CNN has a story on how Bush's undermanned attack on Afghanistan let Osama/Usama/Esama/Isama slip through the net at Tora Bora. Body count, except the body that counted.
Conservative News Network video - and text sidebar on how the US is short on spies. [Hat tip to Roy Temple] No we aren't, short of spies or soldiers they are just all busy spying on Americans, occupying Iraqies, and using torture.
Where the GWOT really is below the fold.
A Hierarchy of Whores
The Department of Defense calls it the "Global War on Terrorism", and on their reflections page lists this quote from TE Lawrence:
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
- T. E. Lawrence from "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"
It is more important than the Kitchener quote that Rummie riffed upon, because it shows the problem of the US approach to the GWOT. We dream at night of a world free of fear, but dream during the day of a world free of freedom.
Consider the GWOT war room:
How does it work? The concept is simple--like a war room you see in old films: Analysts from every agency in the U.S. Intelligence Community receive a steady stream of threat information developed by their agency agents and sources--and they continuously fit those pieces into the ongoing picture...question them...validate them...analyze their implications...demand fresh information from the appropriate agency wherever they see gaps...and produce sequential "fused" snapshots of threats that can be--and are--converted into alerts and actions.
They send daily reports to the President and senior policymakers and share them across agencies responsible for the protection of the country. They make terrorist threat information and finished analyses available 24/7 at TTIC Online to some 2,600 specialists
First, we know what sending a bulletin to Bush does: nothing. When it comes to listening to intelligence, of any kind other than the political polls, the Cabinet is a group of highly motivated snails. Second, the creation of intelligence product has demonstrably been compromised, this is what Afterdowningstreet shows, what Daschle's comments on the information that Bush gave, and didn't on spygate shows, and what the constant flow of rosy scenario Iraq reconstruction reports show. Computer people have a phrase "GIGO" for "Garbage In, Garbage Out", but there is also the "filter effect", where a program or mathematical operation yields the same result no matter what is put in.
With a lumpenexecutive at the top, and a corruption of the synthesis process, all the high sounding organizational ideas are not worth anything. Further more, if there were a serious drive to integrate information, then people such as Crowley - who wrote one of the two "gun shot residue" memos on the possibility of terrorists learning how to fly planes - would be promoted, not exiled, and the people who have overseen the failure to find the Anthrax attacker or forsee 9/11 would not have been promoted to the top of the counter-terrorism chain. An agency run by screw ups, is going to screw up. An agency managed by kiss ups, is going to spend its time managing up, not down.
The corruption of politics can be seen in this list. The second worst terrorist attack on US soil was carried out by a Christianist militia member, there have been repeated bombings - including the Olympic bombing, by members of this dominionist movement. There is not one mention of them on the list of "other organization". We know why they aren't there, it is politically inconvenient. The FBI spends time looking for people who blow up SUVs, because that is where the ruling party's base is. This is one, of many, examples where it is clear we are ruled over by people who are Republicans first, and Americans second - and the brass kissing careerists are willing to go along, putting American and allied lives in danger for political gain.
The situation in Afghanistan from this update shows the problem with the current efforts:
Pentagon officials announced on Nov. 2 that a top al-Qaida operative, Omar al-Faruq, escaped from a U.S. military jail in Afghanistan earlier this year. This is the first time Pentagon officials revealed the identity of any of the al-Qaida terrorists whose escape was reported in July. Faruq is believed to be the person who created the al-Qaida network in Southeast Asia in 1998.
Taliban guerillas beheaded two translators working for U.S. forces on Nov. 8 in Uruzgan province. The Taliban kidnapped and killed the men on the same day.
Coalition forces disarmed an improvised explosive device (IED) discovered near the city of Jalalabad on Nov. 9.
On Nov. 9, U.S. and Afghan forces killed four insurgents that had earlier attacked police in Helmand province. The troops also seized two motorbikes and two grenade launchers.
An Afghan Army officer fired his weapon at two U.S. soldiers slightly wounding both of them on Nov. 9 at a joint base in eastern Paktia province. Other American troops shot the Afghan soldier dead. It is unclear why he opened fire but the Americans are convinced that his intent was to kill.
An IED explosion killed one U.S. soldier, wounded another as well as two Afghan security officials on Nov. 15 in Paktika province, near the Pakistan border. The device exploded under the soldiers' armored vehicle while they conducted offensive operations against the militants.
The Kunar provincial governor announced that on Nov. 15 coalition forces killed three al-Qaida suspects and arrested two others near the border with Pakistan.
