Again, none of these issues are being raised in Congressional hearings or the media, or by the public.The CIA created the facility in Benghazi but barely defended it. They did not have local forces capable of rallying to their defense when they needed it and could not protect two diplomats on whom their cover relied. Then, when the news broke, they manipulated talking points to sell out the State Department and Ambassador Rice, who was told to represent the administration in the media. They have ducked questions in Congress about their conduct, too. Apart from a closed November testimony by ex-CIA director David Petraeus,no one from the agency has had to publicly answer questions the way the State Department has.

Read the whole thing over at Medium.

Taken as a whole, drones seem to be quite good at what they’re supposed to do: disrupting terrorist groups. But that isn’t enough to actually end the threat posed by terror groups. Are the civilian and psychological costs drones incur worth it?

There is no question drones have caused dramatic, explosive anti-Americanism in the countries where they’re used. In Pakistan, the massive public outcry over the arrest of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who killed two people in Lahore, was a disaster for relations between Washington and Islamabad. His involvement in the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan elicited deep anger. Yemen, too, has seen increasing public fury at drone strikes—as witnesses like Farea al-Muslimi recounted during the Senate hearing.

But does this matter? Should the United States care that it’s disrupting the political balance of the countries in which it operates drone programs, and does rising anti-Americanism really matter in the long run?

Read the whole thing at the American Prospect.

Yet many experts are uncertain whether autonomous attack weapons are necessarily a bad thing, either. “Can we program drones well? I’m not sure if we can trust the software or not,” Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in transnational cyberthreats and cyberforensics, wrote in an email. “We trust software with less rigor to fly airliners all the time.”

The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn’t perfect. Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent conflicts. Just on the American side, massacres — like when Marines killed 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha or Marine special forces shot 19 unarmed civilians in the back in Jalalabad — speak to the fragility of human judgment about using force. Despite decades of effort to make soldiers less likely to commit atrocities, it still happens with alarming regularity.

Yet, machines are not given the same leeway: Rights groups want either perfect performance from machines or a total ban on them.

Read the whole thing at Foreign Policy.

“The outcry over extraordinary rendition — which was how President Bush went about capturing and interrogating a lot of these suspected individuals — was incredibly unpopular … abroad [and] in the U.S.,” Foust said. “Frankly, killing people polls better, and it polls strongly across the aisle.” …

Foust explained that capturing targets had become a “political black hole of what to do with detainees,” after the shuttering of black sites left no standard process for arrests and extradition in hot spots such as Yemen and Pakistan.

“That poses a lot of really big challenges to doing this in an up front, legal way,” Foust said. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that it would take a lot of work to put that into place … You end up creating this ecosystem where killing is easier, more politically palatable, and more popular than capture.” …

The biggest problem going forward, according to Foust, is that the aggressiveness of the targeted killing program against al-Qaeda invites overuse.

The U.S. justification for drone strikes in non-battlefield countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are questionable, and expansion to al-Qaeda affiliates in Mali, Syria, and Iraq would be difficult to defend.

“It’s a slippery slope of essentially taking anyone who is attempting to brand themselves with the terror brand [i.e.al-Qaeda] and labeling them a threat to the U.S., which then opens up this whole menu of options that includes drone strikes,” Foust said. “That’s the kind of slippery slope policy making that concerns me.”

Read the whole thing at Business Insider.

I write op-eds for a living, more or less, though I like to tell myself that what I do is more analytic and researched than simply slinging around an opinion. That being said, there is a specific genre of op-ed writing, one meant to float trial balloons for policymakers while propping up the influence and position of the writer. These op-eds are often written by think tankers with close ties to the administration currently in power — people like Max Boot and Michael O’Hanlon. The danger of these op-eds is that they carry the patina of neutrality and scholarship (after all, the writer has a PhD and works for a respected, high-profile institution and even coauthors with a former official), yet are really there to provide political cover and validation for their colleagues in government.

Michael O’Hanlon is an unqualified master of the DC Op-Ed genre. I don’t say this with snark: he is a legitimate expert at writing this type of article, and his record — hundreds of op-eds since 9/11, coupled to a thousand appearances on TV — bears that out. His pace and the breadth topics he publishes about is incredible, almost super-human, especially when one considers the white papers and books he also churns out yearly. He does this while remaining polite, even friendly, at an enormous number of discussion panels, and has the unique ability to remain calm and polite even when people (including me) disagree with him very strongly. And if the content matched such herculean effort, I would probably hold him in genuine awe.

The problem, though, is that such a blistering pace of writing comes at the cost of depth. There just isn’t physically enough time to delve deeply enough into a topic to extract real insights when writing at such an incredible clip. As a consequence, ideas float at the highest level, rarely grappling with their own complexities or downsides.

In a way, this makes perfect sense: after all, the real target of DC Op-Eds isn’t the general public, but the GS-14s and GS-15s who run agency branches and do the nitty-gritty policy work that filters up to the principles who have to sell it to the President. This level of government work eschews detail and hates nuance — not because they’re bad people, but because they just don’t have the time to really ingest how complex an issue might be. They have to trust on their inputs — their own organizations and their trusted outside advisers — to do that for them. A well crafted DC Op-Ed fits perfectly into this workflow, and is an effective way to either promote a certain policy idea or subtly shift an organization to consider a new path.

