Real international politics and apocalyptic rhetoric can be poor matches: Syria version

After the 9/11 attacks, the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party adopted an apocalyptic, good-vs.-evil narrative about The Terrorists, with whom we are now perpetually at war.

Gareth Porter in Al Qaeda’s Name Game in Syria Consortium News 08/06/2016 gives a current illustration of how Good-vs-Evil dichotomies.

Whether the current organizational umbrella called Al Qaeda still said to be headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri bears much meaningful resemblance to the Al Qaeda of 2001 is a question for which I have no answer.

But the hardbitten "realist" notion that nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only national interests that have to be protected, has an awful lot of truth in it.

Since the United States is backing Islamic extremists in Syria against both the Syrian government and the Islamic extremist group Islamic State, it requires some effort to square the Good-vs-Islamic-Evil narrative with actual policy. Porter writes:

The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from Al Qaeda was designed to influence U.S. policy, not to make the group any more independent of Al Qaeda.

The objective of the maneuver was to head off U.S.-Russian military cooperation against the jihadist group, renamed last week, based at least in part on the hope that the U.S. bureaucratic and political elite, who are lining up against a new U.S.-Russian agreement, may block or reverse the Obama administration’s intention to target Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria.

Al Qa'ida's current leader publishes new directions for jihadis - but how much does it matter?

The terms "Al Qa'ida" and variants like "Al Qa'ida-affiliated organizations" is still widely used, even by writers and analysts very critical of the US government's and national-security industry's images of the danger level presented by violent Islamists.

But it's not at all clear to me that even groups that use "Al Qa'ida" as a brand name have much if any meaningful connection to some central organization that is a remnant of Osama bin Laden's organization of that name that staged the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I sure wish we had better, more confidence-inspiring, critical-minded reporting from mainstream US media outlets that have substantial resources to pursue that kind of story.

Yassin Musharbash reports in Al-Kaidas Chef al-Sawahiri stellt neue Regeln auf Die Zeit 17.09.0213 about a new statement published by Ayman al-Zawahiri, presumed to be the top leader of whatever is left of Bin Laden's original organization. It doesn't sound like there is much of anything new or that offers any insight to any particular conflict or groups directly threatening the United States.

Musharbash notes that even among those with ideological affinities with "al Qa'ida", al-Zawahiri isn't seen as anything like the charismatic figure that Bin Laden once was. Presumably he needs to keep some prestige as encouragement for at least whoever may be helping him hide these days.

A statement from Osama bin Laden in, say, 2002, was obviously significant for whatever clues it might give to the organizations direction. And it was downright weird of the Cheney-Bush Administration to discourage American media from reporting on such statements in any detail.

But what Al-Zawahiri is saying in 2013? I'm not sure it makes much difference to anybody.

Tags: al qaida, terrorism, global war on terror

Al Qa'ida: Bin Laden's band or a mythological tradition?

Eric Schmitt and David Kirkpatrick provide more indications that "Al Qa'ida" in its various incarnations today is more a marketing label than anything meaningfully connected to the group led by Osama bin Laden that organized the 9/11 attacks in After Libya, Renewed Questions About the Potency of Al Qaeda New York Times 09/18/2012:

At the heart of the debate is the reality that whatever the continued ability of Al Qaeda or regional groups bearing its name to inflict damage on local or American interests, the terrifying power of its name has also given it a spectral second life as a kind of catchall for Islamist militants. Far-flung militants with little connection to the original group find the use of its name an easy way to exaggerate their threat, and politicians eager to campaign against them — whether in the United States Congress or Arab capitals — share that incentive.

"It is a ghost," said Fahmy Howeidy, an Egyptian commentator. "People here don’t believe that Al Qaeda is this huge scary thing that is moving everywhere and behind everything in the whole world. They think that is American propaganda." [my emphasis]

Obviously, violent groups targeting Americans are a real concern whether or not they use the marketing label "Al Qa'ida". But carrying on a world-wide Long War against a ghost doesn't really make sense.

For political leaders in the United States or the Arab world, both addressing audiences that may have little familiarity with the various schools of ultraconservative or militant Islam, “the big name — Al Qaeda — can mobilize people,” said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist movements at the state-funded Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “It is very difficult to use another name that people don’t know when you already have this brand.”

“Al Qaeda as an organization, as a command, it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Rashwan said. “There are no orders from Ayman Zawahri coming to jihadists in Libya or Sinai to make something,” though he added, “Since the death of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda has been in a sense reborn because some of its ideas and the model have inspired new militants.”