Taliban spokesman Qari Mohmmad Yousuf announced that the organization had carried out a suicide car bomb attack on a U.S. military convoy on Nov. 19 in Helmand province. The local police chief said that American forces cordoned off the blast site, refusing to let local authorities see the damage. The U.S. military say no troops died in the attack.
An IED exploded under a U.S. armored car on Nov. 22 in Tarin Kowt. The explosion killed a U.S. soldier and an Afghan interpreter who were on a supply convoy that supported operations aimed at the Taliban.
Wars are lost, in the passive voice. Note the complete lack of initiative, of active voice. To win a war means to do unto others, before they do unto you. This is both in the positive and negative sense: give to civilians, before they turn against you, rebuild their cities before they turn to destruction. Kill those whose hearts are hardened. Instead, what do we read? That American soldiers are ducks in a shooting gallery. Such passivity cannnot be disguised by high sounding declarations. Believe, instead, in the facts on, and in, the ground.
There is also a warped and inaccurate view of the history of terrorism:
Active from the seventh until the mid-19th centuries, the Thugees are reputed to be responsible for as many as 1 million murders. They were perhaps the last example of religiously-inspired terrorism until the phenomenon reemerged a little over 20 years ago. As David Rapport puts it: "Before the 19th century, religion provided the only acceptable justifications for terror."[vii] More secularized motivations for such actions did not emerge until the French Revolution, as did the first usage of the term now used to describe them.
This is flatly incorrect. Massacres of civilians or political opponents, summary executions and "unfortunate accidents" as a way of enforcing terror in a populace go back before recorded history. The use of terror to enforce political control has copious examples in the middle ages, including Vlad Tempes - Vlad the Impaler, who would leave bodies on stakes to rot as a warning to those who opposed him. The story of the Romans sowing the fields of Carthage with salt - which may not have happened - is another example of secular motivation for terrorism. But governments massacring civilians, even conquered ones, does not fit into the paradigm that is being preached here. Instead the subtext of this very inaccurate history is that modernist ideologies of the left are responsible for secular terrorism, and avoiding the other kind of terrorism - that of states practiced against their populations in the form of repression.
Another form of terrorism was practiced in the slave trade - where populations defeated in war were sold as slaves, and the reality of enslavement was part of the consciousness of people attacked - the defenders of Masada killed butchered themselves rather than being sent as slaves to Rome. The Romans did this to all of their conquered peoples, not merely out of religious animosity.
The article misses the relationship between religion and state power - with one supporting the other. Again, it is inconvenient to make a distinction between religion as support of the state, and religions which we do not like. Partially because any such paradigm will point back to Saudi Arabia, where religion, and state terrorism, are used in precisely such ways.
But this is not merely a bad history on some musty bookshelf, the box around the mentalities of the people fighting the global war on terrorism is the box being built around the bodies of the young men and women being shipped home as cargo from Iraq.
Thus, there is not only an ineffective executive, but an entire subculture whose functional effectiveness is degraded by the realization that they work for a political, and not national, security apparatus. There is a willing participation in the construction of an inaccurate paradigm, the construction of institutions designed to perpetuate and disseminate that inaccurate paradigm, the execution of plans based around that inaccurate paradigm, and the acceptance of the deaths of hundreds of Americans and thousands of civilians because of the willfully inaccurate and criminally negligent handling of the global war on terrorism. The trend line is not upwards for ourside, but flat. And that means that the next spectacular terrorist attack on our soil is a matter of when, not if.
The corruption of executive institution, the willing prostitution of the executive branch of government, and the politicization of hierarchy and research are the root causes for our failure to decapitate Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Towards a New Paradigm of Terrorism
A simple definition of terrorism is this:
The use of disproportionate extralegal violence against civilians or hors de combat military to create a pervasive and paralyzing fear in the survivors.
Terrorism has two modes: that of assymetrical warfare - where one side chooses not to oppose the military of the other side directly, but instead attacks civilians or prisoners. The other is a mode of political control, where privileged - economically or politically is immaterial - actors act in arbitrary and capricious ways, often through proxies, to prevent the formation of political counter-consensus. This second form of terrorism is far more common and pervasive. Its actions account for the bulk of deaths by terrorization. The use of terror and terrorization is an intergral part of warfare and even governance, in that some agentes will only be deterred by the possibility of disproportionate force. However, it only becomes terrorism, when there is the attempt to terrorize the mean, not the extreme, of the body politic. It also is terrorism when there is the discontinuity with the rule of law. The difference between repression and terrorism, is that terrorism strikes without legal justification or accountability. Crystalnacht was terrorism, Dachau was something far worse.
