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.

TERROR IN A KENYAN MALL

It has become axiomatic: the torment of counter-terrorism is, “the counter-terrorists have to win all the time; the terrorists only have to win once.”

To do what?

To convince people that the terrorists are a constant, powerful threat who can make people and states do things they would otherwise not choose to do.

A perfect example of that is this weekend’s bloody mass murder at a Nairobi shopping mall.  Even once the Kenyan authorities can finally correctly claim that the attack is over, that the terrorists are all dead or captured, in their own terms, the bad guys “won.”

They achieved their ultimate goal: global coverage, global recognition of their ability to kill and frighten, of their “mission” to reclaim Somalia for radical absolutist Islam, of their division of the world into Muslims and targets, and of their identification of both “international” and wannabe-cosmopolitan Kenyan consumers as their particular enemies.

But, today, on NPR’s great news broadcast All Things Considered, I heard the implications of their triumph further magnified by the analysis of an accredited “expert,” J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center.

Pham rightly scorned exaggerated claims by Western powers, especially the Obama White House, that the war against Al Shabaab, the Somalia-based Islamist militia and claimed director of the Nairobi mall attack has been a success, that it has crushed Al Shabaab and left them a spent force.

Asked what he concluded from the events in Kenya, Pham said, the attack showed exactly what the terrorists had hoped, that they were still a formidable enemy.  Then, he added, that the US was undermining its own efforts against terrorism and Al Shabaab by trying to keep distance from Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and the government of Ethiopia, both of whom, he said, could be valuable allies in the counter-terror war.

Pham did have the intellectual honesty to note that President Kenyatta is presently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his own widely-reported role in fostering mass-murder of his civilian Kenyan political and/or tribal opponents following national elections in 2007.  But he recommended mending fences with Ethiopia without noting that government’s well-established record of mass-oppression and murder of its civilian political and/or tribal opponents.

One could call this reluctant pragmatism, but I would call it foolishness of the sort that makes countering terrorism so hard.

What the mass murders at the Westgate Mall shows me is how little it takes, beyond great malignity of will, to commit a terrorist atrocity.  The dirty little secret of counter-terrorism is not how mighty are our enemies, but how miniscule.  But, in a world awash in desperate, truly marginalized people, full of powerful, easily portable weapons, and religiously or ideologically-driven benefactors who will buy the guns and bombs that make losers into terrorist “winners,” a lot of bad shit is going to happen.  And no one, not even the collective efforts of the world’s professional counter-terrorists, can consistently stop them.

Mosquitos can cause deadly epidemics, but they are still mosquitos.

Remember John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the “DC Sniper” and his teenaged running-mate?  Back in 2002, they killed 10 people and critically injured 3 more in a series of random attacks in the Washington metropolitan area before they were finally captured by police.  The truth is, they could have killed many more, and escaped arrest a lot longer if Muhammad, like many criminals, wasn’t so stupid and ego-controlled that he called CNN to brag about his vicious prowess and thereby helped police to track him and Malvo down.     

If he had been content to kill randomly and indiscriminately without demanding credit, he might have been unstoppable.  Killing people with no motive but murder is easy.

Yes, bringing together and arming a dozen or more people is harder to do than firing up one plus one; and co-ordinating them to run amok through a shopping center might be marginally more complex than pairing up to pick off people walking in their neighborhoods or pumping gas at service stations in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. 

Muhammad and Malvo were no criminal geniuses, just guys with guns who didn’t care whom they killed.  How much more credit do you really want to give the killers of the Westgate Mall?  How much organizational skill do you want to credit to their Islamist masters back in the Somali bush?

Enough to make us as a nation want to snuggle up to an accused mass-murderer or two?

Our campaign against Al Shabaab has had its successes.  It has, with the help of “invited” invaders from Kenya and Ethiopia, driven the Islamists from their strongholds in virtually every urban agglomeration in Somalia, and weakened their hold on many parts of the countryside, thus buying for the still new government in Mogadishu both space and time to develop.  But in an impoverished country which for 20 years had no credible central government and where rule of law is still barely above non-existent, it doesn’t take much in the way of organization, financial support and armed force to create an opposition.

In Somalia, Al Shabaab may be far from defeated (and claims to the contrary from distant Washington are nothing but obnoxious, if not delusional), but the shocking headlines from Nairobi don’t change the fact that it is losing.  A loser’s occasional win does not make them winners, although panicky overreactions to their terrorist deeds can make them feel like they are.

As far as I can tell, the Kenyan Army’s incursion into southern Somalia has had at least mixed results, and one should note, it and they have been sustained notwithstanding America’s estrangement from President Kenyatta.  On the other hand, American collaboration with air and ground attacks inside Somalia by Ethiopian forces has not been as well-received.  In part because the Ethiopian Air Force, with US “trainers” on board some of the planes, have killed more innocent civilians than targeted terrorists, and in part because Christian-majority Ethiopia is generally considered an “ancient enemy” in mostly-Muslim Somalia, the US’ involvement with the Ethiopians likely strengthened popular tolerance if not support for Al Shabaab more than it weakened it.

Better we invest in the Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and try to build his government which seems to aspire to rule of law values from the inside, than swallow our principles and ally ourselves with outsiders like the indicted Kenyatta or the latest autocrat in Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

The true triumph of terrorism is not in killing innocent victims, but in corrupting the daily lives and political decisions of those who survive.

It is the true terror of our times that it takes so few degraded people to accomplish that.