Center for a New American Security

We have touched in this blog on developments that seem to suggest the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups have started working ever-more closely together. This article by David Rohde of the New York Times makes spells out the case more explicitly by drawing on Antonio Giustozzi's latest book - Decoding the New Taliban: Insights form the Afghan Field.

"The Taliban and their cause have moved effortlessly across national, ethnic, and tribal boundaries. Claudio Franco describes how Pakistan's tribal areas have served as a base for the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. In December 2007, the Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was able to create an alliance of Pakistani jihadi groups, which ranged from Sunni hard-liners eager to kill Shia, to Punjabi militants eager to kill Indian forces in Kashmir, to Pashtuns eager to topple American-backed leaders in Kabul and Islamabad. Mehsud, who was killed in an American drone strike in August 2009*, blocked Pakistani government efforts to split the Pakistani Taliban along tribal lines.

"Baitullah's masterstroke was his involvement in the creation of the TTP in December 2007," Franco writes, using the acronym for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Taliban Movement of Pakistan. "Treating the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] like a section of the Muslim Ummah, and tribals as a single community of believers, the brains behind the TTP were able to introduce a mutual assistance mechanism designed to break the government's strategy."

Franco writes that the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban both operate under a loose Taliban command structure headed by the longtime Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Omar. Broad directives are issued by Mullah Omar, but local Taliban ground commanders in both countries carry out local operations as they see fit. He concludes that the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban are wings of the same broad Taliban movement. "The Afghan Taliban never appear as an external actor," he writes. "They direct the Pakistanis as if they were another of their regional Wilayat, or governorates."

Another important point to look at in the article is how the "semi wild men of the tribal lands" (as a starry-eyed aid worker in Islamabad once said) have become pretty clever at the old technology thing:

"In her essay, "Reading the Taliban," in the Giustozzi volume, Joanna Nathan marvels at the Taliban's haphazard, yet sophisticated and extremely effective p.r. strategy. A movement that seemed to reject modernity in the 1990s is now adept at using technology to monitor its enemy, disseminate its message, and shape its image. One Taliban commander operating just south of Kabul in Wardak Province, for example, recognized the publicity value of carrying out attacks near Kabul. "Being near Kabul allows the news and military events that happen here to reach all the international media outlets," he told Al Somood, the Taliban's official magazine, in 2008. "For instance, when we destroyed 54 logistics vehicles in July, local and international journalists rushed to report the event."

The idea that Taliban leaders think of informational influence as an integral part of their operational planning actually puts them a few steps ahead of their ISAF and Pakistani opponents.

Rohde makes two very nail-on-the-head conclusions.

1. All this talk of talking to the Taliban seems a little too hopeful if you consider that the Taliban (whichever branch) sees itself as doing pretty well at the moment. Why start thinking about negotiating when you feel you are winning (ie managing to stay in the fight) and your opponent is talking about leaving in a year and a bit?

2. An Afghan surge is unlikely to work while the Afghan Taliban is drawing on support from its now integrated branch on the other side of the Durand Line. However, this article was probably written before news emerged of the arrests made by Pakistan, which we talked about here and here.

But, considering the mystery surrounding Pakistan's intentions in relation to those arrests and their possible repercussions<!--EndFragment-->, it's worth keeping Rohde's final words in mind.

"Another scenario is more likely, and arguably more frightening. There is one prospect worse than Pakistani influence over the Afghan Taliban, and that is the Afghan Taliban’s immunity to Pakistani influence. Pakistan’s generals may find that in fact they now do not have the influence over the hard-line Afghan Taliban that they believe. A new generation of Afghan Taliban might remain unwaveringly committed to the jihad that they are waging with their Arab, Uzbek, and Pakistani brethren. They could hunker down in their tribal area strongholds and dare the Pakistani army to dislodge them. What then? As the American troop presence in the region shrinks in 2011 and 2012, the Afghan Taliban could re-emerge with a vengeance."

I have written a little about the utility of quantitative analysis in the field of security studies here and here. Last week, though, I finished Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson's book on how quantitative hedge funds -- as opposed to "fundamental" investors like Warren Buffett -- contributed to the Wall Street collapse of 2008. Patterson ends his book with the efforts of some quants to get their analysis to abide by a code of conduct. The resulting manifesto -- written by Paul Wilmott and Emanuel Derman -- can be read here. There are some useful passages, highlighted below, which address the uncomfortable reality that elegant mathmatical formulae don't always describe messy human endeavors like the behavior of the markets -- or war, for that matter.

