Terrorism

Ending U.S. torture gains the moral high ground, but will not in itself make America safer.

By Thomas Hegghammer

The CIA torture memos have generated a media storm in the United States. Many have expressed surprise and indignation at the nature and extent of state-sanctioned torture in the war on terror. On the center-left of the political spectrum there is also a sense of relief and hope that the dark Bush era is over and that a torture-free America will regain the moral high ground and be safer as a result.

Switch to the jihadi Internet forums, where thousands of radical Islamists log on every day to debate religion, politics, and the latest news from the war on terror. Last week there were debates on all kinds of topics, from swine flu to the financial crisis to the alleged capture of the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. But there was virtually nothing about the torture memos.

This wasn't because the jihadists don't care about how the United States treats detainees. Pictures from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have been among al Qaeda's most widely used and most potent recruitment tools in the post-9/11 era. Since early 2002, not a day has passed without Guantánamo being mentioned somewhere on the jihadi Internet. Outrage over Abu Ghraib was the single most important motivation for foreign jihadists going to Iraq in 2004 and 2005. Al Qaeda hostage takings began after the establishment of Guantánamo and skyrocketed after Abu Ghraib. More than one Western hostage met his fate in Iraq wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Nor is al Qaeda's silence on the memos a tacit admission that the end of torture is bad for its recruitment. Jihadi strategists have never shied away from publicly discussing the objective challenges they are facing. There are many reasons for al Qaeda to fear an Obama administration, but the cleanup of the CIA black sites is not one of them.

The reason for the silence on the forums is that al Qaeda couldn't care less about the current U.S. debate about torture. The questions of who signed which memos when, whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 80 or 180 times, and whether a millipede was inserted into Abu Zubaydah's confinement box are only interesting for those who did not expect the United States to behave this way. And the jihadists are not among them.

For a start, al Qaeda never cared about the black sites in the first place. It never expected its leaders to be treated gently, and it knew the dungeons of Cairo were infinitely worse anyway. Moreover, even if the CIA really did stop torture, the United States has so little credibility left in the Muslim world that virtually nobody would believe it. And those who would believe it would rightly point out that the practice of rendition will continue. Most importantly, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have already provided enough propaganda material to last a generation. For the jihadists -- indeed for most Muslims -- the CIA memos are a small drop in an ocean of examples of Western injustice toward Muslims.

The bottom line is that the damage caused by Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib is irreparable and the end of U.S. torture will not in itself make the United States safer from this generation of jihadists. Ending torture in the United States is obviously important, but it will only bring security benefits if it is part of a broader policy package that includes pressure on allied regimes to do the same.

Cleaning up America's own backyard might make liberals feel good about themselves, but they should not be fooled into thinking that this alone will make them safer.

Thomas Hegghammer is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He is the coauthor of Al Qaeda in Its Own Words and author of the forthcoming Jihad in Saudi Arabia. He blogs about jihadi Web sites at www.jihadica.com.

Photo: Abid Katib/Getty Images

Want to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban? Stop thinking of them as terrorists.

By Gretchen Peters

The Obama administration has promised "a new way of thinking about the challenges" facing the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it's also high time it starts thinking in a new way about America's enemies themselves. The Taliban and al Qaeda have long portrayed themselves as holy warriors, battling under the flag of Islam. Most people in the West have accepted this characterization, imagining them as long-bearded fanatics, while Washington constantly refers to them as "terrorists" and "extremists." No doubt they are. But, having studied their operations at the village level in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than three years, another descriptor also seems useful to me: criminal. When you examine the day-to-day activities keeping their networks financially afloat and probe how they interact with local communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda start to look a lot more mafiosi than mujahideen.

In the last eight years, the Afghan Taliban have greatly expanded their illicit activities, morphing into a force more violent and ruthless than when they were in power from 1996 to 2001 and building up an economic empire worth almost half a billion dollars. Their activities are diverse: In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan's farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities.

They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don't comply. District-level Taliban commanders collect fees as high as $250 per truck passing through their control zones from import-export firms and trucking companies, even "taxing" the tankers carrying jet fuel to NATO air bases in Kandahar and Bagram.

