Category Archives: Terrorism

A European option in Afghanistan

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What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about. And at the moment, much of the international effort there is counterproductive and fairly immoral. Don’t ask me; ask hugely influential counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who makes the obvious point that air strikes into the Hindu Kush probably aren’t helping win the support of the people.

Surely, what we need is a solution under which a reasonable Afghan government would be left in place, the intrusion of foreign forces, their road convoys, fortified camps, heavy weapons, and inflationary spending removed, and as many pieces of the diverse coalition of forces that make up the Taliban reconciled? Perhaps there is one; but first, it’s necessary to remove some of our preconceptions. Everyone knows about Afghanistan, right? Soviet invasion, daring resistance, Western secret aid, eventual withdrawal in 1989, mujahedin triumph, and then it all goes horribly wrong.

Well, this is actually quite misleading. The war began before the Soviet intervention, and in a sense even earlier, in the form of the bitter internal troubles inside the Afghan communist movement. More importantly, the mujahedin/future civil warriors/further future Taliban didn’t win in 1989. To considerable surprise, they failed to take even one town from the Afghan government until 1992. Many important mujahedin leaders were willing to be reconciled with the government as long as the Red Army was withdrawn and, of course, the government made it worth their while. The ones who fought on only succeeded because all assistance to the Afghan government was cut off at the end of the Soviet Union – which included things like wheat, diesel fuel, cash, and ammunition.

In fact, the withdrawal was about the best idea the Soviets had in Afghanistan. Having decided to go, they pursued a policy of building up the Afghan government, changing the military strategy to one based on defending the bulk of the population (to stop this happening) and leaving the mountain wilds to the enemy, pouring in aid of all kinds, negotiation with those who were willing, and leaving a strong advisory mission in place. Here is a US Army study of the withdrawal (pdf); I should hope we could avoid providing the Afghan police with their own ballistic missiles. Seriously – the Najibullah government insisted on having its own Scuds, and assigned them to a unit of the secret police. They eventually fired over 300 of the things.

But the principles apply quite well. Turn down the intensity of the war. Don’t state an explicit timetable, to retain bargaining power. Pursue population security. Build up Afghan authorities. Deliver aid and a strong advisory mission. Open all-party talks. And start removing foreign combat forces. Interestingly, polls of Afghan public opinion, for what they are worth, seem to suggest this may be a good idea.

According to the US Army study, the continuing assistance to the Afghan government cost the Soviet Union about $3-4bn annually – obviously those are 1989 dollars, but in the light of the huge cost of maintaining manoeuvre brigades in Afghanistan (twice as much as Iraq), that’s got to be better. The Soviet aid airlift consisted of 15 Il-76 aircraft a day; currently about 15 mixed Il-76 and AN-12 head to Afghanistan from the UAE a day from the private sector. You could call it a civilian surge if you like; you could also call it ending the Afghan war, if you’re a German Christian Democrat. Certainly, you’d have to involve Iran from the word go – after all, they have the only railhead near Afghanistan and plan to build the railway on into the country. It could be the shortest way from Europe.

It’s got to beat more wedding parties, with the twist that the Russians get to play politics with every transit shipment. Speaking of Russians, however, the man we want to hear from is Makhmut Gareev, who led the Soviet advisors after 1989. Call it the European option.

Hit and Run

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North and south of the Caucasus mountains:

Azerbaijan’s air force commander was shot and killed as he left his home on the morning of February 11 … Lt-Gen. Rail Rzayev, the head of Azerbaijan’s Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defense Force, was shot in the head as he was sitting in a Mercedes in front of his Baku apartment building. Doctors at a military hospital could not save 64-year-old Rzayev’s life, the Interior Ministry announced. … Rzayev had served as Azerbaijan’s air force commander since 1992, after previously heading Baku’s anti-aircraft defenses. …

Most recently, in December 2008, Rzayev attracted media attention after reports surfaced that Azerbaijani military planes had forced a helicopter carrying Minister of Emergency Situations Kamaladdin Heydarov to land. No official explanations were issued for the incident. Azerbaijani mainstream media outlets, however, reported that Heydarov, arguably the government’s most influential minister, had failed to inform the Anti-Aircraft Defense Forces about his flight, allegedly to his villa in the central Gabala region. …

Lt. Gen. Rzayev was among those Azerbaijani generals who strongly opposed any compromise resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, noted Rauf Mirgadirov, political columnist for the Russian-language daily Zerkalo (The Mirror).

