I haven’t commented on the recent terrorist attempt on Flight 253 because I don’t think there was anything new to say, despite the blizzard of news reports, commentaries and blog posts about it.  Let’s review, shall we:

• al-Qaeda (or it’s affiliates) attempt to target Americans and their interests (did anyone really think they stopped?)
• a guy got through ‘cracker jack’ airport security procedures (what idiot thought airport security procedures stopped anything?)
• government response is to apply countermeasures that wouldn’t have stopped the incident and aren’t likely to stop any other type of incident
• Americans seem to jump at the chance to give away their freedoms and privacy in order to appear to increase their safety from an event with a minuscule probability of happening
• The right wing really does love torture (I’m increasingly convinced that large numbers of the political right spend a great deal of time masturbating to a endless loop tape of the 9/11 attacks and scenes from 24) and couldn’t give a damn if it really ‘works’ or not.  They love inflicting pain as it’s a physical demonstration of power.

Let’s be clear, when Janet Napolitano said the “system worked” in reference to our airport security system she was 100% right.  The mistake is everyone assumed our security system is designed to prevent terrorist attacks.  It’s not.  It’s real purpose is to present the appearance of security and safety.  I find it amazing that people still don’t get that.

The only thing really of note (as far as I can tell) is that the President has publicly noted that our intelligence services are still not working properly.  Ok, that’s not really news but this may be a catalyst for some sort of change.  Ok, there probably won’t be any real change but I can dream, can’t I?

Newsweek has a set of stories about domestic extremism but they come across as a bit schizophrenic and one is wondering who’s editing these things.

Case in point…In this article reporting that the NYPD is claiming that there’s a significant and growing threat of radicalized Muslims in America they write:

In the last six months there have been nine cases of Muslims in United States allegedly becoming involved in Islamist terrorism.

There’s another article about the militia movement in America which gives a ‘maybe they’re dangerous, maybe they aren’t ‘ sort of non-story, despite the fact that:

In the first five months of Obama’s presidency, racist, right-wing extremists killed at least nine people…

Again, from NYPD:

“U.S. authorities have uncovered a significant and increasing number of radicalized clusters or individuals intent on committing violent jihad either in the U.S. or abroad,” and that arrests during the last 12 months and intelligence gained by the U.S. government “indicate that radicalization to violence is taking place in the United States.”

But from the militia article:

Today’s troubled economy and the perception that other countries are rising in influence might also be fueling activity among white supremacist and militia groups, according to an intelligence assessment by the federal Department of Homeland Security…But Jonathan White, a professor at Allendale, Mich.-based Grand Valley State University who has done extensive research on violent extremism and terrorism, says most militia members are “rhetoric only”

Now, this isn’t entirely fair since these are two different groups giving these opinions but since they’re both in the same issue of the same magazine, wouldn’t it be valuable to discuss how and why some could look at essentially the same information concerning these two threats and come up with different assessments?  Might that merit a brief discussion or explanation?

About six years ago I heard rumors that the Afghans were convinced that the U.S. had released killer cats into the countryside to terrorize the population.  Now, just to prove that truth is stranger than fiction there’s this report from the BBC…

A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say. The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear’s den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed.  The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise – police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

Perhaps Colbert will need to rethink his anti-bear approach.

What am I missing the the Taliban’s goals in Pakistan?  How does bombing an Islamic university further their aims or separate the people from the government?  I get targeting police, military and symbols of governmental power, but how in the hell do pictures of wounded women who were studying Islamic law in gender segregated facilities?

I guess those questions assume that the Pakistan Taliban don’t have a different identity from the rest of Pakistan.  Perhaps they view Pakistanis from outside the tribal areas as a group wholly different themselves and therefore don’t view their support as something worth working for.

Or…this could be an attempt (not well thought out in my opinion) to do the typical terrorist tactic of ‘convince the people that the government can’t protect them and encourage the state to swerve into repressive tactics which will eventually lose public support.

If that’s their strategy I can’t imagine they’re doing themselves much good after their attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team and bombings in Lahore that killed some people in a hospital (and some security personnel).

Or, maybe they’re just freakin’ nuts.

On other fronts, Tom Ricks and others have been getting increasingly restless about Obama not reaching a decision about our Afghan strategy.  Do we go COIN?  Do we do CT?  Do we limp along like we are or get the hell out.  I didn’t know what to think until I heard Rahm Emanuel yesterday say the following:

“The question, though… does not come [down to] how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?” the chief of staff added.”

