The process began slowly. But with the aid of computers, databases, and the mathematics of topology the process began to gather speed. At some point analysts probably began to understand the al-Qaeda network structure better than the terror organization’s operators themselves, in much the same way as Google may “know” the Internet better than the individual nodes that make it up. With increasingly rapidity, perhaps exponential rapidity, the gaps were closed.
This meant that, after a terrorist hideout was raided, information found there could generate additional raids in less than an hour. The new raids often caught terrorists who had not yet heard of the earlier raid that turned up the data putting them on the American radar. Speed was a weapon, and it took years to develop a superior amount of it.
The theory was known. RAND wrote in 2007 that “as the U.S. military transforms to an information-based force, it will need processes and methods to collect, combine, and utilize the intelligence that is generated by its assets. … The data are assumed to come from a variety of sources, whether a sensor on a platform; a person seeing, reading, or hearing something; or some other source in the battlespace, all of which can be incorporated into the operational picture.” But it took time to develop.
When Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan he was no longer facing an enemy he would have recognized from 2001. In the intervening 10 years they had created the architecture to beat him at his own game. Once the SEALs were through the final protective door he may have dimly realized their goal was not simply to shoot him but to seize every piece of information on the premises. That he did not have the time to destroy it was a regret he took to his grave.
Thus seizing all that data in bin Laden’s house provided thousands of links, and data on who did what for who and when. Added to existing data, and using the specialized software and databases, will provide sufficient information to launch more raids. They are probably already underway. But you won’t hear about it until somewhat later, because more valuable information, and suspects, will be picked up and lead to still more raids.
Bin Laden had done everything humanly possible to survive. His wife said he had not left his compound in five years. He stayed away from windows. Burned his trash. He surrounded himself with walls nearly 20 feet high. Bin Laden strictly limited the means of communication that led back to his safe house.
But extreme as these measures were, the firewalls they provided were not enough. Slender as those links were, OBL was still connected, however tenuously, to the larger network. And on that network his enemy watched at every point. It scanned the earth from overhead; it sucked up transmissions from landlines and the electromagnetic spectrum; it followed his human operatives from hidden vantages. And that enemy assembled all this information together until it ultimately found him. It was his death sentence. In al-Qaeda, bin Laden believed he had created an impenetrable network. It turned out not to be good enough to keep out the penetrators.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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Knock knock…
Who’s there?
Candygram…
Bin Laden built his own prison that could not keep the SEALs out but the dep prison was the one in his mind. He like hundreds of millions was trapped in a self reinforcing recursive pity and aggression network that has so far proven impervious to intervention. There is some flaw in the human neural network. Perhaps there was some evolutionary benefit to developing this trait. How can we unravel and open up the inner nodes?
When I click on the Ajax Edit link it usually comes up blank but this time when I wanted to fix my typo the box displayed the PJM subscription pop-up that obscures the page every 5th refresh. Perhaps we have isolated the source of the bad html that is causing the conflict.
W: another brilliant essay on what’s really going on. Being but one node in the larger net(s), it’s hard for me to “see” the topology. You have a way of finding or making the “traceroutes” in many knowledge topologies. Highly interesting and useful to change how we look at what’s going on around us all. Which is transformative.
Blast from Past: self-imposed prisons, indeed. I share your puzzlement at what possible evolutionary advantage there could be, in a pity-resentment feedback loop. Speculating wildly, the narrative (to self or peers) about “victimhood” (a) is efficient (“they did it to me/us”) and (b) selectively overcomes moral inhibition to capture resources (“we’re just taking back what they stole/hurting them the way they hurt us”). Which, until the rest of suffering humanity recognizes the threat and responds to it, can produce lopsided gains from aggression. Just a thought.
“Bin Laden had done everything humanly possible to survive.”
The Poe story “The Masque of the Red Death” comes to mind.
What I wonder is how these concepts will affect the U.S. techniques for more conventional warfare.
Before WWII the US Army Air Corps thought they had figured out how to do “network” strategic warfare. Use pinpoint strategic bombing to destroy key “nodes” in the enemy’s war making capability and the war would be won. Destroy his ball bearing manufacturing capability, for example, and he would be crippled.
It did not work, not as they intended. But it did in another way, and had some important side effects as well.
The Panther was a terrific tank. And at an average of around 930 miles on the speedometer it was worn out. Many of the Sherman tanks that drove into Normandy already had nearly 1000 miles on them just from doing training exercises, and they would last for thousands of more miles. It was a good thing for the Germans that we came to them; they could never have gotten to the fight otherwise.
What happens when network-warfare is applied to nation-versus-nation engagements? In WWII commando raids to steal radars and such and missions to assassinate enemy leaders were the exception; will they become the norm?
Often times when organizations are compromised from the top, it is hard to visualize the number and magnitude of the fissure lines that permeate downward from an event like this. Compromises from lower levels are more easily compartmentalized.
Last night on a cool Houston evening (which we don’t often see), some friends who we have turned on to BC were discussing how blessed we are to have Wretchard turn out high quality pieces of insight and prose on a daily basis. We couldn’t think of another print journalist alive today who is as prolific.
I wonder why we announced the raid so soon after it happened. That seemed a mistake to me. We could have gathered and exploited the trove of intelligence we garnered with many, most, or all of our enemies unaware they had been compromised. It may have also given the Pakistanis a reason to cover up that a raid had even occurred since they would not want it widely known they had harbored Bin Laden. That would have given us even more time to design our operations and inflict the greatest damage to our enemies while having an ace in the hole with which to beat concessions out of the Pakistanis in future disputes.
It would also have been good to take Bin Laden alive but later kill him after we had tortured everything we could get out of him. I would like to think that is what we are doing now since we have only claimed DNA results and not released any pictures. But it seems counterproductive to crow about our treasure trove of intel if that is how we were playing the situation.
You never want to chance being too clever but it seems to me we made a LOT of mistakes here in the aftermath of the raid. Even in the planning and execution of the raid we had a lot of luck. Who would have thought we could monitor Bin Laden for as long as we did so close to all of those military installations without drawing suspicion? How many things could have gone wrong staging a raid into a putative ally’s sovereign territory? How easy would it have been to end up in a firefight with the Pakistanis? Who would have suspected Bin Laden would be so ill prepared for an attack? In the end we just had to put our fate in fortune’s hands. In war it is possible for an operation to be ill-conceived and yet still turn out to be a tremendous success. I can’t help but think that there was a good bit of that going on here.
Usually people who are targets move about constantly, never staying the same place for two nights in a row. Here we had a guy hole up in a single room for 5 years. But how the hell could we have known he would stay in one place while we spent month after month trying to decide when or if to act? Maybe our intel was a lot better than it seems. Maybe we knew he had not left that compound for years and had no intention of doing so. But each day’s delay chanced exposing the whole operation. With the ISI being co-opted it would have been easy for word to leak out or for them to find out and for them then to stage a counter operation. They could have turned the whole place into an orphanage given just a little notice of a raid or bombing run.
I guess fortune smiles on the bold but we had a strange mixture of being bold vs being being indecisive. That balance is the nature of the intelligence game. You can never be sure. We probably had as much or more intel that Saddam had wmd’s as we had that Osama was in that compound.
Now that I have written this I realize that maybe much of the delay was from us HOPING that Osama would leave his compound and move to somewhere that would allow us to kill him with less chance of repercussions to our relationship with Pakistan. You can second guess yourself endlessly in these types of situations.
Remember Alan Funt (?)
“Hocus pocus, you’re in focus, its your lucky day,
Smile! You’re on Candid Camera.”
Steeple @ 6: “fissure lines that permeate downward…” Indeed. We may never know the full topology of OBL’s network but many of the links must have been “directional,” i.e. he knew the other guy, and the other guy knew another guy; but that far node had little/no knowledge going “back/up” the network. Ideally when we review the thumb drives and notebooks or whatever we collected in our little panty raid last Sunday night, we will be looking into an ant farm where each of them sees only its immediate surroundings or near neighbors, but –apart from misting the glass with our too-eager breath– we will see a great deal.
Just a little O/T I am finishing (finally) Mark Bowden’s “Guests of the Ayatollah” about the Iranian hostage crisis 1979-80. Full of good perspectives on (a) the turbulent political dynamics of such events: the students and mullahs and international diplomats and Carter’s Presidency ended up “stuck” in a chaotic and suboptimal loop; (b) the political price paid for failure both passive (over a year of impasse: it wore the electorate out) and active (the debacle at Desert One: if the mission had succeeded, Carter would very likely have nailed a second term); and (c) the insane courage of the Delta Force team to undertake the attempted rescue mission. This was 1980: no GPS, no stealth, no UAV support. A much bigger jump (from the Nimitz in the Gulf, many hundreds of miles into Iran) with much thinner logistics (a fuel-up at Desert One, a few operatives in Tehran to buy trucks and help hide the team). A much bigger team (130-plus commandos, 8 helicopters, 4 C-130′s) to handle a much more complex mission (sneak into a city of millions of rabidly hostile Iranians, make a surprise forced entry into a 27-acre embassy compound and secure it against an unknown armed force of guards already present, find and rescue over 50 hostages at unknown locations within the compound and bring them out of the compound, out of Tehran, and out of Iran safely). The connection between that failure and our recent success is strong. We learned how to do better, much better; and we owe the generations of special ops teams a big vote of thanks for creating this kind of capability and constantly raising the game.
An understanding of our information warfare strategy, even before it was fully developed, was probably behind the agitprop campaign against the Patriot Act.
