A Chilling Effect on U.S. Counterterrorism – By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been carefully watching the fallout from the Obama administration’s decision to release four classified memos from former President George W. Bush’s administration that authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
In a visit to CIA headquarters last week, President Barack Obama promised not to prosecute agency personnel who carried out such interrogations, since they were following lawful orders.
Critics of the techniques, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have called for the formation of a “truth commission” to investigate the matter, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a criminal inquiry into the matter.
Realistically, those most likely to face investigation and prosecution are those who wrote the memos, rather than the low-level field personnel who acted in good faith based upon the guidance the memos provided.
Despite this fact and Obama’s reassurances, our contacts in the intelligence community report that the release of the memos has had a discernible “chilling effect” on those in the clandestine service who work on counterterrorism issues.
In some ways, the debate over the morality of such interrogation techniques — something we do not take a position on and will not be discussing here — has distracted many observers from examining the impact that the release of these memos is having on the ability of the U.S. government to fulfill its counterterrorism mission.
And this impact has little to do with the ability to use torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.
Politics and moral arguments aside, the end effect of the memos’ release is that people who have put their lives on the line in U.S. counterterrorism efforts are now uncertain of whether they should be making that sacrifice.
Many of these people are now questioning whether the administration that happens to be in power at any given time will recognize the fact that they were carrying out lawful orders under a previous administration.
It is hard to retain officers and attract quality recruits in this kind of environment. It has become safer to work in programs other than counterterrorism.
The memos’ release will not have a catastrophic effect on U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Indeed, most of the information in the memos was leaked to the press years ago and has long been public knowledge.
However, when the release of the memos is examined in a wider context, and combined with a few other dynamics, it appears that the U.S. counterterrorism community is quietly slipping back into an atmosphere of risk-aversion and malaise — an atmosphere not dissimilar to that described by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) as a contributing factor to the intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.
Cycles Within Cycles
In March we wrote about the cycle of counterterrorism funding and discussed indications that the United States is entering a period of reduced counterterrorism funding.
This decrease in funding not only will affect defensive counterterrorism initiatives like embassy security and countersurveillance programs, but also will impact offensive programs such as the number of CIA personnel dedicated to the counterterrorism role.
Beyond funding, however, there is another historical cycle of booms and busts that can be seen in the conduct of American clandestine intelligence activities. There are clearly discernible periods when clandestine activities are deemed very important and are widely employed.
These periods are inevitably followed by a time of investigations, reductions in clandestine activities and a tightening of control and oversight over such activities. After the widespread employment of clandestine activities in the Vietnam War era, the Church Committee was convened in 1975 to review (and ultimately restrict) such operations.
Former President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Bill Casey as director of the CIA ushered in a new era of growth as the United States became heavily engaged in clandestine activities in Afghanistan and Central America. Then, the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair in 1986 led to a period of hearings and controls.
There was a slight uptick in clandestine activities under the presidency of George H.W. Bush, but the fall of the Soviet Union led to another bust cycle for the intelligence community. By the mid-1990s, the number of CIA stations and bases was dramatically reduced (and virtually eliminated in much of Africa) for budgetary considerations.
Then there was the case of Jennifer Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer who used little-known provisions in Texas common law to marry a dead Guatemalan guerrilla commander and gain legal standing as his widow.
After it was uncovered that a CIA source was involved in the guerrilla commander’s execution, CIA stations in Latin America were gutted for political reasons. The Harbury case also led to the Torricelli Amendment, a law that made recruiting unsavory people, such as those with ties to death squads and terrorist groups, illegal without special approval.
This bust cycle was well documented by both the Crowe Commission, which investigated the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, and the 9/11 Commission.
After the 9/11 attacks, the pendulum swung radically to the permissive side and clandestine activity was rapidly and dramatically increased as the U.S. sought to close the intelligence gap and quickly develop intelligence on al Qaeda’s capability and plans.
Developments over the past two years clearly indicate that the United States is once again entering an intelligence bust cycle, a period that will be marked by hearings, increased controls and a general decrease in clandestine activity.
Institutional Culture
It is also very important to realize that the counterterrorism community is just one small part of the larger intelligence community that is affected by this ebb and flow of covert activity.
In fact, as noted above, the counterterrorism component of intelligence efforts has its own boom-and-bust cycle that is based on major attacks. Soon after a major attack, interest in counterterrorism spikes dramatically, but as time passes without a major attack, interest lags.
Other than during the peak times of this cycle, counterterrorism is considered an ancillary program that is sometimes seen as an interesting side tour of duty, but more widely seen as being outside the mainstream career path — risky and not particularly career-enhancing.
This assessment is reinforced by such events as the recent release of the memos. At the CIA, being a counterterrorism specialist in the clandestine service means that you will most likely spend much of your life in places line Sanaa, Islamabad and Kabul instead of Vienna, Paris or London.
This means that, in addition to hurting your chances for career advancement, your job also is quite dangerous, provides relatively poor living conditions for your family and offers the possibility of contracting serious diseases.
While being declared persona non grata and getting kicked out of a country as part of an intelligence spat is considered almost a badge of honor at the CIA, the threat of being arrested and indicted for participating in the rendition of a terrorist suspect from an allied country like Italy is not.
Equally unappealing is being sued in civil court by a terrorist suspect or facing the possibility of prosecution after a change of government in the United States.
Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of CIA case officers who are choosing to carry personal liability insurance because they do not trust the agency and the U.S. government to look out for their best interests.
Now, there are officers who are willing to endure hardship and who do not really care much about career advancement, but for those officers there is another hazard — frustration.
Aggressive officers dedicated to the counterterrorism mission quickly learn that many of the people in the food chain above them are concerned about their careers, and these superiors often take measures to rein in their less-mainstream subordinates.
Additionally, due to the restrictions brought about by laws and regulations like the Torricelli Amendment, case officers working counterterrorism are often tightly bound by myriad legal restrictions.
Unlike in television shows like “24,” it is not uncommon in the real world for a meeting called to plan a counterterrorism operation to feature more CIA lawyers than case officers or analysts.
These staff lawyers are intricately involved in the operational decisions made at headquarters, and legal issues often trump operational considerations.
The need to obtain legal approval often delays decisions long enough for a critical window of operational opportunity to be slammed shut. This restrictive legal environment goes back many years in the CIA and is not a new fixture brought in by the Obama administration.
There was a sense of urgency that served to trump the lawyers to some extent after 9/11, but the lawyers never went away and have reasserted themselves firmly over the past several years.
Of course, the CIA is not the only agency with a culture that is less than supportive of the counterterrorism mission. Although the prevention of terrorist attacks in the United States is currently the FBI’s No. 1 priority on paper, the counterterrorism mission remains the bureau’s redheaded stepchild.
The FBI is struggling to find agents willing to serve in the counterterrorism sections of field offices, resident agencies (smaller offices that report to a field office) and joint terrorism task forces.
While the CIA was very much built on the legacy of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the FBI was founded by J. Edgar Hoover, a conservative and risk-averse administrator who served as FBI director from 1935-1972. Even today, Hoover’s influence is clearly evident in the FBI’s bureaucratic nature.