Is it possible that the administration was waiting for the UN to weigh in officially about the Afghan elections and to see what Karzai’s reaction to it be?  Now that a reelection has been announced is it possible that we can expect an announcement regarding a big troop deployment into Afghanistan soon?  I have to admit, I’ll be shocked if Obama’s decision is anything other than a significant troop increase to Afghanistan.  Now that the administration will be able to argue that a post (November) election will provide for a ‘credible Afghan partner I’m not sure there’s any other roadblocks left.

Assuming this played some role in the delay of a decision I wonder if the delay was used to establish a new…doctrine is too strong a word…principle?…about the importance of governmental responsibility in nations requesting U.S. support.  Of course, we’d need to see that applied elsewhere before declaring this a change in American policy but it’s worth kicking around while we wait to see how this plays out.

My impression is that this administration doesn’t do anything (at least major things) without thinking a few moves ahead.  Is it likely that the past few weeks have really been spent in a totally befuddled free fall when it comes to Afghanistan?  Is everyone so focused on health care that Afghanistan has been ignored.  I hope not and can’t think the administration can only handle one (or two or three or more) issues at a time.

I guess time will tell

I’m not sure if the Taliban were trying to win some sort of prize for irony or not but this is the best most entertaining thing I’ve read all day (h/t Foreign Policy)

The indisputable logic of the Pakistani Taliban:

Meanwhile, a Taliban group also sent two letters to the Lahore Press Club – one on October 12 and the other on October 14 – warning that if the media “does not stop portraying us as terrorists … we will blow up offices of journalists and media organisations”.

A few weeks ago I took a writer to task for inflating the risks of a terrorism/street gang alliance and bemoaned the lack of good research into the question of whether such an axis is a real threat.  Well, maybe I’m just thrilled that someone is confirming my biases but I’d like to recommend “A Crime-Terror Nexus?  Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality” (you’re probably going to have to get it from your library if you don’t have access to a journal archive).

Now, my only criticism of the work is that they don’t really define terrorism very well and include groups that I wouldn’t (FARC, LTTE -until recently, of course-, and Hezbollah seemed to have moved beyond ‘terrorist’ status into some sort of quasi-state status actually controlling territory and fielding more traditional fighting forces and/or weilding political power) but this inclusion makes their findings all the more interesting.

[Terrorist groups'] ideological (political) distinctiveness from organized crime will preclude fully symbiotic cooperation.  Where there is evidence of cooperation between terrorists and organized crime groups, it generally occurs in contexts where terrorists are “forced” to ally with organized crime (for example, because organized crime already controls the relevant illicit markets), and these relationships are temporary and/or parasitical rather than symbiotic.

What’s more, if we’re talking about criminal activity beyond retail narcotics sales (like the Mardrid bombers) and want to think about bigger crimes (like human trafficking, wholesale narcotics trafficking, etc.), then the authors say:

This type of criminal activity, however, requires extensive organizational capability, and is likely to be engaged in by more organized terrorist groups rather than by individuals or stand-along cells.

From the article it looks like the ‘more organized’ terrorists are the ones I would classify as insurgencies or civil war combatants rather than terrorists but the bigger point is that small cells and long wolves are just not likely to have the capability or intent to engage with organized criminal networks on a significant scale.

The authors do a pretty good job of classifying types of criminal organizations based on the crimes the commit and, through them, the skills required for such operations and parallels that with a classification of terrorist groups.  The truth is that there are very few reasons for terrorist groups and criminal networks to interact.  Most terrorist acts aren’t too expensive and require little in the way of cash.  Criminal groups are unlikely to want to work with terrorists either through their own twisted concepts of patriotism, don’t want the risk of attracting attention or because they realize that their profits are dependent of a semi-functioning state and the radical change most terrorists claim to want could endanger that cash flow.

The authors do state that such collaboration could be more likely in weak states but even so, the evidence for a symbiotic relationship between criminal groups and terrorists is very, very thin.

So, two thirds of Americans seem to have difficulty in differentiating between the prisoners in Gitmo and Magneto.

They’re so terrified that putting these prisoners in our prison system will lead to…who knows what.  Will they radicalize our prison population?  That’s possible but I think unlikely (the radicalization talk is fueled in part by…wait for it…a desire to get in on federal grant money…never underestimate they incredible influence of funding to direct an organizations direction) on any significant scale here in the U.S.  Besides, criminal gangs do a good job of turning prisoners into more violent, more ciminal people as it is and no one seems to care.  Will they escape and commit terrorist activities in the U.S.?  Unlikely.  Nobody’s getting out of supermax prisons.  Will they attract terrorists to the towns where the prisons are?  Again, unlikely.  Are we to believe that the reason New York hasn’t been attacked since 2001 is that there are no Islamists incarcerated in Rikers Island?

If it’s too dangerous to put them in supermax prisons, where can we put them?

Apparently Palau.  And Burmuda.

Uh…radical Islam is starting to look pretty good.  Any spots open in Tahiti?

