And here is what I take away from all this. The debate in Washington has been over a counter-insurgency campaign versus a limited counter-terrorism campaign. Counter-insurgency implies a certain amount of state-building. Counter-terrorism implies that state-building is impossible or very, very difficult. Clinton backs counter-insurgency, while Vice President Joe Biden supports counter-terrorism.

The reason Clinton is so eager to insist that Karzai's election is legitimate despite its obvious illegitimacy is that Abdullah's withdrawal puts paid to the idea that there is a plausible Afghan government partner for US counter-insurgency. There is not.

Biden may or may not win the argument in Washington. But there is now no doubt that he should win that argument. Sending another 40,000 troops into Afghanistan to shore up a Karzai government that tried to steal the election and demonstrated so little accountability that the officials who winked at the fraud are still on the electoral commission-- that is an absurd proposition.

Al-Jazeera English has video:

Eric Garris points out that Afghan woman Member of Parliament Malalai Joya was interrupted on the US CNN when she referred to the US presence in Afghanistan as an occupation, but when she went on CNN International she was treated respectfully and allowed to speak. Actually, that the US and NATO are militarily occupying Afghanistan is recognized by the UN security council and is a simple fact of international law.

Tarek Mehanna, 27, was arrested Wednesday morning at his parents' home in Sudbury, an upscale suburb 20 miles west of Boston, and appeared for a brief hearing later in the day. When ordered by the judge to stand to hear the charge against him, he refused. He finally did stand -- tossing his chair loudly to the floor -- only after his father urged him to do so.

"This really, really is a show," his father, Ahmed Mehanna, said afterward. When asked if he believed the charges against his son, he said, "No, definitely not."

Prosecutors say Tarek Mehanna worked with two men from 2001 to May 2008 on the conspiracy to "kill, kidnap, maim or injure" soldiers and two politicians who were members of the executive branch but are no longer in office. Authorities refused to identify the politicians.

Mehanna -- a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, where his father is a professor -- conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, who authorities say is now in Syria, and an unnamed man, who is cooperating in the investigation, according to authorities.

The three men often discussed their desire to participate in "violent jihad against American interests" and talked about "their desire to die on the battlefield," prosecutors said. But when they were unable to join terror groups in Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan, they found inspiration in the Washington-area sniper shootings and turned their interests to domestic terror pursuits while they plotted the attack on shopping malls, authorities said.

Mehanna had "multiple conversations about obtaining automatic weapons and randomly shooting people in shopping malls," Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Loucks said. Prosecutors would not say which malls had been targeted.

Loucks said the men justified attacks because U.S. civilians pay taxes to support the U.S. government and because they are "nonbelievers."

The mall plan was abandoned after the men failed to track down automatic weapons, Loucks said.

Mehanna's attorney, J.W. Carney Jr., would not comment on the allegations. Mehanna is being held until his next court appearance on Oct. 30.

Court documents filed by the government say that in 2002 or 2003, Abousamra became frustrated after repeatedly being rejected to join terror groups in Pakistan -- first Lashkar e Tayyiba, then the Taliban.

"Because Abousamra was an Arab (not Pakistani) the LeT camp would not accept him, and because of Abousamra's lack of experience, the Taliban camp would not accept him," Williams wrote in the affidavit.

Mehanna and Abousamra traveled to Yemen in 2004 in an attempt to join a terrorist training camp.

Mehanna allegedly told a friend, the third conspirator who is now cooperating with authorities, that their trip was a failure because they were unable to reach people affiliated with the camps. The men, who had allegedly received tips on whom to meet from a person identified in court documents as "Individual A," said half the people they wanted to see were on "hajj," referring to the pilgrimage to Mecca in Islam, and half were in jail.

"They traveled all over the country looking for the people Individual A told them to meet," authorities allege in the criminal complaint.

Abousamra was rejected by a terror group when he sought training in Iraq because he was American, authorities said.

The men later decided they were not going to be able to get terror training in Pakistan and "began exploring other options, including terrorist acts in the United States," the affidavit said.

Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in November and charged with lying to the FBI in December 2006 when asked the whereabouts of Daniel Maldonado, who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for training with al-Qaida to overthrow the Somali government.

Mehanna told the FBI that Maldonado was living in Egypt and working for a Web site. But authorities said Maldonado had called Mehanna from Somalia urging him to join him in "training for jihad."

