I've had a number of ongoing battles involving the strategic implications of our tactics and strategies of counter-terrorism globally and in specific elements. So I'd like to draw attention to some key points here.
Prior to 9-11, there were a number of legal and fuzzy legal state actions which were available to the USA and our allies around the globe on this matter which could have been employed against terrorist organisations, their funding sources, and their leaders. For example
1) State military action against suspected terrorist sites unilaterally (ie, US cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan or drone and air force strikes in Iraq/Pakistan, or Israeli incursions into Palestinian territories).
2) State Police and intelligence operations to gather information potentially for use in the former mission or to arrest and detain potential threats, with a variety of legal internal methods (such as warrants for wiretapping, etc)
3) Multilateral use and sharing of information and information gathering sources combined with broad international condemnation of non-state terrorism and fairly broad condemnation (although often hypocritical) of state-sponsored terrorism up to and including the sanctioning of military strikes and extradition of suspects by powerful states.
4) Airplane security already had a large list of substances and weapons which were supposedly screened to prevent incidents of airborne terrorism, which was, in the decade leading up to 9-11, remarkably effective around the globe (with zero incidents).
5) The war on drugs had already, in America at least, eroded a large sense of property and privacy restrictions such that comparable investigative techniques for counter-terrorism were easy to enact, not to mention at this point likely symbiotic (that is: counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics investigations were often pushing at some of the same people and forces globally anyway).
So in response to 9-11 here's what we supposedly needed
1) A new form of just war theory which declared that state actors could make wars against other state actors because they had included in their borders non-state actors who could potentially attack other nation-states. Without making sufficient international demonstrations of evidence to support such a claim public.
2) A new range of state police and intelligence assets up to and including the use of torture on suspects, illegal detention programs and extraordinary rendition to foreign governments, along with more advanced surveillance programs domestically.
3) No requirements for multilateral arrangements and coordination and a public declaration that resistance to stated policies was in effect, support of the opposition (that is: you are for the terrorists if you are not with us) and a broadly defined attempt to denigrate previously agreed to international law as binding on state actors (namely US Senate ratified treaties) or to weaken international institutions by only agreeing to participation on the condition of exemption from their decrees (International Criminal Court).
4) Airplane security eventually broadened its scope to include a heightened scrutiny of all passengers, including much increased delays and detainment of randomly searched persons (without evidence of wrong doing), and a list of behaviors which were required in the name of enhanced security without any demonstration of their actual effectiveness in terms of passenger security, such as the removal of shoes and small packages of liquids. This includes present calls for requiring full body scans of all passengers.
5) A wide range of anti-privacy legislation is called for, including immunity for telecommunications corporations who cooperate, wrongly, with government authorities in broad, vague, or warrantless seizures of information of private citizens, the collection of data with no attending requirements that it be purged, or if stored, that it be attached to on-going criminal investigation of terrorism for national security purposes, the abuse of anti-terrorism legislation to pursue more mundane criminal acts (such as drug trafficking), suppression of media information, doublethink wording defining away the concepts of "battlefields" to include anywhere the Pentagon or CIA says a suspect is found, "enhanced interrogation" to replace words like "torture" with clearer meanings, "enemy combatants" replaced by "unlawful enemy combatants", a term which has little legal meaning (and indeed, has been shown to be so through numerous court cases) but which still leaves detained terrorist suspects held without trial or recourse in a nebulous state of legal limbo.
What confuses me about these changes is that it does not seem clear why we needed them. It seemed to me that most of our failures which allowed 9-11 to proceed were simple procedure problems. We did not share intelligence between our state intelligence gathering organs, so it made sense to share intelligence, particularly on counter-terrorism information. We had many of the supposedly required legal tools to monitor international suspects already in place, as well as many to monitor domestic suspects but we required new legislation to broadly expand on those powers. We could strike at terrorist organisations by seizing or freezing financial assets, rounding up suspects criminally or killing them militarily, but we needed to justify invading hostile nations instead of merely striking back against non-state threats to global stability (in a way which frankly, much of the world would have and often did support in the post 9-11 days, including such often at odds sources as Russia and Iran).
