Monthly Archives: September 2012

Sunk Costs

by caidid Posted on September 28, 2012

General David Barno writes in Foreign Policy about the choices facing the Obama administration in Afghanistan going forward in light of the frequency of ‘green on blue’ attacks and the recent suspension of joint operations resulting from them. In the post, he frames two possible paths the administration could take, and makes his case for the one he prefers. What I want to tease out here is a subject somewhat tangential to the point of Barno’s post. He describes his first option as follows:

“[The administration] could resume lower-level partnering after several weeks, using the pause to enhance security measures and set new rules to protect U.S. and other NATO forces. U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan are almost sure to recommend this option, since they are deeply committed to the current approach and have invested years in developing its structural underpinnings.”

Setting aside any the question of which is the best path and why to look at this one comment, this is terrible reasoning. I don’t doubt what Barno is saying. I don’t doubt that many would make their recommendations on this basis. If you have put a lot of time and effort and energy and sacrifice into something, it is understandable that you’d want to see it through, but there comes a point when it might become clear that your approach isn’t working, and at that point it is irresponsible not to consider changing it. Sunk costs are not a reason to do anything.

Any important decision - of which the decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan is certainly one - should be based on what is in our best interests going forward, and what is going to help us be the most successful in achieving our objectives. Unfortunately, I think we often give undue weight to what we have done in the past, and not enough to clear thinking about what we need for the future.

Part of this simple inertia: it’s a lot easier to continue doing what you’re doing than it is to start something new. The challenge of conceiving and fully implementing a new strategy is daunting to say the least.

Part of it is a desire to save face: we think we’d look dumb or indecisive if we put all this work/time/money/life into an approach only to abandon it midstream. (Or, heaven forfend, like we’re admitting we were wrong).

Part of it is a very human tendency to overvalue past investment. In this interesting piece from a while back in which he illustrates the sunk cost logical fallacy through a discussion of Farmville, David McRaney describes this phenomenon like so:

Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.

We’ve invested years of our time, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives in Afghanistan at this point. If we’re going to get trapped in this kind of thinking about anything, it will be about this. We think: we can’t have done all this for nothing. We can’t have let so many people give their lives in vain. This is an extremely emotional argument. It is also logically bankrupt.

Taking more time, spending more money, risking more lives doesn’t undo what has already happened, doesn’t fix what has gone wrong, and doesn’t justify what we have spent in the past. We need to acknowledge and set aside these emotional drivers in our decision-making so that we can make policy decisions based on what choices give us the best chance of success in achieving our objectives. The psychological and emotional trap of money spent, time wasted, and - hardest of all - lives lost, can’t be permitted to dominate these decisions.

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Green on Blue

by caidid Posted on September 24, 2012

Nathan Finney has a piece up at the Kabul Cable right now on advisors. It’s a good read and he gets at some important ideas. One of his main arguments is that policy should drive everything, which might seem obvious to the wonks, but policy - and the stomach/political will to do what it actually takes to achieve policy goals - has been changeable and often lacking. At this point, it seems clear that when we went into Afghanistan, we either didn’t really think about what our long term objective for Afghanistan itself was - as opposed to our objective for al Qaeda, or the Taliban, which was pretty clear - or that we were not realistic at all as to what it would take to achieve it.

The increased use of, and emphasis on, advisors did not really come up until we were looking for a way out. See, once we had gone in and knocked the Taliban out of power and chased most of what was left of al Qaeda in the country into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, we started that other war, that ill-conceived, ill-fated adventure in Iraq. And we just sort of bumped along in Afghanistan. We set up a government. We fought occasional pockets of resistance that got less and less occasional, but we didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, as a country. Because Iraq, Iraq got so damn ugly, it took all of our attention and in the end, drained us of our will to persevere. When things had gotten bad enough in Afghanistan that we had to pay attention, even as they were finally winding down in Iraq, we just wanted out. Though the President made the decision to ‘surge’ the troops in Afghanistan in 2009, it was basically too little, too late.

So before long the objective had to change again. We would no longer concern ourselves with the whole of Afghanistan, with a democratic government, elected freely and able to provide necessary services to all its people. We would no longer be as worried about trying to do the right thing, or even about cleaning up the messes we had made ourselves. But we didn’t leave. Because if we just left, we were cowards, we were cutters and runners, we were admitting defeat. So where did this leave us? Determined to persevere, largely if not entirely just to save face, but with the only real objective to get the hell out.

The new version of victory would be to stand up the Afghan military and police forces, to act as advisors to build their capacity. It’s not that advisory missions can’t be effective - Finney’s piece touches on some of the ways in which they can - but forgive me if in this case it looked to me like another way to redefine victory, a grasping at one last straw that might let us tell ourselves that no we weren’t leaving because we’d lost, no it wasn’t all for nothing, all the damage and death and ugliness, that we achieved this thing, and that’s why we’re leaving, because we’re done and Afghanistan is better off.

We weren’t going to put in the years and years and billions and billions and time and energy on the day-to-day details of civil-society-building and education and capacity-building and infrastructure creation that this whole war-tired country needed. We want the answer to be easier, cheaper, simpler than it is. Victory, making things better, leaving a stable and friendly nation would have been a long, expensive, and expansive project had we really taken it on. No iteration in a continuing series of half-assed initiatives will change any of that. It’s uncomfortable to admit, because we want to be good, we want to be the people who do the right thing, because we want to always be a success, but the truth is we don’t care about Afghanistan. Not enough to do what it would really take. And this is why we fail.

This is why the advisory mission is a shambles too, with so-called ‘green on blue’ attacks - a pretty term for an ugly thing, that always evokes in my mind high grassy hills and wide summer skies, swirls of cool soothing color, not the heat and betrayal and blood it’s really meant to mean - occurring with alarming frequency, and I can’t help but think that it’s because all it ever was was a cover for our exit, a half-assed attempt to save face on our way out the door, and that deep down, we know it, and so do the Afghans.

Note: It should go without saying - but I’ll say it anyway since sometimes it doesn’t - that when I speak of what we have and haven’t done, I mean collectively as a nation. I know that there are many individuals who have served nobly, who care deeply, who have done what they can, and that there have been good programs and small areas of success. I am referring to our time in Afghanistan writ large.

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Auditing the Surge in Afghanistan

by Jonathan Rue Posted on September 24, 2012

On Friday, I fell assbackwards into was asked to write an op-ed for The Guardian assessing the surge in Afghanistan. Before I tease you with the beginning of my piece in the shameful hope of getting you to visit the site and drive up page views so they ask me to write again, allow me to note the power of social media in the 21st century.

Ten years ago, hell, maybe even five years ago, someone like me is not asked to write an op-ed in a newspaper like The Guardian. They might publish something I submit, but they’re certainly not soliciting me. That’s because the editors don’t know who I am nor do they know what I write, if I write. But because a friend like Chris Albon pays me an enormous compliment on Twitter, likely directing an editor to my Twitter profile, which then leads him to Gunpowder & Lead, I receive an email asking me to write this piece.

Long story short: social media is an amazing tool and the great equalizer in the world of ideas.

But really, none of this is possible without my good friend Diana Wueger, who about a year ago asked me to write here because she thought I might have some interesting things to say. Thanks, Diana.

And now, to my op-ed:

As the Middle East erupted in violent protests two weeks ago, US efforts in Afghanistan sunk to new depths. There hasn’t been much good news out of Afghanistan since March 2003, but last week was particularly bad– highlighted by an audacious attack on Camp Bastion and the announcement that all combined patrols with Isaf and Afghan troops would be temporarily halted. Overshadowed by those incidents were two more insider attacks that killed six Isaf service members the same weekend. Indeed, good news is hard to find.

