Center for a New American Security

I spent part of my vacation reading the new book by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda. Thom and Eric wrote the book while on a writing fellowship here at the Center for a New American Security, so I'm relieved that I a) very much enjoyed reading it and b) can recommend it to the readership. It's a brisk read -- short enough to read while trapped in your houses as a hurricane blows over, for example -- and has all the hallmarks of the great reporting you have come to expect from two of the NYT's finest. 

This will come as no surprise to those who have followed your reporting for the New York Times, but this book was carefully and exhaustively reported. You guys face a tough dilemma, though: when reporting on secret programs, the best sources will often not talk. And although you have managed to interview some of the key decision makers, are you worried that your reporting is limited by its sources? How do you write “The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda” and not “The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda As Told To Us By The People We Got To Speak On The Record?”

It’s wonderful to be asked why we had so many people on the record! Usually we are criticized for too many confidential sources. In Counterstrike, we used both, extensively. Our book is drawn from more than two hundred interviews conducted with current and former military personnel, diplomats, and intelligence officers, as well as law enforcement, Pentagon, and White House officials who participated in the operations, intelligence analysis, and policy making in the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When possible, we named the sources. But because of the nature of reporting on sensitive operations and policies, often involving classified information, many of our sources spoke to us on the condition that they remain anonymous. In each case where we used anonymous sources, we carefully weighed the trade-offs between the need for transparency in reporting this book and the important information that confidential sources could provide. We also found that many sources who might be otherwise reluctant to talk to us for an article for the daily newspaper agreed to speak to us for the book. They wanted to ensure that their perspective on this historic period was understood and chronicled.

You guys cover a lot of breaking, Page A1 news. How difficult is it to step back and write a more reflective piece of journalism looking at a decade-long era?

The hardest part was time-management. We found that to make it all work we had to give 50 percent of our time to our reporting for the Times; 50 percent of our time to the book; 50 percent of our time to our loving and long-suffering wives; and 50 percent of our time to our kids (we each have two). Fortunately, all the time left over was ours, and we could use it to relax. In many ways, we began reporting the book on 9/11, even though we didn’t begin considering a book until about three years ago. But this is what we have done for the past decade. What we discovered in our first work of long-form narrative was the incredible amount of detail a reporter can develop when working on a two-year book project: The ability to return to sources not just once, but multiple times. The ability to check and cross-check stories, and really dig for details. The ability to trace a tip about an important counterterrorism raid and have time to track down participants from the small unit up to the senior commanders – and trace the effect and impact across the inter-agency. The ability to identify characters who had significant counterterrorism roles throughout the decade after 9/11, and were willing to talk to us. Those things you simply cannot do on a daily deadline.

If I had a complaint about the book, it’s that it often read, especially in the middle chapters, like a list of inputs and not effects. This is a real and common problem we researchers have in evaluating counter-terror programs. We know what we are doing. What’s tougher to tell is, what effect are we having on the enemy? To that end, what programs do you think are having the biggest effects on al-Qaeda? What is working? What is not?

You are a smart reader. The insurmountable problem is that we are covering counterterrorism missions from only one side. For obvious reasons, we could not bounce our reporting off of some Al Qaeda press spokesman or operations officer or financier to say, “Hey, we are writing about this mission. Is this how it went down against you? Is this how successful it was?” But we did our due diligence by comparing what sources told us to what responses appeared on jihadist Web sites, and it usually tracked with what we heard from sources here. Clearly, the kinetics have had an impact, as have missions to dry up sources of finances. What remains in the D- department, if not failing, are the efforts to counter the message of violent extremism. If the United States and its allies have been forced to offer an effective counterposing narrative to those who bomb and behead innocents, then the United States has lost before it has even started.

Along the same lines, you guys don’t outright grade the performance of the past few administrations on counter-terror, so I’m going to give you the chance to do that. On an A-F scale, what grade would you assign …

a. The Bush Administration, 2001-2003?

b. The Bush Administration, 2003-2005?

c. The Bush Administration, 2005-2007?

d. The Bush Administration, 2007-2009?

e. The Obama Administration, 2009-2011?

