Topic “COIN CT”
Counterinsurgency - Lessons from Pakistan
There's little news coming out from independent sources about the Pakistani army's campaign in Waziristan. The suspicion amongst the international journalists and analysts is that the Pakistani army doesn't have the capacity to take out militants without causing serious collateral damage to civilians, and so the result of the present action will be further militancy in the future.
However, some journalists who have seen the government's efforts during the Waziristan campaign and before that in Swat have come away with a sense that the government has realised that succeeding against militancy is about resettlement and reconstruction as much as it is about blowing stuff up.
David Rose of The Mail, a British daily, spent a good long time in Peshawar, Swat and Dera Ismail Khan. Amid calls from U.S. and British officials for Pakistan to do more, David says that what Pakistan is doing, it is doing well, and ISAF forces on the other side of the Durand Line could learn a thing or two from the Pakistani approach.
David illustrates what the Pakistani state successes by pointing out how it dealt with refugees from the Swat campaign.
"When I last visited Pakistan in June, at the height of the Swat campaign, there were more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the scorching plains in camps and relatives’ spare rooms.
But a remarkably efficient army-led transport and reconstruction effort has meant more than 95 per cent of them have been back home for weeks."
David's reporting suggests that the Taliban's ability to alienate practically everyone once in power is proving an asset to the Pakistani state.
"‘The people supported the Taliban because they felt the state was not giving them justice. But now they are finished," says one man from Mingora.
Extrapolating, Londonstani wonders if what David saw in Mingora is applicable to Pakistan as a whole? If we look past all the "slave of the West" talk, does the Taliban gain support when the state seems to have failed to provide the basics? And if the Taliban does manage to rule an area, does the state have a window of opportunity to prove to the population that they are better off without Taliban rule? But, doesn't that mean we could avoid all of this if the government could do a good job actually doing its job (like, you know, governing) in the first place.
Doesn't that make the solution seem tantalisingly close at hand? Help Pakistan govern properly.
Unfortunately, this is harder than it seems. In fact, it's so hard the government seems to be concentrating on letting people down gently instead of building up their hopes. A popular political banner at the moment proclaims, "The worst democracy is better than the best dictatorship." Londonstani is not so sure everyone agrees.
Droning on
I don't know about you, but I spent my Independence Day catching up on my Foreign Affairs reading. The big red title of the current issue is "Saving Afghanistan," which seems pretty misplaced because one of its headline articles by Steven Simon, a combined response to Seth Jones' In the Graveyard of Empires and David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla, is most definitely not interested in saving Afghanistan.
Simon's piece is definitely worth a read, as it presents a very coherent and reasoned critique of the conventional wisdom surrounding the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don't think there should be any mistaking that Obama's campaign in Afghanistan is somehow less ambitious than Bush's: Bush talked the talk about building a stable, democratic Afghanistan, but it's the Obama administration that is trying to walk the walk by devoting more resources and promising a "civilian surge" to improve Afghan governance. I tend to share Simon's concern that our approach in Afghanistan is perhaps guided more by sentiment than rational calculation. Afghanistan in and of itself is probably not that important to us, certainly not in the way that Iraq is, and there's something troublesome about spending a lot of national resources to stabilize and reconstruct a country that never had much stability or construction in the first place.
That said, I'm also not sold on Simon's take that our Predator drone strikes are a primary solution to our AQ problems there and in Pakistan. For someone who clearly has such a critical eye for U.S. policy, he seems awfully willing to take official statements about the efficacy of these strikes at face value:
"Thus, if the core concern is terrorism, Washington should concentrate on its already effective policy of eliminating al Qaeda's leadership with drone strikes. In what amounts to a targeted killing program, the United States uses two types of unmanned aerial vehicles -- the Predator and the faster, higher-altitude Reaper, which can carry two Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs -- to attack individuals and safe houses associated with al Qaeda and related militant groups, such as the Haqqani network. Most of these strikes have taken place in North or South Waziristan, as deep as 25 miles into Pakistani territory. There were about 36 against militant sites inside Pakistan in 2008, and there have been approximately 16 so far in 2009. Among the senior al Qaeda leaders killed in the past year were Abu Jihad al-Masri, al Qaeda's intelligence chief; Khalid Habib, number four in al Qaeda and head of its operations in Pakistan; Abu Khabab al-Masri, al Qaeda's most experienced explosives expert, who had experimented with biological and chemical weapons; and Abu Laith al-Libi, the al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan. Some 130 civilians have also been killed, but improved guidance and smaller warheads should lead to fewer unintended casualties from now on.
"The logic of this strategy is straightforward. "In the past, you could take out the number 3 al Qaeda leader, and number 4 just moved up to take his place," says one official. "Well, if you take out number 3, number 4, and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre." In consequence, "the enemy is really, really struggling," says one senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who notes "a significant, significant degradation of al Qaeda command and control in recent months." These same officials say that al Qaeda's leadership cadre has been "decimated" and that it is possible to foresee a "complete al Qaeda defeat" in Pakistan."
