Attackerman

bin Laden as a Commander

As if to illustrate that last point, this is from a briefing I attended at the Pentagon on Saturday with someone we're just supposed to call a "senior intelligence official":

The following is a key point: the materials reviewed over the past several days clearly show that bin Laden remained an active leader in al Qaeda, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group. Though separated from many al Qaeda members who are located in more remote areas of the region, he was far from a figurehead....

The materials reviewed thus far reveal that bin Laden continued to direct even tactical details of the group's management and to encourage plotting.The materials show that bin Laden remained focused on inspiring and engineering international terrorism and specifically on attacking the United States.

From the Washington Post today:

“We’re not going to find operational manuals or Excel spreadsheets” with rosters of operatives and points of contact, the senior intelligence official said. Bin Laden served as a “chief executive who is giving fairly generic, broad instructions and guidance rather than tactical orders,” the official said.

Assessments change as the hunt continues, sure. But it would be valuable to have the 9/11 Commission, when the dust settles, establish this question for history.

Bring Back The 9/11 Commission for the bin Laden Hunt

John McCain, still a torture opponent:

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.

Marc Theissen hardest hit. Now to get consensus-y.

I don't pretend that anything will produce an end to this new debate over torture. The fact that we're debating torture diminishes our standing as a civilization. But moving beyond it: perhaps, after the actionable intelligence is drained from the bin Laden documents, it would be useful to reconvene the 9/11 Commission and have them review the ten-year hunt for bin Laden. It's not helpful for something that looked like a failure on May 1 to be retconned into an inevitable, inexorable success on May 2. The tale of the bin Laden hunt -- and the lessons to learn from it -- is the logical final chapter of the commission's  2004 report. And the gravitas of the 9/11 Commission, delivered through a public report, would create the closest thing possible to a narrative that can stand proudly before history. 

Update: Marcy makes everything better.

Intelligence, COIN and the bin Laden Hit

So the bin Laden raid leaves us with an empirical test case for a core counterinsurgency contention.

Proposed by Dave Kilcullen and others, counterinsurgency theorists argue that theirs is the truer path to robust counterterrorism, the pursuit of which is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context. Counterterrorism requires intelligence on terrorists and their environs. Intelligence requires local knowledge. Local knowledge requires the protection of vulnerable populations from reprisal, plus some incentive -- money, justice, political access, whatever -- to make cooperation with the anti-insurgent faction sensible. If you don't provide those resources and meet people where they are, then your counterterrorism hunt is fruitless. 

U.S. counterterrorism just succeeded, massively, in a place where we don't have a counterinsurgency campaign. But we clearly had sufficient local knowledge (read: informers and ground operatives) -- plus signals intelligence, plus persistant surveillance -- to meet our objective. If there was any counterinsurgency approach that backstopped that effort, then it was a Pakistani COIN, which is pretty poorly regarded; and in any event, it isn't focused outside the tribal areas, where it turns out bin Laden wasn't. Maybe Pak COIN in the tribal areas helped support the raid and we just don't know it. But the evidence of American counterinsurgency efforts supporting it is thin. 

There is a lot we don't know about the bin Laden raid, so it's not really smart to draw firm conclusions. As a working hypothesis, it makes sense to ask whether a central contention of counterinsurgency doesn't apply. Maybe it applies in certain cases, as raids in Afghanistan are way up, although a debate is underway about whether those raids complement or conflict with the overall counterinsurgency effort. Perhaps the bin Laden raid is so singular as a national priority -- ten years and untold billions spent -- that Kilcullen's COIN-for-CT approach isn't necessary. (As Billy Beane famously said, "my stuff doesn't work in the playoffs.") Or maybe it needs to be adjusted -- or jettisoned. 

Let's consider this, shall we?

I Revolve Around Sciences

So my day today was a bunch of Pakistan stuff, some whither-the-war-on-al-Qaida* stuff and some satellite intelligence stuff.  But then I did some science journalism!

Believe it or not, bees are powerful bomb sleuths. That’s why Darpa wanted to enlist them to find explosives, landmines and “odors of interest” in the early 2000s. As it turns out, inside of every bee sting is a small fragment of a protein called a peptide that has an uncanny property.

“When it wraps around a small wire, that allows it to recognize ‘nitro-aromatics’,” Strano explains, the chemical class of explosives like TNT. That wire is a carbon nanotube, a mere one atom thick.