We think readers of our book would come away seeing that the Bush administration adopted a muscular if clumsy capture-kill strategy in the months after 9/11. Understandable, necessary, but not sufficient. And, as Rumsfeld noted in his famous October 2003 memo, kinetics alone risked creating more jihadists than were taken off the battlefield. By the second Bush administration, officials were adopting a more nuanced strategy, one that involved the whole of government to try and counter violent extremism with every tool available. Although Obama was certainly the un-Bush, it is historic fact that his administration has been as much continuity in the CT world as change. Drone strikes? Embraced and expanded. SOF raids? Tempo increased. But Obama certainly has changed the tenor of the discussion with the Islamic world, and even with European allies, and his efforts to close Gitmo, while still unsuccessful, set him apart, to be sure.

This book covers a lot of ground. What chapter do you wish you could have expanded on or dug deeper into?

Cyber and counter-messaging.

I usually end these interviews by asking people to name their favorite bars and such. For you guys, I’ll ask a different question: what are the three weirdest places you have ever met a source for an interview?

Thom:

1. Radovan Karadzic’s chalet at Pale, his mountain redoubt above Sarajevo. He was not yet an indicted war criminal, but we were reporting extensively on the atrocities he had ordered, so it was difficult to get an interview with the Bosnian Serb leader. So we drove from Belgrade up into the mountains, and while my translator was speaking with his aides, I tried to strike up a conversation with his bodyguards, who were playing poker. “Hey guys. What’re the stakes?” I asked. One responded: “Winner gets to shoot the guy from the Trib.” At the time, I was the guy from the Trib.

2. When I was a Moscow bureau chief, dissidents and underground artists always wanted to meet foreign correspondents. So you’d choose a big public location, with signals to identify one another. One spot was a big toy store across Dzerzhinsky Square from the old Lubyanka KGB prison. Sort of hiding in plain sight, I guess. Many of those I met were legitimate outsiders who had a bona fide story to tell about the crimes of the Soviet state. But not always. And I guess the KGB didn’t want to send its stooges too far, because over the course of five years and hundreds of such meetings I went to Children’s World several dozen times -- and among those I met were a Ukrainian nationalist, a Jewish refusenik and a formerly imprisoned poet; but all three of these were the same guy, who obviously couldn’t keep track of which reporters he had tried to set up.

3. I have one defense industry source who likes quick meetings. He will drive up in front of our bureau on Farragut Square, roll down the darkened windows of his SUV and toss me documents. One day our bureau chief was heading out to lunch and saw the exchange, which was too bad. It made the job of Pentagon correspondent look way too easy.

Eric:

1. Inside a sweltering reed hut in Al Turaba, Iraq, a dust-choked village 20 miles from the Iranian border. I was traveling with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in July 2003. He had flown to the village to listen to a dozen wizened tribal elders from the area who asked him to restore a way of life that Saddam Hussein had taken away. Sitting cross-legged in his stocking feet on a Persian rug, Wolfowitz nodded in agreement as the old men chronicled the plight of the marsh Arabs, an ancient people whose homeland in southeastern Iraq had been drained into desert as punishment for their independence and Shiite faith. It was 120 degrees outside the hut and even hotter inside, but Wolfowitz still wore a blue blazer and red tie, both coated with dust. It was hard to hear him and the elders over the raucous banter of scores of villagers jammed inside the hut and a donkey's braying outside.

2. Several hundred feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean inside the U.S.S. Kentucky, one of the Navy’s Trident II ballistic-missile. When I was a young Pentagon correspondent in the early 1990’s, I tried to get out with troops as much as possible. I flew in an Air Force fighter jet. I rode in Army M1-A1 tank. But inside the submerged submarine on a training run in 1993 was eerie. Capt. Mike Riegel and his crew were amenable to talking about their vessel. But no loud voices, please. The cold war was over by then, but there were still reminders of a time when crew members feared that the slightest racket on board could give away a submarine’s position to the Soviets. Equipment was lined in plastic or rubber to avoid pings or banging. Signs in toilet stalls sternly warned crew members: "Don't Drop That Seat. Shhhhhh!"

