International Security

Under the category of self-promotion:

the master’s degree program I was in at Harvard required that all students do a research thesis in order to graduate (many don’t graduate because they can’t get the thesis done; the work involved is more like doing a dissertation than a typical thesis).  I did mine on private security contractors — specifically Blackwater working for the State Dept. in OIF.

It’s now been published on ProQuest:

Armed Contractors on the Battlefield: Coordination Issues in Iraq between the U.S. Military and Private Security Contractors, Harvard University, 2009.

Abstract:

Good feeling. Nice to see it out there.

In September there was a flurry of activity around the web about the DOD’s impending policy on the use of social networking services and web 2.0 in the military. There’s a good aggregate site on DOD SNS. And of course DOD has a “social media hub” on twitter and every place else.

It seems the DOD has quite an active SNS life. But where’s the policy? Seems somewhat moot.

This company takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Recently they made headlines because of allegations they bribed Iraqi officials after they killed 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square during a State Dept. security detail. And the commentary on that story begins. Scahill and Spencer Ackerman at the head of the line. Now an Indian news outlet and The Nation say the Taliban are blaming Blackwater for the bombing in Peshawar in late Oct. that killed 100. Not to mention the problems Blackwater/Xe has had in Afghanistan operating under the name Paravant. Contractors in Afghanistan have no formal oversight by the government covering rules of engagement and conduct as they finally did in Iraq. August Cole reporting for the WSJ on that incident

Two of four Blackwater-affiliated contractors involved in a civilian shooting incident in Kabul [in May] have fled to the U.S. in order to avoid possible prosecution from Afghan authorities, according to their attorney.

The four men worked as military trainers for Paravant, an affiliate of Blackwater, whose parent company is now called Xe. Paravant was assisting Raytheon Co. on a Defense Department contract.

Renaming itself Xe didn’t seem to really help Blackwater in the press. Perhaps it keeps some lawsuits at bay going forward but if any of the current stories are true, I doubt it will matter what it calls itself. But they do seem to keep raking in the federal dollars as security contractors.

I interviewed Dr. Allison Stanger on her new book, One Nation Under Contract, for IA-Forum last week. I asked her to define her concept, “post-industrial foreign policy”:

Post-industrial foreign policy is an effort to capture the strategic reorientation we need for the information age. We don’t need a new prescription for our glasses, we need a new eye chart, we need to change exactly what we see. I think there are really three planks to a post-industrial policy that I’d highlight. The first being to demilitarize American foreign policy, the second being to embrace smart-sourcing, and don’t just blindly turn to in-sourcing, but the third that we haven’t talked about is to embrace a form of radical transparency. Because if you’re going to have this outsourced policy to the private sector it’s got to take place in full sunlight. People have to be able to see where the money is going and how well it was spent. President Obama’s been great at moving things in the right direction with USASpending.gov, which is this website that allows the American people to see where their taxpayer dollars go. Contracts and grants are all up there, you can really track it. But if you look on that website what you’ll also see under the category, “subcontracts and sub-grants”, is that those areas were supposed to be online by January 2009, and the site is still under construction. Well if you’ve got transparency at the big contract level, but then they’re turning around and doling it out to all these subcontracts and that’s opaque, you’ve still got a problem. So we’re moving in the right direction but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

This incident may be a bad omen. The Taliban may be behind this awful shooting. The NYT reports that the soldiers had taken off their body armor and helmets

never thinking that they would be attacked by one of the men they lived and worked with, said a local provincial official.

The Times also noted a similar incident a month ago where 2 U.S. soldiers were killed by an Afghan policeman who

fired on American soldiers during a joint patrol in Wardak Province. [The incident] immediately intensified concerns about Taliban infiltration of the Afghan security forces, in particular the police, which are supposed to be preparing to take a broader role in combating the Taliban insurgency.

General McChrystal insists on pushing on and getting more troops. I have to say my take on this is that Andrew Bacevich is right — we should be doing a counter-terrorism operation, not a counter-insurgency. I fear the U.S. is getting sucked into a long dark hole with little advantage to our national security interests.

In an interview I did with him for International Affairs Forum, he said:

It seems to me that there are many people who assume that Afghanistan is a vital national security interest of the United States, that somehow we have to determine the fate of that country. And I question that assumption. I believe that our interests in Afghanistan are quite limited and indeed do not go much beyond simply ensuring that Afghanistan doesn’t become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda or other groups that are intent on trying to kill us. If that’s an accurate description of our interests there then I would say that protracted war that aims to pacify the country is completely unnecessary, not to mention probably completely unaffordable. So we have to ask ourselves if there are more cost-effective ways to accomplish our limited purposes and I think what’s now being called the counter-terrorism approach, or the Biden Plan, at least offers one possible alternative to what [General] McChrystal is giving us. What it says is basically that rather than occupying the place from now until the cows come home, we will maintain a comprehensive system of surveillance, we will do our darnedest to track Al-Qaida presence and activities and, to the extent that we can, come up with actionable intelligence then we will try to take out, dismantle, the Al-Qaida network, and therefore prevent Afghanistan from being the sanctuary that it was in September of 2001. I’m not saying that would be easy. I’m not saying it would provide a perfect fail-safe system. I am suggesting that it’s quite likely that that would be more effective than an open-ended counterinsurgency campaign and would also be much, much cheaper.

Cheaper financially. Less loss of life. It makes me think of the now-famous line John Kerry said during testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, after his tour in Viet Nam

how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Around Boston, Whitey and Billy Bulger are famous brothers. Whitey as the long-time head of a violent criminal gang; Billy for being a tenacious politician who fell out of favor near the end of his public career.  For many years, Whitey has been on the run and is on the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Now comes the Afghan version.