Yet there is a downside. A poorly-thought out DC Op-Ed can miscast a problem, gloss over complexity, and make ill-considered recommendations. O’Hanlon’s latest op-ed, for USA Today, is a great example of this pitfall. Deconstructing it can show how all the components of a classic DC Op-Ed come together to make a case only a policymaker would find compelling.

First, there’s the action bias:

That President Obama has said Syria’s use of chemical weapons would constitute crossing a “red line,” means he will have to act. If U.S. intelligence eliminates any remaining doubts about the use of chemical weapons, the United States will probably have to retaliate — perhaps with cruise missile strikes against whatever Syrian army unit did the deed.

None of these things are particularly true. For starters, experts in weapons of mass destruction are in consensus that we really don’t know whether Assad has used chemical weapons or not. So calling for action right now is premature. And the idea that responding to a red line must involve American military strikes, as opposed to other measures (such as arming rebels, spearheading a new diplomatic push against Moscow and Beijing, or gathering the Arab League to run its own intervention), is just as assumption. American leaders love being told that they must exercise leadership on an issue, and that the only form of leadership anyone will pay attention to is American military force.

Obama’s critics want him to “do something.” They refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994, or the more successful Libya intervention of 2011, and demand that the U.S., along with other NATO states and the Arab League, find a way to end the carnage.Arm the rebels, establish a no-fly zone, set up safe areas for internally displaced persons and refugees.

Indeed, I tend to support these kinds of ideas myself, and the president is reportedly considering providing some arms to some of the insurgents more seriously than he did before.

Again, a curious bias and assumption for action: who really cares what Obama’s “critics” think or want? That should not affect the objective merits of taking direct action in Syria one way or another. Framing the decision to intervene through the domestic lens of opposition makes an important decision about foreign policy into mere maneuvering. The sad thing is, this is also a persuasive argument — after all, who wants to be seen “doing nothing” while bad things happen? Appealing to domestic critics is one way to lend the impression that taking action enjoys broad support (even if it really doesn’t).

We need a debate about the right exit strategy in Syria before we enter into the war. The right model is neither Iraq, nor Afghanistan nor Libya, but the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Hold on a second. Bosnia was only a “success” after nine years of U.S. troops doing difficult peacekeeping. It was, without exaggeration, a cesspit of corruption, sex trafficking, and misconduct. It took a massive Croat army force to sweep through the region, and they committed countless atrocities along the way. If anything, Bosnia and Herzegovina should be a lesson in how not to intervene in a conflict, as it was more luck than skill or planning that led to a good outcome there.

It wasn’t perfect, but 18 years later, Serbs, Muslims and Croats have not gone back to war.

This is an important aspect of a DC Op-Ed: false historicity. It is easy to look at Bosnia as it exists now, on the verge of joining NATO, and think “oh isn’t that great? We must have done a great job there in the 90s.” The problem with this forgetfulness is that during the 90s, literally everyone pointed to the Bosnia intervention as a boondoggle, a perfect embodiment of how dysfunctional the UN was, and how futile constructive intervention in a civil conflict could be. The killing stopped for a while, which is nothing to sneeze at, but peacekeepers still unearth weapons caches with alarming regularity. The whole house of cards could tumble down at any moment. But ignore that, it turned out well eventually, right? So let’s do that again.

With a Bosnia-type approach, Assad’s Alawite minority would keep a section of the country, most likely along the coast, where local police would be the main security forces. Assad himself would have to step down and ideally would go into exile. Kurds would keep similar sections of the country in the north. The main central cities would be shared.

Another important aspect of a DC Op-Ed is glossing over complexity. In what universe would the Syrian rebels allow the Alawites to maintain any territory after the atrocities they’ve committed? Or allow Assad to leave the country alive? Which country would offer Assad sanctuary, and if not how on earth would Assad agree to “step down” and stay inside Syria? Which belligerents would agree to “share” the “main central cities?” This is an idea that sounds awesome on first thought but the moment it’s examined in any detail it falls apart — which is why it appeals so strongly to the people who run policy: they don’t have the time to think very deeply about complexity, so when it’s presented simply it seems attractive.

And, of course, minority rights would be enshrined in the deal. In other words, having different parts of the country run primarily by one group or another would not be an invitation to further ethnic cleansing or killing.

Hahahahaha. He’s actually serious about this. But what’s most interesting here is that, after painting a happy picture of how Bosnia went (remember how ethnic cleansing stopped so quickly?), he just drops the issue of chemical weapons altogether and gets down to business.

Yes, this plan does imply a number of U.S. peacekeepers on the ground, perhaps comparable in number to the 20,000 who began the job in Bosnia in 1995. The United States should, however, commit to such a deployment only if other countries, including Arab states and Turkey, provide the majority of peacekeepers. In fact, we should seek pledges of international participation before moving to any direct U.S. involvement in the conflict.

