The Campaign Against ISIS

Guest post by Peter T.
(For his previous posts, see here, here, and here.)

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What are ISIS’ prospects of holding out against the coalition now formed against them? And how do the military prospects inform the outlook for a political resolution of the civil wars?

ISIS continues to hold significant parts of northern and western Iraq and north-east Syria, and is putting up a stiff resistance to Iraqi efforts to regain Ramadi and to a Russian-backed Syrian offensive around Aleppo. Various Islamic radical movements around the world continue to sign on as ISIS affiliates, and the extreme violence (gruesome forms of execution, suicide attacks, mosque bombings) characteristic of ISIS has spread to Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and further. How far can ISIS go?

ISIS is several things. At the core, it is a millenarian movement, preparing for (and trying to bring about) the end of days. It draws on Salafist Islam, Islamic eschatological doctrines and holy warrior traditions, and seeks purity through violence. This mix is attractive to many young men, and at the centre of ISIS military strength are some few thousands of devotees – fierce, cohesive, aggressive and, by now, thoroughly competent in battle. Around this core are Sunni tribe members, local conscripts, and foreign volunteers, adding up to some tens of thousands.

Against ISIS are the Iraqi and Syrian armies, Iraqi Shi'a militias, some Sunni tribes, Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces, competing rebel groups in Syria and, of course, Western (mostly U.S.) and Russian air forces and Iranian advisors.  Numerically, this coalition is far stronger.  It is also better equipped and supplied, and can draw on much larger populations.  Yet the record, so far, is decidedly mixed.  The regular Iraqi Army performed poorly against ISIS up to mid-2014. The Syrian Army has likewise not done too well.  Iraqi Kurdish forces have been effective in defense, but made very limited gains.  The Syrian Kurds have done better, sealing off the border with Turkey as far west as the Euphrates, but lack the numbers and equipment to attack major ISIS strongholds directly.  In Iraq, the most effective forces have been the Shi'a militias and in Syria the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.

Up to now ISIS has been able to offset numbers with elan, ferocity, cohesion, greater military competence, and the advantages offered by being on the offensive. These have been enough to seize territory against weak opposition, but not enough to overcome any determined resistance.  In the longer run, they are unlikely to be enough to hold what ISIS has gained.

ISIS has been slowly but steadily losing territory and populations in Iraq since mid-2014, and must now defend against greater forces along a wide front.  Forces have to be tied down in defence of key points, such as the roads between Mosul and Raqqa.  As the aura of success fades, and as supply tightens, its tribal allies and subordinates become less reliable, and greater pressure is needed to keep them in line. At the same time, the competence and morale of its enemies rises. Each successful battle (Kobane, Tel Abyad, Tikrit, Baiji, Hassakah, Shengal, currently Ramadi) costs ISIS core cadres and chips away at its aura of invincibility.  Taking towns ringed with IEDs and defended to the last is a slow process, but it can be and has been done. This is not blitzkrieg, but a steady pressure against a determined but weaker force.

Military geography does not favour ISIS. Both Mosul and Raqqa are exposed, and comparatively minor gains by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq or eastern Syria would sever communication between the two.  Likewise, ISIS has to hold Euphrates valley towns to access western Anbar and the Saudi border, but garrisons are vulnerable to Iraqi forces and their supply open to air attack.  And ISIS has to maintain forces in northern Syria against the very effective Kurdish YPG to ensure access to the Turkish border.  So its striking power is limited and its small elite vulnerable to attrition.


The Balance in Syria

Calculation of the military and political situation in Syria is more complex than in Iraq. The Assad regime in Damascus cannot muster the same numbers or depth of popular commitment as Baghdad, has to fight on several fronts, and faces a relatively stronger set of enemies. Its own indiscriminate use of fire-power has alienated many who might otherwise find it the lesser evil. While Baghdad enjoys support from all sides, the U.S. is hostile to the regime in Damascus and continues to tinker futilely with support for a “third party” -- a secular (or at least non-fundamentalist) and pro-democratic opposition.  Although the Pentagon has recently ended its effort to train separate ‘moderate’ forces to fight ISIS, a CIA program to train ‘moderates’ to fight Assad apparently continues.  Turkey is also hostile to Assad, and somewhat supportive, in terms of actions if not rhetoric, of both ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.

