Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative

Confusion on the Durand Line

Andrew Lebovich — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:46:00 -0400

The news last week of the alleged killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has sparked a round of confused and contradictory messages from various parties.

American and Pakistani officials claim with more and more certainty that Mehsud is dead. Meanwhile, elements of the Pakistani Taliban admitted his death and announced a shura, or gathering, to decide a new Taliban leader, while others strongly asserted that Mehsud is alive, kicking, and making videos to prove it.

While there is at this writing no DNA proof that Mehsud is dead, the strong message from American and Pakistani officials, coupled with persistent reports of fighting between Taliban leaders Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali Ur-Rehman leads me to believe that Mehsud is either dead or out of commission.

Yet while apparently successful, strikes such as this show the potential benefits - as well as limitations - of targeted killings. New America Fellow Nicholas Schmidle explains that Mehsud has been "losing his mojo" of late, and that his killing might weaken the Taliban, but will not eliminate the organization or make Pakistan more willing to cooperate in bringing down other Taliban leaders with closer relationships to Pakistan's military. So while killing Mehsud is a good step, more will be required to effectively diminish the threat from the Taliban, on both sides of the Durand Line.

For more on the news coming out of the region, today is the launch date for a new special project from Foreign Policy and the New America Foundation, the AfPak Channel. Edited and managed by Peter Bergen, the co-director of New America's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, and Katherine Tiedemann, the policy analyst with the same program, as well as by Blake Hounshell and Susan Glasser at FP, the AfPak Channel carries original content and analysis from many of today's top experts on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and terrorism.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Af-Pak Conundrum

Andrew Lebovich — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:03:00 -0400

It seems that the vocal debate about the future of American involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan has spilled into the hallowed halls of the New America Foundation.

This month's issue of the Washington Monthly carries an excellent piece from Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative co-director Peter Bergen arguing against the facile statements many have made equating Afghanistan to Vietman, or persisting in the well-worn cliche that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires." Bergen continues, laying out a good case for continued investment and intervention in Afghanistan, in order to bolster recent security gains and the nascent Afghan security forces. He also argues that further American presence is necessary to keep Afghanistan from suffering a power vacuum as it did when Washington pulled up stakes in Afghanistan in 1989 and again in 2002 and 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Countering this is an article released last week in Foreign Policy from New America fellows Parag Khanna and Michael Cohen. They contend that the emphasis should be on development and counterinsurgency in Pakistan, and that the US is sinking money into a nation-building effort in Afghanistan that is destined to fail. Instead of a US troop presence and nation-building effort, Khanna and Cohen argue that Al Qaeda in Afghanistan can be contained through drone strikes and cooperation with local Afghan forces.

While I understand the very legitimate fears about mission creep and the huge cost of development in Afghanistan, I think that a massive pullout will not help matters in Pakistan, or the region. Afghanistan's government is painfully weak, and even if the majority of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are in Pakistan, as Cohen and Khanna contend, a destabilized Afghanistan simply gives them another place to seek shelter.

Furthermore, while targeted assassinations can work to destabilize an organization, reliance on them carries great risks. These attacks work best in tandem with ground forces, as shown by recent operations by the Pakistani military in the Swat Valley. Without the pressure of ground forces, there is still a power vacuum in which other leaders can emerge to replace those killed in airstrikes and other operations, as has happened over the years in Gaza and the West Bank. And without American forces on the ground, it will be much harder to gather effective intelligence on the movements of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, vastly increasing the risk of civilian casualties in any subsequent operation.

For those interested in this conversation, New America will be hosting RAND Afghanistan expert Seth Jones tomorrow for a discussion of his important new book In the Graveyard of Empires. You can RSVP here.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Measuring Failure

Andrew Lebovich — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:38:00 -0400

This year’s Failed States Index from Foreign Policy magazine is interesting not only for the questions the Index raises about failing states, but also for the questions it poses about the very act of measuring state stability (you can read about FP's methodology here).

