Jihadis Killing One Another: More of this, please . . .

Ahmed Godane

Google Images

Probably, most readers recall that Osama Bin Laden was killed in May 2011, though Al Qaeda still seems to be active, albeit more decentralized, and in an article titled "ISIS's Rise After al Qaeda's House of Cards," Part 4 of "Smarter Counterterrorism" (Geopoliticus: The FPRI Blog, March 22, 2014), Clint Watts explains the decline of Al Qaeda as an organization that is, in part, devouring itself:

To understand how al Qaeda has faltered since Bin Laden's death and to anticipate where jihad will go in the future, we must examine the leadership transition to Ayman al-Zawahiri. Through the summer of 2011, senior al Qaeda leaders and conduits to affiliates were being eliminated every month, Anwar Awlaki in Yemen, Ilyas Kashmiri in Pakistan and strangely the elusive Harun Fazul in Somalia. Fazul, once Bin Laden's personal secretary, died at a Somali government checkpoint similar to ones he likely passed through easily dozens of times before. In the following months, rumors swirled that al Shabaab's leader, Ahmed Godane, had arranged for Fazul's timely death to settle a score with the 'Old Guard' al Qaeda leader floating in his turf. The mysterious pattern of al Qaeda foreign fighters being killed in Somalia continued through 2011 and 2012 and rumblings of internal rifts in Shabaab's ranks grew while a plan for formal membership to al Qaeda was in the works. With Bin Laden gone, al Qaeda princes across many affiliates were making their own plays in a 'Game of Thrones' where politics and power became the priority over ideology and al Qaeda's grand strategy . . . . Stories of al Qaeda foreign fighters being killed in Somalia by Shabaab's leader, Ahmed Godane, continued to surface via the social media pleas of American foreign fighter Omar Hammami. While not the most important foreign fighter or American in Shabaab's ranks, Hammami's rants proved fortuitous of larger splits in al Qaeda's ranks. Shortly after Hammami's public complaints came a call from an original Afghan mujihadeen member in Somalia, Ibrahim Afghani, begging Zawahiri to unseat Godane. Al Qaeda stood silent as Godane's loyalists killed off both Hammami and Afghani. Shabaab has since crumbled under Godane's leadership and Zawahiri has publicly ignored these upheavals in Somalia.

These flaws in Al-Qaeda -- the jihadis killing each other over power despite identical, or nearly identical ideologies -- should be widely publicized, especially among Muslims, so as to show the potentially radicalizable ones just how corrupt so many jihadi leaders are.

Make this publicizing part of the "Smarter Counterterrorism" promised above.

'Thrown-Away' General Picked Up by Yale

Stanley A. McChrystal

Photo by Andrew Sullivan
The New York Times

I was wondering what had become of General McChrystal after his resignation due to repercussions from his interview with Rolling Stone while directing the counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to Elisabeth Bumiller's article of May 6, 2012 for the New York Times, "After War Room, Heading Ivy League Classroom," I know what has become of him: He's teaching a course at Yale! Talk about going out with style.

During his wartime duties in Afghanistan, McChrystal was known for his advocacy of forging relationships to fight insurgencies, so he teaches a course in leadership that helps students investigate this theme:

The theme in his case studies in leadership is that personal relationships matter . . .

He also seeks to establish good relations with his students:

His teaching style is loose: he wears khakis and open-necked shirts, insists that the students call him Stan, prods quiet students into talking and invites them all for runs with him and on overnight field trips to Gettysburg.

He's also known for "heading out to a New Haven bar for beers with his students," so I suppose he's preparing for the day he has to assign grades. With the good relations he's established, he can hope to preclude any potential student insurgency in his classroom due to any low marks he may have to assign.

He's also managed to avoid any general student insurgency at Yale, though this seems more to do with the fact that students differ these days from the countercultural students of my undergraduate years . . .

Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson on US Tactics and Strategy in Afghanistan

ISAF

(Image from Wikipedia)

As I've occasionally mentioned, I'm on the mailing list of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), so I receive something of interest once every couple of weeks or so. Yesterday, an article by Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson popped into my email box, "Parallels with the Past -- How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan, How the Americans are Losing" (April 2011). Goodson is a professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Johnson is a research professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, so they should know what they're talking about. Their article is interesting and informative, but I wasn't quite persuaded about the Soviet-American comparison.

