Paging the Constitution

According to the New York Times,

"Wikileaks began to post pager messages that were sent on September 11, 2001. According to Wikileaks, these messages were intercepted by an "organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11." Some of these messages are from officials in police and fire departments, though a large number of messages are also from businesses."

I guess I should not be surprised that "an organization" was harvesting this info prior to 9/11 even though the individual messages appear to have no relationship to foreign policy, hanging on to it for nine years, and also not bothering to clean it up for analysis. But I am.

Oh, and did you know people still use pagers?

My Page 99 Test

Marshal Zeringue edits The Page 99 Test, and was kind enough to ask me to take the test. Here is how he described the test:

"The test is simple: Is Ford Madox Ford's statement 'Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you, accurate for your book?"

Here is what I wrote about page 99 of my just-published book, The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing:


Like almost every author who takes this test, my first reaction to
looking at page 99 of The International Politics of Intelligence
Sharing was "Ford Madox Ford was wrong."

My second reaction was, I hope, a bit more thoughtful. "My" page 99
starts out with a detailed summary of the complaints that political
leaders in the European Union have made about their counterparts'
willingness to share intelligence. This is inside baseball stuff--it
is not going to give a casual reader a good sense of the book's
argument. It is an example, though, of the key barrier to effective
intelligence sharing, which is that one state cannot reliably insure
that another is living up to promises to share fully and honestly.

Page 99 gets better towards the end. There it begins to suggest that
that solution is closer European integration of intelligence
activities. That is, these countries would be better off if they
applied some of the institutions they have developed to govern trade
or money to intelligence sharing. A key benefit these institutions
provide is the ability to monitor partners to determine if they are
complying with their promises to share. You will have to keep reading,
though, if you want to find out why this is unlikely to happen.

Peace Science

I am at the annual meeting of the Peace Science Society (International). Great conference. If I find out why it has such a weird name I'll let you know.

Station Chiefs: Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

The disagreement between the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency over who represents the intelligence community in foreign countries is over. The CIA won.

While this may clear up who is in charge on the US side, will it actually have any influence on intelligence sharing? I doubt it. The CIA argued that their people had long-standing connections to foreign intelligence agencies that would be undermined by shifting authority to the DNI. Maybe, but then again it was always believed that most station chiefs would continue to come from the CIA. Plus, we know that some other intelligence agencies have pretty solid relations with important counterparts overseas (such as the NSA-GCHQ link up). A potential downside of putting CIA in charge is that, since the DCI no longer oversees the entire intelligence community, he or she may not have as much influence overseas.

But I have to imagine that overall this will do little to improve or worsen actual intelligence sharing, and is really just a turf war among US intelligence agencies.

IR job at UNC Charlotte

Please see the announcement below for a recently authorized tenure track position in peace and conflict studies. I am chairing the search committee. I am happy to answer any questions about the position. I will also be at the Peace Sciences Society meeting in Chapel Hill later this month, and could meet with anyone interested in more information. Feel free to email me at jwalsh@uncc.edu if you want to set up a brief meeting.

Jim Walsh
Political Science
UNC Charlotte
http://www.politicalscience.uncc.edu/jwalsh

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE
DEPARTMENT OF GLOBAL, INTERNATIONAL & AREA STUDIES
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES/MIDDLE EAST

The Department of Global, International & Area Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte invites applicants for a tenure track position in Peace and Conflict Studies, with a preferred concentration in the Middle East, at the level of Assistant Professor. The position begins Fall 2010; Ph.D. in a discipline appropriate to Peace and Conflict Studies is required at the time of appointment. Requirements for the position include training in the field of international conflict and conflict resolution and an ability to contribute to our Judaic and Islamic Studies programs. The successful candidate will have expertise in some or all of the following areas: the political, economic, and cultural consequences of violence; national and international responses to war and conflict; and the development of strategies to promote political and cultural communication, understanding, and reconciliation. Desired qualifications are a commitment to multi-disciplinary approaches to scholarship and teaching and the ability to provide courses on global-scale issues that will enhance the undergraduate International Studies curriculum and help form a foundation for future graduate programs in International Affairs and Global Studies.

Faculty members in the Department of Global, International & Area Studies will be expected to maintain regular high-quality publication, seek external funding, and to play an active role and teach courses that service our global and area studies curricula. They are also expected to advise students, contribute to the governance of the department and the university, and participate in the development of future undergraduate and graduate programs.

UNC Charlotte is located in the state’s largest metropolitan area and is a growing Doctoral-Intensive urban university with a commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching. The university enrolls over 24,000 students. Established in 2009, the Department of Global, International & Area Studies currently offers multi-disciplinary majors in International Studies and Latin American Studies, as well as minors in those two programs, Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, Islamic Studies, and Judaic Studies. The Department also offers a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies. The Department contributes to the university’s General Education program and has strong collaborative relationships with interdisciplinary programs and departments including Africana Studies, Anthropology, Communication Studies, Economics, Geography, History, Language and Cultural Studies, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. The Department’s programs and student population reflect the diversity mission and goals of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information about our department, see: http://gias.uncc.edu/.

Applications must be made on-line at: http://jobs.uncc.edu (click on “Faculty” under Vacancy Type). Please include a letter of application outlining your relevant experience for the position as described above and your ability to contribute to the mission of the Department, a complete CV, relevant syllabi, and contact information for at least three references. Three letters of recommendation specific to this job application, publication samples, and an official graduate transcript may be requested by the Chair of the Search Committee at a later date. Screening of applicants will begin December 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

UNC Charlotte strives to create an academic climate in which the dignity of all individuals is respected and maintained. Therefore, we celebrate diversity that includes, but is not limited to ability/disability, age, culture, ethnicity, gender, language, race, religion, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status. AA/EOE.

A modest gift suggestion

This is now available (and it's a bit cheaper here). My colleague Greg Weeks suggests it would make a "great stocking stuffer".

Intelligence Sharing and US Counterterrorism Policy

A chapter I wrote on the topic of intelligence sharing and US counterterrorism policy will appear early next year in Emerging Transnational (In)security Governance, edited by Ersel Aydinli. You can find a pre-publication version of the paper here, or just read the summary below:

A top foreign policy priority of the United States is the dismantlement of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Like all terrorist organizations, al Qaeda is most effective if it can successfully conceal its activities from the authorities. Accurate intelligence is thus a crucial part of the campaign against the group. And many states are in a position to develop valuable intelligence. Countries in western Europe, North Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South and Southeast Asia are able to collect intelligence that the United States is unable to gather, and can engage in mutually beneficial intelligence sharing with the United States.

But some of these states also face powerful barriers to full intelligence sharing. European governments face legal challenges to some of their foreign intelligence activities. Domestic political pressures prompt some states in the Middle East and Europe to curtail collaboration with the United States. Some countries contain religious or nationalist groups or elements of the government apparatus that are less enthusiastic about taking effective action against al Qaeda. Other governments may wish to exaggerate the effectiveness of their action against and the accuracy of their intelligence on al Qaeda in order to win the approval and support of the United States.

These cross-cutting motives pose an important challenge for the United States because less than full cooperation and sharing is very difficult for it to detect. All intelligence agencies seek to ensure that their sources of information remain secret. This involves strictly limiting the distribution of such information among government officials and carefully controlling its dissemination to foreign governments. But these security measures also make it very hard for the recipients of shared intelligence to verify its accuracy. The problem for the United States is that some of the states that have the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda are also those with the strongest incentives to defect from agreements to share such intelligence.

Yet the United States has managed to strengthen intelligence sharing arrangements with many of these countries. How, if at all, do such arrangements address concerns about defection? At one extreme, it has been rather straightforward to arrange effective intelligence sharing with countries that have the fewest incentives to defect, such as those in western Europe. In many (but not all) areas, the United States and European countries have developed mechanisms for the regular exchange of intelligence. At the other extreme, the United States has largely eschewed intelligence sharing with countries that have the strongest motives to defect, such as Iran. More interesting are the arrangements pursued with many of the remaining countries that are formally committed to share intelligence with the United States but also face substantial pressures to renege on this commitment. Here the United States has created hierarchical mechanisms that give it some ability to directly monitor and control the intelligence activities of its partner. These mechanisms provide the United States with a way to secure intelligence from partners of problematic reliability. This paper explains how hierarchical relationships enhance intelligence sharing the conditions under which hierarchy will emerge. Specific mechanisms include financing the partner’s intelligence service to influence its objectives, providing training that imparts technical skills and socializes individuals to the goals of the United States, and rendering suspected terrorists to allied intelligence services in return for influencing their treatment and questioning. These hierarchical mechanisms provide the United States with a way to secure intelligence from rather unreliable partners.

