The problem is the power to use them, not the drones themselves

I haven't thought much about drones since I had to worry about scheduling and clearing airspace for them when I was still in the Army deployed to Iraq. My deepest thoughts regarding them was to always remind myself not to put a tactical UAV over a target house before the raid hits.  As a strategic tool of national security, they struck me as just that: a tool. It is an alternative to a manned aircraft, but with lesser capabilities. No big deal and not something to waste grey cells on.

But then this was published in the NY Times yesterday. I am shocked at the authority the President has to determine who and what is a viable and legal target for precision strikes. I don't blame the President for this extreme power - it's the Congress' job to check his power and they're not doing that. They passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorists in 2001 and have not updated it since, leaving the President with extraordinary power.  Our strikes (manned or unmanned) in Pakistan, Yemen, and Horn of Africa seem to be against appropriate targets and are conducted in places where we have the authority to do so. It's the ability of the President to decide which individuals should be killed is astounding.

What concerns me about unmanned strike assets is the potential they have, in an environment where a small coterie have wide-ranging discretion to use them, to enable the United States to make a significant moral or strategic blunder. Even though I generally agree with Dan Trombly that many concerns about drones are not relevant today, that does not predict that the concerns he dispenses with will not be valid in the future. At the moment, UAV technology is not so advanced as to make it our primary strike platform across the globe (technology more limited by budgets and policy than capability). And we currently use UAVs in conflicts with the authority of the state where they are deployed. But what happens when we have a president not as scrupulous as President Obama?

My concern about about drones is not the drones themselves. The article linked about has little to nothing to do with drones themselves. My concern is about unchecked power. My concern is that people who can potentially rise to power high enough to direct the use of drones will use them foolishly because of the drones' inherent characteristics. The fact that the United States can now execute a (limited) bombing campaign without putting a single U.S. citizen into harms way is quite alluring - and that capability will on increase with time. With such extensive power, how long until will it be until we have a President who will use this mere tool to conduct attacks that were unfounded, unchecked, or fall short of jus ad bellum criteria. How long will it be until we have a President who orders an attack somewhere but does not understand the nth order effects that might trigger a sizable or regional war? Drones make these types of attacks easier and more palatable because the initial consequences (no loss of American lives) are negligible. We can invest so little and yet realize significant returns, surely, and that makes it so easy to use. But plans don't work out, intel is bad, collateral damage is not acceptable, thinking is muddled - things often assumed as irrelevant before an op but become quite relevant in the aftermath. Especially when it's so easy to execute the strike.

The United States should continue to use drones and develop drone technology for use against its enemies. It is only a tool and it does save (or has the potential to save) American lives while allowing the United States to protect its interests, making it a very valuable tool of American military power.  What we need to do, as a nation, is re-look what powers we vest with the President and ensure it isn't too easy for him or her to use force contrary to our ideals or interests. As drones advance, their use will become alluring to those with interventionist bents who believe that political capital comes cheaply if you don't have any skin in the game. You can't lose what you don't wager and I don't trust that everyone who might have power in the future will understand that using drones is still a wager, even if it's not American lives. Congress should start laying the groundwork now passing new laws to ensure when that person does come to power it's not too late.

The legend of COIN as essential CT enabler: the bin Laden exemplum

Spencer wrote a thoughtful post last week on a question I'm surprised hadn't been brought up earlier: does the bin Laden raid tell us anything about the legitimacy of past claims that a large-footprint counterinsurgent force on the ground in Afghanistan is essential to collecting the kind of solid, reliable local intelligence we need to wage effective operations against al-Qaeda? Take it away, Attackerman:

So the bin Laden raid leaves us with an empirical test case for a core counterinsurgency contention.

Proposed by Dave Kilcullen and others, counterinsurgency theorists argue that theirs is the truer path to robust counterterrorism, the pursuit of which is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context. Counterterrorism requires intelligence on terrorists and their environs. Intelligence requires local knowledge. Local knowledge requires the protection of vulnerable populations from reprisal, plus some incentive -- money, justice, political access, whatever -- to make cooperation with the anti-insurgent faction sensible. If you don't provide those resources and meet people where they are, then your counterterrorism hunt is fruitless. 

U.S. counterterrorism just succeeded, massively, in a place where we don't have a counterinsurgency campaign. But we clearly had sufficient local knowledge (read: informers and ground operatives) -- plus signals intelligence, plus persistant surveillance -- to meet our objective.