The Afghan Taliban aren't the only ones using criminal proceeds to finance their operations. Thieves recently looted a money market in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, later delivering the cash to Baitullah Mehsud, who leads the Pakistani Taliban. There are also indications that al Qaeda operatives help move shipments of refined heroin as they leave the Afghan border area and head toward Central Asia and Europe, precisely where one stands to profit most.

Viewing the Taliban and al Qaeda as criminals doesn't mean ignoring the threat they pose to the West. In fact, criminal activity makes them even more dangerous overseas. Opium profits help pay for weapons and explosives used to kill U.S. soldiers on the Afghan battlefield. Criminal proceeds could help fund future 9/11-style attacks, making it imperative to degrade these sources of funding.

But the new paradigm could offer some extraordinary opportunities for fighting this thriving underground economy. When President Barack Obama speaks of confronting "a common enemy" that threatens the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, his condemnation of extremism doesn't always resonate in the border areas where the insurgents and terrorists rule.

With the help of local researchers, I have interviewed hundreds of Afghans and Pakistanis who live along the frontier. In these deeply conservative Muslim communities, where religious leaders hold tremendous authority, few dared speak out against people who define themselves as "holy warriors." But when we framed the insurgents as criminals, they opened up, describing in clear detail how the militants' illicit activities directly and adversely affect their lives. Speaking in terms the people there can understand will improve America's ability to win local support for the critical task of cutting off terrorist leaders from their illicit profits. In Islam, there is no one more reviled than a thief.

Gretchen Peters is the author of the forthcoming Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

U.S. drones have executed dozens of alleged al Qaeda members along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But is silence on this counterterrorism tactic the best strategy?

By Stuart Gottlieb 

If you were under the impression that U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to craft new counterterrorism policies "in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals" could be accomplished without exposing dangerous contradictions, consider this:

Since Obama's swearing-in, the United States has executed dozens of suspected al Qaeda leaders and operatives without court hearings, the presentation of evidence, or the involvement of defense lawyers. These executions, typically carried out by missile strikes from unmanned CIA drone aircraft, have taken place in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scores of civilians, including many women and children, have reportedly been killed or maimed in the strikes.

Calls for granting habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees and outrage over the Bush administration's harsh treatment of enemy combatants have dominated the headlines. Yet this side of the U.S. war against al Qaeda and its affiliates is little discussed and even less deliberated.

But with tensions rising in Pakistan and around the Muslim world over the brutality and high civilian death toll from these targeted assassination attacks, the United States' day of reckoning regarding this policy may soon arrive as well. As we learned from the Bush administration, there are tremendous costs to aggressive counterterrorism policies, especially when their purposes are not clearly understood. Unless Obama candidly explains how targeted killings fit within his overall counterterrorism approach, he faces similar difficulties and the possible exhaustion of goodwill toward his new administration.

Indeed, although targeted killings can be justified on national security grounds -- to weaken the capability of Taliban and al Qaeda forces to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- they run counter to Obama's espoused counterterrorism ethos. Assuring the world in one breath that "America does not torture" suspected terrorists, while in another ordering Hellfire missile strikes that can burn victims alive, is unsustainable from both policy and diplomatic perspectives. How does the U.S. president explain why one suspected terrorist leader held in Guantánamo gets a team of lawyers fighting for his day in court, while another is killed in his car along with his family?

To justify these targeted killings, the Obama team needs to acknowledge two things. First, that the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates remains so dire that the United States needs to engage in practices that in some contexts would be war crimes. Second, that some of the former Bush administration's most aggressive and controversial policies remain necessary in the conflict against al Qaeda, including targeted killings (admittedly a preferable alternative to a ground operation, which could leave scores of U.S. troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians dead as well).

Obama has taken great care to level with the American people about the current financial crisis. He has made clear that there are no silver-bullet solutions and that returning to sustained economic growth will require difficult trade-offs.

This same candor is needed in the fight against global terrorism, whether on the frontiers of Pakistan or elsewhere. Although this might not mesh well with Obama's overall message on the terrorist threat and his administration's response, in the case of targeted killings, actions are already speaking more loudly than words.

