Scott recently raised some skepticism about the potential impact of the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, former operational commander of the Afghan Taliban.

Today word is out that another high ranking Afghan Taliban was captured by the Pakistanis.  This time it was Mullah Abdul Salam, Governor of the so-called Afghan Shadow Government in the Province of Kunduz.

Add to this Jane Perlez’s brilliant piece last week in the New York Times and I think Pakistan’s strategy in the region begins to come into focus.

Perlez:

Pakistan has told the United States it wants a central role in resolving the Afghan war and has offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies, American and Pakistani officials said…What the Pakistanis can offer is their influence over the Taliban network of Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani, whose forces American commanders say are the most lethal battling American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

So after reading the (chai?) tea leaves on this one, here is my take:

The Pakistanis are making their move and want to make clear to the Americans (and NATO) that they are going to be the power broker in the post-occupation government of Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military appears to be deploying its own version of a “reconcilables” vs. irreconcilables” COIN strategy with respect to the various anti-Western insurgent groups in Afghanistan and even their own tribal territories. The Pakistanis have (I think) decided which Afghan Taliban (the so-called Quetta Shura) are unable to be converted/dealt with and are turning them in.  This puts pressure on the Taliban left in Afghanistan ito make the deals that the Pakistanis are now going to push for and that President Karzai has previously said he is willing to make—in essence amnesty, payoffs, and probably government/military posts.

Furthermore, the Pakistani Army has taken on the southern Waziristan strongholds of the so-called Pakistani Taliban (Tehri-i-Taliban), allowing the US to assassinate (via drone) various leaders within the movement–first Beitullah Mehsud and more recently, Hakimullah Mehsud.

The Pakistanis, however, have a long standing (since the anti-Soviet jihad) relationship with the Haqqani network and the Hizb i Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyr.

The Pakistanis seem to be playing good cop/bad cop with the Haqqanis, telling them that they (the Pakistanis) are the only thing holding back more drone attacks.  If the Haqqanis and the Hekmatyr forces see the Afghan Taliban leadership as increasingly vulnerable, maybe this brings them to the negotiating table.

The Pakistanis did not participate in the Bonn Conference negotiations which brought to power the Karzai government, a deal that was largely struck with the Iranians and the Indians – in other words, Pakistan’s two biggest regional rivals.  The Pakistanis now see a couple of things:

1. The occupation has failed and the new COIN strategy, however effective militarily, is too heavily dependent on the corrupt Karzai government to be long-lasting.

2. The Bonn Conference paradigm of Afghanistan (2001-2010) is also a failure: cf the rigged elections from last fall.

The Pakistanis now see their opening to force the US (and other regional actors) to accept a post-Bonn Afghanistan, which will not be a total return of power of the Taliban as in the 1990s but will include a number of anti-Western insurgent groups in the eventual governing structure.

It’s a shrewd if very dangerous game on the part of the Pakistani military–who in everything but name is now back to running the country, at least with respect to foreign policy.

To answer Scott’s skepticism, all of this again points to the fact that the US should just eliminate the middle man by ignoring the failed Afghan national government in favor of buying off local groups.   Scott suggests the Taliban are practicing a form of 4th generation warfare, complete with their own version of “winning hearts and minds.” Still, the Taliban continue to rely a strategy of body count terrorism—roadside and suicide bombs, etc.   I believe the Afghan Taliban are vulnerable to a joint US military “surge” plus a program of buying off and even deputizing various insurgents and/or tribal leaders (including whole swathes of former Taliban operatives), keeping up the pressure on Taliban leadership with assistance from the Pakistani military, and accepting the likelihood of amnesty for the Haqqanis and Hekmatyr in Afghanistan.

It won’t be a pretty situation but this would probably allow the US to keep a sufficient presence in the area to prevent al-Qaeda’s re-emergence.  This strategy would also allow the US and NATO to exit (I would guess) within the next two to two-and-a-half years.  A strategy of clear, hold, build, and hand over to the Afghan National Government, however, is a complete non-starter and would give plenty of time for the Afghan Taliban to re-group, hide out, and bide their time, while preventing any movement towards a deal with Haqqani and/or Hekmatyr and their forces.

