From The CATO Instutute:
Bin Laden Is Dead
Posted by Christopher Preble
All Americans celebrate the news that we have been waiting to hear for over nine and a half years: Osama Bin Laden is dead. The operation that resulted in his demise is a credit to the prowess and professionalism of the men and women in our military, and our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. All Americans — and the world — owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Bin Laden’s death does not end the threat posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates, but it goes a long way toward delivering justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and al Qaeda’s other acts of terrorism. Importantly, the operation appears to bear resemblance to earlier operations that captured the 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. The details should remind us that some of the most effective counterterrorism techniques do not rely on tens of thousands of troops stationed indefinitely in distant lands.
It is now clear that unrelenting pressure has severely weakened al Qaeda. Its capacity to harm Americans has been degraded for years, and yet we continue to dedicate tens of billions of dollars to combating terrorism in all forms. Here’s hoping that this evening’s welcome news contributes to an evolution of U.S. counterterrorism strategy that avoids costly and counterproductive policies, and that, going forward, we will always balance our efforts to advance American security with the need to preserve our essential rights and liberties.
Christopher Preble • May 2, 2011 @ 12:02 am
This, related, also from The CATO Institute:
V-OBL Day
by David Rittgers
This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on May 2, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
It goes without saying that Osama bin Laden's death is welcome news. But more than that, it is a teachable moment for how the U.S. ought to be carrying out its counter-terrorism policy moving forward.
Targeted killing is an essential component of the fight against al Qaeda. Much of the public debate has focused on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to carry out targeted killings — a misplaced emphasis on means rather than ends. International counterterrorism is primarily an intelligence campaign, and the select application of lethal force is more effective than the deployment of large military units to Muslim nations. A scalpel, not a sledgehammer, should be our primary counterterrorism tool.
Bin Laden's demise is in some ways not news, but an event that confirms many things we have known for years. Bin Laden's hideout was not a cave, but an expansive compound in a community of well-to-do Pakistani military retirees — confirmation that Pakistan is a conflicted ally and that elements of her intelligence services are working for the other side.
A scalpel, not a sledgehammer, should be our primary counterterrorism tool.
The nomination of General David Petraeus to take the helm at the CIA signaled an ongoing military-intelligence campaign against international terrorists. The raid that killed bin Laden exemplifies this new emphasis by the Obama administration. The brilliant success of this operation demonstrates the marked improvement in our human intelligence capabilities over the last decade.
Bin Laden's death underscores the failure of al Qaeda to achieve its impossible goal: establishing a global caliphate living under his nihilistic worldview. As soon as al Qaeda establishes a return address for American special operations personnel to raid or bomb, they will be pummeled into irrelevance. Al Qaeda itself does not present an existential threat — but they can provoke us into sacrificing our blood, treasure and liberties to the point that we no longer recognize the society we set out to defend.
Now is the time to reappraise our counterterrorism policy. Terrorists are not superhuman. We must prioritize spending on national security toward cost-effective measures, just as we do in any other field. Terrorism is a tactic employed by weak actors meant to induce hysteria and overreaction in its victims.
Bin Laden described his strategy in exactly those terms: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al Qaeda,' in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses." It is time to stop playing this game the way al Qaeda wants us to, and transition our forces down as soon as possible in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sustainable counterterrorism path is a mix of intelligence cooperation, direct action, and training regional allies, not using our line troops as a third-world constabulary in perpetuity.
David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, served three tours in Afghanistan as a Special Forces officer and continues to serve as a reserve judge advocate. The views expressed in this op-ed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Defense Department or Army.
More by David Rittgers
America needs this moment. With three wars, a sluggish economy, and continued partisan rearranging of the budgetary deck chairs, a bit of good news may give the country a renewed sense of focus. It is also fitting that the president ordered the strike between playing a round of golf and attending the White House correspondents' dinner: Contrary to al Qaeda's best efforts, life goes on, nations heal, and America will persevere and thrive.
Celebrating V-OBL day is not the end of the road, but a significant milestone nonetheless. Hopefully this moment will provide closure for those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001 and in the decade of war we have experienced since. Bin Laden's death represents a stake through the heart of an enemy inimical to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This too, related, from The CATO Institute:
After Bin Laden
This too, also related, from the CATO Institute:
With bin Laden Gone, Declare Victory and Come Home
by Gene Healy
This article appeared in The DC Examiner on May 3, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
"My first reaction was a cringe," Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak wrote about Sunday night's "macabre jubilee," as D.C. residents of all stripes partied in the downtown streets, celebrating Osama bin Laden's death.