Authorities said Wednesday that Mehanna and his conspirators had contacted Maldonado about getting automatic weapons for their planned mall attacks.

Carney, who represented Mehanna in the previous case, said at the time: "If this is the FBI's idea of a terrorist, they are using a net that is designed to catch minnows instead of sharks."

After his arrest, Mehanna developed a cult following among Muslim civil rights groups and Web sites that believed Mehanna was wrongly arrested. Web sites like the London-based cageprisoners.com, a human rights group that advocates for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees as part of the U.S. war on terror, asked supporters to write Mehanna in prison to keep up his spirits.

The site MuslimMatters.org asked supporters to pray for his release and published a letter they said Mehanna wrote from prison.

In the letter, Mehanna thanked supporters and said he was being treated well.

"I can only think of the countless imprisoned Muslims in the jails of tyrants around the globe and hope that if it is not Allah's Decree to free them in the near future, that they taste the sweetness that Allah has placed them in prison to taste," Mehanna wrote.

He signed the letter, "Your brother in the green jumpsuit."

------

Associated Press writers Jay Lindsay, Bob Salsberg and Russell Contreras in Boston and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report from Boston.

The primary rationale for remaining -- and escalating -- in Afghanistan is the same all-purpose justification offered for virtually everything the U.S. has done since 2001:   Terrorism.  Apparently, the way to solve the Terrorist threat is by sending 60,000 more American troops into a Muslim country and committing to at least five more years of war there.  That, so the pro-escalation reasoning goes, will make us safer.

In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact which the administration's policies -- specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- were having on Terrorism and Islamic radicalism.   They issued a report in September, 2004 (.pdf) and it vigorously condemned the Bush/Cheney approach as entirely counter-productive, i.e., as worsening the Terrorist threat those policies purportedly sought to reduce.  It's well worth reviewing their analysis, as it has as much resonance now as it did then (h/t sysprog).

The Task Force began by noting what are the "underlying sources of threats to America's national security":  namely, the "negative attitudes" towards the U.S. in the Muslim world and "the conditions that create them" (click images to enlarge):

And what most exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism?  "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" -- through our "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan":

Let's just repeat that:  "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies."  And nothing fuels -- meaning: helps -- the Islamic radicals' case against the U.S. more than ongoing American occupation of Muslim countries:

For that reason, "a year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger [had] intensified" and the war had thus "weakened support for the war on terrorism and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide" (see. 14-15).  Similarly, as of six months into his presidency, Obama had vastly improved perceptions of the U.S. among Western Europeans but -- as Der Spiegel put it -- he "has actually made little progress in the regions where the US faces its biggest foreign policy problems," particularly the Muslim world (other than Indonesia, where Obama spent part of his childhood, and Egypt, where Obama spoke).

We can't combat Terrorism by sending our military into Muslim countries.  Doing that only exacerbates the problem, since it inevitably intensifies the anti-American sentiment that enables and fuels the terrorist threat in the first place.  All of that is so basic.  It's been empirically proven over and over during the last decade.  It's not Noam Chomsky or Al Jazeera pointing out these basic truths, but instead, a 2004 Task Force handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon to review and assess the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts, principally the wars they were waging in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Undoubtedly, there is some small faction of "Islamic radicals" principally motivated by religious fervor which will likely hate the West regardless of what it does, but -- as the 2004 Pentagon-commissioned Report found -- their most potent weapons are American policies that inflame anti-American hatred in the Muslim world, beginning with ongoing wars waged by the U.S. military in Muslim countries.  That's so self-evident it shouldn't require a report to document it, but since it seems to, here's a very credible report that does exactly that.

 

UPDATE:  The latest rationale of the pro-war liberal think tanks -- as epitomized by Peter Bergen's New Republic piece yesterday -- is that Al Qaeda and Taliban are inseparable and therefore "we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan."  Steve Hynd has an interview with Afghan-based journalist Anand Gopal, who debunks that claim in several ways, as does Leah Farrall at the All Things Counterterroism blog.  Even if Bergen's claim were true, as Matt Yglesias points out, it merely "beg[s] the question -- [Bergen] says we’re fighting the Taliban because the Taliban is working so closely with al-Qaeda, but arguably the Taliban is working closely with al-Qaeda largely because we’re fighting them."

If -- as the conventional wisdom has it (correctly) -- Osama bin Laden was eager for us to invade Iraq and get caught up in an endless occupation there, wouldn't Al Qaeda and other Islamic radicals benefit for the same reasons from our doing the same thing in Afghanistan?

