Read the whole thing here.

From TNR’s excellent review of The Killer Trail, a history of  one murderous French expedition into the heart of 19th century Africa (emphasis mine):

The Europeans, Taithe notes, never recognized African kingdoms as states, and never interpreted the Geneva Convention as applying to these colonial wars. “Against the uncivilized,” the historian writes, “‘no need to be civilized’ seemed to be the argument.”

And here’s Donald Rumsfeld (emphasis mine):

Rumsfeld replied that the Geneva Convention applies to all prisoners held in Iraq, but not to those held in Guantanamo Bay, where detainees captured in the global war on terror are held.

Any al-Qaeda or Taliban personnel taken prisoner are to be treated consistent with the Geneva Convention, under a decision made by Bush, Rumsfeld added.

He said the distinction is that the international rules govern wars between countries but not those involving groups such as al-Qaeda. “Terrorists don’t comply with the laws of war. They go around killing innocent civilians,” Rumsfeld added.

And John Yoo (emphasis mine):

Al Qaeda is not a nation-state, and its members–as they demonstrated so horrifically on Sept. 11, 2001–violate the very core principle of the laws of war by targeting innocent civilians for destruction. While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions (since Afghanistan signed the treaties), they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

As a result, interrogations of detainees captured in the war on terrorism are not regulated under Geneva.

And Thomas Sowell (emphasis mine):

The argument is made that we must respect the Geneva convention because, otherwise, our own soldiers will be at risk of mistreatment when they become prisoners of war.

Does any sane adult believe that the cutthroats we are dealing with will respect the Geneva convention? Or that our extension of Geneva convention rights to them will be seen as anything other than another sign of weakness and confusion that will encourage them in their terrorism?

No one has suggested that we disregard the Geneva convention for people covered by the Geneva convention. The question is whether a lawless court shall seize the power to commit this nation to rules never agreed to by those whom the Constitution entrusted with the power to make international treaties.

I remain confident that there’s no possible connection between refusing to abide by the Geneva Conventions and subsequent human rights abuses.

This video on one Louisiana town’s plan to defend itself from “homegrown terrorists” really has to be seen to be believed: [Read more →]

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?

The chilling biography of an American high schooler turned Somali insurgent.

I’ve been largely out of the loop for the last week, so there’s quite a bit to catch up on.  A quick word on the attempted terrorist attack on the airliner in Detroit–and then a synthetic remark at the end.

Whatever else comes up in the pseudo-analysis of the (thankfully) failed terrorist attack, we see yet again that the terrorists are largely from middle to upper classes.  The ones who are recruited to perform suicide attacks are usually young and increasingly drawn from a self-selecting pool, communicating through the internet.

This lends credence to the notion that al-Qaeda is the anarchist movement of today.  It follows in the patterns of the Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade, and the earlier anarchist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Contrary to the right-wing US motifs of the early 2000s (which thank God are soon about to end), the analogy for an Al-Qaeda is not to Nazism or Communism.

The attacker came from Nigeria, a country in the midst of a transition to modernity. The revolutionary cadre–as in European history–always come from the upper classes.  It comes from those who are both exposed to and then ultimately break from the modernization process (cf Osama bin Laden).

But unlike Communism or Fascism, these groups hold no states, have no armies, no alternate world economic regime.  They pop up in hollowed out states like Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, or Yemen.  They can recruit from other parts of the world (e.g. Nigeria, even US) but in the end can only perform nihilistic attacks.

Or as Matthew Yglesias says (also holding to the anarchist analogy):

I really mean that analogy to be read in two directions. On the one hand, I think people drastically overestimate the extent of terrorism risks and the extent to which Muslim immigration to Europe is some unsolvable nightmare. But at the same time, I think part of what gets people confused here is a tendency to underestimate how severe the problems of the past seemed. Catholic (and Jewish) immigration to the United States really was, at the time, seen as a major dilemma involving the integration of ideological, religiously, and racially alien people. And people living before World War One really were living in an era marked by a frightening upsurge in anarchist violence, particularly a volume of major assassinations that would be unthinkable today.

