Defeating ISIS

These days I seem to do most of my writing / thinking / arguing etc. on Quora. So for the record, here's what I'm saying about ISIS and the UK vote to join in airstrikes. (Question : "House of Commons in UK voted for action against ISIS/ISIL in Syria - Is this going to be another blunder like Iraq?)

It's utterly the wrong thing to do. And strategically somewhere between pointless and very counter-productive.

But it's not quite the same as the Iraq blunder. Iraq was an unforced war of choice against a non-beligerant nation for the purposes of socially re-engineering the middle-east : something we never had the ability to do and should have recognised from the start that we couldn't do.

In this case, the war has come to us. Or at least to France which is a pretty close ally. And IS explicitly say they WANT a war with us. (It's precisely because they want it that we shouldn't give it to them.) Nevertheless, IS is threatening us in a way that Iraq wasn't when we chose to involve ourselves in it. And we need some strategic response.

The basic problem in Syria is that the West wants to get rid of Assad. And two local powers - Russia and Iran - want to keep him. The West can't move fully against IS until that is resolved. We can't put boots on the ground in Syria without either a) Assad's permission, or b) explicitly going against Assad and therefore Russia and Iran.

This is why we're paralyzed. We all know that airstrikes can't actually beat ISIS ... airstrikes by themselves never beat anyone. We know that going in on the ground really would be a blunder, putting us into the quagmire where we try to hold territory and rebuild a state, under attack from all sides : the Assad government, more surreptitiously by Russia and Iran and their proxies, and by the remnant Sunnis who see themselves fighting for survival surrounded by hostile Shiites.

So, avoiding the quagmire, we have the second most amazingly idiotically bad strategy of all time ...

- We're going to bomb people from the air, with no hope of achieving any concrete victory.

- Some people we bomb will be ISIS fighters but many will be innocent civilians.

- Most of whom never wanted ISIS there in the first place; don't support ISIS, and only collaborate with it out of fear.

- We're going to teach those civilian Syrian Sunnis that we nevertheless consider that their lives are expendable in our loooooong war of attrition against ISIS.

- That's mainly about us "being seen" to do something.

- We'll act all shocked and outraged if some of the next generation of young Sunnis growing up in the area start to think of themselves as on ISIS's side and the West as their enemies. How perfidious can they be, considering we were only trying to help them?

- We will wait for a "miracle". That is, for some other local faction, who are nice and good people. That we'd be proud to associate ourselves with. And very friendly with us. And courageous enough to fight against both ISIS on the ground AND to march on and take over from Assad. And when that faction arises, won't our air-support be wonderfully useful to them?

That's it. That's the current strategy. Keep bombing people, and killing mostly civilians, until the miracle group turn up and do the dirty work for us.

Yeah, I think that sounds utterly fucked too.

So here's what we should be doing.

Phone up Assad, Russia and Iran. Tell them that our priorities have changed. That we aren't interested in deposing Assad at this time ... or any time in the near future. Tell him we'd like to co-operate against the common enemy. That we're willing to use our air-power to support his ground-troops against that enemy. In return we want a deal where he promises not to use chemical weapons (he won't need them with the all bombs we can provide him). And that he accepts some NATO troops / UN Peacekeepers on the ground in the retaken areas, as a guarantee that there isn't too much retribution against the Sunni population. Also we'll ask that he cuts a reasonably lenient deal with the other non ISIS, non Al Qaeda rebel factions that rose up against him.

Do the deal. Get the ISIS region back under Syrian government control. Then do a similar deal with the Iraqi government.

Maybe if we're really lucky we can get some kind of semi-autonomous Sunni area protected from Shiites, where we can work with local leaders. We don't want to make the mistake of abandoning Sunnis to vengeful Shiites, which is one of the processes that led to ISIS in the first place.

Does that sound like we've allied ourselves with an evil monster and sold out our other anti-Assad friends in Syria? Are we bad people when we do this?

Yes. And yes.