3. On a very sensitive story several years ago that involved American spies, commandos and scandal, one of our main sources agreed to meet periodically at a coffee shop along a major Interstate freeway in a Western state. But we never met him in the same place twice. The source gave me and my colleague a cell phone. We never knew exactly when he was going to call. But when he did, he gave us the name of a highway exit and a coffee shop there. We met several times over about many months, each time collecting new information from him and corroborating (or rejecting) tips we heard from other sources. He was always spot on. After the article was published, we received a cryptic message, “Well done.” We never heard from him again.

Wow, who knew John McCain had gotten so paranoid about reporters! Anyway, thanks for the interview, guys. Buy Counterstrike here.

If you watch U.S. cable news in the aftermath of today's attacks in Norway -- and really, why are you watching U.S. cable news? -- you are likely to see various "terrorism" "experts" talking about what happened. If you are lucky, you'll see someone like Peter Bergen who has written extensively and well on various jihadi groups, but beyond that, the quality can go downhill pretty quickly.

As a service to the readership, the following is an incomplete list of several scholars who write and comment well on terrorism.

1. Will McCants. Will, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis, worked in the State Department's counter-terrorism shop until recently. Armed with excellent Arabic and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton, Will is a serious scholar of both Islam and jihadi movements. He founded the website Jihadica and can be followed on Twitter at @will_mccants.

2. Thomas Hegghammer. A Norwegian himself, Thomas is the author of this incredible book and introduces the field of jihadi studies quite well in this excellent if dated essay.

3. Brynjar Lia. Another Norwegian, Brynjar also wrote a rather wonderful book and is an analyst at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

4. Leah Farrall. Aussie goddess of all things counter-terrorism. Follow her on Twitter at @allthingsct.

5. Brian Fishman. A research fellow at the New America Foundation, you might actually see Brian on television. He probably will not say anything ignorant. Which is more than you can say for most people you will see on television. @brianfishman

You will note my incomplete list of counter-terrorism experts is somewhat biased toward those with language skills and formal education in the subject and away from law enforcement and military experience. This is not an accident. Nothing wrong with the latter, of course. It's just that if you want someone to explain the origins of al-Qaeda, some guy who used to kick down doors is probably not your man. (Though he may be, I guess.) My list is also biased toward experts on Islamist terror. There are those in the field of strategic studies who focus more on terror and coercion as general subjects, but I have found they are less likely to be able to say something of consequence about specific groups than people who are experts on specific groups can say something of consequence about terror tactics and coercion in general. Anyway, do add your own names in the comments section.

P.S. This list was compiled after jihadi groups claimed responsibility for the Norway attacks. If the attacks were instead the acts of what we social scientists call an "LDA," or Lone Derranged A******, save this list for the next time there is an attack by bona fide terrorist group or you're just otherwise curious about terror and counter-terrorism.

An American friend from the Middle East who has recently spent time covering the war in Afghanistan had the same question I did upon reading this article in the New York Times: "How can my colleagues not understand that COIN involves killing?"

First off, I note this article was not written by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, both of whom have reported extensively on U.S. special operations in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times and who are writing a book together on the subject. Second, direct-action special operations played an integral and well-documented role in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Iraq during the Baghdad security operations of 2007. They are most effective, in fact, when incorporated into a larger operational framework such as counterinsurgency. I wrote a short piece on the false dichotomy between "COIN" and "CT" for this blog's responsible cousins at the Small Wars Journal last year. Click here (.pdf) to read it. Because I was shaking my head as vigorously as anyone else as I read that article this past weekend.

Update: This Doonesbury cartoon does a nice job of illustrating the balance between the kinetic and non-kinetic.

