Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan.   The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas’ Newsweek piece on “A Day in the Life of Joe Biden” (HTML title: “Joe Biden, White House Truth Teller”):

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

As I explain in my New Atlanticist essay “Strategic Balance in AfPak,” Biden’s got a point.

AP Photo

Andrew Bacevich in an op-ed in the Washington Post proposes an alternative to conventional war or global counter-insurgency, an approach evocative of the Cold War policy of containment:

Containment implies turning to the old Cold War playbook. When confronting the Soviet threat, the United States and its allies erected robust defenses, such as NATO, and cooperated in denying the communist bloc anything that could make Soviet computers faster, Soviet submarines quieter or Soviet missiles more accurate.

Containing the threat posed by jihad should follow a similar strategy. Robust defenses are key — not mechanized units patrolling the Iron Curtain, but well-funded government agencies securing borders, controlling access to airports and seaports, and ensuring the integrity of electronic networks that have become essential to our way of life.

As during the Cold War, a strategy of containment should include comprehensive export controls and the monitoring of international financial transactions. Without money and access to weapons, the jihadist threat shrinks to insignificance: All that remains is hatred. Ideally, this approach should include strenuous efforts to reduce the West’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, which serves to funnel many billions of dollars into the hands of people who may not wish us well.

In principle, Dr. Bacevich is quite right. If we deny them cell phones, computers, access to the Internet, the ability to travel back and forth freely to and from Western countries, purchase munitions, or move money through the international banking system we have little to fear from organized radical Islamist terrorism. Controlling the airwaves and the flow of information and capital can be as effective as controlling the sea was a century ago. Incidental terrorism we will always have with us whether practiced by domestic maniacs or the imported sort. But we can mitigate the risk of organized terrorism by limiting its ability to organize.

However, Dr. Bacevich’s proposal founders on a single two part question: whom are we to contain and how? Al Qaeda and takfiris, generally, do not carry passports or membership cards identifying themselves as such. They have Pakistani, Saudi, Yemeni, or Jordanian passports. Or French, German, British, or American ones. Theoretically, we could ban all travel and trade other than oil, food, and pharmaceuticals between North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian countries and the rest of the world. I’m skeptical about pharmaceuticals because of their relative fungibility.

Would the Chinese go along? Would the Germans? I think the very limited effectiveness of our ability to limit trade with Iran so far is instructive in this context. Would we have greater success in containing a billion of the world’s people or more?

I think that containment could be an effective approach in dealing with Pakistan and I advocate it. Do we have the stomach to enforce the same policy on our trading partners without which the policy would be meaningless? I doubt it.

Leslie Gelb, distinguished diplomat, journalist, and scholar, professes befuddlement over President Obama’s strategy with respect to Afghanistan:

I’m lost on President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy—along with most of Congress and the U.S. military. Not quite eight months ago, Mr. Obama pledged to “defeat” al Qaeda in Afghanistan by transforming that country’s political and economic infrastructure, training Afghan forces and adding 21,000 U.S. forces for starters. He proclaimed Afghanistan’s strategic centrality to prevent Muslim extremism from taking over Pakistan—an even more vital nation because of its nuclear weapons. And a mere three weeks ago, he punctuated his commitments by proclaiming that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity,” not one of choice. White House spokesmen reinforced this by promising that the president would “fully resource” the war.

Yet less than one week ago, Mr. Obama said the following about troop increases: “I’m going to take a very deliberate process in making those decisions. There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things that I’m absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make a determination about resources.” He repeated that on Sunday’s talk shows.

I am befuddled over Dr. Gelb’s befuddlement and even more so by those who are surprised at the course that President Obama has pursued with respect to Afghanistan to date. As a candidate Barack Obama ran on Afghanistan as a war of necessity. As president he re-affirmed the importance of winning in Afghanistan, which we can now say with some confidence is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa’ida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future”. In pursuit of those ends he appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal as U. S. commander in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal was well-known to advocate a strategy of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

The counter-insurgency doctrine that currently prevails in the U. S. military is that, in order to prosecute a strategy of counter-insurgency successfully in Afghanistan, we need more troops there. Eventually, some of those troops might be provided by Afghanistan itself. However, the troops are needed now and that means that we must supply them.

As a spine-stiffener, people in the Pentagon are apparently signaling that Gen. McChrystal will resign (hat tip: Bill Roggio) if he’s not given the resources he’s requested. He was put there to do a job, his approach to the job was well-known in advance, and, if he’s not going to be given the resources to do the job in that way, he shouldn’t be there at all. That only makes sense. The military is a profession and he’s ethically required to do so.