So when a suspicious person comes to the attention of the troops, they get his finger prints, a photo, a record of his voice, and a DNA sample. He may unknowingly get a RFID tag planted on or in him. They ask him who is related to. He may or may not be truthful about that but the wrong answers also give a pattern, there will be a list of names. He’s in the data base now. If he turns up on a camera the computer facial recognition program says “hello!” If he touches anything with bare hands he’ll leave a marker. A war zone dream and a domestic nightmare.
rnie G #10:
I really wonder how much of the Left’s faux hysteria over this and that relative to the war is due to real concerns and how much is enemy action. For the Vietnam War there was a clear linkage; any action that was effective against the communists set off Certain People in the US. Poke Hanoi with a sharp stick and some people in the US screamed.
And I wonder if the Left fears most of all the lessons learned from the war coming home for domestic use. Simply the recognition that All Cultures Are Not Equally Valid would destroy them.
And we…who leave comments here…can our enemies find us?
BC’ers have likely seen this article from Foreign Policy (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/it_takes_a_network). McChrystal makes many of same points W does.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1970/04/25/1970_04_25_034_TNY_CARDS_000296499
What Civil Cold Warrior said @ 7.
What good does it do to pull off the greatest hit ever then go on facebook and tell everybody how cool you are. Just do it. Keep your mouth shut. Go do the next one.
A long chat with Bin Laden might have been useful. But, then, we’d have to admit we whacked him. Maybe…
Maybe it would be better to never say a word. Let survivors in his compound talk all they want. Ignore all rumors and questions. It might drive a lot of people nuts. Kinda like a birth certificate thing.
If you HAVE to say anything at all, why not a simple announcement that this would not have been possible without the help of members of the xxxxx unit/department of the Paki govt or mullah xxxx?
I believe that God sometimes acts in this world through men, that no matter how hard we try to escape; He is there. In the end God is there to help those who love Him, and in the end He is also there to destroy those who hate Him. The psalmist said it best:
“O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, But behold, O Lord, You know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me…”
We caught Osama in the World Wide Web.
You want information warfare? Facebook and Twitter. We’ve used them to capture the new Islamic generations. Islam is doctrinally decentralized and universal. Well, Facebook and Twitter are more “Islamic” in those terms, than anything in the Koran.
Why not? I still say what brought down the Soviets and the Berlin Wall was consumer goods including things like the Xerox machine and the Sony Walkman, two information appliances of their day and age, along with information warfare like satellite broadcasts of Dallas and Knight Rider.
Richard,
Remember this: Delete from TbPerps Where….
I sent this around MarineLand datacenters. True, CONUS, but…
Also, love the fact that it was syntactically correct, used Hungarian Naming convention, and was appropriately CamelBack!!!
So in the end, is the “fight” against Islamic terror not much more than a fancy law enforcement action? If it is more akin to the “war against drugs” than the wars against German and Japanese supremacism, it seems inevitable that we will continue to suffer from Islamic terrorism without end.
Of course, the ineluctable magnet of money draws an endless stream of drug cartels into the extremely profitable business of drug smuggling, so what is the “draw” for Muslims, if the analogy is to hold somewhat true? At first blush, it seems like little profiteth the man who gets into the business of smuggling Islamic terror to the corners of the globe. But is this true? Islam seems to take almost everything away from it’s adherents, including their humanity, their free autonomy, and their ability to accumulate wealth unless it’s through the thieving of infidel loot (through oil and security shakedown schemes). But perhaps Islam possesses even stronger magnetic attractions to Muslims than the draw of limitless money to the drug barons.
I’d argue that Islam, which ultimately aims to dominate the world, actually has more draw for it’s adherents than money to the drug kingpin. After all, a drug kingpin cannot dream ultimately of world dominance, but Muslims dream of this every Friday at their mosques across this benighted planet, and if they are especially ‘good’ Muslims (hate infidels sufficiently, follow the austere rules Allah sufficiently, terrorize and spread Islam sufficiiently), then they are promised an astoundingly corporeal and bointiful afterlife as well… That’s some snow job!
Islamic culture imposes deplorable conditions on it’s votaries, and one is forced to wonder why Muslims continue to adhere to their seemingly failed Islam? In fact, the worse the conditions Islam imposes, the more fervently Muslims want more Islam. To those of us not in Islam’s thrall, such a life is hideous and barren. But to the broken slaves of Allah, whose ranks continue to swell 1400 years after it was spawned, Islam delivers nothing but in doing so, it delivers everything. Muslims covet the world, and everything and everyone in it. They hate us because they covet what we have. They love Islam, because in failing them, it simply teaches they have strayed far from its creed. Faced with misery and failure, a Muslim is convnced that if he re-applies himself to Islam, he’ll someday get the goods.
The Universe Now! The Universe Hereafter! That is Islam’s draw to the people it has captured and shattered. The most heinous thing we can do is to allow it to persist to enslave billions more in it’s bloody, soul robbing deceptions.
We are doing nothing to attack the central tenets of Islam, and doing much to reinforce Islam in Muslim eyes. While we are taking police actions against their myriad terror networks, we are also busy eenshrining Islam and Sharia in the Constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, grovelling and giving endless, abject assurances of our respect, allowing them into our civilization to subvert and supplant it, even tenderly washing bin Laden’s vile carcass, and praying over his monstrous body with prayers in Arabic.
We may bring this network of terror down, but there will be thousands more to replace it if Islam is allowed to persist.
You’ve really outdone yourself here,W. I could spend much of the day pondering the implications here, but I have to get ready for our Derby party this pm.
I’m still pondering Matt’s essay from a few days ago because, as wonderful as it was in many ways — and it really was; you should read it if you haven’t — it contained an irksome equivalency between 9/11 Truthers and the Neocons who contributed to the Iraq campaign. Wretchard here has helped to outline a very important way in which the latter were grounded in reality as the former are not. And it triggers thoughts about how the Tea Party movement has functioned to “inflitrate” and attack America’s other great enemy, the left, exposing the defenses and subterfuge that has sustained it for more than a century now. The simple way to unwrap what’s happening is to say that, when your mind is not right with God, he’s going to whup you.
At another level, God is the source of the ultimate ping job, constantly infiltrating, culling, nudging us toward freedom and its ultimate source, Divine authority. What is life, after all, other than the creation of something that is essentially freedom in that it exists with an interior and for itself.
So, oMan and Blast, your problem is solved by Storm Rider’s comment. You cannot make sense if you see reality as a bottom up process. Darwinian thinking is part of the ultimate scam in that sense, nothing to do with science but a misguided materialist theology, just like leftism, just like Islamism. Once you come to grips with the fact that the cosmos is organized from the top down, such contradictions evaporate and better grounding in the truth — which is ultimately the unveiling of reality, both natural and supernatural (Aquinas, I think) — occurs.
I saw an interesting little movie last night, “There Be Dragons,” that touches on some of this. It’s the story of Jose Maria Escriva (sp?), the pries who began Opus Dei. It’s embedded in the Spanish Civil War and depicts how someone with an eye on the ultimate reality managed to continue forward, through the minefield represented by the battle on the ground, working tirelessly and successfully to help forge the realization of the ultimate victory that was actually won, from our perspective, 2000 years ago.
Getting up to speed on emerging networks doesn’t win wars. All that does is provide job security for the warriors and maybe a little smug self satisfaction on the part of their owners. Killing Nazi subs using ping technology was fine, but what wins wars, from Alexander the Great to Eisenhower is the willingness to destroy the homeland of the enemy. Kill the body or it will just grown another head.
@7. Civil Cold Warrior Fear and panic being eternal components of the springing trap it could be that our publicity is meant to spook the varmints into running into the middle of the road.
Everything was going well and had the super secret stealth chopper not crashed we could have gone in, snatched everyone we wanted and left with never a word said after. But once that chopper went down and was left with it’s tail rotors hanging over the wall it was a matter of time before the world knew something had gone down.
Wretchard,
P.S. – I love the ’4th of July’ traceroute image.
Everything about this post is deeper than the first read presents.
Bin Laden got cyber-punked.
And shot in the head.
And tossed in the drink.
@21. maineman Thomas Aquinas had it right, the true meaning of life is ultimately the unveiling of reality. The true cosmogony is that all creation is an apotheosis and what we have in the instance of Islam is that it is an apotheosis gone horribly wrong. But, for good to be there must be a contrary.
RE: modern warfare
Palin Doctrine:
• First, we should only commit our forces when clear and vital American interests are at stake. Period.
• Second, if we have to fight, we fight to win. To do that, we use overwhelming force. We only send our troops into war with the objective to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible. We do not stretch out our military with open-ended and ill-defined missions. Nation building is a nice idea in theory, but it is not the main purpose of our armed forces. We use our military to win wars.
• And third, we must have clearly defined goals and objectives before sending troops into harm’s way. If you can’t explain the mission to the American people clearly and concisely, then our sons and daughters should not be sent into battle. Period.
• Fourth, American soldiers must never be put under foreign command. We will fight side by side with our allies, but American soldiers must remain under the care and the command of American officers.
• Fifth, sending in our armed forces should be the last resort. We don’t go looking for dragons to slay. However, we will encourage the forces of freedom around the world who are sincerely fighting for the empowerment of the individual. When it makes sense, when it’s appropriate, we will provide them with material support to help them win their own freedom.
Powell Doctrine:
(1) Is a vital national security interest threatened?
(2) Do we have a clear attainable objective?
(3) Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
(4) Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
(5) Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
(6) Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
(7) Is the action supported by the American people?
(8) Do we have genuine broad international support?