The extreme secrecy under which both the Bush and Obama Administration have conducted the "war on terror" doesn't make it easier to have a high level of confidence in their claims about the real or mythical "Al Qa'ida".

Tags: al qaida, global war on terror, war on terror

How effective was Osama bin Laden's strategy from 2001?

This Al Jazerra English report dated 09/11/2011, The 9/11 Decade - The Clash of Civilizations?, looks at Al Qa'ida and Bin Laden's strategy of launching an active "clash of civilizations" in the sense that Samuel Huntington had postulated.



This report seems to use "Al Qa'ida" in an expansive sense to include not only those who were a part of Osama bin Laden's core organization but also those who were directly influenced by him. They do make the case convincingly that the American invasion of Iraq set off widespread hostility in the Muslim world and radicalized many Muslims against the United States.

Tags: al qaida, iraq war

September 11 retrospective: What we don't know

Robert Scheer writes on How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11 and the Religious Zealots Who Perpetrated It Truthdig 09/08/2011. He makes a very important point:

How little we know about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks is laid out in the disclaimer on Page 146 of the official 9/11 presidential commission report. A box on that page states clearly that the conventional narrative of how those portentous events unfolded is based largely on the interrogation under torture of key witnesses who have never been permitted a single moment in a publicly observed court of law.

As the bipartisan commissioners ruefully conceded, their examination of the motives, financing and actions of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators had to "rely heavily on information from captured al Qaeda members" that the commissioners, despite having been granted the highest security clearance, were never allowed to seriously vet:

"We submitted questions for use in the interrogations but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process."

That sensitive interrogation process included the waterboarding of the key witnesses, led by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was scheduled to go on public, civilian trial in Manhattan last spring, until the Obama administration caved in to hysterical Republican-led pressure and called off the trial.

Now, we do know the basics of the history of Osama bin Laden and Al Qa'ida and the issues energizing them. But Scheer is right to point out that we never had a proper criminal investigation and prosecution because of the extra- and illegal methods the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administrations followed in the handling of the accused perpetrators.

Tags: 9/11, al qaida, robert scheer

"Al Qa'ida" after Bin Laden

This is a 24-minute report from Aljazeera English's Inside Story program on the death of Bin Laden and what "Al Qa'ida" is today.



Juan Cole provides a long obituary essay on Bin Laden discussing his career as terrorist leader in Obama and the End of Al-Qaeda Informed Comment 05/02/2011:

The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don't want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil. [my emphasis]

He also reminds us of Osama's early days as a terrorist leader:

The Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress took the small Carter administration program that supported a Muslim insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan and vastly expanded it, ultimately to the tune of billions of dollars. Reagan also twisted the arm of Saudi King Fahd to match US expenditures. Seven major Afghan guerrilla groups were fostered and given CIA training in camps. The Soviets fought back viciously. In that decade, perhaps a million Afghans were killed, 3 million were displaced to Pakistan, 2 million were displaced to Iran, and 2 million were displaced inside Afghanistan. In a country of, at that time, perhaps 15 million persons. It was Apocalypse Now, Kabul version. The two opponents were not attractive. The Communist regime was a cruel dictatorship. The Mujahidin were a mix of tribal and religious forces, but some groups were radical fundamentalists, as with the Hizb-i Islami or Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the most bloodthirsty of the Mujahidin. He got a lion’s share of the CIA money (he is today a die-hard opponent of the US whose men have killed many US troops in Afghanistan).

When Reagan convinced King Fahd to help get up a covert paramilitary to fight the Soviets (Reagan really liked private, unaccountable militias; he also backed them in Central America), Fahd had his ministers look around for a fundraiser who could get money from private sources in Saudi Arabia for the Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden was chosen, being a well-known socialite who also had a serious and religious side. Bin Laden jetted back and forth between the mosques of Saudi Arabia and the the Pakistani city of Peshawar, his headquarters in the struggle against the Soviets. The “Arab Afghans” who gathered around him may not have gotten direct CIA training for the most part, though some likely did, but they learned everything they needed to know about setting up cells and carrying out covert operations from the Afghans who had been through the CIA schools.

Tags: al qaida, osama bin laden

Anatol Lieven on Pakistan and on the Afghanistan War

I heard a presentation yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Anatol Lieven, a former journalist who covered Pakistan extensively who is now Professor of War Studies at King's College in London. He has spent time fairly recently in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which has been the scene of conflict between the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani Taliban.