FBI special agents are unable to do much at all, such as open an investigation, without a supervisor’s approval, and supervisors are reluctant to approve anything too adventurous because of the impact it might have on their chance for promotion.
Unlike many other law enforcement agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI rarely uses its own special agents in an undercover capacity to penetrate criminal organizations.
That practice is seen as being too risky; they prefer to use confidential informants rather than undercover operatives.
The FBI is also strongly tied to its roots in law enforcement and criminal investigation, and special agents who work major theft, public corruption or white-collar crime cases tend to receive more recognition — and advance more quickly — than their counterterrorism counterparts.
FBI special agents also see a considerable downside to working counterterrorism cases because of the potential for such cases to blow up in their faces if they make a mistake — such as in the New York field office’s highly publicized mishandling of the informant whom they had inserted into the group that later conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It is much safer, and far more rewarding from a career perspective, to work bank robberies or serve in the FBI’s Inspection Division.
After the 9/11 attacks — and the corresponding spike in the importance of counterterrorism operations — many of the resources of the CIA and FBI were focused on al Qaeda and terrorism, to the detriment of programs such as foreign counterintelligence.
However, the more time that has passed since 9/11 without another major attack, the more the organizational culture of the U.S government has returned to normal.
Once again, counterterrorism efforts are seen as being ancillary duties rather than the organizations’ driving mission. (The clash between organizational culture and the counterterrorism mission is by no means confined to the CIA and FBI).
Fred’s book “Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent” provides a detailed examination of some of the bureaucratic and cultural challenges we faced while serving in the Counterterrorism Investigations Division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service.)
Liaison Services
One of the least well known, and perhaps most important, sources of intelligence in the counterterrorism field is the information that is obtained as a result of close relationships with allied intelligence agencies — often referred to as information obtained through “liaison channels.”
Like FBI agents, most CIA officers are well-educated, middle-aged white guys. This means they are better suited to use the cover of an American businessmen or diplomat than to pretend to be a young Muslim trying to join al Qaeda or Hezbollah.
Like their counterparts in the FBI, CIA officers have far more success using informants than they do working undercover inside terrorist groups.
Services like the Jordanian General Intelligence Department, the Saudi Mabahith or the Yemeni National Security Agency not only can recruit sources, but also are far more successful in using young Muslim officers to penetrate terrorist groups.
In addition to their source networks and penetration operations, many of these liaison services are not at all squeamish about using extremely enhanced interrogation techniques — this is the reason many of the terrorism suspects who were the subject of rendition operations ended up in such locations.
Obviously, whenever the CIA is dealing with a liaison service, the political interests and objectives of the service must be considered — as should the possibility that the liaison service is fabricating the intelligence in question for whatever reason.
Still, in the end, the CIA historically has received a significant amount of important intelligence (perhaps even most of its intelligence) via liaison channels.
Another concern that arises from the call for a truth commission is the impact a commission investigation could have on the liaison services that have helped the United States in its counterterrorism efforts since 9/11.
Countries that hosted CIA detention facilities or were involved in the rendition or interrogation of terrorist suspects may find themselves exposed publicly or even held up for some sort of sanction by the U.S. Congress.
Such activities could have a real impact on the amount of cooperation and information the CIA receives from these intelligence services.
Conclusion
As we’ve previously noted, it was a lack of intelligence that helped fuel the fear that led the Bush administration to authorize enhanced interrogation techniques.
Ironically, the current investigation into those techniques and other practices (such as renditions) may very well lead to significant gaps in terrorism-related intelligence from both internal and liaison sources — again, not primarily because of the prohibition of torture, but because of larger implications.
When these implications are combined with the long-standing institutional aversion of U.S. government agencies toward counterterrorism, and with the difficulty of finding and retaining good people willing to serve in counterterrorism roles, the U.S. counterterrorism community may soon be facing challenges even more daunting than those posed by its already difficult mission.
This article has been republished by www.jotl.wordpress.com
Attribution for this article goes to www.stratfor.com
Weblinks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26401-2004Jun8.html
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=92143§ionid=3510203
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14299254/Torture-Memo-Interrogation-of-an-al-Qaeda-Operative
Obama’s First Hundred Days and U.S. Presidential Realities – By George Friedman
U.S. presidential candidates run for office as if they would be free to act however they wish once elected. But upon election, they govern as they must. The freedom of the campaign trail contrasts sharply with the constraints of reality.
The test of a president is how effectively he bridges the gap between what he said he would do and what he finds he must do. Great presidents achieve this seamlessly, while mediocre presidents never recover from the transition. All presidents make the shift, including Obama, who spent his first hundred days on this task.
Obama won the presidency with a much smaller margin than his supporters seem to believe. Despite his wide margin in the Electoral College, more than 47 percent of voters cast ballots against him.
Obama was acutely aware of this and focused on making certain not to create a massive split in the country from the outset of his term.
He did this in foreign policy by keeping Robert Gates on as defense secretary, bringing in Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell in key roles and essentially extrapolating from the Bush foreign policy.
So far, this has worked. Obama’s approval rating rests at 69 percent, which The Washington Post notes is average for presidents at the hundred-day mark.
Obama, of course, came into office in circumstances he did not anticipate when he began campaigning — namely, the financial and economic crisis that really began to bite in September 2008.
Obama had no problem bridging the gap between campaign and governance with regard to this matter, as his campaign neither anticipated nor proposed strategies for the crisis — it just hit.
The general pattern for dealing with the crisis was set during the Bush administration, when the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board put in place a strategy of infusing money into failing institutions to prevent what they feared would be a calamitous economic chain reaction.
Obama continued the Bush policy, though he added a stimulus package. But such a package had been discussed in the Bush administration, and it is unlikely that Sen. John McCain would have avoided creating one had he been elected.
Obviously, the particular projects funded and the particular interests favored would differ between McCain and Obama, but the essential principle would not. The financial crisis would have been handled the same way — just as everything from the Third World debt crisis to the Savings and Loan crisis would have been handled the same way no matter who was president.
Under either man, the vast net worth of the United States (we estimate it at about $350 trillion) would have been tapped by printing money and raising taxes, and U.S. assets would have been used to underwrite bad investments, increase consumption and build political coalitions through talk.
Obama had no plan for this. Instead, he expanded upon the Bush administration solution and followed tradition.
The Reality of International Affairs
The manner in which Obama was trapped by reality is most clear with regard to international affairs. At the heart of Obama’s campaign was the idea that one of the major failures of the Bush administration was alienating the European allies of the United States.
Obama argued that a more forthcoming approach to the Europeans would yield a more forthcoming response. In fact, the Europeans were no more forthcoming with Obama than they were with Bush.
Obama’s latest trip to Europe focused on two American demands and one European — primarily German — demand. Obama wanted the Germans to increase their economic stimulus plan because Germany is the largest exporter in the world.
With the United States stimulating its economy, the Germans could solve their economic problem simply by increasing exports into the United States.
