RE-THINKING FOREIGN POLICY AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Thanks to my distinguished brother-in-law Tobe Berkovitz, Professor of Communications at Boston University for calling to my attention Gerald F. Seib’s interesting, frustrating article in the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304887104579304360218759676-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNjEwNDYyWj

Unfortunately, this important piece has a serious flaw, at least in my opinion, it’s premise is just plain wrong.

“It's becoming clear the Arab Spring didn't merely shake up the ossified power structure of the Middle East,” Seib begins. “It launched a total transformation of the region—one that has reduced American influence and ultimately will compel the U.S. to rethink its stake in an area that for half a century was assumed to be central to its global interests.”

Seib is on the money when he says the Middle East region has changed in dramatic and important ways and that American influence there has been sharply reduced, and a re-thinking of America’s stake and policies in that region is both necessary and long overdue.

But dating those catastrophes from the uprisings in Tunisia and Tahrir Square and their sequels from Libya to Bahrain is both historically wrong and politically tainted.  The strategic changes in the region, and the diminishment of Washington’s ability to manage them were obvious more than 5 years before that disrespected Tunisian street-peddler set himself on fire, and sparked the 2011 conflagration that consumed most of the Mideast’s ancien regime. 

What had already changed the balance of power both within the region, and between the region and the United States, what demonstrated and confirmed both the fragility of many of the region’s dictatorships and the incredible shrinkage of Uncle Sam’s moral and transactional influence, was George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld)’s disastrous war in Iraq.  And behind these shifts, was a deeply changed world of widely-available, personally portable weapons of selective destruction and easily-accessible media of immediate communication.

The effect of the gratuitous and ineffective American intervention (done in an even more  gratuitous and ill-chosen alliance with Iraq’s one-time colonial occupier, the UK) made the US not only a definable and familiar kind of regional villain, but an inept, defeatable one.

Dreaming of a benign regional transformation from cruel dictatorships to benevolent democracies, the US bit off more than it could chew (at least within the budgets of money, manpower, and persistence prescribed for the mission; as if transformations ever came cheap!). 

The once-irresistible force of America’s reputation was even more badly damaged than our actual fighting forces, which were damaged more than enough.  The ignorance and foreignness of our concepts for the region appalled even those who had once given lip-service or more to them and us.  Regional leaders, like our own, were somehow caught by surprise by the effectiveness of irregular forces with their mostly light or “improvised” weapons, and their rapid communications building pop-up tactical collaborations, and virtual strategic alliances.

Neither Vietnam nor the monthly recitation of technical developments in arms and media seem to have been observed.     

That’s what is truly important here, and completely overlooked by Seib, is that the same changes manifested by the “Arab Spring” had been building up as obviously as a construction site in a city for decades.  Here’s a short list:

(1)  a widespread popular desire to oust “ossified,” cruel, corrupt leaders,

(2)  the articulation via media both old and new, institutional and personal, of many revolutionary or reforming ideas,

(3)  the increasing dominance of absolutist formulae, dismissive of compromise and collaboration with the “impure,” to create a unifying, and stable governing structure

(4) a myriad of short-horizon, but well-armed mini-states or mini-factions, ruling and only to be subdued by force, that feel like feudalism at its worst.  These are growing, not just in the Middle East, but all around the world.

And what’s driving those changes, what drove the Arab Spring and doomed our dream-mission in Iraq (and Afghanistan)? Changes both broader, deeper, and more consequential than  those above.  The List of Changes continues:

(5) Medical advances which translate into more babies, who survive more often and live longer,

(6) We now live in a world whose demographic  balance has tipped towards youth.

(7) These younger people are ever better educated.

(8) They conceive higher, more developed personal and political aspirations than did their predecessors.

(9)  They are even more likely to be frustrated by poverty and underemployment, which they see as a detailed disgrace and a comparative failure through various media of communication.  Among today’s younger generations bitterness abounds; and our list gets even grimmer.

(10) At least as abundant as bitterness are weapons, which themselves have radically changed over the past 10 to 40 years. 

(11) Arms are becoming smaller and lighter, and thus more portable and concealable, and increasingly destructive in their impact.