If President Obama refuses to give Gen. McChrystal what he’s asked for, it would be foolish or, at the very least, confused. However, it’s too early for befuddlement. Even if President Obama turns Gen. McChrystal down, it won’t be particularly confusing. Either, having become fully informed on the situation, President Obama has changed his mind or he’s yielded to political pressure, as you prefer.

Either way it is likely to be politically damaging to President Obama, leaving him open to charges of naïveté, lack of resolution, or political motivation. But it won’t be confusing.

Today, as you’ve doubtless realized, is the 8th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the thwarted attack on a destination we’ll likely never know.  It is, for those of us too young to recall the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor, the most significant public event of our lifetimes.  We’ll all remember “where we were when.”

At what point, I wonder, do we stop commemorating the anniversary, especially those that aren’t multiples of ten or twenty-five?

Obviously, we do Independence Day every July 4th. But that’s about it. Pearl Harbor usually gets a mention but we don’t do much about it anymore.  Most Americans couldn’t tell you when VE or VJ Day are; many couldn’t tell you what they are.  Few now remember the Maine or the Alamo.   Armistice Day has long since given way to Veterans Day, which itself has long since mostly been just another Monday holiday.

We’ll obviously make a big to-do about the 10th anniversary of 9/11 come 2011.  Will we do so with the 11th?  12th?  13th?  At some point, this day will be just another day for those not personally affected.

Chris Battle is surprised how often he hears the question “How many terrorists has the Department of Homeland Security caught?” He argues that DHS’ job is prevention, not apprehension; that’s what the FBI does.

The implication of the question – usually the questioner already knows the answer – is that the failure to catch members of al Qaeda during the fingerprinting processes at the border, or during Border Patrol operations along the southwest land border, or during the student visa process, or during the airport screening process … the implication is that the tactics implemented by DHS are obviously failing. No terrorists.

It is important to remember, however, that we usually won’t know if the efforts are successful – at least from the perspective of stopping the next al Qaeda operative. It should be remembered that most of the September 11th terrorists who entered the United States did so by exploiting our immigration system. For example, Hani Hanjour, one of the men who helped crash a 757 into the Pentagon, entered America allegedly as a foreign student. He applied for and received his student visa, but he never set foot on the school at which he was supposedly studying. In fact, nobody ever heard from him again until that fateful morning of September 11, 2001.

Had the DHS student visa program been in place at the time, Hanjour’s failure to show up at the school for which he was given a visa would have resulted in an alert being issued to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. ICE would have then investigated the matter. Had they run down Hanjour, he would have been deported.

And he would never have been tagged as a “terrorist.” He would only have been an individual who was caught exploiting the immigration system – like millions of others who do the same.

So, yes, it’s true that few terrorists are “caught” by DHS. It’s also true that few terrorists who are caught will likely ever be known.

That’s fair enough, I think, if the question is being asked as a proxy for “Is DHS doing its job?”

When I ask it, though, I do so as a proxy for “Is this worth the sacrifice in liberty for ordinary Americans?” Chris is right that we’ll never know, for example, how many would-be airline hijackers have been thwarted by the more stringent airport screening procedures implemented after 9/11.  We do know, however, that something like 75 million Americans fly each year and that each and every one of them is inconvenienced.  That tens of millions of man-hours a year are thereby wasted getting to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be required.  That Americans are so frustrated with the new rules that they’ve skipped some 41 million trips that they would otherwise have taken.

Oh, and all of the 9/11 hijackers could have passed through the current screening procedures, albeit possibly not with box cutters.   But there are other weapons that would easily pass through – especially if one includes weapons that could be easily assembled aboard the plane.

None of that matters, though, because of two unarguably useful post-9/11 changes. First, we’ve hardened the cockpit doors and implemented procedures to ensure that they’re not opened — no matter what — in the even of a takeover attempt.  Second, passengers have learned to go Flight 93 on would-be terrorists.  Before 9/11, passengers reasonably assumed that hijackers just wanted to go to Cuba or get paid a ransom or whatever and that the passengers would likely be released unharmed afterward.  Now, as Richard Reid’s almost comical attempt to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb demonstrated, passengers will overwhelm a would-be attacker.

That hasn’t stopped the TSA from making everyone take their shoes off to get through security screening, of course.

Add Chuck Hagel to the chorus of voices rising in opposition to the escalation of our military commitment to Afghanistan:

No country today has the power to impose its will and values on other nations. As the new world order takes shape, America must lead by building coalitions of common interests, as we did after World War II. Then, international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and GATT (now the World Trade Organization) — while flawed — established boundaries for human and government conduct and expectations that helped keep the world from drifting into World War III and generally made life better for most people worldwide during the second half of the 20th century.