This seems like a pretty simple deal, right? Let's reformulate what Spencer has written in the simplest possible terms:

1. Some COIN advocates sold their operational approach by saying that it involves the collection of intelligence that enables accomplishment of the primary national objective, which is the destruction of al-Qaeda and its associated movements. 


2. A significant step towards the accomplishment of that objective was achieved in a manner that suggests that the COIN campaign in Afghanistan did not meaningfully contribute. 


3. As such, we should reconsider whether the massive expense, reduced operational readiness, and other sacrifices being made to enable that COIN campaign are actually essential to accomplishment of the fundamental goal; i.e. is the war in Afghanistan really accomplishing anything vis-a-vis the president's stated objective, which is, lest we forget, to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda"?

This isn't going to come as a shock to you, but I completely agree with all of that. I agree with the line of thinking. I agree with the need for re-assessment. (To be more accurate, I think the assessment -- whether or not our ways and means can meaningfully contribute to the accomplishment of our ends -- should have been done and then explained and justified to the American people before the escalation too place, because it's not as if these concerns are new (pdf)... but we all know how that went.) I agree that this should serve as a kick in the ass for policymakers to genuinely think about why we're fighting the war in Afghanistan and what benefits we're reaping in exchange for its various costs. Agree with all of that. But the original post actually requires a little bit of semantic parsing, because the COIN pitch made by escalation advocates was multi-layered, sophisticated, and not vulnerable to a single point of failure. So let's take a second to get some details straight.

During the debate over possible courses of action that preceded the president's announcement of an escalation, the various positions were basically boiled down to "CT," "CT-plus," and "COIN." I'm not going to rehash the details of all of that, because it's boring and you almost certainly already know the broad strokes. (If not, read this.) But!: one of many, many insidious effects of that simplification was the way that "counterterrorism" or "CT" came in the popular lexicon to mean something like targeted direct action against terrorist networks, personnel, and support infrastructure -- i.e. killing terrorists -- without what constitutes the other half of that definition in military doctrine: "action taken indirectly to influence and render global and regional environments inhospitable to terrorist networks." Now, it may be the case that the DOD definition is too broad to be meaningful, and you could certainly make that argument. But by this definition and according to the justification of the mission provided by Presidents Bush and Obama, any USG activities undertaken in Afghanistan would constitute "counterterrorism"... including COIN, FID, SFA, development assistance, economic support, etc etc ad infinitum.

Now take another look at Spencer's post in this light. "Counterinsurgency theorists argue that theirs is the truer path to robust counterterrorism, the pursuit of which is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context." He goes on to explain the presumed linkage between security to governmental capacity to popular loyalty to local knowledge to actionable intelligence, which serves to clarify what he really meant by "the truer path to robust counterterrorism": COIN ops will presumably result in military forces getting more information about the environment and the enemy than they otherwise would have (without sustained on-the-ground presence), meaning you can kill more terrorists this way.

I want to vigorously dispute Spencer's characterization of this questionable (and opportunistic) corollary as "a core counterinsurgency contention." What we see here is a cunning conflation of two superficially plausible semi-truths: 1) persistent, visible, dispersed presence by counterinsurgent security forces will enable the accumulation of local knowledge that is essential to effectively targeting insurgent cadres and thus enabling the broader counterinsurgency effort, and 2) the local knowledge that's accumulated as a result of sustained presence and security will include intelligence that allows the counterinsurgent force to undertake targeted, effective offensive operations against al-Qaeda terrorists (whose numbers in the Afghan AO are infinitesimal if not zero).

It's only fair to further note that when Spencer writes "the pursuit of [counterterrorism] is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context," he's engaging in a bit of selective memory (or revisionist history). Many advocates for escalation and a broad-based COIN effort in Afghanistan were proponents of a widely-held view in both liberal internationalist and neoconservative circles, one that has only recently -- with a downturn in popular support and enthusiasm for overseas adventurism -- started to recede from the public forum: faith in what we can call the "state strength" paradigm. They believe(d?) that weak states posed the greatest threat to global and national security, that poverty, disenfranchisement and lack of economic opportunity not only drove local conflicts, but threatened Americans' way of life. Here's how it's pitched (pdf):

We know where extremists thrive. In conflict zones that are incubators of resentment and anarchy. In weak states that cannot control their borders or territory, or meet the basic needs of their people. From Africa to central Asia to the Pacific Rim – nearly 60 countries stand on the brink of conflict or collapse. The extremists encourage the exploitation of these hopeless places on their hate-filled websites.