Reminiscent of similar attacks on Pakistani military bases, a small group of well-trained militants carried out the spectacular attack on Camp Bastion, one of Isaf’s largest bases in country. Fifteen well-armed militants disguised in US army uniforms breached the perimeter fence and split into three roving teams. The result: two US marines killed, including the Harrier squadron commanding officer, nine wounded, and eight AV-8B Harrier “jump jets” destroyed or damaged beyond repair. It was the largest, single-day loss of US military aircraft since Vietnam. At roughly $30m per copy, the loss of eight irreplaceable Harriers rendered VMA-211, the squadron hit, combat ineffective for the first time sinceDecember 1941.

Three days later, Isaf announced that most combined patrols with Isaf and Afghan troops would cease “until further notice”. Ostensibly done to limit Nato troop exposure to Afghans while anger over a disgusting anti-Islam video remains palpable, it’s hard to see this order as anything but a response to the growing insider threat – so-called green-on-blue attacks, when an Afghan soldier turns his weapon on his Nato partner. Thirty-six such attacks have killed 51 members of coalition forces this year, roughly 20% of all Isaf casualties. Given that Nato’s withdrawal strategy rests entirely on the premise of ensuring Afghan forces are capable of providing security on their own, and that as of April 2012, only 7% (pdf) of Afghan army units were rated as fully capable, the suspension of combined operations calls the entire strategy into question.

You can read the rest here.

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At What Price Peacekeeping?: Part I of III

by Hayes Brown Posted on September 17, 2012

At a recent appearance promoting his new memoir, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan answered that he would institute a standing force within the United Nations when asked what one reform he would make to the U.N. to make it more effective in responding to crises. The goal would be a contingency of a size that it would rapidly deployable early in crises, with the goal of “showing force, so to not have to use force”.

My eyebrows were roughly through the roof at this point, as this is the kind of rhetoric that U.N. conspiracy theorists salivate over, and I was surprised his comments didn’t generate more buzz, in the room or in the blogosphere. As it turns out, the reason that there was little reaction is that the position is nowhere near new. Annan has been advocating the upgrades to the U.N.’s force deployment capabilities for over a decade now.

Clamoring for a UN Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) in some shape or form has been constant since 1945, coming from governments and NGOs alike. In the face of Annan presenting this opinion so clearly once more, with no hedging about whether it would be under the command of the United Nations, I was left wondering what such a force would look like.

To that end, and as we head into the U.N. General Assembly, I’ll be exploring different angles of the concept’s feasibility (because yes, it’s feasible, but no, it won’t invade Texas) and its effects on peacekeeping operations. In the interest of not having a 10,000 word blog post, I’m going to break this article up into a three part series: Legal Standing, Operational Feasibility, and Institutional Effects.

Before continuing, let me clarify what I mean by “peacekeeping operations” in this context. I’m working off the definitions of Michael Doyle and Nicolas Sambanis in their 2006 book Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations. Doyle and Sambanis describe four types of peacekeeping operations: Observer, Traditional, Multidimensional, and Enforcement.

1. Observer missions - restricted to observing actions such as a truce, troop withdrawals, or a buff er zone. Always deployed with the consent of the parties to the conflict. Examples are the UNMOT and UNMOP missions in Tajikistan and Croatia.

2. Traditional missions - also deployed with the consent of the parties, but with somewhat extended mandates such as policing a buff er zone and assisting in negotiating a peace agreement. Examples are the UNPRESEP mission in Macedonia 1995-99 and the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon.

3. Multidimensional missions - referred to as `second-generation operations’, the mandates, also consent based, are extended with activities intended to go to the roots of the conflict, such as economic reconstruction, institutional transformation (reform of police, army, judicial system, elections). Examples are the ONUSAC mission in El Salvador 1991-95 and the UNMIT mission in Timor-Leste (2006- ).

4. Enforcement missions -`third generation’ operations that do not require the consent of both parties, and therefore must draw on the authority of UN Charter articles 25, 42, and 43 to apply force to protect the activities of the operation. Examples are the UNPROFOR mission in former Yugoslavia 1992-95 and the UNMIS mission in Sudan (2005- ).

Throughout this series, I’ll be primarily concerned with Enforcement, as those are the missions a Rapid Response Force would be most useful in engaging in, but I will also mention the others periodically.

Legal Standing

Of the three considerations I’ll be going through when determining the feasibility of an upgraded U.N. force projection mechanism, the legality of the measure is the most clearly defined. The Charter of the United Nations provides the basis for the Security Council’s primacy in the realm of providing international peace and security. Indeed, under modern international law, the use of force by states is supposed to be presaged by either approval by the Council or invoking the right of self-defense under Article 51.

Though the actual use of force to restore peace is often outsourced to other organizations such as NATO or ECOWAS, via either Chapter VII use of force mandates or Chapter VIII’s regional bodies provisions, the Council was originally envisioned to be able to muster force to use directly. Further, under Articles 43 and 45 of the Charter, Member States were expected to have forces, particularly air forces, on standby for the use of the United Nations at the need of the Security Council:

  1. All Members of the United Nations, in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security, undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities, including rights of passage, necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.
  2. Such agreement or agreements shall govern the numbers and types of forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of the facilities and assistance to be provided.
  3. The agreement or agreements shall be negotiated as soon as possible on the initiative of the Security Council. They shall be concluded between the Security Council and Members or between the Security Council and groups of Members and shall be subject to ratification by the signatory states in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.

…

In order to enable the United Nations to take urgent military measures, Members shall hold immediately available national air-force contingents for combined international enforcement action. The strength and degree of readiness of these contingents and plans for their combined action shall be determined within the limits laid down in the special agreement or agreements referred to in Article 43, by the Security Council with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee.

In theory, the process would have worked whereby the Council determined a threat to the peace, declared it as such under Chapter VII, Article 40, and called up these air forces to act as a rapid response under Article 42, the “use of force” provision within the Charter. After the initial rapid response use of air power, the other forces detailed in Art. 43 were to have been deployed to finish the job. The Military Staff Committee mentioned in Article 45 will be discussed more later, but would be an important requirement to resurrecting the idea of providing the Council with a Rapid Response Force.

In actuality, the Permanent Five disagreed on the meaning of the clauses of Articles 43 and 45 almost from the beginning. Like most issues relating to interpretation of the Charter in the early days of the U.N., the split came in two flavors: between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union, and between the Permanent and non-permanent members.

The Soviets believed that each of the Permanent Five should provide forces to the United Nations of an equal number and equal composition of land, air, and sea forces. For members like the United Kingdom, still devastated in 1947 from World War II, the idea of putting up the same number of forces as the U.S. or U.S.S.R. was preposterous. The idea, of course, was that the United States and Soviet Union, already the clear superpowers, would only need to contribute as much to international security as those weaker members of the Council.

The dispute was never resolved, and the agreements of Article 43 were never concluded, or even started to my knowledge. This collapse of early support for the idea of a rapid response force, however, has not altered the contents of the Charter. In his Agenda for Peace in 1992, then-Secretary-General Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali urged:

“the bringing into being, through negotiations, the special agreements foreseen in Article 43 of the Charter, whereby Member States undertake to make armed forces, assistance and facilities available to the Security Council… not only on an ad hoc basis but on a permanent basis.”