Azerbaijani military politics are murky, to say the least, but this bears watching.

Speaking of murky, the murder of a Chechen in Austria may have some interesting fingerprints on it:

A Chechen refugee killed in Vienna last month was the key witness in an Austrian criminal investigation into Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov that could have led to Kadyrov’s arrest last year, prosecutors and lawyers said Wednesday.

The revelation fuels speculation that the killing of Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard of Kadyrov, was aimed at silencing a vocal critic of the Chechen leadership. Israilov was gunned down on Jan. 13, just four days after The New York Times informed the Russian government that it was planning to publish a report based on interviews with him implicating Kadyrov of murder and torture. …
Israilov last year offered information implicating Kadyrov of torture and murder to a team of lawyers in Austria and Germany, who in turn asked Vienna prosecutors to arrest Kadyrov during an expected visit to Austria for the European football championship, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights said Wednesday. …
Around the same time as the request for the arrest, Austrian police arrested a Chechen man who claimed that he had been sent by Kadyrov to kill Israilov, Der Falter reported Wednesday, citing police records.
Jarosch said the case of the Chechen man was not pursued because Austrian prosecutors believed and still believe that they lack jurisdiction.

Oops. Now that Israilov is dead, Austria may have jurisdiction. At least for one crime.

Prosecutors have arrested seven suspects in Israilov’s death, all ethnic Chechens, and five remain in prison, Jarosch said. He said it was not clear whether the killer was among them.

What’s wrong with the phrase ‘war on terror’?

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Normblog – ‘the weblog of Norman Geras’ – is often quite good and I read it when I get the chance, but this recent post of his was pretty bad. Norman says that those who, like Shirley Williams, dislike the phrase ‘war on terror’ have “trouble coming up with compelling reasons for their dislike” of that phrase.

Specifically, Norman argues, crime is not exclusively a civil affair: actions against criminals may include actions of war. I think Norman’s making some sort of synecdochal error here. Wars are always fought between political entities and hence in a war there are always multiple actors – both leaders and followers – on both sides. This has major implications for considerations of criminality and legitimacy.

All actors in a war (it’s assumed) are willing to use violence; that is to do, in wartime, things which in peacetime would be considered criminal. This said, some may do things which even in the special circumstances of war will be considered criminal. These are war criminals, and they may well include the leaders of a side. Other war leaders may be considered criminal for things they did before war explicitly began. Perhaps their involvement in starting war is their crime. Nonetheless, when you’re fighting a war leader (criminal or otherwise) you’re very likely not fighting him in person; you’re fighting his army. Your opposition to Tojo, say, may be founded in his criminality but your use of violence is legitimised by the fact that millions on Tojo’s side – some of whom won’t ever be thought criminal – present a threat to you which can only be countered by use of violence. After all, if it were just Tojo, you’d send in the police. The police can’t get to Tojo because of his army? Frustrating, yes, but not in itself justification for violence.

And so – the standard criticism goes – use of the phrase ‘war on terror’ suggests that we are under threat in a way which justifies violence, as in a war. If we disagree that this is so, then naturally we won’t want to hear the phrase ‘war on terror’ used in political discourse by way of presenting options for action. Our situation has been described incorrectly. The ‘war on terror’ is only a metaphor? (I think Norman has been misled by this one, somehow.) Maybe. But then, I can take it, so is the call to send in the air force. Count me with Shirley Williams.

A soda with Karadzic

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Just wanted to link to this post about meeting Radovan Karadzic in prison. The writer comes across as a bit naive — gosh, the ICTY cell block is dingy! Karadzic, a former politician turned New Age guru, comes across as charming and at ease with himself! — but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Key point for me: his claim that Karadzic won’t try to turn his trial into a circus as Seselj and Milosevic did. Color me skeptical on that one. We’ll see soon enough.

Real action heroes don’t justify

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The doctrine of double effect has bugged me for some time. It probably doesn’t help that double effect is usually tagged as Catholic, and in that connection we have Blair’s Catholicism … and Iraq … and the self-exculpatory speechifying, and now the middle east peace envoy business. Double effect: it’s all mixed up in there somehow. Obviously I’m not going to like it.