I asked him what he thought from his research was the current state of Bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida organization. His picture is that there's no much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. He said that while it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, that it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

He sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

His picture of the current relationship between the Pakistani army and intelligence with Pakistani jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) that concentrate on the Kashmir issue is that they have a basic deal. They refrain from attacks in Western countries, which is particularly good for Britain, because a lot of the Pakistani immigrants to Britain come from the Punjab region near Kashmir and a lot of them are very sympathetic to LET. And mostly they have to refrain from attacks on India at the moment, after the huge Mumbai incident, with the promise they'll get to hit India again in the future. But they pretty much have a green light to help the Afghan Taliban against NATO and the Karzai government. Including the occasional target with special connection to India.

He stressed how much Pakistanis see the Afghanistan War in the context of the India-Pakistan conflict, with the current Afghan government being seen as pro-Indian. This is something that seems to only occasionally peek into American commentary on the war, so far as I've noticed. And this is a big part of what makes US-Pakistani relationship chronically troubled.

Lieven mentioned that the Pakistani elite tend to have a very Western orientation in terms of speaking English and sending their kids to Western universities and also in terms of their conception of property, etc. But he also said that many Pakistani officials would like to dump the current unsatisfying alliance with the US altogether and become an even closer ally to China.

He told about one factor I hadn't heard at all before. He said that it was common among Pashtun families (I took it he meant mainly in Pakistan) to send one son from the family to serve with the Pakistani Army and another to serve with the Afghanistan Taliban. When one of the two groups comes around looking for the son on the other side, the family can say, oh, that son's a bum and drug addict and a loser, but our good, sensible son is on *your* side.

He also said that the US military's perception that a lot of Afghan Taliban flee "across the border" to Pakistan is mistaken. What often happens, and what happened a lot in 2001-2, was that they simply go home and bury their weapons and wait to see how the military tide turns.

Lieven said that in his conversations with American military officials, they don't have a clear idea of what winning would mean. But they are haunted by their perceptions of Vietnam, which represents a clear idea of what losing would mean, the image of the helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975 being a dramatic example. This is an interesting observation, because to hear official Pentagon spokespeople tell it, our armed forces haven't lost a single battle since probably Custer's Last Stand. And, more specifically, there is a widespread assumption in the officer corps that US *won* the Vietnam War militarily but that our victorious generals were stabbed in the back by the weak-kneed politicians and gutless civilians back home. (Though obviously not all versions are expressed that crassly.)

Lieven also says in that connection that the Pentagon right now tends to view an exit view a general peace agreement with the Taliban as being a kind of unacceptable defeat. He thinks the reports we hear of negotiations with the Taliban represents what he says was a similar approach by the Soviets to make one-off deals with individual commanders. But he thinks the Pentagon is pretty dead set against any general agreement with the Afghan Taliban. He said we shouldn't underestimate the Pentagon's determination to fight on for years to avoid what they see as a humiliating defeat.

Which tells me that if it's left up to our generals, we'll never stop fighting in Afghanistan. That seems to have been the case in Iraq, too; McCain's promise in 2008 of 100 year's war in Iraq reflected something like that attitude. But in Iraq's case, the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad eventually insisted on a status-of-force agreement that pulls out remaining US combat troops this year. And I'm already seeing some reports that the Pentagon is trying to find a way around that.

Lieven also said that it's his sense that the Pentagon is very cautious about any idea of going into Pakistan in a ground war. Which he thinks is a very appropriate caution. He has the sense that sending US ground troops into Pakistan on a large scale would probably wreck the US position completely in the Muslim world. He thinks that the operatives that the US has on the ground there now are "hostages to fate," as the Raymond Davis case illustrated so dramatically this year.

Tags: al qaida, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, osama bin laden, pakistan

Speaking of conspiracy theories...

No, I didn't get this from browsing Paranoia magazine in the grocery story. But if the bad deeds and actual conspiracies in this administration that we already know about and are well-documented aren't enough for you to worry about, there's always the possibility of Cheney pulling an "October surprise" to put Maverick McCain over the hump in November's Presidential election.

Like this, from Target: Bin Laden Los Angeles Times 04/13/08:

... Bin Laden may well understand what many Americans do not: that he is more likely to be killed or captured during the next year or so than at any time since late 2001, when he escaped U.S. warplanes bombing him in eastern Afghanistan, at Tora Bora. ...

