International Security

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.

Walter Pincus at WaPo reports on the new “cyber-range” in the 2010 Defense budget. The “National Cyber Range” (yet to be created) would test the strength and vulnerabilities of government cyber systems against outside experts. DARPA is the owner of this test program now but is supposed to turn it over to another (to be determined) government agency within two years. Given that the DOD is admittedly very short on cyber expertise, hopefully these exercises will highlight not only hardware, software, and partner/contractor network problems but also human resource weaknesses.

Pincus add that currently, DOD is thick with network test beds, “creating an environment of excessive duplication and waste.” No surprise there.

Would love to be a fly on the wall for the “offensive attack” efforts in the cyber test range.

Here’s a link to the DOD Cyber Crime Center and info on its annual conference:

The…Conference annually draws over 800 participants from federal agencies, the law enforcement community, and those from the defense investigative organizations whose primary missions are combating computer criminal and terrorist activities. Leaders from government and industry address cyber-crime topics such as intrusion investigations, cyber-crime law, digital forensics, and information assurance as well as the research, development, testing and evaluation of digital forensic tools. The goal of the conference is to address current trends in cyber crime and those of the future.

It seems that the USA Today,  AP, and The Billings (Montana) Gazette are the only MSM to cover this story (ok, not quite true). Some unknown CA outfit, the American Police Force (APF) (how generic can they be?) shows up in Montana to take over an empty prison with 464 beds. Its first story, “What is the American Police Force and what is it doing in Montana?” ran October 1.  The next story, “Montana Attorney General probes secretive American Police Force” was up the next day. Rumors are out there that APF is really Blackwater/Xe. But I don’t see any comment from Blackwater hunter, Jeremy Scahill, so I’m skeptical about the Blackwater connection (if Scahill doesn’t see it…)

The story so far sounds like a bad Twilight Zone episode: big money, an empty prison out in nowhere, alleged terrorists (Quantanamo prisoners) may be sent there, shady company characters, staff lured from the public sector to work and shill for the company…or, it could just be a twisted, dark version of State and Main.

The AP and the Gazette reported that:

Michael Hilton, the apparent founder of APF who claims to be a military veteran, has a lengthy criminal record and has served time in prison in California.

Not reassuring.

Perhaps one of the best comments so far has come from the governor of Montana as he “ridiculed the idea of a secret government plot, saying: “I think a low-level card shark is not going to rise to the level to get some kind of government defense contract.”" He obviously doesn’t remember the green 22 year old guy who supplied bad ammo to the military in Afghanistan for $300M or the two characters from Custer Battles early in OIF.

TPM Muckraker ran a brief piece on how the town of Hardin has put out press material to allay local fears that “there are no commandos in the streets” there. This seems unnecessary. Montana folks are hardier than that; they don’t scare that easily, right? I mean, just because the American Police Force company image (below)  looks like a major swat team…

An article in TIME magazine today continues the coverage of the sorry private security situation at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. First there were the photos of security contractors behaving ingloriously and the scathing report of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and its letter to Sec. of State Clinton. Yesterday (9/10) Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent detailed the ArmorGroup contract

former senior company officials said ArmorGroup was aware of widespread fraud; intentional use of non-English speaking guards to save money at the expense of embassy security; operations of a shell corporation in order to win contracts intended only for American companies; and even involvement in prostitution — and that the State Department knew about at least some of the company’s illicit practices.

In a follow-up story today, Ackerman quotes the communications director, Leslie Philips, for Sen. Lieberman’s government affairs committee, on what they knew and how long State has known of these issues

Concerns about this contract had been raised long before the meeting [between Gorman, other whistleblowers, and the staff, which occurred November 7, 2007], and the State Department was communicating its concerns to the contractor. The concerns dealt with issues such as the inadequate number of guards at the embassy, high turnover among guards, and the guards’ inadequate English-speaking abilities. None of the concerns involved the sexual malfeasance and other inappropriate behavior that has most recently been reported.

The blog, Diplopundit, has some information as well and fills in the org. chart at State vis-a-vis diplomatic security a bit on this

Ultimately, [the undersecretary for] Management and Diplomatic Security [departments] are the ones on the line here. One oversees administration including contracts and the other has oversight on the ground through the Regional Security Office. Of course, on the ground Regional Security Officers report directly to the Deputy Chief of Mission or the Deputy Ambassador, who then reports directly to the US Ambassador. So this thing is going to ricochet through multiple offices and cubicles before this is over.

POGO urges the military to assume supervision of the embassy’s private security contractors (PSCs). In Iraq, it wasn’t until SecDef Gates pushed the Memo of Agreement through after Blackwater’s debacle at Nisoor Square in Sept. ‘07 that DOD and State really got on the same page there and serious incidents involving State’s PSCs decreased to zero.

Contractors are leery of coming under military command and control (C2) but POGO’s recommendation has some merit. The two reasons why soldiers don’t do this static protection work for the Embassy — (1) it’s not in the military’s remit to do so and (2) they don’t have the personnel.  With all the on-going and pained debate about getting more civilian help and State personnel on reconstruction teams around Afghanistan, it’s a sad statement about State that they can’t even fill their security jobs at the Embassy properly and that this is not a new conundrum for them. Private security is State’s Achilles’ heel.

Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist, gets another day in court.

The NYT reports

There is no question whom she held responsible for the carnage [in Chechnya]: the Russian Army and Mr. Putin. On the day she was killed with four shots from a silenced pistol, she was about to deliver a major report to her newspaper on torture in Chechnya.

This isn’t a retrial of the men acquitted (none of whom was the shooter). The Russian court ordered investigators to start over. If nothing else, this keeps her story alive.