In the broader view, it is all one war. Not only is ISIS a common enemy (certainly for all Shi’a, at any rate), but Syrian Allawis, the core supporters of the Assad regime, are close to the Twelver Shi'ism of Iraq (and Iran), the Zainab shrine near Damascus is a major Shi'a pilgrimage centre, and there are close family ties between leading Shi'a religious families in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.  Iraqi militia are reported to have deployed to Syria in support of the regime, and Iraqi or Kurdish successes in northern Iraq will certainly be pursued into Syria – Iraq is not about to halt its campaign against ISIS at the border.

A deal – or even a stalemate – with ISIS is hard to envisage (one Syrian rebel leader observed “You can't talk to them; they take their orders from God”). If defeats continue, ISIS is likely to go the way of their Algerian equivalent, the GIA (or, for that matter, the several similar groups that arose in 17^th-century Europe): splintering in defeat into deserters and die-hards.  It may be possible to broker an accord between Damascus and the rebel groups in southern Syria, and possibly even with the Nusra Front, along the lines of the resolution of the Algerian civil war.  For that to happen, first ISIS would need to be defeated, and then both the regime and the rebels convinced that a military solution is out of reach.  Both are some way off.

I used to work as an intelligence analyst, a profession notorious for hedging bets.  But, if I were pressed to give a definite forecast, I would say that ISIS is unlikely to hang on as an organised force for more than another two years, and the defeat of ISIS is a precondition for any resolution of the Syrian civil war.  That said, the defeat of ISIS is contingent on the coalition against them maintaining its present loose unity, and on the ability of the Damascus regime to avoid further major losses of territory.

One effect of the war is that whatever remained of the Shi'a tradition of political quietude has been largely abandoned.  While Khomeini's advocacy of a commanding political role for the clergy remains controversial, pretty much all the leading Shi'a figures advocate some form of political activism.  The days when the response to regime oppression was to don one's death shroud and wait are gone.  This in itself makes the outcome of the civil wars pivotal for the wider Muslim community.

-- Peter T.

One thing at a time

Update (4/8): Just to mention that N. Lees, who has occasionally commented here, has resumed posting at his blog; his posts are always worth reading. 

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In the wake of the Iran nuclear 'framework' announcement, a couple of commenters at Internet sites I occasionally visit have suggested that Iran would make a good 'strategic partner' (in the words of this commenter) for the U.S., because the U.S. and Iran share interests in, among other things, opposing ISIS and Al-Qaeda.  That may be, but there are other issues (e.g., support of Hezbollah and of Assad) where U.S. and Iranian interests diverge.   Note also that when Iran was heavily involved in aiding the Iraqi army's recent effort to retake Tikrit from ISIS, the U.S. hung back; when Iraq requested U.S. airstrikes after the offensive had stalled, Iranian involvement in the offensive apparently diminished (I say "apparently" because I'm sure that the situation on the ground was extremely tangled and complicated and I did not even try to follow it closely). 

In short, I don't think the "let's make Iran our new strategic partner in the region" response makes a lot of sense.  It's the opposite of those who are groundlessly concerned that reaching a nuclear deal with Iran somehow amounts to recognizing its putative hegemony in the region.  Carts should not be put before horses.  Get the nuclear deal done and see how that goes, then worry about broader issues of the future of U.S.-Iran relations.  The amount of time it took to get the U.S.-India nuclear deal ironed out -- a civil (i.e. non-military) nuclear deal with a country that the U.S. has much better relations with than it does with Iran -- would suggest that no one should think implementing the details of the Iran 'framework' is going to be especially easy.