Physics, because of its astonishing success at predicting the future behavior of material objects from their present state, has inspired most financial modeling. Physicists study the world by repeating the same experiments over and over again to discover forces and their almost magical mathematical laws. Galileo dropped balls off the leaning tower, giant teams in Geneva collide protons on protons, over and over again. If a law is proposed and its predictions contradict experiments, it's back to the drawing board. The method works. The laws of atomic physics are accurate to more than ten decimal places.

 

It's a different story with finance and economics, which are concerned with the mental world of monetary value. Financial theory has tried hard to emulate the style and elegance of physics in order to discover its own laws. But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, by their ephemeral feelings about events and by their expectations of other people's feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them. ...

 

The Modelers' Hippocratic Oath

 

~ I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations.

 

~ Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.

 

~ I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.

 

~ Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.

 

~ I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

I found the humility in this manifesto to be really refreshing. What might a similar manifesto look like for those using quantitative analysis to study war? And should the U.S. graduate programs in political science (and subsets of the field, like international relations and security studies) pushing their students toward quantitative analysis be more up-front about the explanatory limits of such analysis? Anyway, borrowing liberally (read: plagiarizing) from Wilmott and Derman, here is what I think a Hippocratic Oath for Quantitative Analysis in Security Studies should look like:

• War is a human endeavor. I recognize that it is a phenomenon that does not conform to neat mathematical equations.
• I will use quantitative analysis in conjunction with theory and qualitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis.
• In war and peace, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value.
• I will not use numbers to signify what are fundamentally qualitative assessments without acknowledging to my reader that I have done so in order to satisfy a departmental requirement, gain tenure, or get published in the APSR. Or because I have been in graduate school for so long that I have forgotten how to effectively write in prose.
• I recognize there are no mathematical equations in Vom Kriege and that it is nonetheless unlikely that my legacy will transcend that of Clausewitz.
• I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do. 

A just-published news report has prodded Londonstani out of a work-enduced coma:

The Christian Science Monitor reports today (24th) that the Pakistani authorities have moved against the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Pakistan (dubbed the Quetta Shura)

"In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought."

As the CSM rightly asks; 1 Why is Pakistan doing this now, and 2 Does it significantly damage the Afghan Taliban?

"The crackdown may to be related to efforts by some Taliban leaders to explore talks with Western and Afghan authorities independently of Pakistan, the UN official said"

There has already been much reporting of the politic-ing behind efforts to talk to the Taliban - including the use of the good offices of former Afghan Jihadis who have long since hung up their AKs (like Abdullah Anas). But this changes the game. The Pakistani on-going operation in Waziristan was delayed as the Pakistani army cut deals with Afghan Taliban leaders (among others) so as to limit the fronts it would have to fight on. Might these arrests, which look to be more than a cosmetic exercise, basically equal a declaration of war against the people it built up and then protected for so long. That is a pretty serious shift in policy.

A recent article in The New Republic about General Keyani, the Pakistani army's chief of staff, comes to mind. Michael Crowley thinks Keyani sees that American and Pakistani interests (as viewed by Keyani) are aligned and suggests that Keyani was just getting round to this move all along. But Pakistan's key interest in Afghanistan centres on making sure the people who run the place like Islamabad more than New Dehli. The only Afghanis likely to feel that way are the Taliban. How does arresting their leadership sheltering in Pakistan make them feel warm and fuzzy about Keyani's men? And how does it make them want to conduct any future potential talks with the allies through Pakistan?

As for damaging the Taliban:

“This really hurts the Taliban in the short run,” says Wahid Muzjda, a former Taliban official turned political analyst, based in Kabul.

"You can arrest Mullah Baradar, but there are many Mullah Baradars out there,” says Mr. Zaif. “The commanders are replaceable. The fighters on the ground will keep fighting.”

Seems the jury is out on that one.

UPDATE: Fixing The New Republic writer's name first name and updating headline

Anand Gopal, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now with the Christian Science Monitor, has a scoop.

Pakistan has arrested nearly half of the Afghanistan Taliban’s leadership in recent days, Pakistani officials told the Monitor Wednesday, dealing what could be a crucial blow to the insurgent movement.

In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought.