(12)  For these smaller but badder weapons, there is a comparable explosion of cynical sellers, as likely to pass death-makers to Goth-costumed high school kids in Colorado as keffiyah-shrouded jihadis in Yemen. 

(13)  The weapons are not only more numerous, they are cheaper.  This is true for brand-name weapons, and for their “improvised” analogs being put together in cellars, garages, and tool sheds.

(14) And, the final blow: the communications revolution, ubiquitous mobile phones, computers and tablets – also getting ever less-expensive, ever more widely distributed – has made it easy to give angry rebels causes that satisfy their sense of self, justify their aggressions and solidify their paramilitary alliances.

All of that pre-dated and helped cause the Arab Spring.  All of that pre-dated and doomed Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Re-evaluating what and where our stakes were in the Middle East, re-thinking the aims and values of American foreign policy, probably should have started with the conclusion of the Vietnam War and the launching of the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. Each of these major events demonstrated changes that had transformed the battlefields and societies of the so-called Third World.

Not only were formerly subject peoples less likely to bend to our will, they were more able to formulate, articulate and organize against us.  Whether the issue was as complex as local sovereignty in the face of external domination, or simply the price of essential raw materials, guns and bankers were increasingly free to work for the other side.

The revolution in global communications allowed “enemy” guns and financiers to work more effectively and market their successes more widely.

CNN showed the whole world how richer people lived, what lucky people considered normal, and posed for poorer, less fortunate people, the question, “Why not us?”

Al Jazeera showed the Arabic-speaking world how other people behaved as consumers and citizens, and proposed not just questions, but answers on how to realize the economic and political opportunities in their lives.  You can, the channel and other competitors in the region and around the world told their viewers, have what they have, but your way.  This is what the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring were after, the opportunity, respect and  empowerment they saw being normalized in the US and  elsewhere, but adapted to their own cultural and religious values.  

American power and influence in the Middle East, and elsewhere through most of the world, have been in decline for decades.  This is due, only in part to the increasing self-awareness and ambition of “them,” and the anti-modern, anti-secular, anti-western or just pro-independence polemicists pushing resistance to the US in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or Yemen. 

Much more, America’s reduction in moral and political force has been caused by what America and Americans have been doing for the past half-century.  Where once we were known, and largely admired for Levis, Coca-Colas and social harmony and prosperity, now the world associates America with aggressive war and invasive surveillance, the repeated use of armed force outside our borders, high-tech snooping everywhere, and increasingly sacrificing the interests of the majority of our own citizens to the whims and prerogatives of the hyper-rich.    

No one loves a bully; no one loves a snoop; no one loves a greed-head, but to much of a disaffected world, that trinity is as representative of America as red, white and blue. But Seib seems convinced,  -- I have no idea why, and he offers no supporting evidence -- that if we double down on the use of force and spying and money, we can bring the brightness back to our tri-color.

“A lot of American influence stemmed from the belief that the U.S. could, and just might, intervene militarily to realign the balance of power in the region,” he says, adding, “After the exhaustion borne of more than a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the wake of a conscious decision not to intervene to help rebels in Syria's civil war, that idea simply isn't taken as seriously.”

American influence stemmed from the belief the US could succeed with military intervention.  It is the failure to succeed in Iraq (or Afghanistan), not just “exhaustion” that has diminished our sway.  Does Seib think “a conscious decision” to intervene in Syria will pay off?

Our re-think must be not just about “our foreign policy,” but about the world in which it must operate.  Military intervention simply does not work anymore.  Local forces do not need to “win,” just to bleed the invaders to a standstill.  The realities of today’s weaponry and communications have created a planet of achievable quagmires.

As more people learn to read text, to interpret and create video, to ingest information about the world, and communicate what they think they know, real power is going “soft.”  Respect and persuasion yield greater and longer-lasting influence than force and coercion. Insurgents can’t really rule, nations can’t really influence, until they win, not just military superiority, but popular consent.    

What does America want, what do we stand for in the Middle East?  If it is justice, then the Israeli land theft in Palestine must be halted and reversed.  If it’s just stability, then we should say, we believe might makes right.

