How Will The U.S. Deal With Drawing One Minute Closer to the Hour of al-Qaida's Doom

 

This is a hell of a declaration for his first encounter with the travelling Pentagon press:

Defense secretary Leon E. Panetta, who arrived in Kabul on Saturday, said the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda” and that the American focus had narrowed to capturing or killing 10 to 20 crucial leaders of the terrorist group in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. ... [snip]

“Obviously we made an important start with that in getting rid of bin Laden,” Mr. Panetta said. “But I was convinced in my capacity and I’m convinced in this capacity that we’re within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda. And I’m hoping to be able to focus on that, working obviously with my prior agency as well.”

Ten to twenty leaders away. So many possibilities here. Choose your own adventure.

1. Panetta is recklessly declaring victory by use of a misleading metric. I criticized John Brennan and the White House counterterrorism strategy for simultaneously asserting the U.S. is thisclose to destroying al-Qaida and that we just need to fight around the world forever to get to the end zone. Panetta is going much further than that -- he's talking about rolling up the org chart. After that: dunzo.

So the question that presents itself is if Panetta's got the right metric. Stipulated: al-Qaida's ambitions are way diminished  -- AQAP's printer/cargo bomb would have killed orders of magnitude fewer people than 9/11 did, and it didn't work -- and it doesn't possess the adherent, galvanizing force that it did before the Arab Spring and the height of the Iraq war. Whatever residual strength it possesses, Panetta is implicitly saying, resides in its leadership. But ohhhhh snap -- what's up, Ilyas Kashmiri? Need we remind you about Osama? 

But what if Panetta's wrong? What if chaotic Yemen, home of the most ambitious al-Qaida chapter, is mutating the organization? Stalled ambitions for the Arab Spring could conceivably be an opportunity for al-Qaida as well.  For ten years, successive U.S. counterterrorism officials held out a body count of al-Qaida's leaders as a proxy for breaking its back, only for the country to learn that it doesn't work that way. Don't set such a high expectation.

2. Panetta is prepping the country to get over its irrational fear of half-assed terrorism. Terrorism works best when it ropes a dope into exhaustion. It works really badly when the organization practicing it also has a hysterically grandiose, Pinky-and-the-Brain-style global agenda. (That's why al-Qaida is ultimately doomed.) That means beating it necessarily involves avoiding the temptation of immediately satisfying and ultimately counterproductive responses. We can't play the board while al-Qaida plays its opponent. 

A succession of Obama officials and documents have very cautiously embraced this critique. Outgoing NCTC head Mike Leiter's November speech is a representative example. They emphasize a "culture of resilience," in which the country doesn't freak out if AQ manages to sneak a bomb onto an airplane or some American declaring himself AQ shoots up an Army recruiting center. No calls for invading Yemen, or going back into Mogadishu, or increasing surveillance of American Muslims, etc. 

The big, big problem here is the administration doesn't take the critique far enough. Brennan didn't offer rolling back the expensive, liberty-violative 9/11 security state. Instead, he argued at SAIS that we need it to ensure al-Qaida gets beat and stays that way. We're not getting the porno scanners out of airports. We may end up creating new, globally-applicable systems for terrorist detention. Next year's DHS budget request (which admittedly is for more than terrorism! Like immigration enforcement and disaster anticipation/response!) is $57 billion. The intelligence community is budgeted at $80 billion (for much more than terrorism as well!). Most importantly, the Afghanistan war, with its now-marginal relationship to the war on al-Qaida, amounts to $120 billion annually, and Obama's vision for "ending" it keeps U.S. forces there till 2017 and involves keeping access to Afghan bases beyond that.

Panetta could seed the bed for an argument that we've overinvested in counterterrorism, and in stupid, inefficient ways that feed al-Qaida's "Bleed to Bankruptcy" strategy. An organization that has 20 dudes standing between Massive Danger and Strategic Defeat cannot possibly be very strong. But making that argument also means making tough decisions about accelerating the end of the wars; the necessity of the domestic security state; and the proliferation of admittedly more-efficient drone/commando wars.

3. And it also means being prepared to say some American deaths aren't Earth-shattering events. This is Tupac territory right here -- the realest shit they ever wrote. Remember when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up an airplane, but came pretty damn close? And remember when the media and the right-wing freaked out about it? Even though he would have killed at most a few hundred people?

Well, here's the real test of a "culture of resilience." Eventually, some domestic terror attack will succeed. The logical implication of what Panetta and Leiter and Brennan are saying about resilience is that they'll have to make the case that such an attack is tragic -- and strategically irrelevant. They'll have to make that case in a media environment that will tear them apart for saying anything close to it.

Is this an argument the hyper-cautious Obama team is really prepared to make? They once pledged to confront the politics of fear. But they've accomodated it instead. The aftermath of a successful terrorist attack is the unavoidable crucible here. Unless the fear of terrorism is called out, when it becomes the most salient, then we can expect continued counterproductivity.

I can see a number of objections to my arguments here. How realistic is it for Obama to end the Afghanistan war and the national security state in a puff of logic? Government doesn't work that way, after all. And the counterterrorism vectors -- however slowly they advance -- run in the direction of cheaper, um, global wars. If we're really only 20 dead terrorist leaders away from #winning, then it makes sense to go full-steam ahead and wipe this vexing band of murderers off planet Earth, finally. We've screwed up so long we might not know how to recognize the edge of the end. It might not be fair to say Obama's strategy is to declare victory and not go home. 

But remember that the purpose of terrorism is what mistakes it provokes its targets to make. Panetta's comments about ending al-Qaida. are as important as they are vague. But what really matters is what he'll say about reining in Post-9/11 America.

Comments

[mikey]

Yes.

We knew the truth about al Quaeda when they failed to follow up 9/11 with additional strikes. It's hard to even imagine the impact of a few random truck bombs in that pressure-cooker fall of 2001, but while imagination fails on specificity, the term "The Great Freakout" comes to mind. This was a "war" that was over the day it begun, and has served primarily as a political justification for everything from the invasion of Iraq to corporate-friendly modifications to longstanding copyright law.

Also, Panetta and crew are playing a game without having to acknowledge the rules. Sometimes al Quaeda is a specific organization, sometimes it's anyone we don't like who happens to be Muslim, and other times it's just the idea of violent resistance to the American global agenda. If we kill these 20 guys, that will take care of al Quaeda, but the unarguable fact will remain that six indoctrinated and motivated kids with access to some funds and weapons will always represent the threat we're spending a quarter of a billion dollars a year to counter.

It seems as if everybody in the game is learning as it evolves except the US...

[td]

Would be nice if the national security state, HSA, and related legislation were all dialed back to fit the Panetta-esque rhetoric. Watch what they DO, not what they SAY.

[encannyephept]

paraprotex