“This really hurts the Taliban in the short run,” says Wahid Muzjda, a former Taliban official turned political analyst, based in Kabul. Whether it will have an effect in the long run will depend on what kind of new leaders take the reins, he says.

News of the sweep emerged over the past week, with reports that Pakistani authorities had netted Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the movement’s second in command, as well as Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a prominent commander in charge of insurgent operations in eastern Afghanistan, and Mullah Muhammad Younis.

Pakistan has also captured several other Afghan members of the leadership council, called the Quetta Shura, two officials with the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau, and a United Nations official in Kabul told the Monitor.

These include: Mullah Abdul Qayoum Zakir, who oversees the movement’s military affairs, Mullah Muhammad Hassan, Mullah Ahmed Jan Akhunzada, , and Mullah Abdul Raouf.

At least two Taliban shadow provincial governors, who are part of the movement’s parallel government in Afghanistan, have also been captured.

A Taliban spokesman denied the arrests, saying that they were meant to hide the difficulties that United States and NATO forces were having in Afghanistan.

Why Pakistan’s sudden crackdown?

The crackdown may to be related to efforts by some Taliban leaders to explore talks with Western and Afghan authorities independently of Pakistan, the UN official said. Pakistan is widely suspected of backing the Afghan Taliban in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, a charge Islamabad has long denied. But Pakistan may also be wary of Taliban attempts to initiate talks without its involvement or sanction.

And you people wonder why I never blog or write about Israel and the Palestinians? How the hell am I supposed to make sense of this?

The son of a leading Hamas figure, who famously converted to Christianity, served for over a decade as the Shin Bet security service's most valuable source in the militant organization's leadership, Haaretz has learned.

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder and one of its leaders in the West Bank. The intelligence he supplied Israel led to the exposure of a number of terrorist cells, and to the prevention of dozens of suicide bombings and assassination attempts on Israeli figures.

The exclusive story will appear in this Friday's Haaretz Magazine, and Yousef's memoir, "Son of Hamas" (written with Ron Brackin) will be released next week in the United States. Yousef, 32, became a devout Christian 10 years ago and now lives in California after fleeing the West Bank in 2007 and going public with his conversion.

Yes, this is in fact World Bank honcho Robert Zoellick. And Shakira. No, this is not photoshopped.

Una loba en el armario
Tiene ganas de salir (Zoellick: A-ooooh!)
Deja que se coma el barrio
Antes de irte a dormir

...this one, sure to be under the pillow of every USMA cadet from now until infinity, is out in paperback starting today.

Col. (Ret.) Bob Killebrew just told me that Col. Bob Howard was interred today in Arlington. Who was Bob Howard? Maybe the finest warrior ever produced by the U.S. military. 

While home in Tennessee this weekend, I finished (and enjoyed) this book and this book. More on both later. But as soon as I started Matt Gallagher's new memoir, Kaboom, while waiting on my plane to depart from the airport in Chattanooga, I was hooked. This may well be the best memoir to have been written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Because it captures something I have never really seen captured all that well in memoirs -- how the constant suck of war is intertwined with the never-ended stream of hilarity that takes place in a tight-knit combat arms platoon. Kaboom is laugh-out-loud funny. And brutal. Buy it.

From Mark Helprin in today's Wall Street Journal:

Cancelling the F-22 Raptor, the most capable fighter plane ever produced, is yet another act in the tragedy of a nation that, bankrupting itself, embracing moral decline, and apologizing to its enemies, is losing the will to prevail.

I mean, I do not even know where to begin with this one aside from laugh at how over-the-top that sentence is. I guess I could point out that the Department of Defense's base budget grew, in a time of tremendous financial pressure, 2.8% last year. (1.4% if you adjust for inflation.) I could also point out that since 2001, even if you do not include spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the DOD base budget has increased 40%. (And 70% if you include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.) You and Mark Helprin can both read about this in Travis Sharp's helpful primer on the QDR and FY11 defense budget.

Lamenting a reduced U.S. Air Force presence in Europe, Helprin writes that "while it declined but before it burned, Rome kept only a shadow of legions upon the Rhine and the Danube." He actually wrote that sentence. In a newspaper. A quick Wikipedia search tells me the U.S. military currently has 369,000 military personnel deployed in 150 countries. Hardly a shadow, those 369,000 troops. And maybe -- just maybe -- we have a reduced presence in Europe because it makes sense to stage elsewhere. Or does Helprin think the Visigoths might mount a comeback and threaten Rome anew?