The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s Number 2 man, is, undoubtedly, good news for the Obama administration in its attempts to fend off claims of being soft on terror and the like. But, as per his usual adroitness, Juan Cole has a good post up pointing out why the capture might not be the good news for US efforts in Afghanistan that proponents might like to make it out as. What I took to be the most important snippet,

There are four groups typically but inaccurately referred to as Taliban among Pashtun dissidents. They include Mulla Umar’s original Taliban; the Haqqani Network founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan, which is now led by his son Siraj; the Islamic Party or Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar based in Eastern Afghanistan; and the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, whose leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, was reported recently killed by a US drone strike). For Mullah Omar’s organization, based in Karachi and Quetta, to suffer a severe setback would probably not have a huge impact on the other three, which operate relatively independently. None of the others is actually Taliban in the sense of seminary students or graduates of madrasahs among the Afghan Pashtun refugees in Pakistan.

This news is certainly bad news for, as Cole calls them, the “Old Taliban”, but the situation in Afghanistan remains greatly more complicated and challenging than much of American foreign policy discourse at home let’s on. By and large, it seems that US foreign policy remains under Obama, as it certainly has under all preceeding presidents, to be the continutation of Cold War mentality by other means. Which is to say that the realities of fourth generation warfare continue to seem largely opaque to the US strategic focus and there persists this idea that if specific bad guys, be they Al Qaeda or the Taliban, are beaten then the rest of the chips will inevitably fall into place, or something to that effect. But as the National Security Archive notes, even “the bad guys” have caught on to the folly of this thinking,

The December 1998 Embassy cable mentioned above notes that Omar “maintains an idiosyncratic, almost obscurantist, leadership style,” making policy decisions, “but generally leav[ing] the day-to-day matters to his key lieutenants.” In order to ensure his deputies remain “off balance” and do “not grow overly comfortable in their positions, Omar also rotates Taliban officials from post-to-post, apparently at a whim.”

I mean, call me crazy, but I find it hard to believe that Mullah Omar and other top “Old Taliban” officials haven’t contemplated the possibility of a capture of this magnitude and factored a needed exit plan itno their already much more decentralized organizational structure. Part of the shift in fourth generational warfare, as I understand it, is to recognize that the battle ceases only to operate in an exclusive military theatre and stretches out across a far broader spectrum of foray. It is this realization that I continue failing to hear in most overtly militaristic US foreign policy articulations and a big part of what informs my skepticism about the eventual outcomes.

Which is not to say that military means don’t play any role in dealing with groups like the “Old Taliban” and the others with which US and other NATO forces are dealing in Afghanistan and elsewhere and it certainly isn’t to suggest that I have a nice, clean alternative to the overwhelming challenges in dealing with the myriads of groups intent on doing harm to what amounts to a way of life. Nor is it to say that I’m inclined to dismiss the importance of the potential shift in Pakistani willingness to work in a more coordinated and proactive fashion with American and NATO forces. But is to say that I’ll continue not jumping for joy over new like the capture of Baradar so long as it is apparent, as far as western foreign policy goes, war remains the primary continuation of politics by other means.

On a practical level, Mark Thiessen’s case for capturing and torturing suspected terrorists in place of bombing them is pretty unpersuasive, mainly because he doesn’t have any proof that we lose a chance to interrogate Al Qaeda operatives every time they’re assassinated. Maybe Thiessen has some evidence to the contrary and the military really is sitting on a terrorist-capturing contingency plan, but absent an explanation of how we’d go about detaining terrorists in rural Yemen or Pakistan’s tribal provinces, I think it’s a safe bet that we use drone strikes because the alternatives are totally impractical. As I understand it, one of the benefits of drones is that they’re not as intrusive as a larger US military presence, which makes their use less offensive to the host country’s sensibilities than other military options (emphasis mine):

By early 2008, the Bush administration had tired of the Pakistani government’s unwillingness or inability to take out the militants in the FATA, and in July the president authorized Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults in the tribal regions without the prior permission of the Pakistani government. On September 3, 2008, a team of Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan crossed the Pakistani border into South Waziristan to attack a compound housing militants. Twenty of the occupants were killed, most of them women and children. The Pakistani press picked up on the attack, and the assault sparked vehement objections from Pakistani officials, who protested that it violated their national sovereignty. Army chief of staff Afshaq Parvez Kayani bluntly said that Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all costs,” suggesting that any future insertion of American soldiers into Pakistan would be met by force.

In the face of the intense Pakistani opposition to American boots on the ground, the Bush administration chose to rely on drones to target suspected militants.