But what’s going on with double effect anyway? Roughly, it’s a doctrine that says we can make a distinction between actual effects on the basis that not all effects were intended, even if all effects were correctly predicted. Hence, someone who in a single act brought about both a good effect and a bad effect may be excused if:

(1) He or she intended the good effect and not the bad effect, and;

(2) The resultant good effect did in some way compensate for the bad effect.

A double effect advocate who wants to finesse things might add that the bad effect mustn’t precede the good effect in a causal chain. There’s potential for fuzziness here, but what makes double effect unattractive isn’t some difficulty with causation. If the doctrine of double effect is going to be your guide in deciding whether or not to do something, you’re first going to have to work out who will judge what, and when. On condition (1) above, seemingly the actor carries a special burden of judgement: he or she must single out and focus on a good effect, so as to intend it. Whatever ‘intending’ involves, surely no one else can do it but the intender. But on condition (2) above, it’s not at all clear how the judgement of the good compensating for the bad is to be made. Is it the actor who gets to make this judgement, or his or her peers? A government agency? A court of law? And when do they get to judge? The doctrine doesn’t give us criteria for deciding this. It’s not interested.

Of course, other people (neighbours, end users, professionals) do tend to take an interest, depending on what’s proposed. To take Chris Bertram’s example from the recent thread about this on Unspeak: let’s say that you, as an adherent of the doctrine of double effect, propose a bridge-building project. You expect some people will die, but to have a connection from here to there will be good, and it’s the connection you intend, so you proceed. Except that you don’t, because most places with governments exercise oversight of anything larger than the construction of a hen house. You say: ten people will (likely) die building my bridge. The government, in response, says: this bridge (a revised design) is better because although there’ll be one successful and two attempted suicides over the next fifty years, no one will die during construction. Build this bridge instead. The burden for deciding (2) has been taken on by the state, on behalf of interested parties. Additionally, even though the burden for acting in accordance with (1) officially remains with the actor, his or her options are more likely than not shaped by the presence of an outside interest. After all, society, insofar as it can be said to want something, wants us to think of good effects, not bad ones. The upshot? An agent who invites the views of others in an effort to satisfy (2) limits the agency implied by (1).

In short, the doctrine of double effect tends to offer itself as a doctrine for moral lone rangers. My personal finding is that in most cases where heavy moving is planned, there’s a happier result when advice of parties with an interest is actually followed. Just ask; it might even be the law. Even if it’s not the law, it’s likely that someone cares. For bridge-building, seek advice from engineers (and the neighbours). For bombing, seek advice from air force generals (and the bombed).

5,000 Terrorist Targets = War with Pakistan

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Very, very worrying news from India and Pakistan. I especially don’t like all the stuff about school textbooks.

On Friday, India warned its citizens to stay away from Pakistan, claiming that they were in danger from agencies “that operate outside the law and civilian control”. Yesterday’s newspaper reports reflected increasingly frenzied war speculation. “Pak army on the march” was the headline in the Hindustan Times, while the Times of India – which led its Christmas Day edition with the headline “Pak whips itself into war frenzy” – reported that Pakistan had stepped up its “war moves”. Claims by Pakistan that Indian nationals had been arrested in connection with a Christmas Eve car bombing in Lahore were also angrily dismissed. Anand Sharma, an Indian external affairs minister, called the reports “hogwash”.

Although some in the Indian media have urged caution, there has been a spate of anti-Pakistan stories since the Mumbai attacks. Yesterday’s Times of India carried a front-page report headlined “Pak textbooks foster hate against India” which claimed that “venom against India is officially promoted to infect young minds in Pakistani schools” and asserted that terrorism in Pakistan had its roots in a culture of hate.

Yelling about the other side’s maps and school textbooks is a telltale symptom of nationalist hysteria. Also, look what the head of the Indian Air Force Western Command is saying:

Air Marshal PK Barbora, chief of India’s western air command, said that the air force had identified 5,000 terrorist targets inside Pakistani territory.