Now these weren’t the ‘worst of the worst’ (according to some pinko liberal activist judge anyway) but rather Chinese Muslims that were determined to not be enemy combatants but were detained for 8 years anyway (whoopsie!  Our bad).  We can’t send them back to China because, at best, they’ll be sent to some labor camp to spend the rest of their lives making cheap products for us to buy in WalMart but, more likely, they’ll just get a bullet in the head.  Even though we determined they weren’t a threat, nobody in Congress (or the current or past administration) would let them into the U.S. (BIG vote loser).  Granted, if they weren’t a threat in 2001, they might be after 8 years of illegal detention and abuse courtesy of Uncle Sam but c’mon.  If they’re a threat, prove it and lock them up.  If they aren’t and we screwed up, pay restitution and try to make it right.

Is it too much to ask for just a hint of rationality in our policies?

Karma is a bitch.  One day after taking someone to task for referencing themselves too much I find myself tempted to do the same thing.

Another right wing extremist (conservative translation is apparently:  hard working, God-fearing, patriotic American who isn’t worth the attention of the DHS) has decided to let God sort ‘em out and shot some security guards at the Holocaust museum.

So, we have one guy kill George Tiller and claim more assassinations are on the way, another shooting two weeks later and I still have people telling me that right wing extremism is a liberal invention that will distract us from the ‘real’ threat.  Apparently the guys who can’t figure out how to get a map of Ft. Dix in 18 months are suddenly going to become super-villans and carry out a wave of attacks that will bring the republic to its knees.  Of course, radical Islamists are a threat but their light shouldn’t blind us to the other stars of extremism out there.

I suspect part of the problem is that many still can’t get their heads around the idea of leaderless resistance and so can point to the unconnectedness of these attacks as evidence that there isn’t a real threat but rather ‘just a bunch of kooks’.  But that’s the whole point of that strategy.  You’re not going to have a convenient puppet master you can put on an FBI poster and scare little children with if they don’t eat their spinach.

The Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Law Enforcement complex has invested so much effort into focusing on Muslim terrorists and WMD attacks it’ll be interesting to see what it’ll take to shatter that paradigm.  While I hope I’m wrong it’ll still be interesting to see how people try to spin the ‘it flew under our radar’ or ‘no one could have predicted this’ message if a non-Koran weilding terrorist causes a mass casualty attack or the body count from these types of attacks eventually reaches the ‘Houston, we have a problem’ threshold.

Foreign Policy has an interesting looking article about the organized crime and insurgencies.  In it, the author cites a new paper in the Small Wars Journal by John P. Sullivan titled “Future Conflict: Criminal Insurgencies, Gangs and Intelligence”.  I don’t know how but Sullivan somehow manages to sucker me into reading his stuff every time and every time I’m disappointed.  The paper is a motherload of unexamined assumptions, outdated information and self promotion (17 of his 24 footnotes cite himself).  I don’t know Sullivan and I’m sure he’s a great guy but if this is the sort of thinking that’s driving policy as Robbert Haddick is kinda-sorta implying, we’re in big trouble.  Sullivan has been promoting essentially the same idea for over 10 years, that gangs are going to politicize and become the major threat to the nation state system as these modern day barbarians storm the gates and plunge us into a new dark age.

Oh…he also seems to have a bizarre obsession with the number 3.  There are three ‘generations of gangs’ and three types of cartels.  Why three?  Beats me, since the categories are entirely arbitrary and there’s no evidence to support these divisions.

He begins with a bold statement:

“Gangs dominate the intersection between crime and war.”

I don’t even know what the hell that means but he tells us he’s going to examine areas where “acute and endemic crime and gang violence challenge the solvency of state political control.”  Therein lies his major defect, as I see it.  For Sullivan, gangs are a cause of instability rather than a function of it.  Therefore…eliminate the gang and stability returns.

Too bad there’s no evidence for that.

Gangs don’t form to ‘challenge the rule of law’ as Sullivan states, but rather, form to fill a void where the rule of law is absent.  In the absence of order, people organize and when a group of people are in a Hobbsian state of nature (whether in a Brazilian slum or an urban housing project here in the U.S.) the people who can wield force tend to run things.  They may get more ambitious later but I think you’ll find very few people entering the life of crime with the goal of undermining the Westphalian system (check out Gang Leader for a Day if you want a brilliant 320 page example of this).  They want to meet their basic Maslow(ian?) needs initially.

Transnational gangs aren’t the reason there isn’t a strong, stable democracy in Russia, Columbia, Nigeria or Mexico.  Those nations have a history of corruption, instability and lack of public safety that precedes the arrival/creation of transnational gangs in their territories.  Gangs certainly don’t make the situation better but I’d like to see the evidence that they are the cause of these problems.