McChrystal (link@14):
[The Taliban] are both deeply embedded in Afghanistan’s complex society and impressively agile. And just like their allies in al Qaeda, this new Taliban is more network than army, more a community of interest than a corporate structure.
For the U.S. military that I spent my life in, this was not an easy insight to come by. It was only over the course of years, and with considerable frustrations, that we came to understand how the emerging networks of Islamist insurgents and terrorists are fundamentally different from any enemy the United States has previously known or faced.
….
It takes a network to defeat a network.
….
A true network starts with robust communications connectivity, but also leverages physical and cultural proximity, shared purpose, established decision-making processes, personal relationships, and trust. Ultimately, a network is defined by how well it allows its members to see, decide, and effectively act. But transforming a traditional military structure into a truly flexible, empowered network is a difficult process.
………………………….
McChrystal is describing the evolution of COIN, or more precisely, a (primary) tactical implementation designed to achieve strategic COIN objectives.
Second, I don’t see any material differences between the Palin Doctrine for military engagement and the (much maligned) Powell Doctrine.
Third, I don’t see the relevance of either to the effective execution of networked conflict as described by McChrystal. At a minimum, the two doctrines are incomplete, if not overtly contradictory to networked warfare.
Just dealing with Palin’s shorter version, I don’t dispute the fourth and fifth points. The first three points don’t map easily onto a networked conflict that, to use McChrystal’s words, starts with robust communications connectivity, but also leverages physical and cultural proximity, shared purpose, established decision-making processes, personal relationships, and trust.
The two war doctrines derive from absolutist positions – the kinds of constraints that give decision-makers ease and cover. The modern conflict – if one gives credence to the McChrystal/wretchard formulation – is dynamic and mutable. It’s very strength derives from an inherent resistance to absolutism.
John Hinds: indeed. The development of sonar was a means of protecting the logistic supply lines needed to accomplish that goal. Without the war materiel shipped across the North Atlantic, the pilots, infantry, tank commanders couldn’t have done their job.
Same situation here. To kill the homeland you have to figure out where it is.
The edit function is still down. Seems to coincide with the appearance of the twitter and facebook connections.
The OBL killing shows the tragedy of Obama writ large; to borrow an image from Dennis Miller: Obama is always about one chess move away from true greatness. But he won’t make that move and so frustration reigns on every side. Last weekend he issued a risky and brave order no doubt. Afterwards, in success, he clothes himself in timidity and needless political correctness. [didn't Al Capone receive full catholic mass and burial with priests and chior in attendance? Oops! Wrong universe] Now it looks like the post killing celebrations caught the Obama team completely off guard. Obama rode to the presidency denounceing Bush with every leftist cliche in the handbook. Now after making a world historical Bush-like decision (‘DEad or Alive’) he goes back to relying upon cliche: ‘closure,’ ‘inflame the Middle East,’ ‘preserve dignity,’ ‘Won’t spike the ball,’ etc…the media of course feeds the cliche mongering and buys into the administration illogic and cross purposes.
maineman @ 21 – thanks for refreshing our memory of the post by Matt. I marvel at its magnificence.
The present situation may not be as bleak as was inferred, however. As you are keenly aware, there is one who determines how our nation will fare. That determination is largely dependent on the response of millions of believers to national crisis.
There are certain strong positive indicators. A plurality in this nation have rejected much of the agenda of modernity, as Matt would describe it. Look at the current state of the AGW issue as one example.
We may yet survive this period of ideological and economic calamity.
Our Pakistani Allies
Mark Steyn
They knew they could get away with harboring bin Laden.
As my old friends at The Spectator in London pointed out on Monday morning, I scooped the entire planet in breaking the news of Osama bin Laden’s death: “Osama bin Laden is dead, says Mark Steyn.” This was in The Spectator’s edition of June 29, 2002, which turned out to be a wee bit premature. I jumped the gun, much like Osama’s missus in Abbottabad, but by nine years.
Nor, to be honest, was a teensy-weensy near-decade discrepancy in the date the only problem with my scoop. Much of that Spectator piece was preoccupied with the usual assumptions about Public Enemy No. 1 — caves, dialysis, remote wild Pakistani tribal lands where Western intelligence hasn’t a hope of penetrating unless you turn a cousin of the village headman, etc. All these assumptions prevailed until a few days ago, when it emerged that Osama, three wives, and 13 children had been living in town in a purpose-built pad round the corner from the Pakistani military academy for over half a decade. Brunch every Sunday with a couple of generals at his usual corner table at the Abbottabad Hilton? Eggs Benedict, hold the ham?
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well — elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.
him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.
That’s why Pakistani bigshots harbored America’s mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about, funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They’ve walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university Middle Eastern Studies departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, “Junior’s just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son — a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad’s fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground.”
When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for king and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi’s skull winding up as Lord Kitchener’s novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.
Not a lot of that today. It’s hard to imagine Osama’s noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year’s White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America’s “educators” teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.
A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan “winning hearts and minds” and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they’ve spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the U.N., the EU, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring,” the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam — but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.
It takes too long. Next time, I want the gloat factor of an immediate “nuke ‘em back to the Stone Age” reaction. Especially since JugEars won’t let us see the final picture.
Unless the target is San Francisco and/or Berkeley, which I am currently inclined to believe have brought it on themselves, and then, the military and doofus president can take all the time they want.
Nahncee,
Steyn expands on your point, but I did a poor job of condensing it above, and no edit function to correct.
Suggest you read the whole thing!
Assuming the latest version of the story is true, there’s a sense of satisfaction knowing that, in his few last moments, Bin Laden felt the blood drain from his face, felt his heart pound uncontrollably, knowing the SEAL standing before him, as our representative, was about to blow his head off and there was nothing to be done about it.
21. Maineman,
Just to set the record straight on a small matter (and this may also help to address some of Cowboy’s previous concerns), I did say in the original essay that “the Neocons were much closer to the truth, while the ironically-named Truthers were far away from it.” The equivalence I attributed to the two camps had naught to do with their respective groundings in reality, but in that fact that each side served as one pole in an entire domestic policy debate which itself was disconnected from the realities of the War on Terror. I’m sorry if I was not clear on that point.
However, that there was as much nonsense on the pro-war side as on the anti-war side cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that public perception of the war was heavily filtered through a prism of Washingtonian self-analysis. The War on Terror has been the most documented war in history, yet also one of the most opaque, for the simple reason that extraneous priorities constantly distorted the presentation of the facts.
Thank you, for a very very interesting analysis of this special war.
Morton in #20 – I agree. And that is the point I think most are missing in the war on terror, or whatever euphemism we are now calling it.
Though Bin Laden a big score in name and justice served, Bin Laden had been rendered moot; a false figurehead. He was a beaten man at least six years ago. Dogs lived out their days better than Bin Laden did – a prison of his own making; a coward and megalomaniac, but no martyr. But there are million Bin Laden’s in waiting.
And if we don’t begin to steady ourselves and admit that the basic problem is not men like Bin Laden but Islam itself, then we will fight this war for an eternity. Bin Laden is a facade – Muhammad is the problem.
This course we our on will invariably lead to one of two conclusions for Western Culture, neither of them acceptable: (1) Either we will bankrupt ourselves with incessant small wars over an extended period of time; (2) We will infringe upon our own liberties and freedom for a false sense of security to the point of creating our own prisons.
We are fighting the symptoms and losing this war. And if I’m right, the downfall of these brutal secular tyrants across the Islamic middle east will not ultimately lead to enlightenment or peace, but an religious declaration war against Western Culture. The despots who kept the insane in check will be gone – and each American will have their own epiphany of understanding what it is to be an Israeli Jew.
The US military is really effective
Very interesting analysis with networking and Internet correlations. The real issue remains, though, “Who was Osama bin Laden?” When was the cord cut, and what were the connections before that happened? Still nothing conclusive on those points….after all these years.
Mark Steyn’s reference to Kitchener’s definitive defeat of the Sudanese is noted…as it is noted that that was a much different time.
My position is that what has changed is ourselves not the Islamic menace…it is locked in a time-warp.
“Black-Jack” Pershing had a successful policy which extinguished Islamism in the Philoppines. It did not involve and ritual washing but did involve burying the insurgeants with pigs blood and carcases in un-marked graves.
BTW…Islamic doctrine dictates that those who die in Jihad are simply buried, need no prayers and go straight to heaven.
“I wonder why we announced the raid so soon after it happened. That seemed a mistake to me.”
Me too. I would have kept the lid on and started sending out orders in Obama’s ..whoops, Osama’s name. I’m not POTUS however and if I was, Unemployment would be around 4%, Gas under 2.00$US and I wouldn’t need a cheap trick to get a 30 day bounce in the polls.
The problem with the McCrystal approach is the it is very specific and cannot be applied to warfare on a general level. Information warfare WILL NOT stop 60,000 Soviet MBT’s from driving to the Atlantic. It will NOT stop the Duck of Death from killing Libyan goat herders. It will not stop Assad from slaughtering thousands of his own citizens. No, McCrystals form of warfare is like the Craftsman Universal tool. It looks neat but all it really does is lighten the wallet.
Liberals love it because they think it’s non-kinetic. Remember ALL the portals into the AQ net came because of vicious, bloody kinetic events. People were killed, wounded, captured and tortured to gain access to the AQ net.
Event now, the Left denies that the data which led to OBL came out of torture.
Waterboarding AKA the Chinese Water Torture. The Right denies that it is torture, the left that it works. Those in the center applaud it’s results while feeling queasy about it’s existence.