In this telling, poor economic conditions and injustice stoke disaffection and rage while weak governments are insufficiently capable of taking steps to either ameliorate these conditions or control their disaffected populations, and the whole thing ends up with pissed-off foreigners flying airplanes into office buildings. In short, they believed that failed states created terrorists, and that the best way to fix these failed states would be to build governmental capacity through a wide-ranging nation assistance and state-building effort while taking direct military action to defeat the most immediately dangerous security threats... what's been called, in the imprecise shorthand of our political narrative, "COIN."

In a defense and foreign-policy establishment where this worldview predominates, almost to the exclusion of all others, is it fair to say that "the pursuit of [robust counterterrorism] is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context"? I would argue that it isn't the only reason, and that Kilcullen et al's focus on the CT-enabler angle was merely a matter of opportunistic calculation to appeal to those few "realists" who may not have fully bought into the contemporary conventional wisdom. The real challenge doesn't come from such obviously inadequate policy justifications as the narrowly-circumscribed one that Spencer seeks to highlight, but rather from the undifferentiated monolith that is the state-strength paradigm. It is close to a fact of political science that the risk of civil violence is closely correlated with low per-capita GDP/quality of life (as Jay Ulfelder points out today in a fortuitously-timed post). But it is far more difficult to establish causation, and causation is what we need to understand if we want to bring policy instruments to bear on a security problem. Consider just a few of the multivariate assumptions about the causes of conflict and violence that are embedded in the state-strength paradigm.

Violence is caused by: poverty; unequal access to or distribution of resources; unemployment; the inability of the justice system to fairly adjudicate disputes; the inability of the police to enforce the writ of the state; the inability of security forces to maintain the monopoly of violence; the inability of security forces to defend borders/sovereignty/protect against outside influence and/or infiltration of adversarial elements; the inability of security forces to undertake and/or sustain effective offensive operations against identified targets such as terrorists or insurgent groups; etc.

Some of these may be true, some specious, and some outright absurd. But the lumping of these many purported causes, drivers, or enablers of conflict under one broad rubric -- "state weakness/failure" -- has allowed for that paradigm's furtherance through unified (or at least complementary) advocacy by disparate power bases and interest groups: DoD can talk about the requirement to build capacity and capabilities in partner security forces in order to defend borders and eliminate safe havens; while State can emphasize the need to build whole-of-government capacity with a specific focus on the institutions of justice and so on; and USAID and the development community can pitch the imperative of improving the delivery of basic assistance to address human suffering, economic inequality, and other purportedly fundamental drivers of conflict.

This is how we end up with a sort of meta-COIN, a universalization of vague and arguably specious tactical principles to the level of foreign policy: a global emphasis on development, the effective provision of goods and services, and capacity-building (both in governance and security); counterterrorism in the very most literal interpretation of the definition, emphasizing both the indirect actions that influence and render global and regional environments inhospitable to terrorist networks (economic development, conflict resolution, civil governance capacity-building) plus direct action against terrorist networks... but the easier and cheaper version: direct action by partner security forces (military assistance, foreign internal defense, security force capacity-building). And then you've still got the ultimate trump card in reserve: direct military action by U.S. forces, which Kilcullen insists is basically the worst-case, avoid-at-almost-all-costs scenario.

What I'm getting at is this: while advocates of escalation in Afghanistan may have used the troop presence ---> security ---> popular confidence ---> actionable intelligence ---> direct action against terrorists rationale to help justify their preferred operational approach, it's hard to imagine they were being totally serious and/or honest with themselves. (How were COIN ops in Afghanistan going to provide actionable intelligence about terrorist networks and individuals that reside almost exclusively in Pakistan?) Most COIN advocates are (were?) also believers in the bigger idea, the state-strength paradigm; they saw COIN as a means of sanctuary denial, as an extended process through which Afghan society would be inoculated against the threat of insurgency and by extension, al Qaeda influence. And state-strengthening is/was the answer for Pakistan, and Yemen, and Somalia, and... everywhere, right?

What's wrong with all that, then? Well, the whole concept might be totally bogus, for one thing. We don't really understand the root causes of civil violence, even at the sub-national level. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of civil violence, and localized insurgency with a terrorist component is very, very different to international terrorism (even if you want to identify that as a component of "global insurgency" (pdf)). We can't say why, for example, one country's contentious social issues spark civil war, while those of a similar country do not, at least not with any real certainty... and that question isn't half as complicated as why some disaffected individuals choose to engage in international terrorism against a distant adversary, one that is almost certainly unconnected in any clear way to whatever tangible, material grievances that individual may have, while others join a political party or a local insurgency or just do a lot of drugs. And that's something we ought to think about before we decide to re-order our foreign and security policy around the imperatives of global development, state strength, and capacity-building. There may be plenty of good reasons to prioritize state strength, but it's not totally clear that counterterrorism justifies it.