Our greatest threats today come from the regions left behind after World War II. Addressing these threats will require a foreign policy underpinned by engagement — in other words, active diplomacy but not appeasement. We need a clearly defined strategy that accounts for the interconnectedness and the shared interests of all nations. Every great threat to the United States — whether economic, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, health pandemics, environmental degradation, energy, or water and food shortages — also threatens our global partners and rivals. Accordingly, we cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only “winning” or “losing.” Iraq and Afghanistan are not America’s to win or lose. Win what? We can help them buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates. There are too many cultural, ethnic and religious dynamics at play in these regions for any one nation to control. For example, the future of Afghanistan is linked directly to Pakistan and what happens in the mountains along their border. Political accommodation and reconciliation in this region will determine the outcome.

But what about the Al Qaeda leadership that were believed to be holed up in the ironically named Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan? There are now reports that at least some of the Al Qaeda remnants in Pakistan have fled to Somalia or Yemen. If your objective is truly to pursue the Al Qaeda leadership, we won’t be able to stop in Afghanistan or even in Pakistan.

The current strategy in Afghanistan appears to be one of pursuing counter-insurgency through a combination of increased troops on our part and building up the native Afghan military to make up the rest of the forces needed for a successful counter-insurgency operation. There are no prospects whatever for Afghanistan itself to support an Afghan Army of the size and abilities necessary to pursue such a strategy. That means that supporting a sizeable commitment of U. S. troops in Afghanistan for, perhaps, a decade and billions in support for the Afghan Army for the foreseeable future.

Are we prepared to make similar commitments in Somalia, Yemen, or anywhere else that harbors takfiri terrorists?

Update

The Washington Post editors come out in favor of a “stay the course” approach in Afghanistan:

The Democratic left and some conservatives have begun to argue that the Afghan war is unwinnable and that U.S. interests can be secured by a much smaller military campaign directed at preventing al-Qaeda from regaining a foothold in the country. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) has proposed a timetable for withdrawal — the same demand the left rallied around when the war in Iraq was going badly. Its most cogent argument is a negative one: that the weakness of the Afghan government and the general backwardness of the country mean that the counterinsurgency strategy, with its emphasis on political and economic development, can’t work.

That might prove true. But the problem with the critics’ argument is that, while the strategy they oppose has yet to be tried, the alternatives they suggest already have been — and they led to failure in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For years, U.S. commanders in both countries focused on killing insurgents and minimizing the numbers and exposure of U.S. troops rather than pacifying the country. The result was that violence in both countries steadily grew, until a counterinsurgency strategy was applied to Iraq in 2007. As for limiting U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to attacks by drones and Special Forces units, that was the strategy of the 1990s, which, as chronicled by the Sept. 11 commission, paved the way for al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington. Given that the Taliban and al-Qaeda now also aim to overturn the government of nuclear-armed Pakistan, the risks of a U.S. withdrawal far exceed those of continuing to fight the war — even were the result to be continued stalemate.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan is not Iraq. It’s a significantly larger, landlocked country without significant resources and in which we have no strategic interest absent Al Qaeda’s presence there and Al Qaeda has no presence there. It’s decamped. Today we’re fighting the Taliban, native Afghans who oppose the Kabul government.

We can’t legitimize the Kabul government and plow billions into it at the same time. The billions intrinsically delegitimize it. And I know of no precedent for our making this level of commitment to a country in which we have so little interest.

There are middle grounds between doubling down in Afghanistan with a significantly increased force and an essentially permanent commitment to fund its government and huge army on the one hand and complete withdrawal of our forces and support on the other. Imperfect as that may be it may well be the best that we can do.

Update 2

The Wall Street Journal urges President Obama to take a stand on Afghanistan:

President Obama may not want to spend any political capital on Afghanistan, but he has no choice. The main job of his generals should be to win the war, not also to have to sell it, especially when the main opposition so far is emerging from the President’s own left-flank. The opposition will also grow on the right if Americans conclude he isn’t providing the forces or personal leadership needed to win. Now is the time for Mr. Obama to give his generals everything they need to defeat the Taliban, or leave and explain why he’s concluded that Afghanistan is no longer worth the fight.

Although it has a somewhat more truculent tone, that’s not too different from what I wrote earlier this week.

I believe there’s a strong analogy between the way in which President Obama seems to have allowed his generals to define the Administration’s policy WRT Afghanistan and his handling so far of healthcare reform, the energy bill which appears stalled in Congress, and the handling of the financial crisis. I don’t know whether, as Michael Reynolds suggested, it’s an ingenious approach based on his background as a community organizer, it’s because he’s a technocrat strongly inclined to rely on the expertise of those who are supposed to know something, it’s because he’s inexperienced, it’s because he’s a weak manager, he’s trying to deflect political criticism from himself onto others, some combination of the above, or some other reason entirely. I genuinely don’t know.

