Center for a New American Security

Marisa Porges has a forceful op-ed in today's NYT making the case for beefing up the capture component of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Read the whole thing:

At the moment, the United States has nowhere to hold and interrogate newly captured terrorists. America just handed over control of its detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a significant step toward transferring security operations to Afghans. And while Guantánamo Bay remains home to nearly 170 men that the United States believes are still a threat, no captured terrorist has been transferred there since August 2008. Yet in the past four years, drone strikes and airstrikes targeting Al Qaeda affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have increased dramatically.

Since 2010, there have been about 2,000 such strikes in Pakistan alone, with hundreds more in Yemen and North Africa. Meanwhile, only one alleged terrorist outside of Afghanistan — a Somali named Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame — was captured, held and interrogated. He was later flown to New York to stand trial.

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The fact that the United States now has nowhere to hold a terrorist — and no policy to deal with him once captured — means that a dangerous suspect might very well be let go. At present, there is no standard course of action approved by the president and relevant government agencies for what to do in the days and months following capture.

This situation creates disturbing incentives for troops on the battlefield. It encourages soldiers and policy makers in Washington to opt for the “five-cent solution” — a bullet. Rather than shooting people, we should be exercising due process, and bringing transnational terrorists to justice. That’s an approach that would help America maintain the moral high ground in the ongoing fight against Al Qaeda.

That there needs to be more human intelligence collection in U.S. CT is beyond dispute. So too are the issues currently wracking American detention policy. Warsame, for example, spent a good deal of time onboard the USS Boxer, which Spencer Ackerman fairly described as a "floating Gitmo" when put to this use. But that's not the worst of it. Warsame was lucky enough to make it to a U.S. courtroom, but as Jeremy Scahill has documented, Somalia's NSA and the CIA run some dreadful sounding facilities where not just fighters found in Somalia, but alleged terrorists from Kenya face interrogation and detention. If U.S. detention policy ultimately ends up relying on building Bagrams and Guantanamos across AFRICOM and CENTCOM, or else employing the U.S. Navy to this end, counterterrorism with a human face might not turn out all it's cracked up to be.

But even leaving aside navigating the legal and logistical issue of where to put terrorists once we capture them - an issue that Porges readily acknowledges - there is an issue of how to bring back warm bodies from where we currently have drones buzzing overhead. This is a critical question, because the means the U.S. employs to capture terrorists and suspected terrorists will have a great impact on the costs, benefits, and relative merits and demerits of capturing HVTs as opposed to the current targeted killing campaign.

In Afghanistan, the massive conventional presence of U.S. forces was and still is a significant enabler for capture operations. Afghanistan's infamous night raids, now under the control of the Afghan military or specialized CIA-trained elements, are a prime example. Yet many familiar issues emerged. Civilians resented property damage, casualties, mistaken targets, lack of transparency or accountable due process, and increasing the role of the ANSF may not have significantly improved the situation.

In many respects though, Afghan night raids are easy. Special operations enjoy significant legal and operational freedom of movement. Large amounts of on-the-ground intelligence and conventional forces enable better targeting and mitigate the risks of raids. Try to pick up targets in, say, Somalia, and things get much harder. JSOC raids into that country required air and naval fire support, while the enabling conventional force in question was the Ethiopian military, which did not do much to win Somali hearts or minds. Penetrating Somalia has required a patchwork of often unsavory partner military forces, militia proxies, private contractors, and covert operations. While America has learned much from 1993's most infamous attempt to conduct HVT capture, its foes in Somalia continue to pose stiff security challenges - though fortunately Shabaab seems to be losing ground.

In Yemen, the U.S. has a number of options for conducting capture operations, none of them particularly appealing. It can rely on Yemen's government and U.S.-trained troops, whose political loyalty and human rights credentials are not great. Though drone strikes are destructive, so are smash-and-grab expeditions into ungoverned or hostile space, particularly with a partner state's less, well, delicate touch (this is the country that named its counterinsurgency against the Houthis Operation Scorched Earth, after all). While we should always remember that U.S. airstrikes - manned or unmanned - rely on significant theater basing and local covert ground presence, capture missions would likely increase the footprint of U.S. operations. In Yemen, geography is favorable enough to allow sea-based raiding, but maintaining raids at the tempo of drone strikes would likely mean a vastly expanded U.S. military presence in the area. Or else it might rely on the Yemeni government, the prisons of which helped radicalize an earlier generation of al Qaeda.

In Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, too, we see similarly pressing problems. As C. Christine Fair rightfully points out, it's been Pakistani conventional offensives (which would provide the presumed enabling element for an increased tempo of capture raids) that have done the most damage and displacement to the region's population. A law enforcement approach's outlook is bleak because the entire region, whether the U.S. likes it or not, falls under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a colonial piece of legislation which makes playing by host rules and occupying the moral high ground an ethical gymnastics act. While Pakistan is willing to tolerate, to some extent, drone strikes on its soil, will it be so willing to replace them with more cross-border activity from JSOC, the CIA-trained Counterterrorism Pursuit Team, or let the U.S. direct its own security forces to a degree amenable to U.S. interests?

In areas where government capacity is strong and politically pliant, using the FBI to capture terrorist suspects will likely remain viable. When the U.S. tried to capture the 1993 CIA headquarter shooter, Aimal Kasi, the FBI worked with the Pakistani government to render him to the U.S. But they could not capture him until he entered Punjab province, and even then the U.S. initially hid the extent of Pakistani government involvement due to the controversy of the extradition. This was one arrest in 1997 - conducting arrests and renditions at a high tempo today simultaneously demands a much larger host government role while straining the political space for it to participate.

All this said, on balance the U.S. still must reorient its HVT program towards collecting HUMINT. For pragmatic and ethical reasons, the U.S. also must do something to fix the current legal and logistical morass of its detention policy. Yet assessing the proper role of capturing terrorists, and the likely degree of practical and moral surplus derived from it, demands a frank assessment about the demands of substituting captures for kills, and the capacity and willpower of the U.S. to undertake such operations. Even with the legal problems sorted out, and a system of prisons without the lingering insidious reputation of Guantanamo, Bagram, or CIA black sites, we still have the matter of kicking down the doors of suspected terrorists in well-armed and unfriendly neighborhoods and spiriting them away to a host or foreign prison. This is a process that will still likely get civilians killed, families unjustly torn apart, and put armed men and military hardware in places where they are not wanted. Dealing in such generalities, it is extremely hard to say whether this would appear, to the broader population, more moral, more desirable, or less encouraging of radicalism than drone strikes, in part because it is already so difficult to accurately measure very much about drone strikes in these regions to begin with.

Just look at the Phoenix Program, the massive effort to capture suspected foes in Vietnam to dismantle VC infrastructure. As William Rosenau and Austin Long explain in their invaluable report on its relevance for modern operations, the Phoenix Program unduly gained a lasting reputation as an "assassination" campaign of marauding "death squads" - a reputation so widespread that even President Nixon thought this was what the CIA-handled Provincial Reconnaissance Units were really aiming for. Whether using local governments, proxy forces, special operations, or some other element, snatching somebody from their home at night at gunpoint is a risky proposition for seeking political kudos. Particularly when placed alongside host governments that engage in disappearing opponents, brutal methods of counterinsurgency, and generally repressive practices, the perceptual and counter-radicalization benefits of a similar-tempo capture campaign might rapidly wane.

Doubtlessly, expecting all of this from an op-ed is a curmudgeon's (and a blogger's) game, but shifting the frame somewhat is necessary from a policy perspective. We must at least broach the question of what kind of force commitments and operational guidelines we need to effectively conduct a capture campaign is essential, as well as when and where we ought to employ such means.  While it's undeniable the HUMINT value of capture operations are higher, the costs of undertaking them may well reduce or even eliminate the presumed ancillary benefits.

One of the preemiment problems with the way that guerrilla warfare is discussed is the almost commonplace idea that it is a fundamentally different type of war, requiring fundamentally different interpretive and operational methods. Last weekend's spectacular assault on Camp Bastion should disabuse everyone of that notion. The assault on the heavily fortified airbase demonstrates an Taliban special operations capability that has yielded strategic effect. Since the 2008 Kabul Serena Hotel attack, the Taliban (likely guided by their Pakistani patrons) have developed a capability for complex, high-risk assaults that now seems to have taken center stage. The war of position has hardened, as swathes of the country remain in the hands of either Mullah Omar or the Haqqani Network and the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) continues what has been a problematic effort to consolidate their gains in the south. The Taliban are now using special operations to bolster the political effect of their territorial holdings and make their mark on Afghanistan's new politics.