The structure of this U.S.-aid pipeline [to Pakistan], set against the decades-long history of on-again, off-again American support for Pakistan, encouraged Pakistan's top military commanders to believe that if Bin Laden were ever captured or killed, the U.S. might reduce its support or even go home. A fugitive Bin Laden became their meal ticket.

Now these incentives have been at least partly reversed.

I'm just saying.

Tags: al qaida, dick cheney

A curious Al Qa'ida story

This is really an "I don't know what to make of this" post. El País has an intriguing article, Pulso en el interior de Al Qaeda de Loretta Napoleoni 09/09/2007, about a document proporting to be a description by dissenters within Al Qa'ida against Osama bin Laden. The document complains about Bin Laden's "Saudi arrogance" and his obsession with the US and with Western media.

You always have to be cautious about these reports. All but a handful of experts are forced to rely to a large degree on that handful of experts for making judgments about this type of report. Napoleoni's article invites skepticism in the very first line when it says this report appeared in the fall of 2004, three years ago, in a London Saudi paper, Al-Sharq al-Awsat. So it's hardly new stuff.

I became even more skeptical when I got to the following paragraph:

La disputa terminó con el asesinato del jeque Azzam el 24 de noviembre de 1989. A partir de ese momento, Bin Laden y Al Zauahiri se hicieron poco a poco con el control de la Oficina Árabe-Afgana y convirtieron Al Qaeda en una organización terrorista financiada con dinero saudí. El asesinato fue el primero de una serie que acabó con la vida de varios miembros de la Oficina, con reminiscencias de las purgas realizadas por Stalin entre los dirigentes bolcheviques. Estas purgas prepararon el terreno para el primer atentado contra las Torres Gemelas, en 1993. Según Muhamad Sadeq Awda, miembro de Al Qaeda en prisión, Bin Laden ordenó el asesinato de Azzam porque sospechaba que tenía lazos con la CIA. Sin embargo, muchos creen que fue Al Zauahiri, y no Bin Laden, quien ordenó las purgas. Hoy sigue siendo uno de los grandes misterios sin resolver.

I won't translate the whole paragraph here. But among other things it says that Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri, the two main Al Qa'ida leaders today, orchested some assinations and purges from 1989 onward - which by the way were a lot like the Soviet purges under Stalin, she writes - that cleared the way for them to order the first attack on the Twin Towers in 1993.

Although Bin Laden later praised Azzam as a great jihadist leader, it has been widely suspected that he was behind Azzam's killing, seeing him as a rival for leadership in the Al Qa'ida organization that was then in formation in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

From what I understand, it's pretty much only the neocon hardliners (in the US, anyway) who push the idea that Al Qa'ida as we know it today organized that action.

Bin Laden had been associated since 1980 working with the Saudis and the CIA to channel money to the mujahadeen (Islamic fundamentalist) groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, as part of the Reagan-Bush administration's battle against the Evil Empire. From 1991-6, he was based in the Sudan. Al Zawahiri, with whom he had worked in Afghanistan, had joined him there. Bin Laden would later claim to have been behind the deadly attacks on American troops in Somalia in 1993, though the actual evidence for that appears to be slim. His first public message intended for a broad public audience in the Islamic world was "The Betrayal of Palestine", released at the end of December 1994.

As I said, this is an "I don't know what to make of this" post. But I thought the article was worth noting in a blog post.

Tags: al qaida

The military and the media

Gen. David Petraeus - Is managing American public opinion part of his "battlespace"?

Two recent articles on counterinsurgency (COIN) raise the issue of "information operations" in the broader sense of managing public perceptions in war via the various news media: Neo-Classical Insurgency? by Frank Hoffman Parameters Summer 2007 and New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict by David Kilcullen eJournal (US State Department) May 2007. I quote some of the key passages below.

"Information operations" were traditionally aimed at enemy armed forces or enemy populations, from messages to mislead the enemy about troop movements to propaganda leaflets and broadcasts directly to the enemy country's citizens. But especially in insurgency situations, information operations is taken to include influencing broader audiences, including the American public.

Military discussions about "information operations" as they related to American opinion have to be evaluated in the context of a particular view of the Vietnam War widely held among military officers, the Christian Right and various Republican ideologues. In this view the US military won the Vietnam War. But the gutless civilians, hippie protesters and weak-kneed Congress lost the war by refusing to support an open-ended commitment to continuing American participation in the war. And chief blame for that loss of political Will is placed on "the media".

