Counterterrorism and the Numbers Game
From Fox News yesterday:
US Officials Cite Synergy of Terrorists with Expanding Desire to Kill Americans
There are a lot of interesting things going on in this article, but a couple of quotes stood out to me as being worth highlighting. The first concerns the al Qaeda bodycount as a measure of success:
Purely by the numbers, al-Qaida has been devastated by the past 18 months of drone attacks and raids, [National Counterterrorism Center chief Michael] Leiter said. Half of al-Qaida’s leadership has been killedi n the past year. The organization is down to only 50 to 100 “card-carrying” members inside Afghanistan and roughly 300 operatives in Pakistan.
Even if our estimate is right, and there really is no way to know whether it is, I’m not sure how much this matters. It often seems that we’re assuming that there was some static number of al Qaeda members that existed in 2001, and that we’ve spent the last nine years whittling that number down.
Granted, part of counterterrorism strategy is trying to eliminate members of a group faster than a group can replace them. But what about saying that there are only 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan and 300 in Pakistan suggests that that’s what we’re doing?
If we’re using numbers as the measure, wouldn’t we have to know how many existed in the first place, which no one has ever really known? Or how big the organization needs to be in order to function effectively? Or most importantly, how fast those individuals are being replaced?
Real clandestine terrorist organizations are never really that big in the first place, is it really so obvious that whittling al Qaeda down to 400 “card-carrying members” is really crippling it to such an extent that they are obviously on the ropes?
Even accepting that we are significantly degrading al Qaeda’s leadership, other quotes from the article seem to make drawing definitive conclusions difficult:
An even greater number of well-trained terrorists are setting their sights on the United States…U.S. officials say they’ve seen a fusion of al-Qaida and others targeted by U.S. forces, including the Haqqani group and the Pakistani Taliban, who formerly focused only on their local areas. The difference now is that the local groups are sharing manpower, weaponry, and ideology with al-Qaida.
Leiter said he wouldn’t argue “that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized. But he added, “It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. It means you craft a fully strategy to explain why you’re doing it.”
But, [counterterrorism officials] contend, if the pressure comes off, al-Qaida could transform itself into an even stronger, more resilient foe – a process that they acknowledge has already begun.
I really don’t know what to make of this, but my initial reaction is that for all of the discussion about how much our kinetic pressure is weakening al Qaeda, we don’t really seem to know what our pressure is doing.
It is either weakening al Qaeda or strengthening its ties to organizations that make it considerably more dangerous. It is either reducing its leadership to the point of destruction or making ultimately reparable dents in an organization resilient and deep enough to outlast even our most aggressive efforts. It is either being twisted through terrorist misdirection to persuade the Muslim public to misread U.S. intentions, or it is actually alienating Muslims in its own right, especially Pakistanis who resent their sovereignty and personal safety being threatened by unilateral drone strikes.
I understand going with what seems to be working, especially when critics seem to be relatively light on workable alternatives. Before we start making claims about how much success we’ve been making what will or will not happen if we do or do not enact or continue a given policy, however, we should first step back and acknowledge that our actions have a variety of different consequences, many if not all of which we don’t yet fully understand.
As importantly, before we ratchet things up based on a successful track record, we should take a minute to figure out whether our measures of success are relevant or useful. Though doing so won’t really remove any of counterterrorism’s major strategic obstacles on its own, it could potentially get us closer to having the types of discussions that will help us figure out what will.