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.

I do not usually make it to think tank events in DC, but I made the time today to sit in at the start of the Brookings Institute's Defense Challenges and Future Opportunities confab put together by the awesome Pete Singer, he of Wired for War fame. Dave Kilcullen moderated the first panel of the morning on irregular war, and the first presentation of that panel was a keeper.

Veteran intelligence analyst Matt Frankel, on leave from his service in the intelligence community as a federal executive fellow at Brookings, gave a compelling presentation on high value targeting (HVT) campaigns and their utility. His findings:

1. HVT campaigns are more effective against centralized opposition -- but decentralization is the trend.
2. HVT campaigns do not work in a vaccum. They have to be connected to a broader CT or COIN strategy.
3. Indigenous attacking forces have the edge in HVT campaigns, mainly due to local knowledge.
4. Along the same line, third party HVT campaigns are less likely to succeed, and in order for them to do so, the objectives of the host nation must be alligned with those of the third party.
5. Capture when you can, kill when you must. Obviously, the intelligence yield is better in the case of the former. Dead mean tell no tales.
6. Understanding enemy organizational dynamics is vital. What will the effect on an enemy organization be? And -- and this is my concern -- are we killing the people we might need to do a deal with later?

Frankel's presentation matches up with a lot of what I have often argued, which for the most part has been based either on my personal experiences (I learned the danger of ignoring Lesson #2 in Iraq in 2003, for example) or case study analysis (fun fact: Hizballah's HVT campaign against the SLA in southern Lebanon was more successful than the IDF's HVT campaign against Hizballah, lending support to Lessons #3 and #4). I am pretty sure Frankel's analysis supports a lot of the concerns Dave and I have had about the drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan (namely, that it ignores Lessons #1, #2 and #6), but I would want to see Frankel's presentation in an article supported by footnotes and with methodology laid out in greater detail. Regardless, Frankel's presentation was a great one, and I was sorry that an obligation at CNAS kept me from hearing the discussion that followed it.

Okay, you all know about the famous Abu Muqawama Counterinsurgency Reading List. But a reader wrote in asking whether or not we might consider posting a reading list on counter-terrorism. That sounds like a fun project, actually, for the readership. So for the next few days, leave your suggestions in the comments. Books, academic articles and journalistic articles are all welcome, as are other media -- movies, documentaries, etc.

By the way... I have no informed comment on the capture of Mullah Baradar other than to say that it might be hugely important -- not necessarily from the perspective of the QST's senior leadership but from the perspective of U.S.-Pakistani relations and the stance of Pakistan's military and security services toward the Taliban. Josh Foust, though, has the best instant analysis I have read thus far.

No comment from Londonstani on this, but read the article and comment at will.

Ok, maybe a few excerpts would be useful:

"Foreign Secretary David Miliband was under pressure today to explain why there had been cutbacks in counter-terrorism programmes in Pakistan because of the falling value of the pound.

"...The Foreign Office (FCO) is trying to deal with a shortfall of £110 million, a figure expected to grow in 2010-11, due to fluctuations in sterling.

"...Baroness Kinnock caused astonishment by disclosing that programmes to tackle terrorism and radicalisation in Pakistan had been hit as a result.

"...Her revelation in the House of Lords came hours after Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the Commons that the "crucible of terrorism" on the Afghan-Pakistan border remained the "number one security threat to the West".

And, in case you thought this was due to some sort of unforseen international economic situation:

"Mr Hague said the cuts were the "direct consequence of Labour's decision to remove the FCO's protection against exchange rate movements".

UPDATE:

And where are the cuts landing?

"Kim Howells, a former foreign minister who is now chair of the intelligence and security committee that oversees MI5, MI6 and other intelligence agencies, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning that he was surprised at the timing of Kinnock's comments, but not the content.

"It is well known that obviously if a currency devalues against other currencies than you buy less than your money," said Howells.