Choke points

If I had a working TV, which I don't, I would probably watch Charlie Rose's interview with Bashar al-Assad, scheduled to be aired tonight.  Presumably it will be available later for online viewing on the C. Rose website.  Btw, I was just at that website now, watching a small snippet of a Rose interview with Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and Int'l Studies, about the situation in Yemen.  Cordesman, asked by Rose about U.S. interests at stake, mentioned AQAP, and then he proceeded to mention that should Iran gain control, via air or naval bases in Yemen, of the choke points (Cordesman's phrase) of global commerce that are the Red Sea and Suez Canal, that would threaten U.S. economic interests.  True enough, I suppose, but one has to wonder whether Iran would risk trying to choke off the flow of commerce through the Suez Canal.  After all, it ain't 1956 any more, when the U.S. sided against Britain, France, and Israel in their spat with Egypt over the Canal.  A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then -- or perhaps I should say, through the canal.

Is "al-Qaeda-linked" a useful designation?

Joshua Keating suggests that because, for example, ISIS has "directly disobeyed" Zawahiri and clashed with Jabhat al-Nusra, it may not be useful to describe the former (or the latter) as 'al-Qaeda-linked.' He writes:

The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which is still being used to justify U.S. counterterrorist operations in places like Somalia, pertains to the groups that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Dangerous as ISIS may be for its region, it seems like a bit of a stretch to describe its goals as in concert with those of al-Qaida central, circa 2001. As Osama Bin Laden’s successor, Zawahiri, appears less and less in control of the actions of groups like ISIS, al-Shabaab, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and others that routinely fall under the “al-Qaida” umbrella in media accounts, it seems like it may be time to narrow our definitions a bit.

I understand the point but I think there may be some reason to treat groups as linked if they share a common ideology, even if their specific aims differ. But it's true that the ordinary U.S. consumer of news, hearing the phrase "al-Qaeda-linked," probably has no clear idea what that means. And there's another point: 'al-Qaeda central' itself, c.2014, may not share the goals of 'al-Qaeda central' c.2001. What are Zawahiri's current goals, other than to survive uncaught and to keep issuing videos?

'Three-way war' in western Iraq

A WaPo piece about the apparent fall of Fallujah to al-Qaeda (ISIS) paints a picture of a confused situation:

The capture of Fallujah came amid an explosion of violence across the western desert province of Anbar in which local tribes, Iraqi security forces and al-Qaeda-affiliated militants have been fighting one another for days in a confusingly chaotic three-way war.

A few thoughts: 

(1) The U.S. 'surge' of 2006-07 in Iraq depended on making allies of the local Sunni tribes in the west in the fight against al-Qaeda. Those groups still oppose each other, but what was more-or-less a two-way conflict then has now become a three-cornered one, as the tribes are apparently no longer willing to make any kind of common cause with the Iraqi government. This point leads to:

(2) Had Maliki's government made more of an effort to reach out to Sunnis and bring them into positions of responsibility/authority, the disaffection of the Sunni tribes in Anbar province might have been less and there might not have been the demonstrations against the Maliki government that led to the Iraqi security forces' response and thence to the current situation that the linked article describes. That's a lot of "mights," but it seems hard to avoid the inference that Maliki's shortsightedness, foolishness, fearfulness or a combination thereof have contributed to the current mess.

(3) It might be tempting to argue (as McCain and others no doubt will) that had the Obama admin adopted a more interventionist position on Syria, the al-Qaeda forces currently operating across the Iraq-Syria border would not have had the opportunity to reconstitute themselves in the way they have over the past year or so. But this assumes, first, that a U.S. intervention in Syria would have been able to alter the dynamics of the Syrian civil war fairly quickly and easily, and second, it assumes that if Assad had been removed from power, 'moderate' rebel forces in Syria would have been strong enough both to hold the reins of the state and to keep at bay al-Qaeda and/or the Nusra front and the other anti-Assad Islamist elements. Both these assumptions seem questionable (if not simply wrong).

