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JIHAD DOCUMENTS AND ANALYSIS

A set of analytical pieces and the captured al Qaida documents on which they are based that have appeared recently in the blogosphere in such places as DNI, American Future and The Small Wars Council.

A lot to dive in here, all of it worth reading and it also gives me the unmistakable feeling that the intelligentsia of jihad are avid readers of American military theory on the web including 4GW, COIN doctrine, asymmetric warfare and so on.

Hmm, given the possibility of a feedback loop being in operation, perhaps we need more blog posts convincing al Qaida that it needs to have a gold-plated weapons acquisition and appropriation process. When Osama bin Laden is reported to have ordered a QDR then we may be on the cusp of victory.

Dr. Michael Scheuer – ” al Qaida Insurgency Doctrine: Aiming For A Long War” at The Jamestown Foundation

William Lind – “Army Wins One“

The Combating Terrorism Center :

“Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities“

“Stealing al- Qa’ida’s Playbook“

Harmony Documents in English and Arabic PDF files

DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS AND THE USE OF FORCE [ UPDATED]

Marc Schulman at American Future posted on a real eye-opener of a survey from MIT on the partisan attitudes toward the use of force by the United States. Here are the results ( hat tip to Marc for the following table):

“Democrats (percent expressing approval)

1. To protect American allies under attack by foreign nations: 75.7%
2. To help the UN uphold international law: 70.5%
3. To destroy a terrorist camp: 57.3%
4. To intervene in a region where there is genocide or a civil war: 55.6%
5. To insure the supply of oil: 10.2%
6. To assist the spread of democracy: 6.5%

Average: 46.0%

Republicans (percent expressing approval)
1. To destroy a terrorist camp: 94.8%
2. To protect American allies under attack by foreign nations: 91.9%
3. To intervene in a region where there is genocide or a civil war: 61.4%
4. To assist the spread of democracy: 53.2%
5. To insure the supply of oil: 40.9%
6. To help the UN uphold international law: 35.5%

Average: 63.0% “

A sharp divergence to say the least and a decided discomfort on the Democratic side for using military force to pursue American national interests as opposed to more abstract and altruistic goals. Though even in the latter case the morally persuasive objective of halting genocide lags behind the more ethereal ” help UN uphold international law”.

In my humble opinion, the sophisticated bipartisan foreign policy elite hews closer to the positions expressed by the Democratic respondents, though with far greater realism for such things as supporting allies or securing oil. It was Jimmy Carter, after all, who was the first president to formally define the Persian Gulf as a vital American interest.

The Bush administration is probably to the right of even the Republican respondents in the survey, though currently their options for the use of force are much tempered by the magnitude of our existing commitments. Hence the greater emphasis on diplomacy in the second term.

UPDATE:

Dr. Von weighs in in the first of several posts.

UNPALATABLE OPTIONS [ UPDATED]

Colonel Pat Lang of Sic Semper Tyrannis and counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson have penned an article for In The National Interest on American options in Iran. Interestingly, as fairly severe critics of the Bush administration and the failures of the IC in Iraq they see Iran’s nuclear program as a real and dire issue for which exists a paucity of good options.

What if grand diplomacy fails ( And diplomacy will only succeed if all the great powers, the UN and Iran’s neighbors are solidly arrayed against a completely isolated Teheran – and we offer the Iranians a ” good deal” – and even then this will only serve to delay the progress of the nuke program) ?:

Our real problem is the nature of the Iranian regime – particularly the faction that backs President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which represents the “permanent revolution” wing of Iranian Islamist hardliners. My view is if the consequences of striking Iran are as significant as projected and the nuclear facilities targets are as hardened, dispersed and concealed as described, that we might as well make a grand decapitation attack instead against Iran’s hardline faction and organs of security, control and communication, depriving the survivors of effective levers of power over the Iranian people. Sort of an Operation Desert Fox on steroids and methamphetamines. Perhaps we can incite and arm the Baluchi tribesmen of Eastern Iran as well, though Pakistan would probably be rather jumpy about that kind of a covert-op. After we max out the decapitation option we can turn our attention to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and degrade it methodically.

Pull the arrows out of the Mullah’s quiver before breaking their bow.

UPDATE:

“How we duped the West, by Iran’s nuclear negotiator” in the UK Telegraph

(Hat Tip: Memeorandum)

RECOMMENDED READING

Younghusband at Coming Anarchy on the ” Warrior Gods” of Zen Buddhism.

Extra Zenpundit brownie points awarded to YH for choice of topic. Huzzah !

Fabius Maximus at DNI on part III of his grand strategy series “America’s Most Dangerous Enemy“

This one is quite a mixed bag. I’ll give Fabius kudos on his larger theme of the dangers of paranoia and hubris and I like his reference to the late historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic concept of ” the paranoid style”. On the other hand, Fabius gets the interplay of anti-Communism and Containment policy in the history of the Cold War wrong in my view, often from gross oversimplification. Likewise, I think his interpretation of Dr. Barnett’s views are often the opposite of what Tom intended, particularly in Blueprint For Action, which may be a result of the influence of Wiliam Lind’s recent review.