One article released as part of the Index, written by Robert Rotberg of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, raises questions about the Index itself. Rotberg discusses some of the "puzzling" results, commenting that:

Zimbabwe is the second-most failed state, just ahead of Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet Zimbabwe has no discernible civil warfare. Its government does prey harshly on any opposition, but the Zimbabwean state has not lost its monopoly control of violence and should therefore not be considered failed. And though there are simmering pockets of conflict in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, these states have failed only if their provision of political goods to the entire population has conclusively fallen to the lowest ranking among regional peers…

...Finer and more accurate distinctions among states are always preferable, especially with the world's least effective—and most complicated—countries. A more objective system of rankings would better help policymakers analyze the options available and choose the prescriptions that best fit the country in peril.

Indeed, the Index’s rankings grow murkier towards the middle of the list, especially with states “in danger” of failure. It is difficult to objectively say, for instance, that China, despite enormous wealth disparities and violent ethnic tensions with their Muslim Uighur population, is more of a failed state than Algeria, a country still grappling with the legacy of its vicious civil war and with significantly lower prospects for economic growth.

It is equally difficult to say that Pakistan deserves its spot at number ten on the list, only three spots behind its neighbor Afghanistan, and somehow two spots ahead of Haiti. Undoubtedly, Pakistan’s low ranking comes in large part from the violent Taliban insurgency that has reached uncomfortably close to the capital of Islamabad, and has engulfed the major city of Peshawar.

Moreover, the recent combat operations in the Swat Valley created over two million refugees, one of the categories that the Index tracks. And the prospect of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists who hold sway in much of Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas is, needless to say, terrifying.

But as Peter Bergen, the Co-Director of the New America Foundation’s Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, pointed out in April, it is a mistake to say that Pakistan is failing. As Bergen notes, despite Pakistan’s economic and security problems, it is not on the verge of collapse. Pakistan’s strong civil society, independent judiciary (recall the “lawyer’s movement” largely responsible for the peaceful ouster of Pervez Musharraf), and new-found will to fight the Taliban are all encouraging signs.

Pakistan and many other states are hardly secure, and far from perfect. But it is important to remember that in measuring the stability of countries, statistics only tell part of the story.

--Andrew Lebovich

Adding to the Debate on Guantanamo

Andrew Lebovich — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:50:00 -0400

Six months after the Bush era officially ended, the prison at Guantanamo Bay still causes controversy. President Obama has vowed to close the prison by 2010, while Dick Cheney continues to insist to anyone listening that the US will be at greater risk of an Al Qaeda attack if Guantanamo closes.

In a May speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney cited Pentagon figures that 14%, or one in seven, of released Guantanamo detainees rejoined the fight in the Middle East or Central Asia against American interests.

But New America’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have set about debunking that particular claim. Relying on a careful analysis of open source information and the information available from the Pentagon, Bergen and Tiedemann recently found that only about 4% of detainees have actively taken up arms against the United States since their release.

This work is useful not only because it helps flesh out the threat level from released detainees, but also because Bergen and Tiedemann fisk the Pentagon’s sometimes questionable methodology for determining recidivism.

They write:

Some may argue that even if 1 percent of the men released from Guantanamo go on to commit violence against the United States or U.S. interests, the number would be too high. Others may observe that, in comparison, recidivism rates among convicted criminals in the United States are much higher than any of the Pentagon estimates or tallies concerning the former detainees.

We make a different point: That the Pentagon should be as precise and transparent as possible in ascertaining how many of those released from Guantanamo have posed any kind of threat to the United States and U.S. interests. Whether it is 14 percent, as the Pentagon fact sheet would indicate, or more like 4 percent, as our analysis suggests, the number has implications for how legislators and other policy makers address the problems and challenges posed by the proposed closure of the prison.

This is a crucial point, one often ignored in Washington; when making decisions about important policy considerations, transparency and forthrightness actually help policy makers devise better solutions. Amazing.

-- Andrew Lebovich