Stuart Gottlieb, a former Senate foreign policy adviser, directs the Policy Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images 

It's looking dangerously similar to the 1980s in Northern Ireland, but a lot has changed since the worst days of "the troubles."

By Simon Roughneen

Last weekend shattered the illusion that the gun had been permanently removed from Irish politics. Two Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter groups carried out what seemed to be well-planned hits, first against two Afghanistan-bound British soldiers, and later, against a Catholic policeman responding to what turned out to be a terrorist trap. Tragedy that it was, the violence was just the first of two related messes now threatening peace and prosperity in Ireland. The financial crisis has also sent a wave of panic across the now-dead "Celtic Tiger" -- whose economy is now set to shrink by at least 6 percent in 2009 after a decade and a half of record growth.

Is history repeating itself? To many in Ireland, it's like a return to the 1980s -- shootings in the north and a basket-case economy in the Republic. No one, barring the hard-line pro-independence minority, is nostalgic for the bad old days. But some fear they might get a return to the 80s nevertheless.

From the politics, at least, the crisis looks familiar enough to warrant concern. The two splinter groups, which call themselves the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, continue to push for Irish unification by gunfire; they have resisted the political approach adopted by mainstream IRA leaders. Although this is the first fatal attack since 1998, there have been ample warnings recently that IRA splinter groups were sizing up potential targets. Northern Ireland has seen more than 20 gun and bomb attacks in the past 18 months, wounding seven police officers. One month ago, police found a 300-pound car bomb outside a British army barracks, a hint that some of the old IRA bomb-making and training networks might have been revived and coopted by the dissident groups.

To be sure, these latest murders were intended to spark either a heavy-handed British response, or a reaction from terrorist counterparts on the other side of the sectarian divide. Indeed, the perpetrators might have sought both in a bid to reinvigorate the tit-for-tat vortex of violence that took so long to seal off. The governments in London and in Dublin were quick to condemn the attacks. Yet London will not want to redeploy additional soldiers to Northern Ireland, for fear that this will play into terrorist hands.

It was significant that Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland's deputy prime minister, pointedly and evocatively described the killers as "traitors." As an IRA leader during the 30 plus years of attritional terror endured by Northern Ireland, McGuinness (who helped dole out a good proportion of the misery) today views the "dissident" IRA groups as a challenge to his authority and that of Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, the political party linked to the "mainstream" IRA. Today, the pair lead Irish Republicanism through political channels -- resisting the tradition of using political violence to agitate for an all-Ireland independent republic. McGuinness called the perpetrators traitors to preempt what hard-liners consider his and Adams's own treachery -- taking formal political office as part of a British-ruled Northern Ireland under the 1998 Good Friday peace deal.

So, what now? During the troubles, as the 1969-1998 conflict is now referred to, Dublin was ambivalent about hunting down the IRA in the Republic, given the heavy-handed British response in Northern Ireland and the threat of Protestant terror groups mounting attacks in the Republic.

Now, however, cooperation between the police forces in both jurisdictions is good. The Republic has a highly professional counterterror police unit and an elite Army Ranger corps modeled on the British SAS (the latter of which is now contributing to an EU-UN joint peacekeeping mission in Chad). Both can be deployed against IRA factions hiding out in the Republic.

One can only hope that the dissident IRA factions have not got too much of a head start on the security forces with the recent attacks. As the Irish economy capsizes, the Dublin government -- and the Irish population -- certainly have plenty of other things to worry about. Unemployment, for example, is expected to reach at least 10 percent before the year is out, leaving vast legions of jobless, much as in the 1980s. This time, there is no where to flee to, as the U.S. and European economies falter too.

The recent violence is troubling, but it's not yet the troubles of the 1980s all over again. As Peter de Vries once said, "Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be."

Simon Roughneen is an Irish journalist currently covering southeast Asia.

PETER MUHLY/AFP/Getty Images

How terrorist attacks created the unlikely rise of Avigdor Lieberman.

By Claude Berrebi

This week's Israeli election has yet again failed to produce a clear winner. Still, the results do spotlight two notable trends. First, the Hamas attacks that prompted Israel's war in Gaza, and the war's aftermath, have moved the Israeli political center further toward the right. Second, in the Holy Land, as in most parts of the world, where you stand depends in large part on where you live -- in this case, whether your city or town was recently hit by a suicide bombing or a missile fired by Hamas or Hezbollah.