Update 3

Raymond Pritchett at New Atlanticist articulates the case that COIN isn’t appropriate for Afghanistan very succinctly:

Counterinsurgency theory applies a population centric military strategy for promoting an existing credible governing body in a weak state where the government is facing an armed rebellion or occupation. Counterinsurgency is not the establishment of credible governing authority in a failed state where no credible governance exists. How does a counterinsurgency approach work in a failed state? I thought COIN was for weak states?

We are being told that Afghanistan is a weak state because there is an elected government in power today. How much control does that government have over the people even without the Taliban influence? The Taliban has not been the only problem in Afghanistan over the last eight years, and the governments authority didn’t exist over much of the country even when the Taliban wasn’t the main problem. I am having trouble digesting the suggestion that what we see in Afghanistan is a classic insurgency. Show me the evidence. Can someone please explain why the conditions are that of a classic insurgency, and not the chaotic soup one finds in a country suffering from 30 consecutive years of war caused primarily by foreign power influence compounded by centuries of tribal conflict and mistrust.

I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a case of when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.

Since reading the interview with Anthony Cordesman in the Times of London this morning I’ve been doing the mental equivalent of sputtering. I honestly don’t know how to respond. I’m generally favorably disposed to Mr. Cordesman but I’m having some difficulty in relating the numbers that are being tossed out, the political realities in the United States and with our NATO allies, the means that are being advocated, and our strategic objectives in Afghanistan.

So, for example:

The United States should send up to 45,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, a senior adviser to the American commander in Kabul has told The Times.

Anthony Cordesman, an influential American academic who is a member of a team that has been advising General Stanley McChrystal, now in charge of Nato forces in Afghanistan, also said that to deal with the threat from the Taleban the size of the Afghan National Army might have to increase to 240,000.

and this

The US reinforcements already approved by Mr Obama include 8,000 Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade who have arrived in Helmand province, replacing the British troops in the south of the province, and 4,000 US Army soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade, who are also arriving in the region.

Mr Cordesman appeared to confirm the strategy expected to be outlined by General McChrystal relating to the Afghan National Army. He says that the existing plan to increase numbers to 134,000 soldiers is inadequate. He says that it should be doubled to 240,000 by 2014, and the Afghan National Police should rise from 82,000 to 160,000.

To reach such levels, however, Nato would need to contribute thousands more troops to train the Afghans.

As I wrote in comments yesterday the number of security personnel required for a counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan would be at the very least something like 325,000 and possibly as many as 820,000. The lower number assumes that the activity can be limited to the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and that the border with Pakistan can be closed, assumptions which I think are very strong, indeed, by which I mean I don’t think they can be made.

And as I’ve documented previously we spend about three times as much for every soldier we deploy in Afghanistan that we’ve spent on deploying the same soldier in Iraq. Consequently, to deploy the size of force being contemplated in Afghanistan we’d spend three times what we’re spending in Iraq, which has long been challenged, including by the sitting president, as a waste of money. In addition to that we would need to spend at least $10 billion per year in aid to Afghanistan, a sum roughly equal to the amount we’ve given to the countries receiving the largest amount of our foreign aid, Israel and Egypt. That amounts to roughly 30% of Afghanistan’s GDP, a staggering sum.

The new head of the British army has estimated that our commitment to Afghanistan could be as long as 40 years. That’s not completely surprising since our commitments to Germany and Japan have been that long and more. However, Germany and Japan are not Afghanistan, a poor landlocked country with a tiny GDP and no strategic significance as long as it’s not hosting terrorist training camps.

In 2003 our strategic objectives in Afghanistan were six:

1. Eliminate the Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
2. Convince or compel the Afghan Taliban to end its support for Al Qaeda.
3. Demonstrate that the United States is not at war with the Afghan people or Islam.
4. Demonstrate U. S. resolve in the war on terrorism.
5. Build international support for the war in Afghanistan.
6. Stabilize Afghanistan following the fighting.

At the time I argued against these objectives on the grounds that 1) and 2) weren’t worth doing in the light of the ease of the network decamping into Pakistan, the longer we spent in-country the more difficult 3) would become, 4) could be achieved by other means, 5) had probably already been achieved to as great a degree as possible, and 6) was probably not possible, at least not in a timeframe and at a cost acceptable to the American people, among others.

Now we have accomplished 1), 2), and 4) and the remaining objectives are little better off than they were in 2003. I would very much like to see a statement from the Obama Administration of its current strategic objectives in Afghanistan and how the tactics being used relate to those objectives.