Added later: Liz Sly (WaPo) has another piece on various Syrian rebel groups fighting against ISIS in northern Syria. (I will put in the link later.)

Noted

From NYRB (Oct. 24): Malise Ruthven reviews (h/t) Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone.

A brief excerpt:

Ahmed argues...that the acts of terror or violence directed at the U.S. or its allies are set off as much by revenge based on values of tribal honor as by extremist ideologies.... It seems fair to argue, as Ahmed does, that the values of honor and revenge inherent in the tribal systems contribute to jidahist extremism, and that by ignoring this all-important factor the U.S. has been courting disaster.

But according to Ruthven, Ahmed sees the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as "countertribal." Anyway, RTWT.

How to write a (somewhat misleading) headline

"Lebanon's Sunnis at risk of radicalization," blares this WaPo headline. But the opening graphs of the story have quotes from young Sunnis in the Beirut neighborhood in question saying they are not aligned with any group. But -- wait -- they're flying a black flag "inscribed with the Islamic creed" that is "often associated with the global al-Qaeda franchise." Oooh, the black flag. Cue the headline writers. "At risk of radicalization."  

An omission

CORRECTION (added 6/5/12): Awlaki and his son were killed in two different strikes, not the same one. See here. That no one corrected my mistake is an indication, if any were needed, of how few people read this blog.

Reports (WaPo, NewsHour) about the latest story involving AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) mention the U.S. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki last fall but don't mention that [a later strike, I should have said] killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son.

Quote of the day

Peter Tomsen, in the Fall 2011 World Policy Journal (p.89):

A more realistic and tougher American policy towards Pakistan should take into account a number of regional geopolitical trends.... Duplicating a geopolitical pattern in the 1990s, the closer the predominantly Pashtun Taliban get to the Amu Darya River, dividing Afghanistan from the former Soviet Stans, the more Russia, Central Asian states, India, and Iran will coordinate to assist Afghan Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara anti-Taliban resistance groups.... Counterproductive results of Pakistan's proxy wars in Afghanistan will also be felt at home as Pakistan surrenders the extensive regional economic benefits an Afghan peace accord could deliver to Pakistan.

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There's also some other interesting material in the same issue, e.g. "Kenya: Phoning It In" (on the transforming effects of money transfers by cell phone in Kenya -- pp. 8 and 9 of the hard-copy issue).

Why is the U.S. Senate (and one Senator in particular) so dismissive of the rights of terrorism suspects?

Update: The original post has been changed to correct an error (or two).


A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Oops.

I meant: a long time ago, i.e. before 9/11, one could assume that an ideologically middle-of-the-roadish Democratic Senator would support the notion that those suspected of crimes, even of terrorist activity, had certain rights, including the right not to be detained indefinitely without trial.

No longer. The Senate yesterday kept in the defense authorization bill provisions on detention that Pres. Obama has threatened to veto. According to this NYT article:

The most disputed provision would require the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. The provision would exempt American citizens, but would otherwise extend to arrests on United States soil. The executive branch could issue a waiver and keep such a prisoner in the civilian system.

A related provision would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens. It is intended to bolster the authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which lawmakers enacted a decade ago.

Among the supporters of these provisions is Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to an Agence-France Presse article which I saw at Raw Story (and which I'm not linking to because my browser is having trouble with it), Levin denied the provisions would harm civil liberties (!) and (the NYT story also has this) cited a Supreme Court ruling that a so-called enemy combatant, even if a U.S. citizen, may be held indefinitely without trial (this must be Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, but that case also said the detainee had to have the right to challenge his designation as an unlawful combatant).

Interestingly, the Pentagon itself is opposed to these provisions, according to the AFP piece, and the NYT says even some former Bush admin counterterrorism officials oppose them. Why is Levin supporting them? Why did he agree to their being part of the defense authorization package? He's not up for re-election until 2014, so immediate political considerations would not seem to be the answer. Has he always been this bad on these issues?

In case you missed this...

Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, was killed in a recent drone strike in Yemen that also killed the media chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). (H/t V. Yadav) This will raise further questions about drones and whether their increasing use accords with accepted principles of the law of armed conflict.

Related (added 10/27): Drone strikes in the Pakistan border regions earlier this month killed several al-Qaeda figures and a "top deputy" in the Haqqani network, according to this piece.

Krauthammer outdoes himself

Every time I think Charles Krauthammer cannot possibly write anything worse than the column he has just written, he surprises me: he writes something worse.

His column denying that the War on Terror was an overreaction to 9/11 contains the classic elements of a baseless argument: straw men, irrelevant rhetorical flourishes, and bad historical analogies. The analogies to World War II are especially ludicrous. He implies that "we" defeated al-Qaeda in the present period just as "we" defeated the Axis powers in World War II.

Just a couple of little problems with this: World War II was a conflict against an enemy far more formidable than al-Qaeda, and it was one which demanded some kind of sacrifice from huge swaths of the population. WW2 was fought by an army -- or I should say armies -- of conscripts, of draftees; the WoT has been fought by armies of professional soldiers, in the case of the U.S. increasingly separated from the population, and whose sacrifices have not been shared by the population at large.

Krauthammer points out that the financial collapse and Great Recession were not caused by the War on Terror. I don't know of anyone who claims they were. Krauthammer is taking statements that the WoT "bankrupted" the country a bit too literally; there are different kinds of bankruptcy, as anyone as well acquainted with the English language as Krauthammer must realize.

Most damagingly for Krauthammer's argument, the invasion of Iraq toppled an ugly regime to be sure, but one which had nothing to do with 9/11. If that doesn't constitute an overreaction, then the word has no meaning.

Krauthammer is an intelligent person who writes stupid things. There must be a name for this phenomenon, but if there isn't, then maybe it's time to coin a new verb: to Krauthammer.

The CIA and (alleged) fake vaccinations

Via DPTrombly:

In the latest incident in the rapid deterioration of the US-Pakistani relationship, the ISI have picked up a Pakistani doctor that it claims, and the Guardian reports, was involved in a horrifying breach of medical ethics. According to the Guardian’s sources, the CIA recruited this doctor to conduct a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad, hoping to corroborate bin Laden’s sister’s DNA with residents of the mysterious compound where US operators would later terminate the al Qaeda head. Chris Albon is dead on about the disastrous medical and public health implications of this story, which will seriously endanger health workers even if the story was a complete fabrication.

Trombly says he agrees with Albon but, on the other hand, also says this is what one should expect when a clandestine agency is tasked with eliminating a most-wanted enemy. However, I suspect Albon's point is that there are some lines that even a clandestine agency carrying out an important mission should not cross. Clearly the CIA wanted to be as sure as it could be that OBL was living in that compound. The question -- or a question -- thus is whether the fake vaccination campaign, assuming it occurred, was essential or whether the required near-certainty was obtainable by other, less ethically troubling means (e.g., surveillance, tracking the courier who left and returned to the compound periodically, etc.). The CIA is licensed to do a lot of dubious things, but a good baseline rule is that torture shouldn't be one of them and neither should this.

The OBL news

I've now read some of the NYT coverage. Interesting that it took U.S. intelligence, after determining the real name of Bin Laden's courier, two years to determine the general region in which he was working. I am rather amazed that OBL was living, with some of his family, in a big compound 35 miles from Islamabad (with no phone or Internet connection -- surely they should have put in a phone line to avoid suspicion), rather than in a remote hideout in the border regions. I guess this was on the maxim of 'hide in plain sight'. It seems reasonable to assume that someone(s) in the Pakistani military and/or government apparatus knew he was there, but for the moment this must remain an assumption.

P.s. Will this event change or further complicate the already somewhat strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan? K. Winecoff thinks not and I agree with that, for reasons I will have to put off explaining till later.

