From today’s Washington Post: Strikes Have Disrupted Al-Qaeda:

Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.

This sounds promising.  But unfortunately, the article provides no evidence or details.  All we have are a few hopeful sounding assessments from unnamed government officials, combined with pure speculation like:

The offensive in Swat against its Taliban allies also poses a dilemma for al-Qaeda, a senior military official said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Are we going to contest’ ” Taliban losses, he said, predicting that al-Qaeda will “have to make a move” and undertake more open communication on cellphones and computers, even if only to gather information on the situation in the region. “Then they become more visible,” he said.

This is about as soft as anything one is likely to read in a newspaper:  Speculation about al Qaeda’s internal debates, combined with a prediction about their likely response, leading to a wishful implication that AQ will be forced to come out into the open and as a result be vulnerable to military action.  There is literally nothing solid here.

Al Qaeda does not have any large scale infrastructure.  It does not need to move.  The organization is on the ground in Pakistan and probably does not need to fire up a significant intelligence gathering operation in order to gain situational awareness.  If I were an al Qaeda leader, I’d be laying low, letting the tide of Pakistani military operation ebb  and flow — as they inevitably will.  I could be completely wrong, but my assessment contains precisely as much data as is provided in the Post story.

We are making a terrible mistake if we assume that the advance of Pakistani forces on a map represents control of territory, or worse that it reflects the elimination of operating areas of al Qaeda.  If the Pakistani offensive truly has positive consequences, they will show up in due time.  But for right now, we have to realize that we still don’t know what we don’t know.

ASP Senior Fellow Dr. Evelyn Farkas was featured yesterday on CNN’s American Morning and MSNBC talking about North Korea and how to confront the challenges it presents given the recent missile tests conducted by the regime there.

See the MSNBC Segment here:

And the CNN Segment here:

When we think about protecting our national security, we generally are talking about protecting our physical property, our lives, our economy (or livelihood), and our way of life (including our political institutions and independence).  Anything that threatens one or more of these things can reasonably be declared a threat to our national security.

By this measure, climate change is a threat to the security of the United States and to states around the world.

The news today makes that point pretty clearly.

In this morning’s New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar reports on the work of Pacific island nations whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels.  The Carteret Islands northeast of Papua New Guinea “could well be uninhabitable by 2015,” MacFarquhar writes.  But the danger is not limited to the Carterets whose inhabitants are torn between staying and finding a more secure place to live.

There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances. Aside from the South Pacific, low-lying areas likely to be battered first include Bangladesh and nations in the Indian Ocean, where the leader of the Maldives has begun seeking a safe haven for his 300,000 people. Landlocked areas may also be affected; some experts call the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomads battle villagers in a war over shrinking natural resources, the first significant conflict linked to climate change.

I found a compelling Youtube video about the Carteret Islands, here.

The idea that industrial nations bear some responsibility for climate change might be difficult to hear, but it is also true.  But that alone is not enough for us to act.  We have to act on climate change, because the Carteret Islands are just one example, one early indicator, of what is likely to happen around the world.

Sadly, climate change is already taking human life.

The Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, reported today that about 300,000 people die each year as a result of climate change-related disasters.  Such disasters also account for approximately $125 billion in economic damage each year.

MacFarquhar’s concluded by highlighting the conflict the islanders feel between moving to safer lands or staying on their ever-shrinking shore. 

The sentiment among Pacific Islanders suggests that they do not want to abandon their homelands or be absorbed into cultures where indigenous people already struggle for acceptance.

“It is about much more than just finding food and shelter,” said Tarita Holm, an analyst with the Palauan Ministry of Resources and Development. “It is about your identity.”

Identity.  If we think for just a moment about the lives that have been lost in the last 100 years over “identity,” it is chilling.  Climate change does not just threaten shores, or productive lands, it threatens who people are.  That’s a recipe for violence and extremism of all sorts.

ASP Senior Fellow Evelyn Farkas posted a compelling essay on thestimulist.com in which she argues that the United States–and the international community–have to respond vigorously to North Korea’s nuclear test.

She writes:

Over the last few weeks Pyongyang has tested long- and short-range missiles—purposefully choosing Memorial Day to show off its arsenal—and issued belligerent warnings about “a powerful military strike” if its ships are interdicted by member countries of the Proliferation Security Initiative. The actions have given President Obama the opportunity to do more than write letters and lob rhetoric at North Korea. And he must seize it.

