrastructure and is not urbanized. Expanding programs into Baluchistan would increase collateral damage and cross Pakistani red lines.

     

    Finally, Riedel cautioned against becoming “drone addicted…This is going to be a war of attrition,” but there will be no USS Missouri. The Predator is a tactical instrument to degrade current enemy capabilities and ranks, and must fit within a comprehensive regional strategy to counter al Qaeda and its allies.

    Drones

  • You Stay Classy, Northrop Grumman
    April 16, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:11am | 56 Comments

    A hobby of mine is to examine and reflect upon the ridiculous amount of money the military-industrial complex spends on advertising in the DC metro system in its effort to convince congressmen and bureaucrats to buy all the crap it sells. My rugby team practices on a field close to the Capitol South station, and for the past few months, I have passed this series of advertisements for Northrop Grumman trying to sell, uh, something to do with ISR. I'm not really sure what it's all about, but some of the advertisements highlight remotely piloted aircraft. This one advertisement, though, kinda sickens me. I am, like, 98% sure this is a picture of the southern suburbs of Beirut during or immediately after the July War of 2006. Whether or not Israel needed to bomb the southern suburbs during the campaign is up for debate, and I am sure you can make a strong case for Israel's decision to do so based upon the amount of Hizballah infrastructure in what is commonly referred to as "the Dahiyeh". (Which is the Arabic word for "suburb" but has the same societal connotations in Beirut that the French word "banlieue" has in the context of Paris -- no one from the northern suburbs of Beirut, for example, would ever say they live in the "dahiyeh.") Anyway, my point is, should we really be crowing about the destruction of civilian infrastructure during wartime, even when it's within the parameters of international legal conventions? Should the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- civilian housing, civilian businesses, etc. -- really be something we should be slapping each other's backs about, even when the military necessity of such operations is 100% clear? I think you all know the answer is no. And I'm not trying to get all Frantz Fanon on the readership, but if this was, say, a picture of some bombed out city in western Europe after the Second World War, we sure as hell wouldn't be giving each other this kind of collective high-five. ("Woo-hoo! We %$#@ed up Dresden! Hoo-ray, us!") But because this is a neighborhood populated by Shia Muslim Arabs it's somehow okay for Northrop Grumman to take pride in its destruction. Gross. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Lebanon, Military Industrial Complex

  • Bajaur aftermath - The Independent
    April 16, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 3:13am | 5 Comments

    Patrick Cockburn has great report from Bajaur in today's Independent. The access comes about as a result of a PR trip organised by the Pakistani military but Cockburn takes that into account in his analysis.

    "It is hazardous to draw too many conclusions from an official tour such as the one I was on in Bajaur. There is so much one does not see. But it is impossible for foreign journalists to visit the area without official permission and protection."

    The fighting in FATA needs good independent reporting. Events such as those described by Cockburn are in dire need of independent scrutiny:

    "Many people have died and are still dying in this vicious and little-reported war where it is difficult to get details even when there are many dead. For instance last Saturday some 75 villagers were killed in an air strike by Pakistani jets in the Khyber district of FATA. The army at first said they were Islamic militants, but later admitted that there had been a blunder and victims were being compensated."

    I have heard a good few Pakistani military people and politicians express the fear that a successful military operation now could be a source of a bigger problem in five to 10 years. Without on-the-ground independent reporting there is no voice agitating for things to be done any differently than they are now.

    However, I think Cockburn nails the situation in his last paragraph:

    "Peace has not returned to FATA. Local papers carry stories down-column of suspected Islamic militants' houses being burned, refugees in flight or returning, a girls' school destroyed by insurgents and many killed by American drone attacks. The army is in control, but it is not clear what would happen if it left. It may find it more difficult to get out of FATA than it was to get in."

    Pakistan, Taliban

  • Out of sight - AQ in the Sahara
    April 15, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 2:01am | 13 Comments

    Stephen Ellis, a scholar at the Free University Amsterdam, has a very good article on Open Democracy about what extremists are up to in the Sahara.

    "It is not often that the words "cocaine" and "al-Qaida" are plausibly linked. But these two forces are turning the western half of the Sahara - approximately from southern Libya to the Atlantic coast - into a locus of illicit money-making and radical politics. The development, quite a feat for a sparsely populated region, presents a challenge that the rich states to the north cannot afford to ignore."

    I spent some time in Mali not so long ago and thought it was one of those places that could suddenly become a "hot spot". At which point everyone would sit around scratching their heads saying, "Wow, we didn't know. That came from no-where". Well, it has been building and some of that has been reported. Stephen's article will give you a good round up on what's happened so far and what the situation is at the moment.

    If suddenly something horrible were to happen and all attention turned to the Sahel, I'm pretty sure that we will hear the usual thing about how all Muslims - whether in the Middle East, Asia or Africa - are all violent mental cases who follow a religion that tells them to kill and dance in blood etc etc. That will be pretty annoying. So, I'm also posting an article I wrote while out there about the spread of extremism in the region and the reaction of local communities.

    "In the market next to the grand mosque in the centre of town, Muslim women with their hair covered but their shoulders and arms bare barter for T-shirts emblazoned with photos of US President Barack Obama. In another part of the market, a young man in the austere Saudi-inspired dress of trousers hitched up at the ankle and long beard berates a bookstall owner for not carrying the "right sort of works".