Helprin points out that three successive U.S. administrations before Obama have down-sized the F-22 program, which, come to think of it, should have told Helprin something. Instead he cites the late Sen. Kennedy's support for the F-22, ignoring the fact that the F-22 was manufactured in 48 different states, meaning Helprin could have found a quote from 95 other senators if he had wanted to do so. 

Oh, and he never mentions the word "drones". Not once. He never once takes on the inconvenient reality that the era of manned flight may be reaching its terminus and that remotely piloted aircraft might render manned aircraft irrelevant in the next generation. You would have thought he would have wanted to have at least challenged that idea as he mounted a lusty defense for the F-22, no?

The pity of all this is that I was talking with Fick just a few weeks ago about what a great book A Soldier of the Great War is. You should read that, and Helprin should stick to writing novels.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

...this video, released by the police in Dubai, of the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is just amazing. Like watching Munich. But for real.

Okay, you all know about the famous Abu Muqawama Counterinsurgency Reading List. But a reader wrote in asking whether or not we might consider posting a reading list on counter-terrorism. That sounds like a fun project, actually, for the readership. So for the next few days, leave your suggestions in the comments. Books, academic articles and journalistic articles are all welcome, as are other media -- movies, documentaries, etc.

By the way... I have no informed comment on the capture of Mullah Baradar other than to say that it might be hugely important -- not necessarily from the perspective of the QST's senior leadership but from the perspective of U.S.-Pakistani relations and the stance of Pakistan's military and security services toward the Taliban. Josh Foust, though, has the best instant analysis I have read thus far.

I'm at work, unable to endure watching the rest of France v. Ireland after this epic collapse. It's a good time to read some of the analysis of the ongoing offensive in Marja, though, here, here and here. The analysis I have highlighted comes from three guys who I think have done some of the best English-language reporting thus far on Helmand and the NATO/ISAF operations there: Dexter Filkins, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Tom Coughlan. Filkins and Chand -- whatever, Rajiv -- have reported from inside NATO/ISAF operations particularly well, and Coughlan of the Times of London really knows Helmand. He has a very good chapter on the Taliban there, in fact, in this Antonio Giustozzi volume. That chapter makes for great background reading to NATO/ISAF operations this weekend.

Update: A little cheer to cut through the Six Nations gloom.

Update II: I may not be blogging, but I am posting good accounts I have read on the Abu Muqawama Twitter feed.

Way to go, WTVF-TV Channel 5. After idiots at one of Nashville's television stations aired this ridiculously irresponsible and fear-mongering report on a group of apparently peaceful Muslims who have been living in rural Tennessee since the early 1980s, someone spray-painted epithets and Crusader crosses all over a mosque in Nashville. Watch this report and tell me if this in any way approximates responsible journalism. The hero of the story ends up being the rural country sheriff, John Vinson, who refuses to take the bait he's offered from the reporter and instead says reasonable things like, "The way I look at it, their customs are obviously different from most people in Stewart County. But still, they have a right to that."

Which just goes to show you that we Tennesseans are tolerant, good-natured people at heart until some carpetbagger reporter shows up trying to cause trouble. I mean, really, what must people at Northwestern's famous school of journalism think of this alumnus? The essence of this dude's report is, "We cannot say for sure that these people are not terrorists, so we're going to show some footage of terrorist training camps." Unbelievable.

[To be fair, I think this is the first time "Tennessee" and "Islam" have ever appeared as tags on the same post.]

Update: The Columbia Journalism Review weighs in.

What a life.

A few days ago I posted on this New York Times article about the memoirs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was happy to see memoirist friends like Craig and Nate get some front-page love in the New York Times, but I thought the author missed the theme of the memoirs and used a hackneyed phrase -- "the futility of war" -- to describe it. I also thought the article read like a 4,000-word labor of love that had been pared down to about 1,400. I then got this email from the author, Elisabeth Bumiller.

Subject: spelling penalty box

Andrew,

 

As I just posted on your blog (not sure if you or anyone is minding it in the snowstorm), you are in the penalty box of the spelling of the English language. I appreciate your comments, but you mispelled my name. It's Elisabeth with an s. 

Cheers, Elisabeth

Subject: On the other hand...

I just noticed that I misspelled misspelled.

E.