But to do so, he’ll need to gin up some leverage to force North Korea back into talks about abandoning its nuclear programs. The President must convene his military leadership and ensure that we are prepared to defend our allies in Asia, as well as do all we can with conventional forces to deter Kim Jong-il. Obama must demand creative military thinking about the proper enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718 and whatever new resolution emerges in the coming days, and how we might—covertly or otherwise—disable North Korea’s military strengths, including its special operations forces and artillery units.

You can read her whole essay here.

I’ve written about this before, but this is a good time to revisit the issue.  From today’s NYT: 1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Foun:

An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

Is that a high number?  Here is a point of comparison from the DoJ.  I’ll quote at length:

• Rearrest within 3 years
• 67.5% of prisoners released in 1994 were rearrested within 3 years, an increase over the 62.5% found for those released in 1983
• The rearrest rate for property offenders, drug offenders, and public-order offenders increased significantly from 1983 to 1994. During that time, the rearrest rate increased:

- from 68.1% to 73.8% for property offenders

- from 50.4% to 66.7% for drug offenders

- from 54.6% to 62.2% for public-order offenders

• The rearrest rate for violent offenders remained relatively stable (59.6% in 1983 compared to 61.7% in 1994).

• Reconviction within 3 years
• Overall, reconviction rates did not change significantly from 1983 to 1994. Among, prisoners released in 1983, 46.8% were reconvicted within 3 years compared to 46.9% among those released in 1994. From 1983 to 1994, reconviction rates remained stable for released:

- violent offenders (41.9% and 39.9%, respectively)

- property offenders (53.0% and 53.4%)

- public-order offenders (41.5% and 42.0%)

• Among drug offenders, the rate of reconviction increased significantly, going from 35.3% in 1983 to 47.0% in 1994.

• Returned to prison within 3 years
• The 1994 recidivism study estimated that within 3 years, 51.8% of prisoners released during the year were back in prison either because of a new crime for which they received another prison sentence, or because of a technical violation of their parole. This rate was not calculated in the 1983 study.

So… thus far, at least, released terrorist suspects are much less likely than “regular” prison inmates to return to a “life of crime.”  There are a few possible implications of that, some good, and some bad:

(1) Maybe Gitmo is actual a model of rehabilitation.

(2) Maybe terrorists are less committed to their cause than petty criminals are to breaking the law.

or

(3) Maybe, and frankly, this strikes me as the most likely… the vast majority of the people we’ve released from Gitmo were never terrorists in the first place.

In any case, the idea that we can only release people from Gitmo if we can somehow guarantee that NONE of them ever return to the fight is absurd.  It is an impossible and unrealistic standard.  Trying to implement it would lead inevitably to permanent detention without trial of anyone caught up in our counter-terror programs.

We need to grow up and realize that unfortunately this is not an ideal world.  We can’t achieve perfect security.  There are tradeoffs in any approach.  But holding people forever, without any transparent process for assessing their crimes is both a threat to democracy and such a disaster for our image in the world that we will pay the consequences tenfold for trying to achieve the unachievable.

Update (5/22): Of course, another possibility is that these guys didn’t “return” to terrorism, but rather than some innocent people became terrorists due to our mistreatment.  After all, if we had solid evidence that they were terrorists initially, they would not have been among those released.  We likely released people we realized were innocent, and it seems possible we managed to turn 14% of the innocents swept into Gitmo into terrorists.

In ASP’s recent “Are We Winning” interim report, Somalia was highlighted as a growing “hot spot” for Islamic terror, along with Russia, the Phillipines, and Pakistan.

Yesterday, CNN and other outlets reported that all Qaeda affiliated Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabab seized Jowhar, a city southeast of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

From the article:

The town had been under the control of forces backing the transitional government, which is scrambling to cope with deadly advances from Al-Shabab in Mogadishu.

Al-Shabab was once the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which took over most of southern Somalia in the second half of 2006. The United States says the group is affiliated with the al Qaeda terrorist network, and the U.S. backed an Ethiopian invasion that drove the ICU from power in 2006.