At any time, the United Nations could undertake an initiative to begin and sign agreements with the current Troop Contributing Countries (TCC) to have contingencies of their forces on standby for an RRF.

In fact, the building of an RRF would be even more strictly speaking ‘legal’ than current peacekeeping operations of the Traditional and Multidimensional model, as they would fall squarely in line with Chapter VII unlike the former’s nebulous existence as what have been called “Chapter VI and a half” missions. These models, particularly the “Traditional” model, were the development of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in the wake of the Suez Canal crisis, and not featured anywhere within the Charter.

So why does all of this matter? The enactment of a Rapid Response Force would bring clarity to the authority of the Council to authorize states or ad hoc coalitions to engage in enforcement measures - in short, it would be clear when the Council is acting on its own authority or whether it has delegated that authority to others. A strict reading of Article 42 only provides the Security Council with the ability to use force via the Article 43 arrangements, not the power to authorize the use of force by states (except when extending permission to Chapter VIII organizations’ actions until the Council can act - but even this mechanism implies the Council will be able to take action eventually). In practice, Article 42 has been read in conjunction with Article 48(1), which makes the decisions of the Security Council binding and requires states to carry them out. While a U.N. Rapid Reaction Force would not override that reading, it would allow the Council to more clearly delineate when they are acting under their own authority and when they are conferring that power onto other states, organizations, or coalitions.

Utilization of an RFF would also push to the side many of the legal concerns regarding sovereignty when enforcing decisions of the Security Council. As the deployment of an RFF would necessarily be under the Chapter VII, Article 42 powers of the Council, along with the requirement for states to comply, the oft-quoted need for the host country to permit entry would be overridden. Whether this would be able to be achieved on the ground is for a later section, but the very idea that a military force, no matter the size, could under the authority of the Security Council enter into a country regardless of government protests, has given states pause, no matter what the Framers of the Charter had in mind. For this reason, the vast majority of U.N. enforcement missions have depended on host country permission for access, including the original Congo crisis of 1960, unlike coalition missions as in Libya or Iraq.

Likewise, the concept does face a barrier in that no state has yet to conclude an Article 43 agreement, suggesting such agreements may be difficult to conclude even if the practice were accepted in theory. At present, the legal mechanism for the Security Council acquiring forces for official U.N. missions, such as MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is an individual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with each TCC. The document is fully binding on all parties, and can be taken up for arbitration at the International Court of Justice if disputes on its implementation can’t be resolved at the local level.

While MOUs could be used as a framework for an overarching Article 43 agreement, given the fight to get each of these MOUs signed, it would likely be a difficult struggle to reach an accord by which states agree to relinquish operational control of whole units to the United Nations and whomever controls these forces - a question that will be delved into more deeply in the Operational section.

Should some particularly charismatic future Secretary-General, one in the Hammarskjold mold, find a way to draw countries into Article 43 agreements, a U.N. RRF would rest on extremely solid legal footing. The difficulties would come more strongly in the operational use of such a force and the reverberating effects such a development would have on the United Nations as an institution.

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Free Speech and Political Violence

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on September 14, 2012

I find the number of people willing to censor offensive speech in the wake of the anti-Islam film, and the reaction that it has provoked, disturbing. One example is this USA Today op-ed, written by a professor of religious studies, arguing that “Sam Bacile” (Nakoula Basseley Nakoula), who is said to be responsible for the film, should be arrested. I assume that this view is not widespread among prominent American commentators, but the idea that the U.S. should alter its speech regime is rather prominent abroad. As a couple of quick examples (and there are many more), one Pakistani senator claims to have spoken to Interpol’s secretary general “to enact international law to stop anti Islam material being projected on the Internet”; and a Turkish columnist writes that “the committing of blasphemous acts, be it cartoons, a film or what so ever, [is] not implicit in the right to express one’s self freely.” But the primary reason I write this post is because of the great number of intelligent people I’ve interacted with on social media or by email who feel that arrest or censorship is an appropriate response in this case.

Before making several points about free speech and political violence, I should note that Bacile/Nakoula may have violated the terms of his parole through his work on this film. If so, I have no objection to throwing the book at him. Violating the terms of his parole breaks the law in a manner that renders First Amendment considerations beside the point. Rather, I write against the idea that the First Amendment should be rendered inoperable in this particular case, where some faction would respond to the (admittedly offensive) exercise of free speech with violence. Here are a few points that I think are worth bearing in mind:

  • Deciding to censor speech based on the reaction of an audience is a very slippery slope. Doing so would essentially create a “heckler’s veto,” which our legal system rightly rejects at present. If we as a society made speech illegal when offended people are willing to use violence in response, then essentially those willing to use violence have control over the limits of speech. Is that desirable? If anti-gay groups adopted a strategy of violent protest in response to homosexual imagery in media, should we outlaw such imagery because of their willingness to use violence? Are works like The Last Temptation of Christ or Serrano’s “Piss Christ” protected by the First Amendment only so long as offended Christians (whom both of those works intend to offend!) do not use violence in response? Free speech would be contingent upon the audience reaction.
  • Leaving aside the implications of what kind of censorship might occur if other groups decided to embrace a violent strategy, note the utter unfairness of this speech regime toward groups that do not use violence to respond to works that offend them. Those willing to use violence will have the legal system protect them from being insulted or offended, and it would actually prosecute creators of works they find offensive; whereas those who respect civil society and refrain from violence can be subjected to insult and offense at will.
  • The First Amendment is designed to protect offensive speech. After all, if nobody found a certain kind of speech offensive, then nobody would be pushing to prohibit it. The offensiveness of any kind of speech is thus an awful rationale for arguing that it can be prohibited.
  • A system that only prohibits offensive speech toward one particular faith is absolutely unacceptable. Such a system would in effect run counter to the First Amendment’s reluctance to allow speech restrictions that discriminate based on content (i.e. the principle of content neutrality).
  • The speech contained in the film does not fall under any exception to First Amendment protection. One exception is the incitement standard, that speech can be excluded from First Amendment protection if it is likely to produce imminent lawless action, and if the speaker intends for it to do so. In this case, there is no evidence that the intent of this film was to spark violent mob action; certainly the movie does not call upon mobs to form and attack U.S. diplomatic outposts. Nor is hate speech a legally proscribed category: a good example of this is the Skokie case, which upheld the rights of neo-Nazis to march through the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. (The existence of college and university hate speech codes, which are of dubious constitutionality in the first place, does not alter this dynamic.)
  • It is not clear that jailing those responsible for this film would actually reduce the propensity to violent protest. Isn’t it possible that the opposite is true: that using the legal system to punish the purveyors of offensive speech would send the signal that violence works, and is thus a desirable reaction?

I am all for criticizing the speech contained in this film. The traditional cure for offensive and inaccurate speech under our legal regime is counter-speech. But censorship has significant ramifications that people advocating it are not, in my opinion, fully considering.

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Tactical Patience: The Perils of Rapid Response

by Jonathan Rue Posted on September 13, 2012

There’s been a lot of teeth gnashing and handwringing in the last 24 hours. Having one of your Ambassadors killed and two embassies stormed tends to get the juices flowing. But the embassy protests and consulate attack were just the opening act of a three-act play. Before Act I was finished, Mitt Romney entered stage right and launched a broadside against the administration for “apologizing for American values” and “sending mixed signals.” Act II thus became a referendum on the appropriateness of Romney’s remarks and their timing.

