National Security

At my hotel in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the humanitarian group CARE is holding a meeting today to close down its post-tsunami relief program here. (I wondered why there was a guy at the check-in desk wearing a Thailand Democrats for Obama T-shirt; then I saw the meeting banner.) This has been the run of things over the last year or two. Somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and fifty thousand people died in Aceh five years ago in the course of just twenty minutes or so. It was by far the worst-affected place in that far-flung disaster. A massive reconstruction effort ensued, enabled by a peace deal that brought to an end the province’s thirty years of low-intensity warfare...

A little more than a month ago, on July 17th, suicide bombers detonated themselves at the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta. Nine people died and more than four dozen were wounded. There had not been a successful terrorist attack in the country for several years. Indonesian police have declared the bombings to be the work of Noordin Mohammed Top, a Malaysian national who has been on the run in Southeast Asia since 2002, when his outfit was declared responsible for the first Bali bombing, a devastating strike that claimed dozens of Australian and other expatriate lives. Top’s group is a breakaway faction of Jemaah Islamiya, a jihadi organization with historical ties to Al Qaeda. J.I.’s leader, Abu Bakr Bashir, lives openly in Indonesia, and the group has an over-ground religious and political network in which Top apparently has found shelter. Sidney Jones, the superb researcher at the International Crisis Group here, estimates that Top’s organization is “probably closer to dozens than hundreds, although nothing is known of its structure.”...

It is already clear that media and diplomatic judgments about the Afghan election will turn to a large degree on the issue of turnout. One question is whether the official figures can be trusted. Another is how relatively low turnout nationally and/or in Taliban country in the south and east should be interpreted. These are very serious questions about which we can expect a fair amount of spin and outright propaganda from all sides in the days ahead. To judge what will be on offer, first read this very useful summary from Andrew Wilder about the context of turnout trends in the presidential election of 2004 and the much less well attended parliamentary elections of 2005. Wilder, a research director at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, was the founding director of Afghanistan’s first independent policy research institution, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)... 

The Obama Administration’s first round of internal debate and external defense of its Afghan war strategy, which occurred during the President’s first weeks in office, went pretty smoothly. Vice-President Joe Biden, among others, did voice private skepticism about the prevailing enthusiasm for applying counterinsurgency doctrine as a way to “fix” the Afghan war effort—among other things, Biden feared that the American people would not support the war long enough for such an approach to succeed, since the average length of a counterinsurgency campaign is about fourteen years, according to one study...

Anchor Books has brought out a paperback edition of Hooman Majd’s 2008 book about Iran, “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ,” which adds to the original text a brief new preface about the disputed June 2009 election. Majd is an American-raised journalist and translator whose grandfather was a distinguished ayatollah and whose father was an Iranian diplomat. His book is a blend of journalism, travelogue, cultural reflection, and memoir. In some ways it belongs to a well-populated genre of book-length travelogues through post-revolutionary Iran published in the West since 1979, beginning with V. S. Naipaul’s “Among the Believers,” which came out in 1981. Like Naipaul, for example, and too many of the rest of us, Majd travels to Qom to engage with learned ayatollahs in elusive colloquies about Islam and the West. It is a signal of his book’s elevating idiosyncratic quality, however, that in addition to this, Majd also visits a less pious household in Qom, where the author twice gets baked by smoking opium, and where he reflects memorably on the social meanings of his host’s addiction...

Compared with their position in the period from 2002 to 2004, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia (which has been involved in hotel bombings similar to the attack yesterday on the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta), have become politically marginalized. Opinion polling, election results, and theological discourse all describe an Al Qaeda network that has been rejected by the great majority of Muslims. Al Qaeda has largely brought this outcome upon itself. Unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, it has never developed a political strategy that appealed successfully to the craving among many Muslims for justice and better governance. Al Qaeda runs no schools or hospitals and it competes in no trade-union elections. It operates no semi-legitimate political front, as Hezbollah and Hamas do...

I left Chad a few days ago and apologize for not having posted again sooner. Factors include but are not limited to rain, mud, electricity outages, and then, after departure, the distractions of Paris. After a stretch in such a militia-infested, coup-wary place as Chad, it was disconcerting to wake up to the sound of dozens of French fighter jets sweeping low across the city on a Tuesday morning. What the— Ah yes, the fourteenth of July. I had forgotten about that.

So, belatedly, one last quick note on Chad...

This article originally appeared on Wired Magazine's Danger Room blog.

In 1964, Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze had to check himself into the hospital for a bleeding ulcer. Friends visited, and asked how Nitze could have become so stressed that he literally busted his gut. "I've never said this before and I'll never say it again," replied Nitze. "But the answer is McNamara." As in Robert McNamara, his boss and the Secretary of Defense at the time.

McNamara died Monday at age 93. And his habit of causing maximum stress is one of many things I learned about the former Pentagon chief, while researching my soon-to-be-released book on Nitze and George Kennan, The Hawk and the Dove.

Nitze had run the Pentagon's department of International Security Affairs under McNamara in the Kennedy administration, but he and his boss had never quite bonded. The two were technocratic wizards, but McNamara more so. Nine years younger, the Secretary of Defense had a reputation for being even smarter. He could crunch any set of numbers. He was the man, everyone said, that the computers try to imitate.

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press...

Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California, a genial congressman who sometimes bicycles to work from his suburban Maryland home, convened another panel this morning at the Capitol to survey the future of newspapers and journalism. My purpose in speaking at these congressional hearings is to ensure that Agriculture Department budget allocations now perversely subsidizing rice farmers in Louisiana are eventually redirected to this magazine. (That would be a joke, oh mirthless overseers of the Lobbying Disclosure Act.)...