Refighting the Vietnam media "war"

I've posted a number of times on the problems of that analysis of the Vietnam War and I won't recap them here. But the prevalence of that view, flawed though it is, means that whatever the views of particular writers on "information operations", much of their audience is going to process their work from the viewpoint of this the-military-won-the-Vietnam-War framework. Which means they are likely to view management of American public opinion as a key military task. And that they are likely to understand that as being primarily a function of manipulating media coverage of the war and the military.

That has led in practice to the military managing to repeat in the Iraq War their basic mistakes in their public communications during the Vietnam War.

The basic problem can be seen in this statement from Gen. Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in April 2005: "I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."

It doesn't matter how favorable the attitude of the press is, when military spokespeople keep repeating happy-face assurances like that in a war like the one in Iraq that has gone on longer than US participation in the Second World War with no happy ending (or no ending at all!) in sight, people stop believing it. It's the opposite of the proverbial "crying wolf". When the generals constantly cry "no wolf" by promising progress, tipping points, turning points and victory, when the situation is obviously a terrible mess, after a while most people won't believe it even if events change to make the smiley-face predictions closer to reality.

Nobody expects military spokespeople to go out and badmouth an ongoing war effort. But they should at least be realistic about what happens to the military's public credibility when the pep-rally pronouncements keep crashing and burning.

Members of Congress as well as most voters can and do distinguish between the credibility of generals and military spokespeople, on the one hand, and the success of a war policy, on the other. Our generals could reduce the damage to their own credibility from a bad war policy by learning some basic lessons from the experience of the Iraq War.

One is to report casualties as realistically as possible, on both the American side and the enemy's side, including civilian casualties. Another is to avoid bone-headed stunts like the Jessica Lynch rescue action-video. And downright sleazy acts like lying to Pat Tillman's family about his "friendly-fire" death. Things like that convey a sense that the military leadership doesn't respect its own soldiers and their families, much less the public.

There's also a distinction, to use business terms, between marketing as a broad concept and advertising in the more narrow sense. Even the best product needs good advertising. But even the best advertising can't make up for a bad product. In the war context, even ugly war-crimes incidents like Haditha don't necessarily damage the military's credibility among the public, provided the chain of command follows the law and their own rules and prosecutes them. Doing so consistently could even produce a net increase in the military's public credibility in the short run.

The best advertising won't save a bad product

On the other hand, when the military is intimately associated with a "product" like the Cheney-Bush torture policy as practiced in Guantanamo, Abu Ghuraib, Baghram and other locations, nothing can stop that from damaging the military's credibility in a serious way. That kind of thing is going to become public, often sooner rather than later, and no amount of PR spin is going to make it look like a good thing to most people. And the failures of the chain of command in the case of the torture policy in particular will continue to have practical, political and legal repercussions for a long time. If military leaders don't want their credibility damaged by that sort of thing, they just need to stick to the law and not involve themselves in the systematic practice of torture.

Military leaders enjoy a great deal of public and Congressional deference on military matters. At times that may be because people don't know what the generals are talking about. But that trust and respect for military opinion on military matters is widespread.

The military shouldn't allow people like the Christian General Jerry Boykin to squander that reserve of credibility it by going out in public and talking about how our God's bigger than the other side's God. Or by allowing Gen. Myers, the nation's most senior military officer (JCS Chairman) at the time, to go to an American Legion national convention as he did in 2005 and tell them, "Resolve or will is ultimately what will decide whether we defeat ... extremism and terrorism or whether we give in." This at the same convention where the Legion's "national commander" Thomas Cadmus told the delegates that antiwar protesters were trying to "demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples." Cadmus called for an end to "public protests" and "media events" opposing the Iraq War, and Editor & Publisher reported, The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to 'ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism'." It's hard to read that as other than encouraging violence against antiwar demonstrators. I don't recall hearing of octogenarian Legionaires actually doing so. But the chief military official of a democracy should not be attending such a convention and encouraging such sentiments. Especially if he wants to have credibility among anyone but drooling-at-the-mouth authoritarians.