To parrot Spencer: Let's consider this, shall we?

Leah Farrall knows much, much more than you about al-Qaeda

Like, way more. It's not even close. She reads extremist tracts. She emails with jihadi intellectuals and Taliban political philosophers. She's smarter than you.

That's why you should read her new piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled "How al Qaeda Works: What the Organization's Subsidiaries Say About Its Strength." (If you're not a subscriber, it's reprinted in full on Leah's excellent and sadly underpopulated blog.) Here's the gist:

Despite nearly a decade of war, al Qaeda is stronger today than when it carried out the 9/11 attacks. Before 2001, its history was checkered with mostly failed attempts to fulfill its most enduring goal: the unification of other militant Islamist groups under its strategic leadership. However, since fleeing Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas in late 2001, al Qaeda has founded a regional branch in the Arabian Peninsula and acquired franchises in Iraq and the Maghreb. Today, it has more members, greater geographic reach, and a level of ideological sophistication and influence it lacked ten years ago.

Still, most accounts of the progress of the war against al Qaeda contend that the organization is on the decline, pointing to its degraded capacity to carry out terrorist operations and depleted senior leadership as evidence that the group is at its weakest since 9/11. But such accounts treat the central al Qaeda organization separately from its subsidiaries and overlook its success in expanding its power and influence through them. These groups should not be ignored. All have attacked Western interests in their regions of operation. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has also long targeted the United States, but its efforts have moved beyond the execution stage only in the last two years, most recently with the foiled plot to bomb cargo planes in October 2010. And although al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has not yet attacked outside its region, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was reportedly involved in the June 2007 London and Glasgow bomb plots.

It is time for an updated conception of al Qaeda’s organization that takes into account its relationships with its subsidiaries. A broader conceptual framework will allow for a greater understanding of how and to what degree it exercises command and control over its expanded structure, the goals driving its expansion strategy, and its tactics.

American politicians, analysts, and commentators blithely assert a number of things about the "terrorist threat" to justify their preferred policy course, and it can be tough to know what's true. Our policy toward central and south Asia (and really, our national security "strategy" writ large, such as we can be said to have one) is defined almost wholly by just such a specious assertion: that the continuation of the war in Afghanistan will contribute to al-Qaeda's weakening and eventual destruction.

There are, of course, competing interpretations and analyses of al-Qaeda's branch/franchise structure (at least so far as I'm aware). But the one Leah offers here is compelling, and it should have a dramatic impact on the way we approach the "struggle against violent extremism." This is must-read stuff.

Next you're gonna tell me the Pakistanis aren't planning to use those F-16s for COIN

Spencer Ackerman reports that he's shocked, SHOCKED to find that the Saudis are using military materiel provided by U.S. -- ostensibly for counterterrorism purposes -- to wage war against Shi'ite rebels on the Yemeni border. Similarly surprising is the U.S. ambassador's assessment that the Saudi campaign "was poorly planned and executed" and "embarrassingly long," despite a "massively disproportionate" array of forces and equipment. But wait -- there's more! In a startling turn of events that could never have been predicted, the Yemenis are also taking advantage of U.S. assistance to prosecute a CREB campaign (the French term -- contre-rebellion, usually translated as counterinsurgency so as to avoid doctrinal confusion -- seems more appropriate here, not to mention having that je ne sais quoi...) against the same Houthis rebels the Saudis are using our shit to kill. Foreign Policy's Ellen Knickmeyer reports that Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh assured Dave Petraeus that U.S.-provided helos wouldn't be used against the Houthis just months before insisting to John Brennan that "the Houthis are your enemies too" -- all while preparing to send his U.S. trained "counterterrorist" commandos to quell the northern insurgency. Oh, and just in case you forgot: we're about to ship $1.2 billion in hardware and training to Yemen... better to fight al-Qaeda with.

How 'bout the Saudis? Well, they're fighting the hell out of terrorists... or at least the guys that are terrorizing their border with Yemen. The USG seems to have pretty well given up the ghost on this one; here's Spencer again:

“Based on these assurances, the [U.S.] ambassador [in Riyadh] has approved… the provision of [U.S. government] imagery of the Yemeni border area to the Saudi Government,” the February cable reads. Although the war on the Houthis was petering out, the imagery could enhance “Saudi capabilities against Al-Qaeda activities in this area.”