"Almost vulgar," she pronounced the scene.
There's no accounting for taste, but it seems to me that, if ever there was a death worth celebrating, it's this one.
That's so not simply because bin Laden, murderer of thousands of innocents, richly deserved a bullet to the face, but also because his death gives us the opportunity to end what once threatened to become an era of permanent emergency and perpetual war.
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
More by Gene Healy
Sept, 11, 2001, should have concentrated the mind wonderfully as to the nature of our enemy: a stateless network of militants whose greatest hope lay in getting America to damage itself. Instead, we played into al Qaeda's hands with two bloody and costly foreign occupations, only one of which, in Afghanistan, had any relevance to the al Qaeda threat.
In Kabul in the fall of 2001, Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison lucked into buying Ayman al-Zawahiri's abandoned laptop, lifted from al Qaeda's central office. What Cullison found provided insight into the jihadists' strategy:
"Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers."
Rather, "its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back" in a manner that would, in bin Laden's words, "bleed America to the point of bankruptcy," and enhance terrorist recruitment. "One wonders," Cullison wrote, "if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer."
As bin Laden famously said in 2004, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."
Bin Laden didn't "bleed America to the point of bankruptcy." But we've lost nearly 6,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and contractors, and spent more than $1 trillion on the thankless task of creating democracy at gunpoint.
For a decade now, U.S. troops have been forced to play the role of armed "community organizers." To what end? There was always something odd about conservatives jumping from "they hate us because we're free" to "if we make them free, then they won't hate us."
If you think expanded suffrage "drains the swamp" of terrorist hate, consider the reaction of democratically elected Hamas, which mourned bin Laden's death.
On Monday, neoconservative Max Boot wrote, somewhat nervously, "Don't assume that with bin Laden gone, the rationale for the war effort in Afghanistan also disappears."
Boot's right that having a presence in Afghanistan helped us carry out the operation that killed bin Laden. But how deep a "footprint" do we need? We now have nearly 100,000 troops in-country chasing what President Obama's CIA director admits are "50 to 100" al Qaeda operatives, "maybe less."
We certainly don't need to continue funding what George Will has called "New Deal 2.0" in Afghanistan, complete with agricultural subsidies to discourage opium growing, a 900,000-square-foot police training center for the country's illiterate and corrupt security forces, and USAID-sponsored pro-democracy "kite festivals."
Is bin Laden's death "merely symbolic"? Perhaps, but "merely" ignores the importance of symbols in a fight that has a large ideological component. And the symbolism involved in giving the one-time iconic figure a thug's death allows us to put an end to an era of tragically wrongheaded strategy. We should declare victory, and come home.
And this, also related, from The CATO Institute:
With bin Laden's Death, America Must Recalibrate Its Policies
by Malou Innocent
This article appeared on The Daily Caller on May 3, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
In an operation 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Laden. This victory is a testament to the tireless efforts of our brave men and women in uniform. Their momentous achievement shows why when it comes to capturing and killing terrorists, targeted counterterrorism measures often prove more effective than expansive counterinsurgency campaigns.
With bin Laden's death, the United States closes a long chapter of its "War on Terror." Yet given America's large-scale, long-term nation-building mission in Afghanistan, another chapter remains unfinished. The day after President Barack Obama announced bin Laden's death, NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in a statement congratulating the United States for the operation against bin Laden, reiterated NATO's intent to continue with its nearly decade-long mission, with its ostensible goal of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan ever again.
[T]he diminished al Qaeda threat was and always has been a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America.
NATO and the U.S. need to re-think the mission — for several reasons.
First, while some policymakers claim the war in Afghanistan is worth waging because terrorists flourish in failed states, this theory cannot account for the terrorists who thrive in states with the military power to resist external interference. That bin Laden was found in Pakistan highlights this fact. After all, even in the unlikely event that America and its allies did forge a stable Afghanistan, the fewer than 100 al Qaeda fighters currently believed to be in that country could simply relocate to other regions of the world. Moreover, as far as we know, the al Qaeda movement has cells not only in Pakistan, but also in Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, and, at one point, Germany, Spain, and even Florida.