    And just for fun, here's a photo of Bamako market:


    africa, AQIM, extremism

  • Two Documents of Note: The Ridiculous and the Sublime
    April 14, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 12:22pm | 14 Comments

    I really need to do some editing today and have spent too much of the workday instead reading two documents. The first is the charge sheet of Capt. Mark Hamilton, USCG, which you can read here and which is totally NSFW (.pdf). (h/t Ricks) Officers carrying on sexually with subordinates is normally abhorent, given the obviously unequal nature of the relationships, which can lead to any number of abuses. But some of the things the U.S. Coast Guard considers to have "dishonored and disgraced [Capt. Hamilton's] position as an officer" are quite hilarious when read in the bureaucratic language of a DD Form 458.

    The second document is the one you should actually spend your time reading this afternoon. I was tipped off to Jenna Jordan's "When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation" (.pdf) by an item on a NYT blog. (I made the mistake of googling "Jenna Jordan". Google, instead, "Jenna Jordan uchicago".) Jordan's findings support a lot of the conclusions that Matt Frankel has reached and which I blogged on a few weeks back. Some of her findings are not particularly surprising: Jordan demonstrates, for example, that smaller and younger organizations are more vulnerable to decapitation campaigns. But what I found interesting was her finding that decapitation campaigns often had a counterproductive effect. (Jordan measures the degredation of groups targeted by decapitation campaigns against groups not targeted by such campaigns.) Her really important and very serious and please-someone-in-the-Obama-Administration-read-this conclusion:

    Decapitation is not ineffective merely against religious, old, or large groups, it is actually counterproductive for many of the terrorist groups currently being targeted. In many cases, targeting a group’s leadership actually lowers its rate of decline. Compared to a baseline rate of decline for certain terrorist groups, the marginal value of decapitation is negative. Moreover, going after the leader may strengthen a group’s resolve, result in retaliatory attacks, increase public sympathy for the organization, or produce more lethal attacks.

    If I could make some constructive suggestions, I would ask Jordan to both a) increase her sample size, which is smallish and probably why she labels her findings "initial" and b) do some research demonstrating the effect of decapitation strategies when paired with broader, more comprehensive counterinsurgency or counter-terror strategies and the effect of decapitation strategies when conducted in isolation from other initiatives.

    COIN, CT, social science

  • First my cousin criticizes the insurgent strategy of the rebel alliance in "Star Wars" and now this
    April 14, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:11am | 22 Comments

    These are the kinds of emails Foust sends me at 11:00 at night because he knows I'm the only one who will appreciate them, even if I have never actually watched Glee:

    Watching Glee tonight, as Jesse from Vocal Adrenaline conducted a major PSYOP operation against Rachel to throw off the Glee Club before Regionals, it struck me: Glee is an allegory for classic unconventional warfare. Shu knows he has a Sue (Russian) problem, who is screwed because the Indian principal (UN/NATO/EU) is being wishy-washy. He doesn't realize his internal policy team, the Glee Club (i.e. the Beltway Bandits), is flaky and indecisive. Meanwhile, the jocks are like dopey America, who care but really don't. The ex-wife baby drama is totally the insider threat or maybe the FBI. Vocal Adrenaline are like the Israelis - they want to make out, learn all about you, but they're really just screwing with you. And in the end, shit gets thrown down because the Club is functional in performance, but dysfunctional outside of its enclave or off-stage. Coach Tanaka represents disenfranchised allies like the UK and Australia—depressed he lost the chick, but always told what to do and eats for fun. Think about it, it's perfect.
    COIN, TV

  • How to report Pakistan (or anywhere) and how to.... not
    April 14, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 9:58am | 5 Comments

    This story in the Washington Post is good example of how to write a story on Pakistan. By that I mean, go there. If you do, you get to say stuff like this with some authority:

    "U.S. officials have expressed frustration about Pakistan's reluctance. But a rare visit to the restricted region (FATA) by two Washington Post reporters offered a fresh vantage point into Pakistani thinking, and it suggested that the two sides are trying to find common ground in addressing what Washington sees as the epicenter of the terrorist threat."

    On the other hand if you pontificate from far away.. ahemm.. Peter Tatchell in the Independent... you write stuff like:

    "Punjabi supremacists have imposed an alien language, Urdu, on Baluchi-speaking people. Borrowing from the tactics of apartheid in South Africa, which forced black children to be schooled in Afrikaans, Islamabad has dictated that Urdu is the compulsory language of instruction in Baluch educational institutions. The cultural conquest also involves the radical Islamification of the traditionally more secular Baluch nation. Large numbers of religious schools have been funded by Islamabad with a view to imposing Pakistan's harsher, more narrow-minded interpretation of Islam. This is fuelling fundamentalism."

    OK, so the WaPo article isn't perfect; I mean I'm not sure what the "fresh vantage point" was. Since basically, this was all based on a visit organised by the Pakistani military and involves lots of commentary by official types and the same information might well have been gained just talking to them in Islamabad. But hey, they went and saw the place with their own eyes. And that's a hard thing to do these days. At the same time, the Independent article isn't totally insane. I do agree that Pakistani military reactions to political problems in Baluchistan help extremists sound credible. But seeing stuff for yourself helps you get some real-life understanding and not sound silly.

    So, just to make the point that getting on the ground helps expand the mind:

    1 - Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. It actually is an "alien" language for the entire country since its native land is actually northern India where back in the day Muslim princely states used it as a sort of lingua franca and then a courtly language of cultured exchange. So if Pakistan is "imposing" it on Baluchistan, those same Punjabis are also imposing it on their own people by trying to educate people in a language they should be able to use in the whole country and not just their province. 