I agree with Rich Lowry and other conservatives who believe that the administration’s response is fair game for politics, although I do disagree with the substance of that critique. But Romney’s timing highlights another symptom of a world linked instantaneously by modern communications and a 24 hour news cycle: the “WE MUST RESPOND NOW!” Syndrome.

As the east coast woke up yesterday morning to the horrible news that our Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, had been killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Twitter began to light up with calls for statements and words of reassurance from the President. Mind you, the President had only been notified of Stevens’ death shortly before sunrise. That fact, and the fact that “the facts” were still trickling in, was irrelevant.

Others (mostly private citizens on Twitter) began calling for action. That’s not surprising. After all, our embassy in Cairo, sovereign American territory, was overrun and the U.S. flag was replaced with an Islamic flag. Some wondered why the U.S. Marine Embassy Security Guards had not fired on protesters. Others wanted to bomb Benghazi.

What links both of these reactions is the emotion driving them. Absent is calm, reasoned analysis, particularly of the second and third order consequences. Romney’s statement didn’t necessarily lack reasoned analysis, but by issuing it when he did and by doubling down on it in an early morning press conference, he displayed a remarkable lack of tactical patience. As noted by Dan Drezner had he held back, the media would have done his job for him.

People often think that the military is trained to react instantly. While true, there’s another lesson often taught to young officers that’s equally as important. It’s called tactical patience. In a nutshell, it’s letting a situation develop in order to 1) understand exactly what is happening and 2) ensuring that conditions are most favorable for a strike. Gunner Keith Marine relays this example:

A guy pulling a pitchfork out of the hay at night looks just like a guy taking a weapon out of a cache at first glance. Take the time to wait a few minutes and observe what the guys are doing before you shoot. The damage you cause may be irreparable. Along with that, if you are still covert and have the drop on folks, hold off they may bring in some of their friends and you can kill them too.

In a tactical engagement, a couple of seconds can be the difference between success and failure. On the strategic stage, seconds equals days or weeks. Sometimes doing nothing is okay. Saying nothing is okay. Not always of course, but sometimes letting a situation develop is as prudent as it is necessary. The 24-hour news cycle and social media provide strong incentives to be first, not be right. Leaders have a responsibility to resist that temptation — being right is far more important than being first.

When Romney stepped into Act I, he altered the course of the play. Act II became a narrative of the appropriateness of Romney’s attack itself. When the GOP nominee says that the President is sympathizing with people attacking American embassies (and ultimately killing an Ambassador), what does he expect that news cycle to look like? Thinking it would unfold any differently displays a stunning naivety of the news cycle and political reporters, and/or amateurish political instincts.

But of course Romney isn’t to blame for the WE MUST RESPOND NOW! Syndrome; he’s merely a product of the public sphere in which, thanks to the magic powers of The Google, we are all stakeholders. He said something because a segment of us wanted someone, anyone to say something, anything to make us feel like the U.S. government was on the case. He did this because as his audience we prioritize speed. Instead, we should prioritize patience.

P.S. — It looks like not even tactical patience can help Ralph Peters.

P.P.S — For a somewhat different take read this.

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Terry Jones and U.S. Foreign Policy

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on September 12, 2012

Today, a lot of attention was devoted to an anti-Islam film that may have played a causal role in recent anti-U.S. protests in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia. For the record, I am skeptical that this film actually motivated the attack in Libya, which seems to have been planned in advance, but its role in motivating the Egypt and Tunisia protests is more plausible. The U.S. military is taking the anti-Islam film seriously enough that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Florida pastor Terry Jones on Wednesday and “asked him to withdraw his support” for the film. Jones didn’t serve as the film’s producer, as was erroneously reported early on, but had planned to show it on his website. Dempsey’s major concern is the possibility for the film provoking violence in Afghanistan: when Jones was responsible for the burning of a Qur’an in March 2011, it caused deaths at a U.N. compound in Mazar-e Sharif.

It’s unclear if Jones will withdraw his support for the film. However, it is clear that one otherwise inconsequential man holding American foreign policy hostage (albeit to a small yet deadly degree) through his actions is going to be an ongoing part of twenty-first century diplomacy, something that has been enabled through advances in communication technology. I wrote about Jones, and his previous stunt, in Bin Laden’s Legacy. My analysis there remains applicable in light of this new incident:

There are, of course, many clear advantages to advances in communication technology. Important voices that would have been marginalized or ignored two decades ago have been able to play a role in public debates. At its best, access to numerous competing sources of information can produce instantaneous fact-checking and expose one to a diversity of perspectives, thus producing more accurate and nuanced analysis. But there is also a clear dark side to these advances. They not only empower deserving voices that illuminate otherwise neglected aspects of an issue, they can also empower the voices of those who don’t really deserve a podium: the bigots, the demagogues, and the charlatans.

Even one individual can hold America’s foreign policy hostage to some degree. This was the case with Terry Jones, an obscure Florida pastor who became a major international news story in September 2010 when he threatened to burn a Qur’an. Even General David Petraeus weighed in on Jones’s threats, arguing that burning Islam’s holy book would endanger U.S. forces. Although Jones didn’t follow through on his threat in 2010, in March 2011 he organized a mock trial of the Qur’an in which he served as the judge. (This “trial” also featured attorneys for the prosecution and defense, as well as witnesses.) At the end, Jones declared the Qur’an guilty, and it was set aflame.

Less than two weeks later, an angry crowd in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, attacked a U.N. compound and killed at least eight people. Although there were multiple responsible parties for this outbreak of violence—not least the crowd itself, as well as President Hamid Karzai—this illustrates how one lone extremist can cause deaths halfway around the world and threaten critical U.S. foreign-policy objectives. One aid worker in Afghanistan commented at the time, “This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protesters from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.”

It will be virtually impossible to stop rogue individuals like Jones from igniting similar controversies. Their impact can be mitigated, but one reality of life in the early twenty-first century is that lone nuts can influence geopolitics in ways they couldn’t have twenty years ago. In 1991, Jones would most likely have been consigned to the letters-to-the-editor section of the local newspaper, his Qur’an-burning antics earning no more than local exposure.

Stunts like this will have international ramifications again in the future, and lives will be lost as a result. This new dynamic needs to be understood, and deserves serious discussion.

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Argo

by caidid Posted on September 10, 2012

[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT CAUGHT UP ON THEIR NEWS FROM 1980].

I had the opportunity to see an advance screening of Ben Affleck’s new movie Argo last night, followed by a Q & A with Affleck, and the subject matter as well as some of how it was handled I think will make this film of some interest to readers of this blog. Argo‘s story is so outlandish that it would make a totally implausible movie plot if it didn’t happen to be true. Six Americans escaped the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as it was overrun in 1979, and hid for months in the home of the Canadian ambassador. The film is about how they were rescued: the CIA created a fake film company to work on a fake science fiction film for which they faked a Canadian crew scouting potential film locations in Tehran. A dummy production company, press events, storyboards, a real script, and many other details went into building the background for this film, all designed to provide cover for taking the six Americans right out the front door, as it were. The operation remained classified until 1997.

The first thing about the film I really liked is that it opens with context. It would have been easy to start with the fall of the Embassy, to make or allow the Iranians to be simple villains, standard action-movie ‘bad guys,’ but Affleck chose to open with a brief summary of the years before the revolution: Mossadegh’s time as the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran; the U.S. led coup that overthrew him and installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Shah; the years after that when the shah tried to westernize, protests grew, and the shah’s infamous SAVAK (secret police/domestic security) arrested and tortured more and more people as the U.S. continued to support his regime; the U.S. asylum given to the shah after his regime fell. The presentation is simple, brief, there is no analysis, but as a lens through which to view the film that follows, it’s important and it’s presented objectively. Although Argo does not shy away from moments of cruelty and brutality, it also shows from the start that there were legitimate grievances driving what happened.