But as we say it, we should remember, in today’s changed world, almost everyone on earth can listen in. 

That’s why the “American value” we should be advancing through our “re-thought” foreign policy should simply be this: seek consent of the governed, and sustain it through rule of law and justice.  We should hold our fire, restrain our data-digging, and work towards restoring a real balance of power that entitles all citizens, not just the rich, aggressive and unscrupulous.  If we can accomplish that, America will not only regain its stature and influence, but the respect and affection that was ours before military intervention and surveillance penetration replaced blue jeans and soft drinks as our global brand.

WHAT HAPPENS IN AFGHANISTAN, STAYS IN AFGHANISTAN.

They say there’s no going back in time, but for tens of thousands of Afghans, it is as the blues singer says, “Thems that’s sayin’, sure ain’t  thems that has.” 

Afghanistan’s grip on the 21^st century, always weak and partial, seems to be slipping, threatening a return to its recent, but pre-modern past.

For someone who spent a few weeks teaching young video journalists in Afghanistan, this is a very painful reflection, occasioned by the Washington Post’s account of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of the future of that country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghanistan-gains-will-be-lost-quickly-after-drawdown-us-intelligence-estimate-warns/2013/12/28/ac609f90-6f32-11e3-aecc-85cb037b7236_story.html?hpid=z1

“A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war,” the Post’s front-page story begins, “predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report.

“[The NIE,]” the Post continues, “predicts that the Taliban and other power brokers will become increasingly influential as the United States winds down its longest war in history.”

To this, may we all add, “DUH!” 

What is accomplished by force can only be sustained by force, until all opposing forces have been rejected, disarmed and disabled, and a credible local government is in place.

After 12 years, and more than 2300 Americans killed and more than 19,000 wounded (according to icasualties), and roughly $680 Billion spent (says the Center for Defense Information), The US effort has failed at both tasks, -- creating a government that is close to credible or competent, or disarming or disabling it’s life-threatening enemies (and not just the Taliban; all over Afghanistan, much local turf is ruled by local warlords, militias or religious factions). 

Hence, a sharp reduction, or complete withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan will result in a sharp reduction, if not eradication of American influence in Kabul.  No kidding?  As it did in Iraq?  And Vietnam?

Is it us?  Or is it the world?  More on this later.

Let’s first return to the more immediate question, the future of Afghanistan, a.k.a. after American and other foreign forces leave. Will it irrevocably plunge my Third Millennium former students back into First Millennium feudalism, tribalism, fundamentalism, and violence?  Is the best they can hope for that a few Afghan cities like Kabul or Herat might become relative safe havens of urbanity and opportunity, surrounded and besieged by various rural-based absolutisms.

The Post reports that the NIE says even that hope may be too optimistic.  “The central government in Kabul is all but certain to become increasingly irrelevant as it loses ‘purchase’ over parts of the country,” is the estimate.

The report also predicts “that Afghanistan would likely descend into chaos quickly if Washington and Kabul don’t sign a security pact that would keep an international military contingent there beyond 2014. ’The situation would deteriorate very rapidly,’ said one U.S. official familiar with the report.

Whether achieving an agreement, and keeping forces here for 3 or 10 or a 100 years would, in the analysts’ opinion, do anything more than delay the inevitable, either the NIE or the Post has left unmentioned.

But as to the imminence of “chaos, “the Post reports, “That conclusion is widely shared among U.S. officials working on Afghanistan, said the official.”

But in Washington, it would seem, the Post found a different perspective, or at the least, it found 3 home front dissenters.

“One American official” told the Post, “there are too many uncertainties to make an educated prediction.”  The big variable to this observer, “next year’s presidential election.”

The other push-back against the NIE comes from “a senior administration official [who] said that the intelligence community has long underestimated Afghanistan’s security forces.”

And this person predicted to the Post, White House pushback against the NIE assessment will be decisive. “’An assessment that says things are going to be gloomy no matter what you do, that you’re just delaying the inevitable, that’s just a view,’ said the official. ‘I would not think it would be the determining view.’”

