...and rumors of war

The world appreciates us more now, "...because of the new image that has been projected by Obama". I actually hope that's true. I know it's true of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi - I heard him announce as much to the entire world just the other day, immediately following a speech to the world by the (probably unappreciative) subject of his adoration. And hell, I was actually on active duty when we dropped a surgical strike on that maniac, just to send a message and reduce Libya's ability to support and train terrorists. He got that message loud and clear - along with everyone else with a radio or a TV. We wanted to kill him, too - but you can't win 'em all.

But that's ancient history anyway, and not the topic of this post. The world loves us now. I'd like to believe that. I'd love to see it demonstrated some day. It's a happy thought - but I wouldn't bet my life on it. I hope the guy who spoke to the United Nations before Kadafi did feels the same way, no matter what he said on the campaign trail. So even when I see reports from a "senior administration official" that indicate otherwise I remain skeptical. But good PR stuff, that.

Except when those reports are part of a supposedly serious discussion of the foundation of our national security I start to think unhappy thoughts.

Recent claims of significant success against al-Qaeda have become part of White House deliberations about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, centering on a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander there, for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign that will require more U.S. troops. Discussions began in earnest Tuesday as senior national security and military officials met with President Obama

Those within the administration who have suggested limiting large-scale U.S. ground combat in Afghanistan, including Vice President Biden, have pointed to an improved counterterrorism effort as evidence that Obama's principal objective -- destroying al-Qaeda -- can be achieved without an expanded troop presence.

There's certainly much good news in this report regarding our ability to infiltrate, track, target, and "surgically strike" al Qaeda (or other terrorist groups, we presume). Obviously such efforts should be carried on. But regardless of the degree of faith we want to put in those efforts (even if it's enough to overlook annoying and certainly explainable details like "Barrett's remarks stood in contrast with an assessment he made in June...") nothing here stands as an argument against full commitment to other concurrent efforts. Confidence is a good thing (I've learned not to underestimate American soldiers, for example) but the odds of looking back with regret on a decision to put all our eggs in any one basket remain high.

But what an amazing cultural shift is described here:

Barrett, in a speech Tuesday to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that al-Qaeda is "losing credibility" among potential supporters and recruits because its recent efforts "have not awed people" and are "not up to the standard of 9/11." As the years have passed since the 2001 attacks, he said, al-Qaeda "hasn't really made a connection to a new generation" of young Muslims who have little recollection of the events and are less interested in religion.

How nice if that were true. But the majority of young Muslims actually aren't attracted to life as suicide bombers and mujahideen - and never have been. But enough were motivated by the US tendency to withdraw from direct conflict and rely on "surgical strikes" throughout the 1990s to make al Qaeda look like an attractive winner with a hellagood game plan - a group that could pull off 9/11. It is our post-9/11 behavior that has changed that perception, it's our demonstration of resolve that has directly undermined their attraction. And while we've certainly killed many of them on battlefields that don't require much travel on their part, it's our commitment to the humanitarian side of the mission - even if it has to be accomplished by men with guns, even as that's used against us, and even as we suffer casualties, too - that gives the would-be jihadist pause. Call it war, call it counterinsurgency, call it nation building, call it armed humanitarian work or an attempt to respond to the question why do they hate us - call it what you will, but think deeply before calling it quits. The motivational speech required to flip that switch back to 'on' had best be a damned good one, the need for it is predictable.

The desire to free up defense funds for other purposes is undeniable, too - health care advocates and champions of other domestic social causes share that motivation with manufacturers of F22 components, cruise missiles, and other big ticket items. Certainly enough of the latter are dispersed in enough congressional districts to draw the attraction of a broad coalition of elected officials. (For the rest of you: thanks for your support. Next term - promise.) Outside of specific interest groups of varying degrees of influence, arguments to quit the bloody field of battle (and return to the strategy that created al Qaeda in the first place) have broad popular appeal in the United States - and will contribute much to an already intense desire that overwhelms our ability to acknowledge that last parenthetical aside as exactly what's being discussed here. Arguments that "we're really much better at it now" should be received with equal amounts of appreciation and skepticism. "Keep up the good work" is exactly the right response.

And as attractive as a brief respite from all that soldiering on might seem - regardless of your political persuasion, exactly how much are you willing to bet on this:

The senior administration official said that more "surgical" missile attacks on terrorist leaders in their inaccessible Pakistani mountain sanctuaries and elsewhere had been increasingly successful and had largely avoided the civilian casualties that had been a source of anti-American sentiment...

The official also pointed to "progress we've made in other places," particularly in Somalia, where U.S. Special Forces conducted a raid this month...