    2 - Islamabad is paying for radical madrassas? Really? Islamabad has never really paid for madrassas anywhere in the country. Islamabad might have looked the other way while other people built them, but it's not been a policy decision of Pakistan's to put resources into building madrassas. Radical madrassas are being build right across the country, but that's a national issue. And the money for those is definitely not coming from the government (It's too broke). 

    I don't think Tatchell has been in Pakistan recently. At least I hope not, otherwise the Independent article is inexcusable. I can see the paradigm he's using to look at the Baluch issue. But not all insurgencies or conflicts are the same. It's as if I used what I know of the Middle East to pronounce on Burma. Rights might be universal, but conditions never are.

    army, FATA, Pakistan

  • U.S. Military Assistance to Lebanon
    April 14, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 9:14am | 11 Comments

    I had dinner last night with several Levant specialists, including Aram Nerguizian of the CSIS. Tony Cordesman speaks highly of Aram, and their paper on the Lebanese Armed Forces is probably the best thing you can read on the subject. Aram has a book coming out this summer on the Lebanese Armed Forces, and yes, he has already agreed to do a "Six Questions" interview for the blog when the book is published.

    In the meantime, I want to link to a fascinating discussion between Aram and David Schenker at the Middle East Institute. I can't think of two people I would rather listen to on the subject of U.S. military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces. I "tweeted" this event the week it was held but was not able to be there myself. So many thanks to Aram for alerting me that their discussion is on the internets. I'll link to the first part of the discussion below, but anyone who is screaming for the U.S. to provide Lebanon with fixed-wing attack aircraft and other prestige weaponry should listen to Part 3.

    FMS, Lebanon, SFA

  • About those Scuds...
    April 13, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 3:51pm | 34 Comments

    I don't really have all that much analysis to add to the allegations that Syria has transfered Scud missiles to Hizballah. So let me just contribute two points:

    1. Acquiring scuds from Syria would give Hizballah some interesting options in the event of another conflict with Israel. In the past, Hassan Nasrallah has articulated a kind of measured response to Israeli attacks: You bomb southern Lebanon, we rocket northern Israel. You bomb the southern suburbs, we rocket Haifa. You bomb Beirut proper, we rocket Tel Aviv. Hizballah's ability to do the latter, of course, depends entirely on whether or not they have the capability to do so and whether or not the IAF is able to knock out Hizballah's long-range rockets early enough in the conflict (as the IAF claims to have done in 2006). So for Hizballah to have a credible deterrent, Israel has to know they have long-range rockets.
    2. The problem with this, of course, is that the next Israel-Lebanon war starts when either a) Hizballah or Israel does something stupid or b) Hizballah acquires "equilibrium-breaking" weaponry like powerful long-range rockets or anti-aircraft weaponry. Israel might decide, in the event of the latter, that it must act preemptively and that the very fact that Hizballah possesses such weapons is casus belli enough.

    So everyone hold your breath. Because this is how wars start.

    Hizballah, Israel, Lebanon

  • What does extremist recruiting look like?
    April 13, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 3:27pm | 20 Comments

    So, Western forces rock up in your town, kick out the local humourless, dour puritanical loons that were screwing up your future and tell you things will be getting better. A few months go by, prices go up, drug dealers are building huge houses and you're more likely to be killed for the few Afghanis in your pocket. Pretty crappy, right?

    Well, not for everyone:.."on most nights, Kabul's expatriates go out and partake in the manic craziness of the city's bar and restaurant scene in houses reminiscent of America's Prohibition-era speakeasies, behind 20-ft.-tall blast walls and an outer perimeter of armed Afghan security guards.

    "The expatriates are a boisterous crowd of young and usually single diplomats, aid workers, journalists, spies and mercenaries — or, as they like to call themselves, "contractors." Most of them earn $100,000 salaries and have money to burn.


    Probably looks pretty interesting as you push your cart full of discarded plastic rubbish down the street. "The trouble with most of these places is that, because they serve liquor, which is illegal, the armed Afghan guards at the gate won't allow the patrons' Afghan compatriots to come inside."

    This TIME story could be true of Darfur, Baghdad or Islamabad. As well, I'm sure, of places I do not have any experience of. But in the places i do have experience of, I have seen these sorts of scenes used to make political points by extremists. And I have heard local people point to them as proof of the insincerity of their foreign guests.

    In the great Huffington Post article that Ex has linked to on his twitter feed Josh Geltzer says: "...as terrorism scholars have long noted, terrorists seek to provoke reactions with strategic effects far greater than those that the terrorists can cause directly."

    Joshua is talking about the methodology of war fighting. I would add to that the methodology of delivering logistics, commentary and aid. Facilitating the creation of a "special breed" of foreigners (and token locals, with the right language skills and connections) who are overpaid, hidden away and afforded special treatment is one of the "strategic effects" that indirectly cause all sorts of damage to the central aim of the whole exercise. And it's one that extremists probably didn't even plan.... Think of it as a  bonus prize.

    The great untold secret of warzones, is that they are actually quite fun. But the depressing reality is that if you find yourself having a good time and getting paid lots, the other side is probably winning.

    UPDATE: A journalist friend who has spent considerable amounts of time working in Baghdad, Kabul and other troubled places has this to say:
    "In 2005, I said that white people in Kabul were doing more for al-Qa'eda than anyone since George W Bush and everyone called me a prude who'd spent too much time in Iraq. Well, i don't hate to tell them I told them so. It's sad they screwed the whole thing up, but screwed they did. The Afghan anger over the amount of arrogance and waste was bad enough by 2006 that I doubted it could be fixed. Today, it's far too late.