28. YBR Second, I don’t see any material differences between the Palin Doctrine for military engagement and the (much maligned) Powell Doctrine.
Powell has this statement in his Doctrine: (8) Do we have genuine broad international support?
Palin says nothing about international support and I think she is correct. Why should we care what the EU thinks? (that was who Powell was talking about.)
MOTHERS DAY
A few days ago Navy Seals sealed the fate of Osama bin Laden. We salute them, as we salute all who serve, but let us not forget the mothers who gave them birth and raised them from tots to men. A salute to mothers on this Mothers Day, and a salute to the brave men they have given us.
God Bless the moms who give us life
God Bless their boys in diapers
Who grow to be such fine young men
Who rid the world of vipers
God Bless the Seals and chopper crews
And grunts and guys with rifles
Who know that what they do is real
Unvexed with life’s mere trifles
God Bless the guys who fly the planes
And guys who sail the oceans
And Arty guys and all who keep
Bad guys from having notions
God Bless our M1 Abrams crews
Marine Corps grunts and Gunnys
And all the guys in camo who
Turn tough guys into bunnies
Yes bless the moms who give us life
Raise men from boys in diapers
God Bless our soldiers, bless them all
And especially our Snipers
Walt @ 45: Yes! My only complaint is that it’s a bit long to fit on the Mother’s Day card. But maybe Hallmark can offer an oversize version. In camo.
SH@44: Powell has this statement in his Doctrine: (8) Do we have genuine broad international support?
I thought about that. Figured it might be raised.
My view is that overarching doctrines tend to be over-rated – useful for conditioning and directing the public – and private – dialogues, but not much else. Too much of the modern landscape is situation-specific and requires situation-specific analysis and decision-making. To intentionally constrain that process for the sake of doctrinaire consistency is not only unrealistic and impractical, but yet another disguised set of lawfare which in fact will be broken as soon as circumstances dictate.
The need for and/or desirability of multilateral engagements, whether the EU, or the rest of the world including Australia, Canada, South America, Mexico, India, and on (it’s a biggish world) will be a function of situation-specific circumstances.
I also note that the very nature of networked engagements implies nation-building. At a very fundamental level, the cultivation of relationships that leads to cooperative coalitions, which lead to pockets of stability that hopefully expand into regional and sovereign-level strength, is nation-building.
Cooperative alliances are tricky. While I concede that Gov Palin carefully omitted the flash point item from her list, I do not agree that it is something that should never be considered.
#7 Civil Cold Warrior “I wonder why we announced the raid so soon after it happened. That seemed a mistake to me. We could have gathered and exploited the trove of intelligence we garnered with many, most, or all of our”.
Most of us would agree. However:
1) The “secret” of the raid and Obama’s death was known by too many, both good guys and bad guys, and the best Obama could have done is spent a few days denying the obvious.
2) The Pakis would have been sure to have their own press conference as soon as they interviewed Bin Laden’s family and other intimates at that compound, not to mention having the tail rotor of the stealth helo on a flat bed truck.
3) While I”m sure that the Pentagon had an intel team stood up specifically to receive the information and instruments, check it for booby-traps, catalog it, and then begin the decryption process, even if they’re working at “warp speed” (and unless Bin Laden was arrogant enough to work without encryption), it’ll take weeks or months to process this information and add it to the cumulative Intel database.
I’m pissed as hell at every Senator and Congressman that goes into classified briefings, then immediately walks out and spills everything either directly or indirectly to the press. But, none of them have every been called on it and prosecuted, and probably, they never will be. So, what we’re seeing in the open press doesn’t bother me that much – the info will still be valuable, and we can spin things a bit in any case (i.e. who knows what we actually have).
Here’s the real priority – the essential nuggets that I hope are found in Bin Laden’s information store:
Which nation states and national leaders directly supported Al Qaeda from 1993 onward, with logistical support, direct diplomatic support (i.e. shipping materials via diplomatic pouches, etc.), money, and direct intelligence and military assets? This is probably bigger than just rogues from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other regional players doing their little bit for Allah. What “state sponsorship” did Bin Laden have?
If anyone knew “where the bodies are buried”, it would be Bin Laden. Looks like OPSEC existed for everyone in his organization, except for the big guy himself. It’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have had his information better protected, e.g. heavy safes, instant destruction devices (degaussing or flash paper) – heck Bin Laden could have asked any American bookie for OPSEC advice and fielded something better than he apparently had under his own roof. (In fact, in all the discussions I’ve seen about whether there were “shoot to kill” orders given, I haven’t seen any of the talking heads mention the obvious. I’m sure that orders were given to shoot anyone who didn’t immediately stand down and surrender, whether they had a gun or not. Bin Laden might have dove for a device to detonate the whole structure, or destroy information. Anything other than “hands in the air” and full compliance was going to get Bin Laden killed, and that was precisely the right call.)
So, I expect that the really “big” scores will in fact be information that Obama will never release. For example, what would he do – what action would he authorize – if we developed hard, absolute solid proof that Bin Laden was a Paki or Iranian agent (yeah..yeah..I know, Sunni vs Shiite, and all that bravo sierra), if it was developed that military and civilian leaders knew about and/or supported the 9/11 attack before the event, what does Obama do then? Unleash the B2′s, line up four carriers and begin bombing, nuke the enemy’s strategic nuclear sites? Or, call a meeting at the U.N. security council and present the legal evidence, and then spend 15 years searching trying to get the UN to act before the perps have all died off of natural causes?
What would Obama really do, if the enemy was no longer hidden, but was now hiding in plain sight?
There have to be some folks in this world who are sleeping much less easy now that Bin Laden’s innermost secrets are in the hands of the USA. “What do the Americans know about my role …?”. Interesting stuff.
“Bin Laden had done everything humanly possible to survive. His wife said he had not left his compound in five years. He stayed away from windows. Burned his trash. He surrounded himself with walls nearly 20 feet high.”
Wow, in Muslim cultural terms, Bin Laden has been living like…a woman! I’ll bet even his wife was able to go outside more than he was. As Mark Steyn wrote, women under Taliban rule were forbidden to feel the sun on their faces – how fitting that OBL had to live that life himself. Compare his barren existence with Salman Rushdie’s – how long has it been since the famous “fatwa”? Twenty-two years or so? And the man is still alive, writing books, marrying, divorcing, going places, getting honours – so much for the inexorable power of the warriors of Allah. I don’t think Rushdie is too concerned that an Iranian special ops team will swoop down on helicopters to dispatch him – unless they plan to crash the helicopters through his apartment window, which seems about their speed. I certainly hope that OBL’s last moments were filled with terror and disbelief – that they were coming for him, those soft, sentimental Americans whom he thought he’d so cleverly studied and sized up . They were coming, and they were coming not to festoon him with legal arguments and confused moralizing, but to kill him.
What would Obama really do, if the enemy was no longer hidden, but was now hiding in plain sight?
It’s not entirely up to him because the enemy gets to vote. What would the enemy do if it knew or suspected that it had been unmasked? The Pakistanis began damage assessment operations immediately. They took everyone in the compound into custody, swept it themselves, took away the helo parts.
Obama’s problem is this. If he doesn’t act on knowledge acquired from the raid and there is another major terror attack in the US or Europe, he will have the devil to pay. Only if Enemy X remains forever quiescent does the problem go away.
The alternative of course is to wipe the knowledge from US institutional memory as well. To burn the intel evaluation and shoot the man who wrote it, then shoot the man who shot the man who wrote it. But that is probably infeasible and creates problems of its own.
Knowledge is perilous. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” When something moves from the “unknown unknown” column into the “known known” column it transfers a huge weight along with it.
My own guess is that Obama will be inclined to use such knowledge, if he had it, to negotiate with the enemy in order to make it stop. I’ve referred to this in many previous comments. Osama’s death creates a political crossroads at which the President can either keep opening the can of worms or try to get the enemy to walk away. But I don’t think the President will succeed because terrorists and terror-sponsoring states are one-trick ponies.
I posted a link to the trailer of the the movie “Devil’s Double” which is based on the life of Uday Hussein. What always struck me about people like Uday is why they didn’t quit while they were ahead. Why, like some pathological gunfighter, did they keep looking for the next draw. Didn’t they know that someplace, somewhere there’d be someone faster on the draw than they were?
The same is true for terrorism. They don’t know when to stop. And therefore, even if the President hopes he can deal with them, he probably can’t. The enemy gets to vote on the continuation of history. Once an unknown is known, it is altogether too complicated to make it an “unknown unknown” again. As Milton put it:
The Devil has entropic qualities. It’s hard to unscramble an egg.
os @ 48: 3) While I”m sure that the Pentagon had an intel team stood up specifically to receive the information and instruments, check it for booby-traps, catalog it, and then begin the decryption process, even if they’re working at “warp speed” (and unless Bin Laden was arrogant enough to work without encryption), it’ll take weeks or months to process this information and add it to the cumulative Intel database.
but it’s never too soon to start false rumors, or act on something we already knew and can now falsely credit to bin Laden, or squeeze our Paki buddies for since they are under the gun.
You have to think that the ISI would have charged the Taliban and AQ for the right to have bin laden in a military town. the charge would have come as a slice of the multibillion dollar opium trade that got restarted again in what? 2005 or about the time OBL took up his new residence.
So what happens with OBL dead. Can the ISI continue to get its cut? Will the Taliban continue to pay protection money? Will the Taliban continue to respect the ISI.
Walt, I’m amazed. Only you could hook diapers and snipers together in a coherent and logical way. BRAVO!!!