Five thousand terrorist targets? I’d bet there aren’t five thousand actual terrorists in Pakistan, as opposed to people who might agree with them, or think the Pakistani government is just looking for an excuse to bring its tax-collectors into their valley when it talks about terrorists. Terrorism is by definition a small-team pursuit; otherwise it wouldn’t be terrorism, it would be ordinary war.

Now, let’s remember a classic post on this blog. Back in February, 2007, the National Security Archive at George Washington University got hold of the original slides from the briefing document on war with Iraq. The heaviest air bombardment the planning study included foresaw 3,000 individual aiming points from 2,100 aircraft sorties, the difference being made up by an unknown mix of multiple-target missions and Tomahawk missiles. This was designed to wreck the Iraqi military and military-industrial complex thoroughly. The Pakistani officer here is suggesting a minimum of 5,000 aiming points.

Even compared to the Iraqi military-industrial complex at its hubristic height immediately after the Iran-Iraq war, with its nuclear programme, satellite-launch programme, T-72 tanks and indigenous airborne early-warning aircraft, it would be fair to say that the Pakistani one is a much more complex complex, with the benefit of years more investment and both US and Chinese support, to say nothing of the nuclear system and the secret AQ Khan procurement-network. So the first thing we have to conclude that Air Marshal P.K. Barbora is floating not just an operation directed at Lashkar-e-Toiba, or even ISI facilities, but a conventional blitz intended to wreck the Pakistani Air Force, the nuclear system, and as much of the ISI, the Army, the Navy and the defence industries and strategic infrastructure as he has aircraft left for.

Air Marshals always want this, of course. It goes without saying that he couldn’t launch something like this without an epic air battle and a ferocious Pakistani counterattack of some sort. Barbora’s command has a mixture of MiG-21, MiG-23/27, MiG-29, and SEPECAT Jaguar aircraft; the -21s, -23s and -29s are mostly assigned to air defence roles, the -27s to close support of the army, and the Jaguars are India’s premier strike aircraft. Among other things, their role includes carrying part of the nuclear deterrent. There are 108 of these; 6 are assigned to a maritime role in the Southern command. It is fair to say the rest will be facing Pakistan. An operation of this size would also involve the South-Western command and the Central command; the Central command controls most of the 110 Sukhoi 30 fighters and the 39 Dassault Mirage 2000-5 aircraft, some of which would be assigned a strike/attack role. The Sukhoi 30s are officially there as a pure fighter, but it’s unrealistic to imagine that given a latest-generation aircraft they won’t take any opportunity to get into the fray.

Therefore we can say there are about 150 serious strike aircraft available. There are also the four Tu-22M3 bombers, theoretically reserved for operations at sea. However, the fact the Russians lost one over Georgia may well dissuade them from looking for trouble. A big variable is the percentage of the MiG-27 fleet which will be held back for the Army – the Western command has many of them, but also has Kashmir and the critical Route 1 into Kashmir on its plate. Just using the Jaguars, Mirages, and any Sukhois assigned to the job, 5,000 aiming points would be attacked in 17 days at 2 sorties/aircraft/day. It’s fair to rule out many missions covering more than one target – this won’t be Afghanistan or even Iraq or even Iran. Pakistan has a lot of rather old but much-upgraded Mirage IIIs, Chinese-made MiG-21s, 44 F-16s (which are pre-1984 -A and -B models), and some very new Chinese JF-17s that really, nobody knows much about. Assuming 75% serviceability, it would be a theoretical 23 day campaign, but this doesn’t count the major commitment of fighters and defence suppression aircraft.

Clearly, however, there is no quick and relatively safe option. If Indian planning is anything like Barbora’s remarks, this means major war, with the certainty of the biggest air battle in living memory, the near certainty of a major mountain battle in Kashmir, a significant risk of the armies fighting out a battle of manoeuvre further south, and some risk of nuclear war.

I finished that post by saying that there would probably be no war with Iran. I can’t say that about India and Pakistan.

Karadzic arrested!?

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Breaking news in the last hour is that Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade. Karadzic, you may recall, was the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He’s under indictment for about twenty different war crimes, and has been on the run since 1996.

Few details are available yet. The arrest was made in Belgrade earlier today. It’s not clear by whom. (The Serbian Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police, issued a brief statement saying it was not involved.) The Serbian government formally notified the Hague Tribunal this afternoon.

