Tag: terrorism

David Axelrod Isn’t a Parrot

By
Jim Harper

So why would he talk like one?

On Fox News Sunday this week, Obama Senior Advisor David Axelrod spoke with Chris Wallace about nuclear non-proliferation, saying, among other things:

[President Obama] wants in the next four years to lock up the loose nuclear weapons that are scattered around Eastern Europe, that could fall into the hands of terrorists. And, of course, that is the big threat. That’s why we have to step up the pace. This represents an existential threat and we need to meet it.

Controlling any loose nukes is important, but the chance of them being used by terrorists is exceedingly small, and it is not an existential threat.

For too long, U.S. national leaders have perpetrated the error of speaking about terrorist threats as “existential” when they are not. Talking this way needlessly riles the U.S. public and thrills would-be or wannabe terrorists the world over. When U.S. leaders donate awesomeness to terrorism, the disenfranchised simply have to join a terror group or make empty threats to impact our discourse, policy, and quality of life.

David Axelrod didn’t need the makeweight argument of terrorist access to justify controlling loose nukes.

(Axelrod’s error was made on the road, from a different time zone. To damn him with faint praise, he comes up looking pretty good compared to Newt Gingrich, who issued spectacularly inconsistent positions from the comfort of the Fox News studio: Gingrich first criticized the Obama Administration for avoiding “war on terror” rhetoric, then sought small-government credibility by criticizing Obama’s budget as the largest non-wartime increase in history. There is no such thing as a limited-government war-monger, and Gingrich should not modulate between treating the country as “at war” or “not at war” within a single television appearance.)

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Wednesday Podcast: ‘Turning a Corner on the War Metaphor’

Since President Bush’s “War on Terror” began in 2001, the use of a war metaphor has come with assertions of broader powers by the president. But the U.S. may be turning a corner on how terms like “war” are used, says Cato scholar David Rittgers.

In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast,  Rittgers argues that President Obama’s choice to do away with the war metaphor is a step in the right direction.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Af-Pak and the U.S.

The violence ripping across Afghanistan will not be stopped unless the problems in nuclear armed Pakistan are addressed, says Cato scholar Malou Innocent, who traveled to Pakistan late last year.

In a new Cato video, Innocent explains what the United States can do to protect its interests and return stability to the region.

Her forthcoming paper, “Pakistan and the Future of U.S. Policy” will be released next month.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Friday Podcast: ‘Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy’

President Obama has unveiled his plan for the war in Afghanistan, taking a more regional approach than the U.S. has in the past.

In Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast, foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent says it’s a critical step in the right direction, but stabilizing Afghanistan and fighting an insurgency can’t be accomplished while killing the livelihoods of so many Afghan farmers by destroying opium poppy.

In the future we should take Afghanistan as it is, rather than what we want it to be. So not only does that mean having a decreased reliance on a central state government from Kabul, but also understanding that many of the farms from these rural areas rely on the opium poppy crop for their own livelihood. So we should focus our efforts to targeting those who are in cahoots with   insurgent groups and not simply those who are depending on it for their livelihood.

Her forthcoming paper, “Pakistan and the Future of U.S. Policy” will be released next month.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

An Intellectual Counterinsurgency

By
Justin Logan

My friend (and noble peacemaker) Spencer Ackerman points us to Tom Ricks’ take on the Army’s new stability operations manual:

ricks1I wonder if the very title of the manual is incorrect. After all, we didn’t invade Iraq to provide stability, but to force change. Likewise in Afghanistan. And once we were there, we didn’t aim for stability, but to encourage democracy, which (the thought is not original with me) in a region like the Middle East generally undermines stability. I mean, if all we wanted was stability, why not find a strongman and leave?

What we really are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think, is instability operations… Personally, I think the mission of changing the culture of Iraq was nuts – but that was the mission the president assigned the military.

I think a more intellectually honest title for the manual would be “Revolutionary Operations.” Don’t hold your breath.

Ricks is right, but he misses a larger problem.  The argument of the folks who want to develop COIN capabilities has become completely circular.

Take, for example, the worry of Lt. Gen William Caldwell, in unveiling the original release of FM 3-7, that we live in an “era of uncertainty and persistent conflict.” Accordingly, says Caldwell, we need capabilities to produce stability.  Hence, the stability operations field manual.

This elides the fact that if we had to take an impartial look at where the instability is coming from, a hell of a lot of it is emanating from Washington, DC.  Our Rube Goldberg political science theories, based in large part on liberal international relations theory, have led us to knock over governments and pursue radical transformation everywhere from Latin America to Eastern Europe to the mountains of Central Asia, the jungles of Vietnam, and the sands of Iraq.

Then, when confronted with the wreckage of our policy, we convince ourselves that we are gravely threatened by the instability we have created, and must enhance our capabilities to rectify this instability.  Less kindly, it’s like the Tennessee Valley Authority with guns, Humvees and translators.

Look at the new “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency guide, for example.  The issuance of the volume was predicated on the logically-true-but-practically-misleading claim that “in today’s world, state failure can quickly become not merely a misfortune for local communities, but a threat to global security.” (emphasis mine) The COIN manual then quickly proceeds to tell us that any decision to do COIN “should not be taken lightly; historically COIN campaigns have almost always been more costly, more protracted and more difficult than first anticipated.”  Then it quickly becomes a cookbook on how to use the Agriculture, Treasury, and Transportation Departments to transform the way foreigners run their countries.