There's also the fact, as noted in the paper The Impact of Religious and Political Affiliation on Strategic Military Decisions and Policy Recommendations by Lt. Col. William Millonig (USAF) 03/15/06, that the officer corps is overwhelmingly Republican and disproportionately conservative-Christian in religious terms. Most of the public are neither. That means that military spokespeople and those designing public communications strategies should make extra effort to understand where people are coming from, and not assume that what they hear from Bill O'Reilley or John Hagee or Rush Limbaugh about what "the liberals" think and say bears any relation to reality.

Military leaders should recognize that their own capacity to rally public support for a war is actually limited. American public opinion is not the "center of gravity" in a war. And it's not the military's job to mobilize it. That's the job of political leaders.

There seems to be an irresistible tendency for military leaders to conceive of public-communications functions in terms of censorship and manipulation. So you get things like the Pat Tillman attempted cover-up, which the generals should have known was likely to fall apart fairly quickly, and which is also the kind of thing that would almost make even a Rush Limbaugh "dittohead" angry.

But no amount of manipulation can make a deeply flawed policy popular in a situation like the Iraq War, whatever portion of that bad policy is or isn't the military's own fault. The Soviet Union had far more extensive censorship capabilities than the US military does. But even they couldn't prevent their Afghanistan War from being deeply unpopular and become a serious political problem for the leadership.

Should we rely on Osama bin Laden as a military authority?

I don't know whether the two authors I mentioned in the first paragraph share the particular view of the Vietnam War that I described. But much of their audience will view their arguments through that lens. Hoffman writes:

The sophisticated use of modern information technology can generate significant support for one's cause throughout the international system or more directly through a network of sympathizers and supporters. It is a force multiplier for the side capable of creating a compelling narrative in the effort to gain and sustain an advantage. The [Army counterinsurgency] manual notes the importance of such narratives but then inexplicably defines the information domain as a potential "virtual sanctuary" to the adversary, instead of identifying the virtual dimension as a crucial zone within the expanded battlespace.

While irregular wars are quintessentially won or lost in the minds of men (and women), the US government and the Pentagon have yet to master modern information operations. The decision to withdraw the Marines from Fallujah in April of 2004 highlights the powerful effect that modern communications can have on local, regional, and global audiences.

... Like the French levée en masse, the evolving character of communications is altering the patterns of popular mobilization, and having profound implications on why and how people will fight. The availability of modern media in all its many forms has radically changed the manner by which adversaries acquire and disseminate strategic intelligence, recruit, rehearse, and promote their cause.

Current antagonists seem to understand this, perhaps better than America’s strategists and policymakers. In a letter written by bin Laden to Emir Al-Momineed, he stated, "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles." (my emphasis)

Hoffman is writing at a general enough level that nothing blatantly objectionable stands out in the wording just quoted. He doesn't, for example, explicitly describe American public opinion as part of the "virtual battlespace".

But here's where the audience perception comes in. If military leaders and planners define American public opinion as part of the "battlespace", then it becomes one more part of the spectrum of battle over which they need to exercise "full-spectrum dominance". Conceived of as a "battlespace", the military will inevitably assume that exerting control via censorship, manipulation and propaganda to be the necessary approach. Even if they have people with the talent of a Frank Capra or Steven Spielberg designed the PR strategy - as opposed to the bright lights who came up with the Jessica Lynch "reality-TV" show or the Pat Tillman cover-up - they will wind up creating a new credibility gap with every war that last longer than a month or two.

The other problem is that military spokespeople often seem to equate the proper public "narrative" (to use Hoffman's term) with some vague psychological notion of Will. For instance, he writes, "The decision to withdraw the Marines from Fallujah in April of 2004 highlights the powerful effect that modern communications can have on local, regional, and global audiences." He doesn't expand on that point, so it could even be read to mean that the short-term solution that produced the withdrawal from Fallujah in April 2004 was a good image for the US to project. But given the nature of the commentary I've seen on that, I'm confident that most readers will take that to say it was an insufficient show of determination and Will.

In classic Clauswitzian terms, destroying the opposing army's will to fight is the goal of military operations. But the notion of demonstrating Will as used by most Republican politicians in the US is a much more general, vague notion of not backing down. It's usually used to project the image of courage, toughness, backbone, etc., for the politician (or pundit) posturing about the need to show Will and to paint the advocates of restraint as lacking in martial manliness.

And this may be one area in which the heavily Republican political leanings of the officer corps may lead to a risky form of groupthink. Breaking the enemy army's will to fight is one thing. Assuming that demonstrations of Will in the sense Republican politicians and FOX News commentators use it is key to winning the support of the American public for a particular war is a very different thing.