Human rights and what to do in Afghanistan

How should concerns about human rights influence the current review of Afghanistan policy? Human rights have not figured prominently in this debate. But they are important for three reasons. First, um, human rights are important so we should talk about them. Second, if the human rights picture in Afghanistan deteriorates markedly (and there is a good chance that it will), the US is going to get blamed for it, and Obama is going to get blamed for it by some of his supporters at home. Third, human rights play a big role in some of the strategies currently under discussion.

So what are these strategies, and how do human rights concerns figure into them? Seems to me that the current course, while unsatisfactory in many ways, may not be so bad from a human rights perspective.

One option is for the US to leave. This would be pretty bad for rights in Afghanistan. Two likely outcomes of such a withdrawal are a Taliban takeover of most of the country or a big-time civil war. We have a pretty good idea from the 1990s how the Taliban would treat human rights. Human rights also fare pretty poorly in civil wars. So this would be bad.

Another option is to implement the counterinsurgency strategy advocated by the US theater commander. This could in principle be really good for human rights. A centerpiece of COIN is being so nice to the population that they support you rather than the insurgents. Practical difficulties abound, though. First, where would we find the many hundreds of thousands of troops needed to do COIN properly? If they could not be found, would we abandon some sections of the country to the insurgency (as recent redeployments away from remote areas would seem to suggest we are doing)? Or spread them so thinly that they cannot really protect the population? Another huge issue here is the Afghan government. COIN says we are to support this government in its efforts to win the legitimate support of the population. Well, it's difficult to think of a government with less legitimacy due to corruption, drug smuggling, stealing elections, alliances with warlords, and general incompetence. So legitimacy is a huge problem. Also, past efforts to implement COIN in other conflicts have not always been so nice to the peeps. Some have involved building security barriers, forcibly resettling people, and other violations of basic human rights. So COIN is nice for human rights in theory, but pretty difficult to carry out in practice.

The third major option is "counterterrorism". This means focusing military force primarily on Al Qaeda. It also means largely ignoring the rest of the country and its government. This could be problematic for two reasons. First, the rest of the country might fall apart. If insurgents aim to topple the government, and the US does not intervene to prop it up, both sides might commit massive human rights violations. Second, the inevitable civilian casualties produced by a military counterterrorism campaign could themselves be considered human rights violations and might create more
sympathy for the Taliban or Al Qaeda or both.

A final, and perhaps most likely, option would be to continue with the status quo. This essentially combines the COIN and counterterrorism strategies outlined above, but each at less than optimal levels. What has happened in the last few years suggests that this combo is unlikely to create a legit Afghan government or curtail terrorism, which is why everyone is talking about new and better strategies. But from a human rights perspective, the status quo may be the best of a series of bad options. The reason is that it commits the US and NATO to try to contain the worst excesses of the Afghan government, while keeping it in power. This means that the western powers can restrain the government from engaging in full-scale atrocities to maintain its hold on power, and convince the insurgents that a frontal attack on Kabul and other cities will not succeed.
ct

coin

status quo

election is a hr--so supporting K is good for coin, but bad for hr

The Taliban and Al Qaeda: Joined at the Hip?

In an interview to be broadcast tonight on the NewsHour on PBS, Hilary Clinton states that:

"If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can't tell you how fast al-Qaida would be back in Afghanistan. So we have to be really clear-eyed about this."

Can we really be so confident that this is the case? Of course the Taliban did exactly this before 9/11. But would they really do so again if they take over the entire country? Things did not work out for them so well last time. Maybe they will have learned that joining up with the enemy of just about everyone is not a great strategy for hanging on to power. Just asking.

Afghanistan: So What is the Mission Exactly?

The Washington Post has just published an assessment of the conflict in Afghanistan by the commander of US and NATO forces there. One striking feature of the assessment is that it contains two quite different statements of objectives. These differences nicely capture much of the debate about what to do in Afghanistan. It's a bit disturbing, though, that there is not more clarity on which mission is the priority.

The first page defines the mission as "to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat Al Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan." At a later point, the mission is defined as "to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces, and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development. . ."

So the first mission is counter-terrorism, and the second is state-building. Which mission dominates should have a huge influence on the choice of strategy. If the mission is state-building, the strategy needs to be long-term, much better resourced, and politically insulated from the inevitable setbacks (see: recent national election). If the mission is counterterrorism, the range of possible strategies is wider (the much criticized "offshore" counterterrorism operations, allying with local groups and warlords, focusing on international cooperation in the region and beyond), but likely to demand fewer resources or commitments to a failed Afghan state.

It would be useful if the assessment was more clarity on this point. Is the argument that state-building is the only effective way to pursue counterterrorism? Are NATO and the US pursuing one or both missions? If not, which one is more important?

AfPak Metrics: Where Is the Other Shoe?

The Obama administration released yesterday the metrics it suggests using to measure progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan (the full text is here).

Some are already criticizing the metrics as either insufficiently or overly ambitious. More important, I think, is understanding how these (or any other metrics) will influence policy. What happens if, say, none of the metrics are met in a year? Does the US withdraw? Or does it increase its political and military commitment to achieving the metrics? Is the mission over only when all of the metrics are in place, or do only some have to be met for the mission to be considered a success?

Without detailing the consequences of meeting or failing to meet the metrics, this list seems to serve few purposes. It does not tell the US public or political leaders the link between outcomes in the region and our level of commitment. As or more important, it does not tell the Afghan and Pakistani governments what happens if they fail to meet their metrics.

Publishing this list, though, is a step in the right direction. We clearly need to have a political discussion of the goals we seek to accomplish in the region. But we also need to be clear, before committing more forces, how achieving or not achieving these metrics will influence subsequent policy.

Famous People on Afghanistan

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, which is made up of well-known scholars and think-tankers who study foreign policy, has just published a letter to the president on Afghanistan policy. The letter lays out three reasons the authors oppose ratcheting up our effort there: (1) the objective of building an Afghan state is unrealistically ambitious, (2) it would be impossible to eliminate all safe havens in the country, and even if this could be done, Al Qaeda would simply relocate elsewhere in the world, and (3) the resources that would be expended in Afghanistan could be better used elsewhere.

The letter raises important points that really need to be central to the discussion of Afghanistan policy. I discussed the second point myself in a recent post here.

Should Afghanistan Matter That Much?

The US and NATO are in Afghanistan to suppress Al Qaeda, not to create an effective and humane Afghan state. But much policy seems to be driven by the assumption that you cannot suppress Al Qaeda without well-functioning government that can provide local security, is trusted by civilians, etc. Absent this, Al Qaeda can again use Afghanistan as a safe haven from which to launch attacks around the world.

An big risk, though, is that Afghanistan will come to totally dominate US counterterrorism policy, as Iraq did a few years ago. This is a problem because Afghanistan might not be all that important to Al Qaeda. The organization also has safe haven, to some extent, in Pakistan, Yemen, etc. and is also able to operate clandestinely in western Europe and the Middle East. The use of force in Afghanistan for the last 8 years has not prevented Al Qaeda from sponsoring attacks in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Indonesia, Jordan, Algeria, Britain, etc.

Wiping out Al Qaeda in Afghanistan via state building would be a hugely expensive and difficult task. And it might not work; the organization could simply shift more of its activities to other parts of the world.

Stopping Al Qaeda in Afghanistan leaves fewer resources for stopping Al Qaeda everywhere else. Instead of trying to reform the country from top to bottom, the US and NATO could play more of a balancing role among the different political and ethnic groups in the country. This would involve using carrots and sticks to reward groups that do not work with Al Qaeda and punish those that do. It would also mean leaving most questions of governance (or non-governance) up to the Afghans.

Such a divide and conquer strategy could have serious risks too. What would the US and NATO do if a political faction in Afghanistan engaged in gross human rights abuses? Or trafficked drugs? Could they just stand by and ignore this? What if the US and NATO continued to use drone attacks continued to hit civilians and drove some to support Al Qaeda?

There are no good options for dealing with Afghanistan. But I would point out that the current approach has not prevented human rights abuses, drug trafficking, or collator damage. Maybe it's time to put the threat from Afghanistan in perspective, and scale the effort and ambition there accordingly.

