2010

13.01.2010 ~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

AQ Has a New Strategy, Obama Needs One Too // Bruce Hoffman/WaPo
Terror On Campus // Rob Dover/KoW
Military Justice and the Fear Game // Scott Horton/Harper’s Magazine
Afghan Recovery Report: Afghan Journalists Under Fire // Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Exploring the Megastructure: Smugglers’ Caves // Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG

I’m going to be heads down for the next few weeks, preparing lectures and writing chapters. Any posting I do will be necessarily brief; I’ll be back in full swing after the hump.

The Battle for Tora Bora

07.01.2010 ~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t already read Peter Bergen’s TNR piece on the late 2001 battle for Tora Bora, Afghanistan, you should. It’s a page turner, and offers a “definitive account” of “how Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp.” It definitely lives up to the strapline. In my opinion, it’s also a fine example of good use of source material, as Bergen plumbs the wealth of memoirs published since then by key players.

Excerpt:

What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.

The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle–based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves–I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Read the rest here.

Flipping the COIN

01.10.200901.10.2009 ~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, raises a few interesting points about counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in Afghanistan. “Counterinsurgency doctrine, or COIN,” he writes, “has captured the hearts and minds of many in the D.C. policy community. Upon close inspection, however, it becomes clear that COIN, at least as applied to Afghanistan, is built on a number of shaky assumptions.”

Hmmm, way to take a swipe at CNAS. I especially like this one:

…the COIN framework is built on the larger assumption that eliminating the Taliban and stabilizing Afghanistan is the best use of American resources in the broader effort to combat terrorism. Al Qaeda’s presence in a pre-9/11, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has convinced many officials that a Taliban takeover would result in al Qaeda’s inevitable return to the state. But al Qaeda already has established itself in Pakistan’s semi-governed spaces. Along with Taliban and other extremist militants, the group enjoys the relative safety of these territories, where Pakistani sovereignty precludes any substantive U.S. ground force. Even if al Qaeda were to reenter Afghanistan sometime in the future, the United States would face the same basic terrorist threats that it does today. Critics will argue that Afghanistan served as a base and planning center for 9/11. True enough; but al Qaeda, in establishing a presence in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen has already developed numerous “safe havens.” In short, our overwhelming focus on Afghanistan fails to serve a more nuanced counterterrorism strategy that acknowledges the many other areas in which al Qaeda operates.

I’ve always maintained that a state-centric approach to networked transnational threats – interventions that focus on fixing weak and failing states – is a fool’s errand. Nelson explains why pretty clearly, I think. Not that states are irrelevant; simply that the way armed non-state actors distribute their resources generally runs counter to – or more precisely flows around – the organization of large footprint missions.

Go read the rest.