Turning off Autopilot: Towards a Sustainable UAV Policy

A short piece I wrote on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones has been featured on the Harvard National Security Journal website.  The long and short of it:  If the U.S. wants to retain UAVs as an effective tool of national security policy, we will need to be more transparent about the moral, legal, practical, and strategic considerations we use to justify UAV operations.

Oh, and we should also begin thinking about how the way we use them today will influence how they’re used by our adversaries in the future.  That one doesn’t get enough attention…

Unsavory allies and strategic “blow-back:” Parallels in Pakistani and American Experience

Daniel Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations authored an interesting “contingency planning memo” analyzing the risks of another Mumbai-style terrorist attack against an Indian target by a Pakistani terrorist organization.

Markey judges the risk of a new attack significant and warns that the consequences for US counter terror and regional security interests would be severe.  He prescribes a number of practical measures that the US Government could undertake to lessen the chance and consequence of a new attack.  He takes pains to note the importance of giving the Indian Government non-military methods of expressing its outrage in a post-attack political climate.

After reading Markey’s memo, you can’t help but see the similarities between the Pakistani predicament in the Kashmiri region and the American predicament in Afghanistan.  The Pakistanis trained and supported a network of terrorist and paramilitary organizations to wage a proxy guerilla war for control of Kashmir.  Years later, those same groups operate beyond the bounds of governmental control and now pose a mortal threat to Pakistan’s security.  Lashkar-E-Taiba or any number of organizations could precipitate a regional conflagration without the knowledge or approval of Pakistani officials.  Similarly, American support for the Afghan mujahadeen during the Soviet-Afghan war resulted in strategic blow-back in the form of a global Islamist terrorist campaign.

One wonders if other states keen to wage paramilitary operations through proxies — most notably, Iran — will factor the American and Pakistani experiences into their decision-making.  As the long-term strategic consequences of allying with unsavory organizations grow in lock-step with their ever-more impressive capabilities, one would hope that state leaders will think twice, for their sake and ours.

Social Network Analysis and the Capture of Saddam Hussein

Slate is running an interesting five-part series on the capture of Saddam Hussein in post-invasion Iraq.  Journalist Chris Wilson argues that social network analysis was the key to Saddam’s apprehension and provides a lengthy, well-researched narrative to back it up.

Two interesting conclusions struck me upon reading the first three installments of the piece.  First, it seems that one of the principal obstacles to the US pursuit of Hussein was the assumption that he would rely on high-ranking former regime officials to maintain his security post-invasion.  In fact, he eschewed contact with most of those he had surrounded himself with in the years before the invasion for reasons of operational security.  Instead, he chose to rely on a cadre of relatively anonymous, predominantly-Tikriti bodyguards (numbering about 40) to manage the insurgency and keep him out of American hands.

Second, Wilson’s narrative demonstrates the utility of routine interrogation against even the most uncooperative suspects.  Maddox, a US interrogator, relates how suspects would inadvertently divulge valuable information in their efforts to protect what they thought was more important information:

In piecing together a trail through his network, Maddox says detainees often simply told him what he wanted to know. “They’re not going to tell me about the insurgency,” he explained. “But they’ll talk about who’s drinking buddies with who.” In thinking that they were deflecting the interrogators, lower-level operators were in fact leading Maddox closer to his target. These detainees, in a way, were making precisely the same mistake that the American military made at the start of the Iraq war. Institutional information about the insurgency wouldn’t bring coalition troops closer to Saddam’s hiding place. The social information that these lower-level Musslits provided was much more valuable. Maddox wanted to know the names of Saddam’s friends, not his former colleagues.

Wilson’s implicit endorsement of social network analysis as a method of combating insurgencies is well-received.  However, his piece also demonstrates the overwhelming weakness of this analytic technique: it requires a tremendous amount of high-quality information inputs.  Furthermore, it is rarely apparent when you have “enough” good information to assign high-confidence to the conclusions arising out of a network analysis.  As Wilson makes abundantly clear, in the case of Iraq, this information could only be gleaned through a series of risky raids.

Why succession struggles are bad for the Taliban

This week’s capture of the Afghan Taliban Commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi has been hailed as a leading indicator of a new Pakistani willingness to take on the violent extremists within its borders.   There seems to be a cautiously optimistic sense here in the US that this is the case.

The English language Pakistani press is quick to echo America’s most optimistic assessments.

The Washington Post quoted US officials and anti-terrorism experts as suggesting that Pakistan’s cooperation in the effort to capture Mullah Baradar “could prove a turning point in the Afghanistan war”.

The Indian press is less charitable:

Regional experts are already suggesting that the story is just a cover for Pakistan facilitating US contacts with the Taliban or interposing itself in US-Taliban engagement. Pakistani intelligence agencies have known his whereabouts for a long time, according to Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid.  Others are suggesting that the military-ISI combine has “sacrificed” Baradar to the Americans to win Washington’s trust and secure for itself a role in Afghanistan.

Either way, the US has struck a significant blow to the Afghan Taliban insurgency.  Baradar was a savvy leader who appreciated the finer points of COIN.  His loss will likely result in infighting and disorganization in the Taliban insurgency in the immediate short-term.  In the long term, the loss of his strategic guidance will degrade the Taliban in important ways.  Specifically, the risk of the Taliban over-playing its hand, much like al-Qaeda in Iraq did in Anbar a few years ago, has just increased significantly.

In the medium term ( three to six months), I would expect the insurgency to grow more fractious, violent, and hardcore.  Baradar was a relative moderate who might have been more open to a negotiated settlement than most of his prospective replacements.

The process of succession in terrorist and insurgent organizations can be messy and drawn out.  Historically, it has tended to result in a “race to the bottom” where prospective leaders attempt to prove their mettle by increasing the audacity, lethality, and tempo of their operations.  The new leader of the Afghan Taliban, regardless of who he is, will be shaped by organizational imperative to be exceedingly violent and uncompromising.  Paradoxically, this might be a good thing for those anticipating the Taliban’s demise.