This would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. If I had more technical ability, I'd do one of those hilarious parodies of "Downfall" in which Hitler's disappointed words at the close of the scene were captioned with "...well, maybe the Saudis will use that IMINT against al-Qaeda."

What's the moral of the story? Despite the U.S. military's persistent use of the term "capability" as a synonym for a weapon system -- a semantic manifestation of wishful thinking wherein the provision of a piece of gear is the same as transfer of the tactical and operational competencies that equipment is meant to enable -- we all need to come to grips with the fact that absent the elaboration of very specific consequences for "bad behavior," partner nations are going to use the stuff we sell or give them for "counterterrorism operations" to do pretty much whatever the hell they want. There's two ways to handle this: 1) we can just figure out a way to have less heartburn about this disappointing reality, recognizing that some sovereign states are going to get theirs so long as we're asking them to take care of some housekeeping on our behalf, or 2) we can find a different way to execute a worldwide counterterrorism campaign than rushing materiel and training to every third-world backwater where al-Qaeda pops its collective head up, imagining as we do that the knock-on negative effects of this decision can't possibly outweigh whatever near-term operational and PR benefits we might gain.  Right now we're basically taking Option 1, which would be fine with me if it actually made for effective counterterrorism. But... well... you know (pdf), it's, uh... it's not (pdf). I'm sure it'll be better next time. Or we could be a little more patient, a little more comprehensive, a little less direct, and do a little more of Option 2. Just sayin'.

What exactly does the Washington Post want done in east Africa?

The Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab has claimed credit for the suicide attack in the Ugandan capital of Kampala that killed 74 civilians on Sunday, leading a whole bunch of front pages to squeal about how "al Qaeda's east African branch" had demonstrated its capacity and desire to undertake external operations. The Washington Post's editorial board, for one, is pissed.

Such a campaign poses, at the least, a serious risk to the stability of Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, which all have tried to prevent an al-Shabab takeover in Somalia. Given the U.S. passport holders known to have joined al-Shabab, an attempt to attack the U.S. homeland -- such as that attempted by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen last Christmas -- is entirely plausible. The Obama administration hasn't ignored the danger: In addition to providing aid to the Somali government and army, it has ordered raids by U.S. forces on terrorist targets in Somalia.

But Kenya's foreign minister, Moses Wetangula, was right when he said last week -- before the Uganda bombings -- that the United States was not doing enough to combat the threat. The Somali government and army need more help, and ideally, more foreign forces; more should be done to stop the flow of weapons into the country. More U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Shabab leaders should be undertaken. The situation in Somalia, Mr. Wetangula told the Associated Press, is "very, very dire." It is time for the United States to recognize that -- and to respond before al-Shabab can escalate its foreign attacks.

Now I don't mean to sound dismissive about all of this, but what exactly does the Post want to have happen? As noted in the article, the USG is already providing aid to Somalia and has undertaken strikes against al-Shabaab targets on African soil. American personnel are also providing training and support to the Ugandan forces that make up the bulk of the African Union peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu. So what else?

Well, "ideally, more foreign forces," says the Post. The U.S. obviously isn't going to be the one to provide those forces, so one can only presume that they're asking for more international peacekeepers. The AU force is holding on by a thread, but it's hard to imagine NATO or UN troops going in to push back al-Shabaab forces. So this means more Africans. Is the U.S. really best positioned to go asking for others to participate, considering extant suspicions about our intentions vis-a-vis AFRICOM, U.S. mil presence in Djibouti, and so on?

Furthermore, are more Africans really going to do all that much? I'm not suggesting that the AU force is incompetent, or that more forces couldn't tip the balance, but are there any really good reasons to believe that they will?

What else does the Post have in mind? "[M]ore should be done to stop the flow of weapons into the country." Ok, fine, fair enough. But why? Between this and the plea for more foreign troops, it's clear that the editorial is focused on preventing AS from making further gains in its military campaign against the Transitional Federal Government. But does that really have all that much to do with AS' ability to launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. or its interests abroad? Does AS need to hold the capital in order to have the much sought-after "safe haven" apparently so essential to mounting successful terrorist operations with global reach?

Is the AS-TFG military struggle really all that meaningful to U.S. interests? Don't get me wrong, I think it's probably a better scenario if we can shrink the list of states that are categorically and irreversibly opposed to everything the U.S. says and does, rather than extending it. But from a concrete, tangible perspective, does it really matter all that much who is "running" Somalia (to the extent that it's ever being run at all)?