Why I bring this up now is that it appears, in the aftermath of the latest al Qaeda attack, that we're still engaging in a sort of chicken with its head cut off calculus about what we have in the toolbox and what we supposedly need to strike back. It is not necessary to collectively lose our shit every time someone tries to set off a bomb on a plane (which of course, still hasn't happened that often given the amount of flying going on and the amount of bombing going on globally). We should instead figure out how they got into that position and how our systems in place failed before setting out to give them more and more power to invade our lives in the name of security. If we have already given more arsenal to our warriors in the field, then it seems to me that there are a number of strategic problems
1) We have given them too many options, too much data, too many sources from which to comb through to find truly threatening targets. There should be no realistic expectation that we can prevent every possible threat. After all, some wackos with fertilizer, a high powered rifle, or some home made pipe bombs can ruin our day and nobody may have noticed ahead of time at all, unlike most international terrorist incidents where we appear to have a good deal of lead time warning. Planned and executed international attacks (or internationally funded and trained ones) should be relatively easy to detect and deter however.
2) We have given them the wrong tools. It is possible that they might make better use of body scanners than their present surveillance instruments. However, a better question to me would be...
3) Do we have the wrong people in the field as a front line on terrorism? I have some confidence in the military's ability to conduct a counter-insurgency campaign (although I think they started on such a campaign too late in both Afghanistan and Iraq and I don't think it helps the "war on terror"). I have much less confidence in TSA or Homeland Security as agents appointed to protect us than in simple police tactics and intelligence gathering agencies. I have even less confidence in the ability of a half-assed effort to train hundreds of thousands of people in basic security and detection techniques. Securing a free country with freedom of movement is roughly impossible. Our best line of defence is in identifying probable suspects and monitoring them. This does not mean profiling only Arabic sounding names or young Muslim men as Faux News commentators seem to think would help. But it does mean doing some investigation when a Muslim male with a questionable background shows up as a person of interest and wanders off to Yemen for a while for example. Basically I think the problem here is that we have hundreds of thousands of people we're intending a half-trained agency to keep tabs on. The criminal investigations of all manner of crimes in this country in a given year take up virtually the same amount of manpower and investigative aims and with a few exceptions, are largely useful at reducing criminal acts. Rather than appointing new agencies with vague mandates of homeland security, it seemed more appropriate to build up the resources of counter-terrorism divisions of pre-existing bureaucracies and the coordination of them through one single entity. Perhaps the National Security Advisor, or perhaps the figurehead of a Homeland Security Director with no attending bureaucracy directly attributable to that one person but rather a number of divisions with different mandates and tactics available to them coordinating their investigations on persons of high material interest who present a high probability of threatening action to American civilians and military personnel (and, if this is done properly, coordinating with international allies to warn them of possible threats to their citizens in exchange for information helping us with our own dangers).
4) We have given our people the wrong mission. I think it would be fair to say that occupation and nation building are not sensible military aims. It might also be fair to say that countering terrorism by playing whack a mole with other unstable nation states may be inappropriate or that bombing those same nation-states may fuel dissenting rage against American interests. I have no illusions that sometimes terrorists or insurgents may need to be bombed or killed in combat situations. The question must be how necessary it will be relative to the potential cost of creating new bombers next week, radicalized to a vision of America as the unfeeling killing machine in the sky. Deploying a military is a costly action in the diplomatic and financial arenas of nation-states.
It should have occurred to us that doing so would have to achieve the principle aims of a military conflict. That is: that it should defeat in combat by force of arms or maneuver the enemy force, that it should succeed in separating the enemy force from its line of supply and armament and ultimately destroy such arms, and that it should succeed in suppressing the enemy force from its will to resist through future confrontations. I think we can probably achieve one of these three things by using the military routinely against terrorism or rogue state and non-state actors (the first one), but the problem is that we will have to do indefinitely because it does not account for the ability of the enemy to find ways to attack and counter attack, nor to provide for a sufficiency of will to resist and to engineer new and inventive ways to kill American soldiers and civilians (or those of our allies). Effectively we are swinging blindly. Naturally when we connect with something, it will be smashed and destroyed because we have a powerful force out there, even a flexible one at that. But we won't always connect and we thus leave ourselves open to many small pinpricks and counter blows. This is not good strategy.
13 January 2010
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3 comments:
Speaking only to point the first point 5) about the war on drugs:
One need not travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, communists, and non-whites under prosecution of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance global credibility.