Thiessen also suggests that the Obama Administration is deliberately avoiding efforts to capture terrorists because high-level interrogations would force “hard decisions” about what’s “needed to protect the United States.” By “hard decisions,” Thiessen is presumably referring to the use of torture, a cause he’s championed tirelessly in recent months. This is a clever insinuation, but it’s worth noting that the Obama Administration opposes torture not only on moral grounds, but also because it’s not particularly effective. If we take the Administration at its word that conventional interrogation techniques work better than torture, there’s no real political incentive for Obama to deliberately avoid capturing terrorists.

Despite his enthusiasm for mistreating prisoners, Thiessen does raise one important point. Namely, the moral contradiction between opposing torture and endorsing targeted airstrikes:

The president has claimed the moral high ground in eliminating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, saying that he rejects the “the false choice between our security and our ideals.” Yet when Obama orders a Predator or Reaper strike, he is often signing the death warrant for the women and children who will be killed alongside the target — individuals whose only sin is that they are married to, or the children of, a terrorist. Is this not a choice between security and ideals? And why is it a morally superior choice? Is it really more in keeping with American ideals to kill a terrorist and the innocent people around him, when the United States might instead spare the innocent, capture the same terrorist alive, and get intelligence from him that could potentially save many other innocent lives as well?

My intuition is that airstrikes are appropriate if the military takes all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian casualties. My thoughts on this issue are pretty unformed, however, so I thought I’d throw these questions at the commentariat: Why does the status of terrorists change so dramatically after they’ve been captured? Is it because we can afford to treat enemies better once they’re detained and rendered harmless? Or does being held in captivity fundamentally change a detainee’s moral status?

Here is Part 2 of last Sunday’s conversation between Chris and I. I’ve included about a minute of audio you’ve already heard to set the stage for where Chris goes. The audio is below the fold. [Read more →]

It’s been a while since Chris and I jumped on Skype and rambled on for a while about the state of the world and associated topics, so we decided to remedy that fact last night. What follows is the first part (approximately 35 minutes) of our discussion about Obama’s decisions around Afghanistan, counter insurgency strategies, and American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East more generally.

Part 2 will follow in a day or two so as to break up what are usually hour plus conversations into smaller, bite sized chunks. Check out the audio below the fold. [Read more →]

Scott’s recent post on President Obama’s decision re: Afghanistan is worth the read.  He makes a number of very interesting points, but I’m not quite sure I get this part.

Scott quotes the following from Kevin Drum:

There are two possible reasons for the speech being so unconvincing: either Obama doesn’t know how to deliver a good speech or else Obama isn’t really convinced himself.  But we know the former isn’t true, don’t we?  You can fill in the rest yourself.

Scott then adds:

If Kevin is right, and I think there is reason to believe that he is, then Obama, while not operating in the same cold and calculating fashion as a Karl Rove, has failed in his primary charge as Commander-in-Chief and the implications are potentially as disastrous as Rove, Cheney, and Bush’s soulless calculus was.

Channeling Freddie for a second, it is enragingly infuriating that the idea of actually saying, “This is not winnable, we need to find a responsible way of extricating ourselves,” was simply never an honestly considered option. The myopic sense of options and inability to overcome prideful hubris in American foreign policy is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the country if it is to really move into a constructive and proactive frame in the twenty-first century.

Kevin’s second proposal needs some expansion.  Let’s assume it is broadly correct as does Scott.  Why would Obama not have his heart into it?

One possible (counter)explanation is that Obama really couldn’t find any decision that he felt was the right one and he thought this decision was the least worst and he couldn’t hide that in his speech.  That would still fulfill Kevin’s theory as to why the speech fell flat without the need to piggyback a theory of politics over-riding true feelings on the war.

Another (possibly related) counter-argument would be that Obama brought forth a policy that he thought was the best compromise–and inherently therefore in part compromised–between the various members of his advisory panel.  We’ve learned that VP Biden signed on because Obama narrowed the focus to al-Qaeda and put more emphasis (arguably) on Pakistan than he did Afghanistan, as well as setting a date in 2011 for withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Secs. Gates and Clinton seem to have signed on because that date was open to some conditionality.  While National Security Adviser Jones seems to have found the ambiguity of the timeline conducive to getting both sides of this debate together.