Then there was the “e-mailed statement” from a presumably second “senior administration official saying intelligence assessments are ‘only one tool in our policy analysis toolbox… as we look at the consequential decisions ahead of us, including making a decision on whether to leave troops in Afghanistan after the end of 2014.’”

According to the first “senior official,” “’the intelligence community has long underestimated Afghanistan’s security forces.’”

Actually, the “gloomy” and “grim” assessments of the Afghan armed forces made in NIEs in 2008 and 2010 seemed pretty much borne out by the metrics of desertion, training performance, and battlefield outcomes

But in December 2013, this senior official told the Post, “’the development of a credible and increasingly proficient Afghan army and [has] made it unlikely that al-Qaeda could reestablish a foothold in the country.’”

This, the senior government defender attributes to President Obama’s decision to “surge” 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan in 2009.  Whatever critics, including many of the military participants themselves, may think, the White House insists, the American fighters have not fought, slogged, frozen or died in vain, because al-Qaeda has lost its foothold in Afghanistan.

If Al Qaeda were still (or was ever) primarily an organization, this assertion might hold some water.  But Al Qaeda has long since devolved into an idea, a shared, diversified mission to expel “Western,” modern, secular influences from Muslim lands and to bring the world of Islam under total Wahhabi control.  This idea remains as alive and well in Afghanistan as the Taliban and other jihadis who adhere to it.

The Obama Administration’s “decimation” of the Al Qaeda group’s leadership hasn’t slowed the spread of the Al Qaeda mission to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Kenya,  Nigeria and Mali.  As for Afghanistan, there are real questions to be raised about whether 12 years of American and international military intervention has produced real, lasting change.  The NIE suggests that most of rural Afghanistan will be, as it long has been: a patchwork of feudal zones, controlled by local warlords, tribal elders or religious zealots like the Taliban.  Even the cities, Kabul, Mazar-I-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, whatever their shared interests might be, are as separate in culture and mentality as they are geographically.

But after 12 years of funding and frustration, fighting and dying in Afghanistan, almost all of it borne by people who live far from Washington, one sees few significant changes in the mindset of America’s rulers or its journalists. 

For one thing, we still think it’s all about us.

For the Post that means, receiving the NIE leak, detailing it, and soliciting comment from within the Beltway, and then without any reference to what is happening in Afghanistan, turning to the important hometown question of who benefits, politically, from the leak. “The latest intelligence assessment, some U.S. officials noted, has provided those inclined to abandon Afghanistan with strong fodder.”

Actually, it provides “strong fodder “to those who advised against going to war in Afghanistan and those who opposed the “surge” of 2009.  Especially, since this time, as opposed to when NIEs were issued in 2008 and 2010, the Post says, “Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, the commander of international troops in Afghanistan, chose not to submit a rebuttal.” 

But lest defeatism dislodge “pragmatism,” the article gives the last word to Stephen Biddle, whom the Post calls, “a defense policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations,” forgetting, I guess, that he has been a constant counselor in devising the disasters of Afghanistan’s last dozen years.  “He predicts a stalemate for years to come,” the Post concludes, “‘Whether it’s a worse or better stalemate depends on the rate at which Congress defunds the war,’ he said.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who got and kept his job largely because of American support, says what determines worse or better is the rate of death and destruction in his country, and he says that making things better depends on reducing the numbers, activities and autonomy of American forces.  

Not everyone in Afghanistan agrees, and that very issue is likely to be very important in the 2014 elections for Karzai’s Presidential successor. 

But there are other, perhaps even more important questions about Afghanistan which involve, not Americans, but Afghans. They relate to the 2 goals of the whole intervention, governance and security.

In re governance: these questions about the 2014 elections.  (1) Who will be the candidates? (2) Will any of them represent a national constituency, or will each be beholden to particular local, tribal, or religious interests? (3) If it’s to be the latter, how will coalitions be formed to achieve a national plurality and central government? (4) Will the election be clean and credible, or just another instance of political theft? And (5) will the winner rule in the national interest, or just to enrich his particular constituents, his backers, his family or himself?

And for the purported hallmark of American achievement in Afghanistan, the security forces, the military and the police? (1) Will either group fight, and how well? (2) For what principles or values? (3) For whom, the nation, the leaders, some smaller center of power? (4) Against whom, all comers?