Voters in areas that recently experienced attacks sharply shifted their allegiance toward right-wing parties. For example, in the town of Sderot, which was heavily damaged by missiles fired by Hamas militants in Gaza, polls show support for Likud rose from 10 percent in 2006 to 33 percent in 2009, and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and other right-wing parties also gained sharply. Support for the dovish Labor Party collapsed from 12 percent in 2006 to just 5 percent this year. A similar swell in the right-wing vote was seen in Jerusalem, which has historically suffered more terrorist attacks than anywhere else in Israel.

However, in secular Tel Aviv, which wasn't rocketed during the Gaza or Lebanon wars, Kadima increased its support and won a plurality of the votes, while Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu scored relatively small gains.

These results are consistent with historical patterns. Research has shown that a terrorist attack conducted shortly before an election increases the vote in that area for right-wing Israeli parties by 1.35 percentage points. That may seem small, but in Israel's fractured system, a few terrorist attacks in the months leading up to an election are often enough to propel the conservative parties to victory.

The trend holds true in this election as well. The unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, followed by the barrage of missiles fired from Gaza into southern Israeli towns, persuaded the Israeli public that the current government was unable to protect them.

In national tracking polls, Likud was leading strongly before the Gaza war, and Kadima managed to win back some support with its aggressive handling of the Gaza war. The biggest winner by far, however, was Lieberman. Hawkish voters who thought that the government ended the Gaza war prematurely warmed to his tougher approach.

It can be said, then, that Hamas played a critical role in thrusting Lieberman, known for his hard line toward Israeli Arabs, into the role of kingmaker for the new Israeli government. Yisrael Beiteinu's 15 seats mean that both Likud and Kadima will be tempted to court Lieberman's support.

His ascent will reduce the chances that Israel's new prime minister will be willing to make concessions to the Palestinians, but in the short term, it could actually force Hamas into a deal. Negotiations are ongoing over the release of abducted Israeli army soldier Gilad Shalit and the status of the smuggling tunnels that run under Gaza into Egypt. Hamas might well conclude that it can to get a better deal from the outgoing Ehud Olmert government than from the incoming one, no matter who heads it.

Livni and Netanyahu would both be likely to talk with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and President Bashir al-Assad of Syria about peace prospects, but Lieberman's presence in any governing coalition would make it doubtful that they would make any concessions on the status of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or stopping settlements.

This election is likely a setback for U.S. President Barack Obama's peacemaking agenda and certainly spotlights the shortcomings of the Israeli electoral system, which desperately needs reform. Yet it does broadly reflect the prevailing sentiment among the Israeli public -- that giving up land for peace has been unsuccessful and has weakened Israel. Above all, it shows that once the dust settles, Middle East peacemakers will have to reckon with the increasingly hawkish and ever more fractious Israeli electorate.

Claude Berrebi is an economist at the Rand Corporation.

Is Islamabad next?

By Shuja Nawaz

The coordinated attacks by the Taliban in Kabul on the eve of U.S. Amb. Richard Holbrooke's arrival were no coincidence. Apart from ratcheting up fear among the citizens of Kabul, these attacks may well reflect a sense of desperation on the part of the Taliban. They fear that the impending arrival of additional troops in Afghanistan and simultaneous attempts to begin a dialogue with elements of the Afghan insurgency could leave them isolated. Hence the need to show their strength and ability to penetrate and attack the government in Kabul at will. Apart from showing off their military prowess, the Taliban wish to highlight President Hamid Karzai's inability to control even his own capital. There may be a regional strategy behind this approach.

In Islamabad, intrepid local journalist Hamid Mir, who in the past has managed to get interviews with militant leaders of all ilk, reported in The News today growing signs of an impeding attack on the capital of Pakistan. There, painted signs on walls warn even other militant leaders, who might be distancing themselves from the Taliban's puritanical dogma, not to collaborate with the "pro-American Zardari government."

So, an attack inside the Pakistani capital cannot be ruled out, and indeed might be imminent.