    "Aid is hopeless busted in many of these places. The amounts spent on security and white SUVs in Kabul for dopes who couldn't get real jobs at home is even worse than the nightlife, in terms of waste and fury by the locals."
    Afghanistan, foreign aid, radicalisation

  • Extremism - to debate or denounce
    April 13, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 11:11am | 9 Comments

    The Quilliam Foundation, a pretty influential UK think tank focusing on extremism, is holding a round table discussion on a report it put out last month on Britain's Islam Channel satellite television station.

    Reading through the executive summary just now made me feel a little uneasy. I've had the same feeling reading some of their other work, and I've always struggled to put my finger on what it is exactly that makes me react as if I'd just seen a thug suddenly get kicked to death on a bus by a bunch of grannies. After a long uninterrupted think (having no electricity, I can't distract myself with Pakistani television), I think I've finally figured it out.

    Quilliam says; "the channel regularly promotes intolerance and sectarianism, and gives a platform to individuals and groups with a track record of promoting hatred and violence."

    I don't know how Quilliam conducted the study but I'm willing to believe that material like: "I am not against the women. I am not against anybody. But this is the truth. That today, the problem, the calamities and hardship and suffering is due to the women..." or "Shia madhab [school of jurisprudence] has many aqaid [belief systems] which are not acceptable" is broadcast on Islam Channel because I am depressingly used to hearing such things (although, I have hung out with extremists more than most people). The sound of this sort of talk gets my back up. I can imagine the tone of voice it is delivered in, and it grates in my mind.

    I'm referring to my own reaction because one person I know who has spent more time with extremists than me is Maajid Nawaz, one of the directors of Quilliam. For those that have not heard of Maajid, he was a key member of UK Islamist outfit Hizb ut Tahrir when it was properly nutty, as opposed to the toned down version it is now. Maajid's HT activities landed him in jail in Egypt. After his release, he left HT, denounced their ideology and helped set up Quilliam. I don't know Maajid. But I have bumped into him a couple of times and have heard him speak once or twice (I related one such occasion here as what Maajid was saying about his own attraction to radical Islamist politics brilliantly humanised the issues floating around in a young recruit's mind).

    Ed Husain, the other Quilliam director, had a similar journey (without the jail time). His book The Islamist was very popular and I reviewed it a while ago for AM. I'm sure that due to their own experiences, Ed and Maajid's reaction to hearing intolerant, bigoted claptrap spouted by people who say they are speaking the Islamic "truth" is more pronounced than mine. But is it really a good thing?

    As I sort of touched upon in the Arguing Extremism post, the whole issue of what is "moderate Islam" and what is "extreme" has become a battlefield littered with mines that have more to do with appearances than content. What I mean is that many Muslims will almost instinctively denounce something as un-Islamic because it seems to conform to Western norms rather than anything intrinsic about the issue at hand. By the same token, they will see things that seem an antithesis to Western practice as automatically Islamic. And, of course, this approach has gained more popular acceptance recently because to many it seems the West is at war with Islam.

    You can see this unsaid, but underlaying, viewpoint in some of the statements pointed out in the executive summary:

    "Within the western way of life the idea that a woman, even if she gets married, can refuse relations with her husband because of ‘individual choice'. This is something which is part of the western culture, but not Islam".

    By denouncing material of this sort on Islam Channel, or elsewhere, in their customary manner, I think Quilliam actually gives it a stamp of approval. People who think that anybody who talks about "democracy" "human rights" and "freedom of expression" is automatically a "Western-educated, elitist, secularist" and must not be listened to under any circumstances will be quite happy to earn the ire of Quilliam. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are much better at sounding objective, which makes them then sound more credible. The only group i can think of that sounds like Quilliam in tone is, well... Hizb ut Tahrir. For example:

    "London UK, 13th April 2010 - David Cameron has called for a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir in the Conservative party's manifesto launched today which once again twists the truth and states that "a Conservative government will ban any organisations which advocate hate or the violent overthrow of our society, such as hizb-ut-tahrir".

    "Their desire to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir shows they really fear that our ideas have taken a hold amongst Muslims around the world, because of our uncompromising criticism of Western foreign policy in Muslim countries, and relentless call to replace tyranny and dictatorship in the Muslim world with an Islamic Caliphate that will bring security, stability, authority to the people, and accountability and justice - all enshrined in the Shariah."

    Yes, I am subscribed to email alerts from both organisations.

    I'm a big fan of debate. During the last few months in Pakistan, I have come to realise that one of the elements that has evolved in British Muslim society recently that places like Pakistan don't have and could really do with is rigorous debate on issues that tie together religion, identity and politics. The Quilliam approach, in my view, seems to want to shout down rather than argue, tackle or rebut. Denouncing makes for pithy soundbites, but ultimately doesn't convince people to change their views. 

    Where I think Quilliam does a great job is where it does encourage debate. Such as the discussions it organised last year at the conferences of the major political parties (here's a write up of one of the sessions which took place on the sidelines of the Tory party conference) and got people talking constructively about counter terrorism strategy.

    As for the Islam Channel, is it really al-Qaeda TV? I mean REALLY? I mean, apart from extremism, it will also teach you how to make black forest cupcakes.