This line of reasoning (and questioning) is obviously very relevant to the war in Afghanistan. After all, if we've concluded that we have to fight a war in south Asia to eliminate a possible terrorist safe haven, then it shouldn't come as any great shock that others would conclude that such a safe haven needs to be eliminated in east Africa. But even if the TFG "wins," is the safe haven gone? And even if the safe haven is gone (as it apparently is in Afghanistan, at least within that state's borders), does that mean that terrorists can't operate effectively?

So the Washington Post wants action. So does Kenya's foreign minister, apparently, for whatever that's worth. But can someone tell me exactly why it's so essential that we intervene? And if it is so essential, how we're going to do it? Because it we're going to keep zapping known AS guys with AC-130s and UAVs and Tomahawks and whatnot, fine with me. But it seems like that's about our only option, and it seems like a pretty good way to get the rest of Somalia to pick sides, too.

The foundational flaw of our Afghanistan strategy, universally ignored by its proponents

Supporters of the current approach in Afghanistan seem to have settled on one primary rationale for the strategic necessity of this war: if we leave Afghanistan, it will again become a haven for terrorists to find sanctuary, train, and prepare to launch attacks against Americans. Leaving aside for a moment the reality that such a sanctuary already exists on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, let's consider the implications of this rationale.

If we start from the assumption that Afghanistan's territory must be controlled by someone who will deny sanctuary to terrorists (as George Packer, Ross Douthat, and John Nagl have all recently insisted it must), we're basically left with two options: control Afghanistan with U.S. forces, or build Afghan capacity to the level required for the host government and ANSF to execute this task with minimal support. Our purported current approach is to do the former in the near term, while simultaneously accomplishing the second for a transition of responsibility over the medium to long term.

Douthat rather disingenuously suggests that the administration "hasn't been choosing between remaining in Afghanistan and withdrawing from the fight. It's been choosing between two ways of staying": COIN and Biden's "CT-plus." This is a curious way of framing the options, and one wonders if Douthat believes that the limited U.S. presence in Iraq after this year similarly constitutes just another "way of staying" rather than a pretty significant departure. But I digress. Here's why Douthat thinks we're sticking around:

First, the memory of 9/11, which ensures that any American president will be loath to preside over the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul. Second, the continued presence of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, which makes it difficult for any American president to contemplate giving up the base for counterterrorism operations that Afghanistan affords. Third, the larger region’s volatility: it’s the part of the world where the nightmare of nuclear-armed terrorists is most likely to become a reality, so no American president can afford to upset the balance of power by pulling out and leaving a security vacuum behind.

And so how do we avoid leaving that vacuum? Through the COIN approach, Douthat suggests, "which seeks to lay the foundations for an Afghan state that's stable enough to survive without our support."

But it doesn't just have to survive, does it? It needs to be capable of denying its territory to terrorists. As we should all know by now, governments that are friendly to terror organizations aren't usually the problem -- it's governments that are too weak to do anything about those organizations that are the real trouble.

So if these are our worries -- the memory of 9/11, a base for CT operations, and "the nightmare of nuclear-armed terrorists" -- then any U.S. departure is going to be contingent on creating a government and security force that can secure our interests in these areas to the same degree that U.S. presence can, right?

Here's the thing: is there anyone who believes that the Afghan government will be capable of functioning in even the limited capacity required to deny sanctuary to those committed and confirmed terrorists who already exist within, say, the next decade?

If so, why?

As you'll no doubt have heard by now, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released a report yesterday on the status of international efforts to train ANSF. The report was not good: it concluded that the capability rating system being used by ISAF to evaluate ANSF "basically has not been a dependable system," seeing as "even top-rated Afghan units could not operate independently and that the ratings of many security forces overstated their actual capabilities." NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A), the ISAF organization charged with the ANSF training mission, has since changed its metrics and overall rating system to try to get more useful data.

In his Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, GEN Petraeus addressed the report and tried to "clarify" in a manner that downplayed the significance of SIGAR's conclusions. The old Capability Milestone (CM)-based system conveyed information about the levels of manning, equipping, and training of Afghan units; that is, the system that was being used for the first NINE YEARS OF THIS WAR was based on how well the Table of Organization and Equipment was filled out, or how many boxes you could check on a training plan. The CM system didn't tell you anything about the actual FIGHTING ABILITY of the unit being rated. (For metrics geeks, you could say this was a Measures of Performance-oriented rating system, rather than Measures of Effectiveness.) And apparently it took a SIGAR report for us to figure out that this wasn't a terribly effective mechanism.