20,000 troops. Michael O’Hanlon wants to send 20,000 troops into Syria to establish a peace. Nevermind the fact that the actual Pentagon has said it would need at least 75,000 troops to meaningfully secure Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles (the “red line” that is prompting this intervention talk to begin with). But 20,000 troops, on the ground in Syria, with Assad’s modern air defenses and sophisticated air force, and massive army. He thinks 20,000 troops would really work here.

The last time pundits lowballed the forces needed to invade and secure a country was Iraq. In 2003, before the invasion, O’Hanlon suggested the U.S. would need upwards of 150,000 troops to be successful. As it was, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress something similar, he was soundly removed from his position so that Rumsfeld could invade with 50,000 troops — more than twice as many as O’Hanlon is now suggesting for Syria. Such a minimization of the real likely costs of carrying out this policy is nothing short of negligent.

But to repeat, this is a DC Op-Ed. Its purpose is not to seriously analyze the problem, contextualize that problem in history, and from there eliminate unsound options and pick from a menu of whatever’s left. Its purpose is to flatter those in charge (“of course you alone must exercise leadership on this topic”), appeal glibly to America’s unique capacity to succeed, suggest pyrrhic successes are models to emulate again, ignore all the many horrible things that happened along the way, and dishonestly minimize the real costs that the policy would incur.

Michael O’Hanlon is a master of the craft. In a way, it is a laudable skill — he has become very successful doing this. But it is also terrifying to behold, especially knowing that he maintains influence and friends in the administration. The appropriate reaction to this snake oil salesmanship is scorn.

But, looming behind all of these piecemeal decisions is an important underlying factor: the war on terrorism. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) — passed days after the September 11th attacks — establishes an armed conflict against al Qaeda. It is this technically ongoing armed conflict that two Presidents and dozens of elected officials have used to justify extraordinary decisions to imprison innocent people and prevent access to civilian trials.

Ending the AUMF — and with it the “war” part of the war on terror — would undermine the rhetorical and legal maneuvering used to justify keeping Guantanamo open.

Go read the rest over at Medium.

Russian officials are quick to underscore that they are victims of Chechen terrorism, not causes of it.  As if to underscore this point, Ramzan Kadyrovv—the Moscow-approved strongman who currently governs Chechnya–left a comment on his Russian-language Instagram. It reads, in part, “Any attempt to make the connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevys if they are guilty, [is] in vain… It is necessary to seek the roots of evil in America.”

Russia-U.S. relations are currently at a low point. Perversely, focusing so much on the two brothers’ ethnicity—even if they’ve barely ever been to Chechnya itself—might actually bring Washington and Moscow closer together. After all, it was Vladimir Putin, not George W. Bush, who was the first world leader to announce his country’swide scale campaign against terrorism because of the violence in Chechnya. And since then, one of the few places where Moscow and Washington have found room to cooperate has been on efforts against Islamist extremism.

Read the whole thing over at The American Prospect.

As a result, many Chechens who fled to Central Asia did not find refuge, just harassment and continued uncertainty. It should not be surprising that thousands moved on, as apparently the Tsarnaev family did 10 years ago. The United States has been a country of refuge for people fleeing conflict in the former Soviet Union — and not just in Chechnya. After the 2005 massacre in Andijon, Uzbekistan, for example, many Uzbeks who fled the government crackdown were able to settle in the United States. The United States has granted asylum to some Chechens who’ve fled the wars there, though we don’t yet know if the Tsarnaev family was among them.

We’ll have to see if any of this sad history is relevant to this week’s bombing in Boston. Chechens have had a raw deal, chased from country to country and rarely integrating well. The community where the two brothers were apprehended, Watertown, has a large Caucasus population, though it’s unclear how many are Chechen. There are also enclaves of Chechens in California, and a few live in Washington, DC. But it is difficult for such small numbers — perhaps only a few hundred in the whole country — to form supportive expatriate communities.

Read the whole thing over at Foreign Policy.

The rush to report a piece of information first can lead to regrettable errors. Despite claims to have cross-checked information, even reputable news organizations can get important facts wrong in the scramble to be first out the gate with news. The initial reports about who the police were looking for turned out to be wrong. Thursday night’s revelation that the two suspects were actually young refugees from Chechnya showed just how wrong the initial speculation can be.

The authorities, on the other hand, have not misled the public. On the contrary, the Boston police and the FBIdeserve tremendous praise for being restrained in their public statements, cautious about what they say in press conferences, and quick in identifying and locating the two alleged bombers. So relying on what officials say, rather than fast-breaking media segments, is a good way to stay ahead in the information game.

Read the whole thing over at the Christian Science Monitor.

Panelists:
Ivan Sigal, Executive Director, Global Voices
Joshua Foust, International affairs writer, analyst, and columnist for PBS
Katherine Maher, Director of strategy and engagement at the digital rights organization Access

Segments:

1. Yesterday: Was the Reddit community manhunt a positive use of the released photo?

2.  Last night:  Is this our first post-cable national news story?

3.  This morning: What do we know about the suspects’ backgrounds, and can we process these assumptions usefully in real time?

4.  Next week: What will be drowned out by this story next week?

Video is below!

<iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Do2Af6atuYc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>