The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. Behold, it’s all good. When Eve ate the apple, she knew a good apple, and an evil prohibition. Canadian Marc Emery is being extradited to prison for selling seeds that American farmers use to reduce U. S. demand for Mexican pot.
The CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) reincarnates Al Capone, endangers homeland security, and throws good money after bad. Administration fiscal policy burns tax dollars to root out the number-one cash crop in the land, instead of taxing sales. Society rejected the plague of prohibition, but it mutated. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment.
Nixon passed the CSA on the false assurance that the Schafer Commission would later justify criminalizing his enemies. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA shut down research, and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use, period. Former U.K. chief drugs advisor Prof. Nutt was sacked for revealing that non-smoked cannabis intake, e.g. vapor, is scientifically healthy.
The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership or an act of Congress to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. God’s children’s free exercise of religious liberty may include entheogen sacraments to mediate communion with their maker.
Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.
Common-law holds that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers undersigned that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration. Liberty is prerequisite for data collection of best drug-use practices for intentional outcomes.
I think I would summarize and agree in sum total (and have previously stated in my own forms many of these) that 1) the war on drugs is useless and wastefully imprisoning large sums of people. Drug treatment for violent offenders and voluntary treatment for addiction is appropriate. Perhaps drug prevention programs are acceptable to lower possible addiction concerns and to address the fears of parents, as well as to coerce people into using narcotics responsibly for recreational, mystical, or medicinal purposes. Prison and SWAT team raids are not appropriate methods of dealing with the issue of drug consumption. Since it is ultimately drug demand, which remains consistently unresolved, that causes drug supply to be and the illicit nature of that market causes it to be a violent and dangerous one, we have put all the money on the out hole here rather than on the in. 2) it sends an often dangerous and hypocritical signal in our foreign affairs and policies (particularly with major narcotics producing nation-states) 3) it limits liberties in ways that should not be tolerated by free peoples, not merely by reducing what a person may do with their own body in a consenting fashion but also by reducing private property rights through seizure of assets and by instilling a police state and/or militant/military atmosphere among policy enforcement circles 4) religious expression should not be an exemption for drug use but rather be merely another format for it 5) that scientific studies are deliberately suppressed and banned concerning narcotics for their physiological and medicinal effects, in particular marijuana
The problem with all that: it doesn't have a whole lot to do with counter-terrorism directly. Ending the war on drugs will reduce many sources of income for some hostile enemies and some of the hypocrisy and animus of our foreign policy. I think it will be important for these reasons, in addition to the domestic stability it would offer, particularly in poverty stricken areas largely populated by non-white citizens as well as rural areas dealing with crystal meth production as an alternative to domestic production of safer narcotics. It will do little for the kid in Yemen or Pakistan whose parents were blown up last week or who watches America and its allies going around occupying Muslim nations or supporting corrupt and repressive governments in them. Our general Afghani policies include opium suppression and interdiction (as well as allowing opium production and profiteering by favored leaders) but that's pretty hard to believe to be a sum total reason that we remain in country with newly deployed forces at billions of dollars of expense per week.
The interconnection, such as it is, between the war on drugs and the war on terror is often overlooked, in particular for its impact on domestic security policies and police and police state capabilities, but should also not be overplayed.
I am pretty sure the stated opinion was that we should not profile because it makes little sense and offers a great deal of downside risk (by pissing off people who might be liable to help us). But that we should not also be afraid of doing things that sometimes will look like profiling: ie, that investigations and detainment of terrorist suspects will probably turn up a fairly high margin of Islamic or Arabic people due to the probable nature of who is presently attempting to commit acts of terrorism or aggression against American interests. Assuming this to be a constant state of affairs will not provide security, both because our enemies can adapt to such tactics and seek to find willing accomplices in other demographic groups and because the long run threat of asymmetrical warfare against America (given our large military capacities in a conventional war) is very high from any source who wishes to oppose our interests.
Additionally, as I noted in a previous posting, the history and nature of domestic terrorism in America does not include a large percentage of Islamic radicals but rather a bunch of "disenfranchised" white guys. It might make sense for an airline to screen its Islamic or Arabic passengers (I am not sure that it does) because the typology of people likely to blow themselves up at present on airplanes are typically (affluent) Muslims, but this effort at best may result in only securing airplanes and divert essential resources from a more general and effective security against terrorist threats, particularly in the long run. Meaning it is a waste of time and expense.
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