Schneier on Security

Skeptical • July 1, 2015 5:24 PM

@Clive: AQ can be shown to be an invention of the US Govt,

There is no sense in which that statement is true.

@Gerard: Yes, the terrorists of Al Qaida changed the skyline of NY. That’s what you get when you piss people off.

Which people did AQ speak for, Gerard? They were, and in their forms today are, an organization seeking power. UBL’s ultimate objective, his desired end-state, was the establishment of a caliphate in the Middle East, which required the defeat of the various governments of the Middle East (or at least their collapse). UBL believed that those governments relied upon the United States to exist – remember that, in 1990, he offered to raise a force of volunteers to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq (the Saudi Government declined and went with the US coalition instead). He also believed that the US could easily be defeated (an incorrect lesson drawn from Somalia), as the US would not accept casualties while his personnel would be highly committed.

So, UBL’s path in broad strokes was: attack the US, and ultimately sever its support for governments in the Middle East; then undermine and topple those governments, re-establishing a caliphate in the process.

It’s an incredibly bad strategy, as its various premises are simply false. But it fit with his worldview, and so he and others took it.

The reaction of USG to 9/11 made things a lot worse. They changed the skylines of lots of places in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen. How do you think the people who live there are gonna think about the US?

Be nice and the threats will stop. That’s your strategy in a nutshell. That’s a good strategy in many social circumstances, but it’s a very bad strategy in others. Getting a society to effectively oppose terrorist organizations that operate in its midst (e.g. AQ in Taliban controlled Afghanistan) requires much more than simply encouraging members of that society to take a positive view of you. For example, a Yemeni villager might kindle warm feelings in his heart if the US sent nothing but aid packages to his village, but that villager isn’t going to do anything about the AQ cell building bombs in his village because they’ll kill him if he tries. Worse, that cell or its supporters can use the aid packages (which they will acquire and control before it can be distributed to the populace) to exert further control over the village and to support its own operations.

You’re taking an incredibly complex problem and reducing it to the framework we use in our personal relationships with others. Unfortunately this isn’t that simple a problem.

Put differently: you’re using the wrong metaphor to think about this. Map out the various entities involved in the problem, describe how you want the system to look as your objective, and then think about actions that can be taken to produce that objective, given the likely courses of actions taken by those other entities in pursuit of their own interests and in response to, or in anticipation of, your actions.

Skeptical • July 3, 2015 8:33 AM

@Clive : The idea of a “global conspiracy” by muslims that the US Govt put to the court and then publicaly pushed is ludicrous for several reasons. Thus the idea of AQ failed the “sniff test” that investagative journalists use.

It’s highly misleading to call AQ a “global conspiracy by muslims”. AQ members account for an extraordinarily small percentage of the total population of Muslims in the world. It’s like someone in 1941 describing the Nazis as a “global conspiracy of Europeans.”

Think about this idea of muslims from various sects getting together, they hate each other with a hate inbred from infancy, even on the “enemies enemy” theory they would not start a collaboration.

Who said anything about “Muslims from various sects getting together”?

Secondly history shows us that terrorists that grew up together don’t trust each other let alone those a town away, it’s why they form cells and use peasonal contact. So the idea of halfway around the globe as the US Govt indicated is extreamly suspect, especialy as there was no know communications paths between them.

Read up on collaborations between the IRA, FARC, ETA, or between the JRA and the PFLP, or a dozen other links between various international terrorist organizations. Read some of the correspondence between al Qaeda in Iraq and AQ-Central.

And as we now know OBL just happened to have been part of the house of Saud and received CIA etc training to attack the Russians. It was through this he realised that the biggest threat to the Middle East was the cosy relationship between US politicos and neo-cons and the house of Saud.

No, the Arabs in Afghanistan were small in number for much of the 1980s – the CIA did not train Bin Laden. It had developed relationships with much larger, indigenous groups in that area.

Skeptical • July 4, 2015 3:13 PM

@Clive: You quote Robin Cook from an op-ed he wrote shortly before his death:

Throughout the 80s he [UBL] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.

To put the op-ed in context, it was written in 2005; Cook’s last day as Foreign Secretary was in June 2001. There is almost nothing in those sentences which is true. Even his bizarre theory as to the origin of the name “al Qaeda” is incorrect – unless you think Robin Cook knows more about the name than Bin Laden.

Every reputable researcher to have looked at this issue, including Peter Bergen (who interviewed Bin Laden) and Stephen Coll (who wrote one of the best books on CIA support of Afghan rebels in the 1980s), have found no evidence that CIA had any contact with Bin Laden or that CIA was funding Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Apart from independent researchers, the CIA chiefs of station involved in the program have denied it, and Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have denied it.

You can however find the claim repeated ad nauseam on various conspiracy-theory sites. That’s about the extent of support for it.

Look, you have to understand that there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans willing to fight against the Soviets, and who already were fighting by the time CIA became involved. By comparison, at their peak, there were perhaps a thousand or two Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, and those volunteers were funded by Bin Laden and the Saudis. The major players in the fight were the native Afghans, and the primary concerns of CIA and the USG were ethnic divisions among the Afghans and the control exerted, and choices made by, the ISI, through which US funds and supplies frequently went. Arab volunteer forces were a strategic non-factor in the overall fight, were a source of friction with the native Afghans, and would be a source of sensitivity with the Israelis. So I wouldn’t expect CIA to have had any contact with Bin Laden, much less to have played any role in the formation of his forces.

It is possible, however, to view US funding/supplies as enabling factors for the creation of Bin Laden’s forces, insofar as the ISI controlled where that funding/supplies was directed, and insofar as the ISI-preferred destinations were frequently Islamist groups with more ideological points in common with Bin Laden than other native Afghan groups.

As to your comments about ISI, who has any illusions? When President Clinton launched cruise missiles against an AQ complex in 1998, which were unfortunately on target hours after Bin Laden had departed, the casualties included numerous ISI personnel who were apparently at the compound as well. I doubt that discovery contributed to US-Pakistani relations.

@Gerard: But I do believe that 9/11 could have been prevented if Afghanistan was rebuild after the war with the Soviets. Unfortunately we will never know because we can’t rewind history.

I suspect AQ would simply have used a different haven, perhaps somewhere in Africa.

As to rebuilding Afghanistan… a nation riven by stark ethnic divisions, stark tribal divisions, and in which other nations have undertaken strategies at odds with that? I think it would have required a commitment of money and troops, over a long period of time, that would exceed the political will of any country who could do so.

I certainly don’t deny the humanitarian reasons for doing so, but as we’ve surely learned by now, state-building requires enormous time and resources. That’s especially the case when the state in question lacks a natural unity.

Failed states, and the horrible circumstances they entail, are often difficult problems to solve without a steadfast willingness to invest enormous military, diplomatic, social, and economic resources – and over a long period of time, despite any casualties, and with a great deal of care and expertise. NGOs and nations have learned the hard way that merely shipping aid into such areas often results in either the enrichment of groups at odds with a desirable end-state and in the prolonging of suffering, or in the creation of a system that cannot be self-sustaining.

What Bin Laden missed, and what ISIS seems to be missing as well, is that while the US is generally much less willing to sacrifice American lives for the sake of nation-building, the US is willing to sustain casualties in the course of an effort to destroy a violent enemy. I’m not sure ISIS leadership realizes that a major terrorist attack on the US, undertaken on behalf of ISIS, will rapidly expedite the death of their organization.