In fact it might be argued that al-Qaeda the franchise is essentially being subsumed into regional/local insurgencies:  Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq, Algeria, and Yemen. On one hand, this gives al Qaeda-ism (if not Al Qaeda in Pakistan itself) another lease on life, but on the other continues their slide into being swallowed up into local insurgencies, limiting their political influence and eventually leading them down the road towards a kind of mafia-hood.

Either way, the future of al-Qaeda lies in Africa as Africa is the next great place of globalization (or modernization) and therefore (as Horkheimer and Adorno argued) of counter-modernization.  [Either there and/or into former Soviet republics in Central Asia.].  With what in the West is normally called Islamism representing something of the counter-modern force (or rather a more conservative modernist force) and al Qaeda being the extreme, violent, anarchist wing of Islamic counter-modernism.

The “War” was never against Civilizations but was always a war within a Civilization (Islam) as it becomes shaken up by the process of globalization.  The West can (and has been) drawn into that conflict–and through the Cold War inserted itself into that conflict and fomented it–but the conflict is fundamentally about one between modernists, counter-modernists, and traditionalists (largely being rubbed out) in the Islamic world.

Or according to Vali Nasr:

If the global values of “peace, security, democracy, freedom and human rights, moderation, and religious tolerance,” have not yet taken hold in Muslim lands, concludes Nasr, it is not because of the “fundamental nature of Islam,” but  because the “commercial class that must spearhead the process of propagating [those values] is still too small.” Helping this “critical middle” grow and come to “dominate their societies is the best way of making sure those global values will take deep root as Muslim values, paving the way to democracy.”

Critical to that evolution is taking place is an ability to live with ambiguous and developing situations, letting the internal and regional dynamics of a country play out (e.g. Iran).  The paradox will be that as these groups come to power many, if not most, of them will be (at least rhetorically) more anti-American, but their presence will overall be a better sign of geopolitical stability (including the US).  See Lebanon as an example.

–

Other thoughts as we approach the end of the year:

The Department of Homeland Security still sucks and has yet to learn anything about what is going on.

Yemen is fast becoming a mini-Pakistan with the Obama counterterrorism practice of air raids, training of local forces, pay offs, and all the rest.  Yemen has not yet reached (because the attack failed) counter-insurgency mode (a la Afghanistan).

Will asked me to comment on this op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes pleading with Congress and the President to formulate clear rules regarding detention policy in the War on Terror.

Although I suspect I would strongly disagree with Goldsmith and Wittes about what the proposed rules should look like, I think the substance of this op-ed is probably right on target. The courts ultimately are the arbiters of what is and is not constitutional, and have to remain that way, but they are absolutely not well-suited for affirmatively drafting rules and that sort of thing. Once the Supreme Court started (correctly, IMHO) ruling policies unconstitutional, it was the job of the legislature and, to a lesser extent, the executive, to formulate clear rules to replace the unconstitutional policies rather than leaving an undefined vacuum. Perhaps the replacement rules would have still been unconstitutional and perhaps the Supreme Court would have been forced to intervene again. But at least some of those replacement rules would have been constitutional and would have formed a basis for prosecutors, detainees, and attorneys to rely upon, and Congress could have again gone back to the drawing board to fill the new, smaller vacuum.

Now, however, you’ve got different cases pending before different judges in different courts with little to rely upon other than a handful of SCOTUS decisions that may or may not be relevant in a given case. Whatever results from that process, including whatever rules come out of Judge Hogan’s chambers, are going to be of very limited precedential value. At a minimum, you’re going to wind up with a whole mess of rules that will likely be contradictory, and at the very least uncoordinated, and provide absolutely nothing upon which potential litigants may rely. Until you’ve got something that has the weight of a formally enacted law or, at a minimum, properly enacted administrative regulations, you’re not going to have anything upon which litigants can look to. The conflicting rules will also mean that you will wind up with detainees getting freed while other detainees with essentially identical cases languish in prison, with the only difference being the court or judge before whom they brought their claim for relief. Not good.

