Sending Theirs to the Morgue

“He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.  He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way!  That’s how you get Capone.” The soliloquy recited by Sean Connery’s Chicago policeman in the film The Untouchables is frequently invoked by commentators on the War on Terror.  For some years now, much of the news out of Afghanistan has been about Taliban leaders being sent to the morgue.  Taliban commanders Qari Amullah in 2005, Mullah Osmani in 2006, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Berader in 2007, Mullah Mansur and Maulawi Hassan and Baitullah Mehsud in 2009—all have been reported killed by NATO forces, with a now-formulaic assurance that their importance to Taliban operations makes sending them to the morgue particularly significant to the War on Terror.

This parade of bodies to the morgue has, however, been fully compatible with a worsening operational situation in Afghanistan.  The routine loss of its commanders to NATO targeting has not prevented the Taliban from holding most of southern Afghanistan, using Pakistan as a base, and extending its reach into parts of northern Afghanistan.  As in Iraq, we are finding that a strategy emphasizing the killing of insurgent leaders is inadequate to the task of decisively changing the political and security environment.  In a late-August report to his seniors, the U.S .  commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, called for a new strategy that focuses on protecting the population in areas menaced by the Taliban, a method that sounds more like “clear and hold” than “send one of his to the morgue.”

The trend of President Obama’s overall War on Terror policy has, however, prioritized manhunts over securing territory and populations.  His seminal speech in August to a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience contained these words on Afghanistan:

“…we’re able to refocus on the war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  That’s why I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March  –  a strategy that recognizes that al Qaeda and its allies had moved their base from the remote, tribal areas  –  to the remote, tribal areas of Pakistan…  And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.”

Obama has always discussed the war against “Al Qaeda and its extremist allies” in these terms, with the emphasis on attacking their personnel and organization.  Whether we call it a “law enforcement” orientation or not, his strategic posture is that of the manhunt, focused on tracking the terrorists down rather than transforming the environment that produces them.  Even though he speaks of needing “diplomacy and development and good governance,” he cannot seem to bring himself to speak explicitly of committing the US to establishing a secure and survivable state in Afghanistan.

As conservative commentators have noted repeatedly, Obama avoids speaking in these terms about Iraq as well.  The VFW speech is remarkable for its avowal that the commitment the US is determined to honor is the one to leave Iraq — come what may:

“Now, as Iraqis take control of their destiny, they will be tested and targeted.  Those who seek to sow sectarian division will attempt more senseless bombings and more killing of innocents.  This we know.

“But as we move forward, the Iraqi people must know that the United States will keep its commitments.  And the American people must know that we will move forward with our strategy.  We will begin removing our combat brigades from Iraq later this year.  We will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next August.  And we will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.  And for America, the Iraq war will end.”

The continuation of Taliban-hunting, while Obama’s rhetoric and policy inexorably disengage from the project of fostering democratic self-determination and national security for the fledgling polities in Iraq and Afghanistan, cannot help sending a powerful signal about US attitudes and intentions.  This signal is amplified by events like the targeting, yesterday (14 September), of Al Qaeda operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in Somalia.  Nabhan has been implicated in the 1998 US embassies attacks, and was reportedly killed in a helicopter raid mounted by US forces against an Al-Shabaab terrorist convoy in southern Somalia.  What Obama is willing to continue doing – assassinate terrorist leaders – stands in stark and informative contrast to what he is not willing to continue.

We should look for two systemic problems to emerge from this policy orientation.  One derives from its “all stick, no carrot” aspect: it backs off significantly from giving terror-producing polities and populations alternative futures to hope for.  The message that “America will stop targeting your terrorists if you stop producing them, and consider more constructive interaction with the rest of the world” will fade into the more punitive, less encouraging “send ‘em all to the morgue.” The difference between the latter message and the message of radical Islamism itself is not clear.