But that's a bit of a digression, isn't it? Our rating system isn't exactly the point here -- the capability of the ANSF is what we should care about. And size, but in this context, size is really only significant as a factor in determining capability to accomplish a certain mission set or secure a defined end-state. So this becomes a sort of a math problem: can 400,000 ANSF (ANA + ANP) do the business, assuming we get to the target size within the expected time period?

Can 400,000 ANSF deny sanctuary to al-Qaeda? Can 400,000 ANSF ensure that America won't be attacked by individuals who train or plan their attacks from Afghan territory? (We already know they can't do anything about the AQ folks on the other side of the Hindu Kush, but again, we're going to leave that aside for now.) Can 400,000 ANSF do the job that 130,000 ISAF troops plus ~245,000 ANSF are currently doing? So, basically, what's the time frame on which we can expect ANSF to effect a one-for-one, straight-up capability match with the ISAF troops who will be departing the country?

Seriously: is there anyone who thinks this can be done in a decade?

And if not, then why is this our strategic concept? Why aren't we working on some other plan to mitigate the nearly certain shortfalls that will exist when U.S. troops pull chocks and head home?
Or perhaps the better question: why do we insist on repeating the tired and utterly unsubstantiated line that Afghanistan will be vital to U.S. national interests until its territory can be wholly secured against the presence of terrorists and militants?

Paul Pillar wrote the essay I should've written six months ago

I never sat down and did it, and then it was December. By then I would've just looked like a bandwagoner, right? Oh well. Mine would have been an obnoxiously over-sourced 9,000-word jeremiad, totally lacking in the clarity and elegance of Pillar's piece. So go read his. Here's a taste:

It would be fruitless to search the contours of current international terrorism for a compelling explanation of why the United States is escalating a military campaign in Afghanistan. Clearly there is a disconnect between where war is being waged and where terrorism is rearing its ugly head. The appropriate response is not to run off, guns blazing, to find new battlefields, be they in Yemen or anywhere else. The U.S. military, pressing the limits of sustainability and winding up one war while slowly winding down another, does not have the resources to open a new front in every territory that may become associated with terrorism. There is no shortage of such places.

Regardless of the available resources, it is a mistake to think of counterterrorism primarily, as Americans have become wont to do, as the application of military force to particular pieces of real estate. This pattern of thinking is rooted in a history in which the vanquishing of threats to U.S. security has consisted chiefly of armed expeditions to conquer or liberate foreign territory. The pattern has been exacerbated by the unfortunate “war on terror” terminology, which confuses and conflates the seriousness of, the nature of and the means used to counter the threat.

The strength of a terrorist adversary, al-Qaeda or any other, does not correlate with control of a piece of territory in Afghanistan or elsewhere. If a terrorist group has a physical safe haven available, it will use it. But of all the assets that make a group a threat—including ideological appeal and a supply of already-radicalized recruits—occupation of acreage is one of the least important. Past terrorist attacks, including 9/11 (most of the preparations for which took place in scattered locations in the West), demonstrate this.

Also, if you're interested, John Nagl disagrees. (Or as Josh Foust put it, Nagl says we're at war because the President says we're at war. Or something like that.)

Déjà vu in the Sahel

The kidnapping of a French aid worker in northeastern Mali last Wednesday, as well as three Spanish aid workers in Mauritania on Sunday, bring AQIM—the most likely culprit at this stage— back to the fore.

Let’s just hope that these two tragic events will garner better analysis on security in the Sahel than this recent Newsweek article, which goes to great pain demonstrating that 1) the situation in the Sahel is nowhere near as bad as the situation in the Af-Pak border region (no kidding), and 2) that it is wrong to believe that the Sahel is the next hotbed of terrorism (good news: few people believe this, and are more worried about places like Yemen and Somalia). Kal from The Moor Next Door does a great job at tearing the article apart and providing rebuttal to most of its flaws, misjudgments, and blatant omissions.

And as Kal underlines, nothing in this article is new. How too much of a Western presence can backfire was raised by ICG in 2005. Even the State Department got the memo: two weeks ago, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Johnnie Carson emphasized to Congress the need for a limited US footprint in the Sahel region:

“The United States can play a helpful supporting role in the regional effort, but we must avoid taking actions that could unintentionally increase local tensions or lend credibility to AQIM’s claims of legitimacy.
[…]
The countries in the region continue to demonstrate the political will to combat terrorism and trans-national crime. They have explicitly stated that the Sahel’s security is the responsibility of the countries in the region. They have not asked the United States to take on a leadership role in counterterrorism efforts and have, in fact, clearly signalled that a more visible or militarily proactive posture by the United States would be counterproductive. We fully concur that the appropriate roles for the United States and other third countries with even more significant interests in the region must be to support regional security efforts while continuing to provide meaningful development assistance to the more remote areas. Moreover, we have emphasized that while the United States will do its part, the burden must be shared.”

