Serendipity – again! Drezner’s got a piece, “Where Are Khamenei’s Proxies?“. Responding to Marc Lynch and Ezra Klein on Iran, he writes “I was struck by Ezra Klein’s shrewd point about how truly powerful actors rely on proxies to fight their more vicious battles for them.” Good, good, good…

Even better, I just stumbled over the trailer for the comic-book adaptation of The Surrogates (or is that the movie adaptation of the comic book?). Wired’s Underwire (Ed: gasp! you read a Wired blog OTHER than Danger Room? And why are you copying Drezner’s editorial device? Thief.) has a review up; you can see the trailer here. Scott Thill writes

Building on the foundation of Blade Runner and its replicants, The Surrogates posits a near future where what David Cronenberg called “the old flesh” in Videodrome is replaced with “the new flesh” of mass-produced synthetic doppelgangers. But the process proves to be more complicated than the marketing admits, and trouble brews once the cops, the streets, serial killers and postmodern prophets seize upon surrogate technology to advance their own mysterious agendas.

The real reason this is all so important is because I’m in the final stages of editing the manuscript for my new book, Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates and the Use of Force, under contract with Potomac. Actually, it’s an edited book, I’m the editor, and the line-up is killer: Jeff Bale, John Horgan, Mia Bloom, Bill Rosenau, Peter Chalk, Kevin O’Brien, Brian Glyn Williams, and Antonio Giustozzi.

Now, with these important, edge-of-cool pop culture referents, I can do what everyone else is doing and whore myself for better sales weave it all into my introduction. 

From the Institute For War and Peace Reporting:

While British and American forces concentrate their efforts in southern Afghanistan, the once-peaceful north is fast spiralling out of control with the Taleban making a number of important gains.

They include the town of Chahrdara in Kunduz province, where a recent visitor reports that the Taleban have set up their own administration to rival that loyal to the central government, complete with tax collection and a court system.

The northern provinces – Balkh, Kunduz, Jowzjan, Faryab, Sar-e-Pul and Baghlan – have seen a surge in violence over the past few months, with suicide attacks, armed assaults and roadside bombs, and the insurgency appears to be gaining ground.

At the same time, the attention of the Afghan and international military remains firmly focused on the south. Last week, the Americans unleashed a major offensive, Operation Khanjar (Dagger Thrust), in the Helmand River valley, the poppy-rich area that supplies more than half the world’s opium.

Also in Helmand, the British are fighting a bitter battle around the capital, Lashkar Gah. Operation Panchai Palang (Panther’s Claw) has claimed the lives of several soldiers, including a high-ranking commander, in the past few days.

But while the war in the south consumes valuable time and resources, the north could spiral out of control, warn international experts.

Read the full article.

Geoffrey Corn, Associate Professor at the South Texas College of Law, on “Clean Kills” in Foreign Policy:

The term “targeted killing” has become a political lightning rod lately, with new revelations of the development of a CIA antiterrorism assassination program, but the concept really shouldn’t be so controversial. As a former U.S. Army judge advocate, my instinct is to assume that being as precise as possible when targeting an enemy opponent is generally a good thing. Nonetheless, debate persists over where such operations fall within the spectrum of international law. But in their inquiries into the legality of the strikes, critics may themselves be aiming at the wrong target.

Read the full article.

I’m pretty happy about all the COIN discussion that’s been going on at the lab over the last couple of weeks. While we’re at it, here’s a little something from Foreign Affairs: Eliot A. Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, has produced an annotated syllabus on fighting insurgencies. Cohen:

Interest in counterinsurgency comes and goes. During the 1950s and 1960s, soldiers, politicians, and scholars wrote voluminously on what was sometimes called “revolutionary war,” a supposedly new mode of conflict that enabled nationalist and communist movements (and some combinations of the two) to thwart or even defeat seemingly stronger European colonial powers. The Vietnam War generated a rich literature on the topic, but attention waned with the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina and the American desire to avoid irregular warfare in the future. In recent years, however, hard experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have rekindled interest in the subject and caused even some experts to reconsider old ways of waging “the war of the flea.” 

Nothing, errrr… revolutionary about the list. Cohen also included Small Wars Journal. Nice one.

I can’t say I’m even slightly surprised that while ex-VP Dick Cheney was doing end-runs around democratic oversight, the intelligence program he was protecting was something that was… actually… not… that… spectacular….

The plan, to form direct action units for assassinating senior Al Qaeda members, doesn’t sound like anything more sinister than the consolidation of what’s already been done and discussed. Getting people in close is also entirely consistent with military ethics. I’ve lost count of all the soldiers with whom I’ve spoken who’ve stated flatly that there’s no substitute for putting people in harm’s way to do this sort of thing.

I’d also quickly point out that I don’t think it exonerates Cheney et al from the consequences of their decisions. The aggressive fetish they’ve made out of secretly torturing and killing things paints too broad a picture to suggest they actually cared about minimizing collateral damage. I realize that that’s in part a caricature, but it’s also a perception that they themselves are responsible for cultivating.

More importantly, Current Intelligence contributor Ken Anderson, a professor of law at American University in D.C., was quoted in the article that explains it all in the New York Times.

Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University who has studied targeted killings, said the United States first made the argument in 1989 that killing terrorists would not violate the assassination ban and would be a legal act of self-defense under international law.

Such killings would be premised on the condition that the authorities in the country where the terrorist was located were unable or unwilling to stop the terrorist, Mr. Anderson said.

In legal terms, he said, there is no real difference between killing a terrorist with a missile or with a handgun. “In political terms,” he continued, “there’s a real difference. The missile feels more like regular warfare, even if it’s carried out by the C.I.A.”

Don’t forget to read Amos Guiora‘s article on the subject in Foreign Policy.