He then describes ‘criminal enclaves’ and uses Ciudad del Este as an example.  He discribes it thus:

A jungle hub for the world’s outlaws, a global village of outlaws, the triple border zone serves as a free enclave for significant criminal activity, including people who are dedicated to supporting and sustaining acts of terrorism. Denizens of the enclave include Lebanese gangsters and terrorists, drug smugglers, Nigerian gangsters and Asian mafias: Japanese Yakuza, Tai Chen (Cantonese mafia), Fuk Ching, the Big Circle Boys, and the Flying Dragons. This polyglot mix of thugs demonstrates the potential of criminal netwarriors to exploit the globalization of organized crime.

That certainly seems to make sense but if there’s such a good case that the area is as bad as all that why does he use a reference that’s ten years old?  Are we to assume that this area of the world has been untouched by 9/11 and its aftermath?  There’s certainly been work done to assess the nature of Ciudad del Este in the past ten years why not mention any of it?

Ciudad del Este is a cartel?  Who’s running it?  Is there some sort of Evil League of Evil pulling the strings or is it an anarchic wonderland that attracts all sorts of criminal and terrorist group because they can all do their own thing?  If the latter, how could it be a cartel?

There’s just so much to critique in the paper I’m not sure how much detail I should go into.  His ‘generations of gangs’ is absolutly terrible and has no utility when discussing gangs or anti-gang strategy.  It’s uselessness is demonstrated by his definitions of the generations which require the existance of gangs which exist in more than one generation at a time.  So, does that mean there are five generations?  Four and a half?  It starts to feel like the papal astronomers adding more and more orbits to the planets in order to keep the Earth at the center of the universe.  Just dump it and find a better explanitory tool already.

I’ve been looking at gangs for about 10 years now and ever since that time I’ve been hearing horror stories about how gangs are just about ready to destroy civilization.  I suspect scaremongering like this has a lot more to do with securing grant funding and speaking engagements than it does with depicting reality.  Some gang leaders in the U.S. do occasionally attempt to transform their gang into a politically motivated force.  There are even some examples of short term, local successes on their part.  But they don’t last over time or space because of a number of inherent contradictions between the conditions needed for a politically motivated group (even if criminal) and an economically motivated one.

There are some interesting parallels between gangs and insurgencies.  They both feed on disenfranchisement.  The Sunnis fueled the insurgency in Iraq because they were out of power and looking to be on the wrong end of a payback spree.  The reason street gangs went from neighborhood nuicence to serious criminal problem has a lot to do with collapsing economic systems in inner cities in the 70s and 80s, the rise of narcotics as an opportunity to achieve financial well being and neglect by government of social services.  Both populations had little to lose and so elements of that population decided ‘What the hell’.

There are important lessons to our response to both as well.  Our current anti-gang strategy (such as it is) much more resembles our Iraq strategy (such as it was) in 2003-2006.  We generally isolate ourselves from the population, do the occassional ‘kenetic operation’, engage in the usual post operational chest pounding and declarations that we’ve ‘turned a corner’ and then find ourselves right back where we’ve started.

Perhaps the answer isn’t what Sullivan recommends (more riot police, counterterrorism forces, high intensity policing, etc. – you know an M-16 armed balaclava wearing dude on every streetcorner to kick the shit out of anyone who questions state authority) but rather the same principles advocated for COIN operations.  Hearts and minds.  Clear, Hold, Build.  Restore order, establish you’re there for the long haul and rebuild infrastructure, opportunity and trust.  Yes, it’ll be expensive.  Yes, it’ll take a lot of time.  Clearly building and filling prisons isn’t proving to be the answer so perhaps it’s time for a different approach.

The outrage at intelligence agencies calling out right wing extremism were spot on, even if the reports themselves were a bit generic and bland.  Information about the Tiller assassin indicates he wasn’t a single issue fanatic:

“He told me about a lot of conspiracy stuff and showed me how to take the magnetic strip out of a five-dollar bill,” Leach said. “He said it was to keep the government from tracking your money.”

Roeder, who in the 1990s was a manufacturing assemblyman, also was involved in the “Freemen” movement.

“Freemen” was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which they called common-law courts. Adherents declared themselves exempt from laws, regulations and taxes and often filed liens against judges, prosecutors and others, claiming that money was owed to them as compensation.

In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff’s deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate. In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.

If there’s any good to come of this, hopefully it’ll be that people will realize this isn’t some sort of game and pull back before the body count rises.  Certainly after Oklahoma City that happened.  One indicator of how things will go, I believe, will be if Roeder is regarded as a kook or a martyr by the far right.  If the former, this event might just be an anomoly.  If the latter, get ready for more of the same.