I'm no doctrinaire one way or another on drone strikes, but I do think there are at least some reasons (which this blog's founder has enumerated) to be wary of the possibility that they're self-defeating in the long run. The counter-terror crowd in government is really high on their effectiveness, and even Andrew Bacevich seems to endorse them as a means to deny terrorists sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And, as Dan Byman says in this smart piece, there are so few good options here that "relying on bolts from the blue to keep al Qaeda and the Taliban weak and off balance" might be the best thing we've got going. But shouldn't we be at least a bit skeptical of this policy? As unpleasant as "nation-building" is, there's also something unpleasant about bombing Afghan and Pakistani villages without a really clear idea of what we're getting for it. I mean, we are America and we pride ourselves on ideals and humanitarianism--are we comfortable with a policy that offers Afghans and Pakistanis pretty much nothing but the occasional Hellfire missile? It seems like that deserves to be questioned, even as we also question the wisdom of trying to do nation-building in Afghanistan. There has to be more to our strategy than that.
Not being privy to any super-secret intelligence (please send some my way if you have any!), my novice questions are: how do we know we're getting the right guys, and as we keep killing them off, how will we be sure that we've got tabs on all the most dangerous up-and-comers? How can we be sure that this is having such a strong impact on al-Qaeda and the other radical groups we're trying to take down? (For all their alleged effectiveness, it seems worth noting that our drones have not bagged bin Laden or al-Zawahiri. And just how many times do we have to kill the al-Qaeda #3?) Are the civilian casualties caused by these attacks (usually dismissed as the inevitable "collateral damage") creating more jihadis than they kill? And what creates more terrorist sympathizers, drone strikes or the large-scale troop presence?
Sageman vs. Hoffman (and COIN vs. CT)
You no longer need a subscription to Foreign Affairs (or an Athens password) to
read about the feud between Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman regarding the nature of the jihadist threat. First there was Hoffman’s takedown in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in which he accused Sageman of “a fundamental misreading of the Al Qaeda threat.” Sageman’s rebuttal, in which he accuses Hoffman of a “gross misrepresentation”, is on the way. But thanks to the NYT Week in Review, we’re all treated to a little preview of what Sageman will have to say. Along with some trans-Atlantic commentary on the feud and a summary of why this matters beyond the realm of the ivory tower.
Charlie tends to come down with Hoffman on this one, if only because she's quite certain that leaving what's left of AQ(C) to re-group in Pakistan's tribal regions is a recipe for disaster. Sageman may be right that the organization has diminished capacity and weak leadership, but there's no reason to assume things will remain that way (especially if things in FATA continue their downward trend).
But the good folks at Kings also highlight a crucial difference in CT approaches in Europe and the US. From the NYT:
France, Spain and Italy, for example, pour resources and manpower into
investigations at home — from studying radicalization and wiretapping suspicious
individuals to infiltrating mosques and community centers. These countries also
track movements of suspicious individuals abroad and networks with both
local and foreign connections. Terrorist-related cases fall under the
authority of special investigative superjudges who have access to all classified
intelligence, and can use much of the information in trials.
As the Pentagon debates the lexicon of "irregular warfare" (not Charlie's favorite), let's also start thinking about how to link robust, long-term COIN and CT strategies. We're gonna need both.
Saddam and the Terrorists
Just to throw a little red meat to the masses, though, here's an article from the other end of the political spectrum by Abu Muqawama fave Eli Lake on Saddam's links with terror groups. The key finding, according to Eli:
The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.That's a nice spin on things -- that there was "no smoking gun" -- which allows the folks who insist there were operational links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda to continue claiming so despite all the evidence to the contrary. Just wait a little longer and we'll find those WMDs too! Gang, there was no operational relationship whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. But let's move onto these ties with terror groups:
A long time skeptic of the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq and a former CIA senior Iraq analyst, Judith Yaphe yesterday said, "I think the report indicates that Saddam was willing to work with almost any group be it nationalist or Islamic, that was willing to work for his objectives. But in the long term he did not trust many of the Islamist groups, especially those linked to Saudi Arabia or Iran." She added, "He really did want to get anti-American operations going. The fact that they had little success shows in part their incompetence and unwilling surrogates."And there you have it. That paragraph and quote pretty much sums up the reality, removed from the reckless pre-war exaggerations of Hayes and also from any rhetoric on the extreme left that might like to imagine Saddam Hussein should have been left alone in Baghdad where he wasn't harming anyone and had no interest in funding or otherwise supporting terror groups.
This is going to be the last thing Abu Muqawama posts on this issue because it has nothing to do with counter-insurgency. The only reason Abu Muqawama linked to the piece in the first place is because it's absurd that Goldberg and Hayes continue to be promoted through the ranks and feted as star journalists as if what they wrote in the kinda important run-up to the Iraq War turned out to be true. Now let's all move on from this and go back to writing and reading about COIN (and NCAA basketball and Six Nations rugby). Deal?