It is tempting to critique the film for the absence of any major, fully fleshed out, Iranian characters - the largest role is that of Sahar, a housekeeper for the Canadian Ambassador who knows about the Americans hiding out in the Ambassador’s home and faces pressure to give away their secret - but the story is about the rescue mission, about the rescuers and the rescued, so it is also tempting to forgive the omission. There are certainly depictions of angry mobs and harsh Revolutionary Guards, of street executions and bodies hanging from cranes in Tehran, but - and I know this is not the highest bar to clear - the depiction is not as flat as in your standard Hollywood movie. The context provided by the opening sequence, as well as by subtle choices in background dialogue and images, keeps it from straying into ‘America Good, Iran Evil’ territory. In one scene, a man chases down one of the American women in a rage in the bazaar, terrifying her. He appears at first as just an angry face shouting in a foreign language, but what he is shouting is that the shah murdered his son with an American gun.

It’s not heavy-handed, and I’ll allow that my interpretation may be colored by my own knowledge of the history, but I did not get the sense that Iran was being villainized. What Argo shows is a bad, ugly situation, a terrifying one for the Americans in Tehran, but one we were not blameless in bringing about. I also really appreciated the resolution of the housekeeper’s story. She survives, but a brief glimpse of her near the end of the film quietly shows the cost to her of protecting the Americans and the Canadians for whom she worked. It is not showy - little of what Affleck does is showy - but enough to provoke thought in an observant viewer.

As a movie, Argo is part caper, part political thriller, part deadpan farce. The pieces balance nicely. There are moments of comedy, and a well-built and extended suspense when the operation finally goes down. There are elements for the political wonks, for the Hollywood wonks, and for Canadians everywhere. The depiction of government agencies is subtly tongue-in-cheek and provides much of the dark humor of the movie. It includes peeks at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department (including one meeting before which Mendez’s boss - played by the always excellent Bryan Cranston - warns him to expect to feel like he’s dealing with Waldorf and Statler). The image of Hollywood is less subtle and more overtly funny, with John Goodman and Alan Arkin providing most of the real levity. Bits of Canadiana are peppered throughout the movie, appropriately as the whole operation was enabled by Canada in several important ways, starting with the Canadian Ambassador’s decision to hide the Americans at great personal risk, and going right through the aftermath, in which Canada had to take full credit for the rescue so that the CIA’s involvement could be kept quiet for the protection of the hostages still in Tehran at the time.

Affleck is understated and quietly expressive as Tony Mendez (if perhaps a bit too tall and handsome to be fully believable as the blend-in-anywhere ‘gray man’) and he is surrounded by a stellar lineup of character actors, with notable performances from, in addition to Cranston, Arkin, and Goodman, Zelko Ivanic, Titus Welliver, Clea DuVall, Kyle Chandler, and Victor Garber, among many others. The setting - sets, set dressing, costumes, props, hair, etc - is meticulously arranged. It feels real, and lived in, and not ostentatious or gimmicky. (The eyeglasses and hair and mustaches almost seem ostentatious until you look at actual photos from 1979-80 and realize whoa, nope, they actually looked like that. The glasses really were that big, the hair that unflattering, the mustaches that bushy…)

During the Q&A, Affleck alluded to some of the liberties taken with the story, some falling under the category of ‘minor alterations for the purposes of narrative clarity,’ some clearly meant to build drama. I do think some of the changes might not have been necessary - for example, a more boilerplate chase scene was substituted for a mechanical problem in one place where I think the true story could have been used to create greater psychic tension - but changes to the story are inevitable and inoffensive. This is, after all, a film built to please a large audience, not a documentary about the operation, and creative license goes with the territory.

In a nutshell, I thought the movie was well done and enjoyable, and I would urge viewers to pay attention to the subtle details - they contribute much to the experience, and I do worry that many of them might be lost on a lot of audiences. Having summed that up, there is one last point I want to discuss, which is more about art writ large than this film in particular.

Mr. Affleck noted in the Q&A that he wanted to keep his own politics, his own views, out of the film, and just tell the story. I think that was likely the right move for this particular story, but I hope in the future, he allows more of his own point of view to color his films. Argo is entertaining, but for art to be truly great, it must challenge us, give us new ways of looking at problems, pose questions, make arguments. An informed argument intelligently presented can spark debate, or make your audience think, as great books or articles can do. A strong point of view in a painting or a piece of music or a poem can have an effect on the broader debate in society. Great films can do the same, although it’s only rare filmmakers who have the capacity.

I think Affleck has it. His work on this film, as well as his prior features Gone Baby Gone and the The Town have shown him to be quite capable with the structural and psychological aspects of filmmaking, with pacing and tone as clear strengths of his work as a director. He paces the action in his films adeptly: the North End chase scene in The Town is taut to the point of nail-biting, one of the great chase scenes for my money, and the climax of Argo has a more (appropriately) slow-burning edge-of-your-seat kind of tension. He also has a deft hand at establishing tone: the sadness and frustration of the decay of the working class community in Gone Baby Gone, the way class juxtaposition in The Town inspires a tension of mixed rage and aspiration, the very current-feeling sense of fear of being American in a hostile place in Argo (all the more evocative for being a milieu we at least helped to create for ourselves, in Iran then as in more places than I’d like to think about now). He works with his actors to create very believable emotions. He is clearly skilled at coordinating all the many details of script and cast and location and costumes and all those thousand things that go into making a movie. From what I saw tonight, he also seems to possess the intelligence and the thoughtfulness required to make him one of the great directors.

Affleck spoke intelligently about both filmmaking and geopolitics. As concerns this film in particular, he clearly has great admiration for people like Mendez who dedicate (and risk) their lives in service to this country, and has thought a lot about what they do and how it affects them and their families. He was a Middle East Studies major in college, and maintains an interest in the region and a more-than-casual grasp of current affairs - he touched on the situation in Syria and the 2009 protests in Iran, among other things, during the discussion. He does his homework: his aid work in the Democratic Republic of Congo - counter to the trend of well-meaning but misdirected celebrity charity projects - is well-thought-out, evidence-based, and focused on supporting and expanding the capacity of good local programs and initiatives. In short, he seems to be smart, well-informed, and socially and politically conscious; Argo is a great story and a good film, but my main takeaway from seeing it is that I hope that in the future, Affleck lets more of his own ideas and argument into his work, because I think he has it in him to make a great film.

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LIFG and Al Qaeda: A Response to Zelin

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on September 9, 2012

On Friday, I had a post at G&L questioning the field’s conventional wisdom that a) there is currently no relationship between the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and al Qaeda, and b) LIFG is almost entirely nationalist in orientation, or else regionally focused, rather than embracing an ideology of global jihad. My contention is not that there is more likely than not a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda at present, nor that there are more likely than not large parts of LIFG that embrace an ideology of global jihad, but rather that I am unpersuaded by the assertion that neither of these are true. Aaron Zelin took issue with my post on Twitter, and Will McCants also disagreed for the same reasons that Zelin provided. I respect both Zelin and McCants enormously, but I think they are both over-interpreting the available evidence while giving insufficient weight to contradictory data — which was my critique of the field’s understanding of this issue in the first place. This entry will be devoted to answering Zelin’s objections.