Sending this message puts the US, moreover, on a plane with autocratic and much less open polities like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where terrorists who threaten the regimes are dealt with far more summarily than they have ever been at Guantanamo.  The US focus under Obama on assassinating terrorist leaders is likely to begin seeming too similar to, for example, the suspicious elimination of “Nigerian Taliban” leader Mohammad Yusuf in July, after his Al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram group launched an offensive in northern Nigeria this spring.  The charge that America’s waging of the War on Terror was “all about oil” or “all about power” never stuck, in the average American’s mind, while our strategic focus was on transforming the dysfunctional autocracies that enabled global Sunni wahhabism.  If our focus indeed degenerates into merely killing wahhabist leaders, the charge of cynical pragmatism — doing whatever it takes to avert threats to state power — will become more adhesive.

Many Al Qaeda terrorists were killed, as well as captured, under Bush, of course.  But it was always clear during his tenure that this was not the main effort in the War on Terror but a supporting, and subordinate, one.  Less clarity on that matter reigned in the Afghan theater, even under Bush; and the shortcomings of that posture are likely to spread to the overall GWOT.  It has not worked well in Afghanistan to essentially do what George Will recently urged:  pull out of a role in securing “Afghanistan,” forget nation-building, and target terrorist leaders from “over the horizon.”  We have never made a serious effort to secure Afghanistan as we did with the surge in Iraq; and the free-for-all developing across southwest Asia — including fresh evidence of Iran supplying the Afghan insurgents — is the result.

The messy situation on the ground highlights the second problem we should expect to continue emerging with a narrow focus on assassinating terrorist leaders.  That problem is a mental orientation to the military situation that is skewed and doomed to failure.  Afghanistan is a problem we should approach primarily from the standpoints of political geography and civil integrity:  that is, as General McChrystal advocates, the security of the people and their civil life from exploitation and intimidation by the Taliban.  Regarding the issues raised by political geography, however, we have been almost wholly uninterested or uninspired.

The US military has at least made use of a geographic perspective, emphasizing almost exclusively, with linear thinking, the pacification of southern and eastern Afghanistan – the Taliban’s stronghold.  As this analysis concludes, that emphasis is putting us out of position to address Taliban inroads in northern Afghanistan.  (I do not concur with everything in the Carnegie analysis, but its conclusion on the danger of ignoring Taliban activity in the north is sound.  The maps in the latter half of the piece are very useful.)

It is unquestionably significant that the Taliban’s position in southern Afghanistan facilitates its use of Pakistan as an operational rear.  But in focusing operationally on that concern, we are allowing the Taliban to flank Afghanistan’s center – and its capital – with its penetration of the north.  We are also effectively quiescent in the face of cross-border supply routes emerging elsewhere in the country; namely, for the moment, from Iran into the western province of Herat.  The Taliban are made more lethal by supplies from Iran, but we must also be concerned that the Taliban’s establishment of entrenched positions in the north will give it access to supplies across other borders – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan – a situation many times harder to plan for interdicting.  A supply route from Iran is a hard enough problem, particularly as it is almost certainly facilitated not by politically sympathetic groups but by simple bribery of largely apolitical mountain tribes, which in this area speak a local dialect of Farsi.  Moreover, the possibility of Russia adopting the Taliban (probably by proxy), as a means of creating additional difficulties for the US and NATO in Afghanistan, cannot be ignored.  We have already ceded Russia a problematic veto power over our own (NATO) supply lines into the country.

We are thus in the position of ignoring, at the level of national policy, almost everything that is most dangerous and significant about the situation in Afghanistan, and focusing instead on manhunting the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  In spite of the occasional false reports – exaggerations, as Mark Twain would have put it, of the deaths of terrorist leaders – we have been pretty good at sending them to the morgue.  We need to ask ourselves, however, if that is really the character we want our GWOT policy to have, in Afghanistan or on a global basis.

Because, as the student of history can readily relate, sending his men to the morgue was not, in fact, the way to “get Capone.”  He endured the loss of a lot of men.  What took him down was a pedestrian case of tax fraud.  And the most important lesson of all is that “getting Capone” did not end the larger problem of syndicate crime or its threat to political control of civic life.  Rudy Giuliani might have some good ideas about cultivating a respect for the rule of law in Afghanistan, but “the Chicago way” is not a good model for it.  First, however, you have to care about effecting a “rule of law” transition, and fostering a common commitment to it.  Obama does not talk like a president who has this in mind.  He is most comfortable and explicit when he talks about sending theirs to the morgue.