Slashdot Mirror
A New Kind of War
Americans think of D-Day or the invasion of Iraq when they think of war -- massed fleets, armies and planes, tanks and fortifications. But the National Security types and military brass were clearly talking about something else completely.
This sort of offensive, confusing and strange-sounding to non-tech laypeople and those outside the military, will clearly rely heavily on security technology -- surveillance, wire-taps, electronic ID's from cards to voice and fingerprint scanning, biological warfare and defense, e-mail encryption and interception, satellite photographs, the digital tracing of money, the use of pin-point troops and weaponry to go after small numbers of terrorists located in inaccessible cells in distant countries. Such a conflict raises all sorts of policy questions, from our grasp of different cultures to the nature of religious fundamentalism to changes in traditional ideas about civil liberties, to use of the Net as a communications medium for terrorism, to technologies that might make airplanes and buildings safer. People have suggested more sophisticated X-ray devices to spot weapons and bombs, stronger pilot cabins, buildings less massive and vulnerable than the World Trade Center towers.
Most officials were quick to say the war would like unlike any other, and that drafting vast numbers of people wouldn't be necessary. This war would be fluid, varied, combining weaponry with diplomacy and economic pressure.
The intelligence experts who came out of the cold last week were nearly unanimous in agreeing that old-fashioned spies -- sometimes unsavory humans -- were crucial to get close to terrorist "cells" but also that new forms of communications -- e-mail, cell, the transmission of encrypted files -- required new laws and better technologies to monitor them, since they were terrorist tools. Also needed, they said, are computer programs to better track the movement of money.
Is such a war possible? Technologically feasible? Can encrypted terrorist communications really be followed online? Is it possible to trace money so precisely by digital means? To what degree can civil liberties or privacy be protected in this context? Is there technology that can spot a knife in a briefcase or hidden in a human body? How close can satellite surveillance take us to small terrorist hideouts in urban or rural areas? Is the idea of the mobile, tech-equipped soldier feasible? What weapons would he or she carry?
Over the last few years, I've gotten e-mail from academics, defense researchers, satellite trackers, government cryptographers about various issues relating to technology. It would be interesting to hear from some of you who know more about this than most people. In fact, some of you might be directly involving in working on these things.
America's defense and policy planners are calling for a new kind of war and a new kind of warfare. Few people have any idea what it might look like or how it might work.
I have to admit I was astounded that I heard that current US policy was that informants could not have a criminal background, or some such nonsense (anyone know what the standard actually is?). I mean, who the hell expects upstanding citizens in criminal organizations?
I think that is definitely one law that needs to be reviewed.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A quote
BIN LADEN COMES HOME TO ROOST (From MSNBC)
At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.
Before you call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.
But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.
Beginnings
As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.
By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan's freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.
Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to "read" than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the "reliable" partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
Intelligent Agencies
Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.
In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.
Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt's Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. "It was worth it," he said. "Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."
Tunnel Visions
It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this.
It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA's Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party's grip on power in Moscow.
Even Hatch can't be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its "mission," had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director William Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual "Soviet Military Power" report right up to 1990.
Given that context, a decision was made to provide America's potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.
That decision is coming home to roost.
Seriously, Jon, what credentials do you have for war? There are many people on /. who have military experience, and you're not one of them.
Look, it's going to be nasty, brutish, bloody, not fun. War sucks. Killing, noise, fire, confusion, being tired constantly, on edge, it's not a game.
There are many ways we can do it. The smartest would be to get some local intel of terrain and people (many of whom have fled, maybe some assistance from Afghanis who fled the Taliban to Iran would work, since the Pakistanis support and arm the Taliban, and half their intel would be designed to trap us). Land on mountain tops and passes, set up defensive perimeters with mines and mortars, anti-tank and ATA, put spread out artillery in gun pits, and blast any vehicle or concentration that moves. Because only the Taliban moves in 2/3 of Afghanistan, the local population that they control (who don't support them) don't have mobility.
But we'll probably do something dumb instead.
Some of us have combat experience in mountains, Jon. And you're not one of them. Your techie toys won't work in mountains - a defender has a 20:1 or 10:1 advantage if he knows the terrain and the opponent is vaguely unfamiliar with it. A few people can hold off battalions, when placed right, we'll be lucky to move 2 miles in a day.