James Kiras, a historian of special operations, writes that special operations are "unconventional actions against enemy vulnerabilities in a sustained campaign, undertaken by specially designated units, to enable conventional operations and/or resolve economically politico-military problems at the operational or strategic level that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with conventional forces alone."  Special operations generate cumulative moral or material attrition on the opponent in conjunction with conventional forces. Both moral and material vectors are vulnerabilities for the United States and its Afghan ally. Seven percent of the Marine Corps' overall Harrier fleet went up in smoke, and each high-risk assault in a Afghan urban center and targeted killing of an Afghan official adds to the perception of Taliban will and capability. While the Taliban special operations community may not look much like the Anglo-American model of special operations honed in World War II, it is still capable of formidable feats. The raid on the heavily fortified and geographically remote Camp Bastion required solid operational planning skills and intelligence prepartion of the battlefield. As Jeffrey Dressler argues, the complexity of the operation suggests planning and direction from Pakistan's intelligence services.

Under Kiras' model, special operations and regular forces both produce effects to support a political end. That end, as the transition process nears, is political position in Afghanistan's new order. There is nothing particularly unique about that kind of warfare. In major conventional wars after World War II, operations frequently were designed to bolster an overall political position rather than lead to decisive victory. The ending phases of the Korean and Vietnam wars both were marked by intense battles to gain a favorable position before the cease-fire. North Korea has repeatedly utilized a range of conventional and unconventional military tools for brinksmanship over the last few decades, and seems to be expanding its special operations and information warfare capabilities. Special operations, which utilize specially trained and tasked men to undertake difficult missions, are ideal for achieving strategic effect under such political conditions.

The idea that the Taliban could field a special operations capability and deploy it in a manner consistent with historical campaigns is not shocking when one considers that they originally gained political power in Afghanistan through mobile warfare to seize territory in the mid-90s. This required combined arms coordination, operational logistics, and command--all helped by generous Pakistani support. They lost political control through the similarly successful Northern Alliance prosecution of maneuver operations, which leveraged combat power to convince both Taliban elites and rank-and-file to change sides. Force destruction and the seizing of territory certainly can certainly achieve strategic ends all on their own (think Napoleon's most glorious campaigns) but the political element of war is paramount in every mode of warfare. The problem is not that Afghanistan is a uniquely political kind of war--all wars are---but that we forget that strategy involves the use of battle to generate political currency. The opening gambit of the current civil war cycle was, after all, a Soviet direct action raid to decapitate and destroy the Hafizullah Amin regime.

The Taliban are unlikely to use special operations to achieve anything that dramatic. However threatening their recent exploits may be, one concrete lesson of special operations history is that pinpoint raids do not obviate the need to painstakingly eliminate the opponent's ability and will to resist. The culminating point will be reached if the Taliban's reliance on special operations gets too far removed from what their main forces achieve. There are many people in Afghanistan and the wider region with a vested interest in seeing that the Taliban do not return to power, and a hard force-on-force fight looms. But Camp Bastion has demonstrated that Taliban special operations are nonetheless an important threat.

When Egyptian rioters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, raising the black banners (and bizarrely enough, some were hiding behind Guy Fawkes’s now ubiquitous visage), the news was bad enough. A handful of well-financed cranks, advancing a deluded and hateful but crushingly unsurprising agenda, helped ignite a crisis in a critical U.S. partner. The Embassy’s security personnel managed to avoid harm to its staff or the exercise of deadly force (today, it seems, Egyptian internal security has finally showed up at the compound walls). Yet despite the presence of Egyptian security services in the area, the rioters still stormed the walls, desecrated the flag, and flaunted those of the country’s foes – all on nominally sovereign U.S. territory.