This paradigm makes it clear that the flip side of non-state terrorism, and revolutionary or anarchist terrorism, is state or hierarchical terrorism. The two are co-dependent upon each other.
In this view, the United States has often been a participant in terrorist actions, such as the Trail of Tears, massacres of native American civilians and so on. However, there are few regimes of any duration that have not been, even if the present population abhors terrorism. The dutch were privateers once. The important question is not examples from the past, particularly the distant past, but participation in terrorism present.
By this idea, there are states whose existence relies on pervasive repression - but not all repressive states use terrorism as a consistent tool. Soviet Russia seldom used terrorism, but instead built terror into the mechanisms of state. China, likewise, does not use terrorism against Han, though it has against minority populations on occcasion. The extra legal element is essential to the difference, in that there is an admission by the party backing terrorism that its actions cannot be rationalized with a consistent and stable way of life, but must step outside of it. Legal actors often behave permissively to terrorism - as law enforcement officials often looked the other way towards the Klan - but that is not the same thing as legal standing.
In this paradigm the root of terrorism is, then, not economic circumstances, but the lack of what can be called "the power of banality". Terrorism, by the admission of the user of it, is outside of normal discourse, outside of everyday intercourse, and extreme - and used in order to prevent that discourse from embracing means, ends, ideas or structures that the terrorist abhors, or to destabilize existing means, ends, ideas or structures that the terrorist opposes.
Thus the "War on Terrorism" must begin from the question of disfunctionality. Terrorism comes when that which is going on, can't. Thus it has three, coequal and reinforcing parts.
- The Social: an attack on unsustainable political and economic structures.
- The Military: the isolation of those who do not function within stable and sustainable structures.
- The Political: the removal of individuals who use extralegal means to enforce a particular legal shape.
The current War on Terror, far from pursuing these three legs of a stable triad against terrorism, has failed on almost all counts. It has been very good at killing foot soldiers, who can be replaced by "non skilled labor that enjoys their work", but very poor at isolating and destroying those individuals who pervasively see the world through the eyes of the extra-legal. That is, those who dream during the day of a world where others are stripped of their consent through terror. In fact, by creating two failed states, we have created the conditions for a renewal of terrorism as soon as active suppression is ended. And consistently the casualty ratios do not support any contention that the US is making progress against terrorism in Iraq.
This is not to take, or advocate in any way, a "soft" stance against terrorism. On the contrary, numerous terrorist organizations can only be exposed to soft power after they have been beaten militarily. However, it is to deny that mere "hard" solutions work. Bombs, by definition, rupture daily life. Unless daily life is rebuilt after the bombing, all bombing does is sow the soil with the next generation of terrorists, and fertilize discourse with the excuses and rationalizations for it.
But it does point out that one of the most important tools for ending terrorism is ending intransperant mechanisms of government and finance. It points out that the creation of functioning states and functioning economies that have a basic sustainability is the root of defeating terrorism. The terrorist is the acute sign of a chronic illness. One that is like an infection in the heart, that flows out to the body, erupting in distant apendages or organs.
This paradigm is grounded in the historical reality that terrorism rests on the extra-ordinary and extra-legal actions that buttress it. It is an attempt to act outside the box, in order to change the shape of the box itself without others being able to respond.
It is also clear that basic managerial incompetence is rife in the present executive - any one in business knows that one of the signs of a failing executive team is to engage in all encompassing data mining as a substitute for making good decisions. When information is no longer acted upon, there is the search for ever more, in hopes of finding the one clear nugget, rather than in being able to synthesize and analyze. Spygate is not merely illegal, it rests on a fundamentally failed idea of how to stop terrorism.
The other part of this paradigm is to note that the US cannot restructure its actions to not upset "the terrorists". Whatever actions the US has undertaken, what ever injustices we have committed, these are not the source of terrorism. Repression does not breed terrorism, unsustainability does. Establish a regime by legal means without repression that does not work, and you will get terrorism more surely than massacring civilians. Going into Iraq did not cause 7/7 or M11 - it merely picked the location. Instead it is the basic economic and political means of the west - doing business with regimes that impose conditions that we would not live under, and which are propped up solely by our willingness to do business with them - that is the essential problem.
This problem will no more be solved by the military, than Wales was conquered with castles.