So here's the question. How serious are we? How badly do we want to kill ISIS? Are we (and our politicians) willing to pay the price?

To which Rupert Baines replied :

And the other thing people seem to ignore: we have been bombing ISIS for 14 months in Iraq

Have we been bombing civilians there?

If so, odd that their government is ok with it

If not, why would we do so in Syria?

No, we have been bombing oil fields, military bases and combat positions

And my further (lengthy) reply

I'm not ignoring that. I'm aware we're bombing a bit of Iraq ... at the invitation of the Iraqi government. And with the hope that Iraqi ground-troops will eventually move back into the IS region and re-establish the government's control there. As far as I know, we are NOT bombing a bit of Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. We are not co-ordinating with Syrian ground-troops. We don't particularly want them to re-establish control over the region. Indeed, we have an ill-disguised hope that Assad is still going to fall to some other rebel faction.

I know people seem to think that international law and boundaries are basically ignorable. Last decade our leaders promoted the idea that our expedience trumps such niceties. So we undermined the entire system.

But THAT is one of the big problematic legacies we're struggling with now ... do we want to re-establish the rule of law? Or it a free-for-all where might-makes-right? We can't have it both ways. We can't ignore international law whenever we like, and then convincingly claim that our wider actions are aimed at, and justified by, establishing such law and stability. Even if the British conveniently blind ourselves to the hypocrisy, the rest of the world notices.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-a-borderless-world-the-days-when-we-could-fight-foreign-wars-and-be-safe-at-home-may-be-long-a6741146.html

ISIS define themselves against the system that we built and that we are ostensibly defending. If we now casually ignore our own system, then we just make ISIS's argument for them.

Everyone sort of admits that when we fight ISIS, we're "fighting an idea". And the priority when fighting an idea is to have a BETTER idea to offer in its place. But that's exactly what we don't have. Instead we're reiterating the mistake of Iraq : we break stuff, but don't know how to put it back together again. And then we're surprised when what emerges to fill the vacuum isn't to our taste. We hate all their ideas ... Islamic rules for creating a stable society through extreme religious obedience and harsh punishment; but we have no ideas that work better for them in their place.

We allegedly love the idea of autonomous nation-states. But draw and ignore boundaries for our colonial and post-colonial convenience. We allegedly love democracy, but support the Egyptian army overthrowing an elected Muslim Brotherhood. We love free-markets and competition, but Iraq was a feeding trough of well connected corporations sucking up the redevelopment budget.

I'm not saying this to make an argument that Islamic attacks on the West are justified because of our hypocrisy. Don't accuse me of that. I AM saying that the hypocrisy reveals the weakness of the ideas we're offering them. They are superficial facades which even we don't respect or believe in, deep down. But without having something better to offer, how do we "win" against the idea of the Caliphate?

And without a strategy for winning, you have nothing but tactics, designed to maintain some kind of stand-off.

When the attack comes in England, it will almost certainly be executed by British born or resident ISIS sympathizers. It's likely not to be directed from the ISIS region but be planned here too. And largely financed locally or from a very diffuse global network of funders. How exactly do tactical strikes on oil-fields in the ISIS regions prevent, or degrade ISIS's capacities to execute, such an attack?

Airstrikes attacking the military and even economy of the Islamic State are a perfectly valid tactic ... IF you are supporting a ground invasion to seize control of the territory and hand it over to a legitimate authority. That's fine.

But don't try to fool yourself, or anyone else, that airstrikes against ISIS territory are at all useful in preventing the next "terrorist atrocity" in London. There's no possible way that an airstrike in Syria is going to do that. There are no fat causal pipes that can be cut. Just diffuse memes floating across the internet and individuals circulating through the international air-transport system.

It's stupid to imagine that airstrikes in Syria will protect us. And that's what's totally terrifying, the ignorant level of political discourse. People who are meant to be responsible enough to run the country engaging in magical thinking about what military action can and can't do.

Airstrikes in Syria are ONLY useful in support of a ground-invasion. WHERE IS THE GROUND INVASION?