    Anyway, the roundtable is taking place at midday on April 21 in London somewhere. If you want to go email: events@quilliamfoundation.org

    deradicalisation, extremism, Politics, UK

  • Woah, hey! Spot the Afghanistan expert!
    April 12, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 11:24am | 16 Comments

    Gilles Dorronsoro makes his Saturday Night Live debut two minutes in. This is hilarious to the approximately .000012% of the U.S. population who know who Gilles Dorronsoro is.

    Afghanistan, Humor

  • Tribal Engagement for Afghanistan?
    April 12, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 10:50am | 30 Comments

    Spurred on by this paper (.pdf), the gang at Small Wars Journal ran a great workshop a few weeks back examining whether or not tribal engagement would work as a strategy for Afghanistan. (I moderated one of the discussion groups.) The participants in the workshop included scholars, intelligence analysts, and military officers -- including a lot of Special Forces officers. The verdict?

    • Tribal engagement is appropriate in some locales, but needs to be considered as one component of a broader community or local engagement approach in order to reflect the wide variety of local social and power structures across the country.
    • Community engagement must be accompanied by reinvigorated efforts to link the national with district and village level governments – in essence , a “top-down, bottom-up” strategy must be employed or the international community risks further balkanization of Afghanistan.
    • The focal point for the engagement must be at the district level where, constitutionally, the interface between GIRoA and the Afghan population occurs.
    • Government legitimacy, accountability and transparency must be improved at the district level, either through actually conducting district elections or by holding local community jirgas to appoint district representatives. Without this legitimacy Afghan communities will have little to no desire to reach out and interface with their local leadership.

    Translation? Most of the attendees agreed an "engagement" strategy was necessary in Afghanistan, but almost all of the participants had in mind something very different from what Jim Gant argued for in his influential paper. (And in fact rejected his approach more or less explicitly -- something that surprised me.) Most of the participants favored, instead, a kind of "community engagement" strategy. Anyway, you can read the full workshop report for yourself and access other media here. The report itself is short and worth a read, and Ben Fitzgerald's band of Aussie ninjas at Noetic Group get the kudos for putting it together.

     

    Afghanistan

  • Arguing extremism

    April 11, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 1:25pm | 33 Comments

    A lot of people in Western Europe and North America (OK, possibly Australia too) are of the opinion that Islam = death, destruction and terrorism (with some female hating thrown in). Even those with a slightly more charitable bent of mind will automatically assume that the only way forward for the Muslim world is a development process that mirrors what happened in the West. This is not only a little limited in imagination but also plays into the latent fears of many in the Muslim world. Fears which are then skilfully manipulated by the messages put out by extremists.

    Which is why I was surprised and pleased to see this pop into my inbox courtesy of the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor:

    "CONTROVERSIAL GATHERING OF ISLAMIC SCHOLARS REFUTES AL-QAEDA’S IDEOLOGICAL CORNERSTONE"

    I don't want to paste the full article as it's fairly long, so I'll sum it up. The gathering in question was a conference held in Turkey in late March attended by some of the most respected and widely followed Islamic scholars in the Muslim world.

    Jamestown reports: "The conference was sponsored by two Muslim NGOs: the Global Center for Renewal and Guidance (GCRG) and Canopus Consulting. The GCRG describes itself as an "independent educational charity." Its president is Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah, a well known Mauritanian scholar of Islam who teaches at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. The GCRG vice-president is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf (a.k.a. Mark Hanson), an American convert to Islam who runs the Zaytuna Institute for Islamic studies in California."

    The conference was held in Turkey's Mardin Artuklu University. The location's relevance in the grander scheme of things is that Mardin lends its name to the "Mardin Fatwa", the Islamic legal ruling issued by Taqi al Din Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 - 1328) who argued that it was Islamically permissible for Muslims to declare other Muslims apostates and set about killing them. Sound familiar? Yep, it's Ibn Taymiyyah's Islamic legal arguments that the likes of al-Qaeda use to justify everything from rising up against a tyrannical regime run by Muslims to suicide bombings and beheadings.

    The scholars taking part in the conference (find a list of them here) issued a declaration (but not a fatwa) saying: "Anyone who seeks support from [the Mardin] fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation and has misapplied the revealed texts".

    I wasn't aware the conference was taking place, but was really interested to hear that it had because many of those involved have also contributed to the project I'm working on in Pakistan, which is called Karvaan-e-Amn (there's a little Union Jack link that will give you the English version). Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah recorded a discussion programme for Pakistani television and Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric of Bosnia came on an official visit despite the security situation.

    Make no mistake, you might not have heard about these people, but they are extremely influential in large bits of the Muslim world. They represent the mainstream world of Islamic scholarship that extremists cannot challenge head on since they don't have the same sort of traditionally recognised grounding. Instead, they rely on a different sort of legitimacy - the kind you gain from fighting a war or spending time in jail (or both). Imagine a "scientist" who got his "degree" on the internet telling people with doctorates in astrophysics from both MIT and Cambridge that while locked away by the government for discovering a secret project to build superweapons a dying alien imparted to him the secret of interstellar space travel... and it involves a food processor.

    To help give you an idea of the kind of following I'm talking about, here's a few lines from an article I wrote in the Telegraph a year back when I covered a different gathering in Mali attended by similar figures:

    "As the conference delegates started arriving in Bamako, the extent of their influence became clear. Shaykh Tijane Cisse from Senegal commands the devotion of over 50 million people in West Africa... Fifteen minutes after he arrived at the hotel without prior announcement, word spread around the city of his presence and a steady flow of followers formed a line leading to his room."