This would limit job creation in the United States, particularly because German exports involve automobiles as well as other things, and Obama has struggled to build domestic demand for U.S. autos. Thus, he wanted the Germans to build domestic demand and not just rely on the United States to pull Germany out of recession.
But the Germans refused, arguing that they could not afford a major stimulus now (when in fact they have no reason to be flexible, because the U.S. stimulus is going to help them no matter what Germany does).
Germany’s and France’s unwillingness to provide substantially more support in Afghanistan gave Obama a second disappointment. Some European troops were sent, but their numbers were few and their mission was limited to a very short period.
(In some cases, the European force contribution will focus on training indigenous police officers, which will take a year or more to really have an impact.) The French and Germans essentially were as unwilling to deal with Obama as they were with Bush on this matter.
The Europeans, on the other hand, wanted a major effort by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Central European banking system, largely owned by banks from more established European countries, has reached a crisis state because of aggressive lending policies.
The Germans in particular don’t want to bail out these banks; they want the IMF to do so. Put differently, they want the United States, China and Japan to help underwrite the European banking system.
Obama did agree to contribute to this effort, but not nearly on the scale the Europeans wanted. On the whole, the Europeans gave two big nos, while the Americans gave a mild yes. In substantive terms, the U.S.-European relationship is no better than it was under Bush.
In terms of perception, however, the Obama administration managed a brilliant coup, shifting the focus to the changed atmosphere that prevailed at the meeting.
Indeed, all parties wanted to emphasize the atmospherics, and judging from media coverage, they succeeded. The trip accordingly was perceived as a triumph.
Campaign Promises and Public Perception
This is not a trivial achievement. There are campaign promises, there is reality and there is public perception. All presidents must move from campaigning to governing; extremely skilled presidents manage the shift without appearing duplicitous.
At least in the European case, Obama has managed the shift without suffering political damage. His core supporters appear prepared to support him independent of results. And that is an important foundation for effective governance.
We can see the same continuity in his treatment of Russia. When he ran for president, Obama pledged to abandon the U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) deployment in Poland amid a great show made about resetting U.S. Russia policy.
On taking office, however, he encountered the reality of the Russian position, which is that Russia wants to be the pre-eminent power in the former Soviet Union.
The Bush administration took the position that the United States must be free to maintain bilateral relations with any country, to include the ability to extend NATO membership to interested countries. Obama has reaffirmed this core U.S. position.
The United States has asked for Russian help in two areas. First, Washington asked for a second supply line into Afghanistan. Moscow agreed so long as no military equipment was shipped in.
Second, Washington offered to withdraw its BMD system from Poland in return for help from Moscow in blocking Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and missiles.
The Russians refused, understanding that the offer on BMD was not worth removing a massive thorn (i.e., Iran) from the Americans’ side.
In other words, U.S.-Russian relations are about where they were in the Bush administration, and Obama’s substantive position is not materially different from the Bush administration’s position.
The BMD deal remains in place, the United States is not depending on Russian help on logistics in Afghanistan, and Washington has not backed off on the principle of NATO expansion (even if expansion is most unlikely).
In Iraq, Obama has essentially followed the reality created under the Bush administration, shifting withdrawal dates somewhat but following the Petraeus strategy there and extending it — or trying to extend it — to Afghanistan.
The Pakistani problem, of course, presents the greatest challenge (as it would have for any president), and Obama is coping with it to the extent possible. Obama’s managing of perceptions as opposed to actually making policy changes shows up most clearly in regard to Iran.
Obama tried to open the door to Tehran by indicating that he was prepared to talk to the Iranians without preconditions — that is, without any prior commitment on the part of the Iranians regarding nuclear development.
The Iranians reacted by rejecting the opening, essentially saying Obama’s overture was merely a gesture, not a substantial shift in American policy. The Iranians are, of course, quite correct in this.
Obama fully understands that he cannot shift policy on Iran without a host of regional complications. For example, the Saudis would be enormously upset by such an opening, while the Syrians would have to re-evaluate their entire position on openings to Israel and the United States.
Changing U.S. Iranian policy is hard to do. There is a reason Washington has the policy it does, and that reason extends beyond presidents and policymakers.
When we look at Obama’s substantive foreign policy, we see continuity rather than changes. Certainly, the rhetoric has changed, and that is not insignificant; atmospherics do play a role in foreign affairs.
Nevertheless, when we look across the globe, we see the same configuration of relationships, the same partners, the same enemies and the same ambiguity that dominates most global relations.
Turkey and the Substantial U.S. Shift
One substantial shift has taken place, however, and that one is with Turkey. The Obama administration has made major overtures to Turkey in multiple forms, from a presidential visit to putting U.S. anti-piracy vessels under Turkish command.
These are not symbolic moves. The United States needs Turkey to counterbalance Iran, protect U.S. interests in the Caucasus, help stabilize Iraq, serve as a bridge to Syria and help in Afghanistan. Obama has clearly shifted strategy here in response to changing conditions in the region.
Intriguingly, the change in U.S.-Turkish relations never surfaced as even a minor issue during the U.S. presidential campaign. It emerged after the election because of changes in the configuration of the international system.
Shifts in Russian policy, the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and shifts within Turkey that allowed the country to begin its return to the international arena all came together to make this necessary, and Obama responded.
None of this is designed to denigrate Obama in the least. While many of his followers may be dismayed, and while many of his critics might be unwilling to notice, the fact is that a single concept dominated Obama’s first hundred days: continuity.
In the face of the realities of his domestic political position and the U.S. strategic position, as well as the economic crisis, Obama did what he had to do, and what he had to do very much followed from what Bush did.
It is fascinating that both Obama’s supporters and his critics think he has made far more changes than he really has.
Of course, this is only the first hundred days. Presidents look for room to maneuver after they do what they need to do in the short run. Some presidents use that room to pursue policies that weaken, and even destroy, their presidencies.
Others find ways to enhance their position. But normally, the hardest thing a president faces is finding the space to do the things he wants to do rather than what he must do. Obama came through the first hundred days following the path laid out for him.
It is only in Turkey where he made a move that he wasn’t compelled to make just now, but that had to happen at some point. It will be interesting to see how many more such moves he makes.
This article has been republished by www.jotl.wordpress.com
Attribution for this article goes to www.stratfor.com
Weblinks: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/197134.php
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/the_state_of_the_race_2.html
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html
Memorandum for John Rizzo: Bush Torture Memos reviled.
Where credit is deserved, credit can be expected to be given! Four years is a long time in politics for either civil servants or government, while throughout the tenure of the Bush Administration, all main echelons of bureaucrats must have have handled the criticism levelled at them really well.
We may all want to harangue our national governments for not being truly honest with us, or for keeping guard over certain strands of information which have ridiculously been kept secret in the first place for far too long.
But, in terms of the recent declassification and public release of particular U.S Department memos, which discuss the effectiveness of certain torture techniques on the mental health of both ex-operative Al Qaeda prisoners and US student military cadets who commence with a certain SERE military training, I believe it would difficult to presume that there was’nt any kind of authorative wariness shown by officials prior to their availability on the Web.