Why not?

Their claim is that there are "startling and unsettling similarities between Soviet strategies and tactics in Afghanistan during their Afghan war of 1979-1989 and American coalition strategies and tactics in Afghanistan since October 2001." They focus on "three similarities . . . central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies: the focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the development of 'Afghan' solutions to a variety of security concerns."

None of these three worked for the Soviets, they point out, so the three are unlikely to work for the US, either. That sounds plausible, except that I recall the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan well. The Soviets employed extremely brutal, scorched-earth tactics of warfare and alienated most Afghans. On this point, the Americans have endeavored to use very different tactics based on a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategy aimed at protecting the civilian population from the Taliban and other insurgents, nothing at all like the Soviets' scorched-earth approach.

I therefore wondered what someone involved in planning the tactics and strategy used in Afghanistan by the US Military would think of the article, so I forwarded Goodson and Johnson's paper to one of my contacts who had been closely involved in working out those tactics and strategy (and to whom I've promised anonymity), and I inquired about this person's opinion. Here is the reply concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan:

Interesting piece with some good points. I'm probably a little biased, but the article didn't adequately "connect the dots" between the history and the current situation for me. The comparison to the USSR's approach was superficial with cherry-picked, dated examples to draw connections or similarities that don't exist. A more thorough review of the ISAF population-centric approach shows a fundamental difference compared to that of the Soviets'. I suppose advancing such a provocative proposition is the authors' way of getting people to read and discuss their article, and I'm also not sure the authors know what's really been happening there the past year and a half. In the end, the authors actually advocate the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued. The authors are correct that the central government is one of the biggest problems, and it undercuts the connection to the population distributed throughout the country with its incompetence and corruption. The outcome in Afghanistan is still to be determined. I think by the end of summer 2012 we should see if the McChrystal/Petraeus approach is successful. Let's hope that all our blood and treasure yield some significant level of success.

I wish that my contact had said more about "population-centric approach," as well as about "the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued" -- and these two approaches are complementary, I gather, being two different aspects of the ISAF endeavor. Anyway, concerning the former point, about the "population-centric approach," my memory is that the Soviets really did abandon the countryside and simply hold the cities; the ISAF, however, has not abandoned the countryside -- at least not in my reading of reports from Afghanistan. As for the latter point, about "the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued," I assume this approach is a variant on the counterterrorism strategy advocated by Goodson and Johnson:

Counterterrorism is Enough -- A counterterrorism approach does not accept the necessity of nation-building -- or at least holds that such a commitment of means is not justified by the ends. Instead, adherents of this [counterterrorism] approach, increasingly in the ascendance in Washington, believe that the United States and its allies can achieve minimal national security goals through the relatively secretive activities of counterterrorism specialists.

I presume that this is what my contact was referring to in stating that "the authors actually advocate the approach that General McChrystal and Petraeus have pursued." The US approach does seem to have given up on any belief that reforming Karzai's government is possible, so rather than get any deeper into nation-building, if that means setting up a government in Afghanistan that isn't corrupt, the Americans will be content with the lowered expectations of counterterrorism to ensure that Al-Qaeda doesn't ever again obtain a foothold there. This alone may take some doing, however, for Goodson and Johnson note that jihadists are not the most flexible individuals:

History would suggest that secular insurgents negotiate, jihadists do not. Rather, the Taliban that matter most within the movement are jihadists with perceived intense religious obligations (for instance, Mullah Omar, the Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful). "Peeling" such individuals away from the Taliban is virtually impossible because they believe they are following the mandates of a higher calling. Indeed, history suggests that no jihad has ever ended with a negotiated settlement or via reconciliation.

What holds for the Taliban jihadists would hold for Al Qaeda jihadists, too, as well as any other jihadists. A fully successful long-term counterterrorism strategy would have to determine why some Muslims turn to jihad and terrorism and would need to utilize policies that dissuade potential jihadists and potential terrorists from becoming actual jihadists and actual terrorists.

Good luck on that, though, for I'm not too hopeful . . .

Ganesh Sitaraman: "The land of 10,000 wars"

Ganesh Sitaraman

Harvard Law School

(Image from Harvard Law School)

In Monday's edition of The International Herald Tribune appeared a short but interesting article by Ganesh Sitaraman on the complexity of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, but the article can also be read under the same title, "The land of 10,000 wars," on Harvard Law School's website.

