Arms and influence

Grenades OK, as long as they're in a plastic bag

Please, please, please, whoever is the next President of the United States, order an immediate review of TSA regulations. We still take off our shoes in the security line, but it's OK for someone to take hand grenades on an airplane.

Who cares if "TSA specialists then determined that the explosives were inert"? Let's not even get into who t how qualified the TSA's Bomb Assessment Officer was to deem the grenades "inert." Someone threatening to blow up a plane with fake grenades is more of a threat than me getting on the plane without someone looking at my shoes.

And, of course, there's the continued erosion of the TSA's credibility, when it's willing to do something as symbolically stupid as this. But maybe they deserve it.

Good news devolves into bad

I shouldn't write posts like this one. Celebrating the news that a federal judge ordered the release of the 17 Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay just jinxed it for them. A circuit court judge ordered the Uighurs' continued imprisonment until the court had a chance to consider the DOJ's plea.

Even more repulsive, the DOJ argued that imprisonment was in the interest of the Uighurs:

The Uighurs had been cleared for release in 2004 but the US says they may face persecution if returned to China.

The White House said if they were released it could set a precedent that would allow "sworn enemies" to seek US entry.

The government says the 17 also pose a security risk if released into the US.

No word yet on whether the same "logic" will apply to Native Americans flying to Canada, Kurds traveling to Turkey, or Sikhs traveling to India.

Here's a link to the SCOTUS Blog's summary of the case so far. It's worth taking a look at Judge Urbina's decision (now in limbo) to order the release of the Uighurs.

Enough with the Uighurs

One piece of good news on an otherwise dreary day: a federal judge has ordered the release of the 17 Uighurs whom the US government has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the last seven years.

At a hearing packed with Uighurs who live in the Washington area, Urbina rejected government arguments that he had no authority to order the men's release. He said he had such authority because the men were being held indefinitely and it was the only remedy available. He cited a June decision by an appellate court that found evidence against the Uighurs to be unreliable.

Urbina said in court that he ordered the release "because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detention without cause." He added, "The separation of powers do not trump" the prohibition against holding people indefinitely without trial.

And if you were curious how broken the Justice Department still is, wonder no more. The DoJ attorney, John O'Quinn, who had been making the argument for holding the Uighurs until the stars fell from the skies, intimated that, upon release, the US government might detain them again. In other words, having failed to produce any evidence that the Uighurs were terrorists bent on killing Americans, the Justice Department asserted that it would hold the Uighurs again because the US government accused them of belonging to a terrorist organization.

Maybe the US government is trying hard to keep the Uighurs in prison to keep Chinese leaders happy. However, I suspect that the DoJ's "assert executive fictional executive powers with maximum effort" policies, created and perfected during the Bush Administration, have as much or more to do with the continued effort to keep these 17 Uighurs in one prison or another. If you find that hard to believe, listen to this podcast before jumping to any conclusions. Ashcroft and Gonzales may be gone, but most of the people that the DoJ hired or promoted in the last several years are still there. Many are stalwart public servants with great respect for the Constitution and the laws...And some have different ideas.

Pakistani penury

Ye gods, the global financial crisis, which has already compelled Europeans to build firewalls against further US economic shocks, is now prompting the Pakistani government to warn that it is approaching bankruptcy.

Ratings agency Standard and Poor's, has given Pakistan's sovereign debt a grade of "CCC +", a few notches above default. It said Pakistan may be unable to cover $US3 billion in debt payments.

Obviously, the US government will be in no position to bail out Pakistan with loans or direct aid. So where will Pakistan go for help? Pakistan will have to come to some form of arrangement with Saudi Arabia already about its oil imports, so why not extend the conversation in other economic directions?

Meanwhile, how aggressively will the Pakistani military pursue Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Meh, not so much, maybe, since military operations cost money.

Where's the nominal President of the United States today? Glad-handing the US Olympic team. As I said at the beginning of this post, ye gods.

Stalking bin Laden

In case you missed it, here's the 60 Minutes piece in which a Delta Force officer describes the hunt for bin Laden in 2001. It's an important part of the story of what happened in the early phase of the post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda and US intervention in Afghanistan. (And I still maintain that Not A Good Day To Die should be on everyone's reading list.)

The focus of the piece is the decision from somewhere in the chain of command to cancel Delta's planned attack on bin Laden. Who knows, there may have been good reasons. Perhaps the information about bin Laden's location wasn't as completely solid. Maybe there were fears about extracting the Delta team, once angry Al Qaeda fighters started hunting for bin Laden's killers. Or maybe the reasons were bad.

Nevertheless, it's worth remembering this small piece of the much bigger history of American counterterrorism--especially when we need to judge other risky missions that we assign to special operations forces (SOFs) like Delta. Not every decision to pull the plug is an outrage--as long as there's continued effort to reach the same objective.

So what's the big secret? Part I

As Bob Woodward makes the rounds promoting his new book, The War Within, his interviewers keep asking the same question to which he keeps giving the same answer: What's the new program, technique, or technology that's supposedly responsible for the drop in Iraqi insurgent attacks? In the absence of knowledge, we're left to speculate--and speculate I will!

Violence decreases--but where?
First, we have to deal with the question of the numbers themselves. How substantial was the drop, and when did it happen? Global Security maintains three charts that help answer this question: (1) the overall level of violence; (2) the distribution of attacks, by province; and (3) the distribution of attacks, by target. Since a detailed look into the data's reliability is another big discussion altogether, we'll accept the numbers as presented as accurate, or at least in the right zip code of accuracy.

The first statistic is important--but so are the other two. Since the middle of 2007, the frequency of attacks has dropped dramatically. Geographically, the major drops occurred in Baghdad and Anbar province. Target-wise, the big decrease is in the number of attacks on coalition forces. The number of attacks on Iraqis, both in uniform (security forces) and out (civilians) dropped far more gradually, and far less proportionately.

Coalition forces become harder targets
Are there any conclusions we can draw? Since the numbers reflect insurgent attacks only, omitting violence from other sources, we're seeing only part of the story about fighting among Iraqi groups. Other indicators of internecine violence, such as the recent UCLA study of Badhdad by night, are necessary to depict what people mean by the phrase "civil war."

On the other hand, we can say that either (1) Coalition forces have figured out some way to reduce the number of times insurgents try to shoot them and blow them up, or (2) something else is happening that has the side effect of reducing the attacks on US and British forces. Therefore, it's entirely credible that US officials have crafted some secret something that's responsible for the drop in attacks on Americans.

The imperfect shield
The numbers do cast some doubt on the efficacy of the surge. The focused escalation of effort in Baghdad and Anbar is responsible for some drop in violence. However, this escalation has not created as strong a protective shield around Iraqi civilians as many people assume. Insurgents can still harm, and therefore intimidate, Iraqis within the enclaves that US and Iraqi forces have struggled to create.

Case in point is this weekend's suicide bombing of Shiite mosques in Baghdad. While no protective shield will be perfect, the aggregate statistics echo the anecdotal evidence, such as this weekend's attacks.  Particular insurgent groups, such as Al Qaeda In Iraq, may be weakened, but some Iraqi insurgents retain the power to terrorize.

[Given the scope of this topic, I'm continuing the discussion in a later post.]