The Guardian has come out against the current conduct of the war in Afghanistan:

The empty rhetoric has to stop. State-building from the ramp of a Chinook is a fantasy, a folie de grandeur. The war against militants will not be won by expanding the battle-space. The resolution to this “good war” will not come from Kabul alone, but will be dependent on every neighbouring country with a stake in the conflict. The directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence made a telling point to the New York Times yesterday when it warned that a push by US marines in southern Afghanistan would force militants into Baluchistan. We have to stop thinking of Helmand as the frontline in a war that ends on the streets of London or Manhattan, and start thinking of what the growing conflagration is doing to Afghanistan’s immediate neighbourhood. There are no good options after eight years of warfare, only least worst ones. We should stop pouring more oil on to this fire and start thinking of realistic outcomes. And we should be doing this now.

Hat tip: Steve Hynd

The Guardian is the first British newspaper to come out in opposition to current policies, a reversal of editorial position for the newspaper.

Steve Hynd also draws our attention to this alternative proposal from Rory Stewart, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard:

The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Stewart is an authority on Afghan culture and society and has lived there and traveled extensively throughout the region, frequently on foot.

Stewart’s view sounds remarkably similar to my own. Counter-terrorism activities, including preventing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from resuming their control over Afghanistan, are consistent with our interests. A complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is not consistent with our interests. Counter-insurgency which requires the possibly unachievable objective of creating a coherent nation state in Afghanistan capable of preventing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from reasserting control over the country, the course on which we are now embarked, is not within our interests because it is probably outside our grasp. The more modest counter-terrorism activities can be accomplished with a signficantly smaller commitment of troops and other resources.

At the very least our policies with respect to Afghanistan deserve serious review. Such a review must go beyond campaign promises and sound bites and hold American interests as the yardstick against which our policies should be measured rather than Republican or Democratic interests or their effect on the next election campaign.

Hilzoy pronounces herself “happy as a clam” with President Obama’s speech yesterday on national security issues, with one glaring exception:

But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.

This was followed by a long list of caveats about “fair procedures,” “the rule of law,” and “checks and balances.” While applauding the caveats, Hilzoy nonetheless retorts:

Preventive detention????????

No. Wrong answer

If we don’t have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don’t have enough evidence to hold them. Period.

The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is unreliable. If we just don’t have enough evidence, that’s a problem, but it’s also a problem with detaining them in the first place. [all emphases original]

Were we talking about American citizens or even aliens captured on American soil, we’d be in agreement.  But we’re not.  These are people captured on the fields of battle of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama is quite right here:  “Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.”  It has long been established in international law that enemies captured on the field of battle are subject to detention through cessation of hostilities.

To be sure, the present conflict introduces a new murkiness.  We are not at war with a nation-state, so there is no one with whom to negotiate a definitive surrender or peace treaty.  Further, most of the combatants in detention are not privileged belligerents under the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war in that they wore no distinguishing uniforms or insignia, fought for no state, and were not part of a traditional resistance movement.   Many if not most are war criminals who hid amongst noncombatant civilians and/or used the cover of mosques, hospitals, and other protected sanctuaries as shields.

The problem with Guantanimo is not that we’re holding enemy combatants indefinitely but rather that we’ve flouted some of the rules of the Geneva Conventions, most notably in not establishing some minimal due process to allow people to present evidence that they’re not who we claim they are.   Additionally, we used “enhanced interrogation techniques” on a handful of captives that were quite probably torture and quite certainly a violation of the laws of war.  Obama, to his credit, has renounced all of these practices.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting, as Blake Hounshel and Chris Brose do, that they’d long since been abandoned by the Bush Administration, too.  Brose:

I don’t fear for America because of the policies Obama laid out today, because I agree with Jack Goldsmith that most of these policies are largely similar in their substance to where the Bush administration ended up, often as a result of shifts in its approach during the second term based on new facts that emerged and new perspectives that were gained. This is the irony of Cheney’s current position: Many of the policies he is arguing for now were in recent years rolled back by President Bush himself, or overturned by the Supreme Court. Closing Guantanamo is an exception, but it was Bush’s stated goal to do so, and people like Secretary Rice and John Bellinger and Matt Waxman worked tirelessly to do it. Closing it now, though difficult, is both right and necessary. So in all these ways, Cheney’s argument is with Bush as much as it is with Obama.

Quite right.   For all the talk of Cheney as the power behind the throne, he was increasingly an outlier in the administration whose counsel was taken but largely not followed.