ASP Senior Fellow Dr. Bernard I. Finel noted in the interim report that:

Somalia continues its downward trajectory dating to the western-backed Ethiopian invasion of that country to remove the Islamist regime of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU).  There was little evidence to suggest that the ICU was interested in promoting global terrorism, but the remnants of that movement have merged with preexisting, al-Qaeda affiliated groups, in the post-invasion environment.

Read the entire report here to learn about the greater implications of expanding Islamic terror “hot spots,” and other developments in the so-called “War on Terror.”

The firing of General McKiernan in Afghanistan and his replacement with General McChrystal has prompted some interested debate and discussion. Three of the arguments that emerged are of particular interest and deserve further comment.

First, posting at Foreign Policy, analyst Kori Schake argues provocatively that “McKiernan may become the General Shinseki of Afghanistan.” She writes:

The danger for the administration in having relieved McKiernan will come if their Afghanistan strategy does not produce the desired results on the expedited timeline the administration has committed itself to. McKiernan is on record as having asked for at least 10,000 more troops than the administration provided, and given his military judgment that the political objectives military force has been enlisted to help achieve would take a decade. If Afghanistan does not turn, the Obama administration will have just created this war’s Eric Shinseki.

The reason Shinseki became a poster boy for the mistakes of the Iraq War was not because Iraq went badly. Rather it was because he was correct on a key matter of strategy. Shinseki was ultimately highlighting a fundamental weakness of the Iraq war plan, namely its lack of focus on providing a stable post-conflict security environment. By contrast, it does not seem likely that McKiernan has actually raised any fundamental strategic concerns in the handling of the Afghan conflict. Yes, like Shinseki he has suggested a larger deployment, but asking for more forced to implement the same mission is not quite the same as Shinseki’s assessment that an entire mission — post-conflict stabilization — was being ignored. In short, the situations are quite different.

A more fundamental critique of the decision to fire McKiernan was provided by Celeste Ward in Sunday’s Washington Post (Countering the Military’s Latest Fad). Ward takes on the increasingly dominant counter-insurgency paradigm. She argues:

Washington’s ultimate objectives in Afghanistan remain unclear. The United States has spent six years, more than 4,000 American lives, mass quantities of psychic and political energy, and untold billions on the effort in Iraq — a project that has to date yielded little in a strategic sense. Iraq had an urban, educated population, infrastructure and bountiful natural resources, whereas Afghanistan has none of these. If “counterinsurgency” is merely a more palatable stand-in for “nation-building,” that politically freighted but strategically more illuminating term, then our terminology may be obscuring the true extent of our predicament.

Ward’s decision to conflate counter-insurgency with nation-building will likely elicit some spirited rebuttals from the counter-insurgency community. Nevertheless, Ward does make a significant point — providing good governance and security in Afghanistan may very well be a bridge too far.

Unfortunately, Ward’s op-ed fails to address a larger and more fundamental weakness in the counter-insurgency literature, namely the assumption that if an insurgency exists it demonstrates ipso facto a gap in governance. Ultimately, it is unclear whether lack of governance causes insurgencies or whether insurgencies cause a collapse in governance. The direction of these causal arrows is strategically significant. A simple glance at the world today raises significant questions about the counter-insurgency paradigm because there are many, many parts of the world with very low levels of effectives governance, and only a small number of these are wracked by significant insurgent movements. In short, Ward’s critique of the counter-insurgency paradigm is not that it is wrong, per se, though she argues that it has tended to oversimplify complex events like the dynamics of the “surge” in Iraq, but rather her main concern vis-a-vis Afghanistan is that the goals of a counter-insurgency strategy may be unachievable given conditions in the country.

It is also possible, however, that the counter-insurgency paradigm encourages a more fundamental strategic error in Afghanistan, namely an overemphasis on underlying conditions and an underemphasis on the goals, actions, and capabilities of the insurgents themselves.

In Saturday’s New York Times (Death From Above, Outrage Down Below), counter-insurgency theorists David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum apply the logic of their argument to the use of Predator airstrikes in Pakistan. They write:

The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error — our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing “high-value” targets — not to mention the bounties placed on their heads — distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods.

In their view, it is better to provide services to the population — notably security — than it is to hunt down insurgent leaders. They are unquestionably correct that eliminating “high-value” targets provides few long-term benefits. In war, only a vanishingly few leaders are genuinely irreplaceable. There is little evidence to suggest that any of our targeted killings has done more than buy a few days or perhaps weeks of advantage.