    Looking back, "steady flow" was an understatement, the place was mobbed.

    Sadly we are at a point where these men need to take a stand against an ideology that was pretty much buried with Ibn Taymiyyah and the Mongol horsemen he had in mind when he formulated it. It was dug up again in the 20th century by men and women who psychologically needed an Islamic justification to confront the injustices they felt were all around them.

    It's also a measure of how badly "the war for hearts and minds" (to use a cliche) is going when it seems as if the standard bearers of the mainstream are actually the minority. So, if you happen to be among those  that think Islam is all about killing people and dragging society back to the 7th century, you have friends who.. well, actually do want to kill people and drag society back to the 7th century. And if you think that Muslims need to be converted/de-Islamised or any of the other Ann Coutler type stuff then you are giving ammunition to people like these guys:

    "Reaction also came from an Iraqi militant group, Jaysh al-Fatihin (Conquering Army), which denied that circumstances had changed since the Mardin fatwa. "All of us know that the incidents most similar to our [present] situation were those that happened in the time of Imam Ibn Taymiyya..."

    When Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric was in Pakistan he suggested that perhaps if Muslim scholars in the past had done a better job championing the cause of social and economic development along with accountable government and social justice maybe they wouldn't need to be now refuting an ideology their forebearers had not thought worth commenting on. Today, the problem that men like Dr Ceric, Shaykh Bin Bayyah and Shaykh Tijane face is that they cannot criticise the actions of Muslims in the light of Islamic injunctions without someone saying they are apologists. The Muslim versions of Ann Coulter are quick to point out, "If you don't condemn the injustices of the Western oppressors and their agents, you are excusing their actions."

    If we all want to go forward in a non-Ann Coulter type way it is going to involve listening to grievances, because shouting them down or putting your fingers in your ears doesn't make them go away. It just gives someone else less savoury the opportunity to exploit them.

    extremism, Ideology, theology

  • Alaska and Afghanistan
    April 9, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 3:31pm | 64 Comments

    I know a lot of smart Republican analysts of the war in Afghanistan who must be absolutely cringing as they listen to Sarah Palin beat up on Barack Obama for presuring Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Steve Biegun served as Palin's foreign and defense policy advisor during the 2008 campaign, and one wonders what goes through his head when she says something as incredibly ill-advised as what she said today. Cheering for Hamid Karzai right now is like rooting for Duke against Butler. Or Goldman Sachs against homeowners. Or Tiger Woods against Elin Nordegren.

    But as I thought about it a little more, it occured to me that it makes perfect sense that a former governor of Alaska would cheer for the president of Afghanistan. The two states are really quite similar:

    1. They are both home to spectacular natural beauty and mineral wealth.
    2. The political process in each is hopelessly corrupt.
    3. They are both rentier states. In 2004 and 2005, according to research done by this woman, fully 69% of Afghanistan's budget was externally financed. Those same years, Alaska suckled at the teat of the federal government more than any other state in the union on a per capita basis. (Go here for the 2004 figures, and here for the 2005 figures.) Palin wasn't yet the governor of Alaska in 2005, but you'll note in the 2008 figures that Alaska continued to trail only Wyoming among states receiving federal aid on a per capita basis.* My back of the envelope calculations suggest that Alaska received about $23.4b in federal aid during the same time period (2001-2009) in which Afghanistan was receiving approximately $37.7b in aid and development funding from the United States. Alaska, meanwhile, and at the same time that it was receiving massive amounts of federal aid, distributed $13,599.16 in annual payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund to each individual in the state.

    I'm not going to go all Theda Skocpol on you and explain the consequences of rentier states. Suffice it to say, though, that they encourage political classes unaccountable to the people they govern. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why Hamid Karzai is not particularly responsive to the needs of the average voter in Zabul Province. And maybe why you never see Sarah Palin feel the need to hold a press conference where people can ask questions that haven't been pre-screened.

    Oh, and by the way, if you think using leverage to affect the political choices made by the Afghan leadership is not a good thing right now, then you are a) Liz Cheney, b) Sarah Palin, c) a blithering idiot or d) some combination of the previous options.

    *Ever notice how the states with allegedly libertarian tendencies blush the least when accepting federal funds?

    Afghanistan, Alaska

  • Dialogue and aid in Pakistan
    April 9, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 7:34am | 7 Comments

    Ahmed Rashid (the author of Descent into Chaos and Taliban) sums up on the BBC website what the "strategic dialogue" between Pakistan and the US means for relations between the two countries.

    This is how Rashid says the US-Pakistani relationship used to work: "After 11 September, former Presidents George Bush and Pervez Musharraf carried out a largely transactional relationship. "I will give you an al-Qaeda operative in exchange for two F16 fighter bombers" - was what that boiled down to.

    And how is it different this time? "The Pakistanis also carried a brief which frankly addressed Pakistan's strategic interests and security needs with regard to India, Afghanistan and sensitive issues like nuclear weapons and terrorism... For the Americans this was a welcome change from the subterfuge, lack of clarity and covert support for militant groups that Pakistan has engaged in in the past."

    But while Rashid seems generally optimistic, Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to London and Washington, in an op-ed in The News asks why Pakistan seems to be convinced it can't solve it's problems itself:

    "Three points emerge from the ruling elite's help-us-with-everything stance. One that it appears to be overwhelmed by the challenges at hand and seems to regard these as insuperable. Two, it doesn't seem to have much confidence in its own ability to fix these problems. And three it has come to believe that only outside help can resolve these issues and even considers foreign actors to be catalytic agents for the country's stabilisation if not progress.