Some of the pages speak about the holding and interogation of an Al Qaeda Operative named Abu Zubaydah, there is a brief rundown on his psychological profile, detail on his duties as senior lieutenant to Usama Bin Ladan, his managing of a network of two terrorist training camps, one inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, between places and times which range from 1996 -1999 and 1999 – 2000.
There is word on what legally defines torture. A reponse is given by someone who writes in answer to another correspondent’s request for advice prior to conducting an interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
From a certain legalistic document called the United States Code,
a certain Section 2340A contained within this code helps to guide an interrogator’s conduct duriing interviewing a detainee.
The thrust of quite a few of these memos revolves around someone writing to ask for advice on where the use of propriety applies to how the interview is conducted.
There are pieces of information saying that an “increased pressure phase” will be entered into. Belief that use of these torture techniques would force Zubaydah to divulge what he knows was also expressed.
Weblinks:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002340—A000-.html
http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Torture.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6138465.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6112947.ece
Gurkhas stage their own fight against the UK Government.
Sharing just a little in all the pomp and pageantry of the British Crown, those of a deeply imbued Royalist persuasion in the UK have for generations commemorated dates to Commonwealths wars with a definite ethno-centric national pride.
The Gurkhas who for 200 years have fought alongside many named regiments of the British Army are presently at loggerheads with the UK Government.
A section of these soldiers called “The Brigade of Gurkhas” have over recent years been requesting the UK Government to grant them a right of residency within the United Kingdom.
The actress and New Avengers star Joanna Lumley, who’s own family association has ties with the military history of the brigade, has re-entered (with great avenging spirit) the media spotlight campaigning for the rights of Gurkha veterans.
Weblinks:
Disruption vs. Prosecution and the Manchester Plot – By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
On April 8, British authorities mounted a series of raids in Merseyside, Manchester and Lancashire that resulted in the arrest of 12 men suspected of being involved in a plot to conduct attacks over the Easter holiday weekend.
In a press conference the following day, Prime Minister Gordon Brown noted that the men arrested were allegedly involved in “a very big terrorist plot.”
British authorities have alleged that those arrested sought to conduct suicide bombing attacks against a list of soft targets that included shopping centers, a train station and a nightclub.
The searches and arrests targeting the suspects purportedly involved in the plot, which was dubbed Operation Pathway, had to be accelerated after Bob Quick, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of terrorism investigations, inadvertently allowed reporters to see a classified document pertaining to the operation as he was entering 10 Downing Street to brief Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on April 8.
An embarrassed Quick resigned April 9 over the gaffe.
In spite of the leak, the British authorities were successful in detaining all of the targeted suspects, though the authorities have reportedly not been able to recover explosive material or other bomb-making evidence they were seeking.
British authorities arrested 12 suspects, 11 of whom were Pakistani citizens. Smith told British Parliament on April 20 that all 11 of the Pakistani nationals entered the United Kingdom on student visas.
The youngest of the Pakistani suspects, who is reportedly still a teenager, was remanded to the custody of British immigration authorities to face deportation proceedings April 9.
The rest of the 11 suspects were released by British authorities April 21, though ten reportedly were placed in the custody of immigration officials.
Many of the specific details of the plot have not yet come out, and due to the sensitive nature of the intelligence sources and methods involved in these types of investigations, more details may never be fully divulged now that there will be no criminal trial.
However, when viewed in the historical and tactical context of other terror plots and attacks (in the United Kingdom and elsewhere), there are some very interesting conclusions that can be drawn from this series of events and the few facts that have been released to the public so far.
This case also highlights the tension that exists within the counterterrorism community between advocates of strategies to disrupt terrorist attacks and those who want to ensure that terror suspects can be convicted in a court of law.
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Targets
Among of the most significant things that have come to light so far regarding the thwarted plot are the alleged targets.
According to press reports, the British MI5 surveillance teams assigned to monitor the activities of the purported plotters observed some of them videotaping themselves outside of the Arndale and Trafford shopping centers in Manchester, as well as at St. Ann’s Square, which lies in the center of Manchester’s main shopping district.
Other reports suggest that the plotters had also conducted surveillance of Manchester’s Piccadilly train station, an intercity train station that is one of the busiest in the United Kingdom outside London, and Manchester’s Birdcage nightclub.
These targets are significant for several reasons. First, they are all soft targets — that is, targets with very little security.
As STRATFOR has pointed out for several years now, since counterterrorism efforts have been stepped up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and as the tactical capability of groups like al Qaeda has been degraded, jihadist operatives have had less success targeting hardened targets and have turned instead to striking soft targets.
While authorities have moved to protect high-value targets, there simply are far too many potential targets to protect them all.
Governments are stretched thin just trying to protect important government buildings, bridges, dams, nuclear power plants, airports and mass-transit systems in their jurisdiction.
The reality on the ground is that there are not nearly enough resources to protect them all, much less every potential location where people concentrate in large groups — like shopping centers and nightclubs.
This means that some targets are unprotected and are therefore, by definition, soft.
The selection of soft targets in this case indicates that the alleged Manchester plotters did not possess the operational capability to strike more strategic, high-value targets.
While attacks against soft targets can be tragic and quite bloody, they will not have the same effect as a successful attack on high-value targets such as Parliament, the London Stock Exchange or a nuclear power station.
It is also very interesting that the plotters were purportedly looking to hit soft targets in Manchester and not soft targets in London.
London, as the capital and a city that has been the center of several plots and attacks, is generally on a higher alert than the rest of the country and therefore would likely be seen as more difficult to target.
Additionally, many of the suspects lived in the Manchester area, and as we have previously discussed, grassroots operatives, who are not as well-trained as their transnational brethren, tend to “think globally and act locally,” meaning that they tend to plan their attacks in familiar places where they are comfortable operating, rather than in strange and potentially more hostile environment.
In addition to targeting locations like shopping centers and the train station, where there were expected to be large crowds over the holiday weekend, the alleged plotters also apparently looked at the Birdcage nightclub, an establishment that is famous for its “flamboyant and spectacular” shows featuring female impersonators.
This is a location the alleged plotters likely considered a symbol of Western decadence (like establishments that serve alcohol in Muslim countries).
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Flawed Tradecraft
As noted above, the alleged plotters had been under surveillance by MI5. This indicates that their operational security had been compromised, either via human or technical means.
Furthermore, the suspects did not appear to possess any surveillance detection capability — or even much situational awareness — as they went out into Manchester to conduct pre-operational surveillance of potential targets while under government surveillance themselves.
Furthermore, the suspects’ surveillance techniques appear to have been very rudimentary in that they lacked both cover for action and cover for status while conducting their surveillance operations.
This aspect of the investigation reinforces two very important points that STRATFOR has been making for some time now.
First, most militant groups do not provide very good surveillance training and as a result, poor surveillance tradecraft has long proven to be an Achilles’ heel for militants.
Second, because of this weakness, countersurveillance operations can be very effective at catching militant operatives when they are most vulnerable — during the surveillance phase of the terrorist attack cycle.
Media reports indicated that during Operation Pathway, British authorities intercepted a series of Internet exchanges between the suspects suggested a terror strike was imminent.
