Arms and influence

Full speed reverse!

IN THE NEWS
The Bush Administration has been murmuring lately about a possible spring withdrawal of some US forces from Iraq. The common response I've heard to this proposal—which may just be a trial balloon at this point—is, Huh? As an official policy position, it makes little sense to those who have been trying to understand together the Bush Administration's thinking and map it to the reality in Iraq.

At this point in a classic Star Trek episode, the computer trying to correlate several contradictory statements blows up ina shower of sparks. Iraq is the central front in the battle against terrorists…Brzt…But drawing down US forces would weaken that front…Error…But we are training new Iraqi troops every day…Zznk…But almost none of these troops are combat-ready…Bweep…But the Baghdad electrical grid is doing so much better…Ka-chunk…But the important measures of progress against the Iraqi insurgent groups show that we're not winning…Zrft…Illogical…Illogical…Landru, Landru, help me! Heeeelp meeeeee! KA-BOOM!

What exactly is going on here? I'll run through several possibilities, and then make an educated guess.

• All the information we have about Iraq is wrong. From a vantage point on the other side of the planet, it's impossible to get a good picture of what's really happening there. Many of the most important forces at work in that war—for example, the nature of support for the insurgent groups outside of Baghdad and a few other cities with a strong US/UK presence—are almost impossible to gauge with the tools we have. The Bush Administration may have information we don't, in which case they may have the data that justifies a reduction in the US deployment to Iraq.
• Our interpretation of the data is wrong. Maybe all the information is there, but we're reading it incorrectly. Sure, there are bombings every day, and their lethality has been rising. As horrific as they are, and as much as they draw the news cameras to them, they don't represent the reality of life in Iraq. Alternately, the news we receive may accurately portray the most hotly-contested areas, particularly in the "Sunni triangle." According to this view, we're missing the calmer picture of the rest of Iraq. Therefore, if the insurgents are contained to particular locations, the US can withdraw troops while still helping the Iraqi government corral the insurgents.
• The Bush Administration doesn't understand how badly the war in Iraq is going. Maybe they're looking at different measures than the rest of us, or perhaps at the top levels of the Administration, there's no rigorous analysis at all. The modus operandi of the White House, which does not seem to take bad news in stride, may have led to a lot of internal spinning and wishful thinking. (Insider accounts, like  Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, point in this direction.)
• The Bush Administration's "policy" is really a political message crafted for the mid-term elections. According to this hypothesis, the hyper-politicized White House is putting as good a face it can on the Iraq War before the 2006 elections. Incumbent Republicans face a lot of anger about Iraq. A planned withdrawal—whether, in the White House's private meetings, it's serious or not—could reduce some of that emotion.
• The British government has decided to withdraw, so the Bush Administration feels it has to put the best face on a fait accompli. Perhaps Blair has said to his American ally, "Enough is enough, it's time for the British government to focus on terrorists in Britain, not Iraq." If Great Britain pulls out of Iraq, the United States will have a hard time sustaining the effort alone. In that case, the Bush Administration might want a face-saving exit, rather than be left holding the bag (full of suicide bombers).
• The real target of this announcement is the Iraqi government, whom the Administration feels it can pressure into making better progress. The statistics on the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces is not encouraging. The United States might be threatening a withdrawal just to put pressure on Iraqi leaders to do better fast, or else they'll be left completely to their own devices.
• The military's manpower meltdown has reached unsustainable levels. Drop in recruitment and retention, the exhaustion of the Guard and the reserves, and the limits on who can be re-deployed from other theaters add up to the following conclusion: unless the basic equation changes in fundamental ways (major force re-structuring, a draft, etc.), the Department of Defense has to shrink the Iraq deployment.
• The Bush Administration has decided to declare victory and leave, regardless of the consequences to Iraq. The "check box" mentality that the Bush team has inherited from the private sector is now driving the endgame for Iraq. Sovereignty handed over? Check. Elections? Check. Security forces trained? Check. In this hypothesis, none of these achievements really exist, but they look good in PowerPoint presentations. In this style of leadership, it's not important whether the speaker making these claims really believes them, as long as the stockholders or the voters do.

Having laid out the possibilities, let's start shaving the list down. First, we can't go anywhere with the notion that there's information the Administration has that's wildly at variance with what we see in the news. Regardless of who's in the White House, we have to proceed with the information we have. This particular White House, of course, invites a higher degree of skepticism about purported "facts" that, "If we could only show them to you, you'd feel completely differently." Remember all the overheated speculation about the secret information the US government might have had concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, ties between the Hussein regime and Syrian governments, and an alliance between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government? Of course you do.