These are really hard questions, but they define the Afghan reality and its future, and not just political gamesmanship thousands of miles away.  But these are the questions that matter.

Where were they in the Post’s report?  AWOL.

No wonder the US has such an interventionist losing streak.  We remain steadfast in our ignorance about our ignorance; we retain our Rumsfeldian determination to deny or ignore what we don’t like about what we ought to know.

Before we “surge” somewhere else, here a few small lessons we might want to learn.

Force sometimes works, but always breeds resentment, especially when it is visiting force used against “homies.”  Thus, a visitor’s use of force should be minimized.

Reliance on local sources to identify enemies sometimes works, but always risks confounding the visitor’s enemies with their sources’ enemies.  On the other hand, the visitors’ enemies, and local bystanders, can always identify them, both for blaming and for targeting.

The only way in which visitors win is by weakening their local enemies so definitively that their creation of a “better” home team can survive.  The quicker and more completely the home team government can take over, the better.

It is always just a matter of time until the visitors return home. Everybody there knows this, and knows the capabilities of the “insurgents” to re-insurge, and shapes his or her loyalties accordingly.

Everyone here and there knows that time in Afghanistan is coming; sooner, or Steven Biddle would say, “better,” later. Then we’ll know the truth. 

Did American intervention produce both a credible, sustainable governing structure, and a population ready to embrace it?  Or have we, once again, spent blood and treasure trying to impose old-fashioned short-term domination on a world where new-fashioned weaponry and communications make that an impossible long-term ambition?

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANTI-ANTI-DRONE WARFARE

“I have visited the UK before without incident. I have long admired British culture.”

So begins Yemeni drone warfare investigator Baraa Shiban’s description of what happened to him at London’s Gatwick Airport on September 23, published 2 days later by The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/like-david-miranda-interrogated-british-airport

“I spent part of my education in Wales,” Shiban continues. “This time I came at the invitation of Chatham House to speak at a seminar on Yemen. Standing at passport control, bleary eyed from the long flight, I expected another routine trip.

“The border agent asked what my job is. When I explained I was the Yemen project co-ordinator for London-based legal charity Reprieve he said, ‘Sir, please come with me. We have a Terrorism Act and I have some questions I need to ask you.’"

This was Shiban’s welcome to the low-calorie version of what had happened to David Miranda, the life partner of Guardian reporter Glen Greenwald, and the business go-between for Greenwald and his investigative partner Laura Poitras.  Miranda was detained at Heathrow Airport on August 18, and dispossessed of his cellphone, his computer, and files containing more revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, detailing the agency’s surveillance and other activities in the interest, the NSA would claim, of American national security.

Miranda was held incommunicado and harshly questioned by officers of the Metropolitan Police for 9 hours before being released.  Shiban’s security toss took just an hour and a half, but it shared some of the same abusive and deranged anti-terrorist assumptions that marred Miranda’s interrogation.

“The suited man quizzed me about my political opinions,” Shiban says. “When I suggested that these should have no bearing on whether I am allowed into the country, the agent threatened to hold me for the maximum extent of his powers. ‘I am authorised to detain you for up to nine hours," he said. "We have only been here for an hour, but we can be here for up to nine. So you understand what this can lead to.’

“He took my Reprieve business card and disappeared. When he returned,  … A telling exchange followed: ‘So,’ he asked, ‘does your organisation have anything to do with terrorism in Yemen?’

“I replied, ‘My organisation addresses counter-terrorism abuses inside the country.’

“‘Exactly!’ He said. ‘Why doesn't your organisation do something about the terrorism that happens in your country, instead of focusing on the counter-terrorism abuses?’

“What could I reply? Of course I oppose terrorism. But I also oppose the secret air war in my country – waged by the US, apparently with covert support from the UK and others. The drone war in my homeland has claimed innocent lives and terrorised civilians. It operates wholly outside the law, and serves only to fuel anti-western sentiment.”