 

UPDATE II:  There's also this:

The U.S. is an empire in decline, according to Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and author of The Ascent of Money.

"People have predicted the end of America in the past and been wrong," Ferguson concedes. "But let's face it: If you're trying to borrow $9 trillion to save your financial system...and already half your public debt held by foreigners, it's not really the conduct of rising empires, is it?"

Given its massive deficits and overseas military adventures, America today is similar to the Spanish Empire in the 17th century and Britain's in the 20th, he says. "Excessive debt is usually a predictor of subsequent trouble."

There's substantial dispute over Ferguson's general economic analysis but does anyone really dispute this?  From today's New York Times article on Robert Gates' trip to Japan:

Japan’s future contributions to the Afghanistan mission were to be on the agenda, but Mr. Gates said he would be making no specific request for either money or troops. Since the invasion of Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks in the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, Japan has pledged $2 billion for civilian reconstruction and security training, one of the largest contributors. About $1.8 billion has been distributed.

By comparison, however, the United States has budgeted $68 billion for its military and civilian effort in Afghanistan in the current fiscal year.

That number would obviously be much higher if we escalate.  One would think this factor would play a larger role in discussing whether we want to occupy and wage war in various countries for the next decade or so, but it seems that we believe if we just blissfully ignore that, it will cease to exist. Nero fiddles along.

 

UPDATE III:  Just as was true for the first two installments of David Rohde's account of being held hostage by the Taliban for seven months (which I wrote about here and here), his third installment, now available, bolsters all of these conclusions:

Some nights, commanders and their fighters visited the houses where we were being held. Conversations were dominated by their unwavering belief that the United States was waging a war against Islam.

It was a universe filled with contradictions. My captors assailed the West for killing civilians, but they celebrated suicide attacks orchestrated by the Taliban that killed scores of Muslim bystanders. They bitterly denounced missionaries, but they pressed me to convert to their faith. They complained about innocent Muslims being imprisoned by the United States, even as they continued to hold us captive. . . .

One morning, [Aby Tayyeb, chief of the captors] wept at news that a NATO airstrike had killed women and children in southern Afghanistan. A guard explained to me that Abu Tayyeb reviled the United States because of the civilian deaths. . . .

My captors saw me — and seemingly all Westerners — as morally corrupt and fixated on pursuing the pleasures of this world. Americans invaded Afghanistan to enrich themselves, they argued, not to help Afghans.

As is to be expected, Rohde's account contains widely divergent depictions of his captors -- some are violence-obsessed religious fanatics while others "showed glimpses of humanity" to him.  As is clear by now, the Tablian are not monolithic.  But in all of Rohde's accounts, there is one common strand:  fury towards the U.S. for invading and occupying their country, killing civilians, imprisoning people with no charges, and generally attempting to control the Muslim world.  There's simply no way to continue doing that while decreasing the threat of Terrorism.  The only thing that can result is the opposite.

So what is in South Waziristan? Groups that are targeting Pakistan itself. These include the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan [TTP] or Pakistani Taliban Movement and elements of anti-Shiite Sunni extremist groups from the Punjab, who have begun hitting Pakistani government targets. The campaign will thus have little effect on the fighting in Afghanistan, except to the extent that some militants may be displaced from Pakistan north to Afghanistan.

Dawn reports on the Pakistan military's advance into South Waziristan on the campaign's second day.

I picked out some worrisome parts of this report which are mentioned but not highlighted:

• South Waziristan's population is 600,000; the campaign has already displaced 100,000 of them.
• Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Sangin has brought in 1,500 Afghan Pashtun fighters to support the Pakistani Taliban Movement in South Waziristan.
• Azam Tariq, spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban Movement, said that militants’ supporters from Muslim seminaries in Punjab, Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province were in touch with the Taliban and were coming to the battle zone through various routes.

(In support of this last point, police teams intensively investigated seminaries or madrasahs in the capital of Islamabad and some other areas on Sunday.)

Pakistan may even have to close its schools for a week because they have been threatened by the Taliban.

In other words, this military campaign is not just a matter of troops versus guerrillas. It is becoming a rallying point for Muslim radicals, with volunteers coming in from Afghanistan and others from madrasahs from all over Pakistan -- and with Pakistan's own security hanging in the balance.