But he maintained that other governments and intelligence services "have been much more amenable to cooperating with Washington because of the new image that has been projected" by Obama. "I don't want to criticize the previous administration, because they were equally motivated," he said, "but cooperating too closely with Americans at that time tainted them."

..."Over the last nine months . . . the environment has been much more conducive to cooperation."

For me, not that much. I'd like it to be true, I wish it was, but hope is not a strategy.

Two previous discussions on this topic here and here, and reproduced below.

April 4, 2009
This New Kind of War

Tom Ricks says T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War is "The book to read about the Korean War"...

...if only for one passage: "You may fly over a land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life -- but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud." This should hang on a wall somewhere in Washington.

Perhaps it should. I read this book while I was in Korea, sometime around 1991. From then until 2003 the US strove mightily to ignore that axiom with regards to Iraq. One can argue the motives, but it's undeniable that a (rarely noticed) twelve-year standoff war followed our removal of troops from Iraqi soil after Operation Desert Storm. Likewise, that the war intensified from primarily diplomatic to increasingly military throughout that period, achieving maximum lethality during the final years of the Clinton administration - all with no indication that its stated goal of "regime change in Iraq" (downgraded to "containment" for 1999 even as near-daily kinetic strikes continued) was achievable. Lest anyone mistake this for Clinton bashing it's worthwhile to recall that this long-distance war began with a deliberate choice by the first Bush administration not to march on Baghdad at the head of a very large coalition of the willing.

After more than a decade his son would decide that Fehrenbach had it right. As a result of acting on that decision, one could draw a conclusion that the only answer to the question "how long does it take to achieve goals in a standoff war?" currently available is "unknown - but twelve years is not enough".

But Fehrenbach was right on other related points, too - as other results of acting on that same decision would reveal.

The people of the West - stunned by reports of failure and retreat in the earliest days of the Korean conflict - had changed, he tells us from 1963. "They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will."

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of truth why the United States was almost defeated.

Nothing has happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand - at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life -- but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

Fehrenbach offered and rejected an alternative, back in 1963:

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order - our own decent order - in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

And so "pushbutton war has its place", Fehrenbach argues - and will in fact be a popular option in a future - as he saw it from 1963 - wherein Americans care not for wars and rumors of wars - - with a few exceptions.

"There is another kind of conflict - crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose... If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.

Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war - against militarism, against fascism, against Bolshevism...

Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions - as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except in this world there are tigers.

But not the sort we would care to confront face to face. If Fehrenbach was correct, the political ramifications would be too extreme for any leader to actually execute any option other than long range warfare a la Iraq in the 1990's. Post-2003 events may be perceived as indication that this is so.

Elsewhere on our modern internets today, other discussions:

The humanitarian benefits of precision targeting are far more obvious than the more remote and abstract suppositions of their humanitarian costs. Their direct policy consequence is to introduce greater discrimination in targeting than full-scale military assault and large-scale war permit, through targeted killing using high technology. There is a clear humanitarian advantage favoring the use of targeted killing over full-scale war. Advancing technology allows for more discrete surveillance and therefore more precise targeting that is finally better able to minimize collateral civilian damage.

The result is a strategic incentive for targeted killing, for Predator strikes, and for increasing the quality of technology to make targeted killings both more precision targeted and more standoff. Precision targeting and standoff delivery are each independently desirable and, in combination, considerably increase the incentive. The Obama policy team did not quite run on a policy of targeted killing - but it did run on a policy of taking the fight to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in a targeted way.

Plus we won't track the mud from our boots on our nice new clean floors.

September 16, 2009
This kind of war

You may have heard...

Witnesses said foreign troops swept into the town on helicopters, fired missiles from an attack helicopter, killed Nabhan and another terrorist, and captured two others after wounding them, Mareeg reported. Nabhan's body was recovered, ABC News later reported.

...or you may not have heard. Apparently Kanye West chose that moment to seize a microphone, prompting a brief quip from the president that was twittered to the public by a reporter while congress voted to censure a politician who called a politician a liar and expert panels were formed for on-camera discussions of racism in America as news of the suppression of the news about ACORN was... well, you get the picture.

And frankly, those involved in that page 3 sort of story shun the spotlight others seek anyway. But much (perhaps more than many would be comfortable with...) is revealed in this account:

Navy Seals from US Special Operations Forces conducted a raid in southern Somalia on Monday that killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of 4 co-conspirators wanted in the 2002 bombing of an Israel owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, two senior U.S. military officials told Fox News.