A final comment on the Hoffman quote: It's become common for writers and politicians to illustrate their points with brief quotes from Osama Bin Laden. Hoffman quotes him as saying, "It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the battles."

But is Bin Laden really a reliable authority on such matters? Yes, he's been successful terrorist leader and jihadist agitator. But the guy is hiding in cave or a hut somewhere in the Pakistani badlands or some other godforsaken corner of the world. He lives in a world where God communicates to him and his followers through dreams and visions. He defines every real existing Muslim government of the world as unbelievers. He pursues what to most Muslims is a very extreme Salafist view of Islam. Do we even know what he means when he said something like "the media war" is 90% or so of "total preparation for the battles"?

After all, for all the anger in the Muslim world toward the US, we don't see massive numbers of Muslims flocking to set up Bin Laden as the caliph of all the world's Muslims. Even in Iraq, the hardcore Sunni guerrillas who have been so tenacious in fighting the Americans are also killing adherents of "Al Qaida in Mesopotamia". How successful is Bin Laden's approach to information operations really?

That particular quote is taken from Steven Corman and Jill Schiefelbein, Communication and Media Strategy in the Jihadi War of Ideas Report #0601, Consortium for Strategic Communication, Arizona State Univ., April 20, 2006. The full English text is found at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point's Web site, Document #: AFGP-2002-600321 Full Translation Date: June 5, 2002. The Emir Al-Momineed to whom that letter was addressed is better known as Mullah Mohammed ‘Omar, head of the Taliban government in Afghanistan that was overthrown by the Northern Alliance with American leadership and assistance in late 2001.

It's not even entirely clear that Bin Laden intended that statement to be some kind of blanket principle of insurgent warfare, as opposed to addressing a more particular goal at a point in time. It seems doubtful that it was meant as a principle of insurgent warfare as such at all. The document is shown as having been translated as of 06/05/2002 but the CTC identifies it as "date unknown". The content refers to events prior to the overthrow of Mullah Omar's Taliban government, focusing on the need to organize jihad actions in the "Islamic Republics region" of Central Asia, in part to divert American and Russian hostility to the Taliban regime. The second major theme of his letter is the importance of Saudi Arabia to the jihadist cause:

The existence of the Ka’abah [in Mecca] and the Prophet’s mosque [in Medina] -The existence of 75% of the world’s oil in the gulf region; and whoever controls the oil controls the world’s economy. -This explains the wide international interest in this matter. It also explains clearly the tenacity of the American forces and others to staying over the land of the two Holy Mosques, and their bragging that they will not leave and abandon their interests in these areas. -Many international media agencies corresponded with us requesting an interview with us. We believe this is a good opportunity to make Muslims aware of what is taking place over the land of the two Holy Mosques as well as of what is happening here in Afghanistan of establishing and strengthen the religion, and applying Sheri'a (Islamic laws). -It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach 90% of the total preparation for the battles. These matters and others of Moslems interests which we wish with Allah’s assistance to get together and consult about; hoping for His guidance to accomplish our goals. Peace, mercy and blessings of Allah upon you. (my emphasis in bold; quote selected by Hoffman in italics)

Another of Bin Laden's statements, this one addressing specifically the war in Iraq, does not give the impression that Bin Laden thinks that actual insurgent warfare is 90% public relations. This is from an audiotape broadcast on Al Jazeera 01/04/2004, included in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (2005), Bruce Lawrence, ed., "Resist the New Rome". Lawrence in his introductory note to this text says that it "was bin Laden's most outspoken attack on the rulers of the Arabian peninsula". Bin Laden said in that message:

Therefore the advocates of reform should know that reforming and uniting the nation under Islam cannot be achieved through lectures and books only, but through a practical plan involving the entire nation, each according to his own capabilities, beginning with prayer to God and ending with fighting in the cause of God, for fighting in the cause of God is an indivisible part of our religion. In fact, it is the pinnacle of religion. So, how can religion survive without its apex? It is a pressing need for our nation's life, glory, and survival. Although our enemy lies, our religion tells the truth when it stipulates: You fight, so you exist. This is what they teach their children, but they tell us the contrary. Moreover, fighting comes about through the big powers' need for survival. Just read history if you want — including the history of America, which has ignited dozens of wars throughout only six decades. This is because this was one of its most pressing needs. When the United States makes a sincere decision to stop wars in the world, it knows before anyone else that that day will mark the beginning of its collapse and the disintegration of its states. This day is coming, God willing. So, beware of any call for laying down arms on the pretext of achieving peace. This is because this will be a call to humiliate us. Only a hypocrite or an ignorant person can promote such calls.