Wretchard, FDR once said in a speech that you can’t turn a tiger into a kitten by stroking it, nor negotiate with an incendiary bomb. The won hasn’t learned that painful lesson. Hopefully, he will be gone before he does.
“…bin Laden believed he had created an impenetrable network. It turned out not to be good enough to keep out the penetrators.”
It must be awful for a guy like OBL to live like a woman for so many years and end up being penetrated by the U.S. penetrators.
What is it with us that we don’t understand it is not OBL , Zarqawi, Taliban or al zawaheri what ever his name is, It is Islam and their stupid book. Stupid.
“Waterboarding AKA the Chinese Water Torture. The Right denies that it is torture, the left that it works. Those in the center applaud it’s results while feeling queasy about it’s existence.”
As to the Left’s opinion on that. I have noted to people, if Waterboarding is considered ineffective, then why is it a part of military SERE training? SERE training teaches you, prepares you, how, and when, to resist.
The purpose of Waterboarding is to break your will to resist, not extract all of your knowledge, screaming on the Rack.
The history of the last ten years suggests a fundamental flaw in the Jihadi strategy: as long as it engages America it will perforce keep handing out logins to its network. At the edge of battle America will gain access and get inside.
The possible workarounds to this problem are either to annihilate the world of the infidel at a stroke in order to prevent it from climbing back up the network or to subvert the political system of the West by subclinical bribery. In other words Sudden Death or SubClinical Attack.
The problem with the first approach is that it is very hard to pull off. The Islamic world is not well suited to the task of preparing for a global First Strike. The Russians couldn’t do it, the Jihadis probably couldn’t either.
The second approach requires capturing countries without engaging the United States and using the acquired sovereign resources to buy Western officials. Taking over the “Arab Spring” looks like a far better strategy now than continuing the al-Qaeda model. The al-Qaeda model has shown its conceptual limits.
The trouble with the second approach is that it relies on the continued dominance of oil in the energy market. If ever the West develops its own energy sources by domestic production or nuclear power, the Jihad will run out of money and the capture of impoverished states is no prize.
I think the biggest loser over the long run is Pakistan. Pakistan relied upon the secret warfare method. Now it must know that its U-boats — the LET and similar groups — can be detected. Since it has nothing else going for it but terror, they can only decline or double down, raising the risks to levels that will prove fatal to itself.
Overall, radical Islamism’s big dream of world conquest has probably hit its high-water mark. The best way forward for all Islamic societies would probably be to rise through business, science and technology. In other words, through the arts of peace. They may yet create a second golden age of the Islamic world. But it will not be the world that Osama Bin Laden had in mind. It will of necessity be one in which Islam tames its demons and recognizes the brotherhood of mankind. And though it was an infidel who said it, it would be well for them to follow this advice.
That door is still open.
The details WERE released too soon.
Intel gave Anwar al-Awlaki’s location, and he was a target within hours in Yemen. But, he had the news, just like everybody else the planet over, so he was able to escape before he was vaporized.
Looks to me like your everyday Obama incompetence, and haste at getting his name published for this great deed.
If you remember; “Never let a crisis go to waste”. So, he jumps the gun and shoots America in the foot.
Politics as usual with this bunch.
I wonder if all these experiences are cumulative? I expect so. i.e. An army that knows how to fight and slow (with neutron bombs) a soviet army that’s quickly found a purchase in western Europe (on friendly soil) because democracies are guaranteed unable to react quickly enough to stop a Warsaw Pact exercise that didn’t turn left or right at a border can learn a new kind of war that requires tools that none of their traditional acquisition and requirements processes would produce (systems that advance by looking backward at what needs to be fixed – incrementally improved) – and in learning these lessons, not forget the past or the ability to deter and fight same.
I wager we’ll find wonderful and apocryphal stories of units in the field developing their own data-centric investigation and pursuit systems (similar to what Intergraph sells in the States to public safety orgs) because even the best-of-breed current DoD RF-spectrum traffic-analysis-based “order of battle” systems could not be adapted to human terrain issues and social network analysis. Esp. when the op tempo required was hours, if not minutes, to beat the rat-line of “Rico was just picked up, everyone that knows him go hide!” – and normal military practice was incapable of operating at less than a 72 hour cycle – OODA loop. To say nothing of the bureaucratic mindset that these capabilities were too important to ever deploy where they would be shot at or bombarded.
We’ll likely find it’s a few passionate (tech) sergeants who could open a book (and say “even I can do this”) and a few tolerant executives (owners of agencies) back in CONUS willing to share their data who were more interested in results than protecting turf that saved our bacon. Not new, this pattern of innovation is never ending because it’s a mirror of the human condition. See all of Elting Morison’s 1950’s works. Search for “Gunfire at Sea” (at gmu.edu) for just one example.
They may yet create a second golden age of the Islamic world.
The first is mostly myth, and I cannot imagine a second unless and until Islam changes so much it would deserve a new name.
Islam from its start has been another name for rust. While it never sleeps, it never has a golden age, nor would anyone want it to.
55/Nestor – There are many who do understand, but far fewer who are willing to face the consequences of acknowledging the awful reality, so they buy time and postpone that day by focusing on and analyzing lesser hierarchies of possibilities. It’s just human nature… /g
“If he turns up on a camera the computer facial recognition program says “hello!” If he touches anything with bare hands he’ll leave a marker. A war zone dream and a domestic nightmare.”
AAH, finally for sure 1984 has arrive with gusto. Now the watch towers are everywhere, and everywhere there is a watcher. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash,we know where you are.
Check “6″
Both the gunfighter and the terrorist have something in common: they have reduced themselves into a savage state of being where who they are is now tied up in blood. Both of them practice Private War, in which they exercise Natural Law to the exclusion of all else. The gunfighter, to be supreme, must keep fighting challengers or seek them out, similarly terrorists must continue to kill until they either pull down mankind or are themselves pulled down. Here is how Blackstone put it for those others in Private War, we call Pirates, but as the activity is the problem and not the excuse for it, the definition fits:
By reducing themselves to a savage state of Nature, the outcome is the same no matter what the excuse is for doing so. Be it worldly wealth, worldly power or worldly prestige, the outcome is the same: giving up being civilized and indulging in the redness of Nature’s Law.
That is why killing bin Laden was an exercise in sanitary conditions and ridding humanity of someone who had no compunctions about killing anyone if it gave him more power. Power is a medium of exchange just as money is, and prestige, and if you lust after it to the exclusion of civilized restraint, then you become an animal once more. A sentient one, yes, but one who moves to savagery by choice, not by being brought up by animals. The poor soul raised by wolves can be civilized, the civilized man reducing himself to a Natural State must seek to actively repent and mend his ways and still will not be fully trusted ever again. That is a clean, clear and distinct dividing line in warfare which the Left has tried to obscure with moral equivocation… yet the actions taken by those reverting to savagery are savage and a threat to all mankind because of that.
As for the network penetrations involved against aQ: we have penetrated some of the most insular person-2-person networks on the planet to get these actions done. This is a full scale assault on aQ by rooting them out through any means necessary… that is Palin’s doctrine, in answer to a previous commenter… the full spectrum of attack must be utilized in all fields as war cannot be limited to any one venue once it is started. Any road to victory is acceptable so long as it is done by those selected by society to fight in defense of them. That is a stark difference between the savages and the civilized: the savages seek to bring civilization down by its own works, while the civilized find the penetrations and seek it out to remove them. Fighting isn’t done just with bullets nor bombs, and a shadow war is often far nastier, longer and harsher than dropping nuclear devices as the very fabric of what makes us civilized is at stake. This goes from simple evidence gathering all the way up to strategic deployment of troops and material… from the crime scene to the area of Grand Strategy there is now a common linkage so that the highest level of doctrine is in accord with the lowest. We did not have that before 9/11. Now this IS the normal way to fight wars, and anyone trying to fight like we did just a decade ago will lose. And lose badly. War has changed again.
#57 Wretchard “The problem with the first approach is that it is very hard to pull off. The Islamic world is not well suited to the task of preparing for a global First Strike. The Russians couldn’t do it, the Jihadis probably couldn’t either.”
Careful! The Russians didn’t do it because they could conceive of no earthly way to benefit from the result. The Jihadies aren’t greatly concerned with earthly ways, nor whether they are materially or politically better off as a result of the war.
If Ahmadinejad feels that launching the attack will bring forth the next Mahdi, then he will damn well start the next war. Moreover, it won’t be Nuclear weapons as the primary threat – I still see those as tactical weapons in Iran’s inventory. It’ll be Biological. It’s the easiest, most viable way of destroying hundreds of millions of the infidel’s world wide, let along given a specific vector such as the USA.
We’ve got to win, because we can’t survive defeat at the tender mercies of those who cheerfully send children in a suicide bombers (or to charge machine guns, as in the case of Iran), or hide behind women and children. They will not hold our civilians more dear than their own, and they consider their own as expendable chattel.
Item #2 – “The trouble with the second approach is that it relies on the continued dominance of oil in the energy market.”
Bingo!
It is ironic that the world’s smartest people (i.e. the American political left, in their own eyes) can’t understand the impact on the Middle East, the “War on Terror”, and the nation’s economy that would result from a firm, bi-partisan, sustainable decision by the USA to achieve energy independence.
Exhibit A: Correlate G.W. Bush’s decision on July 14, 2008 to lift the executive ban on offshore oil drilling with the price of gasoline in the USA (chart price in 2008 with gasbuddy.com). The price of gas peaked the very DAY that Bush signed that order, and did not rise above $3.00 a gallon again until after Obama took office. (Also, the price drop occurred before the markets began to tank, so it wasn’t simply a result of the recession.)