It’s not as if Congress isn’t amenable to taking second, third, and fourth bites at the apple when their legislation is found unconstitutional, either. For instance, in the various iterations of the Communications Decency Act, and COPA and CIPA, they made numerous attempts to legislate access to porn on the internet despite findings in each case that the legislation was unconstitutional. Eventually, they got it right so it wasn’t necessary to go back to the drawing board anymore.

Ross Douthat has a smart post on why we shouldn’t opportunistically try terror suspects in civilian courts.

I hesitate to even write this post, in all honesty. I fear that we’re still too close to the set of events and too much remains unknown for us to be able to have a clear and grounded and constructive conversation about what happened at Fort Hood. In retrospect, I feel like posting on the shootings as quickly as I did was a mistake, even if my intentions were honourable.

But over the weekend, I heard something that I think requires some push back and rebuttal. And in providing that push back, I am hopeful that we can resist the impulse to descend into the kind of ugliness that often attends these discussions.

On the November 13 Week in the News segment of On Point, host Tom Ashbrook and guests Ellen Goodman, David Gergen, and Jack Beatty continued to discuss, among other things, Nidal Malik Hasan and the shootings at Fort Hood. During the course of that conversation, David Gergen said roughly the following (I paraphrase only slightly),

While it might true that right wing radio has been quick to jump on calling Hasan’s actions terrorism, I don’t understand why the left is so hesitant to call them acts of terrorism.

Now, off the top, I think we need to jettison the suggested dichotomy that the “right” is universally for calling Hasan’s acts terrorism and the “left” is universally opposed to the proposed labeling. Things just don’t break down that cleanly anymore, if they ever did. The fact of the matter is that a clear majority of Americans believe that Hasan’s acts constitute terrorism and want them investigated as such.

That being said, I think there are good reasons for remaining hesitant about calling Hasan’s actions terrorism, which lie outside of the general throw away explanation of “political correctness” that we’ve heard so much about. It may well be that Hasan’s actions were acts of terrorism and if so they should be labeled as such, but the reality is that at this point we remain in a state of conjecture about the matter. But I think we would do well to look at the context around the use of terms like “terrorism”, “Islamofascist/ism”, and “jihad” to understand why a certain subset of the political class is wary about their use. [Read more →]

Rod Dreher:

On the other hand, it is also wrong to pretend that the Muslim religion had nothing to do with this massacre, that it is mere happenstance that this mass murderer’s crime was incidental to his Islamic faith. The US is in a war against Islamist terrorism. What Hasan did yesterday, on the evidence, was an act of Islamist terror. Period. When a devout Christian commits an act of violence against an abortion clinic, and does so pretty clearly in the name of his religion, it would be an act of stupidity, and possibly moral cowardice, to declare an investigation of his religious motive off-limits. And, in fact, we don’t do that, even as we are, or ought to be, aware that the overwhelming majority of Christians neither commit nor endorse such acts. Similarly, it is right and proper to have a critical discussion of the role Hasan’s religion played in this evil act, if only so we can identify Muslims like him in the future before they’re tempted to act on their convictions.                                 —(my emphasis)

Let’s look at that assertion I’ve highlighted.  The US is in a war against Islamist terrorism.

This, as the young people say, is the part where I break it down (word by word).

1) Terrorism

As has been said by many others, you can’t shouldn’t have a war against a tactic.  Terrorism is a tool and will horribly be deployed.  A country like the US particularly doesn’t want to declare itself in a war against a tactic whose technological and social trajectory is inevitably headed in the upward direction.  Otherwise you have definitionally set yourself up for failure.

Another reason I think the US (or any country for that matter) would not want to define itself in a war on terrorism is that it leads to the potential for ideological backlash.  e.g. I’ve never lived in a village where robotic aerial drones frequent and periodically drop bombs.  I assume however it is an act that would cause me to experience sheer terror.  If a country defines itself in a war on terror than it will admittedly set itself up for the charge of hypocrisy if it uses tactics that are seen to be (or really are to be fair) terror-inducing.