Update (Alex Knapp): I am more inclined to agree with Kevin Drum than with Hilary Bok on this issue:

I appreciate the outrage, but this is a genuinely knotty problem. It was knotty under Bush and it remains knotty under Obama. For various reasons, some defensible and some not, Obama is right: there are almost certainly a small number of Guantanamo detainees who are (a) unquestionably terrorists and unquestionably still dedicated to fighting the United States, but (b) impossible to convict in any kind of normal proceeding.

At the same time, they aren’t American citizens. They were captured on a foreign battlefield, not U.S. soil. They are, essentially if not legally, prisoners of war in a war with no end. So what do we do?

One thing that I think we should not do is let the government say “trust us” on this. If there is evidence against particular detainees, then provide it. Then we can debate the legal channels. If the law needs to be changed, Obama can go to Congress. If it’s possible to extradite some of them because they have outstanding warrants in other nations, let’s look into that. I agree that this is a hard problem, and I also agree that the simple release of some terrorists puts Americans in danger, and that risk needs to be appreciated.

That said, there needs to be some kind of open, transparent process through which claims against such detainees can be evaluated and pains can be made to ensure that detainees that their detention continued are actually dangerous. We shouldn’t just take the President’s word on it. Not any President.

Update (James Joyner): I was about to append an update linking to Kevin’s post on this but noticed Alex already had.  I agree entirely with both of them on this matter.

This morning Bill Roggio is reporting that the Pakistani government has moved paramilitary forces, potentially to oppose Taliban forces should they advance on the capital:

Islamabad officials have moved paramilitary forces to block a potential Taliban advance into the nation’s capital as US officials question Pakistan’s ability to stop the creeping insurgency.

Islamabad’s deputy commissioner and its senior police official said they are taking steps to counter the Taliban encroachment from the Northwest Frontier Province, Geo News reported. The Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force under the command of Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, have been deployed to the Margala hills on the northern outskirts of Islamabad. The deputy commissioner said the Taliban will not be able to cross through the Margala hills and into Islamabad.

The move to reinforce Islamabad comes just one day after Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl, an Islamist political party, said the Taliban are beginning to move into the districts of Haripur and Mansehra. Haripur directly borders Punjab province and Islamabad, and is close to two sensitive nuclear storage facilities.

Bill’s coverage of the situation in Pakistan has been uniformly good so I recommend you take a look at his several recent posts on the subject.

Meanwhile Pakistani venture capitalist and financier Mansoor Ijaz, in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, proposes a “rescue plan” for Pakistan that has the following components:

• Redefine the Taliban as the foreign fighters, e.g. Tajik, Uzbek, Chechen, Afghans, etc. takfiris, in Pakistan.
• Convince specific far-left and far-right Pakistani politicians to jointly “declare all-out war on Taliban mercenaries”, presumably appealing to Pakistani nationalism and thereby creating political cover for the government to oppose the Taliban more vigorously.
• The U. S. would give the Pakistani government substantial military aid to prosecute the campaign.
• If the Pakistani military were to direct their attentions against Afghanistan or India, the U. S. would withdraw its support.
• U. S. civil aid would be increased and specifically dedicated to secular schools to oppose the Islamist schools being financed by the Saudis.

He concludes:

This plan, once set, would then be ratified by Pakistan’s National Security Council and Army corps commanders, and implemented.

If no plan is agreed upon, America walks out and previews its contingency plan for securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons on the front page of The New York Times.

Frankly, I think it’s too late to implement such a plan, I doubt that we have the acumen or leverage to involve ourselves in Pakistani domestic politics in such a manner, I question whether we should involve ourselves in Pakistani domestic politics even if we had the acumen or leverage, and I see little practical way of preventing whatever military aid we convey to the Pakistani military from falling into the hands of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

However, if the Taliban advances on Islamabad it may confront the Obama Administration with a truly serious dilemma: what is the U. S. willing to do to prevent Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of the Pakistani Taliban and their Al Qaeda guests?

After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun.  Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives.

The most interesting of these, alas, comes from CNS and is headlined “CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles.”

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

[...]

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

Marc Thiessen, who “served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the White House from 2001 to 2009, most recently as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush,” takes to WaPo’s editorial pages to proclaim “The CIA’s Questioning Worked.”

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists “did not make us safer.” This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public — in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

[...]

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

The memo notes that “[i]nterrogations of [Abu] Zubaydah — again, once enhanced techniques were employed — furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda’s ‘organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi’ and identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” This information helped the intelligence community plan the operation that captured KSM. It went on: “Zubaydah and KSM also supplied important information about al-Zarqawi and his network” in Iraq, which helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country.

Peter Baker’s NYT report, “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says,” is a bit less exciting.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.  “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush adminis

[...]