Saddam's Chemical Weapons

Status Report:

Saddam's Chemical Weapons :  Existed, sold to him by the US / European companies, covered up by Pentagon at the cost of their own soldier's health due to potential embarrassment.

My cynicism : Undiminished.

The Weaponization of Social Media

Open the Future: #War

Extra Judicial Assassination

Glenn Greenwald:

Obama - the killer of Anwar al-Awlaki, Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman, and countless other innocent men, women, teenagers and children - could not possibly condemn Israeli actions in Gaza without indicting himself. Extra-judicial assassinations, once roundly condemned by US officials, are now a symbol of the Obama presidency, as the US and Israel converge more than ever before: if not in interests, than certainly in tactics.

The Case Against Obama

1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn't "precise" or "surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue. 
2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.  
3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.

More ...

Stratfor

John Robb comments on The Fall of Stratfor.

Wikileaks notices the hypocrisy of an organisation that hates Julian Assange but still uses Wikileaks material in its intelligence collecting.

Violent vs. Non-Violent Resistence

Looks an interesting paper.

Back when discussing Eustonianism (whatever happened to that?) I took issue with their worry that

Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology is widespread today. It threatens democratic values and the lives and freedoms of people in many countries ... like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, and not excused.

As it turns out, the threat of Islamist terrorism was much exaggerated .

As the link above explains :

So the danger is big and growing, and Islamists are the source. Right?

Wrong, actually.

The European Union's Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010 states that in 2009 there were "294 failed, foiled, or successfully executed attacks" in six European countries. This was down almost one-third from the total in 2008 and down by almost one-half from the total in 2007.

So in most of Europe, there was no terrorism. And where there was terrorism, the trend line pointed down.

As for who's responsible, forget Islamists. The overwhelming majority of the attacks- 237 of 294 - were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA. A further 40 terrorists schemes were pinned on leftist and/or anarchist terrorists. Rightists were responsible for four attacks. Single-issue groups were behind two attacks, while responsibility for a further 10 was not clear.

Islamists? They were behind a grand total of one attack. Yes, one. Out of 294 attacks. In a population of half a billion people. To put that in perspective, the same number of attacks was committed by the Comité d'Action Viticole, a French group that wants to stop the importation of foreign wine.

We've now just seen what, by anyone's standards, is a major terrorist attack in Europe : 93 killed, another 97 injured. Ie. that's more killed - though fewer injured survivors - than the 7/7 bombings in London. Does that make Anders Breivik's cause - a brand of right-wing paranoid euro-culturalism - a supreme evil? Of course not. Or especially to be worried about? I doubt it. Should it make those who've talked up the clash of civilisations and who bang on about the threat of Europe being overrun by Islamic (and other immigrant) cultures consider their words more carefully? Yes, a bit.

But I remind myself of what I wrote in response to the Eustonians :

But let's continue with the Eustonians beyond values : lives and freedoms are under attack too. It's true, and the bad news is that it's getting worse.

But not because Islamism is especially wicked or powerful. Our safety is diminishing because, as the fourth-generation war people put it, the nation-state has lost the monopoly on violence. All non-state actors, whatever their ideological motivations, are potentially empowered by new technologies and organizational structures, to cause more damage than ever before.

More people allegedly die in gang-warfare in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro than in the Palestinian Intifada. The US confronts a similar rising violence on its Mexican border. These are symptoms of the democratisation of violence, and the shift in loyalties from the nation-state to some other identity-system, whether religious or ethnic or economic.

I don't approve of that thing that the Eustonians label "Islamist terrorism". But I see it for what it is : one among dozens of fundamentalisms, acting as one among dozens of malign networks. You could scour "Islamism" from the earth, and tomorrow the same problems would be with us under another label : an uncertain world where the dispossessed search for identity and self-assertion through membership of gangs and tribes with excessively anti-liberal ideologies. Such gangs must have an anti-liberal ideology, because notions of them-and-us, sinners-and-saved, infidel-and-martyr are the basic principle holding them together in the first place. If your sense of self depends on your membership of a gang. And the main organizing principle of the gang is that members are good and non-members are bad, then inevitably liberal values of tolerance and egalitarianism are out of the window.