But first, I would like to say a word or two about what I mean by “LIFG.” As noted in my last post, there is a serious question of what LIFG is today, and whether it even exists. Jihadi groups go in and out of existence, or adopt new names, frequently. A good example of a group that was significantly disrupted, and became defunct in name, but wasn’t truly gone, is Somalia’s Al Ittihad al Islamiya (AIAI). The noted Somalia specialist Ken Menkhaus explains in his 2004 volume Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism that after Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime collapsed in 1991, AIAI attempted to seize “targets of opportunity” throughout the country. The only location it held for a sustained period was the town of Luuq, near the border with Ethiopia and Kenya. From there, AIAI carried out a string of attacks into Ethiopia, including assassinations and bombings from 1996-97 that reached Addis Ababa. In response, Ethiopian forces intervened and smashed AIAI. Soon, Menkhaus writes, AIAI was regarded as ”a spent force, marginal if not defunct as an organization.” But, it would have been wrong to simply hold that AIAI no longer existed at that point, had become irrelevant. Indeed, the old leadership of AIAI would resurface as a critical part of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), such that analysts correctly note a continuity between those two groups. The question “what is AIAI up to today?” would have been highly relevant in 2004, and indeed could have helped analysts to anticipate significant developments in 2006, such as the ICU’s seizure of Mogadishu.

Another jihadi group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has used different names and different banners in an effort to confuse its foes. As V.S. Subrahmanian and his co-authors write in an interesting new study about LeT, the group used this strategy just before Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf banned it in January 2002. Subrahmanian et al. note that “weeks before on December 24, 2001, LeT leader Hafez Saeed declared that LeT and MDI [the Markaz al-Dawa Irshad] were now separated and that he no longer had any affiliation with LeT. Further, MDI reverted to the name Jamaat ud-Dawa (Society for Preaching-JuD).” This was an organizational split in name only, as LeT continued to use JuD offices as its own.

So when I speak of what LIFG is doing today and what it believes, I am not referring to what an entity that calls itself LIFG is doing. Nor am I asking what a few stragglers from the organization are doing. Rather, I am interested in critical leaders from LIFG, and their followers, and LIFG’s militant apparatus. And for my money, we don’t know enough about them to say they are definitely, or even overwhelmingly likely to be, unconnected to al Qaeda and an ideology of global jihad. While one could object to my entire question on definitional grounds, and claim that there is no longer a LIFG so the question is irrelevant, the implication of this argument should be clear: if there is no longer a LIFG, there is also no longer a group that would feel itself bound by LIFG’s 2009 revisions.

So, turning to Zelin’s specific objections:

Zelin’s first objection: Ex-LIFG members that joined AQC [al Qaeda core] did so in an individual capacity. The so-called “merger” was rejected by LIFG leadership.

This response is overly focused on a single event, the merger that Abu Layth al Libi and Ayman al Zawahiri announced of LIFG and al Qaeda in 2007, and that was later repudiated by the organization’s imprisoned leadership when it issued revisions in 2009. But a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda preceded the revisions by about two decades, as this report that Evan Kohlmann wrote for the NEFA Foundation in 2007 makes clear. To highlight a few (though by no means all) of his data points:

  • LIFG members were present in Afghanistan shortly after al Qaeda was founded in 1988, and were considered an early affiliate (pp. 3-4).
  • LIFG was present in Sudan from 1992-95 during Osama bin Laden’s time in that country, and about twenty LIFG members were part of the Islamic Army Shura that bin Laden formed (p. 5). This was not always a warm and friendly relationship; as is often the case within jihadi circles, it included its share of arguments and tensions.
  • After bin Laden was forced from Sudan and returned to Afghanistan, LIFG began to view that country, by 1998, as “the preferred venue for LIFG recruits seeking extremist indoctrination and military training.” During this time, “LIFG leaders managed to put aside some of their past frustrations with al Qaeda.” John Negroponte noted, during his time as the U.S.’s director of national intelligence, that during this period LIFG “expanded its goals to include anti-Western jihad alongside Al Qaeda.”
  • LIFG fought beside al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded. Illustrating this, Kohlmann writes, “In 2002, Khalden training camp manager Abu Zubaydah was captured by security forces in a residence in Faisalabad, Pakistan alongside at least three LIFG operatives and a fourth individual also ‘known to have ties to the LIFG.’ Other LIFG members were captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield in Afghanistan and subsequently transferred to the U.S. prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”
  • LIFG’s alleged involvement in 2003 terrorist attacks in Morocco illustrate that at that time, ambitions outside of Libya and also a general anti-West orientation may have been prevalent within the group. Kohlmann writes, “In May 2003, senior LIFG leaders based in Europe allegedly conspired with their North African allies in the GICM to help plan and facilitate a wave of suicide bombing attacks on targets in the Moroccan city of Casablanca that killed over 40 people and caused more than 100 injuries. The attacks focused on Western and ‘Jewish’ interests, including community centers, a restaurant, and a hotel. British-based LIFG Shura Council member Abdelrahman al-Faqih—who ‘has a history of GICM-related activity’ and has served as a key liaison between the LIFG and the GICM—was convicted in absentia by the Rabat Criminal Court of Appeals in Morocco for his alleged involvement in the Casablanca bombings.”
  • LIFG commanders, including Abu Layth al Libi and Abu Yahya al Libi, held prominent positions within al Qaeda prior to the 2007 merger.
  • LIFG also strongly supported the jihad in Iraq. Kohlmann writes, ”Eager to continue its war against the West as the battlefield shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, the ‘LIFG has called on Muslims everywhere to fight the U.S. in Iraq,’ according to U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. In October 2004, al Qaeda supporters in Libya posted an open request on Arabic-language Internet chat forums to the chief of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s media wing regarding Libyan national Khalid al-Zaidi—who allegedly survived combat with U.S. forces in Iraq only to be subsequently killed back home in Libya. According to the message, ‘we think you have heard about [his martyrdom]… the most important thing we want from you, the Tawheed wal-Jihad Movement, is to name one of your upcoming operations in his name in order to show support for your brothers in the land of Libya.’”

Focusing only on Abu Layth al Libi’s merger of LIFG into al Qaeda in 2007, and its subsequent repudiation by another wing of LIFG, ignores the fact that a relationship had long existed between the two groups prior to the merger. This relationship was sometimes tense, but generally cooperative. Since a cooperative relationship had existed for such a long time, it is not impossible, nor even particularly unlikely, that it would continue in a real way even after one LIFG wing issued its revisions.

Further, neither Abu Layth al Libi nor other LIFG leaders who became part of al Qaeda can be written off as low-level individuals. They were prominent within LIFG, and when they joined al Qaeda, they brought their followers along. Nor is the fact that it took the imprisoned LIFG leadership two years to reject al Libi’s attempted merger with al Qaeda wholly irrelevant: Abu Layth al Libi purported to speak for all of LIFG in his merger announcement, so if this merger were completely out of character, and seen as outrageous by others within LIFG, shouldn’t the repudiation have come much earlier? Available evidence suggests that there might be significant LIFG factions who were both dedicated to the ideology of global jihad and also desired a working relationship with al Qaeda, even if other LIFG factions did not. It is not clear to me (though not necessarily wrong) that the imprisoned leadership that issued the revisions in 2009 should be held up as the “real” LIFG while Abu Layth al Libi’s faction is written off as marginal.

Zelin’s second objection (combining two tweets): The former LIFG leader first changed the name of the group in spring ’11 to the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change. Since then former LIFG members split into two political parties al-Watan and al-Ummah led by Belhaj and Sa’adi, respectively.