Ten days ago President Obama signed the Execute Order for Nabhan, who since 2006 was on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists. He was also wanted for the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998.
<...>
Intelligence operatives had been monitoring Sabhan prior to the attack. The helicopters passed once, firing on the vehicle, and then circled back around to retrieve the body so they could make a positive identification, according to an official.

One wonders at the source of such detail.

It's the stuff that a decade ago would be found in a Hollywood blockbuster. Drama: young, determined president sanctions action (perhaps determining after deep internal debate that sometimes the needs of the many trump many other considerations - but even so he harbors doubt) and men of action handle the rest. (One of them is a comedian of a sort, cracking jokes all the way and keeping spirits high...) We cut back to the home front from time to time to depict the experience of the wives and kids of our men of action, but that may be cut in final. Will Smith has reached an age where he can play the leader of such men. Is he available? Phone his agent, let's do lunch...

That's the sort of movie the very real, spotlight-shunning men of action would join their fellow Americans in viewing, perhaps afterward confiding that while the movie was great it ain't really like that.

Beyond entertainment for the masses, it's also the sort of activity that many scholars and men-at-arms agree would make a fine approach to prosecution of what we used to call the war on terror. "Off shore" (on land or sea) - occasional strikes based on good, solid intel from our boys on the scene and eyes in the sky; sometimes carried out by men who pull triggers at short range (the secretary will not confirm or deny) and often by those who use more remote controls. (We can match our capabilities to your time requirements. We can discuss the risk involved with each of the available options - but if you're busy a simple "get it done" will do.) No photos of flag-draped coffins or of soldiers in their dying moments to trouble the minds of those who pass the newsstands on their way from here to there or on the internet or cable TV. For that and other reasons such an approach is tempting, we must admit. And regardless of what any may say, we harbor thoughts at various depths wherein such men who do such things are admired, and we wonder could we do the same?

Perhaps we should try fighting only that sort of long range, off shore war. It is the kind of war that makes heroes, not the sort that wears down armies, chews up soldiers and spits them out.

The sort of war that inspires stories - like this recent one from Pakistan:

Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.

The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.

And it's the kind of war that in the more distant past simply inspired...

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

...Osama bin Laden's call for jihad against America in 1998. From his view, that sort of war was evidence of failure at others, a weakness that could be exploited - if nothing else at least as a recruiting tool:

After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. ...America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers.

We, of course, thought we were on a humanitarian mission at the time - not some sort of war. We know what war is - war takes two sides, ours gets to debate it, vote on it, - and not one of us had voted for that kind of war.

Given the chance, many of us would vote no war - and others perhaps for trying out this kind of war: "And finally, your recommendation is sound," retired Marine Corps General Chuck Krulak recently wrote to George Will, responding to the noted pundit's announcement that it's "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan". Here's the recommendation he meant:

America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

I would put "hunter-killer teams" along the borders and in suspected al Qaeda strongholds. I would support them with intelligence, logistics thru use of parasail's, responsive airpower (needs to be close), armed and unarmed (fitted with cameras, infrared, etc) drones,"reach back" capability for cruise missiles, and other capability as needed. The H-K teams should be given minimal rules of engagement... when they identify the bad guys, they need to be empowered to take them out.

They are wise and learned men.

And here's a letter to the President of the United States from (by my signature count) 38 other wise and learned men. While they don't offer the level of detailed alternative expected from a Marine (perhaps each would have his own advice on that, against which others might argue) they unanimously support an anything but this kind of war:

Today, we are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached from considerations of length, cost, and consequences. Its rationale is becoming murkier and both domestic and international support for it is waning. Respectfully, we urge you to focus U.S. strategy more clearly on al Qaeda instead of expanding the mission into an ambitious experiment in state building.

These men, we are told, are Realists.

Perhaps we should remove ourselves from that useless patch of dirt we call Afghanistan, to more welcoming places nearby. Perhaps we should send in the occasional drone or HK team. Obviously (at least, if you haven't forgotten the Somalia story we started with) we do that now, but perhaps only that is better. Maybe we could provide them some humanitarian assistance, too. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps we should bring all the troops home to be with their families. They deserve that, don't they?

We don't need that kind of war. We don't need any kind of war. We don't need American mothers crying over the graves of their sons or bereaved American fathers outraged that we aren't acting tough enough... let's turn away so that we never have to see such things again.

We're safe enough over here. And besides, we have our own problems - our own differences to resolve.

And plenty of candles.

Still more - because there's still more to consider on this issue:

"...as desirable as it may seem to make such stand off efforts the centerpiece (or only piece) of our efforts, it's worth noting there are those who would prefer it be very much restricted:" Attractors (and their detractors)

And a closer look at what we are doing in Afghanistan, and other consequences of stopping not addressed above: Unkind of war