In Benghazi, the stronghold of a revolution that, with aid from America and its allies, toppled the murderous Gaddafi regime, worse fears came to pass. Beset by militants – let no media outlet utter again the ridiculous phrase “armed protesters” – firing automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades, U.S. personnel returned fire. An outmatched Libyan security force proved basically ineffectual. One U.S. diplomat died, at least another was wounded, and the whole consulate burnt to the ground after the mob finished looting it.

UPDATE: As I woke up to edit this, news broke reporting that in addition to a potential three additional U.S. deaths, a high-level official – possibly a Consul or even U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, died as a result of the assault there. This new information, if it is verified, makes this all the more urgent, and the record of warning signs below all the more troubling.

This was not, of course, the first attack on diplomats in free Benghazi.  Militants fired rocket propelled grenades at British embassy vehicles, and bombed an Egyptian diplomat’s car. America’s Benghazi legation also suffered an IED attack. I discussed the apparent compromises with, or neglect of, Libya’s extremist armed groups in a previous post, when they were mostly focused on razing Sufi shrines. Today, the inability or unwillingness of the Libyan security forces to rein in these actors cost American diplomats their lives. The last Ambassador to die in duty was Adolph Dubs, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, killed after a botched, hasty raid on his militant kidnappers in 1979. That same year, three American embassies – Tripoli, Tehran, and Islamabad – all suffered sieges. As in Tehran, there was a record of targeting foreign diplomats and officials (including by groups such as the MEK) before the siege. Unfortunately, the hindsight is too late.

What is to be done? The most obvious solution would be for the governments of Libya and Egypt to perform their diplomatic obligations and curb attacks on other countries’ diplomats. Yet compelling even a friendly government to conduct such a task when it disrupts transitional regimes’ relationships with violent, and powerful political actors, is a task difficult even when the government in question is deeply dependent on American largesse.

For those few for whom hasty (and later repudiated) Embassy press releases and tweets might tip the balance from violent assaults on American lives and sovereign soil to less ferocious forms of truculence, there is public diplomacy, information operations, and the “war of ideas” (which Adam critiques magnificently). For everyone else, there’s the Marine Corps. In addition to the Marine Security Guards at U.S. facilities, today’s Marines maintain FAST units – Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams and RRTs – Rapid Response Teams – to protect American officials, citizens, and interests abroad.

Far from being historically unprecedented, the Marines and Navy have long been the big stick that enables American diplomats to speak softly, and for merchantmen to go about their business peaceably. In the hundreds of military interventions from America’s founding to today, many concerned specifically the enforcement of widely recognized sovereign privileges. These were initially, and especially, the rights of maritime shipping, upon which global trade and diplomatic communication depended. Depredations against American merchantmen, murder of sailors, and piracy all earned swift and limited punitive action. Revolutionary upheaval prompted landings in defense of American lives and property.

When the Marine Corps hymn sings of the “shores of Tripoli,” they really mean Derne, in Cyrenaica, where Marines, supporting a Consular official leading an army of mercenaries, with the backing of American offshore power, hoisted an American flag over foreign shores. The goal was not to liberate Libya but to discourage its governments from violating America’s maritime rights.

Similarly as important and almost universally recognized, in both practice and law, as legitimate sovereign privileges, are the rights of diplomats. All these rights have limits, of course. In 1984, when anti-Gaddafi protesters surrounded the Libyan embassy, Britain sent police officers for crowd control. The Libyan officials inside decided to open fire on the crowd, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Libya then used its diplomatic bags to smuggle the submachine gun out of the country. Diplomatic missions and associated officials have obligations to avoid interference with domestic affairs and especially breaches of the peace, and host governments have responsibilities to assist them in that task. When that becomes impossible, diplomatic missions have a right to repel offenses with violence.

Effective diplomacy demands the safety of diplomats. When diplomats feel they cannot leave the embassy, their professional duties suffer for it. In 1866, when bandits attacked the American consul in Newchwang, the USS Wachusett landed bluejackets to apprehend them. In the late 19^th century, America landed forces in Samoa, Argentina, and Chile, in part to protect consular officials and properties – and these were acts where there were far more legitimate grievances about America’s role, such as its overt backing of rival partisans in the Chilean case. America landed also, in the early 20^th century, to protect consular officials in Honduras, and even further aflung, in Syria and Abyssinia. America landed troops frequently in China throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and defended legations in Korea frequently. In more modern times, George H.W. Bush deployed military forces to defend and evacuate U.S. diplomatic facilities in Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America.