As always in these matters, there’s some mystery and confusion. Just last week, officials in both Serbia and the Republika Srpska had announced that they didn’t believe Karadzic was in their countries. This was actually plausible! The new Serbian government had just arrested another war criminal in Belgrade a few weeks ago. So you’d think Karadzic would have stayed well clear.

Was he simply stupid? Or was he lured back to Belgrade somehow? Or was he there all along? If the latter, then former Prime Minister Kostunica surely knew about it… and was lying his ass off to the Hague and the world for five years straight. I’m no fan of Kostunica, but I’d hate to think that.

On a personal note: for years my wife has said that Karadzic was living “down the street” from us back in the early 2000s. At that time, we were living in the street Golsfortieva (that’s Serbian for “Galsworthy”) in the neighborhood of Vracar in central Belgrade. She picked this up from talking with the neighbors, and for five years it’s been a running joke in our house. “Right down the street from us!” “Right, sure, yes, dear. Whatever, okay.”

Well, at least one source is claiming that the arrest was made in… the neighborhood of Vracar, in central Belgrade. Headline: Blogger’s Wife ‘Very Satisfied’ By Arrest.

Anyway. A day or two may pass without much news, as under Serbian law the accused has the right to challenge certain aspects of his arrest — most notably, whether or not he’s really the person in question.

Still: great news, if true.

Privacy Chernobyl in Bonn

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That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will kibosh all those monster database schemes for the foreseeable future. The subtext is perhaps that whatever the damage may be, it’s the collateral damage we have to accept to stop the bastards overrunning us.

What if, however, the first people to catch it were pompous German executives? Some would fear this wouldn’t draw any moral reaction from the public – who cares what happens to the bastards? Others might think it’s precisely their outrage that would finish the buggers quickest. It seems, though, that the Privacy Chernobyl might already have happened, in Germany. Scandal has been raging around Deutsche Telekom for a while; the monster telco, one-third state-owned, has been caught spying on members of its supervisory board, and much worse, journalists and trade union reps. Der Spiegel burst the story, interviewing the boss of a Berlin information security firm that was given the raw data from DTAG’s systems to analyse. He’s singing like a canary. DTAG promised that it was all over by the time the current CEO took over, but it turned out that the security firm was receiving money years later, money that came from the same cost-centre as the CEO’s office.

But this is far from the worst that might have happened. It wasn’t so much the content of the calls that was being spied upon, but rather their metadata. This is something one learns quickly on joining the telecoms industry – it’s the signalling that matters. The SS7 signalling traffic on a mobile network contains a treasure of information on who telephones, with whom, and from which geographic locations. Matching the dumps of data, they would have been able to trace the movements of the targets, their social networks, and who they met with.

It gets worse. Last week, Der Spiegel revealed that Lufthansa had also trawled its frequent flyer files in order to find out who a particular hack was getting information from. The real killer was, though, the suggestion that the two companies’ security departments might have swapped data – it turns out there is a strong old boys’ network between the security organisations German industry set up during the extreme-left terrorism of the 1970s, and something like a black market in database tables. Lufthansa’s frequent flyer programme offers benefits on all kinds of other stuff, including railway tickets and their own virtual mobile phone operator (MVNO), and a credit card – there’s a lot there already, but the kicker is that most big German companies outsource their expenses management to the same Lufthansa division that runs the loyalty scheme. And the journos were run through the same analysis.

Quite possibly, an entire corporate elite’s movements, communications, and tastes may be compromised. Everyone involved is already in the deep shit, as the rights to privacy and to freedom of the press are guaranteed by the German constitution, to say nothing of the ordinary law. If the radioactive smoke isn’t already billowing over the countryside, the containment vessel is bulging and glowing.

But there’s an odd detail here – T-Mobile USA refused to participate in illegal surveillance operations, like Qwest and no other US telcos. I have always believed that the reason for this was that T-Mobile, alone among telcos, has on-network transatlantic roaming. Due to the fundamental principles of GSM, T-Mobile subscribers from Germany, Holland, the UK, or indeed any other T-Mobile network in Europe, would have been spied on in the US with the involvement of T-Mobile in their home country, because their Home Location Register (HLR) would have been queried for every network transaction that occurred in the US. (It’s the signalling, remember.) This would have obviously had very serious legal consequences back in Europe.