    "As Pakistan's history attests such external help – however well-intentioned – sets up a perverse set of incentives by which urgent domestic reform is postponed or avoided as resort is made to band-aid or quick-fix solutions imported from abroad. Assistance should serve as a means to build self-sustaining national capacity so as not to need more external financing. But this has not been the experience of the past two decades or more."

    Pakistan, USA

  • But Is Tom Hanks Right? -- On Race Hatred and Combat
    April 8, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 8:38am | 54 Comments

    Dorothy Rabinowitz has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal arguing that we need to stop coddling American Muslims, who really, Rabinowitz reasons, haven't had such a bad go of it since the September 11th attacks. In my paper edition of the Journal, Rabinowitz's op-ed is accompanied by a helpful 3x5 picture of Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan, which, hey, is a fair thing to do since he is obviously as representative of American Muslims as these guys are representative of gun-owning American Christians like myself.

    At the beginning of her op-ed, though, Rabinowitz also has some tough words for Tom Hanks, who reportedly said in an interview with Time Magazine, which I confess to not knowing was still published, that the war in the Pacific was one of "racism and terror". I didn't find those words in the interview itself, but Hanks did apparently say those words in other interviews.

    Now, obviously, the first question that comes to mind is, who the hell Tom Hanks is to be lecturing us about the war in the Pacific? And is he trying to say our grandfathers were anything less than übermenschlich in their personal conduct and attidues toward their fellow man while at war? Whereas contemporary combat-veteran readers of this blog occasionally write in to bemoan the lack of pornography on deployments, it's a well-known fact that our grandfathers slogged it out across the Pacific with steely-eyed purpose, pausing only to thank their (Christian) god for such a blessed opportunity to get shot at by suicidal Japanese light infantry. The idea that racism might have played a role in relations between opposing sides, or that terror might have had something do with the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945 is seditious, right? Right?

    Look, I'll make my own thoughts known in a second, but it is worth pointing out that when Tom Hanks talks about racism having played a big role in the combat between U.S. and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific, he is hardly saying something controversial. When John Dower published War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War in 1987, I suppose it might have been controversial then. But now? Hardly.

    On the other hand, after reading Dower, one should also read combat memoirs of the war in the Pacific, the best of which is almost certainly E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Sledge's memoir is noteworthy for its brutal portrait of combat and -- in light of Dower's thesis -- the complete lack of any discussion of race hatred toward the Japanese as a motivating factor in combat. Sledge was a native of Mobile, Alabama and presumably knew something about racism, but you don't really find much in his first-person narrative of the war in the Pacific to support what Dower argues. My own grandfather grew up in Mullins, South Carolina in the 1930s before fighting in the Pacific and also presumably knew something of racism. But aside from that time in the 1970s when my Aunt Susan drove home in a new Toyota, I don't think he ever exhibited any unkind post-war feelings toward the people of Japan.

    At this point I'm going to take a step back and open things up to the readership, which has probably read a lot more history of the Second World War than I have. But my general sense is that Rabinowitz, for all the grief I have given her, might be right if she's arguing that the theme of racism is a little overblown in our contemporary understanding of the Second World War. One could make a mighty strong argument in the other direction, of course, given some of the less attractive things we did as a nation during that era. But my hunch is that race hatred really wasn't the motivating factor among combat infantrymen that Dower thinks it was. I fought in Afghanistan, against some Arab foreign fighters and remnants of the Taliban, more or less right after the September 11th attacks, and I found that the normal combat motivations, like not letting down your buddies, was a lot more prominent than any "hey, let's go take it those Arab Muslims" sentiment. But maybe my experience is, like that picture of Nidal Hasan, unrepresentative.

    Thoughts?

    Books, WWII

  • Pakistan catch up - What's in a name?
    April 8, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 7:05am | 6 Comments

    Sometimes, you go on holiday for a bit and you return to find everything has just...gone very wrong! I came back from visiting Ms Henley-on-Thames to find the Islamabad electricity board had managed to cut off my power, my car had flat tires, and... they changed the name of NWFP?!?!

    Renaming NWFP to "Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa", is part of a raft of legal changes that were passed by parliament on Thursday. The 18th amendment to the constitution, as it's called by the local press, basically erases changes made to Pakistan's 1973 constitution by General Zia ul Haq and later General Parvez Musharraf. The main points of the legal move (according to Reuters) are:

    - The president can no longer dissolve parliament

    - Executive power passes to the prime minister, the cabinet and chief ministers of the provinces

    - The courts will not be able to validate the suspension of the constitution

    - The power to appoint judges passes to a commission headed by the chief justice of the supreme court

    - The chief election commissioner will be appointed by a committee and not the president

    - The prime minister chooses the heads of the armed forces, which is then rubber stamped by the president

    - Oh, and the Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa thing.

    In Pakistan, this is largely being hailed as a major democratic breakthrough. Not everyone was convinced that Musharraf's departure and an election meant Pakistan REALLY was a democracy. And many would still say that a largely disenfranchised population and a military with outsized influence on political decisions means Pakistan's democracy is far from even adequate. But Pakistan's ability to recognise the difference between good and bad governance, and ultimately accept what needs to be done is the kind of thing that makes me optimistic about the country's fortunes. It also shows potential partners that there are people and processes that can be engaged with in Pakistan.