The very day America (perhaps under a President such as Palin and a GOP Congress) unleashes American enterprise to provide the most cost effective energy available, the Arab (and Muslim) influence in the world will crater.
For the USA, “drill baby, drill” means “peace, baby peace” in the same year.
aj@63: This is a full scale assault on aQ by rooting them out through any means necessary… that is Palin’s doctrine
“By any means necessary” leads directly to an internal contradiction because the Palin Doctrine explicitly excludes “nation-building” (point two) which, as I said, is the essential foundation of the long-term networked engagement behind COIN operations.
65. YBR
Which is why COIN operation is mostly “hooie” to borrow from Col Potter.
Despite all the COIN gobbly-gook, it was a detective following a suspect that led to a head shot into the target. Nothing in the COIN manual about that. Nation building normally isn’t seen as a double tap in the temple. COIN is a THEORY, one that prolongs the war and puts money into the pockets of the MIC. Nothing more, nothing less. It certainly isn’t a silver bullet for anti-guerrilla.
I don’t like COIN as a doctrine either.
Of course you don’t shoot your friends, and you don’t make new enemies, and if you can convert the undecided to your side all the better, but these are just truisms, not strategies.
OTOH, one might argue that the Sunni Awakening in Iraq was a COIN success. One might be smoking crack to think that, but I suppose it’s something that will be claimed.
I’ll go for a COIN that includes demolishing mosques and building churches, synogogues, and KFC’s. Short of that, I think hooie covers it.
s@66: Which is why COIN operation is mostly “hooie”
I was not arguing that COIN led to bin Laden’s demise, nor was I arguing that bin Laden’s demise was particularly critical in the long-term GWOT scenario. I was arguing that it is being employed as a tactic to neutralize AQ and stabilize AfPak.
Concerning MIC, an unpleasant necessity for some time to come, with or without COIN. I’d say at least another 1000 years.
J@67: I don’t like COIN as a doctrine either.
Then I suggest, as I understand things, that opponents of COIN support more “boots on the ground” to employ the “whatever it takes” Palin Doctrine, as per General Eric Shinseki:
The showdown came just before the war began. Shinseki, who had direct experience with land warfare (in Vietnam) and post-combat occupation (in the Balkans), was urging that the U.S. go in with a force large enough to ensure that it could maintain order and genuinely control Iraq’s sizable territory and potentially fractious society after it ousted Saddam. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz hated this whole idea.
That would feed the MIC.
Afghanistan and such are afflicted by invasive war – -it’s not an insurgency.
The Taliban are NOT homeboys. They are foreign invaders with dress and accent so marked that the locals can spot them a mile away.
WE have a hard time telling Taliban from local Pashtun. Perhaps that’s where the whole schtick got started.
Back in 2001, when we cranked up the CIA the Taliban fled — back home to Pakistan!
Musharraf shielded them. Heck hundreds were flown out. He’d conned Bush — entirely.
Musharraf made his bones expanding the Afghanistan ops. Why do you think the military was behind his coup?
He and his ISI successor, Kayani, HAVE to be up past their eyeballs in this double con. Why do you think Musharraf put Kayani right behind him? Yeah, that’s right, Kayani got his backside.
Kayani is a first to nuke kind of guy.
Folks we’re dealing with South Asian Prussians. Pakistan has been hatched from hatred and paranoia. That’s worse than a cannon ball.
In a parody of SAC — ISI’s motto is:”Instability is our business.”
BTW, google this player. For a nation that’s been a military fiasco — check out his self-medals. They must be issued for lying and deceit!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jgIlTAZM44
A well written story of warring networks. As pleased as I am about the demise of Osama Bin Laden and at the undoubted cleverness of the network warriors, I suspect that old fashioned betrayal played a key part here.
Yes the networks and all the technical stuff are neat but I bet that common human duplicity was a key element in the getting of Osama Bin Laden
#64. Old Salt
It is ironic that the world’s smartest people (i.e. the American political left, in their own eyes) can’t understand the impact on the Middle East, the “War on Terror”, and the nation’s economy that would result from a firm, bi-partisan, sustainable decision by the USA to achieve energy independence.
It is and it isn’t. The great contradiction and intrinsic flaw in the schemes of the Western Left is that there can be no demand for a Welfare State (and that is basically the model that they espouse and love) unless it has clients. When you have general prosperity there is no need for the welfare state. In order to have clients and thereby political support you need to make sure that there will indeed be misery, either by poisoning the economy through irrational laws and regulations or by importing the economically dysfunctional through lax immigration standards, or both. Does this sound familiar?
The problem is that by pursuing such a strategy they render the economy they control to a level that it simply cannot support the level of goodies they have promised their supporters. Does this sound familiar?
And in the meantime, when everything is going to hell in a hand-basket, the inhabitants of that basket can look around and see that other societies which don’t follow those principles are actually better off across the board from the standpoint of the common citizen despite the propaganda that comes from the Enlightened and Wise. Look at the recent comparisons between Texas and California, or the historical comparisons between the West and the USSR.
If the US was to allow the private sector to develop our energy resources to their actual potential our economy would soar, and the demand for the “services” of the welfare state would fade. At some level the Progressives know this. They must keep a choke chain on the economy, and they must maintain a client base of the “disadvantaged” and the government workers whose jobs depend upon redistributing the income and poisoning the economy.
Its not blindness on their part–its a deliberate strategy, but its one that is ultimately doomed to fail. As so many card cheats in high stakes poker games have learned, the first time you get caught dealing from the bottom of the deck will probably be your last time.
“The second approach requires capturing countries without engaging the United States and using the acquired sovereign resources to buy Western officials. Taking over the “Arab Spring” looks like a far better strategy now than continuing the al-Qaeda model.”
Good Lord. You act as if the grand Jihad of Islam is not already a multiple-pronged, wide, and deep affair… How can such a smart, insightful guy be so clueless!?!?
Al Qaeda is simply one of he metastises of Islam. Just because one school of Islamd doesn’t directly sanction the actions of another branch, what should matter to we infidels is that Islam is making significant inroads against ten Westa cross the board. Compare the status in world affairs of Islam today to Islam from a mere three decades ago. After the inflow of several trillion petro-dollars, and by any metric you mat wish, Islam is more robust, more confident, more well-supplied, and more well placed than before. By every measure, it is ascendant. Measuring it’s progress by the possible demise of al Qaeda, or any other particle of Jihad is therefore meaningless, as long as Muslm coffers are bulging, and the myriad other methods and channels of Jihad remain intact and unscathed. We have not yet laid a finger on Iran or Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
And as for your “second approach” whereby Muslms capture countries “without engaging the United States [...] using the acquired sovereign resources to buy Western officials…” have you not noticed? This process is already well under way after a century of Western oil exploration in Arab lands. They have already subverted most of the important levers of power and influence in he West, otherwise tose Muslim nations behind 9/11 would be glazed parking lots already. Instead we still have Westerners still essentially waxing moronic on the subject, even those who should know better.
Dear Civil CW,
My sources suggest to me that one of Usama’s wives finally got bored with the whole five years of the same damn stucco 21-foot walls, and took to brazening it about the bars in Abbottabad. All we needed to do was plant a few metro-sexually trained types (i.e., “sensitive guy who listens”) in those hang-outs. Eventually, they connected and she spilled her discontent and yearnings for something more she just knew must be waiting for her out there…
Look at Hillary, who likewise had enough of small beans low-brow corruption in the third-world environment of Arkansas. Drafting the U.S charter for BCCI, and the petty cash thievery of Whitewater was clearly not sufficient challenge for one of the century’s greatest legal minds. She HAD to get out of Little Rock. Poor little William Jefferson simply had to relocate to a location offering a more sophisticated group of women to polish his staff, or Hill would never get a chance to break into the political tussle at the stratospheric heights where her towering talents could be properly recognized.
Churchy LaFemme.
A small question: If, as Wretchard says, “What was worse for al-Qaeda, America began to redesign its operations not only to inflict casualties but to acquire information.” then how does the practice of killing our enemy with drones as opposed to capturing and interrogating them, fit in with the acquisition of information?
In other words, does the Obama practice of ordering killings (via Seals or drones) vitiate that essential information gathering and network penetration?
And is this part of the plan?
75. batman – And is this part of the plan?
Think about it – BHO was raised by Muslims, spent time in Indonesia, is not culturally American, does not want think the US is any better then any other country, bows before potentates, is anti Israel, is anti western allies, is pro Syria – Hamas -Iran.
Yeah, it is part pf the plan, no prisoners, no new leads.
What plan? The Chicago way is fake it till you make it.
Doesn’t matter. We will win regardless;
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/04/war_dog?page=0,0
Bin Laden needed to live in a large, 3 story, ostentatious home in Pakistan like
he needed a hole in the head.
batman, f47
John Yoo argues that Obama has decided to stop further information-gathering because he doesn’t want to deal with the legal risks of taking these guys alive. It makes sense – this administration has repeatedly argued that terrorism is a law-enforcement problem, and the only way to square that view with the simultaneous policy of targeted assassinations and drone attacks is to conclude that Obama doesn’t want to deal with the legal problems that arise from pursuing the policy he claims to advocate.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703834804576301032595527372.html
On the whole, though, I think Yoo is being generous. Obama has a very tiresome habit of repeatedly assuring one and all that the US will never be at war with Islam. Never? Really? And what makes him say that? It’s as if he knows perfectly well who and what the enemy is. Which begs the question – which side is he on? I don’t think he knows
One problem is the left thinks it is smarter than the military and intelligence communities. It treats them with disdain and arrogance. One draw back to this is the left doesn’t get the full picture anymore. If you want something leaked you tell it to Democrat Senator or Representative, other wise you tell them stuff that won’t get to many people killed when they talk out of committee. The Us Army intelligence started restricting some stuff back in the Clinton days about China in particular. It seems to me that leftists leaders are OK with dumb subordinates as long as they have the correct ideology, whereas the smart leader are known for working with subordinates that they realize are smarter than they are. The ability to lead is a specialized intelligence that the left doesn’t seem to be to good at in my opinion. My suspicion is that more than a few on the left are in passive for now data bases.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEnJDaqT3-0
b@70: The Taliban are NOT homeboys.