But, again, there is a bigger issue here. The problem with the Predator strikes in Pakistan is not so much the opportunity costs, but rather than political costs associated with giving the Pakistani government plausible deniability about its role in authorizing these strikes. It is an open secret that our strikes in Pakistan are launched from Pakistani territory with the approval of the Pakistani government. It is a terrible mistake of the United States to be complicit in the dissemination of the notion that U.S. strikes are a unilateral initiative undertaken without the knowledge  — and indeed in the face of public opposition — of the Pakistani government. It feeds into every negative perception of the U.S. role in the world. Indeed, many of the negative political consequences of the Predator strikes could be mitigated if they were undertaken in response to public requests for assistance from the Pakistani government. But in order to limit the political pressure on the Pakistani government, we are deliberately channeling the anger and rage of the Pakistani population on the United States. It is a terrible bargain in the long-term.

In short, we need to be careful to think through the strategic issues associated with the now-dominant counter-insurgency paradigm. The COIN framework is now so pervasive that most of our debates are wedded to the framework. So instead of asking whether it even desirable to nation-build in Afghanistan, we debate the secondary issue of whether it is possible. Instead of considering how Predator strikes fit into our broader strategic posture of foreign intervention, seemingly often in opposition to the wishes of allied governments, we focus on the opportunity costs of various tactical initiatives. It is likely that as a consequence, we are missing the forest for the trees in many of these discussions.

Andrew Sullivan approvingly quotes an essay by Professor Manan Ahmed that attacks the claim that Pakistan is a failed state.

It is a peculiar argument, in large part because very few people actually do consider Pakistan a failed state. That said, it is unclear what most people really do fear is likely to happen in Pakistan. We can, however, suggest a few plausible scenarios.

Those most sanguine about the future of Pakistan tend to make the following claims: (1) Pakistan is a modern state with a strong civil society and a powerful military; (2) the Islamic radicals operating along the border with Afghanistan are relatively small in number and are generally quite unpopular. As a consequence, it is tremendously unlikely that any faction or factions of Islamist radicals could actually seize power.

There is also a slightly less sanguine group of analysts who largely accept the above arguments, but are nonetheless skeptical of the capacity of President Zaidari’s government. These analysts ultimately believe that in the worst case scenario, all we’d see is another military takeover (which would be the 4th since 1958) which would lead to the rapid suppression of the Islamist radicals.

The first argument is almost certainly accurate. The chances of the Pakistani Taliban marching into Islamabad and seizing control of the government are vanishingly small. The second argument is more problematic. It assumes, ultimately, that the military could stamp out Islamist radicals quite easily. The current hard fighting in the Swat valley calls that assumption into question.

There remain, in addition, three additional scenarios that could result in unpredictable consequences.

(1) It is likely that we are over-estimating the capabilities and cohesion of the Pakistani military. Insurgencies are notably difficult to defeat, and the Pakistani military is neither trained nor equipped for counter-insurgency operations. Its heavy-handed approach to current operations in the Swat valley follow a classic pattern of overuse of deadly force in counter-insurgency operations that serve to strengthen rather than suppress insurgent movements. In addition, we simply do not know how reliable the Pakistani military would be in the context of a domestic conflict. Traditionally, the collapse of military authority during a civil conflict is not gradual, nor it is often visible beforehand. On the contrary, all it often takes is a single unit to refuse orders to set off a very rapid chain reaction where all units are forced to make a choice to embrace a new order or defend the old. Most analysts considered the Iranian military to be reliable up until elements of the Iranian Air Force defected to the Islamists in early 1979. The situations are not identical, but we should be very cautious about the assumption that the Pakistani military will be either able or willing to suppress the Islamist radicals indefinitely.

(2) Radical groups often come to power not through conquest nor through elections (though there are examples of both historically), but rather through subversion after having been granted a role in governance. Establishment officials are often tempted to create coalition government and power-sharing arrangements on the notion that it is good advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Once inside the halls of power, however, many radical groups work to expand their power and authority and gradually launch an internal coup — examples include the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 and the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban create a pathway for this sort of erosion of state institutions from within.