A third version would go that Obama has (seriously and sincerely) thought the US should be fighting the war in Afghanistan for awhile now.  That accords with everything he’s said for basically the last 6 years.  But simply it’s too late in the game and Obama has realized he can’t fight it in the way he wished and yet at the same time he knows that if he starts extrication now it will be a bloodbath and he doesn’t want that on his hands.

Obama said during the campaign that on foreign policy he aligned with the realist school of George H.W. Bush.  He has been advised by Colin Powell and kept Bob Gates (a Bush I realist) as Sec. Def.  In fact this decision is a kind of mini-Powell Doctrine refracted through the lens of population-centric COIN popular in the military:  go in hard and heavy and then get out.  In some ways the past President Obama appears to be most emulating in foreign policy (so says Peter Beinart in a very sharp piece) is Richard Nixon, the arch-realist with his own version of an escalation-cum prelude to withdraw.

I don’t have a real way of knowing if any of those hypotheses are valid.  I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate for a moment.  But if any (or any combination) were to be correct, then I think they undermine Scott’s comparison to Rove, et. al.

But let’s examine this comparison Scott makes to the previous administration.  [Read more →]

The news is out on what appears to be the Obama plan on Afghanistan.  It’s obviously quite provisional at this point, but it seems to line up with what I thought would be the basic outline.

Obama will send 30,000 troops, has a (basic) end-date in sight (approximately three years later according to the piece I linked above), will ramp up training of the Afghan Army and Police, and wants to gradually transition over to an Afghan government.  Though it’s also likely that the US will keep some military advisors as well as air and logistical support in the country longer than that time-frame.  In short, Obama wants to try to achieve some victories against the insurgency in Afghanistan in the short term and then quickly transition the US out of the hot zone.

Unfortunately, things usually don’t turn out so neat and tidy in any war:

“We want to – as quickly as possible – transition the security of the Afghan people over to those national security forces in Afghanistan,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “This can’t be nation-building. It can’t be an open-ended forever commitment.”

Here’s more information on the national army and police:

In Kabul, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the new head of a U.S.-NATO command responsible for training and developing Afghan soldiers and police, said Tuesday that although the groundwork is being laid to expand the Afghan National Army beyond the current target of 134,000 troops, to be reached by Oct. 31, 2010, no fixed higher target is set.

There is a notional goal of eventually fielding 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police, but Caldwell said that could change.

“Although that is a goal and where we think it could eventually go to, it’s not a hard, firm, fixed number,” he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He indicated that one reason for avoiding a hard-and-fast commitment to those higher numbers is the expected cost. So his orders are to reach the targets of 134,000 soldiers and 96,800 police by next October. He intends to hold annual reviews, beginning next spring or early summer, to determine whether the notional higher targets of 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police – for a combined total of 400,000 by 2013 – are still the right goals for Afghanistan.

According to counterinsurgency doctrine, there needs to be roughly 500,000 counterinsurgents in Afghanistan. So 240,000 army plus 160,000 police equals 400,000 troops plus the NATO contingent (mostly US) of about 100,000 when this additional surge is factored in.  And there you have 500,000 counterinsurgents.

But counterinsurgents fighting from whom exactly?  Who is going to be there to follow-up with political and economic development after the fighting is over?  That question–the central question with respect to Afghanistan, in my mind–has yet to be persuasively answered.

To make that point clearer, I think a comparison with Iraq is in order.

If this policy is going to be likened to the Iraq surge (and it is certainly based in some measure on that event), then it’s worth reviewing exactly what happened in Iraq.  The surge–i.e. the addition of more troops into Iraq–was only a part of a larger process which could be broadly labeled counterinsurgency.

We need to recall what was going on in Iraq 2005-2007: [Read more →]

Part I here, Part II here.

The Obama administration has proposed a very, very narrow objective, which is counterterrorism, and a very maximalist, broad definition of how to achieve it, which extends to counterinsurgency and the defeat of the Taliban, and basically the fixing of the entire Afghan state. And the whole problem with this strategy is its very narrow aim is connected to this hugely ambitious means.

That’s Rory Stewart, laying out a very precise and well thought out criticism of the Obama administration (and by extension the military generals) in relation to Afghanistan.

Here he gets to the heart of it:

I think what we’re talking about is actually state building, not nation building, which is to say that it’s very blind to politics, to religion, to history, to culture, to context — the kinds of things from which nation [building] is composed.