The Libyan Islamic Movement for Change was a shift adopted by LIFG’s European expatriate and historic Libya-based leadership, the same ones who supported the earlier revisions. They claimed to speak for the whole of LIFG — but then again, so did Abu Layth al Libi and his followers during the 2007 merger. It isn’t clear that the former should be given preeminence over the latter, other than the fact that the former was trending in a direction that the U.S. wanted it to — particularly given that Abu Layth al Libi’s contingent definitely had access to significant amount of resources and personnel. The question of who has a greater claim to legitimacy isn’t trivial, particularly given the salafist attacks that have erupted across Libya.

This wave of attacks on sufi shrines is unprecedented in Libya’s recent history, and suggests that whomever is carrying it out embraces an extreme for of takfirism. Who is responsible for the attacks is an open question, but it’s certain that they’re dangerous enough that the state is hesitant to openly confront them. The New York Times recently quoted Libya’s interior minister, Fawzi Abdel Aal: “If we deal with this using security we will be forced to use weapons, and these groups have huge amounts of weapons. We can’t be blind to this. These groups are large in power and number in Libya. I can’t enter a losing battle, to kill people over a grave.” This is a remarkable quote: Libya’s interior minister feels powerless to stop the destruction of sufi shrines and sites, in large part because these groups are “large in power and number,” and also well armed. Did the groups carrying out these attacks derive their organizational structure or leadership from LIFG? To be sure, we don’t know the answer, but can we say that it’s more likely than not that they didn’t?

Zelin references the emergence of al Watan (Hizb al Watan) and al Ummah (al Ummah al Wasat) as political parties. This splintering raises the question of whether or not there is still a coherent group. If not, as I asked before, should LIFG’s revisions still be considered operative? (Surely some in the group would still likely adhere to them, but could we consider them binding on all the factions that existed within LIFG?) But moreover, in Libya engaging in the political process is not inconsistent with maintaining a militia capable of undertaking violent actions outside of it. Abdal Hakim Bilhaj is a good example, as he continues to head the Tripoli Military Council (TMC) despite his official resignation on May 15, 2012. According to open source reports, the TMC, one of Libya’s most powerful militias, has a large number of former LIFG members. Estimates of its total size range from 5,000 to 25,000 members.

Zelin’s third objection: Indeed, there are former LIFG elements around Libya that didn’t buy into politics, see al-Qumu, but it’s not under the LIFG banner.

It is true that they aren’t operating under the LIFG banner at this point, but I assess that as less important than Zelin thinks it is. The fact is that in Libya:

  • There are a large amount of takfiri attacks being carried out against sufi targets, and we don’t know to whom those attacks should be attributed.
  • There are credible reports of an al Qaeda presence inside Libya (as detailed in my previous post), and we don’t have a great deal of granular knowledge about it.
  • We don’t have a good idea of what became of a large portion of the fighters within LIFG (although some are accounted for, such as those who are now in the TMC).

There is, in essence, a lot that we don’t know, and hence the need for a great deal of analytic humility about what might be happening. I think the banner that a group operates under is less relevant than where its structure and members came from. If I wrote a post about Somalia in 2004 arguing that AIAI might be trying to consolidate power, one could reasonably object that they weren’t doing so under the banner of AIAI. That would be true enough, but also somewhat beside the point: for practical purposes, AIAI was trying to consolidate power then, but we didn’t really know what to call them. Asking about AIAI in 2004 would not only not be wrong, but would in fact be the exact right question to ask if you wanted to understand Somalia’s future. Until we can name the specific factions that have emerged from LIFG, I think it is fair to ask what LIFG is up to now, and also to question whether its revisions in fact represent the overwhelmingly dominant view among LIFG members/former LIFG members.

So, to highlight my points of difference with Zelin:

  • I believe that focusing only on Abu Layth al Libi’s attempted merger with al Qaeda and the subsequent 2009 revisions ignores a history between LIFG and al Qaeda that covers about two decades. There is much more to the connection between the two organizations than just the attempted merger.
  • I don’t think it’s self-evident that we should find that legitimacy lies only with the imprisoned leaders who issued revisions in 2009, and not with Abu Layth al Libi’s faction that also claimed to act in the name of LIFG when it merged with al Qaeda. I think it is reasonable to say that it seems LIFG has been somewhat fluid, possessing more than a single faction, and that both nationalist and also global jihad-oriented factions have existed within the group. Given the dearth of information we have about Libya, I don’t see how we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of LIFG members endorse the positions expressed in the revisions.
  • Further, in my previous entry, I noted that other aspects of LIFG’s revisions, such as the pledge not to fight Qaddafi’s regime, were abandoned. This calls into question, at least in a small way, how binding the totality of the revisions will be.
  • The best objection to my argument (which Zelin seems to hint at) is that LIFG simply does not exist at this point. (This entry makes clear that the question what is LIFG? does not have a straightforward answer.) But this argument begs the question: what do we call armed groups whose structure and leadership is inherited from LIFG, if we don’t have another name for them at this point? And should their history within LIFG be seen as irrelevant to their current form, function, and logic?
  • Further, to the extent that one argues that LIFG does not exist, that undermines the importance of LIFG’s revisions. If there is no LIFG, there’s also no longer a group that has endorsed the revisions.
  • I believe that the banner a group is operating under is relevant, but we cannot view it as absolutely determinative. If a group’s leadership and structure derives from a previous organization (i.e. LIFG), then that group can sometimes be functionally seen as a continuation of the previous organization rather than a wholly new thing.

The bottom line is that there is a hell of a lot that analysts don’t know about violent non-state actors operating in Libya. And the more we don’t know, the more we should be open to possibilities that defy the conventional wisdom. That is particularly the case for LIFG and al Qaeda: the two groups’ fairly long relationship should make it difficult to say with confidence that any working relationship is only a thing of the past.

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The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Al Qaeda, and Epistemology

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Posted on September 7, 2012

Yesterday I was quoted in a Spencer Ackerman article over at Wired, saying, “We don’t know whether there is a current relationship between LIFG [the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] and al Qaeda.” I wanted to expand upon that quote here, because I feel that it represents a minority opinion within my field: I believe that most analysts with an opinion on the matter would argue that we do know whether there is a current relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda, and that the correct answer is that there is none.

The argument for the lack of relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda is pretty straightforward. I also believe that it is wrong: not that the opposite is true, but that analysts are drawing too strong a conclusion based on the available evidence. First, let me outline the case for LIFG and al Qaeda having no relationship as clearly as possible. The case is rooted in a series of revisions that LIFG published in September 2009, which Paul Cruickshank discusses in this CTC Sentinel article. Among other things, the revisions contained a repudiation of al Qaeda’s ideology. Cruickshank argues that the revisions constitute “the most significant critique of al Qaeda that has yet emerged from jihadist circles.” He provides a number of reasons that observers should be optimistic about the impact that these revisions might have. One reason is that, while “LIFG never joined al Qaeda nor shared its ideology of global jihad, the close personal ties between its leaders meant that al Qaeda still considered the LIFG’s leaders brothers in arms.” Another reason is that LIFG’s critique of al Qaeda still came from a jihadi perspective, which in Cruickshank’s view meant that it was more likely to resonate with the target audience (those who might otherwise be receptive to al Qaeda’s message). Those arguing that there is no relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda point to the rejection of al Qaeda contained in the revisions, and conclude that it precludes a relationship between the two groups.