Homeland Security Essay Competition

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security (www.chds.us) is seeking entries for its Third Annual Essay Competition. The competition carries a $1,500 prize for the winning entry and the writer will be invited to the Center’s campus for its annual Forum. This competition strives to stimulate original thought and analysis on issues in Homeland Security and Homeland Defense. The competition is open to anyone with an interest in homeland security issues.

The criteria for the essay and its submission are:

Statement of Purpose:

According to the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the objectives of homeland security are to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America’s vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur. The purpose of this competition is to promote innovative thinking that addresses these objectives.

Essay question:

How can, or should, the United States make homeland security a more layered, networked, and resilient endeavor involving all citizens?

Responses may be general or may focus on a specific aspect (organizational, policy, strategy, practice, technological innovation, social impact, etc.) or discipline/field, such as emergency management, public health, law enforcement, critical infrastructure or intelligence. The essay may also be written from any perspective — e.g. government, private sector, cultural, local community or citizen.

Who may enter:

Anyone interested in homeland security issues. Individuals associated with CHDS past and present are not eligible.

Competition Guidelines:

The essay should be no more than five pages, single spaced, 12-point type and in Word or PDF format. Do not include author’s name on the essay. Entries will be submitted via webpage instructions. Deadline for submission: January 31, 2010.

Notification:

The winner and finalists will be announced no later than May 31, 2010.

Criteria:

Essays are judged according to the relevance of the response to the question, innovation of ideas, strength of the argument and quality of the writing.

Award:

The winner will receive a $1,500 cash award and will be invited to the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, located at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he or she will be recognized at the CHDS Forum.

Last year’s winning entry was titled “Emergency Response, Public Health and Poison Control: Logical Linkages for Successful Risk Communication and Improved Disaster and Mass Incident Response” and authored by Valerie Yeager, research assistant and writer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham South Central Center for Public Health Preparedness. The essay was the top essay out of 147 entries.

The winning essay for the first year of the contest was titled “Reducing the Risk” by Matthew Allen, a staff scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. This essay was chosen out of 80 entries.

For contest information and to enter, visit www.chds.us/?essay/overview.

About CHDS:

Established in 2002 on the campus of the 100-year-old Naval Postgraduate School, the Center seeks to educate homeland security leaders in strategic thinking and leadership from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The Center’s master’s degree program graduates 90 senior officials every year and is noted for offering the nation’s first master’s degree in homeland security. The Mobile Education Team (MET) travels around the country and has conducted more than 100 seminars for governors, mayors and their homeland security teams. More than 3,000 senior officials have participated in the MET program since its inception. The Center’s Executive Leaders Program draws leaders from government and private industry to provide an educational forum to enhance senior leaders’ capacity to identify and resolve homeland security problems. For information, visit www.chds.us.

About NPS:

The mission of the Naval Postgraduate School is to provide unique advanced education and research programs in order to increase the combat effectiveness of the U.S. and Allied armed forces as well as enhance the security of the United States. For information, see www.nps.edu.

For information, contact:

Heather Issvoran
Director, Strategic Communications
(831) 402-4672
Email: hissvora@nps.edu

How People Find This Blog

Like all self-absorbed bloggers (and I recognize the redundancy in that phrase), I wonder how many people read my musings and how they find them. This blog has a counter that tells me, among other things, what terms entered into a search engine brings people to Back Channels (I put that in italics to make it seem more like a real thing). Below I list some of these searches from the last week or so; it looks like a lot of people on the internet are interested in torture and in having their computer read a book to them:

• Why is torture bad
• New Geneva Convetion
• Read my book to me for free
• Effect of torture on war on terror
• Back start
• Read my book for free
• Substitutes for torture
• STM vs humanities and social science publishing
• Torture on terrorism statistics
• Intelligence sharing EU
• The coffin torcher how it works
• Statistics on terrorist torture
• Channels journal
• Iphone email notification light
• European Union intelligence sharing
• Henley-Putnam University controversy
• Read my book to me online

Taking Over in Afghanistan?

There is a big push on to increase the number of Afghan military and police. The argument is that this will relieve the US and NATO of much of the responsibility for securing the country. Mark Moyar points out a problem with this. Rapid expansion will fill the Afghan forces with poorly-trained officers. Bad leaders would fight poorly, be unable to persuade troops to stay in the military, and abuse the local population--all contrary to the goals of our current counterinsurgency strategy. He suggests it takes about 10 years to develop an officer well-trained in counterinsurgency.

One solution he suggests is giving the US military the authority to fire incompetent local commanders. Another is to have US officers directly command Afghan units. Both solutions have been used in the past with some success. But both also have substantial downsides. As Moyar acknowledges, putting US forces in the drivers seat "will elicit accusations of neocolonialism and will slow the development of indigenous leaders". In addition to this, American forces are still going to have some difficulty monitoring their Afghan subordinates 24 hours a day. The still not-very-well-trained Afghan forces might engage in crime, corruption, or human rights abuses even when led by US commanders. And the Taliban and Al Qaeda certainly blame the US for such actions.

Direct command would also reduce the United States' leverge over the Afghan government. There is little argument with the suggestion that it is really the Afghan government that needs to reform in order to contain the insurgency. But it has shown remarkably little interest in ending corruption and plain old bad governance in the last eight years. Putting US forces in charge will furhter increase the responsiblity of the United States for the conflict, and reduce the responsibility of the Afghan government, giving it fewer incentives to improve.

A better way to spur the Afghan government to action might be for the US to develop a credible exit strategy rather than doubling down by running the Afghan army. This was part of what changed the situation on the ground in Iraq; after the 2006 midterm elections in the US, the Iraqis knew that there was no support for a long-term commitment to keeping troops in the country. This (together with other developments) may have pushed them to get their act together. One way to do this would be to publicly give up on building an effective Afghan state. Instead, focus the US mission strictly on counterterrorism and to reduce the US military footprint in the country as much as possible. The argument for doing so is that as long as Afghanistan is unable to work against Al Qaeda effectively, it is not living up to its obligations to the international community. Some Afghans may buy this argument, see that it represents a credible American threat to either leave the country or see the current government replaced, and get on with more effective governance.

Why "Does Torture Work?" Is a Bad Question

The debate about the "effectiveness" of torture is in the news again. The CIA released a trove a documents about its past treatment of detainees. Dick Cheney claims these show that torture (oops, I mean "harsh interrogation techniques") provided the US authorities with valuable counterterrorism information. This Washington Post piece concludes that waterboarding led one big shot Al Qaeda detainee to spill important secrets.

This debate about the effectiveness of torture has been conducted in overly narrow terms. Those that think it is effective define effectiveness as when detainees give up information that help US counterterrorism efforts. Opponents of torture say that this is unlikely to happen, since detainees lie under duress, that other techniques are quicker and more effective, and so on. Opponents also argue that torture is simply bad, and we should never condone its' use.

Both sides in this debate, but especially the former, ignore the much more important second-order effects of torture. The biggest material cost to the US of torture is the impression it creates in foreign and domestic audiences. If the US government tortures, and the US public finds out about it, a lot of us are going to be upset because we don't like torture. And this is going to create problems for the US government. Look at how bogged down the late Bush administration got in tangles over torture, rendition, etc. It had to expend a lot of effort putting out these torture fires, effort that it could not expend on things like, say, counterterrorism. The Obama administration, which literally outlawed torture on the day it took office, is also tangled up in figuring up what to do with those who tortured, or authorized torture, in the past.

Foreign audiences matter too. Foreign governments may be less keen to cooperate with the US if it has been accused of torturing--this helps explain why Obama is having trouble offloading Gitmo detainees on the rest of the world. Torture in places like Afghanistan and Iraq can alienate the locals from the US and its' guilty-by-association Iraqi and Afghan allies, making them less willing to provide intelligence on terrorists and insurgents. And torture by the US is great propoganda for terrorists--they can use it to demolish American claims of moral superiority, and in effect argue that the US is just as much a terrorist as they are.

Thought about in these terms, it's unlikely that we could conclude that torture is effective. Even if the proponents of torture are correct, and it does provide actionable intelligence, we must balance this against the cost to the US reputation. This cost has been very large since 9/11 in terms of tying domestic politics in knots, alienating potential allies, and providing support to enemies. It seems very unlikely that the benefits of the literally handful of known cases in which a detainee *may* have provided some useful leads could outweigh these costs.