(3) It is often a mistake to assume that because a situation is bad, it is unlikely to get worse. Indeed, when Islamist radicals were operating only in the Northwest Provinces and Federally Administered Tribal areas, optimists argued that they were a localized threat made possible solely by virtue of the lack of government control over those areas. When the radicals moved into the Swat Valley, it was again seen as a localized dynamic, driven by ethnic identity and local issues are much as anything else. In short, conventional wisdom has tended to minimize the potential potency of the Islamist movement by stressing the role of local conditions. The problem is that the strength of radical and revolutionary movements is deceptive. For those outside — like most Pakistani government officials and scholars studying the region — the appeal of the radicals is hard to fathom. It is, as a result, both convenient and comforting to ascribe any successes of the movement to local conditions. Unfortunately, trendlines suggest that we need to take seriously the possibility that the radical Islamist movement in Pakistan has real legs, and that it feeds off structural conditions such as corruption in Pakistan as well as a high level of enthusiasm and commitment from those within its ranks. In short, while there is no reason to panic, we need to also resist the temptation to simply look for reasons to dismiss the threat posed by groups loosely affiliated under the banner of the Pakistani Taliban.

In the short run, collapse of military discipline and internal subversion are more likely pathways to an Islamist takeover in Pakistan than either electoral success or conquest. We need to watch for both these possibilities. In the long run, however, we should spend some time trying to explain the durability and potential growth path of radical groups rather than just looking for reasons to dismiss the threat.

In a Senate hearing on torture today, former FBI Special Agent and Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan decried so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques used against detainees, calling them less effective than traditional methods of information gathering.

From CNN:

Soufan, who was involved in the interrogation of CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah, took issue with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has said that enhanced interrogation techniques helped the government acquire intelligence necessary to prevent further attacks after September 11, 2001…

“From my experience — and I speak as someone who has personally interrogated many terrorists and elicited important actionable intelligence — I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’” Soufan noted in his written statement.

Such a position is “shared by many professional operatives, including the CIA officers who were present at the initial phases of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.”

This comes on the heels of increased calls for investigation into abuses by former Bush administration officials who may have knowingly violated the law while advising the president.

On a related note, former Bush administration lawyer Philip Zelikow, whose 2006 memo opposing torture was ordered destroyed by the White House, added his voice to that growing chorus, saying that:

[O]ne of the reasons I support some kind of inquiry is to comprehend why so many people believed that a program like this was a good idea - since we now believe it was a mistake. So we can learn from the mistake. When there is this kind of collective failure, we need to learn from what happened.

Clearly there is a need for greater accountability in the executive branch than there has been in recent years. For a historical perspective and insight into what can be done to prevent future abuses, read ASP Senior Fellow Dr. Bernard Finel’s recent column on the issue.

In case you missed it, there was a great piece by Alexandra Zavis in the Boston Globe on May 3, “Going green becomes a matter of national security.”

In it, Zavis details how the military is, in many respects, leading the way on climate and energy security–not simply because military leaders say so, but because it makes good strategic and tactical sense.

Consider this:

The Defense Department is the single largest energy consumer in the United States. Last year it bought nearly 4 billion gallons of jet fuel, 220 million gallons of diesel, and 73 million gallons of gasoline, said Brian Lally, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.

Or this:

American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are using more fuel each day than in any other war in US history. When oil prices spiked last summer, the Defense Department’s energy tab shot up from about $13 billion per year in 2006 and 2007 to $20 billion in 2008. The Army alone had to make up a half-billion-dollar shortfall in its energy budget, said Keith Eastin, assistant secretary of the Army for installations and environment.

Think of all the lives lost because Americans had to protect fuel convoys in Iraq.  Think of the billions of dollars flowing straight from the U.S. treasury to oil producing states that may not have America’s best interests at heart.

At Fort Irwin, California, initiatives to insulate tents for rotating units reduced generator usage by 45 to 75 percent, according to Zavis.  Officials there believe they can “cut the carbon emissions at the base by 35 million pounds each year–the equivalent of taking 3,500 vehicles off the road.”

Last year, ASP’s bipartisan board of directors included climate change and energy security as two of the critical national security challenges facing the United States in the years ahead and recommended taking urgent action to meet both threats, including leveraging the purchasing power of the U.S. government to seed the market for climate-friendly technologies and energy security.

It’s gratifying to see the U.S. military take action on this front–but then we shouldn’t be surprised.  Military officers, in my experience, understand the uniqueness of the climate-energy nexus as a national security threat better than many others.