Furthermore, among the locations raided April 8 was the Cyber Net Cafe in Cheetham Hill, an establishment where British authorities observed the suspects using computers to communicate.
Not only is this electronic surveillance significant in that it allowed the authorities to surmise the approximate timing of the attack, but perhaps just as important, this ability to monitor the suspects’ communications will allow the authorities to identify other militants in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Indeed, in several previous cases related to the United Kingdom, such as the investigations involving the U.S. arrest of Mohammed Junaid Babar and the U.K. arrest of Younis Tsouli, authorities were able to use communications from militant suspects to identify and roll up militant cells in other countries.
Therefore, we will not be at all surprised to hear at some point in the future that British authorities were be able use the communications of the recently arrested suspects to tip off authorities in the United States, Canada, other European countries or elsewhere about the militant activities of people the suspects were in contact with.
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Links to Pakistan
And speaking of elsewhere, as noted above, 11 of the arrested suspects were Pakistani nationals who entered the U.K. on student visas.
At this point it is not exactly clear if the British believe the 11 suspects were radical militants specifically sent to the United Kingdom to conduct attacks or if they arrived without malicious intent and were then radicalized in the Petri dish of Islamist extremism that so rapidly replicates inside the British Muslim community — what we have come to refer to as Londonistan.
Many British lawmakers and media reports have made a huge issue out of the fact that 11 of the alleged plotters entered the United Kingdom on student visas, but even if the suspects were radicals who used student visas as a way to enter the United Kingdom, this is by no means a new tactic as some are reporting.
STRATFOR has long discussed the use of student visas, bogus political asylum claims and other forms of immigration fraud that have commonly been used by militants.
In fact, there have been numerous prior examples of jihadist operatives using student visas, such as the following:
- While Sept. 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi initially entered the United States on tourist visas, they were approved for M-1 student visas shortly before carrying out their attacks.
- Youssef Samir Megahed, who was arrested in possession of an improvised explosive device (IED) in August 2007 and later sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence, was a Kuwaiti engineering student who entered the United States on a student visa.
- Mohammed Aatique, a convicted member of the “Virginia Jihad Network” who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy and weapons violations, also entered the United States from Pakistan as an engineering student.
In some ways, connections between the alleged plotters and militant groups in Pakistan such as al Qaeda or the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) would be more analytically significant than if they turn out to be grassroots operatives.
The operational security, skills and terrorist tradecraft exhibited by the plotters are about what one would expect to see in a grassroots militant organization.
This level of sophistication is, however, far less than one would expect from a transnational organization. Therefore, if this was an al Qaeda operation, it shows how far the group has fallen in the past eight years.
If it was the TTP, it means that our previous estimate of their operational ability outside of Pakistan was fairly accurate.
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Lack of Evidence
To date, the British authorities have not been able to find the explosive material and IED components they were expecting to find. This might mean that the materials may still be hidden somewhere and could be used in a future attack.
It is also quite possible, and perhaps more likely, that this lack of evidence is an indication that the plot was not quite as far along as the British authorities believed.
Perhaps the references the suspects allegedly made to launching the attack on a bank holiday pertained to a holiday later in the year.
While the plot as described by the British authorities would not have been a significant, strategic threat to the United Kingdom, it could have been quite deadly and could very well have surpassed the July 7, 2005, attacks in terms of final body count.
Because of this potential destruction, it is quite possible that the British government decided to err on the side of disruption rather than on the side of prosecution.
This is something we have seen in the investigation of several other plots in recent years in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the August 2006 Heathrow plot, in which a cell of operatives was preparing to bomb a series of trans-Atlantic airline flights using liquid explosives.
It is much more difficult to obtain a conviction for a conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism than it is to obtain a conviction for an attack that was successfully conducted.
Once the attack is executed, there is no longer much room to wrangle in court over things such as intent or capability. Governments also frequently know things via intelligence they cannot prove to the standards required for a conviction in a court of law.
This was seen in the Heathrow case, where only three of the eight suspects were convicted of the main charges during that trial, which ended in September 2008.
(The other five suspects had pled guilty to lesser charges.) During that case there was reportedly some tension between the U.S. and British authorities over when to wrap up the Heathrow plotters — some of the British apparently wanted to wait a while longer to secure more damning evidence, while the Americans were reportedly more interested in ensuring that the plot was disrupted than they were in obtaining convictions.
It is likely the same dynamic was at play during the investigation of the Manchester case.
Although Quick’s disclosure did hasten the launch of Operation Pathway by a few hours, it did not significantly alter the timing of the investigation — the British authorities were preparing to execute an array of searches and arrests.
From an ethical standpoint (and, not insignificantly in this day and age, a political aspect) it is deemed better by many to disrupt a plot early and risk the terror suspects being acquitted than it is to accidentally allow them to conduct an attack while waiting to gather the evidence required for an ironclad court case.
Disruption can have an impact on the success of prosecutions, but in the eyes of a growing number of policymakers, that impact is offset by the lives it saves.
This article has been republished by www.jotl.wordpress.com
Toolbar: http://constructivereviewofsociety.ourtoolbar.com/welcome/
Attribution for this article goes to www.stratfor.com
Weblinks: http://www.france24.com/en/20090423-pakistan-urges-british-apology-over-terror-arrests
http://www.esnews.co.uk/?p=3627&mode=1
http://www.onenewspage.com/news/World/20090422/1830964/Pakistan-wants-terror-raids-apology.htm
Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure – By George Friedman
The Obama administration published a series of memoranda on torture issued under the Bush administration.
The memoranda, most of which dated from the period after 9/11, authorized measures including depriving prisoners of solid food, having them stand shackled and in uncomfortable positions, leaving them in cold cells with inadequate clothing, slapping their heads and/or abdomens, and telling them that their families might be harmed if they didn’t cooperate with their interrogators.
On the scale of human cruelty, these actions do not rise anywhere near the top.
At the same time, anyone who thinks that being placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings — all while being told that your family might be joining you — isn’t agonizing clearly lacks imagination.
The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It was terrible nonetheless.
Torture and the Intelligence Gap But torture is meant to be terrible, and we must judge the torturer in the context of his own desperation. In the wake of 9/11, anyone who wasn’t terrified was not in touch with reality. We know several people who now are quite blasé about 9/11.
Unfortunately for them, we knew them in the months after, and they were not nearly as composed then as they are now.
Sept. 11 was terrifying for one main reason: We had little idea about al Qaeda’s capabilities. It was a very reasonable assumption that other al Qaeda cells were operating in the United States and that any day might bring follow-on attacks (Especially given the group’s reputation for one-two attacks).
We still remember our first flight after 9/11, looking at our fellow passengers, planning what we would do if one of them moved. Every time a passenger visited the lavatory, one could see the tensions soar.
And while Sept. 11 was frightening enough, there were ample fears that al Qaeda had secured a “suitcase bomb” and that a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city could come at any moment.
For individuals, such an attack was simply another possibility. We remember staying at a hotel in Washington close to the White House and realizing that we were at ground zero — and imagining what the next moment might be like.