Rendition: Can We Make It Kindler and Gentler?

The New York Times reports that

"The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday."

That's nice. But how do we "ensure that they are not tortured"? That is trickier. Past practice relied on "diplomatic assurances" from other states that they would not torture. States like Syria. So that didn't work very well.

The US also relied on having American officials visit the detainees after they have been moved to a new country. This is promising, since the US could directly monitor the condition of the detainee. But it turns out not to work too well. According to the Times, at least one prisoner was visited many times (by Canadian diplomats) but was to afraid to tell them he had been tortured. And we know from Darius Rejali's work on the topic that torturers have available to them a huge range of cheap and effective means of inflicting suffering while leaving few marks or other physical evidence of abuse.

Now officials are promising that they will not, according to the Times, send detainees to " countries known to conduct abusive interrogations." Like what countries? According to a recent Amnesty International report, a majority of countries in the world practice engage in torture. So that limits the potential recipients to nice democratic countries in Europe, for the most part. But these countries may not want to detainees.

And let's face it, the US does not really want to send its detainees to nice European countries. The basic purpose of extraordinary rendition is the send detainees countries that will mistreat them (see Charli Carpenter's post on this point). There is another, long-established legal process--extradition--for sending prisoners across borders. The modern US practice of rendition was invented (by the Clinton administration in the 1990s) as a way to get around this process. Why bother? Well, judges have to approve extraditions but not renditions. And the Convention Against Torture binds the US from sending detainees to countries that torture. Judges seem more likely to take this commitment seriously, and to refuse to extradite detainees if they might be tortured.

This does suggest a way for the Obama administration to achieve its objective of not sending detainees to be tortured: stop the policy of rendition. Instead, simply extradite the prisoners. No doubt national security officials would object that this would greatly delay the process. If this is the case, another solution might be to require the approval of a US court before a detainee is subject to rendition. This might require new legislation, and perhaps the creation of a special "fast track" procedure so that such cases are decided quickly (but not too quickly; after all the judge would need time to hear evidence about the torture practices of the receiving country and other matters). Such a change would still represent an end run around extradition, but it would at least incorporate the independent assessment of judicial authority that has an obligation to ensure that the detainees is not subject to torture.

Blame Shifting and Torture

The Washington Post writes that the Obama administration has approved a new unit, housed in the FBI but drawing personnel from other national security agencies as well, that will interrogate suspected terrorists.

The article has new details about what the unit, whose creation was floated a few weeks ago in general terms, will and will not do. To my mind one of the most important changes is that the unit will be overseen by the National Security Council (i.e. the White House).

Usually such organizational box shuffling is just that, but in this case it could really matter. One reason detainees were abused in the past was that no one was clearly responsible for setting out how they should be treated; the Justice Department issued rules defining torture, but these were implemented by other agencies such as the CIA. The Bush White House played an indirect but influential role in the crafting of these rules. But since the role was indirect, it allowed the President and principals to blame abuses on overeager or ill-trained subordinates in the field.

By centralizing authority and oversight in the White House, this new arrangement could make it more difficult for the political authorities to shift blame onto others. Knowing they are (now) responsible for making sure nothing bad happens, people in the White House hopefully will exert a lot of effort to ensure that detainees are treated in accordance with domestic and international law.

So you want to go to graduate school....

Consider this comparison from Jorge Cham's PhD Comics first:

I Blackberried My Iphone

Warning: This post is more technical and boring than most on this blog. Really.

I have had an Iphone for about a year, and it's great for all of the reasons you have heard--nice design, apps, integration with music, etc.

I used to have a BlackBerry, which was fine but inferior to the Iphone in many ways. One advantage that he Blackberry had was "push email"--your emails appeared on your device immediately, and a little light went off when you had a new message. The Iphone instead "polls" for email, meaning it check your email server occasionally for new mail. This means you might have wait--gasp--a half hour or so for your messages to show up on your Iphone! Such a delay is of course totally unacceptable, especially if you're used to the CrackBerry experience. Also, the Iphone doesn't even notify you on the main screen when you have new mail.

Recently, though, Apple has been allowing "notification" applications, which will play a sound and display a message on the screen when you receive a new email. I tried three of these email notification services recently. Two were terrible, and one has worked pretty well so far:

Gmail Growl: Not so good. First, it only works if you have a computer that is always on and connected to the Inteernet. Second, it's complicated: you need to install two pieces of software on your computer, the Prowl app on your Iphone, and then configure everything properly. Third, it only works for Gmail; this is fine for me but not for everyone of course. Fourth and worst, I could never get it to work consistently; it stopped sending notifications after a day or so, forcing me to reinstall the software over and over again.

GPush: This is a standalone Iphone app, so there's no need to install software on your computer. It also only works for Gmail, though. And in my case it stopped working after about half a day. I fiddled with settings a bunch of times, which was no fun. Apparently I'm not the only one that was frustrated by this; it has a terrible rating in the App Store.

PushMail: This one works. It's an Iphone app, so that is good. You install it, create and username and password. You then set your email to forward incoming messages to an address that PushMail provides (while making sure you also keep the incoming messages in your normal email account). PushMail uses these to send notifications to your Iphone screen. You can set it to only provide notifications for some messages (i.e. from particular senders), to notify you on the screen, and to play a sound when new mail arrives. More or less just like BlackBerry. So far this has worked flawlessly for me, and I'm very happy with it. One concern is that you are forwarding some or all of your mail to PushMail. They state very clearly that they immediately discard this, but some might worry about it. Not me though, as my email is so boring that no one would gain anything by reading it!

Elections and Terrorism

Afghanistan had a national election today. Many expected (correctly) that this event would be accompanied by a surge in terrorist attacks. This got me to wondering: what does the social science literature have to say about the connection between terrorism and elections?

I didn't find what I expected to find. I expected that someone out there has written a paper using cross-national time series data on elections and terrorism plus some control variables. My (admittedly not exhaustive) search found no such paper. This is surprising. Such a paper would be pretty easy to write; we have good data (or at least data that is widely used) for both phenomena. There is a really nice paper exploring the connections between elections and human rights abuses that could serve as a model. There are of course huge literatures on terrorism and on elections that could be mined for insights. There is also a smaller literature exploring the relationship between political violence, riots, etc. and elections that could certainly be brought to bear on terrorism. It seems like there would be some pretty straightforward hypotheses that could be developed from the existing literature on democracy and terrorism. One might argue that elections prompt terror attacks, as terrorists use them as an opportunity to make a political point at a time when many citizens are paying attention to politics. Or one might argue that elections dampen terrorism by giving dissidents non-violent means to express their political views. More interesting would be to see if any relationship between terrorism and elections is conditional on the history of past elections, the nature of the parties competing for government, the party system, etc.

So why has no one written this paper? Maybe the connection between terrrorism and elections is so obvious that no one (but me) thinks such a paper would be valuable. Or maybe someone has written such a paper, but did not get "interesting" results that could be published. I hope this isn't the case, since some of the ideas I sketched in the past paragraph would suggest that any relationship would be not entirely obvious.

There are a number of papers that look at the effect of terrorism on the outcomes of elections. This is in some ways a more interesting relationship to explore, as terrorists that engage in attacks presumably want to influence the election. This very interesting paper concludes, contrary to what one might initially expect, that terrorist attacks make Israelis more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause; there are a number of other papers that explore additional effects of terrorism on voters. This paper argues that the terrorist attacks in Spain in 2004 reduced support for the government, contrary to the "rally" hypothesis that predicts more support for the government in power after security threats.

These works on effects are really interesting, and as the two cited above suggest, often reach conclusions that contradict our expectations. Most are based, though, on a single country, such as Spain or Israel. This makes sense, as it allows the researchers to obtain high quality and comparable data (such as from polls) and to control in part for the context of the attack and the likely attackers. One obvious and interesting extension would be to see if these insights could apply cross-nationally. This might give us a better idea of the general influence of terrorism on elections as well as highlighting some reasons why these effects vary due to differences in party systems, age of regime, and so on.

New Paper: Understanding Why Terrorist Operations Succeed or Fail

Interesting new paper on this topic by Brian Jackson and David Frelinger available here. The authors start by defining success and failure. They then posit that success is influenced by three factors:

• terrorist group capabilities and resources
• requirements of the operation it attempted or is planning to attempt
• relevance and reliability of security countermeasures.
  