My colleague Ben Friedman recently remarked that “Both Creighton’s Abrams’ reforms ensuring that the president had to activate the reserves to start a war and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were sneaky usurpations of authority. They were also realistic efforts to avoid bad wars and on balance good things.”  He’s right.  It would be good if we were devoting a tenth the resources toward stopping the next policy disaster as we are devoting to figuring out how to execute self-destructive policies more effectively.

In short, if, as the leading COIN advocate of the moment tells us, the best way to fight the “war on terrorism” is by engaging in a “global counterinsurgency,” we’re in deep, deep  trouble.  As long as the only people who can stop us are ourselves, I’m afraid we won’t be stopped.

Power, as Karl Deutsch once wrote, is “the ability to talk instead of listen.  In this sense, it is the ability to afford not to learn.”  And we’ve got loads of power.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

The Problem of Guantanamo

By
Doug Bandow

The Constitution obviously does not leave Americans helpless in fighting against those who wish them ill.  But it also sets standards of conduct that should not – indeed, cannot – be carelessly tossed aside.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay has become such an international symbol of the U.S. abandoning its principles because it reflects an anti-terrorism policy gone badly awry.  First, the Bush administration was both callous and careless in imprisoning people, even paying unreliable tribal allies for captives.  Second, the U.S. government created no effective and objective truth-determining process to assess guilt.  Third, Washington employed torture, violating both domestic and international law.

No doubt dangerous terrorists have been incarcerated at Gitmo.  But so too have many innocent people.  Indeed, the claims of former State Department Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson are particularly sobering:

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, admitted today that of the approximately 800 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay since the controversial detention center opened, only “two dozen or so” were actually terrorists. Wilkerson told the Associated Press today that “there are still innocent people there,” and that “some have been there six or seven years.”

Wilkerson made other comments earlier in the week in an internet posting entitled “Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay.” In that posting he said that “several in the US leadership became aware of the lack of proper vetting very early on and thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Wilkerson also claimed that then-Secretary Powell and Richard Armitage were pressuring for the repatriation of as many detainees as possible, and that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were unphased by the fact that “among the detainees was a 13 year old boy and a man over 90,” standing in opposition to returning detainees.

Even if Wilkerson exaggerates–and he has been a credible witness so far–he points to the price America has paid for failing to live up to its principles.  The U.S. has locked up many who were neither terrorists nor otherwise dangerous.  Doing so undoubtedly has helped turn some people in and out of Gitmo towards violence against America.  And mistreating the innocent has badly sullied America’s reputation as a shining city upon a hill.

Confronting terrorism will never be easy.  But violating America’s principles is no way to defend the America in which we all claim to believe.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

What’s New in Pakistan?

By
Malou Innocent

200903_innocent_blogThis weekend, protesters supporting Pakistani opposition leader Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) clashed with police in riot gear in downtown Lahore. The sight of lawyers being tear-gassed is shocking to many Americans. But what should be more shocking—yet extremely more complicated to work through as explained below—is America’s continued backing of Pakistan’s unpopular president, Asif Ali Zardari, who continues to obstruct his democratic opposition and (until recently) the reappointment of ousted Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudrhy.

It’s easy for people in the West to dismiss these demonstrations as the outgrowth of the country’s petty political infighting. But Americans must recognize that historically, U.S. policy and assistance has either enhanced the position of Pakistan’s military at the expense of its civilian leaders, or has helped domestic civilian leaders more popular within Washington than within their home country. Throughout the Cold War and up to the present day, these domestically unpopular figures devoted more government resources toward themselves, their own political parties, and their own bureaucratic expansion rather than toward economic and social reforms to modernize and better educate Pakistan’s population. Consequently, Pakistani citizens began to blame American aid and support for their own deteriorating situation.

Certainly Pakistan’s domestic power struggles and ceaseless political infighting will continue to overshadow a menace more sinister than legislative rivals—i.e.-the Taliban, al Qaeda and other militant groups sweeping through large swaths of Pakistani territory.

But for long-term stability, U.S. policymakers must jettison the idea that a foreign leader’s denunciation of America means that leader poses a direct threat to U.S. interests. What America should want most is stability and continuity, particularly within Pakistan if we want to prevent the convergence of global terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Thus, in a perverse way, Sharif’s condemnation of the United States, coupled with his unwavering support for restoring judges sacked by Musharraf, has shored up his support within Pakistan, and his rise to power may actually bring solidity to the country.

The question of whether the military will step back in is much more complicated. Last August when the military backed away from politics, that move was based on political expediency (a desire to repair its tarnished image) rather than on political principle (a desire to restore the country’s democratic rights). If people in the military begin to feel that the country is slipping out of control they would attempt to retake power. There are, however, two main reasons why the military would not try to reassert its authority: 1) political pressure from Washington (the belief that with the military focused on governing, it would take its focus off combating the insurgency); and 2) pragmatism (after all, if Pakistanis are in an uproar over Sharif, imagine the protests that would ensue if army generals tried to impose martial law).

But when it comes to foreign policy, anything is possible, and Pakistan’s government has swung like a pendulum between military dictators and electoral democracies throughout its 61-year history. Because civilian leaders do not have a monopoly on government decision-making, U.S. policymakers must cultivate relations with both the civilians and the military, as civilians may be in power one day and the military in power the next.

Pakistan’s army is on standby ahead of today’s planned sit-in by lawyers in Islamabad, and authorities warn that such a protest would paralyze the government. The best U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can do is work with both Zardari and Sharif to arrive at a negotiated settlement to restoring judges and ending the political deadlock. But overall, Pakistan’s long-term success depends on the strength of its civilian institutions and the public’s repudiation of extremism. In this respect, America must be committed to strengthening cooperation not only with the Pakistani Government but with the Pakistani people.

Update: Sharif this morning calls off protest

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

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