Nation building could only be done by an Afghan Thomas Jefferson. It’s a job for a founding father. It’s an indigenous project. State building, in the view of the Pentagon, is a very technical, technocratic process where there are certain things just listed off: civil service; legitimate monopoly on the use of violence; good financial administration; the rule of law; a pragmatically regulated free market. It sometimes seems to be a little bit like the recipe for building a garden shed or baking a cake. It’s a management consultancy tool for fixing a state.

The COIN strategy advocated by many in the military (and some in the administration it would seem) talks about clearning, holding, and building. Clearing areas os insurgents, holding the territory (called population-centric warfare), and then building.  In many cases building a state.  But also building buildings, schools, roads, local government, and a whole host of other things.

But here’s the problem:

Counterinsurgency is the most fashionable thing at the moment because the U.S. military believes that’s what allowed them to turn around the situation in Iraq. Afghanistan, however much people claim otherwise, is really about Iraq. It’s really about the fact that people said it couldn’t be done in Iraq and it was done.

And a lot of the U.S. military think if we manage to pull it off there, we can pull it off again. … What they forget is that what made it work in Iraq is all about Iraq. It’s all about Iraqi politics; it’s all about Iraqi government; it’s all about Iraqi landscape. You try to move the same thing over to Afghanistan, where you don’t have that kind of government, you don’t have that kind of landscape, you don’t have that kind of politics, it’s not going to succeed.

What Afghanistan does not have is a history of a strong central state, a history of a large national army/police force, or a middle class, nor a heavily urbanized existence.

To wit: [Read more →]

For Part I here.

So I’m breaking my own rules in this second post (a little bit).  I said these posts would only be buitl around the interviews in this PBS documentary, but then Peter Bergen had to go and write a really important piece in TNR that merits some comment.

The central thrust of Bergen’s argument is:

“Today, at the leadership level, the Taliban and Al Qaeda function more or less as a single entity.”

Bergen here means the high leadership level of both the Afghan Taliban (or more properly Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar) and The Tehrik-i-Pakistani, i.e. The Pakistani Taliban (now under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud).

The evidence he provides is substantial with Bergen arguing that al-Qaeda has essentially become a kind of embedded military trainer for The Taliban leadership.

Bergen then proceeds to knock down various counterarguments that for example al-Qaeda will move to Somalia or Yemen and thereby be as effective as in Pakistan-Afghanistan.  Or that the internet allows for more training or that urban centers in the West are grounds for the training of terrorist attacks.  As to the latter, the real operational training took place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whatever logistical and coordinational plans were hatched in Western cities (e.g. Hamburg in 9/11).

Bergen is the Western world authority on al-Qaeda, so I think he makes a persuasive case that the leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in deep symbiosis.

However there is this point:

And it is also true that Taliban foot soldiers today are fighting for any number of reasons–ranging from cash payments, to tribal opposition to the government, to a hatred of foreigners.

This leaves a potential opening for what in COIN terminology is called separating the reconcilables and the irreconcilables.  The reconcilables being drawn from the “foot soldier” ranks, the irreconcilables being the top layer leadership.

Now reconciliation to what?  And here I think Bergen near the end of the article leaves something to be desired. [Read more →]

This weekend I finally managed to have the time to sit down and watch this excellent PBS Frontline documentary called Obama’s War. Highly recommended and hats off to the folks at Frontline for a very good piece of work on an extremely important topic.  I’m going to do a number of posts all branching out of this doc this week. One of the key strengths of this film is that it gets some very big name folks on all sides of this issue.

As Andrew Exum (who by the way has the greatest avatar in the blogosphere), one of the ones interviewed put it:

John Nagl, Bill Mayville and Stan McChrystal make a good argument for a counterinsurgency campaign, while Andrew Bacevich and an especially pithy Celeste Ward make a good argument against pursuing such a campaign. All sides, in other words, acquit themselves rather well. All sides, that is, save for the Pakistani officials.

Digging deeper into the Frontline site, there is a page with transcripts from all the interviewers.  There are a whole mess of them, but the best ones in my opinion are Steve Coll, Andrew Bacevich, John Nagl-Andrew Exum, and Rory Stewart.

Nagl, Exum, and McChyrstal are on the side of a full counterinsurgency (COIN) operation in Afghanistan following their work in Iraq, predicated on clearing insurgents, holding territory, and building infrastructure policy so that a central government might come into take over, thereby allowing a natural exit of US/NATO/ISAF forces.