So far, so good. The most interesting contribution of the paper is the argument that it is not useful to look at these factors in isolation. Instead, one has to consider how the implications of various combinations to understand the likelihood of success. Here is the punchline from the paper:

The heart of our argument is that it is not the absolute values of any of the characteristics that fall into these classes that are important for understanding the likelihood a terrorist operation will succeed or fail, but the relationships between them.. . . . .In general, the chances of an attack succeeding increase when (1) the
characteristics of the attackers closely match the characteristics of what they are attempting and (2) when there is a mismatch between those characteristcs and the security or protective measures the attack must overcome.

Most of the paper is devoted to developing this line of thinking in detail. As I read the paper, I wondered him the argument might be tested in a rigorous way. The authors point out that most terrorist datasets lack the level of detail needed to engage in such an evaluation. Case studies seem the way to go, is the implication.

An additional way to evaluate the argument might be with the use of fuzzy set methods. (Charles Ragin wrote the bible on fuzzy set methods in the social sciences, as well as software that can be used to implement them). These might have two advantages. First, they are explicitly designed to evaluate arguments that rely on the combination or interaction of independent variables. This would seem to match up very closely with the type of analysis advanced here. Second, one can use fuzzy set methods with a smallish number of cases (roughly, a dozen or more). It might be feasible to collect information on this number of attacks or campaigns without too much difficulty.

Quadrennial Homeland Security Review

DHS is conducting a quadrennial policy review, and has opened the process up to outsiders for comments and suggestions. Here is what they list as preliminary goals for counterterrorism:

1. Counter terrorists and other malicious actors.
2. Protect critical human, physical, and cyber infrastructure and the services they provide.
3. Prevent illicit access to and movement of dangerous capabilities and material.
4. Prevent loss of life and property from natural and manmade hazards (shared goal with Preparing for, Responding to, and Recovering From Disasters).
5. Foster a prepared, informed, and empowered citizenry and local communities (shared goal with Preparing for, Responding to, and Recovering From Disasters).
6. Build and sustain robust critical systems, networks, and functions.
7. Ensure levels of readiness to rapidly respond and recover (shared goal with Preparing for, Responding to, and Recovering From Disasters).

What about human rights and civil liberties? Not mentioned here. So here is the comment that I left:

"Efforts to achieve these objectives must always respect human rights. Human rights are an integral and valuable part of the American political tradition. Respecting human rights--especially the right not to be tortured, killed, or imprisoned for one's political beliefs--is not only a valuable goal in and of itself, but also reduces grievances that motivate terrorism. Encouraging other countries to better respect human rights should also be an important objective of US counterterrorism policy."

I got this idea here. Pretty clever, yes?

I have never met a homeland security person that disagrees with this basic idea. What's interesting, though, is that they treat it as a background condition. Many assume that *of course* respecting human rights is important, and that since everyone agrees with this sentiment, it does not really need to be discussed or evaluated further. Others assume that *of course* the US has a great human rights record, so we don't really need to work on it.

The US does have a great record of protecting and promoting rights. My worry, though, is that this attitude opens the door to policies that ignore rights or that actually infringe on them. After all, the US record is not perfect--think of Abu Graib, torture, rendition, etc. Assuming that this is not an issue makes it easier to ignore the practical problems that such abuses create for an effective counterterrorism policy.

Quadrennial Homeland Security Review

DHS is starting it's to implement a congressional mandate to conduct a Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. The idea is to mirror the process that has produced quadrennial reviews for defense policy for some time now (in fact, the defense QDR is also in progress).

More details are here. You can participate; here is how DHS describes the process:

"This groundbreaking, web-based interactive dialogue is designed to allow a broader range of opinions and ideas to inform the QHSR process, and to strengthen the Department's relationship with its vast array of partners and stakeholders, including other federal agencies, state, local, and tribal governments, law enforcement professionals, first responders, academic institutions, and the business community."

Sign ups are available here.

Journal Articles: Crazy Exepensive?

A new study summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available here for five days if you're not a subscriber) concludes it costs about $10,000 (yes, that's $10,000) to publish an article in a scholarly journal in the humanities and social sciences.

Is that a lot, or a little? After all, think of what goes into publishing. There are the actual costs of printing, distributing, advertising, etc. These turn out to account for roughly half of the cost of publication. The other half are made up of editorial functions--soliciting manuscripts, reviewing them, editing them, etc. So there are some real costs here--even if we eliminated print journals, it would still involve substantial work and expense to publish articles.

But costs in the social sciences and humanities are three times those in science, technology, and medical (STM) fields. How come?

"According to the new report, humanities and social-sciences articles tend to be longer and to have a lower acceptance rate. The average article length in the eight journals surveyed is 19 pages; the STM average is 12 pages. Acceptance rates are much lower on the humanities and social-sciences side; the eight journals in question accepted about 11 percent of the articles submitted to them, while their STM counterparts' acceptance rate hovered around 42 percent."

So a big part of the difference is the far, far lower acceptance rate. (The differences in length should not, I think, account for much of the difference in cost. I paper that is 19 pages long should not be three times as costly to edit or publish as a paper that is 12 pages long.) Why are acceptance rates so much lower in the social sciences and humanities?

One reason might be that there are simply more journals in the STM fields. The report notes that many authors in these fields have grant money that they can use to defray some of the costs of publications. If journal publishers are actually getting paid by their authors, it makes sense that they would publish more journals.

Another reason, I suspect, is that the standards for good work that merits publication are more universally accepted in the STM fields than the humanities and social sciences. Maybe this reflects my total ignorance of STM (you've been warned), but I imagine that, say, mechanical engineers do not disagree a great deal about what methods are appropriate for their field and, perhaps, what questions are most important. The social sciences and humanities see far more disagreement on these issues, which creates more bases on which to reject manuscripts submitted to journals. To paraphrase Kuhn, the STM fields engage in more "normal" science, where there is broad agreement on questions to ask and how to go about answering them, while the rest of use are in some pre-scientific (or maybe never-to-become-scientific wilderness) where these issues are still up for debate, and maybe always will be.

Journal of Strategic Security Looking for Articles on Insurgency and Terrorism

The Journal of Strategic Security (JSS), a quarterly publication of Henley-Putnam University, announces a call for articles that address global insurgency and terrorism. From the resurgence of Taliban militants in Pakistan to the presence of al-Qa`ida sympathizers and supporters in strategic theaters of conflict, what does the future hold for stability in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region? What strategies are most effective to combat insurgencies? What role do Special Forces and intelligence operations have on the contested battlefields of Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan? What regional policies need to be developed, refined, and implemented to tackle the increasingly complex strategic security environment across the South Asian landscape and the greater Middle East? Authors from around the globe are invited to share their perspectives on these and other strategic security issues - your creativity and unique perspective are welcome. Please send all questions, proposals, and submissions to: editor@henley-putnam.edu.

Is cyberterrorism a thing?

An interesting debate about this yesterday in my class on terrorism: can cyber attacks be considered terrorism?

I took a very narrow definitional approach to answering this question and not everyone agreed with me. My take was that cyber attacks can be considered terrorism only if they meet what we might consider the standard definition of the phenomenon: the use or threat of violence by a non-state actor with the intent of creating fear in an audience for a political objective.

Of course much of this definition can be contested, but the biggest area of debate in class was over "violence". My position was that terrorism is terrifying precisely because it creates a fear of physical harm in the audience. If an action does not seek to create such fear, it's not really terrorism. So defacing a website, or hacking into a server for information, by a terrorist group is not terrorism. Hacking an air traffic control system with the intent of causing planes to crash would be terrorism.

Given this definition, has there ever been any cyberterrorism? I cannot think if a single event that would qualify as cyberterrorism. Perhaps my recall or imagination are limited. Or it could be that some want to magnify the problems of information security and assurance by attaching the label "terrorism" to it? After all, terrorism is a bad thing, and a pretty serious bad thing at that. So calling the problem that you think about all day "terrorism" might have some inadvertent appeal. Just be careful to make this claim on my final exam.

Read my book--FOR FREE!!!!

No, this post is not spam (or is it?).

I recently realized that my "first" book is now available online for free (oops, I mean FOR FREE!!!). It's here if you're having difficulty sleeping. The interesting thing is that this appears to be part of a new service by Questia to offer books online. I don't know any of the details, but sounds interesting and maybe more useful than Google Books.

Don't confuse this with my forthcoming book, which is available FOR PURCHASE!!!! online here, in case you are not yet sick of me alerting you to this fact.