The U.S. may not need be as audacious in its expeditions now, particularly since in the case of Egypt and Libya, the U.S. diplomatic presence is, however influential, nowhere near as powerful in each country’s internal political situation as America’s legations were in say, Latin America or the Pacific during the early 20^th century. Yet the U.S. must remain willing to deploy the Marines as precautionary measures, and it must be willing to defend its diplomatic personnel with lethal force. While questions of punitive expeditions are more complicated, the use of military force in the defense of nigh-universally recognized sovereign rights is a principle in keeping with American interests, history, and its proper comportment under international law and state practice.

The alternative to effectively securing American diplomats through traditional means is not pretty. The rise of private security contractors owe much of their current prominence in part to this fact. After the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing, private contractors took increasingly large roles in providing facility security, with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security hiring contractors in 1994 to protect State Department personnel in Haiti. Expanding the role of the State Department sounds well and good, but a more robust diplomatic presence requires security, and when military forces are unavailable, private contractors fill that gap, to frequently problematic results.

So, if and when the U.S. Department of State returns in full force to Libya, it may again be bringing a few hundred mercenaries with it – not to overthrow the government, but to keep its lack of will or martial capability from threatening its ability to maintain a presence in the country. The complement, or worse, the alternative, will likely be diplomatic missions – and their clandestine counterparts who rely on diplomatic covers – even less willing to leave the facility, less willing to engage with the local population, and less effective at actually doing the job of professional diplomacy (or intelligence collection and covert operations, as the case may be).

It is far too early to reasonably outline any kind of punitive measures for what has occurred now. In theory, the bulk of the work of securing cities for diplomats will fall to host governments. Yet it is manifestly unclear how or how soon governments such as Libya’s, (particularly given the almost total denial of reality some Libyan spokesmen have evinced by blaming these acts on Gaddafi bittereinders) can adequately secure these facilities, or if they really have the will to prioritize them.

In the past, offenses such as these – even against, say, sailors of naval vessels – prompted a punitive expeditions against non-state groups such as bandits or partisans, followed by the imposition of an indemnity on the government for the U.S.’s troubles. In Libya, nothing so dramatic is likely to occur. Yet the capability to rapidly respond to evacuate or assist State Department officials under threat will remain essential, even if the full expeditionary power of a Joint Task Force or MAGTF is unlikely to be unleashed.

The readiness to defend American diplomatic rights is a cornerstone of American foreign policy. The strength of the State Department is bolstered, not detracted, by deterring power of the limited military detachments which accompany it and stand over the horizon to defend it. The more that deterrent and security is weakened, the less able the State Department can operate safely and effectively without a growing reliance on private security or other measures.  Regardless of what policy options should or do play out in Libya, the US Department of State – together with its colleagues in the USMC – ought ensure that anyone contemplating to forcibly enter our legations or partake in an open season on our diplomats do so only with a great and well-founded fear for their lives.

Lastly, and perhaps most striking, is something Joshua Foust reminded me of on Twitter today – since World War II, more Ambassadors have died in the line of duty than general officers. During many years of American history since, it has arguably even been more dangerous to be a member of the Foreign Service than the Armed Forces. The complexity and difficulty of protecting diplomatic personnel, as outlined above, leaves them in a deeply vulnerable situation. Responsible for the constant maintenance and crafting of the vast and inscrutable beast that is U.S. foreign policy, they assume serious amounts of personal risk, knowing that by the nature of their trade they must leave themselves exposed, and that the very nature of their profession will inherently constrain what their country can do to save them in an hour of need. In theory they are protected by inviolable sovereign rights and centuries of diplomatic tradition. In reality, the options for the Marines attached to the legations will always be circumscribed by the foreign policy considerations those they protect serve to advance. With the enormous amount of risk State Department civilians face, it is imperative the military components supporting the State Department ensure they retain the capability to protect those rights if called upon, and deter breaches of those rights so they need not be called upon in the first place – and it is also imperative that policymakers give them an effective mandate to support those missions. They fight so that we might not lose men such as Ambassador Chris Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and it appears in Benghazi,  some lay down their lives to do so.