For the government, however, the problem was having scraps of intelligence indicating that al Qaeda might have a nuclear weapon, but not having any way of telling whether those scraps had any value.
The president and vice president accordingly were continually kept at different locations, and not for any frivolous reason. This lack of intelligence led directly to the most extreme fears, which in turn led to extreme measures.
Washington simply did not know very much about al Qaeda and its capabilities and intentions in the United States. A lack of knowledge forces people to think of worst-case scenarios.
In the absence of intelligence to the contrary after 9/11, the only reasonable assumption was that al Qaeda was planning more — and perhaps worse — attacks. Collecting intelligence rapidly became the highest national priority.
Given the genuine and reasonable fears, no action in pursuit of intelligence was out of the question, so long as it promised quick answers. This led to the authorization of torture, among other things.
Torture offered a rapid means to accumulate intelligence, or at least — given the time lag on other means — it was something that had to be tried. Torture and the Moral Question And this raises the moral question.
The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens).
But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”
This indicates that world opinion matters. At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.
While this all makes for an interesting seminar in political philosophy, presidents — and others who have taken the same oath — do not have the luxury of the contemplative life.
They must act on their oaths, and inaction is an action. Former U.S. President George W. Bush knew that he did not know the threat, and that in order to carry out his oath, he needed very rapidly to find out the threat.
He could not know that torture would work, but he clearly did not feel that he had the right to avoid it. Consider this example. Assume you knew that a certain individual knew the location of a nuclear device planted in an American city.
The device would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but he individual refused to divulge the information. Would anyone who had sworn the oath have the right not to torture the individual?
Torture might or might not work, but either way, would it be moral to protect the individual’s rights while allowing hundreds of thousands to die?
It would seem that in this case, torture is a moral imperative; the rights of the one with the information cannot transcend the life of a city.
Torture in the Real World But here is the problem: You would not find yourself in this situation.
Knowing a bomb had been planted, knowing who knew that the bomb had been planted, and needing only to apply torture to extract this information is not how the real world works.
Post-9/11, the United States knew much less about the extent of the threat from al Qaeda. This hypothetical sort of torture was not the issue. Discrete information was not needed, but situational awareness.
The United States did not know what it needed to know, it did not know who was of value and who wasn’t, and it did not know how much time it had.
Torture thus was not a precise solution to a specific problem: It became an intelligence-gathering technique. The nature of the problem the United States faced forced it into indiscriminate intelligence gathering.
When you don’t know what you need to know, you cast a wide net. And when torture is included in the mix, it is cast wide as well.
In such a case, you know you will be following many false leads — and when you carry torture with you, you will be torturing people with little to tell you.
Moreover, torture applied by anyone other than well-trained, experienced personnel (who are in exceptionally short supply) will only compound these problems, and make the practice less productive.
Defenders of torture frequently seem to believe that the person in custody is known to have valuable information, and that this information must be forced out of him.
His possession of the information is proof of his guilt. The problem is that unless you have excellent intelligence to begin with, you will become engaged in developing baseline intelligence, and the person you are torturing may well know nothing at all.
Torture thus becomes not only a waste of time and a violation of decency, it actually undermines good intelligence.
After a while, scooping up suspects in a dragnet and trying to extract intelligence becomes a substitute for competent intelligence techniques — and can potentially blind the intelligence service.
This is especially true as people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make torture stop. Critics of torture, on the other hand, seem to assume the torture was brutality for the sake of brutality instead of a desperate attempt to get some clarity on what might well have been a catastrophic outcome.
The critics also cannot know the extent to which the use of torture actually prevented follow-on attacks. They assume that to the extent that torture was useful, it was not essential; that there were other ways to find out what was needed.
In the long run, they might have been correct. But neither they, nor anyone else, had the right to assume in late 2001 that there was a long run. One of the things that wasn’t known was how much time there was.
The U.S. Intelligence Failure The endless argument over torture, the posturing of both critics and defenders, misses the crucial point.
The United States turned to torture because it has experienced a massive intelligence failure reaching back a decade.
The U.S. intelligence community simply failed to gather sufficient information on al Qaeda’s intentions, capability, organization and personnel.
The use of torture was not part of a competent intelligence effort, but a response to a massive intelligence failure. That failure was rooted in a range of miscalculations over time.
There was the public belief that the end of the Cold War meant the United States didn’t need a major intelligence effort, a point made by the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan.
There were the intelligence people who regarded Afghanistan as old news. There was the Torricelli amendment that made recruiting people with ties to terrorist groups illegal without special approval.
There were the Middle East experts who could not understand that al Qaeda was fundamentally different from anything seen before.
The list of the guilty is endless, and ultimately includes the American people, who always seem to believe that the view of the world as a dangerous place is something made up by contractors and bureaucrats.
Bush was handed an impossible situation on Sept. 11, after just nine months in office. The country demanded protection, and given the intelligence shambles he inherited, he reacted about as well or badly as anyone else might have in the situation.
He used the tools he had, and hoped they were good enough. The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations.
The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator’s tool kit.
At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda.
The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process.
Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn’t. If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool.
But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war.
That’s not when you use torture. That’s when you simply point out to the prisoner that, “for you the war is over.” You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him.
That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.
U.S. President Barack Obama has handled this issue in the style to which we have become accustomed, and which is as practical a solution as possible.
He has published the memos authorizing torture to make this entirely a Bush administration problem while refusing to prosecute anyone associated with torture, keeping the issue from becoming overly divisive.
Good politics perhaps, but not something that deals with the fundamental question. The fundamental question remains unanswered, and may remain unanswered.
When a president takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” what are the limits on his obligation? We take the oath for granted.
But it should be considered carefully by anyone entering this debate, particularly for presidents.
This article has been republished by www.jotl.wordpress.com
Attribution for this article goes to www.stratfor.com
Somali Pirate attacks top the news agenda.
Prior to the ambush at sea of the Maersk Alabama and the later operation by US Navy Seals to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips, the incidence of Somalian piracy in and around the Gulf of Aidan had’nt received the kind of ubiquitous coverage about the whole issue, it is now deservedly getting.
One of the most renowned places where pirates are said to originate from is a coastal town called Eyl, within the state of Puntland on the Hafun peninsula, Somalia.
The certain brand of chaos of which some Somalis have definitely sparked off and gained from is steadily causing many of the world’s big and international shipping companies serious agitation.
With the power to demand and successfully extort phenomenal sums from chief cargo vessels by disrupting their paths of transit, a minority of participants involved in this lucrative business of hijacking have understood that there are huge dividends from this trade.
Ransom money from these exploits have also been filtered through to such US terror-listed groups as Al-Shabaab (a Somali Islamist network) Shipping has had to divert away from the Gulf of Aden/Suez Canal, making alteratives moves to traverse around the Cape of Good Hope.
The international community on the other hand still monitors the situation with caution.
Weblinks:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=29473&Cr=somali&Cr1
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/somalia/2009/0201response.htm
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/548378/-/13qjlmpz/-/index.html
http://ue.eu.int/uedocs/cmsUpload/090325FactsheetEUNAVFOR%20Somalia-version4_EN.pdf
Terror threat is adminstrative headache for UK universities.