(Why is "first" in quotations above? It really annoys me when someone describes their book as their first when the second is but a gleam in their eye. I've taken the liberty of describing it as my first, since what I plan will be the second one is pretty close to appearing in print).

Page proof hell?

I am editing the page proofs for my forthcoming book (which you can pre-order here. Or here. I'll wait a moment while you do so......)

It's nice to see that the work that went into this will result in something tangible. At the same time, though, wading through the page proofs is enraging because:

1. Somehow the prose is different when it's printed too look like a book page rather than a double-spaced manuscript. All of your imperfect sentences and word choices just jump out at you. Writing that seemed almost elegant (or at least efficient) in the manuscript now just seems pompous or incoherent.

2. That's especially frustrating because at this page proofs stage, you're really only supposed to change honest-to-goodness errors. The bad writing is supposed to stay. The publisher's guide to editing the page proofs has some scary (but not very specific) language about how major changes at this stage will be very costly, might delay publication, etc.

3. T.S. Eliot was right--I could have written a shorter book. The first version I submitted to the publisher had an additional chapter on terminology, the existing literature, theoretical extensions, research design, etc. You know, all the stuff that academics think is so important to highlight, but no one else does. My editor very wisely persuaded me that this stuff could be shortened and combined with another chapter to make the book "more readable" (although I suspect she really meant just "readable"). Reading it again, I realize I could have taken this even further and tightened up this section even more. I could not get it down to a tweet (or is that Tweet?), but there are at least 1000 words that could have been cut.

4. History matters. Once I write a paragraph or section, it's really really hard to go back to be objective about it. It reads to me as being much better than it actually is. Obviously this is because I'm too lazy to start from scratch and too dishonest to admit this to myself. So once text is in the manuscript, it's likely to stay even if it no longer belongs due to changes in other parts of the book.

5. What about a copy editor? Isn't he or she supposed to fix all of this? No. A copy editor very thoroughly reviewed my manuscript, and did in fact fix numerous errors to poor choices. But I don't think it's really in the copy editor's job description to fix the structural problems of your manuscript (i.e. to point out that section 4 should really disappear, or should be half as long but appear as section 2). Or to really even understand fully the technical elements of the argument you are making. This is frustrating for the author on two levels. First, we can't legitimately blame the copy editor for bad things that remain in the manuscript, much as we (unconsciously, of course) would like to. Second, copy editors are not Gods, and if they were the would have better things to do that fix my lousy writing. Instead, they are mortals like the rest of us, which no doubt in some cases means that they too make mistakes or overlook things.

Whining aside, my experience in the book process has been fantastic--very responsive editor who made suggestions that improved the book a great deal, super efficient production editor who is able to explain complicated (to me) processes clearly and cheerfully, and a copy editor whose diligence did save me from some embarrassing errors.

DHS Blogs

The Department of Homeland Security has just started up it's own blog. You can find it at:

http://www.dhs.gov/journal/theblog/

Better late than never; even I beat them to the punch on blogging. The posts look interesting and useful so far. It looks like they will include a daily round-up of some news items on homeland security issues, including some that are not so praiseworthy about how homeland security is working out. Bravo for that, although I wonder what guidelines they are using to select some stories but not others.

There is also the usual government department PR stuff (such as a video of FEMA chief Fugate leading a roundtable discussion) as well as updates on public appearances by the department leadership.

Hopefully they will follow the lead of the TSA blog, which appears to be written by a real person (i.e. one without the personality of a PR specialist) and that provides actually useful and sometimes interesting information. So far the DHS blog does not seem to have a clever name (like, say, "Back Channels") but is known just as The Blog @ Homeland Security. Well, at least that's a better name than Dipnote.

Political Violence Against Americans

The United States State Department has released the latest version of their report "Political Violence Against Americans." The 2008 report is available at

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/125224.pdf.

There was no reports produced from 2003-2007.

This report was known as "Significant Incidents of Political Violence Against Americans" from 1987-1997 and there was a previous study Lethal Terrorist Actions Against Americans: 1973-1986." This is available at http://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/reading_room/122.pdf

(Thanks to Frada Mozenter for sending this along).

Ink Blot Counterinsurgency

The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan is making noises that he will shift the emphasis away from looking for Taliban/Al Qaeda types in the eastern mountains of the country, and towards protecting the population. This would, of course, be consistent with the Army's newish counterinsurgency doctrine. He even suggested that there are not enough troops to do everything, and that securing population centers is the more important task, and that the metrics for success would internal commerce and how secure local leaders felt in their hometowns, rather than body counts or the number of insurgent attacks.

This sounds like good stuff, especially from an officer who made his reputation killing and capturing insurgents and terrorists. I wonder, though, if even this will produce enough troops on the ground to provide sufficient security for the population across a large country with poor transpration networks? And are the troops trained to take on this sort of task?

More important, though, is how the insurgents would respond to such a move. The shift in emphasis is premised on the "ink blot" logic which suggests improving things in some population centers, and this happiness will then spread to neighboring areas while the insurgent sit in the mountains waiting to shoot at Americans. But they might not wait. Their goals are not to control the mountains, so that will not satify them. Instead, they may resort to more terrorist attacks and bombings in the same population centers that the Americans are trying to secure, with the objectives of staying politically relevant and showing that the Americans are not really in control. So this strategy might lead to more, not less, terrorism. The hope, I guess, is that this would be a short run response, and that over the longer run the locals would turn on the insurgents as they see how well the Americans are securing them.

AfPak: New Advice on What To Do

A new paper from the Center for a New American Security offers interesting advice on what the US should do in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the next 12 months. Here is the punchline:

In Afghanistan, we recommend that protecting the population take precedence over all other considerations for the time being. At the same time, however, any “civilian surge” must be used to increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government in the eyes of the Afghan population. In Pakistan, meanwhile, the U.S. government should place a moratorium on drone strikes on non-al Qaeda targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Northwest Frontier Province until such strikes can be incorporated into a coherent strategy for separating the population of these areas from al Qaeda. And the United States should refocus its train and equip mission in Pakistan to place a greater emphasis on the police – the only Pakistani security service focused entirely on domestic security.

Solid ideas. It's very difficult to imagine, though, that much progress can be made on these in the next year (with the exception of stopping the drone attacks). Basically the authors are talking about building new states in both countries, which does not happen overnight. But one does have to start somewhere, and these suggestions are consistent with the existing counter-insurgency literature and might work if (and it's a big if) a consistent effort was sustained by the US and its allies for many years.

A New Geneva Convention?

Jeff Stein reports that lawyers at Georgetown are working on plans to revise the Geneva conventions to figure out how to treat non-uniformed combatants, civilian fighters, terrorists, etc. Geneva either does not cover such individuals, or is so vague it's not a very useful guide to action.

This is a great idea. A well-drafted treaty might help prevent such bad things as indefinite detentions, disappearances, secret prisons, more Gitmos, and extraordinary rendition to not very nice places. Now could be the ideal time to push forward on this, as the Obama administration talks about changing course on human rights. Sure, it has been criticized for not going far enough in the right direction, the US government (as well as other governments) might be more willing to agree to tighter constraints on detainee treatment that everyone else signs on to follow, and that is unlikely to be in place for at least a few years as a treaty update is negotiated and ratified.

At the same time, though, it's clear that such a treaty alone would do little. There is a pretty substantial scholarly debate about if and when humanitarian and human rights treaties influence state behavior. Some studies find that such treaties actually lead to more abuses (see these papers by Oona Hathaway and James Vreeland, for example). Others hold that the influence of such treaties is conditional on other factors, especially if the country in question is democratic. James Morrow concludes that the treaties governing conduct during war have a larger effect on democratic states, whose political institutions allow them to credibly signal to opponents their willingness to play by the rules. In seperate papers, Hathaway and Neumayer conclude that human rights treaties do reduces abuses, but only in democratic states. Jeffrey Staton adds some specificity to this, holding that it is the existence of an independent judiciary in democracies that can enforce international commitments. This could lead to a quite important change in the actions of the United States, which of course has argued against expanding the interpretation of Geneva to include such detainees but also has an independent judiciary.

The punchline is that, alone, a new improved Geneva probably would not change much in general. But it might change the treatment of detainees in some situations; for example, democratic countries, and/or those with independent judiciaries, might follow the new rules. And some improvement would be better than no improvement.

Will COIN work in Pakistan? One reason it might not.