Are we interpreting the facts the wrong way? I think that, for significant portions of the US population, there are strong tendencies to read the news from Iraq in completely positive or negative ways. Fox News is definitely guilty of putting a positive spin on the war effort, but bloggers like Atrios are equally guilty of uncritically accepting every piece of news as signs of an imminent collapse of the Coalition/Iraqi effort. The signal-to-noise ratio is worsened by the number of analysts in the print and electronic media who, frankly, don't have expertise in guerrilla warfare and terrorism. However, if you listen to the military and civilian professionals  who have worked on these matters full time, they don't present a very rosy picture.

In the end, whether or not the news accurately depicts the situation in Iraq may be moot. As countless students of revolutionary warfare have noted, the effects of a political message are what ultimately matter. In political warfare, you can complain that the enemy's message was unfair. In maneuver warfare, you can complain that the enemy didn't attack your defenses where you thought they would. In both cases, the complaint is rather pointless.

Some of these hypotheses are just too difficult to test with the available information. Who can say for sure what's being said in the Oval Office in the most private meetings, or what's happening inside Tony Blair's brain? Blair speaks passionately, it seems, about the importance of continuing the fight in Iraq, but he also has to be worried about what the 7/7 bombings portend. Which will ultimately guide his decisions? Probably more than just his own thinking, since he has many other political and bureaucratic factors to weigh.

My guess—and at this point, it's just a guess—is that we're seeing a combination of different forces at play. There are clear signs that the top levels of the Bush Administration genuinely do see the Iraq war in a more positive light than the general population. There are also reasons to believe that the DoD's manpower crisis has reached a critical level. Recent polls show that Republican legislators do face a lot of antipathy about Iraq—even if the Democrats continue to look as though they can't lead us to victory, either. All of these pressures may be pushing through different channels of government to the very top, where senior decision-makers may be pre-disposed to seeing progress that isn't really there. Any one of these officials may be of two minds about Iraq: (1) the insurgent groups are defying our best efforts; (2) on the other hand, we could turn the corner tomorrow.

For further enlightenment, let's go back to Star Trek for a moment. On no less than four occasions in the original series—the episodes "Return of the Archons," "The Ultimate Computer," "The Changeling," and "I, Mudd"—Captain James T. Kirk talked a computer or robot into self-destruction, just by pointing out a logical contradiction. Clearly, the major forces behind the Star Trek scripts, Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana, had a lot of faith in the power of reason. Even psychotic machine overlords and genocidal robots could be forced into a logical corner where they had to admit, You know, you've got me there.

Of course, Star Trek was a TV show. In reality, individual human beings live with cognitive dissonance all the time. When several people reach the stage of "groupthink," they can believe all kinds of crazy things. Huge, complex bureaucracies like the US executive branch can pursue several conflicting policies at the same time. The fact that George W. Bush hasn't self-destructed when presented with contradictions in his own thinking shouldn't surprise us.

What's in a name?

IN THE NEWS

Fred Kaplan at Slate has just noticed that the official US counterterrorism strategy has a dumb name. Correction: It had a dumb name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Now it's called the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE).

I've heard the "missing link" between these two monikers, the Global War on Extremism (GWOE), for months. GSAVE isn't exactly new, therefore.

In any case, I don't like any of these terms. They obscure more than they reveal, and as Kaplan says, there's a little too much of a PR ring to them.

Still, names do matter, so it's worth the time of someone in the Administration to worry about them. Unfortunately, there's no pithy acronym for the real conflict, The Undeclared War on the Al Qaeda Network and All Its Local Allies. (UWAQNAILA?) As I've noted from practically the first day I started this blog, we're not (or shouldn't be) fighting a war against terror as a frame of mind or terrorism as a method. These categories are so broad that they risk confusing the US public and its government about whom and what we're fighting, and whether the campaign is inherently winnable. Meanwhile, we have to stay focused on the real enemy, Al Qaeda and its "clients," so that we can prevent further 9/11-like attacks. Because our enemy, Al Qaeda, operates on a global scale, doesn't commit us by default to a global commitment to assorted conflicts where Al Qaeda may have a presence. Because the US government never declared war—against Afghanistan, Iraq, or Al Qaeda itself—there were no pressures to sharpen the definition.

