I was just on the Montel Williams show talking about Pakistan.  He asked about how safe Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were… I responded by saying that they’re safe in the short term, in part because Pakistan’s military is the “most stable institution in the country.”

This could imply that the Pakistan army really has its s**t together.  Not entirely.  “Most stable” basically implies the best of a bad bunch.  But don’t take my word for it, read counterinsurgency expert David Killcullen’s take in front of the House Armed Services Committee, via Abu Muqawama.  Pakistani Army “lowlights” include:

• The 2004 Shakai agreement, where the Pakistani army surrendered to militant demands after losing a campaign in Waziristan, and negotiated directly with Pakistani Taliban leaders, empowering them over local community leaders and ceding control of parts of Waziristan to them.
• The subsequent takeover by Pakistani Taliban of large portions of the FATA, the Malakand Division, the Northern Areas, and parts of Baluchistan.
• The September 2006 North Waziristan agreement, which again was signed directly between militants and the military (after another failed campaign), and led to a seasonally‐adjusted spike in Taliban infiltration into Afghanistan of 400‐600% over the fall and winter of 2006‐7.
• The December 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, close to Pakistani Army headquarters, after she had publicly expressed concern that members of the military and intelligence services were trying to kill her. Read the rest of this entry »

I just got an email from Bernard Finel at the American Security Project, responding to my critique of their report. It’s reprinted here with Bernard’s permission:

It is indeed difficult to provide a one word answer to the question, “Are we winning?” the struggle against al Qaeda and associated groups.  And, ultimately, we don’t claim to do so.  In our annual report (available at  http://americansecurityproject.org/files/ASP_AWW2008.pdf) we track ten separate empirical indicators.  Some are good news, and some are bad.  We code each metric as positive, negative, or neutral, giving what we hope is a balanced assessment of the state of the issue.  Mid-year we update the key changes and trends from the previous report, and the mid-year update is by its nature an incomplete assessment, but we think nonetheless useful.

We don’t claim to have answers.  But we do claim to have data.  And frankly, too much of the discussion of counter-terrorism is fact-free.  Much of it is based on political convenience.  One thing you won’t find coming from ASP is the claim today that the terrorism threat is dire/slight when we are promoting/opposing passage of a domestic surveillance bill and then the claim the following week that the terrorism threat is easing/increasingly when our preferred candidate is gearing up to run on his/her counter-terrorism record.  We think that there are numerous ways of assessing progress or lack thereof, but all those assessment ought to be grounded in empirical data, even though we acknowledge and discuss the limitations and shortfalls of data availability.  In short, our goal is not so much to settle the question as it is to raise the level of the debate.

I hopped on a conference call today for a briefing from the American Security Project’s Bernard Finel called, “Are We Winning?  Measuring Progress in the War On Terror.”

As the report accurately states, the last six months or so haven’t been too pretty - the Mumbai attacks, increased violence in Pakistan and Iraq, and continued instability in Afghanistan are all cause for concern. Very true.  Furthermore, I agree with Finel’s broad conclusions:

[T]he explosive growth in Islamist violence in 2008 forces us to have a very pessimistic outlook on the struggle at the start of the Obama Administration.

However, I have concerns with the quantitative analysis of the kind of report.  First, it shares a fault common to macro-level terrorism analysis — it relies too heavily on raw numbers of attacks to determine if “we’re winning.”  These stats pose more questions than they answer:  How many were tried and failed?  How many did the attacks kill?  Do you count a small firecracker as much as 9/11?  Are the groups’ efforts sustainable in the short term?  The list goes on and on.

The problem lies in a tempting, but ultimately false, dichotomy that raw numbers set up - we have definitively “won” if the number of attacks falls to zero.  However, I don’t think it necessarily means that we’re “winning” or “losing” if the numbers shift over relatively short snapshots of time (6 months, a year).