I'd sign a manifesto that recognised this; that recognised that violent terrorism is the hallmark of all repressive fundamentalisms. And that the proper response is to build benign networks of participation and discover new identities based on shared projects and activities : membership of alt.currencies or gifting circles, free-software projects and blogrolls; quilting circles and book-clubs; theatre, music, dance and a million other things humans do together to express who they are. This, and only this, do I consider to be a serious attempt to fight "terror". :-)

I stand by this. (Even the slightly silly rhetorical flourish at the end.) Even though there are some slight differences. Breivik may not have had much of a network (though that remains an open question at time of writing. He was certainly on the fringes of Euro-paranoid discussion circles.) He seems to have been economically well off (but then again so was Bin Laden) It's not clear whether he has been searching for identity and self-assertion though he clearly was worried that some kind of European identity was under threat.

Still, despite the differences, I think my model still stands. Terrorism is cultural insecurity + technological empowerment. We don't want to lose the technological empowerment, so we must lose the cultural insecurity.

Bloody hell! You want to know where the next generation of improvised hi-tech weapons are coming from? Look at what hackers are doing in war-zones!

John Robb :

A trial could be cathartic and that is dangerous. It would reveal the gap between demonization and reality. It would also deflate the fear bubble. Fear was/is so useful in making the defense and homeland security dollars flow (at levels beyond reason) and perpetuating the government's emergency powers.

OK. So maybe I was wrong (again) about Osama Bin Laden's active role in today's al Qaida.

I'm trying to think of something interesting to say about Osama Bin Laden.

His death ought to be a momentous occasion but I'm not sure I have much to add. I guess I admit that I am surprised. I think I would have bet that he'd be able to manage to avoid capture for the rest of his life. So as a demonstration of the US's operational ability and capacity to project its power anywhere in the world it's an important fact.

I think I'd also say that if anyone, ever, "had it coming to him" it was Bin Laden. This is a man who dedicated half his life to stirring up a war between Islam and the "Western" (Christian / Liberal Democratic / Capitalist) powers, with some hope of cruelly damaging the US, if not destroying it outright. It was inevitable that the US was going to react against him. It was a war Bin Laden freely chose. (And I suppose didn't regret.)

That isn't to say that I think any any attempt to make war on, or destroy the US, deserves death. I think there can be legitimate reasons for such an action; motivated by the hope of putting something better in its place.

But those causes that I believe motivated Bin Laden (a desire to expel infidel US troops from the Arabian Holy Land, outrage at the pernicious influence of Western values on the Islamic world) were not ones I would support or condone. (There's an issue with the Western powers' support for the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, but we have little reason to think Bin Laden represented the kind of progressive alternative that we'd want.)

So what follows? Is it "over"?

In one sense, it clearly isn't. I follow John Robb's general analysis of the "bazaar of violence" and not a "great man" view of history. In this analysis, Bin Laden played the role of the "venture" terrorist, investing in, and retrospectively giving a stamp of approval to, the terrorist actions of others. He wasn't operationally involved, and rarely the prime mover of such plots. He may even not have been much concerned with strategy except at the most abstract level. He was not no longer a "leader" in the normal sense. Hence, his removal may have little effect on the current operations of al Qaida.

On the other hand. Much of the "War on Terror" propaganda was convenient rhetoric for the politicians of the day to seize and retain more power, hand fat contracts over to their cronies, and accuse their critics of aiding the enemy. They seem keen to push this message that it's not over, undoubtedly because being in a constant state of war is highly convenient for them.

So one must question that. It isn't fully over. But perhaps we should be sceptical of exactly how over it isn't. (If that makes any sense.)

What else?