Spending just a few minutes in front of the camera lens, sensitive security information riskily appeared on view as an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service stepped out of a car at No. 10 Downing Street, London.
A counter-terrorist raid which took place at John Moores University, Liverpool, related in some way to what these briefly exposed documents contained.
The suspects arrested and detained were all of Pakistani origin. Therefore internally, the procedures connected to the issuing of university student visas and due scrutiny given to their proper allocation has made dramatic headline news in the past week.
For Further Information on this topic see:
Tehrik-i-Taliban: A Specious Claim and Brash Threats – By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart.
When we wrote our Global Security and Intelligence Report last week on Baitullah Mehsud and the Manawan attack, we had no intention that the piece would be part of a series, but several developments over the past week have compelled us to once again write about Pakistan — and Mehsud and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in particular.
First, on April 4, eight paramilitary police were killed in a suicide bombing against their camp in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. This attack was the second suicide bombing in Islamabad in less than two weeks, and followed closely on the heels of the March 23 attack on the headquarters of the Police Special Branch in Islamabad.
After the April 4 attack, one of Baitullah Mehsud’s deputies, Hakimullah Mehsud (who, like Baitullah, is a member of the large Mehsud clan) contacted the press to claim credit for the attack and threatened that the group would carry out two suicide attacks per week in Pakistan.
According to press reports, Hakimullah Mehsud said: “We have shown enough restraint, previously, we were striking once in three months, but from now onward we will go for at least two suicide attacks a week.”
On April 5, a suicide bomber attacked a Shiite mosque in Chakwal, a Punjab city located approximately 50 miles southeast of Islamabad. The attack killed at least 22 people and injured another 35. About 2,000 people had gathered at the mosque for Majlis Aza, an annual Shiite celebration.
The bomber reportedly detonated himself when guards stopped him in the crowd at the mosque’s front gate.
Umar Farooq, the spokesman of the shadowy militant organization Fedayeen al-Islam (FI), called The Associated Press the same day to claim credit for the Chakwal attack.
Farooq said his group staged the attack on the mosque as part of a “campaign against infidels.”
Oddly, on April 4, Baitullah Mehsud (or someone claiming to be him) called Reuters to claim responsibility for the April 3 shooting at a U.S. immigration center in Binghamton, New York. “They were my men,” the caller told the AP. “I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks.”
This claim was quickly discounted by eyewitness accounts of the shooting. According to surviving victims and other witnesses, the Binghamton shooting was carried out by a lone gunman, Jiverly Voong, who was a Vietnamese immigrant with no apparent links to Islam or the Taliban.
Background on Mehsud
Before plunging into the Binghamton claims and threats to attack the continental United States, let’s take a quick look at the man behind them, Baitullah Mehsud.
As STRATFOR has previously discussed, Mehsud, who is only in his mid-30s, is a member of a new generation of militant leaders in Pakistan’s tribal badlands.
As part of this new generation, Mehsud has endeavored to systematically remove or undermine the established tribal leaders in South Waziristan, usurping power and thus severing many of the tools of influence the Pakistani government held in the region.
This process of killing off the old tribal leadership has been a significant contributing factor to what we have previously referred to as the “Talibanization” of Pakistan.
In some ways, Mehsud personifies the struggle between al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence organizations for influence and control of Afghan and Pakistani jihadists.
Since Mehsud operates largely outside of its control, the government of Pakistan has come to view Mehsud (and others like him) as a larger threat to Pakistan than the Afghan Taliban or the foreign jihadists — like al Qaeda — that Mehsud considers allies.
Indeed, Pakistan has long tried to play up the importance of Mehsud to the United States and has been quite agitated that, until relatively recently, the United States was not targeting Mehsud’s TTP organization.
When the United States finally did turn its sights on Meshud and his network, the TTP responded by launching attacks against the Pakistani authorities.
Indeed, Hakimullah Mehsud said the group was stepping up the tempo of their attacks precisely because of the U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks directed against the TTP.
As we noted last week, although Baitullah Mehsud tells journalists that he is ready to be martyred, the UAV attacks against the TTP do pose a very real threat to him, and to the viability of his organization. The scope of this threat is made evident by their response to the attacks.
However, there is also another dynamic that threatens the TTP, and that is the efforts of the Pakistanis and the Americans to try to split the nationalist militants from those who are more internationally focused.
That is, split those groups who want to carry out jihad to create a transnational caliphate (like al Qaeda) from those groups whose primary interest is establishing more localized control — like the Taliban in Afghanistan prior to the U.S. invasion.
This approach is very similar to the approach coalition forces took in Iraq to separate al Qaeda in Iraq from the more nationalistic Sunni tribal militants in places like Anbar province.
While the United States is attempting to divide the jihadists on the Afghan side of the border, the Pakistanis are attempting to do the same among those in Pakistan.
If the Pakistanis and Americans are able to split the more nationalist jihadists (like the Haqqani network) away from the more internationalist jihadists (like al Qaeda and the TTP) this could leave al Qaeda and the TTP isolated and far more vulnerable — which is why this process is seen as a threat by Mehsud and company. Indeed, divisions already exist with groups like the Haqqani network, which opposes attacks inside Pakistan.
Claims and Threats
Into this mix, Mehsud has injected threats to hit the United States and has made the strange claim of credit for the Binghamton shooting.
Let’s examine the Binghamton claim first. We were quite surprised — and a bit embarrassed — to see this claim come out only a couple of days after we wrote in our security weekly that a prominent militant leader like Mehsud did not have to take credit for other people’s attacks, and that lying about such things would hurt his already well-established reputation.
Initially, we thought that perhaps the claim was some sort of psychological operation by the Pakistanis or Americans designed to make Mehsud look like a fool or a nut. However, when days passed and the TTP issued no retraction, it became apparent that Mehsud had actually made the claim for some reason.
Also, despite his carefully crafted public image of never displaying his face, Mehsud is a media animal, who, as his frequent calls to Reuters, The Associated Press and Pakistani journalists testify, loves to see his name in print.
With all the coverage surrounding the Binghamton claim, he undoubtedly was aware of the event. Had the claim been orchestrated by an intelligence agency seeking to discredit him, he would have quickly denied it — just as he quickly denied the claims that he was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
As to the threat to attack the United States, one must use a two-step test: 1) Does the actor behind the threat possess the capability to carry out the threatened action? and 2) Does the actor possess the intent to do so?
When we look at the capabilities of the TTP, the group has not demonstrated the ability to operate as a transnational organization. We have seen instances of grassroots-type jihadists elsewhere who were allegedly trained at TTP camps, but providing paramilitary training to grassroots jihadists is different from actually training and dispatching operatives to conduct attacks on your behalf.
The technical skills and tradecraft required to conduct an act of terrorism are very different from those needed to be an insurgent, and are very different from the subjects taught in basic military — or paramilitary — training.