I want to butt in here, to make 3 points:

1)    I agree with Shiban’s negative judgments of the American directed drone attacks against suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

2)    I have been impressed with the evidence he, and any number of reputable local and global news organizations have compiled, suggesting that although our targeting is intended to be selective and precise, it is often misinformed about its selections and indiscriminate in its effects.  The bottom line, any number of reports from Yemen have said, is that any tactical benefit derived from killing some “bad guys,” and I’ll agree with the NSA that the drone-missile-struck Islamist preacher and accused terrorist recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki was a very bad guy, is negated, nay overwhelmed, by the strategic disrepute America has earned in Yemen by killing more than a few innocent, non-terrorist civilians.  One suspects, just to mention one case, that Al-Awlaki’s 16 year old son Abdurrahim, also drone-popped, in a separate attack, might not have been that bad.

3)    Whether you or the British government agree with Shiban’s conclusions, his subject is worth considering, and his evidence was bravely and professionally collected, and is essential to any rational consideration, affirmation or rejection of an increasingly important component of American and British military practice, missile-armed drones.

4)    Critically considering drone warfare is something every military, intelligence, or political official, indeed every citizen, should do, and is NOT to be confused with aiding or abetting terrorism.

If you think that distinction is obvious and can go without saying, you probably missed a Greenwald article published in The Guardian the same day as Shiban’s story of his arrest.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-uk-drone-opponents-threats

In it, Greenwald makes public an entry identified by Snowden as being from “a top secret internal US government website,” used only by people "with top secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates," which Greenwald notes equates “the most basic political and legal opposition to drone attacks [with] ‘propaganda campaigns’ from ‘America's ‘adversaries’”

“One specific entry,” Greenwald writes, “discusses ‘threats to unmanned aerial vehicles,’ including

1)    ‘air defense threats’,

2)    ‘jamming of UAV sensor systems’,

3)    ‘terrestrial weather’,  

4)    ‘electronic warfare employed against the command and control system’ [and]

5)    ‘propaganda campaigns that target UAV use.’”

What does this high-powered NSA analyst (I’ll bet my money these are the “thoughts” of a “Beltway Bandit” contractor) consider enemy propaganda?

One example is the idea, being pressed in the Federal courts by The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, that executing American citizens, like the Awlakis, father and son, without formal accusation or trial, deprives them of their Constitutional rights to due process.

You don’t have to be a law professor to see the logic of this argument, agree with it or not, and I don’t.  But, you do have to be totalitarian or a fool to use the label “enemy propaganda” to try to preempt its presentation and discussion.

Not to say, you can’t be a totalitarian and a fool like those who tried to quash any consideration of the wisdom of continuing the war in Vietnam with labels like “Communist,” or “tool of Hanoi.”

Or the "senior American counterterrorism official" who smeared the UK-based non-profit The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose website says it has collaborated with such respected news organizations as the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera English, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Daily Mirror.   Said this fellow, who undoubtedly has an access key to the “top secret website” mentioned above, "Let's be under no illusions – there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign [drone warfare] and help Al-Qaeda succeed."

He must believe the crapulous in-house propaganda against “propaganda.”  And he’s not the only one.  Thus summer several folks in the Obama Administration conspired to deny a visa to Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents family members of victims killed by US drones in a suit against the US government.

Akbar had been invited to come to the US to testify before a Congressional committee, not necessarily because members agree with his criticisms of the US drone campaign in northwest Pakistan, or endorse his arguments in behalf of his clients and their relatives allegedly killed or maimed in drone attacks, but because he has information about when and where drone attacks have occurred, and whom they killed or injured, and what the popular reaction to these attacks has been, in the affected “tribal areas,” and across the country, where every poll shows deep Pakistani hostility to the US drone campaign.

If you want to understand the leaders of Pakistan, from President Nawaz Sharif on down, something any responsible Congressperson would want to do, it is useful to hear Akbar out, perhaps even cross-examine him rigorously. But thanks to the Obama Administration, Congress, the news media, and the American people have been denied the chance.

Do you suspect that sometimes, the security apparat inflates the threat of terrorism?

Do you worry that drones kill too many civilians?

Do you think the net effect of deadly remote-controlled American attacks inside other countries’ national territory may be to alienate people over there, fuel more terrorism, and create more hatred of the US?

