A Lengthening Chain

The recent attacks in Mumbai are already fading into the collective memory here in the United States, joining the list of organized terror attacks in places like Madrid and Bali. Much has become clear in the days since my first post on this matter: the attackers effected a seaborne insertion, seized locally available vehicles, and proceeded to conduct themselves with a professionalism approximating a special operations force. Maintaining radio silence, they split in to teams and executed a series of diversionary attacks to confuse first responders, and then moved into their target hotels and office buildings. They carried secure communications gear, were familiar with the floor plans, directed their movements with hand signals.

As Newsweek points out, at this point it is a fairly open secret that the Pakistani military had something to do with training these individuals. The article also does an excellent job of detailing the limitations of Pakistan's civilian government's efforts to confront a military establishment which has traditionally kept its own council with regard to suppressing Islamic extremists. Oh, and efforts to protest innocence by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Pakistani "charity" which seems to have been somehow involved, are undermined by this Times article, written by a reporter who interviewed one of their members the week before the attacks. I don't personally know anything about the organization, but the guy in this interview appears to have an agenda rather beyond clothing the poor and helping the needy.

None of this will strike any student of contemporary Southeast Asia as particularly surprising. India has shown admirable restraint with regard to Pakistan after the attacks, which is reassuring considering the weapons technology available to both parties. The solution, which would be for Pakistan to actually work to suppress violent extremist groups, may well prove beyond the reach of many of those in Pakistan who would like to see it happen. Which is truly unfortunate, in part because it means that Mumbai really is just another link in what will prove to be a lengthening chain of tragedies perpetrated by extremists, and in part because India is a democracy, and it's only a matter of time before people there start to demand a more aggressive foreign policy with regard to Pakistan. If they do, it will be hard to blame them. No doubt, this was in part precisely what those gunmen wanted when they came ashore in Mumbai, and I hate to see brutality rewarded.

Carnage in Mumbai

So I've been following the carnage in Mumbai since the early confused reports last night, was still on the BBC for the 0500GMT transition from the skeleton night-shift to the morning pros, and the whole thing sounds like a nightmare. As this remains a "fluid and dynamic" situation, I'm just giving you a link to CNN, as their team coverage with IBN has in fact been pretty decent.

For anyone about to dismiss Mumbai as one of the several cities made less relevant by its lack of American flags, let's put this in perspective. Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is the world's 5th largest city with some 19 million residents, it is the financial capital of the world's largest democracy, and it is among the most international cities in a subcontinent filled with international cities. In other words, it's kind of a big deal.

So the idea that groups of gunmen could invade the place, rolling up as many as ten targets with rifle fire and grenades, and then move to subsequent targets (in some cases?) by car (or according to one report, by boat?), and then have the discipline to create three hostage situations, suggests a degree of sophistication no previous terrorist attack I am familiar with has approached. It doesn't sound impressive at first, but think about it a little more- you have to have multiple strike teams, each with multiple, prioritized targets, and multiple transport elements capable of getting between those targets, all moving at the same time. In the world of organized violence, so much complexity should be a recipe for failure.

Further, the targets were mostly Western in nature- the hotels targeted were from the days of the Raj and favorite foreign hangouts, the train station a duplicate of St. Pancras in London, and the gunmen apparently sought out British and American passport holders when they were taking their hostages.

Certainly, it's possible to read this as bearing many of the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation- sophisticated, cheap, targeting westerners and finance. If so, we can expect to learn that it was perpetrated by a combination of locals and foreign operators- certainly, the emergence of a previously unknown organization hardly seems to offer much context or explanation. India is also about to hold the first elections in Kashmir, and this could be aimed as much at a domestic audience as the rest of the world- considering the complexity of this operation, the notion that these guys either are or were military types can't be ruled out- but if they were, I'd expect more sophisticated equipment, and besides, you'd have to be insane to do this as a foreign state. The cost-benefit just doesn't work out.

Finally, following the publication of a paper by the 304th military intelligence battalion that the Twitter service has already been used by socially disruptive groups as a real-time intelligence gathering service (here), I thought I would check out a service I've previously assumed appealed mostly to the Tiger Beat crowd. I was totally unprepared for the result- seconds-old posts by more or less regular people who are actually on the spot, watching the Taj burn from their own hotels, or who narrowly escaped the day's bullets themselves, then a cascade of information, links to real-time news feeds, someone posted a link to every emergency service and hospital in the city- it was far, far more powerful and impressive than I would have imagined, like a high-speed emergency wiki. Brace yourself, and have a look. It's a small world, after all.

The Cleanup Crew

One of the most pressing issues that the newly minted President Obama will face is what to do about the giant clusterfuck called Guantánamo Bay. Bush is going to leave quite a mess behind, even if he doesn’t do anything to make it worse in the next seventy or so days. The Obama camp has already said that the detention camp will be closed, but the question is, what do you do with the people who are already there? Some of the people there undoubtedly have done things that deserve punishment, and a lot of them are innocent of any crime save bad luck. And then there’s the great middle ground of people there, where it’s just hard to say. Thanks to Bush’s torture and treatment policies, it might be impossible to obtain convictions of most of the people there.