Even if the grassroots operatives are trained in some of the more technical skills of terrorism such as bomb-making, there are still important tradecraft skills that must be acquired and honed before a person can become a successful transnational militant capable of conducting acts of terrorism in a hostile environment. We define terrorist tradecraft as the set of subtle skills needed to maintain secrecy and operate within a hostile environment. These skills are foundational to the success of both the individual jihadist and his network anywhere, but they are acutely critical while conducting transnational operations.
Merely being able to travel internationally with ease is something many guerrilla fighters cannot do. More refined tasks, such as conducting preoperational surveillance in a major metropolitan area, maintaining secure communications, establishing cover for status and cover for action while undertaking operational activity, or acquiring weapons without arousing unwanted attention, are simply things not taught to most guerrilla fighters, and they are skills that require a great deal of practical training in order to master.
So far, the TTP has shown an ability to successfully operate inside Pakistan and Afghanistan, but its operations to date have been somewhat rudimentary (like the Marawan attack) and have not shown an advanced degree of nuance or sophistication.
Likewise, the group has not demonstrated the ability to train and dispatch operatives to a major western city like New York or London in order to conduct an attack. (Al Qaeda has demonstrated this ability but the TTP has not.)
When all is said and done, employing an improvised explosive device manufactured at a camp in Pakistan against a target in Pakistan is a far cry from employing it against a target in London. Now, with regard to the second step of the test — intent. Is the TTP really planning to strike Washington, D.C., New York and London?
This is a question that almost every major intelligence and law enforcement agency in the West began to focus on following Mehsud’s public statements in a January 2008 interview with Al Jazeera that he wanted to attack the United States and the United Kingdom.
“We pray to God to give us the ability to destroy the White House, New York and London,” Mehsud said during the interview. “And we have trust in God. Very soon, we will be witnessing jihad’s miracles.”
But does such a public statement — or even his March 31 statement in which he threatened strikes against Washington, D.C. in response to U.S. UAV attacks — really translate into intent? This is where the intent side of the equation gets very fuzzy.
Merely stating that one is going to do something is not necessarily a clear indication that there is real intent to do so.
Indeed, there is a good argument to be made that if Mehsud truly intended to strike the United States or United Kingdom he would remain silent about his aspirations in order to help ensure the operational security of any operatives he has dispatched abroad to conduct such strikes.
Certainly, Osama bin Laden did openly declare war against the United States in August 1996 and again in February 1998, but he never mentioned specific targets in those declarations and was certainly far more circumspect with his statements as his operatives got closer to actually executing attacks.
In fact, bin Laden even went so far as to deny responsibility for many of the early al Qaeda attacks and initially denied responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
Calculations
Mehsud is neither stupid nor crazy. Such people do not become major militant leaders at age 35 in the violent world of Pakistan’s tribal areas. He is clearly rational and quite Machiavellian. What he is doing, therefore, likely has some rational explanation beyond the fact that he likes to hear his name mentioned by the media.
While the threats against the United States and United Kingdom may be explained away under the “media debutante” rationale, unless Mehsud made a terrible miscalculation in taking credit for the Binghamton shooting, there must be some other overriding reason to risk damaging his reputation as a militant leader with a specious claim.
As seen by the U.S. reaction to the 9/11 attacks, any successful large-scale attack on American soil could have dire consequences for Mehsud. Such a strike could, at the very least, serve to steel U.S. resolve to stay in Afghanistan, or it could motivate the United States to dramatically increase its focus on totally destroying the TTP.
Additionally, if Mehsud is truly intent on hitting the United States or United Kingdom, we should see him begin to hit American and British targets within his current operational sphere, i.e., within Pakistan, before graduating to American and British targets overseas.
There is another possibility. Perhaps Mehsud does not possess the intent to attack Washington, New York or London. Maybe his threats — along with the Binghamton claim — are intended to scuttle the emerging U.S. strategy of dealing with factions of the Taliban in an effort to divide them and isolate the more radical elements.
If Mehsud does fear such a strategy — and he has reason to, following its successes in Iraq — it is possible that his recent antics are an effort to influence public perception inside the United States regarding the Taliban.
As the United States reaches out to factions of the Afghan Taliban in an attempt to split them from al Qaeda, et al., Mehsud threatens the United States and attempts to link the Pakistani Taliban to a shooting in Binghamton, New York.
Even though the link to the shooting was quickly and officially discounted, it is a safe bet that it will live on for a long time as an urban legend or rumor, especially among the more conspiracy-minded.
Such perceptions are going to make the strategy of negotiating with any Taliban (Afghan or Pakistani) appear to be less tenable for many Americans.
At the same time, Mehsud could be using his rhetoric in an attempt to steer the more nationalist jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan toward his more transnational agenda. In any case, Mehsud’s efforts to shape opinion at home or abroad could explain his recent posturing, however bogus or brash it might be.
This article has been republished by www.jotl.wordpress.com
Attribution for this article goes to www,stratfor.com
Nuclear being Unclear to all who want peace: The North Korean Missile Crisis.
Plenty of countries take their chances when expressing nationalist sentiment. Indeed, a tolerance so exercised by the international community expects for all foreign governments to use both their human and natural resources wisely.
North Korea’s latest manufacture and testing of a Taepodong 2 missile (TD-2) has caused this state of play to change a little, since North Korea’s political honesty with seemingly important official nuclear monitoring organizations is all too frequently brought into question.
The TaepoDong Program
With the appetite for pushing forward with engineering ballistic missiles, North Korea’s attempts to produce these weapons date back to the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Two initiated programs for the development of this arsenel came into being in the early in the 1990’s, these include a Taepodong 1 and 2 grade of system.
Speculation about when any known prototypes were made gauge the time being around 1995 or 1996. Initial production runs for the Taepodong 1 have been estimated to have ran in 1997 or 1998. Prototypes of Taepodong 2 are thought to been produce by the end of 1999.
There was no real awareness of of either one of these design programs until the 31 of August 1998, when a Taepodoung 1 launch was commenced with. The venue for this launch was the Musudan-ri Launch Facility in North Hamgyong Province, northeast coast of North Korea.
The design specifications and objectives for these weapons equip them with the capability of reaching to a range of 1,500 to 2,500 km. As for what these are capable of delivering, the Taepodong 1 has a 1,000 to 1,500 kg warhead and the Taepodong 2, carrying the same type of warhead, is capable of travelling to a 4,000 to 8,000 km range.
North Korea’s Military Spending.
Aptly named the ”Hermit Kingdom”, North Korea spends approximately 40% of its Gross Demestic Product (GDP) on the miltary. In fact, North Korea’s investments are purposely directed towards ensuring advancement in their nuclear, biological, chemical and missile programs.
Part of the reason for this, is that the government want to secure an ”asymmetrical” advantage over the US and South Korean forces.
The country’s willingness to allocate these kinds of proportions of its GDP to missile production and weapons of mass destruction might just justify further suspicions; to which the US Government might have over how feasible it is that other known rogue states would be in close dialogue with North Korea.
Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Syria, Yeman and Libya have provided assistance on ballistic missile development and possibly on a whole lot more besides.
Weblinks:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6872166785475076272
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VzDqbMUlrU
http://nuclearthreatinitiative.org/e_research/profiles/NK/Missile/chronology_1995.html
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