The Pakistani army is finally cracking down on militants rather than preparing to fend off an Indian invasion. Yea!

The crackdown has created millions of refugees. Boo!

Why boo!? Because it seems likely that the refugees (technically, "internally displaced persons") could make things much worse in Pakistan. Sarah Lischer has a paper in International Security which analyzes the problems that refugees created in Iraq. She shows that large numbers of refugees can be subject to political manipulation. Extremists can provide them with humanitarian assistance and use camps for recruiting and indoctrinating new supporters, who may have few other options for work or protection. Large numbers of refugees also threaten the legitimacy of the government by demonstrating that it cannot maintain order or provide basic services to many of its citizens. Her paper also suggests policies that can mitigate these effects, including not building large refugee camps. I would add to this that it might help if the Pakistani army lost some of its gusto for effectively kicking people out of their homes and focused more on actually protecting them in place.

Pakistan is not Iraq, and the refugee crises are not the same. Fewer of the Pakistanis have fled overseas, suggesting that the refugee problem is lessl likely to spill into other countryies. And there are reports that some are able to settle with relatives elsewhere in the country (although you cannot exactly put 2 million people in relatives' basements). But this cannot be good for political stability in Pakistan, and that cannot be good for cooperation with the United States, getting the Pakistani army to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy that actually works for more than a month, or for the refugees themselves.

Intelligence Sharing: Squaring the Circle

The New York Times reports that the United States is depending on other countries to obtain counterterrorism intelligence:

"The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials. The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits."

This move has the advantages of reducing the need of the US to detain and interrogate people itself, and drawing on foreign intelligence services that have better language skills and contextual knowledge useful for obtaining such human intelligence.

At the same time, though, it exposes the US to these partners' actions. What if they abuse the rights of detainees? Do a poor job of interrogating them? Allow some to escape? Gather useful intelligence, but fail to share it with the US? Demand more guns or money from the US as compensation for sharing the intelligence they do collect? All of this has happened before, and the problem is likely to get worse as the US comes to depend more heavily on others.

What to do? One solution is for the US to exercise more direct control over its partners. It can use its leverage to try to insist they respect rights, learn effective interrogation techniques (although I'm not sure that the US intelligence community is the best teacher on either of these points), strengthen security at detention centers, etc. In the language of principal-agent theory, the US is increasing the principal that sets (intelligence collection) goals, and its partners are (potentially shirking) agents. Some direct control by the US one way it can monitor for and punish shirking. And there's new evidence that this is happening. In congressional testimony last week, Chair of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen noted that Pakistan--whose intelligence service is hugely valuable to the counterterror effort, and hugely successful at shirking--is changing personnel at a rapid clip. He also points out that he, meaning the US, is keeping a close eye on this process and seeking to ensure that the new faces at the ISI are willing and able to effectively cooperate with the US.

The establishment of such a hierarchical relationship might reduce shirking by intelligence partners. But it's not cost-free. The biggest cost is that the US will take on more responsibility for the mistakes and abuses that its partners make in the name of counterterror. A shiny new ISI reformed to look more like the CIA will still make mistakes (the CIA has made mistakes, right?). But now the US may bear some of the blame for these mistakes, to the extent that a reformed foreign intelligence service got reformed by its American counterpart.

This is so interesting that someone should write a book about it....oh, someone has.

Congress and Torture: He Said, She Said

The drama about what and when Nancy Pelosi know about the treatment of detainees raises a larger question: Why did Congress do such a poor job investigating the bad things done in the name of the War on Terror?

I cannot think of a major abuse that was exposed by Congressional investigation. Torture, Abu Graib photos, warrantless wiretaps, extraordinary rendition to countries practicing terrorism, abducting that Muslim cleric in Milan, waterboarding, that dead guy who they put on ice--all of these were revealed in the press, not by Congress. How come?

Pelosi implies that her intelligence briefers misled her. This may be the case, and it's certainly true that the current system--under which, for example, on an handful of top Congressional leaders learn the details of sensitive programs in oral briefings--makes oversight more difficult. But certainly not impossible. A motivated Congress could give itself the authority to undertake real investigations.

A better explanation is that Congress was not motivated to find out what was going on. Remember, the Republicans controlled both Houses until early 2007, and had little to gain from exposing abuses that took place under the authority of a Republican president. Republicans did, for example, limit Congressional efforts to fully investigate warrantless wiretapping, and delayed a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the use of intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Consider the counterfactual, though--if the Democrats had controlled Congress, would they have launched full-throated investigations? I doubt it. Sure, some members, including some pretty powerful members, would have pushed for such investigations. But I wonder if the leadership would have seen this as in the party's interest. Republicans would have no doubt countered that thorough oversight would weaken counterterrrorism efforts (although they would not phrase this so politely) at a time when Democrats did not want to appear "weak" on national security (remember how John Kerry "reported for duty" in 2004?). Better, from this perspective, to give the Republicans the rope to hang themselves. If these abuses seemed to stop terrorism, highlighting them would put the Democrats in the position of criticizing apparently successsful (if nasty, but mostly to foreigners) security measures. If they did not work, producing more terrorism overseas or at home, then the Republicans could be criticized for implementing policies that failed.

The Democrats clean sweep last November changes the dynamic, though. Now it is the (Democratic) White House that is telling some (Democratic) members of Congress to go slow on investigations. I doubt this will work. These members of Congress want to uncover Bush era abuses. This does not directly threaten Obama (although it makes his job a bit trickier), so the White House might not push back very strongly. And now that the Democrats do control the Hill, they can use the legislature's institutional powers to launch more intrusive investigations. So I suspect that many of the administration's attempts to get Congress to go slow will fail, and that Congress might now play its proper oversight role--better late than never.

More Deep Thoughts on Torture and Terror

In part in response to an earlier post discussing my research with Jim Piazza on the relationship between torture and terrorism, Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage ponders this question:

My original thought was that good social science research that shows that torture does not extract useful intelligence information would be the final nail in the coffin in any public argument in support of torture. But what happens if one of us gets access to the relevant data, does the empirical analysis, and then discovers the opposite: that torture does lead to useful intelligence information. What do you do then? Sit on the results? Would any political science journal publish such a paper? How would that look in a tenure review? (“Right, she’s the one who said torture was valuable…”).

Which leads to another question: should social scientists by engaging in research where we only want to share the results if they come out in one particular direction? I personally believe US national security is harmed by the use of torture in any form by our government, so I would welcome good empirical findings that provide added weight to arguments against the use of torture. But despite that goal, should I actually engage in research if I’m not willing to accept (or publish) findings to the contrary? Do we need some sort of social science code of ethics that sets certain research topics off limits? (e.g., something equivalent to doctors refusing to work on projects about devising more effective/painful instruments of torture.) Or is that an automatic affront to intellectual freedom?

For what it's worth, here's the short reply I posted yesterday:

This sort of question is of deep importance for social science. I would still urge publication of the results, though, for two reasons. First, the other arguments against torture you mention are pretty powerful. Finding that torture “works” in the sense that it provides valuable information would be only one victory for those favoring torture, and they lose all of the other battles. Second, I imagine that this problem comes up often, and that any important question might yield an answer with which one disagrees on ethical or moral grounds. What if an Americanist finds that negative advertisements “work”, or a scholar of international relations finds that preventive war “works” for the state that initiates it? These would be important if unpleasant realities. They might be valuable, though, for those opposed to torture, or negative ads, or preventive war, if they identified the conditions that facilitate each of these actions. Opponents could use this knowledge to advocate for more effective policies for ending torture, for example.

What Makes for Homegrown Terrorist? Still Waiting for an Answer.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has just issued a research report "Homegrown Terrorists in the U.S. and U.K.: An Empirical Examination of the Radicalization Process." Unfortunately, it tells us remarkably little about this process. It suffers from a problem--selecting on the value of the dependent variable--that anyone who has taken an undergraduate class in methods will quickly understand.

I started with the "Methodology" section of the report--not so exciting, I know, but definitely the most important for something like this. The key part is this:

This study’s data is comprised of every known Islamic homegrown terrorist
in the U.S. and U.K. who perpetrated an attack, attempted to do so, or illegally supported Islamic terrorism through the end of October 2008. A total of 117 individuals were included in the study.

They then analyze these 117 individuals beliefs and attitudes across six dimensions: adopting a legalistic interpretation of the faith, trusting only select religious authorities, perception of a schism between Islam and the West, low tolerance for perceived theological deviance, attempts to impose religious beliefs on others, and degree of political radicalization. Based on this data analysis, they conclude that religion is likely to influence radicalization.