The aim there might be to hasten the government's retreat from normal rule of law in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas and Swat in favor of a sharia-based system, using the Taliban's convoluted interpretation of Islamic traditions. The Taliban's strong selling point is the absence of good governance and speedy justice in both the tribal areas along the Afghan border and inside the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. If the government resists the temptation to buy them off with sharia laws, it will have taken a first step in reasserting its supremacy. If it chooses to fold, then the Taliban pressure will only increase, and they will attempt to spread their system to other parts of Pakistan, using fear and intimidation, as appears to be the strategy in Afghanistan.

President Karzai may need to show the same resolve and demonstrate his ability to provide good governance in Kabul and the countryside, if he wishes to be reelected in the summer. Given how rapidly U.S. support for him is diminishing, Karzai's efforts may well become an academic exercise as time runs out on his term in office. The challenge for those who wish to succeed him will be to show how they can bring a clean and responsive government to Afghanistan that relies on shared power with the provinces rather than a centralizing of authority in Kabul. In the final analysis, good governance and speedy justice are likely to be the most effective riposte to the Taliban's terror tactics.

Shuja Nawaz is the Director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council and author most recently of FATA: A Most Dangerous Place (CSIS 2009).

Photo: SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

Closing Gitmo is the right decision; now the really hard work starts.

by Matthew Waxman

Today, U.S. President Barack Obama suspended military commissions at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and it is widely expected that later this week he will order its closure. That's the right thing to do. So is leaving options open to get it done, as Obama has. He'll need that flexibility. Proclaiming an intention to close Guantánamo is the easy part; actually doing it is another thing. Even harder will be crafting a new detention policy and legal regime for a post-Guantánamo world. And Obama has offered few details of how he will do so.

A few major elements of the new administration's Guantánamo closure plan are already clear. First, as to those detainees who are not considered the most dangerous, it will step up efforts to transfer them to their home countries (or third countries) that can be trusted to deal with any continuing security threat and not mistreat them. The Bush administration has already sent home two thirds of the roughly 800 total Guantánamo detainees this way, and the new administration hopes its diplomatic goodwill will energize this process.

Second, as to those detainees it seeks to keep locked up, the new administration will pore over the evidence to see if criminal prosecutions can be brought effectively in federal court and without risking disclosure of critical intelligence sources and methods.

The big question is what to do with any detainees who are too dangerous or heinous to send home but who cannot be effectively prosecuted. Some expect this category to be very small, maybe even zero. Don't rest assured. The recent withdrawal of charges against the alleged "20th hijacker," Mohamed al-Kahtani, due to his improper treatment at the hands of interrogators is but one example of the difficulties Obama will face. The government has expanded criminal statutes for terrorism since 9/11, and courts have gained experience in handling terrorism trials. But even when the information linking some of the most dangerous suspects to al Qaeda terrorism is reliable, it may not be usable or admissible in court.

If federal prosecutions aren't workable in many cases, and releasing the most dangerous detainees is ruled out, the new administration has several options -- all of them with significant downsides. It could continue to hold current and future detainees in U.S. facilities as "enemy combatants" and let current habeas corpus litigation continue through the courts. Or it could try to prosecute them in reformed military commissions with more lenient evidentiary rules. But both these options look much like the deeply discredited Bush administration policy, only moved inside U.S. borders.

Another option would be to work with Congress on new legislation authorizing "administrative detention" for periods of time of a carefully limited category of detainees, pursuant to strict standards and robust judicial review. Opponents of this approach justifiably worry that such laws would institutionalize detention without trial.

Any closure plan will entail risks and difficult trade-offs. The new administration should not hurry to adopt new detention schemes that lack the established features and protections of American criminal trials. But nor should it rule out legal tools that might durably protect both liberty and security within constitutional and international legal bounds. Either way, the thorny problems of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects picked up in lawless regions or amid covert intelligence operations will persist long after the 250 remaining Guantánamo cases are resolved. Obama may close Guantánamo, but the complex legal and policy challenges that led to its creation are not going away anytime soon.

Matthew Waxman is associate professor at Columbia Law School, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. He previously held senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council.

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