Granted, this may be nothing more than a way to keep DoD out of the way. But at least, and in contrast to Newsweek, Carson also offered a rather nuanced view of the threat, underlining for instance how the Malian situation differs from the one prevailing in Mauritania with regards to AQIM.

Am I being oversensitive here, or is it really a sad day when one finds more analytical nuance in a political statement than in a press article?

It's Great Being Surrounded by Smart People

For starters, it makes you look smart. Gulliver and Alma, of whom I refer to in the title, have great posts on what a more CT (or enemy-centric COIN) fight would be like, or at least the implications and efficacy thereof, in Afghanistan. They came at it from different directions with very valid points and I think these two posts show the brackets for what that option actually looks like.

So what do I have to add to this? Not much other than suggest a change in strategic context in which these posts could be used effectively. Alma is 100% on as far as HUMINT requirements go (at least per my experiences in Iraq). Gulliver is 100% on with the fact that you can kill some really bad dudes with this method without significant ground forces and really stick the enemy in the eye. (To be sure they both present many more arguments and questions than that, but for our purposes here...) So the question becomes (to me at least), in what strategic context would these operational forms take place?

The last eight years in Afghanistan suggest that these operations have no hope of defeating the Taliban or al Qaeda in and of themselves. To suggest that it suddenly could in the future is absurd based on historical precedence. But I don't think these operations are useless, they're just useless to thus far poorly defined ends (that is the defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda).

At the operational or high-tactical level, we would make an area like this a disruption zone (for all of you engineers out there, I'm not talking about the term in the doctrinal-complex-obstacle sense). In a disruption zone, you're just trying to make it hard for the enemy to do what it wants. I guess it could be called a "hassle zone", but that just doesn't have the same ring to it. The disruption zone would allow us to harass al Qaeda and the Taliban to the point that while they probably exist in the region, it would be hard for them to organize effectively or govern. For other examples of this, look at JTF-HOA. This is pretty much what those guys are doing - a huge disruption zone.

So let's be realistic here. We will not drone ourselves to "victory" in Afghanistan. But we'll make life hard for them to be there. Which isn't too much less than what we're doing there now with tens of thousands of soldiers and marines on the ground.

This is exactly why a light footprint counterterror campaign will never work in Afghanistan!

Stand-off CT missions lack necessary intelligence. We can't get to targets in time. We'll never tell friend from foe. The bad guys will never show their faces if they're allowed to live in places controlled by sympathetic regimes or factions. Al-Qaeda is too capable and dangerous to try to fight from the other side of the globe. Large troop commitments are necessary to sustain the logistics and support operations that accompany counterterrorist trigger-pullers. Like so:

American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration’s willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda’s growing influence in the region.

Western intelligence agents have described the militant, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, as the ringleader of a Qaeda cell in Kenya responsible for the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002. Mr. Nabhan may have also played a role in the attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.

American military forces have been hunting him for years, and on Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert. The trucks were carrying leaders of the Shabab, an Islamist extremist group fighting to overthrow Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized government. The Shabab work hand-in-hand with foreign terrorists, according to Western and Somali agents, and in the past few months, as the battle for control of Somalia has intensified, the group seems to be drawing increasingly close to Al Qaeda.

American officials on Monday provided few details, but confirmed that Special Operations forces, operating from a nearby American warship, participated in the helicopter raid.

Whoops. Turns out all that stuff I said up there was wrong, and this is an example of exactly how the light footprint can be done.

Ok, ok, I'm being smarmy and I'm not really engaging substantively in this debate. I get it. And just because you can do it in one place doesn't mean you can do it -- or that it's the best way to do it -- in another place. The Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier is less accessible to offshore assets. There are more targets there. Surveillance is probably more difficult than in the desert of Somalia. I get all of this.

But please, please, can we stop dealing in self-assured assertions like "remote, kinetic counterterrorism would never work in South Asia"? Killing one guy ain't the same as winning the war, I know. But until we (all of us that are involved in this debate, I mean) stop taking everything so personally and clutching on to our beliefs like baby birds, stop refusing to accept anything that doesn't fit into our construct, stop labeling people as "gets it" or "doesn't get it," it's going to be really difficult to make any progress.