Also given Rod’s own analogy between the shooter and say a Christian abortion-doctor murderer, why is the US then at war against Islamist terrorism and not simply, as a civilized rule-based society, opposed to all criminal terrorist acts?  Does this individual’s despicable actions represent any real threat to the government of the United States?  Does any talk even of domestic home-grown Islamic extremism represent a substantially more serious threat to public order than say Salvadorean gangs, Mexican drug lords, and/or ultra ring-wing terrorist organizations?

I agree with Rod that when you have say anti-abortion terrorist activities by self-defined Christians claiming religion as their motivation, you should study their religion.  I agree with that proposition in the Ft. Hood case.  But why go from there to this act as part of some larger war?

Here’s terrorism expert Marc Sageman (h/t Yglesias) testifying before Congress this past October (p.2):

I excluded lone wolves, who were not physically or virtually connected to anyone in the global neo-jihad, for they often carry out their atrocities on the basis of delusion and mental disorder rather than for political reasons.

Sound relevant in the Ft. Hood case?

On to the other word I suppose to answer that one.

2) Islamist

Islamism is political view that seeks to create an Islamic state.  There are all kinds of problems with saying the US is in a war against Islamist terrorism. [Read more →]

Scott’s quickie on Andy McCarthy’s take on the tragic Ft. Hood shooting (hands up – anyone whose surprised it was A Mac?) is timely and worth the read.  There are some very excellent comments in the thread which are also worth a look (esp. recommended is #10 from Chad).

The controversy of course comes down to the question of the shooter (Nidal Hassan Malik) and his Islamic faith.  Folks like McCarthy want to draw linear causality from the religion to the act.  Instead of “The Devil made me do it,” it’s “Islam made me do it.”

Now Islam, of course, is not the only factor involved.  For some background, here a relevant story from the AP (h/t to Br. Mark).  Of particular note is the common refrain of how negatively Hassan (as a psychiatrist) was affected by working with returning soldiers from the battlefield as well his rather private, lonely existence.

The only point I want to make in this context is to watch how Islam is discussed in this controversy.  My presumption–and see for yourself if this holds–is that Islam is always treated as this giant, monolithic thing.  So either it’s the cause (implied in McCarthy’s case) or it’s kind of put in the corner and ignored (for various sensitive cultural-political reasons).

Either way, this response treats Islam as some uniform entity.  When in reality there is no such thing as monolithic Islam.  What exists (in enormous numbers and influence) are Muslims around the world who have all kinds of views, ethics, ways of understanding the relationship of their faith to the world in which they live, and doctrines or elements of the faith they foreground.

This is particularly the case in a religion like Islam (esp. Sunni Islam) that lacks any centralized authority structure that once and for all determines the true meaning and practice of the faith.

In other words both anti-Muslim US conservatives and Muslim (or Muslim-friendly liberals) always want to get to “the real Islam”.  But that is, to use an old Arab metaphor, a mirage in the desert. There is no “real” Islam, neither the stereotypical bloodthirsty avenger practicing the religion of the sword nor the totally peaceful religion of brotherhood.

Islam treated in this Huntington-esque fashion of some uniform, glacier-like cultural bloc the world over is just nonsense.  What matters is what Muslims do and how they understand, argue for, and what they believe.

Some (very broad and generic) history is helpful here.  Especially in relation to the question of religion and political policy (esp. US foreign policy), since it comes up in this context, insofar as it was appears to have been a motive behind Hasan’s actions given how he understood the concept, emphasis on his understanding. This topic is usually discussed under the label of jihad, so a little history on that one. [Read more →]

John Mueller, at his counter-intuitive best. I routinely pimp his Foreign Affairs article on the terrorist threat, which is also worth reading if you’re looking for a measured assessment of the capabilities of stateless actors.