He did not believe these cuts would affect "the hard end" of counterterrorism activities, he said, before adding: "Undoubtedly what it will affect are those softer diplomatic efforts ... for example, trying to convince the Pakistani government and the regional governments in Pakistan that they should try to improve the material lives of people that will make them less susceptible to the overtures of al-Qaida, the Taliban and so on."

So like in the areas where many analysts think we have the best opportunity to make substantial changes

My readers are geniuses. They would have this debate sorted in no time, even if it took the Thunderdome:

Maybe we could handle it another way, taking a clue from classic Greek warfare and playing to the President's interests. We get the best COIN basketball player and match them against the best CT dude and winner gets to make the call on CT or COIN for the rest of this Presidential term. We get a quick and final decision and the WP can have a twofer writing Afghanistan and the President's latest basketball team(s) in the same story. We have Ex, Col Gentile and Charles Barkley do the TV color. Pay per view bonanza.

Meanwhile, staying on the same subject, I read this yesterday and thought it pretty smart.

Credit goes to reader and enthusiastic supporter of all things counterinsurgency Michael Cohen for sending along this piece by the very serious and very smart Austin Long that escaped my view earlier this week. Austin makes a case for a counter-terror campaign in Afghanistan and, bless him, gets down to the specifics. The people who have actually led and executed counter-terror operations in Afghanistan -- Gens. Stan McChrystal, Mike Flynn, Scott Miller -- are the best people to explain why such campaigns will not work. In the words of Gen. McChrystal, “You can kill Taliban forever, because they are not a finite number.” And in my mind, these kinds of CT strategies ignore the political dimension even more egregiously than do most counterinsurgency strategies. But read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. You guys may think I'm so far down the road of counterinsurgency that I am not open to alternatives, but I really am. I'm just wary of those which are more conceptual than operational.

A few more things for the readership:

1. The leader in this week's Economist agrees with us imperialist war-mongers, so go direct some of your hate mail in their direction.

2. Easy on the Vietnam analogies, gang. There are a lot of good books on Vietnam, and what historical conclusion one draws from the war depends on which books one has read. (Of course, we have actual veterans of the war who read this blog, so they can probably skip the reading list.) Who do you read? Krepinevich? Karnow? Goldstein? Sorely? Fall? Those who suggest advocates of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan have not read their history need to explain exactly what history we need to read that we have not. Regardless and whatever you think of the current U.S. administration, the decision-making process of Barack Obama's national security team could not be more different than that of Lyndon Johnson.

3. Anyway, this is what I'm reading this weekend.

Currently watching President Obama speak to the UN General Assembly. Of note to readers of this blog, he reiterated his stance about not allowing al-Qaeda the use of any safe havens from which they can plot attacks. "We will permit no safe-haven," the president said, "for al Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan or any other nation."

I have written on safe havens before, and I'm still not sure if the president realizes the ambition of what he's saying. Are we going into Yemen next? The Horn of Africa? What does this mean for U.S. operations abroad? Will we use commando raids? Drone strikes? Indirect approaches? Again, because I'm not a real strategist and tend to think operationally, when I hear him say stuff like this I wonder how, exactly, we're going to execute the polcy he is articulating. There is a big difference between disrupting al-Qaeda activities in safe havens and denying them the use of safe havens to begin. And -- and here's a bone for all you realists out there -- it's not as if we have unlimited resources to do all this with.

In other news, I apologize for the Afghanistan-centric nature of this blog of late (there are better Afghanistan blogs out there), but here are some quick-hit links to some recent pieces of note:

1. Fred writes a typically smart piece in Slate
2. Blake interviews Khalilzad
3. Laura notes a backlash to the McChrystal report
4. Robert crunches some numbers on troops
5. Though this blogger was against the AP's decision on the dying Marine, this historical reflection offers a great counterargument
6. And finally, Rep. Ike Skelton -- a man always worth listening to on defense issues -- and his letter to the president on Afghanistan and the need for a properly-resourced counterinsurgency strategy.

Skelton Letter to President AFG 22Sept09