But now I'm repeating myself, over a year after I started this blog. Still, it's worth noting that, four years after 9/11, there's no clear definition of the war we're fighting.

More on links

IN THE NEWS
All Things Considered has a brief interview with Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks, about the links between Al Qaeda and the groups behind the recent bombings in Egypt and Great Britain. I think the headline on NPR's web site, "Are Freelancers Co-Opting Al Qaeda's Name?" is a bit off the mark. Still, the important point is understanding the loose but effective relationships between Al Qaeda and its "clients."

Another thought about the second London attack: It definitely seems like that group was far less competent than the group responsible for the first, highly lethal bombings. Sometimes Al Qaeda's investment in a group pays off; sometimes, it doesn't.

The link (sort of)

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday, I wrote that I was concerned if the two London attacks were coordinated as part of a single operation. Today, British authorities are claiming to have made a link between the two bombings.

It's not quite the link I had in mind--which is good news. I was worried that Al Qaeda was learning how to expand the terror quotient by timing operations close together, much like Palestinian suicide bombers do. According to the British government, the same Al Qaeda "patron" may have met with both groups, in an effort to pool their efforts. That's a picture consistent with how Al Qaeda operates, and it also makes it less likely that Al Qaeda and its local allies can execute the sort of  tightly-coordinated, close-in-time attacks that Palestinian groups have perfected during "Intifada II." There's also evidence that the groups behind the two bombings may have used a white water rafting trip as cover for a meeting.

The British finding is still tentative, so we're a substantial distance away from finding out exactly what happened.

General Joe Strummer

IN THE NEWS
Thanks to Armchair Generalist for this pointer to an article in the latest issue of Defense AT&L entitled, "Everything We Need To Know About Program Management We Learned From Punk Rock." The US military on dress parade might find time to salute to the strains of Lee Greenwood or Kate Smith. The US military at war, on the other hand, talks and acts more like The Ramones or The Clash.

Help the poor

IN THE NEWS
Poor Afghans need work. The US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan have reconstruction dollars. Therefore...

War? What war?

IN THE NEWS
Today's New York Times has a must-read article, "All Quiet on the Home Front," by Thom Shanker. It's not the definitive article on the topic, but it's a pithy summary of an important question: If we're at war, why doesn't it feel that way at home?

The United States should be able to fight minor wars without disrupting daily life. However, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with other escalated efforts against terrorist groups worldwide, do not add up to a minor war. Pretending otherwise doesn't serve anyone's interest--particularly the military's. 

Asked to fight hard conflicts with fewer forces than it otherwise might have, the US military might increasingly represent a "society within a society," asked to make sacrifices not matched even symbolically by the rest of the American population. To make matters worse, we're already at the point reached after several years of the Vietnam War: the percentage of children of the elite--regardless of political party--are seen to be serving in smaller numbers than the general population. Public opinion has gradually turned against the Iraq war--not because it's difficult, but because American voters question either its purpose or its execution, and often both.

In circumstances like these, Americans can get very angry, and the results can be destructive to both US national security and the ties that hold American society together. People asked to make larger sacrifices might be outraged that the US government didn't ask for them earlier, or more honestly. The electorate might turn against minor projects like expanded US bases around the world, or major endeavors like the war in Iraq. Although the military is unlikely to suffer the opprobium it did during the latter half of the Vietnam War, service in the regular military, National Guard, or Reserves may be increasingly seen as a sucker's bet. The less the reality resembles the ideal of the citizen soldier--harder and harder to achieve, in light of the pressures on recruitment, retention, and funding--the harder it will be for Americans to support the military as an institution.

The idea of the "citizen soldier" is at the heart of both our political culture and the American way of war. Honoring it--in large part, by an honest discussion about sacrifices needed--is the best way to prevent any form of destructive backlash.

What worries me

IN THE NEWS
What's the most important counterterrorism campaign today? I'd nominate the ongoing investigations of the second London bombings and the horrific attack in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. These investigations are vital because they'll indicate whether or not (1) Al Qaeda has the global reach we often attribute to them, (2) Al Qaeda's ability to refine and coordinate attacks, and (3) what phase of their own campaign the Al Qaeda leaders believe them to be.

Right now, we don't have enough information to do much more than speculate--which, again, is what makes the investigations vital. We have a good idea, however, what conclusions we'd rather not reach.