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

[...]

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

The foiled LA attack has long been murmured about (Patrick Frey wrote about it in November 2007, for example).  It’s unclear from these reports how serious the plan was.  Certainly, we have seen reports of numerous “foiled” attacks that, upon closer scrutiny, appeared to be mere fantasies of incompetents.  Then again, we’re talking about the planner of the 9/11 attacks here.

But let’s take at face value that CIA interrogators managed to extract information that foiled a developed, 9/11 style attack, thereby saving, say, 3000 innocent American civilians.   Does that outweigh the moral and legal issues of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times?   I’d say it does.  It’s as close to the “ticking time bomb” scenario as we’re ever likely to get.

[UPDATE: Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Timothy Noah examines the timeline and demonstrates we likely foiled the LA Towers plot months before KSM was captured! This doesn't necessarily obviate any of the other "high value information" but it would undermine the most impressive of the examples offered.]

Blair correctly notes that we may well have gotten this information using legal techniques.  Then again, we might not have.  These guys didn’t break before they were tortured.   Of course, we didn’t try very long if we managed to get in 183 waterboarding sessions during KSM’s first month in U.S. custody.  The most reliable forms of interrogation require establishing trust and can take weeks, if not months.

What we also don’t know is how much damage the fact that the world, including our enemies, know that we were torturing terrorist suspects did.   Blair wrote, “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”   The first clause in that sentence is undeniable; the second is not.

In my recent interview with retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, he observed that, in Pakistan, “We’ve forgotten Rumsfeld’s question: ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?’ And we probably are. The drones may be killing a lot of Taliban and al Qaeda but they’re alienating the tribesmen we need to win the war.”  Remember all the hostage beheadings, wherein the victims were dressed in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits?  Would they have occurred had we not done this?  We don’t know.  How many people joined al Qaeda and the Taliban after these incidents became public, convinced that the United States really is as degenerate as the jihadists claimed we were?  We don’t know.

When I was being trained on this issue as a young cadet a quarter century ago, in addition to the legal and moral factors explaining why we must treat captured enemy combatants humanely — even risking our own lives and the accomplishment of our immediate mission to safeguard them — was a practical lesson:  The other guy was a hell of a lot more likely to surrender to you if he expected to be treated well.   Americans were more likely to keep fighting in Vietnam even against overwhelming odds because they knew they enemy would treat them as subhumans, whereas NVA and VC soldiers would surrender to us knowing they’d get three hots and a cot.   Certainly, that proved to be the case in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Saddam’s soldiers couldn’t throw their weapons down fast enough.

That’s not likely to be the case for some time now.

There’s an interesting news article from the Associated Press that highlights the complexity of dealing with Somali piracy:

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced the Yemenis to sail a “mother ship” attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, NATO officials said.

In a separate incident, gunmen from Somalia seized a Belgian-registered ship and its 10 crew, including seven Europeans, further south in the Indian Ocean. A pirate source said the vessel, the Pompei, would be taken to the coast.

Somali sea gangs have captured dozens of ships, taken hundreds of sailors prisoner and made off with tens of millions of dollars in ransoms despite an unprecedented deployment by foreign navies in waters off the Horn of Africa.

The attacks have disrupted U.N. aid supplies, driven up insurance costs and forced some shipping companies to route cargo round South Africa, rather than risk approaching Somalia.

NATO Lieutenant Commander Alexandre Fernandes, speaking on board the Portuguese warship Corte-Real, said the 20 fishermen were rescued after a Dutch navy frigate on a NATO patrol responded to an assault on a Greek-owned tanker by pirates firing assault rifles and grenades.

Commandos from the Dutch ship, the De Zeven Provincien, pursued the pirates, who were on a small skiff, back to their “mother ship” — a hijacked Yemeni fishing dhow.

“We have freed the hostages, we have freed the dhow and we have seized the weapons… The pirates did not fight and no gunfire was exchanged,” Fernandes told Reuters. The Corte-Real is also on a NATO anti-piracy mission.

He said the hostages had been held since last week. The commandos briefly detained and questioned the seven gunmen, he told Reuters, but had no legal power to arrest them.

“NATO does not have a detainment policy. The warship must follow its national law,” he said.

“They can only arrest them if the pirates are from the Netherlands, the victims are from the Netherlands, or if they are in Netherlands waters.”

This story underscores the thought behind the suggestion that Galrahn of Information Dissemination made on OTB Radio last week. His suggestion was that the United States would agree to underwrite the insurance of American-flagged vessels carrying cargo off the coast of Somalia. This would encourage more vessels to be American-flagged (there are fewer than 250 American-flagged vessels of over 1,000 tons today). Vessels being American-flagged would give the United States a legal underpinning for apprehending and detaining Somali pirates who attacked or harassed such vessels.