I would suspect that Obama will want to disengage from Afghanistan as quickly as possible now he can claim a real "mission accomplished". There are many reasons to stay, but none as good as the reasons for getting out. And it will be perverse not to take this opportunity. It won't be good for those in Afghanistan hoping for peace or a liberal state. But such promises from the West were always a cruel illusion. NATO troops can deliver neither deep cultural engineering nor economic prosperity to Afghanistan.

What we can and should do, is arbitrarily declare that every woman in Afghanistan is threatened and oppressed. Every woman who wants to leave should be given unconditional asylum in Europe or the US, and receive support from the NATO forces to travel. With luck we can do something useful to help women escape the oppression of a vicious culture, and perhaps the men of Afghanistan may learn to respect what they fear losing.

Couple of final links :

Guardian analysis plays down Bin Laden's actual achievements. I suspect this profoundly misunderestimates him. Much of the damage done to the US in the last 10 years has been self-inflicted by bad politicians and opportunistic oligarchs. Nevertheless, it was Bin Laden who set the trap and lured the US down this path. Without him there'd have been no invasion of Afghanistan, probably no invasion of Iraq, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Ghraib, no descent into the use of torture, no polarisation of the American people, possibly no unmanagable budget deficit (how much money was wasted in Iraq again?), no Tea Party, no blood in the water, smell of American weakness. Bush might have bumbled harmlessly through his presidency like a less charming Boris Johnson.

The US today is far different from the shining beacon of prosperity and moral authority it was in 2000, when all it had to worry about was the odd presidential sex scandal and some irrational exuberance around internet startups.

And Osama Bin Laden was undoubtedly a significant cause of that.

Oh, and here's what I wrote on September 11th, 2003.

Thomas L Knapp :

QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.

This is absolutely awesome if true.

Palantir appologise to Glenn Greenwald for any part they've played in trying to attack him and liberal journalists who support Wikileaks.

Curioser and curioser.

Update : Greenwald does an excellent job in explaining what's at stake.

Wikileaks points to "plans to bring down wikileaks" by a couple of security companies.

Lots of new leaking sites.

Some have been around for a while, some are new.

There are complaints about wikileaks, some of which seem valid - ie. it may be an issue that the sign-up for for your mirror-site to be automatically updated from wikileaks is sent plaintext.

However, most criticisms of wikileaks don't matter. It's wikileaks which has inspired this wave of imitators. It's wikileaks which has goaded existing whistleblower sites to up their game. And it's Assange who has created the "plausible premise" that support for leaks is a forceful political action, capable of striking fear into the most powerful conspiracies on earth.

Remember the wikileaks slogan : "courage is contagious", which seems increasingly profound now.

PayPal cuts line of funding to Wikileaks.

I hope my donation got through the other day.

I'm not the one to judge this, but here's an interesting exchange in blog comments a couple of months ago :

subpatre says :

Wikileaks published reams of documents with the unredacted names, even home addresses and relatives names, of Afghans who opposed Talliban, supported US or NATO, or in some way helped the current government. Collaborators. These folks will now die or be tortured —really tortured, like with electric drills, battery acid, etcetera— by theBase or Talliban thugs. Not all, but most will.

Which I believe gives anyone of conscience a pause for thought.

However MMCloud asks :

Has anyone actually seen the names of Afghans listed in some of the documents? Can you point me to where they are? I can't seem to find them. My regex/grep skills were always poor

To which one BF Skinner replies :

@MMcloud "anyone actually seen the names of Afghans "
I have not. I figure the reporters at the Post and Times might have; but all I've heard from people at DoD is there 'might' or 'possibly' be such a disclosure.

Would be great to know more.

According to wikileaks supporters, the US DoD haven't been able to point to concrete examples of anyone killed due to the leaks. Undoubtedly there will be people who are made angry, for example, by revelations about the government in Yemen. And that may recruit people for Al Qaeda. But we have to ask how much the government's own deceit of its people is the root cause of such anger.

US Government witch-hunt against sites which present wikileaks data continues.

Tableau Software : Why we removed wikileaks visualizations.

Huh? Do people still want a war with Iran?