Update (added 5/7): There has been much discussion over the last few days about the fact that OBL did not have his AK-47 and pistol in his hands when he was shot; according to the NYT the weapons were "in arm's reach" but not in his hands. So he was unarmed. Perhaps he was expecting to be taken alive; it's hard to come up with another explanation. Some think this makes the action an extrajudicial execution and that he should have been captured and put on trial. I can see arguments on both sides but cannot get too exercised about this particular action in this particular case. (I do deprecate the celebratory reaction of some, which I think was unseemly and does nothing to enhance the U.S. image in the world.) Militating against capture-and-trial in this case was, among other things, the difficulty the U.S. has had in determining how and where to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad; the problems involved in trying OBL would have been even stickier. However, I think this should be treated as a special case; in general I'm not in favor of the killing of unarmed individuals, no matter what their crimes. More to say, but I'm tired and will leave it at that for now.

Critique of drone strikes: W. Post

Here.

The Ghailani verdict

"The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi Building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. Many were pinned under the rubble, and soon their cries arose in a chorus of fear and pain that would go on for days.... The toll was 213 dead...; 4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days."

Thus Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, describing the aftermath of the August 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi. There's no question that this and the bombing of the embassy in Dar es Salaam were reprehensible acts. Ayman al-Zawahiri had an al-Qaeda operative throw a stun grenade into the embassy courtyard in Nairobi, thereby drawing people to the windows. Wright notes: "One of the lessons Zawahiri had learned from his bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad three years before was that an initial explosion brought people rushing to the windows, and many were decapitated by flying glass when the real bomb went off." (Looming Tower, p.307)

Despite the depraved character of these acts, however, it's not clear that the conviction of Ahmed Ghailani in New York federal district court on only one count (of conspiracy) as opposed to 200-some counts matters very much. As it is, he may well get a life sentence. Meanwhile Zawahiri, the mastermind of the operations, continues to reside ... somewhere (maybe North Waziristan, maybe not...).

The real issue that should be under discussion is why it has proved so difficult to close Guatanamo Bay (a myopically reluctant Congress deserves a fair amount of blame, no doubt), not the issue of whether detainees should be tried in civilian courts or military tribunals. That has already been debated ad nauseum, positions have hardened, and arguably the main beneficiaries of the entire discussion have been the lawyers, legal analysts, and other talking heads whom it has kept employed. When the definitive history of this whole episode is written, complete with endless litigation, the Supreme Court striking down the original military tribunals legislation, Congress rewriting and re-passing it, etcetera, not to mention the meager results to date -- unless I'm forgetting something, exactly one detainee so far has completed the military tribunal process, pleading guilty in a plea deal [added later: I am forgetting something; it's more than one] -- it will go down as one of the more monumental wastes of resources spawned by the 'war on terror'. It is hard to avoid the feeling that there had to have been a better way than this drawn-out mess. The British government has even concluded that it must pay compensation to several British citizens who were held in Guantanamo. And the talking heads on American TV go on discussing this is in little amnesiac bites, failing to see the larger picture and failing to remind people that they have been having these same factitious debates for years. All in all, a rather appalling spectacle.

Is U.S. national security really at stake in Afghanistan? If not, we should get out

I was more-or-less inclined to give Pres. Obama the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while, when he announced the so-called Afghan surge in December of last year. He argued that the mission was vital to U.S. national security and that the commitment of 30,000 additional soldiers was designed to stop the Taliban's momentum and give the Afghan security forces the necessary time to increase their capacity.

In hindsight, perhaps I did not think hard enough about a couple of basic issues: (1) how closely is stopping the Taliban's momentum etc. linked, in a practical sense, to the goal of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda?; and (2) if the answer to (1) is "not very closely," then why is the U.S. committing so many resources to fighting the Taliban in the first place? Put more simply: would it make it any real difference to U.S. national security if the Taliban re-took the essential levers of power (such as they are) in the country and re-established themselves as the government in Kabul? I am more and more inclined to think the answer is no it wouldn't, in which case it becomes more and more difficult to justify the current U.S./ISAF policy.