Sitaraman, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, has recently returned from Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was working as a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center, presumably under its director, John Agoglia, and probably as part of General Stanley McChrystal's effort to formulate a strategy for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Sitaraman opens his article with a reference to McChrystal:

As General Stanley McChrystal's 60-day strategic assessment is wrapping up, he poised to recommend a new approach for Afghanistan, one grounded in counterinsurgency's strategy of protecting the population.

I'm no expert on counterinsurgency, but my understanding is that this strategy of "protecting the population" has been developed since World War Two, and especially since the Vietnam War in response to the US failure there. The strategy is somewhat counterintuitive at times because it entails putting troops at risk to protect a population that may in fact have some sympathies with the insurgents. But the rationale -- insofar as I understand it -- is that even a population with sympathy for insurgents will be ambivaent about the insurgency, so a counterinsurgency strategy that protects the population can perhaps "win the hearts and minds" of the population by offering more than the insurgents offer.

This worked rather well in Iraq against Islamists who alienated Iraqis by brutally applying strict Islamic law. To the extent that the Taliban Islamists threaten the same brutality, this counterinsurgency strategy might work. Afghanistan, however, is a more complex place than Iraq:

The defining feature of Afghanistan is its diversity. Consider, for example, the eastern province of Nangarhar, on the Pakistani border. Nangarhar is about 90 percent Pashtun, but it has a significant minority of Nuristanis, Tajiks, and Pashai, each of whom speak different languages. In addition to ethnicity, Afghans identify by qawm, a kinship or residence group akin to a tribe. There are almost 30 different qawm within the Nangarhar Pashtuns alone.

The sources of conflict in Nangarhar are as complex and overlapping as the identities of the people. The local insurgency has splintered into at least three major factions, each of which was once aligned with one of the others. Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda send fighters into the area, and vast criminal networks provide support to the local Taliban faction. In the midst of these interconnected insurgent relationships, tribal feuds and blood feuds between families put the Hatfields and McCoys' to shame. One story I heard featured a man who waited 40 years before taking vengeance on his neighbor. Insurgency was his cover for retribution.

This might make application of the counterinsurgency strategy of protecting the population rather complicated and therefore difficult. Some of this effort is military, but a lot of it is police work, which requires state-building efforts, and that entails that the state be perceived as legitimate. Unfortunately, Afghanistan's government is seen as grossly corrupt, detracting from its legitimacy.

And even if this state-building is successful in the short run, will it prove a long-term success? Iraq is seen as a success story, but it was easier because a semi-functioning state had been in place there for some time, and even with Iraq, questions remain as to whether the quasi-democratic system constructed with American assistance will survive. Afghanistan raises even bigger questions. I suppose that we'll just have to see what happens.

By the way, does anybody know where Sitaraman gets his expression "the land of 10,000 wars"? Is Afghanistan known as a land of 10,000 wars?

In William Whiston's 1737 translation of Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus tells in Book 8 of a dream that King Solomon had in which God informed him that if the people of Israel turned away from the Torah, they would be destroyed "with ten-thousand wars and misfortunes" (page 337), and in The Flame of Attention, published in 1983, Krishnamurti states in Chapter 3 that human beings have suffered "ten-thousand wars" (page 39), but neither of these two instances of the expression has any specific link to Afghanistan.

If anybody knows where Sitaraman got the expression -- or if he coined it -- please let us know.

David Kilcullen on Insurgencies and Ideological Movements

Militiaman in Najaf, Iraq (2004)

Photo by Joao Silva

(Image from The New York Times)

Janine di Giovanni has a good review of David Kilcullen's book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.

Why should we care? Because:

David Kilcullen is a former officer in the Australian Army, a strategist . . . a scholar, . . . . an expert on counterinsurgency, . . . and one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White House and advised against the invasion of Iraq.

But also because:

[Concerning] Iraq and Afghanistan, . . . he still sees [them] as "winnable" with a long-term commitment.

Giovanni tells us that Kilcullen has read the French military expert on counterinsurgency, David Galula, who learned from France's colonial wars in North Africa as well as his diplomatic service in East Asia, where he observed the rise of communism. "Galula's thesis," according to Giovanni, "is that one aim of war is to support the local population rather than control the territory."