Fair enough. Now, in approaching questions like whether there is a relationship between al Qaeda and LIFG, definitional questions loom large. There are various debates about what al Qaeda means, but let us stipulate an answer that I believe analysts who think there is no LIFG/al Qaeda relationship would agree with: that in saying there is no LIFG/al Qaeda relationship, they are saying a) that LIFG does not have links to al Qaeda’s core leadership, and b) that it is now a regionally focused or nationalist group rather than one with global ambitions. (The revisions explicitly reject al Qaeda’s ideology of global jihad.)

The definitional questions become more difficult, though, when we ask what LIFG is today. Does it even exist? Fox News noted this summer that LIFG is “purportedly moribund,” which is accurate, but that doesn’t mean that no organization that we could describe as LIFG exists. There is a long tradition of jihadi groups shedding old names and adopting new ones (Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates provide a great example of this practice): if an organization remains that is comprised of high-profile members of the old LIFG, it would be fair to see it as a continuation of LIFG even if it goes by a new name. If LIFG or a successor organization currently exists, who is its emir? What does its organizational structure look like? Does it make decisions in a centralized or decentralized manner? Abdal Hakim Bilhaj is frequently described as LIFG’s “former emir.” Does that mean he can still be considered a LIFG leader? The answers one can discern from open-source information are less than clear. Thus, one reason it is difficult to answer the question of a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda should be apparent: what LIFG means in this context is far less clear than the sometimes perplexing question of what we mean by al Qaeda.

Let’s sidestep this question entirely without diminishing its importance, and turn to a more basic problem with the argument that the revisions preclude a relationship between LIFG and al Qaeda: I think it is, in fact, rather apparent that they do not. The revisions, after all, did not just contain a repudiation of al Qaeda: they also contained, as Cruickshank notes, a pledge to end LIFG’s campaign against Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. Yet when the opportunity arose, LIFG leaders — quite prominent among them its former emir, Bilhaj — joined the fight against the regime. Is the repudiation of al Qaeda more fundamental than the promise not to fight Qaddafi’s regime, such that key LIFG leaders would turn back to fighting the regime when the opportunity arose, yet are sure to keep their distance from al Qaeda and global jihadism? Based on where analysts fall on the issue, I think most would answer yes, but I don’t see that as self-evident.

And thus we have the point that I wanted to make about epistemology. Much of what happens in the world of violent non-state actors occurs in the shadows, such that analysts have to be very modest about what they know, and what they do not. This is even truer in the case of LIFG, for whom there are very real questions about whether it even exists, and if it does, what its leadership and organizational structure look like. I find that areas where I most frequently disagree with others in the field — and where the field often gets its answers wrong — are those where relatively broad conclusions are drawn based on only a few data points. I believe that analysts often overreach in their conclusions because they like to be able to provide answers: not knowing is a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Thus, when most available data points suggest a certain conclusion, they will put forward the conclusion that the data points suggest they should.

That is fair, I suppose, except for one problem: when an analyst is dealing with an extremely limited set of available data points, and he knows that there is a lot more to answering the question that he simply cannot see, he should be aware that the limited data points he possesses may well have pushed him to the wrong conclusion. I recently had a similar critique of the report that West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) produced about the documents recovered from the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden: CTC reached broad conclusions that go far beyond what the documents actually demonstrate. Sometimes all you can say is that you have some suggestive data points, but that the data points do not answer the question. And I think this is the case here: that the conclusion that LIFG has no globally-oriented faction, and no relationship with al Qaeda, does not follow from the fact that the revisions exist. The revisions are not irrelevant, but neither do they provide a definitive answer to the question.

That is the epistemological point that I wanted to make before inundating readers with my own evidence. If you were more interested in the broad argument, you can stop reading. But if you’re actually interested in LIFG, global jihadism, and al Qaeda, the following data points will be relevant:

  • There appears to still be a pro-al Qaeda faction within what can currently be described as LIFG. Old leaders such as Abu Layth al Libi, Abdal Ghaffar al Libi, Abdullah Sa’id al Libi, Urwah (Abu Malik al Libi), and Abu Yahya al Libi are dead, but a review of open source information reveals that such figures as Anas al Libi, Abu Shahin al Darnawi, Abu Raghad al Libi, Abu Ishaq Hamzah al Libi, Abu Hafs al Darnawi, and Sufyan bin Qumu remain active in Libya.
  • Those figures within LIFG who publicly sided with al Qaeda after LIFG’s revisions were never expelled from the group. Overlapping membership does not mean LIFG was cooperating with al Qaeda, but it suggests that the distinction many analysts now draw — that within LIFG there is only a regional focus — is too sharp.
  • The aforementioned Urwah, a senior LIFG commander, was killed in April 2011 while fighting to retake Al Burayqah. His background prior to returning to Libya is suggestive of al Qaeda connections. He had been detained in Iran in 2004, and was released from Iranian custody in late 2010. A large number of al Qaeda figures were held in Iran during this time period, and released around the time Urwah was released.
  • There have been multiple reports of an al Qaeda presence in Libya. Within the Algerian press, sources making this claim include El Fadjr Online (Aug. 3, 2011, describing al Qaeda’s presence in eastern Libya), El Khabar Online (Sept. 3, 2011; Sept. 12, 2011); and Echourouk El Youmi Online (Oct. 2o, 2011). Lest one think this is nothing more than Algerian propaganda, Daniel Benjamin, the U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, has noted that “the terrorist threat has become more complex with some changes in the region, particularly in Libya.” If there is in fact an increasing al Qaeda presence in Libya (something that these reports do not prove with absolute certainty), where is it coming from? It’s unlikely that the increasing al Qaeda presence would come entirely from foreigners who migrated there; and if you’re looking at Libyan groups containing factions that might lean toward al Qaeda, LIFG would at the top of your list of suspects.
  • Further underscoring this point, Algeria’s Echourouk El Youmi reported on Aug. 29, 2011, that AQIM was attempting to find new allies among Libyan rebels, “particularly since among them there are some old elements who were active in the so-called the Libyan Combat Group.”
  • According to an October 2011 post on the jihadi web forum Ansar al Mujahedin (that was subsequently removed) the former head of the jihadi media group Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), Ahmad al Wathiq Billah, was serving as Bilhaj’s media adviser. Billah was freed from a Libyan prison earlier in 2011.
  • Writing in London’s Al Hayah in June 2012, Kamil al Tawil noted that there are likely three types of jihadis in Libya. The first is the “old guard” — and he includes Bilhaj in this category — who “seem to have adopted an explicit decision to abandon the armed action.” The second type is “second generation” jihadis who feel no loyalty to LIFG, and objected to the dialogue with the Qaddafi regime that produced the group’s revisions. Tawil writes that this group “is extremely enthusiastic to join what it considers to be ‘jihad,’” and that this is the type of jihadi who would gravitate toward the Syrian conflict. (A number of Libyan fighters have gone to the Syrian front.) And the third type of jihadi is former LIFG members “who now consider themselves as part of al Qaeda, whether through its central command at the Afghan-Pakistani borders, or through its branch in North Africa, Al Qaeda in the Lands of Islamic Maghreb. These jihadis could be considered as a part of the branch of the Islamic Fighting Group, which joined al Qaeda in 2007, and which was led by the late Abu Layth al Libi in Afghanistan.”

None of this constitutes a smoking gun proving there is a global jihadi faction within LIFG or a LIFG-al Qaeda relationship. However, I consider these data points suggestive, enough that they make me skeptical of the definitive answer that many analysts have adopted based upon a single data point.

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