Stewart and Bacevich, for various differing reasons, stand opposed to such a position.

While Steve Coll represents something of an in-between point of view.

So I’ll start with Coll.  His interview is here.  Coll has the best understanding of the history of Afghanistan, and as a guy with a history degree, I think it’s the best place to start.  [Read more →]

From Washington Post piece on the continued discussion around the McChyrstal’s strategic troop increase request:

But White House officials are resisting McChrystal’s call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, “A lot of assumptions — and I don’t want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions — were exposed to the light of day.”

Among them, according to three senior administration officials who attended the meeting, is McChrystal’s contention that the Taliban and al-Qaeda share the same strategic interests and that the return to power of the Taliban would automatically mean a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

The use of the parenthetical thought makes me guess that was Biden who is directly quoted there.  As a sidenote saying “I don’t want to say myths” says myths.

Anyway, this question of what exactly the relationship would be/is between the (Afghan) Taliban and al-Qaeda is the central one strategically.  And I have to say I don’t know.  There’s evidence suggestive of both directions.  For the record between the fork in the road that is the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. McChyrstal (with Gen. Petraeus and Adm. Mullen supporting) and the Biden plan (with Gen. Jones? and maybe Jim Webb supporting?) which is a counterterrorism only focus, I would lean towards option #3, the John Robb approach (i.e. open-source counterinsurgency).  But that will likely not happen, so we are left the with the population-centric, really Afghan city-centric, counterinsurgency strategy and the counterterrorism one.

At this point I’m agnostic on this one.  [Read more →]

Jamelle makes some persuasive points in this post on Afghanistan–arguing that the administration and its supporters have yet to make a solid case that the war is in the US interests.  As he says, the case is still “up in the air.”

I think on that specific point he’s right.  Attempting to build a nation-state in Afghanistan will not destroy the threat of al-Qaeda (especially if AQ is hiding in Pakistan and as appears likely heading either to Yemen and the Horn of Africa and/or northward into Central Asia).

But I think he goes too far in the other direction with this point:

There’s not much evidence to suggest that a stable government in Afghanistan will lead to a lower overall incidence of terrorism.  Of the major terrorist attacks (against Western targets) since 9/11, the two largest – the March 2004 attack in Spain and the July 2005 attack in Britain – were planned and executed within the respective countries.  Indeed, the same is true of 9/11. What’s more, and as Matt Yglesias has repeatedly noted, the terrorist attacks that we’re really worried about – nuclear, chemical or biological attacks – are unlikely to be carried out by terrorist groups located in Afghanistan, or even Pakistan for that matter.  In all likelihood, those plots will be developed and carried out by terrorists within the targeted country.

The Spainish and British cases (even 9/11 for that matter) are a little more complicated in terms of geographic influence/causation.  For example, the idea of the plot for 9/11 was thought up by Khaled Sheik Mohammed.  Not in Germany nor in the US.  The Madrid attacks were largely funded by selling hash and ecstasy on the Spanish nightclub scene (which in Barcelona in particular has a very global makeup).  The hash largely coming from Morocco.

And the British attacks occurred through the pipeline of Pakistani extremism.

In other words, while the standard notion that attacks emanate from one point in the world–i.e. a failed state like Afghanistan–and therefore we need to go and create stable nation-states where there are failed states is really flawed, the opposite is not therefore true. Namely that terrorist attacks only perpetuate within the host countries.

Terrorism is much more like (or is) a black market criminal enterprise.  As such it is global, like all corporations across the planet.  The concept of “citizenship” or which nation-state is the site of the issue is largely a false frame in this age.  As Dan Drezner said, All Politics is Global.  Terrorism included.

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, as I’m very skeptical (as I’ve said before) of increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, but the alternative of assuming that all interventions only make situations worse (which I’m not saying is Jamelle’s position to be clear) is no good in my mind either.

We need some framework for this muddy in between.  Which is why I was so pleased to read Dr. Thomas Rid’s piece in The Atlanticist.  I recommend the post in full.  It’s very good.

He lists ten points to consider in an analysis of what to do re: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the larger operation against terrorism.  Those ten points include insights from both camps–the Afghanistan is central to fighting al-Qaeda/US interests and those who oppose that view.  [Read more →]