While I’m on the subject don’t miss Galrahn’s recent post drawing a connection between the increase in operational tempo among Somali pirates and their interaction with groups linked to Al Qaeda:

I was reading this CBS World News blog article discussing a new audiotape from the senior Al Qaeda operative Sa’id Ali Jabir Al Khathim Al Shihri (aka Abu Sufian al-Azdi), who you may have heard about considering he was a 6 year resident of Guantanamo Bay before being released to Saudi Arabia last year.

After serving his time in Gitmo, being released in Saudi Arabia, and participating in a repatriation and rehabilitation program, Shihri has popped up in Yemen calling on Somali jihadists to attack “crusader” forces at sea in the Gulf of Aden. The audiotape appears to be a response to the US and French actions against piracy last week. The article discusses the typical Al Qaeda rhetoric then states:

Al Qaeda does have links to Islamic extremist groups operating in Somalia but, thus far, piracy and al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism have remained largely separate. The pirates in the Gulf of Aden have always sought ransom payments or loot — they have not been motivated by Islamic fundamentalism.

That is exactly how I have come to understand the relationship between the Al Qaeda terrorism and pirates in Somalia. However, I had never seen what was reported in the very next paragraph.

Read the whole thing.

President Obama told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the Bush administration had lost its focus in Afghanistan and that his team will “refocus attention on al Qaeda.” He additionally promised that “we now have resourced properly this strategy. It’s not going to be an open-ended commitment of infinite resources. We’ve just got to make sure that we are focused on achieving what we need to achieve with the resources we have.”

Except — and I hate to sound like a broken record here — the administration has no exit strategy for Afghanistan. It claims to have milestones but has not actually articulated any.

As to the idea that the mission previously lacked a focus on the al Qaeda threat, we are already beating al Qaeda, with senior U.S. officials saying the terrorist group’s leadership has been “decimated” and saying a “complete al Qaeda defeat” is in the offing.

I’ve been asking since Friday’s release of the new plan:  What’s so new about it? Now, Thomas Barnett is wondering the same thing.

Rusty Shackleford is hot on the trail of an Afghani arrested in California  for lying about his lack of association with terrorists.

The indictment, unsealed this morning, alleges [34 year old Ahmadullah Sais] Niazi hid associations with “Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” groups including Al Qaeda, Hizb-i-Islami and the Taliban, when he completed nationalization papers five years ago. During one visit, the government alleges Niazi visited Dr. Amin al-Haq, the security coordinator for Osama bin Laden.

Worth keeping an eye on.

Rusty Shackleford:

Bush-Hitler: Holding terrorists indefinitely without charge in Gitmo.

Hope-Change: Holding terrorists indefinitely without charge somewhere else.

As Jacob Sullum notes in much more thorough post, it’s a natural consequence of the Obama administration’s continuing the Bush perspective that we’re at war with terrorists.

In Holder’s view, then, we are engaged in a war that started years before we noticed it and may never end, at least not in any definitive way. The enemy is not simply the guy who shoots at you on the battlefield, who can be readily identified; he can be anyone, anywhere who helps anti-American terrorists. He could be a guy captured in the Philippines suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda, or (presumably) he could be the employee of an Islamic charity in the U.S. that is accused of sending money to Hezbollah. Given Holder’s invocation of cyber and mental battlefields, the enemy could even be someone accused of fomenting terrorism through incendiary online criticism of the U.S. government. The implication is that any of these people could be held in military custody without trial until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., indefinitely.

Right.

This was entirely predictable and, indeed, predicted by several of us here at OTB and by other analysts.  Being president is a hell of a lot different than being a candidate for president. No administration is going to simply release possible terrorists and take the resultant risk.

The key problem with the Bush policy wasn’t detention but rather the lack of even a modicum of due process.  So long as the Obama administration comes up with a way to let suspects put forth evidence that they’re not who we think they are, we’ll have moved forward.  Sullum isn’t happy:

Such suspects need not even be tried by military tribunals; they could simply be identified as “unlawful enemy combatants” through a process that is yet to be determined but that will certainly be much less rigorous than a full-blown trial. What will be the basis for deciding which suspects get full due process and which get something far less, which receive determinate prison sentences and which are held indefinitely? If the option is available, it will always be tempting to take the easier route, which could mean that every case related to terrorism will be militarized. Then anyone accused of aiding terrorism can forget about justice as it is usually understood.

So long as we treat terrorism as a national security problem rather than a criminal justice problem, no one should expect different.