Second, remaining in Afghanistan presents a bigger threat to American interests than al Qaeda itself can pose. Amassing troops there has fed the perception of a foreign occupation of Muslim land, and spawned terrorist recruits in that country and elsewhere. Following the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, no one could have imagined that the United States would go from punishing al Qaeda and the Taliban to ten years later mandating the number of women who can serve in the Afghan parliament. Luckily, American security does not depend on us transforming what is a deeply divided and poverty-stricken society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, stable electoral democracy.
Third, Afghanistan's landlocked position in Central Asia will forever render it vulnerable to meddling from surrounding states. The clash of strategic interests not just between the United States and Pakistan, but also among other competing regional powers, shows, to quote America's new CIA director, General David Petraeus, that "while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible." Under such conditions, Washington's periodic troop surges, increased development aid, and Predator drone strikes will fail to translate into anything more than limited gains on the ground.
Malou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
More by Malou Innocent
Finally, the U.S. military is a professional and competent fighting force that is adept at bombing enemy command centers and destroying adversaries with disproportionate firepower. However, finding hidden killers such as terrorists often requires precision. The most effective methods used to disrupt safe havens and round up suspected terrorists have been America's ongoing intelligence sharing with close allies and partners around the world, its monitoring of inaccessible regions with unmanned aerial vehicles, and its use of covert operatives against specific targets when absolutely necessary. Indeed, bin Laden's death, the greatest victory against al Qaeda so far, relied on counterterrorism, not on counterinsurgency. So too did the other successes scored against al Qaeda, such as the snatch-and-grab operations that netted Ramzi bin al Shibh in September 2002, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed in March 2003.
Bin Laden's death does not mean the end of al Qaeda. But the diminished al Qaeda threat was and always has been a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America. Tragically, the enormous costs of ongoing operations in Afghanistan tend to dwarf the victories America routinely scores against al Qaeda elsewhere in the world.
Policymakers and prominent opinion leaders will continue to push for open-ended nation-building missions and large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns against al Qaeda and other jihadists. But like the medicine a doctor wrongly prescribes to a patient, don't blame the medicine, blame the doctor.
Bin Laden Is Dead
Posted by Christopher Preble
All Americans celebrate the news that we have been waiting to hear for over nine and a half years: Osama Bin Laden is dead. The operation that resulted in his demise is a credit to the prowess and professionalism of the men and women in our military, and our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. All Americans — and the world — owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Bin Laden’s death does not end the threat posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates, but it goes a long way toward delivering justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and al Qaeda’s other acts of terrorism. Importantly, the operation appears to bear resemblance to earlier operations that captured the 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. The details should remind us that some of the most effective counterterrorism techniques do not rely on tens of thousands of troops stationed indefinitely in distant lands.
It is now clear that unrelenting pressure has severely weakened al Qaeda. Its capacity to harm Americans has been degraded for years, and yet we continue to dedicate tens of billions of dollars to combating terrorism in all forms. Here’s hoping that this evening’s welcome news contributes to an evolution of U.S. counterterrorism strategy that avoids costly and counterproductive policies, and that, going forward, we will always balance our efforts to advance American security with the need to preserve our essential rights and liberties.
Christopher Preble • May 2, 2011 @ 12:02 am
This, related, also from The CATO Institute:
V-OBL Day
by David Rittgers
This article appeared in The Washington Examiner on May 2, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
It goes without saying that Osama bin Laden's death is welcome news. But more than that, it is a teachable moment for how the U.S. ought to be carrying out its counter-terrorism policy moving forward.
Targeted killing is an essential component of the fight against al Qaeda. Much of the public debate has focused on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to carry out targeted killings — a misplaced emphasis on means rather than ends. International counterterrorism is primarily an intelligence campaign, and the select application of lethal force is more effective than the deployment of large military units to Muslim nations. A scalpel, not a sledgehammer, should be our primary counterterrorism tool.
Bin Laden's demise is in some ways not news, but an event that confirms many things we have known for years. Bin Laden's hideout was not a cave, but an expansive compound in a community of well-to-do Pakistani military retirees — confirmation that Pakistan is a conflicted ally and that elements of her intelligence services are working for the other side.
A scalpel, not a sledgehammer, should be our primary counterterrorism tool.