Someone high up in the NSA is being told that all these ideas are just "adversary propaganda themes."

In fact, the document Snowden showed Greenwald labeled  “the phrase ‘drone strike’ …a ‘loaded term,’ [designed to] ‘invoke an emotional reaction’. This, the document asserts, ‘is what propaganda intends to do.’”

Yes, Polonius, propaganda plays with people’s emotions, in large measure by limiting or eradicating their options for rational consideration.        

The Brits gave Baraa Shiban an unwarranted hard time, but they let him give his speech at Chatham House, which was probably not unlike the presentation he had been allowed to make to Congress back in May.

How’s the old song go? “It’s a long, long way from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.”  Too short for the beleaguered Obama Administration to permit a full discussion of the drones falling in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and soon, I’ll bet, in Somalia.

Wanna bet, at the NSA and the White House, they’ve already got a drones’ “enemies list?”

 

AL-SHABAAB: ENDGAME?

For a very interesting and well-informed perspective on Al Shabaab and the recent terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, I recommend this report from the always-excellent Peter Greste of Al Jazeera English.

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/africa/al-shabab-dying-or-resurgent#.UkkfOUsSLD8.twitter

Greste suggests that my (when it was published) contrarian analysis of Al Shabaab as a declining rather than ascending threat is becoming more of a commonplace in Nairobi, where he is based.  He then offers a refutation, which, in my typically insistent way, I see largely as a confirmation.

What’s my logic?

The picture he paints of Al Shabaab activity inside Somalia is of a once-aspiring revolutionary movement now descended into simple, if widespread criminality.  The once alluring moral authority of Al Shabaab’s late predecessor the Islamic Courts Movement has devolved from religious fidelity into extremist puritanical tyranny.  Gone, as in much of once Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (and northwest Pakistan), is all but a fragment of popular support.  Discredited is a group that once claimed to be better, both in morality and efficiency, than the Government.  What has replaced subscription or tolerance is just fear.

Al Shabaab’s wannabe prophets of a purer Islam are now seen just as dangerous criminals.  Their success is simply extortion.  They may still be a constant and menacing presence in Mogadishu, as Greste bravely reports from the scene, but almost everyone who lives there wishes only for their absence.

This in all the important terms of Al Shabaab’s one-time ambitions is devastating failure.

It must also be said, and seriously thought upon, that in today’s difficult world, noted in my previous pieces on the Kenya attack, a weak central government means lots of ungoverned spaces.  And in those inchoate zones, there are many desperate and angry people who can still be mobilized into desperate and angry actions.  And, worse, there is endless, easy access for these desperados to powerful, portable weapons, supplied by rich and irresponsible sponsors to fanatic criminals like those acting as Al Shabaab, who commissioned the Westgate Mall raid.

As presently constituted, the armed and police forces of the government of Somalia, and the visiting troops of the African Union, the Kenyan Army and the Ethiopian Army and Air Force, lack both the will or the capability to pursue and extirpate the urban extortionists or hidey-hole terrorist commanders out in the Somali bush.

That may change, as an effective response to the Nairobi attack is organized.  Again, as I said before, attackers come with “jackets,” criminal and security files, so that, once identified, they and their contacts go up on military and intelligence radar screens.  For them, the hunt is on.  It will be long, slow and expensive, and alas, violent and often not-well-focused.  But if Al Shabaab and its diminishing support network are not already on the run, they soon will be.

But for them, the revolution is over, and whatever battles they may win, the war is lost.  Now (as always) the real job is to make government in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, (in Kenya and Ethiopia, Congo and Zimbabwe, and for God’s sake, in the USA) work.

This struggle will be longer and harder than eliminating Al Shabaab.

SYRIA: BITS, PIECES, MORE

Some random thoughts on Syria and related topics. 

Did you see Der Spiegel's report of the Trifecta -- a German listening ship off Syria reportedly picked up a conversation between a top Hizbullah guy, and someone at an Iranian Embassy, talking about how Bashar done it? Perfect or too perfect?