For those of us who have been paying attention in Iraq, this aim will sound familiar, for it has been the essence of General David Petraeus's strategy there. And little wonder, for:

Kilcullen went on to advise Condoleezza Rice and helped Gen. David Petraeus implement the 2007 surge -- which, up to a point, he believes has been successful, largely because of his friend Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

I read a book by David Galula several years ago, about a year after 9/11, but I guess that I should look at him again. According to Giovanni, Kilcullen read Galula when he was doing his doctoral work in political anthropology and learned from Galula to go directly to the primary sources (a bit more 'primary' than my own doctoral work on the Gnostics):

Part of Kilcullen's academic research involved living and working alongside villagers in West Java, trying to absorb the culture of Dar'ul Islam, a guerrilla movement hatched in the late 1940s (and later identified by some as an Indonesian clone and ally of Al Qaeda).

What Kilcullen wanted to do was to observe the movement the way the locals did -- not from the "official version I could find in books." So he lived in villages and conversed with his curious neighbors about blue jeans and the Internet, until they trusted him enough to share ­information.

"You should talk to old Mrs. N, her husband was an imam who worked with the movement," was the kind of lead Kilcullen would get after a time. And with patience and cunning, he built up the knowledge he needed.

From what he gleaned, he learned to distinguish between local wars (with their 'accidental' guerrillas) and the larger-scale ideological movements (with their true-believing militants) to which they get linked up:

[The latter] is the larger international movement: the Long War, as the Pentagon calls it, against Al Qaeda. The [former] . . . , though largely ignored, is equally crucial: the uprisings of local networks and fighters. These are small insurgencies seeking autonomy that align themselves intentionally (or sometimes not) with the larger movement.

How does that alignment get established? Here's how:

Discussing the tribal areas of Pakistan, Kilcullen shows how Al Qaeda moved in by taking over communities -- establishing bonds by marrying local women, operating businesses, eventually recruiting the villagers as fighters.

I recall that Al Qaeda in Iraq attempted this with the large tribes in the eastern, Anbar Province, but it didn't work. The tribes didn't want to marry off their women to the outsiders, and Al Qaeda responded with a brutality that alienated the locals, resulting in the phenomenon called "Anbar Awakening." I wonder why the intermarriage strategy has worked in Pakistan. Anyway, once such links are established, the next phase begins:

Al Qaeda establishes its presence in a remote area of conflict, then penetrates the population the same way influenza infects a weakened immune system. Contagion occurs when the safe haven is used to spread violence. When outside forces intervene, disrupting the safe haven, the local population aligns with Al Qaeda. The terrorists' effort is meant to be long lasting, and it's highly effective.

The terrorists use their haven -- now reinforced if the outside forces fail -- to spread their influence by disrupting neighboring areas and then coming in to establish order, the process outlined in Abu Bakr Naji's Management of Savagery and commented upon in previous blog entries of mine, such as this one, but which sometimes fails to work (much to certain people's annoyance). How can we ensure that it fails much more often? Giovanni summarizes Kilcullen's solution:

Counterinsurgency, he says, "demands the continuous presence of security ­forces"; "local alliances and partnerships with community leaders; creation of self-­defending populations"; and "operation of small-unit ground forces in tandem with local security forces."

In short, a long-term commitment. Is the world up to that? The Islamists may be.

Words to reflect upon...

Greg Mills

(Image from The Brenthurst Foundation)

...in the "great war against terror":

"The death of one insurgent creates many more in societies where blood ties and nationalist zeal are stronger than ideology."

The quote comes from Greg Mills, "Ten Counterinsurgency Commandments from Afghanistan," which I received April 10, 2007 in an e-note from the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

I had previously reflected on this paradox to the American counterinsurgency efforts in kinship-based societies like Afghanistan and Iraq: "the more you win, the more you lose."

If the death of any given insurgent raises up ten more, then unless one is willing to contemplate genocidal warfare, a counterinsurgency effort that focuses upon body counts is bound to lose.

Mills sets forth a more complex strategy, which I won't try to summarize here since I have a presentation to give this morning. Eventually, the paper by Mills should show up on FPRI's E-Notes site, though it hasn't yet, so keep on checking if you're interested.