Recent Small Wars Journal themes are in today’s news
Three stories in today’s news connect directly to themes discussed here at the Small Wars Journal blog. These three themes are central and unresolved questions about how the U.S. and the West should protect themselves from global terror threats.
Somalia strike and offshore balancing
A helicopter-borne U.S. special operations group, apparently operating from a U.S. warship in the Indian Ocean, attacked and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan along with several of his associates along a road in southern Somalia. According to the cited New York Times article, the U.S. special operations soldiers recovered the bodies and presumably other interesting intelligence products from the site.
This strike will boost the argument for “offshore balancing,” a subject of intense discussion after an email by General Charles Krulak, USMC (ret) in support of offshore balancing for Afghanistan found its way to Small Wars Journal blog.
After the “Blackhawk Down” episode of 1993, there is no chance that U.S. policymakers would consider any form of counterinsurgency or stability operations in Somalia. Intelligence cooperation, covert action, raids, and offshore balancing are the only choices available to U.S. policymakers. It remains to be seen whether these tools will be enough; as happened in 2001, a catastrophic attack on the U.S. homeland sourced from Somalia might change these assumptions.
But for now, U.S. policymakers dealing with Somalia have to make intelligence cooperation, covert action, raids, and offshore balancing work. The U.S. apparently received enough intelligence from local sources to make the Nabhan raid a success. Such sources, combined with other surveillance and quarantine efforts, might be enough to prevent Somalia from hosting terror threats with a global reach. Most important for U.S. policymakers, the U.S. could sustain offshore balancing for Somalia indefinitely.
So the question will then follow, if the U.S. has to make offshore balancing work for Somalia, why can’t it choose to make it work for Afghanistan?
Sri Lanka Rules in the Swat Valley
On August 27, Niel Smith opened a discussion at Small Wars Journal blog on the Sri Lanka Rules for ending an insurgency. Today’s New York Times ran a story on the discovery of scores, perhaps hundreds of dead bodies dumped in the streets of Swat, Pakistan. These are the bodies of Taliban sympathizers and some allege that they were left as calling cards of the Pakistani army (a charge the Pakistani army leadership denies).
Earlier this year, the Sri Lankan government used extreme brutality to end, at least for now, the LTTE insurgency. The Sri Lankan army’s violence successfully cut a path to the center of the LTTE’s leadership, destroying it. The army’s violence may also have tilted the “balance of terror” in the government’s favor.
Western counterinsurgency theory makes the hopeful assumption that eliciting positive cooperation from the indigenous population is the most effective course of action against the insurgents. Needless to say, not everyone in the world agrees with this assumption. Someone is attempting to get the residents of Swat to fear the anti-Taliban more than the Taliban. In the battle for “hearts and minds,” they must believe that winning over the mind must come first. We should monitor this experiment in applied sociology.
Raid a New York apartment, update the terror database
I have written about TIDE (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment), the U.S. government’s extensive database of global terror suspects. I have asserted that this database is the U.S. government’s most effective counterterrorism tool. Naturally, such databases are only useful if they are constantly maintained.
At 2:30 am on Monday, a dozen federal agents bashed down the door of a New York City apartment in what will very likely end up, in one form or another, as a small maintenance procedure for the terrorist database.
As reported by the New York Times, the raid yielded no arrests, no weapons, and the discovery of no conspiracies. According the article, federal agents had followed an Afghan immigrant to this apartment and its occupants. They suspected the man of having ties to al Qaeda. The agents seized a computer and cell phones, which government technicians will now scour.
TIDE will get an update. But will the apartment dwellers get a new door?