Tom Friedman's column today about how we can build more schools and defeat terrorism is one of those things that sounds right but probably isn't. Leave aside the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- by Friedman's own admission, the only reason he is in Yemen right now -- is a graduate of University College London and the product of a superb secondary education before that. Alan B. Krueger and others have shown that the causal relationship between education and terrorism is weak. Very well-educated men and women can fall under the sway of extremist ideologies and go on to do evil things -- like blow up airliners and buy Coldplay albums.

This is no reason not to build schools. Building schools is a lovely thing, and as the great Greg Mortenson pointed out to me in Kabul once, when you teach little girls to read, you teach entire villages to read. (Because the girls teach their mothers.) And female literacy then leads to a healthy drop in birth rates and less poverty. That's all wonderful. Education transforms societies. But education only has a place in counterinsurgency -- most naturally a subfield of stabilization operations -- if you can prove that a lack of schools is a driver of conflict. And as far as counter-terrorism is concerned, well, the idea that more schools will lead to a drop in terrorism remains one of those things that sounds good when discussed at dinner parties but has yet to be proven and is, if we are to trust our research thus far, most likely false.

[All that having been said, allow me to stress once again that building schools in underdeveloped societies is something we should all support. Maybe not for reasons of counter-terrorism or counterinsurgency but for more altruistic reasons. So everyone buy Greg Mortenson's new book to help the cause, okay?]

I got the heads up on a battle brewing in southern Afghanistan a few months ago. Not a battle between Marines and insurgents, mind, but one over the appropriate tactics to fight the Taliban. Specifically, I heard the staff of Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson's MEB was getting frustrated by being forced to essentially camp out on the population and, Marines being Marines, wanted to go chase the bad guys. Now this from today's Washington Post:

"I'm not a big fan of the population-centric approach. We can't sit still. We have to pursue and chase these guys," said Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand province. "I haven't seen any evidence it's working. The only thing that's working is chasing them."

I've heard Col. Amland is a thoughtful officer, but I wonder if he's thoughtful enough to recognize that a) his decades-long education as a Marine officer might have prejudiced him toward a preference for violent offensive operations and b) many counterinsurgents through the years have been in exactly the same spot where Col. Amland finds himself today -- and have pursued violent offensive operations, like battalion sweep-and-clears, that have brought no lasting security. But as the author of the Post article notes, "hunkering down to the slow work of improving governance" is a lot less sexy than killing bad guys. But you have to do both, and if given the option of choosing between the two, the operational and strategic culture of the U.S. Marine Corps will lead its officers to do the former at the expense of the latter.

I think we sometimes focus too much on trying to understand the culture of the enemy without first recognizing our own cultural quirks, norms and biases. The individual services within the U.S. military are especially effective at conditioning their officers to believe that the service's preferred theory of victory is the one most appropriate for a conflict. As a remedy for this, I wish Marines would be more conscious of their "Marineness" -- and all the assumptions, biases and norms (most of them good) that entails. (The same goes, of course, for Air Force officers, Army infantry officers, Naval aviators, Army armor officers, Army Special Forces officers, submariners, etc., etc., etc.)

In the end, though, I'm left with this image in my head of Col. Amland as Daniel-son wandering why the hell he's been waxing Mr. Miagi's car.

Elizabeth Bumiller, you are in the penalty box of the English language. Describing the many great memoirs that have been written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she writes these books "explore the timeless theme of the futility of war."* If that hackneyed phrase was even accurate to describe the books she profiles, we would forgive her, but since almost all of the books she describes deal with war at its tactical levels divorced from the question of whether or not the violence is realizing political objectives, it makes no sense. Here's a question: whatever happened to the authors of The Unforgiving Minute and One Bullet Away? Because it seems to me the career choices they made after writing their books endorse the utility of war.

As the author of a quickly forgotten memoir myself**, allow me to identify what I see as the theme that emerges from the memoirs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been published thus far. And because Bumiller interestingly includes a think tank report in her list, we'll add to our corpus the many journal articles and reports we have read from serving officers. The theme that emerges from this generation of veteran-authors is:

War is necessary if reprehensible. Because it's so awful, war should be waged well. It should be fought by well-trained men and women, managed by the most talented and creative young officers, and executed by adaptive, nimble fighting organizations supported by empathetic, resolute publics.

*"Futility of war" aside, the article is actually quite good, as are most of the books profiled.

**I have, like, three times as many followers on Twitter than Craig, though. Boo-yah!