The nomination of General David Petraeus to take the helm at the CIA signaled an ongoing military-intelligence campaign against international terrorists. The raid that killed bin Laden exemplifies this new emphasis by the Obama administration. The brilliant success of this operation demonstrates the marked improvement in our human intelligence capabilities over the last decade.
Bin Laden's death underscores the failure of al Qaeda to achieve its impossible goal: establishing a global caliphate living under his nihilistic worldview. As soon as al Qaeda establishes a return address for American special operations personnel to raid or bomb, they will be pummeled into irrelevance. Al Qaeda itself does not present an existential threat — but they can provoke us into sacrificing our blood, treasure and liberties to the point that we no longer recognize the society we set out to defend.
Now is the time to reappraise our counterterrorism policy. Terrorists are not superhuman. We must prioritize spending on national security toward cost-effective measures, just as we do in any other field. Terrorism is a tactic employed by weak actors meant to induce hysteria and overreaction in its victims.
Bin Laden described his strategy in exactly those terms: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al Qaeda,' in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses." It is time to stop playing this game the way al Qaeda wants us to, and transition our forces down as soon as possible in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sustainable counterterrorism path is a mix of intelligence cooperation, direct action, and training regional allies, not using our line troops as a third-world constabulary in perpetuity.
David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, served three tours in Afghanistan as a Special Forces officer and continues to serve as a reserve judge advocate. The views expressed in this op-ed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Defense Department or Army.
More by David Rittgers
America needs this moment. With three wars, a sluggish economy, and continued partisan rearranging of the budgetary deck chairs, a bit of good news may give the country a renewed sense of focus. It is also fitting that the president ordered the strike between playing a round of golf and attending the White House correspondents' dinner: Contrary to al Qaeda's best efforts, life goes on, nations heal, and America will persevere and thrive.
Celebrating V-OBL day is not the end of the road, but a significant milestone nonetheless. Hopefully this moment will provide closure for those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001 and in the decade of war we have experienced since. Bin Laden's death represents a stake through the heart of an enemy inimical to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This too, related, from The CATO Institute:
After Bin Laden
This too, also related, from the CATO Institute:
With bin Laden Gone, Declare Victory and Come Home
by Gene Healy
This article appeared in The DC Examiner on May 3, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
"My first reaction was a cringe," Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak wrote about Sunday night's "macabre jubilee," as D.C. residents of all stripes partied in the downtown streets, celebrating Osama bin Laden's death.
"Almost vulgar," she pronounced the scene.
There's no accounting for taste, but it seems to me that, if ever there was a death worth celebrating, it's this one.
That's so not simply because bin Laden, murderer of thousands of innocents, richly deserved a bullet to the face, but also because his death gives us the opportunity to end what once threatened to become an era of permanent emergency and perpetual war.
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
More by Gene Healy
Sept, 11, 2001, should have concentrated the mind wonderfully as to the nature of our enemy: a stateless network of militants whose greatest hope lay in getting America to damage itself. Instead, we played into al Qaeda's hands with two bloody and costly foreign occupations, only one of which, in Afghanistan, had any relevance to the al Qaeda threat.
In Kabul in the fall of 2001, Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison lucked into buying Ayman al-Zawahiri's abandoned laptop, lifted from al Qaeda's central office. What Cullison found provided insight into the jihadists' strategy:
"Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers."
Rather, "its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back" in a manner that would, in bin Laden's words, "bleed America to the point of bankruptcy," and enhance terrorist recruitment. "One wonders," Cullison wrote, "if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer."
As bin Laden famously said in 2004, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."
Bin Laden didn't "bleed America to the point of bankruptcy." But we've lost nearly 6,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and contractors, and spent more than $1 trillion on the thankless task of creating democracy at gunpoint.
For a decade now, U.S. troops have been forced to play the role of armed "community organizers." To what end? There was always something odd about conservatives jumping from "they hate us because we're free" to "if we make them free, then they won't hate us."
If you think expanded suffrage "drains the swamp" of terrorist hate, consider the reaction of democratically elected Hamas, which mourned bin Laden's death.
On Monday, neoconservative Max Boot wrote, somewhat nervously, "Don't assume that with bin Laden gone, the rationale for the war effort in Afghanistan also disappears."
Boot's right that having a presence in Afghanistan helped us carry out the operation that killed bin Laden. But how deep a "footprint" do we need? We now have nearly 100,000 troops in-country chasing what President Obama's CIA director admits are "50 to 100" al Qaeda operatives, "maybe less."