Meanwhile, these could be perilous times for Hizbullah. I wonder if, under cover of our attacks in Syria, we or somebody else will take a few swipes at the Big H. Without outside interference they will continue to dominate and distort life in Lebanon, while pressing an essentially sectarian, completely anti-American agenda (three things not to like). Somebody's money (us, Israel, Qatar, Saudi???) could surely buy a Sunni fighting force to do the dirty work. Of course, that would mean/has already meant "our side" arming Al Qaeda.

Obviously, these are also perilous times for Israel, but salutary, if the threat wakens Israelis to their reality -- they are isolated and surrounded. They gotta make peace, if it's not too late already, and they gotta stop screwing the Palestinians to get it.  President Shimon Peres knows this.  He told me as much 17 years ago.  It’s still true.  But things are getting worse, not better, for Israel.

I hope, pray and believe the American attack on Assad will not unleash some kind of Hizbullah/Syrian/Iranian/Al Qaeda attack on Israel.  But it could.  And among Israel’s many enemies there are both chemical and biological weapons, and munitions to carry them, not to mention tons of conventional missiles, rockets and bombs.  I think, right now, those enemies lack the co-ordination or the will to launch significant attacks on Israel.  But they get closer on both fronts every day, month and year.  Only peace can pre-empt these trend lines from reaching a disastrous conclusion.

I've always thought that Syria was supposed to be a more modern, urban and urbane culture than Iraq, with more of a national concept and a favorable balance between modernist/secular moderation and Islamist fanaticism. Recently, several reporters say, the Sunni nuts – Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front and others, have the edge. This matters a lot. We can't achieve anything more than destruction without substantial inside support of the sort Iraq was never gonna provide.

If, over the past 2 years of warfare, our intelligence agencies have not identified that Syrian support and solidified it, our mission to turn the tide against Assad, while keeping the rest of the region stable, will fail.  The means, either that Assad will survive at great cost to our national dignity, or that Syria will wind up in the hands of our most fanatic enemies, or -- best case -- simply dominated by a different, hopefully less toxic version of the incumbent Nationalist dictator.

Or we can link to a sufficient fighting force and political leaders who will put Syria on a more civilized path, and our push at the tipping point will have been a masterstroke.  It’s a lot to hope for, and makes one wish we coulda (but never that we shoulda, or woulda) given this whole mess a pass. But, if Der Spiegel’s sources are right, a petulant, murderous rage by Bashar al-Assad has pushed us, and his region, to a very dangerous place.

In Afghanistan, (to finish an earlier thought) we have, despite mighty, costly, and sincere efforts, not accomplished much we believe will last. We have found and developed some steady allies who subscribe to the ideals behind our presence – a free economy, a functioning democracy, and a national concept based on religious and ethnic and tribal tolerance.  This, in spite of our many mistakes, including the reckless killing of civilians and recurrent signs of personal ignorance or disrespect for Afghan people and culture.   

But., the most those supporters can achieve, I fear, is a paralyzing, unchanging, balance of power between sometimes corrupt, sometimes progressive, modernizing urbanites, and radically retrograde, fundamentalist tribalists in the considerable countryside.

And what are in Putin's "plans" for after the Syria attack?

Yesterday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings offered yet another awkward airing of John Kerry's indiscreet, mindless babblings.  This from

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/04/five_takeaways_syria_intervention_hearings

"'With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes," Kerry said. "They have. That offer is on the table.  Some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we've done it previously in other places, they'll carry that cost," Kerry said. "That's how dedicated they are at this. That's not in the cards, and nobody's talking about it, but they're talking in serious ways about getting this done.'

"Kerry also gamely insisted that so many U.S. allies wanted to take part in a potential strike on Syria that the Pentagon couldn't find a role for all of them. That seems unlikely, since Turkey and France are to date the only major powers to publicly express a willingness to use military force against Assad. But Kerry may have an elastic definition of "participation." Albania, he said later in the hearing, was willing to provide political support for a strike. He didn't say anything about Albania being willing to do much else."
 
Not since the "glory days" of Leon Panetta's probably unintentionally hilarious "I'm now the Defense Secretary," tour have so many hi-ranking words ranked so low for logic and mental discipline.  Panetta was 75.  What's Kerry's excuse?

So much to worry about.

 

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.