And cruise missiles are economically ineffective - JATO-assisted dumb bombs have a 98 percent kill rate, while a cruise missile there has at best an 80 percent kill rate, and you just need a dug-in position and nothing short of a nuke will affect you (and even those have to get the angle right).
This isn't a war game. This is a war. We will lose people, we need sound strategy and tactics, not people with ideas about fire-and-forget missiles that get confused in mountain terrain, or using MBTs in mountains (which are easy to kill with mines and vertical attacks with anti-tank).
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
While in Israel, my first experience with liberty in that country was in passing through customs. It was actually quite easy to get into the country, compared to leaving. I was asked the purpose of my visit (a standard question) and asked to give a list of places I would be visiting. Since I didn't really know where I would be going yet, I said so. I was greeted with suspicious looks and incredulity, but allowed to pass through. I fit the profile of "single male, travelling alone."
Upon entering the country I immediately took a bus to Ashdod where my girlfriend lived. There were several soldiers on the bus. This seemed odd, but my girlfriend assured me they were there merely as travelers, not guardians. I still felt safer knowing there were several people with assault rifles on the bus.
Over the course of my visit, I was in many busy public places, including restaurants, night clubs, transit centers, malls, etc. In the malls and transit centers I was asked to show the contents of my bag upon entering. I didn't feel violated by this. I felt safer knowing these checks were being made. The people were friendly and expeditious.
Everywhere I went in Israel I saw soldiers. All had rifles; some had rifles with grenade launchers. You actually get used to this after a while. I was only there a month, but by the end of my visit I hardly noticed anymore.
But the most important thing I noticed in Israel was the degree of freedom I had. I didn't have to pass through checkpoints (except when I went to Bethlehem, which is a Palestinian area, and even then we weren't even stopped, just looked at as we drove through) and was never asked what I was doing or where I was going.
Look people. America has been changed, and not by choice. Security must be enhanced, or we will continue to be blown to small pieces on a whim. I ask people to look at Israel as an example of how to conduct security without impinging unduly on people's liberties. There are necessary steps which must be taken. There is simply no option. But it needn't be an end to liberty. If Israel (a country that clearly has its own governmental problems) can do it, so surely can the United States.
I am hopeful.
umm, when isn't propaganda an important part of war strategy? Any war throughout history has been plagued by leaders handing out pro-whatever information.
Other "police actions" that we have taken part in were less than popular b/c of the fact that the propaganda was ineffective. Honestly there was little worry by most of the American public that communism would spread to the US or large European states (yes the domino effect -- no it never really truly happened -- yes this is IMHO)
This "police action" already has very little need for propaganda due to the graphic impression it left on the public.
I myself am already quite annoyed w/Bush's statements and his bullshit (yes I voted for Bush and I am a republican) but I find his "wanted dead or alive", "new war", etc to all be over-stated and obvious propaganda.
We are going to start a serious war that IMHO will have very little effect on stopping future terrorism from happening again on American soil. Take out Bin Laden and who is left? Tons more...
That's just my worthless rambling.
(See this commentary in the New Yorker and this one in Salon for calls to treat this as a police action.)
I suggest that the best analogy for what we need to do is treat this like the Italian struggle against the Mafia. The crucial step is a cultural change, from the situation where the CD party treated the Mafia as a necessary evil that was just part of the political landscape, to where all of Italian society turned against the Mafia, and magistrates and judges were willing to risk their lives to rid Italy of Mafia control. The Mafia still exists, no doubt, but it no longer has the same insidious grip on the political system.
Here, the crucial step is getting the Arab and Muslim countries to stop treating their radical Islamists as necessary evils who, since they can mobilize the poor, and can kill dissenters, must be tolerated and accepted. Many countries, such as Iran and Syria, have used these groups to fight proxy wars for political control over the Middle East. The best thing that can come out of this tragedy is an alignment of Arab and Muslim contries against their radical elements, and a change in the culture there to stop accepting bloody attacks against civilians as acceptable political tactics.