If the second, unsuccessful London attacks were part of the original plan, Al Qaeda tactics have achieved a disturbing but not wholly unsuspected refinement. Thus far, recent Al Qaeda operations--the 9/11 hijackings, the Bali bombings, the Khobar attacks--have been single strikes with no follow-up. The carnage has been terrible, but the terror has been limited by the feeling that, once each attack was over, it was over. Of course, people looked over their shoulders a bit, but the fear of follow-on attacks is nothing like what Israelis face in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

Palestinian suicide bombers learned that immediate follow-on attacks are a huge "force multiplier" for terror. An attack occurs in a crowded restaurant, market or other public place; people are wounded and killed; emergency response workers and concerned bystanders rush to the scene. That's when another car bomb or other device explodes, killing even more people. The terror factor--compounded by the anguish felt when trying to do the right thing--is much greater with these immediate follow-on attacks.

It would be surprising if Al Qaeda hadn't studied the methods of Hamas and the Al Aksa Martyr's Brigade. Although the second attacks occurred days, not minutes, after the 7/7 London bombings, they would have much the same effect, if they were part of the plan. They may not be--which is one of several important questions that the British investigation will address.

The Sharm el-Sheik attack has different portents. First, it may be a sign that Al Qaeda is trying to coordinate nearly-simultaneous operations across national boundaries. To date, it hasn't done so--in large part because of its dependence on local groups in which it invests. Coordinating groups in separate countries, who share little beyond the backing of the core portions of the Al Qaeda network, may be more trouble than it's worth. My own speculation (and that's all it's worth) is that the timing of the London and Sharm el-Sheik attacks isn't significant. Of course, bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders may want to make a point about the reports of their demise having been greatly exaggerated. But the operations themselves make that point already.

However, the choice of target--a prominent resort on the Sinai Peninsula--does have one clear implication: Al Qaeda feels comfortable continuing attacks against the "near enemy," the regimes of Middle Eastern countries like Egypt. Although Al Qaeda attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries haven't received much press in the United States, it's worth remembering how more difficult these operations can be. The local security forces (and their paid informants) are more likely, on average, to identify the people involved in an attack than, say, the Boston or Detroit police departments. (No slight intended to the men and women in blue in these cities, by the way. It's just a fact of life that they have limited contacts among local Islamist groups, plus a significant language barrier.) The security forces may have significant background information on the terrorist operatives--who may have been born and raised in the country in question. Terrorist messages like, "The Saudi royal family is corrupt," have greater resonance in these countries--which means the regime's reponse is that much more ferocious. Continued attacks on the near enemy show confidence and determination. Escalated attacks against the near enemy show that Al Qaeda is moving into the next phase of its strategy.

I wish I could say more, but I can't. We'll just have to wait to learn more about these attacks before drawing any further conclusions.

Absolut indifference

IN THE NEWS
According to The San Francisco Chronicle, relations between Russia and the United States have a new impetus for going downhill. The Russian government is objecting to the US government's efforts to permanently base US forces in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan:

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Russia and China of "bullying" Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan into cutting off access to U. S. troops. And Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, rejected any timetable for a withdrawal in an interview with the Washington Post last week, saying that the U.S. military operates based on "circumstances'' and not "dates.''

On this question, I agree with the Bush Administration: we need some sort of long-term presence in Central Asia. The number and composition of US forces in these former Soviet republics is no threat to Russia. There's a lot of sense in having both more intelligence-gathering capability in Central Asia, as well as bases for rapid deployments to this area.

I've never had much faith in the ties between the Bush and Putin Administrations. After 9/11, the US seemed eager to build good relations with any country that might have Islamist terrorists lurking within its borders. Russia does have a problem with Chechen, Ingun, and Ossetian terrorists. However, these separatist groups don't seem inclined to attack the United States, and whatever contact they've had with Al Qaeda doesn't seem to affect US national security noticeably. Meanwhile, Putin has cynically used rodina security as an excuse to shut down as many threats to his personal power as possible.

If the United States has any reason to focus on Russia, it's closing the door to any "loose nukes" risk. However, raising the rhetorical stakes over Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan makes it harder for Putin to work with us on the nukes problem anyway. Both issues--the loss of territory, the destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal--dramatize the calamitous collapse of Russian power. When Putin drew the rhetorical line on one concern, the same line now blocks progress on the other question. The US should be taking the "loose nukes" problem more seriously, but Putin isn't helping.

Nation's experts give up

IN THE NEWS
On a lighter note, American experts have given up on providing advice that everyone ignores anyway. (Courtesy The Onion.)