    And just to prove the point, here's a dissenting voice from the eminently sensible Dawn newspaper:

    "...many big issues were never put on the table. For example, the Islamic clauses gratuitously inserted by Gen Zia in the constitution were not touched and the colonial-era status of Fata was not looked at."

    What would Dawn do?: "Consider that the security threat that has radiated from Fata is unprecedented in the country’s history and yet the committee did not see fit to amend its constitutional status at this stage... The security challenge in Fata has to be dealt with by more than just guns and money — the ‘wild west’ political status of the place is part of the reason that the area has become the greatest threat to internal security."

    And of course, not everyone is happy about NWFP's name change, as a disgruntled reader says in The Nation's letter's page

    "I am often surprised by inventiveness of the intelligent people in our political fraternity. Their latest masterpiece is this new fudge of a name ‘Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwah... Campbellpur was changed to Attock for no rhyme or reason. Only people without the slightest knowledge of history could do such a thing. We also changed the name of Montgomery to Sahiwal, I do not know why?... This Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwah is like taking the joke too far. A few visionless people should not be allowed to distort history and the age-old facts. Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwah is not a name, it’s a joke, a practical joke on people of the province. -ARBAB ALAMGIR, Hoti, April 8."

     

    FATA, NWFP, Pakistan, Politics

  • Just Admit It: The Surge Worked (Updated)
    April 6, 2010 | Posted by Abu Muqawama - 8:24am | 93 Comments

    Ever since my friend and mentor Tom Ricks concluded at the end of his book The Gamble that the Surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically, it has been safe among others to say that the Surge -- for all the heroics of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps -- failed. Andrew Sullivan and Tom write this regularly on their blogs, and because they are serious people, others parrot what they say. At some point, though, evidence gets in the way of their conclusion.

    If you really move the goal posts, defining up "success" as the Surge having not only reduced levels of violence and addressed immediate drivers of conflict but having also managed to fix all the problems in Iraq's political process, then yeah, it failed. But I don't recall that ever being the aim of the operation in 2007, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the U.S. military and its friends in the diplomatic corps to be able to settle the political affairs of a host nation. That's not what a military does, and I am known for having a pretty expansive definition of what militaries should be expected to do on the battlefield. “We intervene in … a conflict,” Gen. Sir Rupert Smith wrote in 2005, “in order to establish a condition in which the political objective can be achieved by other means and in other ways. We seek to create a conceptual space for diplomacy, economic incentives, political pressure and other measures to create a desired political outcome of stability, and if possible democracy.”

    So how has the U.S. military and its partners done in carving out that conceptual space Sir Rupert writes about? Well, let's take a look at the numbers:

    ESV Slide March 9204

    We can argue about how many other factors aside from U.S. diplomatic and military operations led to the stunning drop in violence in 2007. There was a civil war in 2005 and 2006, tribes from al-Anbar "flipped" in 2006, and Muqtada al-Sadr decided to keep his troops out of the fight for reasons that are still not entirely clear. Those are just three factors which might not have had anything to do with U.S. operations. But there can be no denying that a space has indeed been created for a more or less peaceful political process to take place. Acts of heinous violence still take place in Baghdad, but so too does a relatively peaceful political process.

    If you want to argue that getting involved in Iraq in the first place was a stupid decision, fine. I agree with you. But trying to argue that the Surge "failed" at this point -- even if Iraq someday descends anew into civil war -- simply isn't a credible option anymore.

    Update: Sullivan, Larison and Cohen object. Cohen's concern is that we'll take the Iraq experience and think that we now have a one-size-fits-all COIN blueprint that we can apply with equal success to Afghanistan and elsewhere. And I have some sympathy for that concern. (Rand's Nora Bensahel -- who knows more about Iraq than Sullivan, Larison, Cohen or me -- wrote a note in the comments, and I have a lot of sympathy for her concern as well.) Sullivan and Larison, meanwhile, cannot seem to come to grips with the fact that a stunning drop in ethno-sectarian violence -- caused by several factors, including U.S. military operations in 2007 -- has indeed facilitated political reconciliation. We have the recent elections and several negotiated agreements -- not least the status of forces agreement negotiated between the United States government and the Iraqi government -- as evidence that the space created for a political process has been exploited. So my beef with Larison is like the conversations I have with Tom: I don't think he gives enough credit to the political successes in Iraq since 2007.

    Again, I thought the Iraq War was a really stupid idea too -- and I actually had to fight in it, so I should be more bitter than most. But the inability to admit that we managed to avoid a horrific defeat in 2007 is really something. You simply cannot look at the above chart and read what Sullivan is arguing without scratching your head. Sullivan even points to something Ayad Allawi said about this Iraqi government not representing all Iraqis and saying that is evidence the Surge failed. Which I think is hilarious, since Allawi is ... an opposition politician. Sullivan regularly links to opposition politicians in this country saying nuttier stuff than Ayad Allawi has ever said (and I have sympathy for what Allawi is saying, actually) without wringing his hands as to whether or not it amounts to a Constitutional crisis. ("The U.S. Civil War failed!") "Opposition politician criticizes government" is hardly a shocker. And after denying he is moving the goal posts, Sullivan then says his criteria for success is "a non-sectarian space for a non-sectarian national government capable of running the country when the US leaves." Well, okay, so an absence of sectarianism is now a requirement for success? You're not going to ever beat "taifiyya" in Iraq, so though I do not remember eradication of sectarianism as one of the metrics tracked by either Gen. Petraeus or the Bush Administration, I guess Sullivan will never have to say he was wrong about the surge.

    Iraq

Search