That's why bombing Kabul, for example, is likely to be counter-productive. As much as we want the Taliban to be out of Afganistan and replaced by some more acceptible government, the likelihood that we will succeed is low, and the likelihood that we will simply piss off the very countries we need to align against these guys is high.
I suspect that what Rumsfeld et al. are talking about by "new kind of war" is making their point on asymetric warfare: the notion that we have gotten so good at fighting conventional wars that no one will send armies and navies against us, but will instead fight with more "terrorist-like" actions. My guess is that internal in the Pentagon this is being used as an "I told you so/wake up call".
"we must be willing to continue our bombing until we have destoryed every work of man in North Vietnam if this is what it takes to win the war"
-Curtis LeMay
General US Air Force
Long Beach CA,
April 1, 1967
"We have dropped twelve tonnes of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam. Whole provinces have been substantially destroyed."
-Robert Kennedy
Senator from New York
Washington DC,
Feb 8, 1968
"You've got to forget about this civilian stuff. Whenever you drop bombs you're going to hit civilians. It's foolish to pretend you're not."
-Barry Goldwater
Senator from Arizona
New York City
January 23, 1967
"It has become increasingly apparent that the US bombing of North and South Vietnam has been one of the most wasteful and expensive hoaxes ever to be put over on the American people."
David M. Shoup
Commadant US Marines Corps
in Atlantic magazine
April 1969
2 1337 4 u!
Here, read the interview with bin Laden, it's all right there.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/tra nscript_binladen1_990110.html
Not only is bin Laden pissed at the U.S. being mostly Christian, he's pissed because we aren't allowing them to literally exterminate the Jews in Israel. But it goes farther than exterminating the Jews in Israel, he really wants to exterminate all non-Muslims around the world.
And for all the Liberal Europeans blaming U.S. foreign policy on the whole mess, watch out, he doesn't like you much better and wants you dead too.
note: I'm not condoning U.S. foreign policy, there's plenty I don't agree with, however, preventing other middle-eastern countries from taking over Israel and exterminating the Jews is not one of them.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
As most political science people have been warning for years, increased globalization must inherently lead to anger and frustration, even if every country in the world were a democracy (which they are not, making it even worse). The reason is that while the actions of your national government have at least the stink of legitimacy for a dictatorship, and lots of legitimacy for a democracy: the actions of on foriegn nation upon another have absolutely none. So, as the foriegn policy of one nation increasingly effects the lives of people in other countries, we're bound to see major unrest and anger. It's simply what occurs whenever there is major disconnect between people who make a policy and those affected by it. The innovation of democracy is that it mostly solves this problem. But it can only do so domestically. The fact that a nation is "democratic" is totally meaningless from the perspective of those who are not citizens.
The Middle East is a prime example: many of our foriegn polices, which seem almost trivial wave of our hands to us, have had tremendous effects on the lives of people there. Some are good, some are bad. Naturally, those who feel they are bad are going to feel absolutely violated, and these feelings of illegitimacy often give rise to extreme fringes that are willing to use violence- because they lack any other avenue (remember: in a democrcacy, this avenue is becoming part of the political and legal system: even if your party loses, it still has a chance to live and fight another day).
So, contrary to people's claims that Bin Laden hates democracy: that we are a democracy is actually probably totally irrelevant to people like him. This concept, in fact, is almost totally opposite to the real problem: that he feels that there is no legitimacy (which democracy would be one avenue of providing) to what the US does in the Middle East. The problem is not that we are a democracy, but rather that there is NO democracy at work to mediate between our ME policies and the people affected by them.
Remember: this is not a moral estimation of anything or anyone: simply a policy analysis of the dangers that inevitably arise when situations of political illegitimacy exist.
A side note: The one morbid effect our democracy might have on Bin Laden would be to lead him to conclude that all Americans are ultimately responsible for what our government does, since it's power ultimately rests in us. That this rationalization might be how he or his cells justified attacking civilians is an almost chilling thought. There is nothing per se wrong with this reasoning: we are responsible for our government. But to think that such a previously glorious and wonderful fact could be employed in such a sick, blowback fashion, is deeply deeply saddening.