In a recent post on his blog, Stephen Walt writes:

As our numbers fall [i.e., when U.S. troops start to be drawn down, starting presumably some time in 2011], the Taliban will regroup, Pakistan will help rearm them covertly, and the struggle for power in Afghanistan will resume. Afghanistan's fate will once again be primarily in the hands of the Afghan people and the nearby neighbors who meddle there for their own reasons. I don't know who will win, but it actually won't matter very much for U.S. national security interests. [emphasis added]

If who wins doesn't matter very much for U.S. national security interests, then I, for one, will find it increasingly hard to watch on the NewsHour those photos and names of U.S. military personnel who have been killed. I'm willing to stipulate that the Taliban leadership is a nasty and repressive lot and that a victory for them would be bad (to put it mildly) for Afghan democrats (small "d") and for women, among others. But the sacrifice of American lives at the scale on which it is occurring can only be justified if American vital national security interests are at stake. If, as Walt suggests, the U.S. is eventually going to concoct a fig-leaf peace settlement and then persuade ourselves that we won (if, indeed, this is the best possible outcome given current conditions), it would probably be better to get out right now.

Historical analogies are easy to misuse, and I have been wary of analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam. (After all, the misuse of historical analogies contributed to the U.S. getting into Vietnam in the first place.) However, it's worth recalling that whatever one thought of the 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, it was never in the cards that, once U.S. forces had left Vietnam, they would be re-introduced to prevent the 'fall' of Saigon. The Kissinger-Nixon strategy of pursuing "peace with honor" -- hugely costly in terms of Vietnamese and American lives, and costly too for the Cambodians and Laotians -- appears pointless (indeed, flatly immoral) in retrospect. Walt is worried that we have forgotten this piece of history (among others). I continue to be wary of historical analogies when they are mobilized for use in policy debates, but one can be wary of analogies and at the same time acknowledge that there is some wisdom in Santayana's dictum that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Strategy against al-Qaeda

Via this blogger, I came across Nicholas Lemann's review in The New Yorker of various recent books on terrorism. One of the books Lemann discusses is Audrey Kurth Cronin's How Terrorism Ends (Princeton Univ. Press). According to the review, Cronin urges, among other things, trying to separate local grievances from al-Qaeda's global ideology:

" 'Bin Laden and Zawahiri have focused on exploiting and displacing the local concerns of the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, and many others, and sought to replace them with an international agenda,' Cronin writes. The United States should now try to 'sever the connection between Islamism and individualized local contexts for political violence, and then address them separately.' It should work with these local groups, not in an effort to convert them to democracy and love of America but in order to pry them away, one by one, from Al Qaeda. ('Calling the al-Qaeda movement "jihadi international," as the Israeli intelligence services do,' she writes, 'encourages a grouping together of disparate threats that undermines our best counterterrorism. It is exactly the mistake we made when we lumped the Chinese and the Soviets together in the 1950s and early 1960s, calling them "international Communists." ')"

Cutting the connection between al-Qaeda's international agenda and its local affiliates sounds sensible, especially since the affiliates already appear to be at least partly driven by local concerns. Take the recent suicide bombing aimed at the British ambassador in Yemen, presumably carried out by al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula. The intended target was a high-ranking Western diplomat, but that in itself does not mean that the motive for the attack was a grandiose global ideology, as opposed to a desire to strike at a perceived ally and patron of the Yemeni government. And the recent bombings against Shias by al-Qaeda-in-Iraq seem more like a response to the killing of that group's two top leaders than part of an effort to further the establishment of a new caliphate.

The U.S. press, citing intelligence sources, has drawn a portrait of al-Qaeda's central leadership as increasingly isolated somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and increasingly unable to communicate effectively with its various branches. The connections that Cronin calls for severing on the plane of ideology may thus already be tenuous on the level of organization -- and that in turn may furnish an opening for pressing forward with a strategy of "address disparate threats separately."

Lowther's linkages; or, could a nuclear Iran be good for the U.S. and the Middle East?