In the end, I don’t think any report of this style can really answer the central question that it seeks to - is America’s counterterrorism strategy successful?  There’s a lot more to the story than a few facts and figures condensed into eight pages.   Everything from the conditions of the local terrain, to individual government CT partnerships, to terrorists’ financial solvency, to their recruiting success, to talent and training of the operatives, and availability of weaponry are so varied throughout the globe that we simply can’t distill them into a simple tidy report with a catch-all conclusion.

I can sit here and throw rocks, but I readily acknowledge that quantitative terrorism analysis poses a great conundrum - how else are you supposed to measure this stuff?  I have only one suggestion - you can’t.  We’ll just know “victory” when we see it, and we’ll have an unquantifiable sense from widely varied datapoints if our strategies and policies are working.

This report is a noble effort;  though I agree with its conclusions, I arrived there separately.

There has been a coordinated effort by US official over the last several weeks to push Pakistan into taking the offensive against the Taliban:

General “sources”, NYT:

American officials welcomed the redeployment but said Pakistan was still not doing enough to fight the insurgents, who are tightening their hold on the country.The Americans expressed frustration that Pakistan was still rebuffing their offers to train more Pakistanis to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Hillary, FT:

The militants’ move into the region last week came as Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, accused Pakistan of “abdicating” to extremists intent on seizing control of the nuclear-armed state.

Hillary, LAT (basically the same story as above):

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in unusually bleak terms Wednesday that Pakistan’s fragile government is facing an “existential threat” from Islamic militants who are now operating within a few hours of the capital.

Richard Holbrooke, Press Trust of India:

“Pakistan does not have to worry about India in Afghanistan. They need to worry about the miscreants in western Pakistan”

Mike Mullen, WSJ:

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Pakistan last week and came away “more concerned about the security situation in Pakistan than he had ever been before,“

The prodding has started to work — today Pakistan launched military strikes against Taliban elements outside Islamabad.   And for that, Pakistan got a pat on the back from a DoD spokesman, who called the offense “exactly the proper response.”  Of course, maybe Pakistan was nudged into action by a DoD war spending bill that’s set to provide them aid…

Here’s the best foreign policy story of the WaPo’s “100 Days” retrospective:

From the vantage of his inner circle, the new president has stepped into the role by projecting a sense of calm and confidence. The “no-drama Obama” campaign mantra has been adopted by Obama the president, sometimes through glimmers of humor during serious times.

While visiting Prague this month, Obama was awakened with news that North Korea had fired a long-range missile, and he joined Axelrod and Mark Lippert, the National Security Council chief of staff, in a secure room in their hotel to discuss the development. Looking at Axelrod, his hair suffering from an acute case of bedhead, and Lippert, who had thrown on a pair of shorts, Obama quipped: “I don’t know which is more frightening — your hair, Lippert’s legs or this launch. I’ve got to think about this.”

Here’s an idea:

After writing this op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune on Monday, I’ve been contacted by scores and scores of veterans.  Okay, perhaps not literally that many, but many more than I expected (and I expected a fair number).

BUT, when I do a quick search for my name and a select few key words in the op-ed… nothing.  Crickets.  Tumbleweed.  Awkward cough in the Simpsons.

I thought it quite odd to receive so much email pointing out my piece’s shortcomings (ahem), yet there wasn’t a single website that had torn me a knew one.

This tells me that there is clearly a community of veterans that deeply cares about these issues, but there’s no central site online where the masses discuss issues pertaining to personnel, benefits, pay, and retirement, etc..

So someone get out there and do it - there’s an underserved market just itching to read your stuff!

New Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu didn’t figure as one to be convinced of much.  He’s never embraced the idea of the “two state solution”.  But now this:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s review of Israel’s policy on the Middle East is expected to be completed by the time he visits the United States next month, an aide to the premier said Tuesday.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Haaretz on Monday that he believes Netanyahu will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of “two states for two nations” during his upcoming visit to Washington.

It’s way to early to tell if this is just positioning or an actual embrace.  If it’s the former, at tip of the hat to George Mitchell, who may have pulled off the near-impossible.  But we won’t know the results for years…