Josh at The Adventures of Chester asks ” The Key Strategic Question” – is Islam compatible with a free society ? Josh writes:

“To say yes to our question, one assumes that there are aspects of being Muslim and faithful to Islam, that can coexist peacefully with liberty, tolerance, and equality. The strategy that follows is one of identifying the groups and sects within Islam that adhere to these notions of their religion, and then encouraging them, favoring them, propagating them, and splitting them off from the elements of Islamic practice that are all too incompatible with the portions of modernity that invigorate men’s souls: free inquiry, free association, free commerce, free worship, or even the freedom to be left alone.

To answer no, one states that Islam itself is fundamentally irreconcilable with freedom. This leads to a wholly different set of tactical moves to isolate free societies from Islam”

This post by Josh gets to the heart of the strategic debate between those like Thomas P.M. Barnett who advocate connectivity to shrink a Gap that contains a majority of the Muslim world and William Lind who argues for isolating ourselves from ” centers of disorder” and those migrants who would bear disorder with them into the heart of our civilization.

THE NATURE OF CONNECTIVITY

John Robb at Global Guerillas had an important and thought provoking post on the effects of System Perturbations entitled ” Big Bangs” – a casual term that Thomas P.M. Barnett uses for the invasion of Iraq . After a nice applied physics explanation of systems and feedback, Robb writes:

“If we look at today’s global environment we see a moderately unstable system. It is a relatively high performance system that is increasingly controlled by global markets. This explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, our drive towards a high performance system, powered by rampant global interconnectivity, has outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).

For example, instead of building resilience into the system, we have embarked on a path of introducing more rogue feedback into the system (the invasion of Iraq seen as a “big bang” in the Middle East). This is based on the belief that Fukuyama’s “End of History,” where we all live in capitalist democracies is inexorable. It’s not. There isn’t any guarantee that our current system is the inevitable result of history. As a result, the more likely short term outcome is more chaos (we are seeing the start of that right now). Small attacks, like the one on the Askariya shrine and the facility at Abqaiq will continue to put entire sections of the system on the brink. Over the longer term, the system will continue on its unpredictable path until the weight of numerous fundamental changes to the system’s design and operation are made that dampen this chaos. Where we end up at the end of this process may be a dynamically stable state that is far from the current political and economic status quo. You might not recognize what you see. “

There’s a lot to like in this post as Robb clearly has a grasp on the nature of globalization and some of the potentially negative implications arising from that process interacting with American policy – in this case deliberately intiating a system perturbation in the Middle-East by invading Iraq. However, I’m also reading a significant internal contradiction present in the passage that undermines Robb’s argument that has to do with connectivity.

The global market ( which John seems to define separately and as something less than the environment but an economist probably would not) has always been interconnected, even autarkic, self-isolating, lunatic regimes like the DPRK allow some exchange to take place. What globalization has done is accelerate the transaction speed while dramatically diversifying and increasing the volume of exchanges so when Robb writes about fading borders, fewer governmental controls and the diminishing impact of distance, he’s correct. While we normally consider money and goods when speaking of markets, in reality most of the choices that we make are actually economic decisions, even apparently intangible ones involving information or personal relationships.

These decisions all take place within the infinitely complex global system, so whether we call it a “market” or something else the world is effectively one system. The Gap constitutes a region in the system where the transaction rates are slower, irregular and subject to greater irrationalities or distortions than in the Core. This is because there is either too much centralized control wielded over access to the Gap nation, usually by corrupt, authoritarian, rulers or not enough state control exists to assure physical security and enforce rule-sets as in the case of failed states.

In the former case ” decentralization” needed for ” long term stability” advocated by Robb is little else than the very connectivity that Robb argues that requires a greater dampening capacity on the part of the system ( incidentally, Robb is correct that the interconnectivity yielded by globalization also makes the system more vulnerable to perturbations and rogue feedback. I outlined a similar thesis in my review of system perturbation rule sets). The systemic dampening capacity Robb asserts is needed can only be established by:

1. Better governance in Gap states – something that in extreme cases will involve ” exporting security” through system administration intervention ( abstaining from intervention does not mean an absence of “rogue feedback”, as Afghanistan under Taliban rule proved).

2. A new rule-set consensus being implemented among the Core states whose economic dynamism drives the global market’s destabilizing high performance characteristics. Primarily this is the realm of international economic diplomacy, rationalizing market effciency while setting up breakers to interrupt potential domino effect transnational market collapse in cases of panic, natural or man-made disasters.

Can the system be stressed by a series of smaller shocks to a ” tipping point”, at least regionally, as Robb argues? Yes, I think that is certainly possible but we need to remember that in a dynamic system it isn’t simply the centrifugal, disintegrating, entropic or negative events that count against a status quo but those events in relation to the centripetal, integrating, nonzero sum or positive events happening simultaneously. This is why complex systems are notoriously difficult to game out without relying on greatly simplified models – the mathematical predictability of the model comes at the cost of varying from reality. Even supercomputer modelling of, say,weather patterns or the stock market cannot produce reliable outcomes, being thwarted by the sheer complexity and the dynamic state of the global market.

The disruptive effects – political, economic and moral – that Robb worries about and encapsulates as his strategy of Global Guerillaism are quite real and are not to be dismissed lightly. In any system, the devolution toward entropy will be present but these forces are not the only ones driving mankind and the evolutionary and creative phenomena that add value to our civilization have a powerful logic of their own.

UPDATE:

Chirol at Coming Anarchy has his own take on Robb’s post, leaning toward…ahem..a coming anarchy.