In a recent New York Times op-ed ("Iran's Two-Edged Bomb," Feb.9), Adam Lowther argues that a nuclear Iran might be a blessing in disguise for the U.S. and the Middle East. He should have settled for making the point that a nuclear Iran would pose less of a threat than is generally supposed. Instead Lowther produces an intricate and implausible linkage scenario that makes the most convoluted aspects of Bismarck's diplomacy look like tiddlywinks by comparison.

Here's the gist of his argument: (1) a nuclear Iran threatens countries in its region, including, e.g., Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states; (2) the U.S. could offer security guarantees to these countries mainly in the form of "a Middle East nuclear umbrella" and in return (3) the U.S. would demand: (a) wide-ranging democratic and other reforms in Arab autocracies that would drain some of the major breeding grounds of Islamist militancy; (b) higher oil production and lower oil prices from the oil-producing countries and (c) cost-sharing by those under the 'umbrella' for the expense of maintaining it. The result of all this, says Lowther, could be defeat of al-Qaeda and other similar groups; "a victory in the war on terrorism"; lower oil prices; a "needed shot in the arm" for the U.S. defense industry as weapons systems are exported to U.S. allies (read: client states), etc.

Now I happen to think that Western governments and foreign policy establishments exaggerate the potential bad consequences of Iran's getting nuclear weapons. But Lowther's scenario rests on some weird assumptions. First is the notion that trading a U.S. nuclear umbrella for fundamental reforms in Saudi Arabia and other allies is something these allies would go for; if they felt as threatened by a nuclear Iran as Lowther says they would, why couldn't they turn to China or Russia for security guarantees instead of the U.S.? Unlike the U.S., China and Russia would not demand those pesky domestic reforms; instead they would probably be content with economic rewards and concessions. Secondly, Lowther seems to think it would be a wonderful thing to create a Cold War-style regional balance in the Middle East, with a nuclear Iran playing the role of the USSR and Saudi Arabia et al. playing the role of Western Europe under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. How this arrangement, even if it did lead to domestic reforms in the Arab autocracies, would result in the demise of Islamist militancy is something of a mystery. Doesn't Lowther recall that one of al-Qaeda's main complaints was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia -- i.e., in proximity to some of Islam's holiest sites -- during and after the Gulf War? The notion that the extension of a U.S. nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia would persuade al-Qaeda and similar groups that they should give up the struggle, because the price of said umbrella would be a fundamental transformation of the Saudi polity, doesn't really compute. Where is the evidence for the argument that autocracy breeds discontent which breeds terrorism; therefore get rid of autocracy and you are on the road to getting rid of terrorism? Are those attracted to the jihadist worldview really interested in seeing a parliamentary democracy in Saudi Arabia? To be sure, they want to remove the current Saudi regime, but I was under the impression that it was that regime's links to the U.S. that is one of their prime grievances.

The main argument of Lowther's column has the feeling of a fantasy, of a Rube Goldberg contraption dreamed up at a desk. Instead of arguing that a nuclear Iran could lead to all good things from "victory" in the "war on terror" to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Lowther should have written a column about why in fact a nuclear Iran poses less of a threat than is widely thought, how states that acquire nuclear weapons generally do not become irrational or insane in their foreign policy behavior, and why the West should therefore not be getting its knickers into such a twist over the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Now Lowther does make the point at the end of the piece that "unless the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, and his Guardian Council chart a course that no other nuclear power has ever taken, Iran should become more responsible once it acquires nuclear weapons rather than less." But this sensible sentence has been preceded, unfortunately, by so many non-sensible sentences that I doubt many people will still be reading.

Soufan on Al Qaeda in Yemen

Ali Soufan, FBI case agent for the USS Cole investigation from 2000 to 2005, writes about al Qaeda in Yemen and observes that those who were jailed for their roles in the Cole bombing have been released. While recognizing the problems Yemeni officials are dealing with, he urges the U.S. to hold them more accountable in return for the U.S. aid Yemen gets.