Put that against a nitro-aromatic treated with the bee peptide, and take a look through a near-infrared microscope. “The light from the carbon nanotube will fluoresce — so red that your eye can’t see it,” Strano says. “What you’d see in the microscope is: The nanotube would flicker off and on.” A single molecule of the explosive material would set off the sensor.

That's a belated Mother's Day gift for my beloved mother, whose attempts to get me to learn biology didn't pass through my flourescent high-school era hair down into my brain. Bronx Science in the mid-late 1990s was not the most aptly named high school in New York. But now here I am, the least probable Wired reporter ever. Word to Mr. Bodkin and Mr. Lee.

*Wired style spelling

When There's Nothing On The Horizon, You've Got Nothing Left To Prove

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 394-11

May 10, 2011

DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Sgt. Ken K. Hermogino, 30, of Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., died May 9 in Herat province, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained in a non-combat related vehicle accident. He was assigned to the 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.

For more information, media should contact the Fort Carson public affairs office at 719-524-2446 or 719-526-4143.

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of War

The survivors, on the other hand, have the heaviest burden to bear. Imagine the horrors that Samar must overcome. And try to suppress a chill at the thought that her home of Mosul, one of Iraq's remaining contested cities, has not approached the end of the Iraq war. The U.S. will leave, as it should. She can't. Wherever she lives, she can't leave. At 12 years old, she's been forced to be stronger than most of us.

Internationally Known

  I hope P4 is getting mis-paraphrased here:

Gen. David Petraeus warned that Afghanistan is still a potential refuge for international terror groups, and al-Qaida is just one of those.

And we care about the others... why? The threat they pose to the United States is...? The rationale for expending blood and treasure fighting them would be...? Their desire and capability to strike international would be...? The Afghanistan war, post-surge, makes a maximal amount of sense when viewed from the perspective of producing a soft landing. Build up the Afghan security forces; sloowwwwwwly draw down troops; transfer operations to the Afghans; secure access to launching pads in eastern Afghanistan (and Kandahar) to harass the residual safe havens in Pakistan. But this can come off... strategically discordant:

"Targeted military strikes don't produce security on their own," Petraeus said, noting that NATO forces only started to establish stability in southern Kandahar province when they combined such strikes with programs to build up government and local security forces.

Petraeus isn't wrong. But we only care about southern Kandahar because of al-Qaeda. Establishing lasting security isn't a U.S. goal in itself. It's a means to an end.

They Call Me The Hunter

 Everything about this Lawrence Wright piece is baller, but this demonstrates how intelligence professionals who mean business go about searching for proxies:

 In 2004, I visited Gul—a short man with a rigid, military posture and raptor-like features—at his villa in Rawalpindi. He proudly asked his servant to bring me an orange from his private grove. I asked Gul why, during the Afghan jihad, he had favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven warlords who had been designated to receive American assistance in the fight against the Soviets. Hekmatyar was the most brutal member of the group, but, crucially, he was a Pashtun, like Gul. As I ate the orange, Gul offered a more principled rationale for his choice: “I went to each of the seven, you see, and I asked them, ‘I know you are the strongest, but who is No. 2?’ ” He formed a tight, smug smile. “They all said Hekmatyar.”

 The only thing that could make that quote better is if DJ Drama put a gangsta grillz drop right after it. 

Beyond that, the point Wright makes about the path dependency and security dysfunction forged by U.S. aid illustrates the wicked problem Pakistan represents. You give them all this cash to help hunt bin Laden while you're in Afghanistan? Then they're never going to find him and never going to forge a path to extrication from the war. You pull the money out and the intransigence escalates. This is a stick-up. The answer might be more unilateralism in counterterrorism, papered over with a lot of diplomatic bullshit. At least until the U.S. decides that al-Qaida is degraded to the point that we no longer have to fear them and underwrite Pakistan's security state.

When There's Nothing On The Horizon, You've Got Nothing Left To Prove

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 388-11

May 07, 2011

DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Spc. Riley S. Spaulding, 21, of Sheridan, Texas, died May 4 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained in a non-combat incident. He was assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, Vilseck, Germany.

For more information, the media may contact U.S. Army Europe public affairs office at 011-49-6221-57-5816 or ocpa.pi@eur.army.mil.

When There's Nothing On The Horizon, You've Got Nothing Left To Prove

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 378-11

May 04, 2011

DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Cpl. Kevin W. White, 22, of Westfield, N.Y., died May 2 in Kunar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

For more information, media may contact the 25th Infantry Division public affairs office at 808-655-6354.