Tariq took responsibility for the recent horrific bombings in the Punjabi city of Lahore, which targeted Pakistani security forces, thus claiming that South Waziristan had a very long reach into the rest of the country.

Pakistani security forces also arrested some 300 Afghans on Sunday.

CBS reports on the Waziristan campaign: 

 

Reuters also has a video news report.

As if the fighting in Pakistan itself is not worrying enough, the USG Open Source Center translates a threat against India from TTP leader Hakimullah Mahsud:

Pakistan: TTP Chief Hakimullah Mehsud Says India Next Target After Country

Unattributed report: "We Shall Declare War Against India After Islamic States Is Established in Pakistan: Hakimullah Mehsud"

Khabrain

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Islamabad -- Hakimullah Mehsud, chief of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has threatened that the Taliban will send terrorists to fight against India after succeeding in establishing an Islamic state in Pakistan. He said in the footage shown in a British news channel Sky News : "We wish to make Pakistan an Islamic state, and we are striving for this objective. We are battling against the Pakistan Army, the police, and militia."

(Description of Source: Islamabad Khabrain in Urdu News, a sensationalist daily, published by Liberty Papers Ltd., generally critical of Pakistan People's Party; known for its access to government and military sources of information. The same group owns The Post in English, Naya Akhbar in Urdu and Channel 5 TV. Circulation of 30,000)'

The goal of American liberal internationalism, since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, has been what Wilson called "a community of power" -- a great power concert whose members collaborate to keep the peace. This is different from the conservative vision of unilateral U.S. hegemony. But whether you think the law should be enforced by a posse or a single sheriff, you want the law officers to be better armed than the law-breakers.

Superior conventional forces are the weapons of the rich. Only the most advanced industrial states can afford to build world-class conventional military forces, and paying for them is much easier if an economy is large and dynamic. This is good news. Countries with large and dynamic economies tend to have relatively rational if not necessarily democratic governments and to be committed to the geopolitical status quo. Nazi Germany, rich but irrational, committed suicide in a short period of time, and the Soviet Union eventually fell apart because its economy could not support its massive conventional and nuclear forces. Today's rapidly developing China is far more prudent and responsible than Mao's China.

Nuclear weapons, by contrast, are weapons of the weak. They can be acquired by regimes that, because of poverty or ideology, are incapable of developing the world-class economy needed to support world-class conventional forces. It is easier for North Korea to build an atomic bomb than a fleet of aircraft carriers.

We should support the total abolition of nuclear weapons, then, for practical strategic reasons. It would reinforce the military primacy of the U.S. and what Theodore Roosevelt called the "civilized" great powers. In the early years of World War I, the U.S. and Britain denounced submarine warfare by Germany, not because it was uniquely horrible (the official reason) but because it weakened the British Fleet and the ability of the U.S. to reinforce Britain in a war (the actual reason). Today the U.S. and other great powers -- including, perhaps, China, India, Russia and Brazil, acting as partners in a future great-power concert -- can deter regional aggressors and undertake necessary interventions most effectively if their near-monopoly of conventional military force is unchallenged by weapons of mass destruction.

Alas, it isn't going to happen. As long as relatively poor and weak regimes like Iran and North Korea feel endangered, they will be motivated to obtain the cheap deterrent -- nuclear weapons -- rather than the expensive deterrent -- first-rate conventional forces. That is precisely what Israel, Pakistan and India already have done. And even if every nuclear weapon on the planet were dismantled in the near future, the growing use of nuclear energy for domestic power production will ensure that many countries would be able to build new nuclear weapons in a hurry, if they felt a strategic need to do so.

So a nuke-free world -- as desirable as it would be, for strategic reasons, from an American perspective -- is probably not in the cards, as long as some weak and worried countries think that nukes enable them to deter attack by other nations on the cheap. That being the case, how alarmed should we be by the possibility that states or stateless terrorists will use nuclear weapons?

Since the 1970s, I have been reading nonproliferation experts who write solemnly that in the next decade there is a 20 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent chance that an atomic bomb will go off in a major city. Decade after decade, they tell us that a city will be incinerated within a decade, and it never happens. Should they get credit for averting the disaster by motivating countermeasures with their predictions? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they are like the Texan deer hunter I know who wears an amulet to ward off elephants in the woods. When somebody points out that there are no elephants in Texas, he replies: "See? It's working." 