Before concluding, I urge the Muslim youths to carry out jihad, particularly in Palestine and Iraq. I also call on them to be patient and pious, and to weaken the enemy by inflicting wounds on it, along with protecting Muslims during these actions. They also should be careful not to expand on applying the law regarding the use of human shields, for this should be left to their honest ulctiiii on a case-by-case basis. We beseech God to grant us victory through patience and piety. May God make us patient and pious. (my emphasis)

My point on this is that brief, isolated quotations from Bin Laden can be misleading because he is operating from a very different set of conceptions than that of most Americans and from that of most Muslims in the world. And, while Bin Laden is a successful practitioner of the "propaganda of the deed" with his terrorist attacks, it's a huge leap to assume that his maxims are somehow definitive statements on the functioning of insurgencies like the complex one going on in Iraq right now. And another huge leap to assume that some kind of mirror-image assumption makes since as a counterinsurgency approach.

Kilcullen on information-operations strategy

David Kilcullen is one of the leading contemporary authorities on counterinsurgency. In the article cited above, he writes on "strategic information warfare":

Al-Qaida is highly skilled at exploiting multiple, diverse actions by individuals and groups, by framing them in a propaganda narrative to manipulate local and global audiences. Al-Qaida maintains a network that collects information about the debate in the West and feeds this, along with an assessment of the effectiveness of al-Qaida's propaganda, to its leaders. They use physical operations (bombings, insurgent activity, beheadings) as supporting material for an integrated "armed propaganda" campaign. The "information" side of al-Qaida's operation is primary; the physical is merely the tool to achieve a propaganda result. The Taliban, GSPC (previously, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb), and some other al-Qaida-aligned groups, as well as Hezbollah, adopt similar approaches.

Contrast this with our approach: We typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain our actions. This is the reverse of al-Qaida's approach. For all our professionalism, compared to the enemy's, our public information is an afterthought. In military terms, for al-Qaida the "main effort" is information; for us, information is a "supporting effort." As noted, there are 1.68 million people in the U.S. military, and what they do speaks louder than what our public information professionals (who number in the hundreds) say. Thus, to combat extremist propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare — an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say and what we do to send strategic messages that support our overall policy.

At present, the military has a well-developed information operations doctrine, but other agencies do not, and they are often rightly wary of military methods. Militarizing information operations would be a severe mistake that would confuse a part (military operations) with the whole (U.S. national strategy) and so undermine our overall policy. Lacking a whole-of-government doctrine and the capability to fight strategic information warfare limits our effectiveness and creates message dissonance, in which different elements of the U.S. government send out different messages or work to differing information agendas.

We need an interagency effort, with leadership from the very top in the executive and legislative branches of government, to create capabilities, organizations, and doctrine for a national-level strategic information campaign. Building such a capability is perhaps the most important of our many capability challenges in this new era of information-driven conflict. (my emphasis)

As Anthony Cordesman observes, "political legitimacy in counterinsurgency is measured in local terms and not in terms of American ideology." (A Poisoned Chalice? The Flaws in the FY2008 Defense Program Center for Strategic and International Studies 07/03/07). So targeting media information operations at American public opinion may be directly counterproductive to the political goals of the COIN effort.

There are no foolproof formulas in such things. But the current fad of pressing on-duty servicepeople into reflecting the political line of the Cheney-Bush administration in public appearances or even "news" videos that are really propaganda pieces is an unhealthy development. The idea that the Chief Executive would go before the nation the way Bush does and say that he's simply going to do whatever the generals ask him to do is ridiculous. It's not true, for one thing. But it also reinforces the pressure on those in uniform to promote the political positions of the administration.

Again, there are no hard-and-fast lines that can be drawn, especially in COIN operations when the "purely" military and the political often blur together more than in conventional wars.

But somehow, our political culture needs to find a way to back away from this notion of justifying policy decisions on wars by insisting that it reflects the judgment of military leaders. And our military leaders and strategists need to back off the notion that its their business to manage American public opinion as an integral part of warfighting.

Tags: al qaida, counterinsurgency, david kilcullen, frank hoffman, militarism, osama bin laden