Maybe not now, but they were.
CIA supplied mujahideen (“freedom fighters” – very much insurgents) with stinger missiles to aid the resistance movement against the Soviets in the 1980′s under Reagan (going through the door opened by Brzezinski under Carter.) After Soviets were expelled, mujahideen proved poor at governing leading to several years of additional violence. With the aid of Pakistan, Mullah Omar formed a radical splinter group from the infighting mujahideen that called itself the Taliban.
Invaders or insurgents? You decide. The entire history of the region supports the metastasis thesis of Islamic evolution. Blink and the landscape shifts.
Which is why simplistic doctrines, like Palin’s and Powell’s, offer little of relevance to the threats presented by conditions in the ME. One could go on and on about war vs non-war, short-term vs long-term objectives, but the end-game is how best to facilitate a path towards stability that has to start somewhere if the culture is constitutionally capable of mastering the art of peace. Current indicators are not particularly positive.
I feel for President Bush (sometimes.) He had his eye well focused on Pakistan, which will require a unpleasant decisions, but his administration went out on the sour note provided by Paulson and the Wall St boys. He never saw that one coming.
The protection money the ISI got from the Taliban may be the reason that the intel stash is being so broadly promoted– and why the Pakis warn of such dire consequences if the US does another OBL like hit in Pakistan.
The US is telling the Taliban/AQ/et al that the Pakis can’t protect them –so why pay.
imho the Pakis need a new business model.
The USA proposed a new business model when a geological survey found 1 trillion dollars worth of natural resources in Afghanistan. its also not likely that if the Pakis allowed a similar survey team in Pakistan–that natural resources there wouldn’t yield similar numbers.
ybr @ 69: Then I suggest, as I understand things, that opponents of COIN support more “boots on the ground” to employ the “whatever it takes” Palin Doctrine, as per General Eric Shinseki:
Don’t need boots, need bombs and bullets.
In fact, don’t even need bombs and bullets, need ROE and competent generals.
I’m basically a Rumsfeldian, and think Shinseki was old-school.
The issue is, if you bomb an Arab society, it doesn’t surrender – because it can’t. It has no structure, no control. All you do is make the rubble bounce. So, you need to do “nation-building”. Fine, but make it a colonial, coercive type of nation-building. And when that fails, return to step 1 – more bombs and bullets. Rumsfeld never touched on these kinds of issues.
Other terms for this web of networks is society, culture, humanity. Facebook.
Y’ever notice who Facebook brings out the worst in people? That is “life as an immature pleasure-seeking unaccountable drunken sexually-profligate college student”? That is, Facebook’s initial market? All groupthink of the most base sort.
Facebook is awfully like the Taliban, like Islam, in that ferocity of debasing GROUPTHINK.
Okay now we have a counter-network, and network systems engineering tactics. How is THAT not like Facebook or the Taliban itself? What keeps it from been debased?
What keeps any society intact and whole, vital and good, long-term?
C@82: imho the Pakis need a new business model.
I think the new business model is something like ‘our protection is better than theirs.’
Some numbers: Between FY2009 and FY2010, average monthly DOD spending for Afghanistan grew from $4.4 billion to $6.7 billion a month, a 50% increase… [h/t EB]
RE the potential Pakistani mineral wealth, a shining window of opportunity, no doubt; interesting to see how the death grip of religious fanaticism fares against the potential of ‘another way.’ It seems to me that blert et al are correct re the Maslovian hierarchy of human needs.
J@83: In fact, don’t even need bombs and bullets, need ROE and competent generals. … I’m basically a Rumsfeldian, and think Shinseki was old-school.
I don’t have enough knowledge/training to know what school of military thought I belong to, but I would suggest middle school. Shinseki was correct, but implementation wasn’t politically feasible. McChrystal is correct, but implementation runs counter to traditional military operations.
The military understood the difficulties of finding ‘another way’ and I have no idea how it will turn out. But my understanding is that the current crop of generals (despite the McChrystal affair) is a cut above the tidal wave of recently resigned memoir writing generals of the last ten years.
I am ambivalent re the ROE. I suspect the issue has been exaggerated for the usual suite of self-serving nefarious reasons, but I also suspect the military rank and file is experiencing a period of fitful and frustrating adjustment. A kernel of truth but not the major issue.
So what would have been a “perfect” mission?
Fly in with the stealth helicopters. Invade the compound undetected. Kidnap Osama bin Laden. Take all the computers, disk drives, flash drives and cell phones in the entire compound. Then kill everyone else in the compound with knives, leave in the stealth helicopters with OBL and his data, and drop a couple of bunker busters on the compound to completely obliterate it. Wait for the enemy to make the claim that we killed OBL.
Result: bin Laden is captured and available for interrogation. We have all of his computer data, but no one suspects we do. His family tells no tales. We then quietly wrap up his entire network from the top down.
Instead, we fly in, crash a top secret helicopter, leave it there, kill bin Laden, take his data, but announce that we have it and start releasing portions of it, thus scattering his network. We leave his family alive to make claims like “they executed him in front of his family”, and the whole damn compound turns into a tourist attraction/shrine.
Congratulations are certainly in order for having killed bin Laden, but we could have had so much more if the whole damn White House wasn’t filled to the brim with amateur blabbermouths.
It’s likely that any of UBL’s minions who heard of the raid figured the data got swooped up.
They will have to stop whatever they’re up to and hidehidehide, deep, or start to flee.
In either case, they will change their activities, in many cases inadverently giving our guys some glimpses that, absent panic and hurry, would not have been possible.
jms @ 86: exactly right. but I’m OK with taking out Osama cold, I doubt he has anything of very great interest to tell us other than the passwords to his files, and I trust the NSA can take care of those. with luck the passwords are all written on post-it notes stuck to his screen, anyway.
“Then I suggest, as I understand things, that opponents of COIN support more “boots on the ground” to employ the “whatever it takes” Palin Doctrine, as per General Eric Shinseki:”
I’m not sure you understand what COIN is.
“Counterinsurgency involves rebuilding a society, keeping the population safe, boosting the local government’s legitimacy, training a national army and fighting off insurgents who are trying to topple the government — all at the same time. As the manual puts it, “The insurgent succeeds by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere; the government fails unless it maintains order everywhere.”"
from here;
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf
It is a THEORY based on Not Winning. The central idea is Lincoln’s “The best thing to do to your enemy is make him your friend”. Lincoln killed more Americans then any other person ever has and was rewarded with a well deserved bullet to the Head. So far that is the best results ever from the idea of making your enemy your friend.
What you do with enemies is make them dead. That is what the Palin doctrine says.
Generals Sherman and Grant knew war. Grant said ‘war is about getting to your enemy as fast as you can, hitting him as hard as you can, then not stopping until he quits’. From Sherman we have, ‘ If war is the solution our enemy desires, give him all he wants’, and ‘War is horrible. The more horrible you make it, the sooner it is over.’
Rummy tried to replace the old calculations of man power needed to fight insurgents with technology. The technology available at the time was not up to the task. So they went with a COIN strategy. Yes, that’s right. Iraq was COIN from day one.
The “surge” wasn’t(a surge). Remember, at peak strength, the surge still had less troops then the invasion. The surge was actually a change in tactics. A small change but an important one. COIN uses basically the ‘Ink blot’ or ‘Fortified hamlet’ at the operational level. Both ( they are cousins, sorta) are ancient approaches to insurgents. Both work. The surge was a change from Gen. Crooks “sweeps” ( Used against the American Indians of the Northwest) to the French and British, ‘Ink blot’ used in SE Asia in the 19th century. Which type of ops plan is used depends on METT.
Just as R2P is orwellian for Colonialism, so COIN is orwellian for ‘Nation building.
Changing the nouns here has no affect on the verbs. Call it R2P or Colonialism, one takes the same actions hoping for the same results. Call it COIN or Nation Building, both require the same action for the same results.
The Right HATES Nation building. The Left loves it. United we stand, divided we fall. So the Left (guys like you) think that by renaming Nation building COIN, they can trick the Right into co-operating. You are wrong.
Turn the odometer back as far as you want, that trade-in is still a clapped out old junker.
Call it what you will, COIN, Nation building, whatever, it has NEVER worked. The best that can be hoped for is to confuse the enemy for a while. If that confusion makes it easier to kill the enemy, then good. IF you have no intention of killing the enemy, why bother?
Killing the enemy ALWAYS works. It has for thousands of years. Osama is Dead. We will have no more trouble from him. Killing them works. COIN doesn’t.
The US Navy is closer to reality on this issue. We sink targets. Period. We will pick up survivors if there is time. If there isn’t, let them make friends with the sharks.
s @ 89:Rummy tried to replace the old calculations of man power needed to fight insurgents with technology. The technology available at the time was not up to the task. So they went with a COIN strategy. Yes, that’s right. Iraq was COIN from day one.