The NYT has the story on President Karai and his brother, Amed Wali, who apparently is not only a huge opium drug dealer but has been on the CIA payroll for eight years. One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is how the CIA uses Amed Wali

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The CIA denies the connection and allegations. But it does support the Kandahar Strike Force, that aforementioned paramilitary group, which is now living in Mullar Omar’s former compound. This story links back to that odd incident in Kandahar in June when the local police chief was killed

The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai intensified in June when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.

The  fact is that credibility is hard for the CIA to come by these days. This story rings true. Drugs generate a phenomenal amount of money in Afghanistan. Corruption reaches up to President Karzai as we’ve seen in the recently rigged election. And, two brothers working on opposite sides of the law is not a new story.

One final question, so if we follow that money trail, will it lead to U.S. contractors somewhere in the pipeline?

This is an ongoing annoyance for me. I see it as a trend worth noting.

Years ago, academics wrote books for each other and their students. The number of academics, and their books, was limited. In recent years, they’ve begun to write books for the public; these books are cropping up with a distracting element: way too many footnotes. One current book has 185 pages of content and 45 pages of footnotes. That’s just wrong. I gather that it’s because publishing houses and authors are so afraid of charges of plagiarism. Another explanation: academics that can get a book published have gone so far down the road of scholarly writing that they don’t know how else to do it. A less appealing hypothesis is that the writer is reiterating facts and ideas from others too much; leaning too heavily on analysis and research that’s gone before. Given how many people write books these days…that’s not an unlikely explanation. It’s hard to write completely new material. Yet, truly fresh and sound analysis, if not research, would be refreshing.

Two separate air crashes in Afghanistan killed 14 Americans. WaPo reports

The first helicopter crashed in Western Afghanistan after leaving a joint operation with NATO and Afghan forces against insurgents and suspected drug traffickers, officials said. That crash killed seven troops and three civilian U.S. government employees who were reportedly connected with anti-drug operations.

In the second accident, two military helicopters collided in mid-air in eastern Afghanistan, killing four U.S. troops, officials said. No other details were provided, but NATO officials also ruled out any hostile attack or foul play.

No foul play? That’s been ruled out already? What are the odds of these two accidents on the same day?

This is the highest number of Americans killed in one day there in four years. What was going wrong in each situation? Maintenance, pilot error, malfunction in equipment/flight controls, sabotage?

(Gene Thorp – WaPo)

David Rohde offers a riveting account in the New York Times of his kidnapping by the Haqqani network and captivity in Pakistan for over 7 months. He notes that Carlotta Gall, the intrepid NYT reporter in Quetta, never does interviews with the Taliban in person — only on the phone, as a safety measure. There’s a fine line between intrepid and reckless. For all that Gall has been subjected to in her years of living in and reporting from Pakistan, she has never become a victim (she’s been arrested and seriously harassed, but not kidnapped like Jill Carroll, Daniel Pearl, or Rohde). 

One of the most useful elements of his ordeal and the re-telling of it — he shows the complexity of the situation, e.g., the “Taliban” is not a monolith. There are Afghan Taliban, Pakistan Taliban, and some who are just plain criminals.  Between the story and the NYT blog which takes readers’ questions on it, there is a great opportunity to understand this layered world the U.S. is swimming through opaquely in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Drugs, money, religion, power, violence, and suffering.  It’s all there. Indeed, there are some clear villians but we are in no position to simply rush in and eliminate “the enemy”. Even our drone strikes do not offer the clean “win” we could wish for; killing civilians is a major setback for the U.S. forces and an effective tool in jidhadist recruitment. In Afghanistan, part of the problem is geography that’s working against us. In Pakistan, there’s that “small” issue of sovereignty. The Kerry-Lugar bill of aid to Pakistan doesn’t solve too much either since the Pakistanis feel it ends with a thud on a low note of disrespect.

Perhaps a more successful long-term strategy is a regional solution; one that addresses the sticking points among and between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. We need to work on incentives that will appeal to each country and we need more civil affairs personnel than soldiers in Afghanistan.

An excerpt from my interview for International Affairs Forum with Dr. David Ucko on his book, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars:

IA-Forum: In counterinsurgency, victory can be hard to measure. Are we asking our military to engage in drawn out conflicts that end only when both parties are exhausted?

Dr. Ucko: Ideally not. Ideally the point of the exercise is to seize the initiative and maintain momentum. I think the notion of mutual exhaustion would be a very unsatisfactory end point to what is often a very painful campaign. Victory is a misleading word, but in the framework of counterinsurgency, you could see victory perhaps as creating an order that is preferable to the status quo ante. And it’s also self-sustainable, that is that it won’t unravel once the intervening forces are removed. Now that takes a very long time and that’s why these conflicts are so drawn out. In a sense, are we asking our military to do this? Well, of course if there was a way of avoiding these types of operations all together, I think that that would be infinitely preferable. The problem is that these types of operations are not always easy to avoid and for some of the reasons that I touched on before, I see the complexities that we see in Iraq and Afghanistan as being representative of future campaigns.

So it doesn’t look good. It is not the type of operations that the military has wanted to fight and perhaps operations that are rapid and decisive, which were two key words in defense planning prior to Iraq, because these were the types of operations that the military was structured to conduct. These are neither rapid nor decisive, but unfortunately it seems to be the only operations that we’re going to face. So that’s why I feel that one way of undercutting their complexity and perhaps making it less of a grueling process is to prepare accordingly rather than to pretend that these counterinsurgency campaigns are not to re-occur.