I don’t think you can overstate the moral component of why torture and unlawful detention are wrong, but from a practical level it simply doesn’t work. We are holding people we can’t try because of how we’ve treated them, we’ve made their families and countries distrust everything we say and now we have to decide what to do with people who have been in a prison for going on eight years. It isn’t just a moral disaster for the Union, it’s also a practical one: if you wanted to try and fight terrorism, this is about as far as you can get from a way to do it.

The New York Times had an interesting article this weekend dealing with rehabilitating jihadists in Saudi Arabia. Something like this is in order for the men we’ve kept hostage at Guantánamo Bay and our other extralegal detention facilities, known and unknown. As with crime, exercise and diet, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Wheroin

The BBC has a fascinating report on the disappearance of huge quantities of heroin in the wilds of Afghanistan. One of the aspects of the “war on terror” that has often gone unremarked upon is the degree to which the “success” of rebuilding Afghanistan depends upon growing huge quantities of poppies for the production of heroin. The drugs that they’re making are being funneled into Western Europe and the United States. What’s really interesting about the situation is that Afghanistan is currently producing almost three times as much opium as needed to satisfy the world’s known demand for heroin – but the streets of the Western world aren’t being flooded with unheard of amounts of heroin. Why?

The article quotes speculation that the heroin is being stockpiled inside Afghanistan for distribution into new markets – Russia, Iran and China – that are unwilling to admit to the size of their heroin problem. It underscores the degree to which terrorism is just one subset of a much larger and more interdependent series of world crime problems. You can’t deal with terrorism and drugs as separate issues – this whole underground world is linked together.

Life Inside Guantanamo Bay

The Washington Post has an essay by a Saudi man who was held in Guantanamo Bay for five and a half years. He was never charged with any crimes, and he was released with little explanation in 2007. It’s a pretty harrowing read. Guantanamo Bay and the Bush administration’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention are certainly abhorrent. Jumah al Dossari’s story of being swept up by the Pakistani military and shuffled around until finally arriving in Guantanamo Bay is full of details that ought to give anyone pause: being kept in freezing metal rooms, suicide attempts, beatings and the inexplicable legal proceedings where he was unable to see the evidence the government was using against him.

In all the things I’ve read about Guantanamo Bay and the way the government has pursued the “war on terror,” the biggest question I keep asking myself is, what was this supposed to accomplish? What did the Bush administration think they were going to get out of this? They kept a man who had done nothing wrong in prison without charge for over five years, and then just let him go. When in that time did they discover that al Dossari was no threat, either to himself or to others? Presumably, by releasing this man, the government is admitting that he is not a terrorist. If he isn’t, why did they keep him? If he is, why did they let him go? Why did it take over five years to determine this? This whole operation, Camp X-Ray, the military tribunals, keeping “enemy combatants” in indefinite detention – to what end? These people are not super villains. Even the people in Guantanamo Bay who are terrorists, the lengths that they go to – al Dossari was transported to the camp on a plane, shackled to the floor, wearing black-out goggles and ear muffs – makes no sense. Did they expect him to use superpowers to take over the plane? This central incoherence is what I find truly perplexing about our reaction to terrorism. The mentality that says, “even if it’s wrong, we’ve got to do something” doesn’t make any sense to me. On an individual level, that may be understandable, but as a governing philosophy it creates travesties like the one we find ourselves in now.

Keeping America Safe

Now that we’ve been protected from the diabolical mastermind that is the guy who drove around Osama bin Laden, the Washington Post is reporting that the Defense Department isn’t sure that they’re even going to let the guy go after his sentence is fulfilled. Honestly, if they aren’t planning on letting these guys go, even people like Hamdan who are of little or no importance, what are we planning on doing with them?

What I find truly shocking about the Bush Administration and the abhorrent way they’ve conducted the push back against al Qaeda is not the ugly, illegal way they’ve treated people – we still have people in Guantanamo Bay who are innocent of any crimes – although that’s bad enough – but the impression that they give of not having put any thought at all into what they were going to do down the road.

Seriously, did they just envision keeping these men in a prison until they all died of old age? One reason they don’t want to let them go is the fear that they’ll go back to their old terroristin’ ways. Did we not think about this before we decided to keep these men locked in an extralegal limbo for years and years?

So, my question for you guys. January, 2009, President Obama is sworn in. What does he do with Guantanamo Bay? What does he do with these prisoners? Does he transfer the ones who really were involved in terrorism to federal prisons? What about the innocents that have been rotting away there for years? I really don’t have any idea. But it certainly is something that bears thinking about.

The Worst of the Worst

Well, thank god we started these extralegal, extrajudicial military tribunals to try the “worst of the worst.”  Because, lord knows, I wouldn’t feel safe at night if I didn’t know that the military was protecting me from guys who know how to drive.  For the next five months, I’ll know that I can get a safe night’s sleep.

The whole Guantánamo Bay fiasco has exemplified the Bush Administration. Executive overreach, absurd claims, insistence that they’re protecting us from the harsh realities that we’re not ready to face, and at the end of it, we’re left with this pitiful, laughable conclusion.  If this man really did anything to deserve thirty years in prison, I’m glad to know that the Bush Administration has screwed it up so thoroughly that a rigged, semi-legal military tribunal couldn’t even convict him of the main charge against him.  The last six years have been like Orwell writing for Monty Python.