I wouldn’t tell it that way. Rummy got his victory in Iraq in two weeks. It was far from perfect, especially since the 4ID couldn’t come down from the north, but the DoD did its part. Then the political side didn’t know what to do with the victory. We did not request, nor receive, any kind of capitulation. First mistake. Just as with Bush41 in 1991, there was not the spontaneous reformation and evolution of the Iraqi government that we hoped for. Second mistake. And with the Iraqi army defeated, we thought we could immediately make peace with all the remaining forces, Sunni and Shia, mujihadeed and tribal. Third mistake. Bush43 believed in extending Christian charity to one and all. In the short term at least, that has to be judged a fourth mistake, in that it costs a *lot* of American lives and treasure to act on that faith.
Only after all that, did COIN come into the equation.
Even then, only because Bush43, still asshole buddies with the Sauds even after everything, insisted on their behalf that Islam is a religion of peace and that we were not at war with it – not it with us. Otherwise our implementation of COIN might have been far more aggressive – and effective.
That’s my take, anyway.
s@89: Aah food fight on Mother’s Day. Seriously, much of your post is confusing.
I’m not sure you understand what COIN is.
I wasn’t sure this board understood the concept so I attempted to flesh it out vis a vis ME ‘engagements.’ I am too disinclined and not computer literate enough to research all my posts on COIN but taken in toto I made all the points itemized in your post – at one time or another. They’re out there somewhere.
COIN is orwellian for ‘Nation building.
What started it on this post was the conflict between the Palin Doctrine of no nation-building (not explicitly prohibited by the Powell Doctrine) vs the current COIN activities, which, as I said, are essentially a nation-building effort. I was looking for comment on that.
Rummy tried to replace the old calculations of man power needed to fight insurgents with technology. The technology available at the time was not up to the task. So they went with a COIN strategy. Yes, that’s right. Iraq was COIN from day one.
I believe that was the point I was making. Again looking for comment. If people consider themselves Rumsfeldian, then they support COIN.
COIN uses basically the ‘Ink blot’ or ‘Fortified hamlet’ at the operational level. Both ( they are cousins, sorta) are ancient approaches to insurgents. Both work.
Call it what you will, COIN, Nation building, whatever, it has NEVER worked.
?????????
So the Left (guys like you) think that by renaming Nation building COIN, they can trick the Right into co-operating.
Peculiar statement since I was the one who clarified the semantics on this thread.
Both Palin and Powell are reacting to previous failures and stupidities.
These are not complete doctrines.
I would add that the neoconservatives did indeed have decades long wet dreams of nation-building in the ME – and their role under Bush post-9/11 was little more than not wasting a crisis.
At the same time, one has to give credence to the policy predicated on stabilizing an oil-rich region for the sake of preventing economic collapse of global markets. How to do that? The Palin Doctrine suggests bomb, baby, bomb, which is simplistic and inadequate. Much better to make oil go away.
Wretchard #57
“The history of the last ten years suggests a fundamental flaw in the Jihadi strategy: as long as it engages America it will perforce keep handing out logins to its network. At the edge of battle America will gain access and get inside.”
If the flaw continues.
What if the predominant means of advancing Islam becomes different? It could be something as simple as moving to a more Druze-like version of Islam where there are no converts, only those born into the system. Or adopting a strategy of killing every family member of an informant for any discretion. Or something none of us can foresee.
My point is, in any conflict you’ll see both adversaries adapt and change. To that end, brute force must always be there in case the “interrupt and use the network” strategy is no longer functioning.
“The Palin Doctrine suggests bomb, baby, bomb, which is simplistic and inadequate. Much better to make oil go away.”
First it suggests “bomb, baby, Bomb. Only to the Left. It does leave bombing as an option. The left doesn’t see it as an option and so you guys are trying to portray it as the only option. That isn’t so and I seriously doubt that Sara said or meant it that way.
As far as OIL. It is never going away. Period. Even if we stop using it as fuel and the basis of Western civilization, we will still need it for Chemistry.
Your Electric vehicle might not burn hydrocarbons but it CANNOT be manufactured without them.
Guerrilla (small war) is the second oldest form of warfare. About 5 minutes after the first army defeated another army, the defeated army took to the hills and started Guerrilla. One of the Oldest bits of wrrting translated is clay tablets dating from 3500 BC. In it the King is complaing about a defeated army attacking his supply lines at night. They weren’t fighting fair. Guerrilla.
The Authoritative manual on the subject was written by a Major Caldwell in or about 1890. Everything since then has been a study of how new technologies applied to Caldwell’s “Small Wars”.
The techniques in “Small Wars’ work. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t. COIN borrows from “Small wars” with one major difference. In “Small Wars” the first and most important step is determining what sort of Guerrilla you are fighting. COIN treats them ALL the same. I guess when all you have is a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.
This administration is about to make a really critical mistake. Islamic terrorism is on the run. The verge of defeat. So do we pursue and turn defeat into rout, rout into slaughter? Or do we show mercy and prepare for the next round? If we don’t pursue, there WILL be a next round. When in pursuit, you don’t stop until they are ALL slaughtered. THAT is what needs to be debated. COIN or KILL?
“Call it what you will, COIN, Nation building, whatever, it has NEVER worked.”
I believe what is being called COIN first was tried and was successful in subduing the insurgency in the Philippines under General Pershing. And to me, COIN was successful in subduing the insurgency in Iraq. That said, I do not think the conditions in Afghanistan will allow COIN to work, and unless America is willing to impose it’s will on a whole host of Islamic nations as well as become self sufficient in oil, COIN should not be tried again. Islam must be prostrate for COIN to work. THe fundamentalist power structure that murders and punishes the apostate must be eradicated before COIN can make any difference, otherwise the moment we leave, those muslims who became westernized and civil will be punished, if not murdered. And then we’re back to square one.
But for all those who criticize COIN and nation building, you must realize that you have to be ready to nearly annihilate a la Carthage any muslim nation that we go to war with, otherwise that nation we eventually re-arm and attack us back. Islam needs to be put down and kept down almost like a rabid dog. COIN is really not the issue. The real issue is that America needs to be willing to attack and defeat Islam’s center of gravity: the oil states.
Unsk @ 96:”unless America is willing to impose it’s will on a whole host of Islamic nations as well as become self sufficient in oil, COIN should not be tried again”
Could not agree more.
I thought for sure that Bush, in his 9/16/01 speech to a Joint Session of Congress would ask for an 80-division Army to invade, conquer, and reconstruct Arabia and Pakistan, and that his first overseas trip should be to New Delhi. I was actually dumbfounded (nobody ever said I was smart) that he failed to do this.
The whole Iraq adventure was incomprehensible to me, if it was not to be a staging area for the conquest of the rest of Arabia. Ann Coulter, in her “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert their people to Christianity” quip actually expressed, in very brief form, the sort of war that is required to bring this barbarism to an end.
Until cathedrals are rising in Lahore, Karachi, Riyadh, and Mecca, the war will go on. However much we wish it were not so.
Or until we lose.
Josh @ 83: “I’m basically a Rumsfeldian, and think Shinseki was old-school.”
Yes, Shinseki was very old school. Old school, like, “We win they lose”.
What you deride as the “old school”, as exemplified by the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the USA, conquered most of the planet and made the wretched of the earth tremble with fear, and submit. Kitchener kept the Mahdi’s skull as a trophy, for heaven’s sake, and bought 60 years of peace.
Just what exactly has the “new school” accomplished? Other than the loss of more than a hundred thousand brave men in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and turning the fantail of the USS Vinson into a venue for a barbarian ceremony?
J@90: Then the political side didn’t know what to do with the victory.
My view of the difficulties in the ME (of which there are many of course) is that “Winning the War” butted up against “Securing the Peace” (one might add stability as well.) These two “clearly defined objectives” that we in the west have now come to worship got well and truly muddled. I believe they still are – or might be and the subtleties have not filtered down. My problem with the Palin/Powell Doctrines is that they provide policy guidance for Winning Wars but nothing for Securing Peace. In that sense, they are ‘incomplete’ as noted above.
s@95: As far as OIL. It is never going away.
You caught me there. I was trying to say ME oil. Take away the cash cow and force this culture to embrace normal sustainable economic activity – or perish.
I seriously doubt that Sara said or meant it that way.
One of the concerns I have about Palin is that she has the potential to pull a Christine Todd Whitman. (Not so sure you all are aware of how Tricky Christie balanced the NJ state budget.) Republican Golden Girl who crashed and burned at the federal level.
THAT is what needs to be debated. COIN or KILL?
Agreed. I don’t think Palin helped her case with her so-called Doctrine. Neither considered nor thoughtful nor particularly insightful. In fact, I found it to be borderline shallow and hardly worthy of the press coverage.
Follow Colonel C. E. Callwell’s 1896 Small Wars guidance and you end up with excellent tactics that will win wars you should lose. Or you will be super frustrated by the inability to carry out such tactics long term due to politics.
Follow such brilliance — and it is brilliant — and you have a failed Empire and failing ex-empire. You have South Africa — a place that would be better today had the Boer’s followed the astute lesson of the Dutch in New Amsterdam. Win by losing. Or if the English had followed that sublime principle of LONG war. You have England today, it’s politics captured by the politically correct fifth column and the insurgents themselves.
We need more who follow the examples of Sherman. Sherman won two wars, a long one and a short one by breaking out of the mindset of war and tactics. Sherman was an intensely moral man.