A more plausible reason why atomic bombs haven't been used in war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they are pretty much useless except as deterrents. Israel's possession of nuclear weapons since the '60s didn't prevent the Arab states from attacking it in 1973 and hasn't stopped Iran and Syria from waging a proxy war against it by arming Hezbollah. America's conventional forces have more intimidating effect than our nuclear arsenal, which nobody expects us to use except in retaliation.

(If even then; it's by no means clear that we could, or should, respond to a nuclear first strike with tit-for-tat mass murder rather than morally discriminating conventional war against the attacker. A conventional superpower like the U.S. should consider unilaterally renouncing the use of mass-casualty nuclear weapons not only in first strikes but also in retaliation.) 

Genuine great power status today requires massive, expensive conventional forces. Iran would be much more alarming if instead of trying to obtain nuclear weapons it were building up a first-rate navy, a long-distance air force and an enormous army capable of occupying one or more of its neighbors. The fact that it is not doing so suggests that the nuclear weapons capability it evidently seeks is for deterrence, not offense.

What about stateless terrorists? As Michael Krepon recently pointed out, "Terrorists have had a hard time getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Although governments and enterprising freelancers have sold missiles and centrifuges, there is no reliable evidence that they have auctioned off nuclear weapons to wild men they can't control. More good news: It would be very hard for a terrorist group to build a nuclear weapon on its own without being discovered in the process. Terrorists could acquire enough nuclear material to make a dirty bomb, which would use conventional explosives to spew radioactive material, but they could actually do much more damage with automatic weapons."

Krepon's point about automatic weapons is well taken. Why should a terrorist go to the trouble of trying to smuggle a nuclear bomb into the U.S., when it is easier to spread mass panic with guns, backpack explosives, suicide bomber belts or truck bombs? I've never understood why we devote so much attention to the remote threat of loose nukes, rather than worrying about more immediate threats like loose planes, loose guns, loose grenades and loose fertilizer. At an academic conference on U.S. foreign policy a few years back, I was one of two people in a working group who voted to urge the government to stop all terrorists from entering the U.S. whether they planned to use weapons of mass destruction or conventional weapons. Shouldn't we want to stop terrorists who overstay their visas and then rent U-hauls to make truck bombs? We were voted down by the majority, who wanted the recommendation to focus only on WMD.

I think of it as the mutant factor. Weapons that conceivably could produce a ravaged landscape populated by cannibal mutant zombies -- atomic bombs, lab-created pandemics -- are far more frightening than dynamite and small arms, even though the latter are more likely to be used. The scenarios for mass casualty terrorism sometimes appear to have come out of Hollywood science fiction and thrillers. At another discussion, when I was asked what I thought of one expert's hypothetical scenario in which jihadists infiltrated cosmetic factories to poison their products, I replied, "That's exactly the sort of thing a terrorist would do ... if he were the Joker."

I don't doubt that some specialists in nonproliferation and terrorism issues would tell you that I'm too complacent. Well, they would, wouldn't they? After all, they're experts. If you listen to doctors, you need to be treated; if you listen to lawyers, you need to sue; if you listen to some antiterrorism specialists, you should never leave home, and you should keep lots of duct tape on hand to seal the windows against a mass gas attack emanating from ... from what? Giant balloons? (Tim Burton's Joker again).

I don't mean to criticize serious scholars or the officials whose job is to protect us. My point is that, in our age of publicity-driven policy advocacy, experts who inflate threats obtain grants and get on TV. For a specialist to say, "Having examined the issue carefully, my conclusion is that we should not be overly concerned" is not only career suicide but also heresy. The patron saint of this day and age is Our Lady of Perpetual Alarm.

I sleep soundly at night, even though I live a few blocks from the White House, because I've calculated the odds that I, along with various other national monuments, will be incinerated in a mushroom cloud. I've slept even more soundly ever since, as part of a routine heart stress test, I was injected with a small dose of radioactive isotopes. The doctor's office gave me an official form that I was instructed to show to any Department of Homeland Security officials who apprehended me, telling them, in effect, that, yes, I was radioactive but no, I was not a weapon of mass destruction. From this I inferred that Washington, D.C. -- and, I would hope, New York and L.A., if not Bucksnort, Tenn. -- are full of concealed sensors, ensuring that it would be difficult if not impossible to bring in radioactive substances without being detected.

This is pure inference on my part, and if agents from DHS ask, you didn't hear it from me.