We certainly don't need to continue funding what George Will has called "New Deal 2.0" in Afghanistan, complete with agricultural subsidies to discourage opium growing, a 900,000-square-foot police training center for the country's illiterate and corrupt security forces, and USAID-sponsored pro-democracy "kite festivals."
Is bin Laden's death "merely symbolic"? Perhaps, but "merely" ignores the importance of symbols in a fight that has a large ideological component. And the symbolism involved in giving the one-time iconic figure a thug's death allows us to put an end to an era of tragically wrongheaded strategy. We should declare victory, and come home.
And this, also related, from The CATO Institute:
With bin Laden's Death, America Must Recalibrate Its Policies
by Malou Innocent
This article appeared on The Daily Caller on May 3, 2011.
PRINT PAGE
CITE THIS
Sans Serif
Serif
Share with your friends:
ShareThis
In an operation 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Laden. This victory is a testament to the tireless efforts of our brave men and women in uniform. Their momentous achievement shows why when it comes to capturing and killing terrorists, targeted counterterrorism measures often prove more effective than expansive counterinsurgency campaigns.
With bin Laden's death, the United States closes a long chapter of its "War on Terror." Yet given America's large-scale, long-term nation-building mission in Afghanistan, another chapter remains unfinished. The day after President Barack Obama announced bin Laden's death, NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in a statement congratulating the United States for the operation against bin Laden, reiterated NATO's intent to continue with its nearly decade-long mission, with its ostensible goal of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan ever again.
[T]he diminished al Qaeda threat was and always has been a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America.
NATO and the U.S. need to re-think the mission — for several reasons.
First, while some policymakers claim the war in Afghanistan is worth waging because terrorists flourish in failed states, this theory cannot account for the terrorists who thrive in states with the military power to resist external interference. That bin Laden was found in Pakistan highlights this fact. After all, even in the unlikely event that America and its allies did forge a stable Afghanistan, the fewer than 100 al Qaeda fighters currently believed to be in that country could simply relocate to other regions of the world. Moreover, as far as we know, the al Qaeda movement has cells not only in Pakistan, but also in Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, and, at one point, Germany, Spain, and even Florida.
Second, remaining in Afghanistan presents a bigger threat to American interests than al Qaeda itself can pose. Amassing troops there has fed the perception of a foreign occupation of Muslim land, and spawned terrorist recruits in that country and elsewhere. Following the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, no one could have imagined that the United States would go from punishing al Qaeda and the Taliban to ten years later mandating the number of women who can serve in the Afghan parliament. Luckily, American security does not depend on us transforming what is a deeply divided and poverty-stricken society into a self-sufficient, non-corrupt, stable electoral democracy.
Third, Afghanistan's landlocked position in Central Asia will forever render it vulnerable to meddling from surrounding states. The clash of strategic interests not just between the United States and Pakistan, but also among other competing regional powers, shows, to quote America's new CIA director, General David Petraeus, that "while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible." Under such conditions, Washington's periodic troop surges, increased development aid, and Predator drone strikes will fail to translate into anything more than limited gains on the ground.
Malou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
More by Malou Innocent
Finally, the U.S. military is a professional and competent fighting force that is adept at bombing enemy command centers and destroying adversaries with disproportionate firepower. However, finding hidden killers such as terrorists often requires precision. The most effective methods used to disrupt safe havens and round up suspected terrorists have been America's ongoing intelligence sharing with close allies and partners around the world, its monitoring of inaccessible regions with unmanned aerial vehicles, and its use of covert operatives against specific targets when absolutely necessary. Indeed, bin Laden's death, the greatest victory against al Qaeda so far, relied on counterterrorism, not on counterinsurgency. So too did the other successes scored against al Qaeda, such as the snatch-and-grab operations that netted Ramzi bin al Shibh in September 2002, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed in March 2003.
Bin Laden's death does not mean the end of al Qaeda. But the diminished al Qaeda threat was and always has been a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America. Tragically, the enormous costs of ongoing operations in Afghanistan tend to dwarf the victories America routinely scores against al Qaeda elsewhere in the world.
Policymakers and prominent opinion leaders will continue to push for open-ended nation-building missions and large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns against al Qaeda and other jihadists. But like the medicine a doctor wrongly prescribes to a patient, don't blame the medicine, blame the doctor.
No comments:
Post a Comment