Any study like this is going to run into some pretty tricky research problems, such as defining radicalization, distinguishing between those that do and do not fall into each of the six categories, finding reliable data on individuals' true beliefs, and so on. Such problems don't mean we should throw up our hands and never do research, but they do suggest that we tackle these issues pretty carefully if we want anyone to have confidence in our results. This particular study, though, has a huge hole that the researchers could have seen coming:

The project seeks to generalize about the radicalization process. It does this by analyzing only those that have already demonstrated that they are radicals (as defined by the study). They find patterns across many individuals that are similar, and conclude that these patterns contribute to radicalization. But here's the problem: Isn't it possible that lots of individuals NOT included in the study exhibit similar patterns, but don't become radicalized enough to blow something up?

It seems very likely to me that there are many who, for example, perception of a schism between Islam and the West, but don't become terrorists. The point is that my opinion or my guess on this should not matter; the study could have tried to address this issue from the start. It's a basic issue of research design known as selecting on the dependent variable.

Actually dealing with this problem, though, is itself very difficult. Ideally one would want to survey a random sample of individuals (or at least a largish number of individuals that could reasonably be presumed to be potential radicals), measure them on these six variables, and then compare them to the radicals. But I cannot imagine that this would be impossible to carry off with sufficient resources. There are also techniques for analyzing data that is selected on the dependent variable that the authors' might have utilized, but they didn't, and I'm not sure if these techniques would save them even if they did.

Country Reports on Terrorism

The US State Department today released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2008. The entire report is available here as a (quite long) .pdf file. You can also access individual parts of the report here.

Some initial reactions:

• Most of the report is devoted to detailing terrorist activity in most countries of the world, the evolution of specific terrorist groups, and details on state sponsors of terrorism. Pretty dry stuff unless you happen to be interested in a few groups or countries for whatever reason.
  
• This mass of detail is preceded by an introductory chapter that outlines trends in terrorism and the main lines of US counterterrorism policy. It's pretty short, though, which is either a good thing (if you want a quick overview) or a bad thing (if you want policy details).
• As further evidence that I am a boring person, I found the most interesting part of the report the "Annex of Statistical Information". It's got a nice discussion of how difficult it is to collect reliable information on terrorist attacks, perpetrators, and motives. It also suggests that summary measures, such as the number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2008, are a pretty poor indicator of how terrorism is changing.
  
• Given the media's treatment of swine flu, though, I doubt many reporters will pay attention to this good advice, and expect to see TV news readers tonight starting with something like "According to the State Department, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2008 declined by over 20 percent from the previous year".
• We can also expect fans of the Surge in Iraq to claim that this is further evidence that it worked. That is, if swine flu does not prevent them from getting any attention at all.
• The report includes a summary of a letter by Gary LaFree, the Director of the START Center at the University of Maryland and one of the world's best known researchers on terrorism. LaFree summarizes some of the recent developments in terrorism databases and makes some interesting suggestions about how these could be improved. A longer version of the letter is at the end of the National Counterterrorism Center 2008 report.
  
• My colleague Greg Weeks did a double-take on reading why Cuba is a classified as a state sponsor of terrorism; read his post here.
  

Why Don't All Terrorists Claim Credit? We Have An Answer.

Earlier I blogged some pretty speculative ideas about why some terrorists do not claim credit for their attacks. I now learn that Bruce Hoffman also thinks this is an interesting question and that he beat me to the punch by a significant margin, publishing an article on the topic in Terrorism and Political Violence back in the spring of 1997. Check it out if you're interested in the issue--his ideas are far better than mine.

Does Torture Stop Terror? Nope.

Torture is in the news. Bush-era memos justifying the use of violence against detainees have just been released. The Bush people that wrote or acted on these memos justify such violence in the name of stopping terrorism. The claim is that the violence led the detainees to give up information that allowed the authorities to foil terrorist attacks in the planning stages.

As many have pointed out in recent days, it's difficult to know with any certainty that this is the case. It's possible that the detainees would have given up the intel even if gentler techniques of questioning had been used (as professional interrogators for the FBI and other agencies have long claimed). It's also possible that the authorities would have found about the impending attacks from other sources, or that the attacks would have been called of for any number of reasons. So the debate is stuck in a circle, with supporters of the methods claiming they worked, and opponents saying that they did not.

One partial solution is to look at different types of data. In particular, do countries that practice torture heavily experience less terrorism? The answer is pretty clearly "no." Here's how I arrived at this conclusion:

My colleague Jim Piazza and I have a paper coming out in Comparative Political Studies that analyzes the influence of human rights abuses on terrorism. We find that, for a wide range of data sources, control variables, and statistical specifications that governments that abuse rights actually experience more terrorism.

But what about torture? Torture is only one of the broader range of human rights we looked at in the paper. Is the relationship of torture to terror different? It might be, since far more countries engage in torture than in other forms of violent human rights abuses. To answer this question, I re-analyzed the data from the paper. Details are in the following paragraph; skip down if you just want the punchline.

I re-estimated the three models described in the paper that use the MIPT measure of terrorism as the dependent variable. This counts the number of terrorist attacks in each country from 1998 to 2004 committed by domestic and transnational groups, and also combines these into a measure of all terrorism. I used a negative binomial regression with robust standard errors clustered on countries and the same independent variables as those reported in the paper (political participation, constraints in the executive, regime durability, international war, civil war, and the logs of population and GDP per capita). I replaced the independent variable measuring human rights with two new variables. The first is a measure of torture from the CIRI project. The second is the measure of human rights used in the paper minus torture. This is meant to capture the possibility that torture and other human rights abuses are substitutes for each other; a regime might not torture, say, but could still have a bad record of respecting other rights.

Torture has a negative and statistically significant relationship to terrorism in all three models. In other words, countries that engage in more torture (and thus have a lower score on the torture variable) consistenly experience more, not less, of both domestic and transnational terrorism. This mirrors the more general finding reported in the paper that respect for human rights is associated with less terror as well.

What are the implications for the debate in the US today? The clearest is that torture does not work, at least in reducing terorism. It's another nail in the coffin for those who justify torture as a tool of counterterrorism. It also suggests that we don't need to worry about how revealing the details of the US torture program will provide terrorists with the skills to avoid providing information to interrogators. Intead, it suggests that a suprisingly easy and morally unambiguous counterterrorism strategy is to be nice to people. Being mean (like, say, torturing) seems to annoy some victims, who go on to become or serve as examples to new terrorists.

Message to Joseph Nye: I Am Relevant

Joseph Nye published an op-ed in the Washington Post a few days ago arguing that academic political scientists are, well, too academic. We don't reward those among us who engage in policy debates. Policy relevance is at best ignored and at worst punished. This has attracted a lot of attention in the small world of political science blogging--see, for example, Peter Howard, Daniel Drezner, and Henry Farrell.

OK, but what does "policy relevance" mean? Us academics have this habit of insisting on definitions. Nye does not provide one. He implies that an academic is relevant when he or she does work that can contribute to contemporary policy debates. But where's the line between policy relevance and irrelevance?

I cannot find it. Consider Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions. This book--enormously influential in political science if only because every graduate student, even the Americanists, have to read it at some point--analyzes the causes of revolutions in France, Russia, China, and other countries (some of which don't exist, like Prussia, so are not very policy relevant). A nice piece of academic work, perhaps, but it would seem to be totally irrelevant for DC types, right? But aren't these types thinking about the possibility of revolution in, say, Pakistan? And weren't their predecessors criticized for ignoring revolutions in Iran and in the Soviet Union?

So maybe studying revolutions could be a bit "relevant", and not just interesting for ivory tower types. Indeed, the same Theda Skocpol that generated dozens of pages on Prussia applied her ideas to the sources of the Iranian revolution shortly after it occured. Wouldn't this have had the potential to help policymakers understand what what happening in Iran in the 1980s? Oh, and the CIA in the 1990s funded a project--run by academics--to analyze the sources of revolution. I doubt they did this because they just thought revolutions were, um, interesting.

Policy relevance is important. But do we really want the academy stuffed with people who are up to date on the latest developments in country x? No. That's what think tanks and CIAs are for. We (by which I mean I, of course) want an academy with people that are interested in the bigger causes and consequences, and are trained to think about these things in a systematic way. How come? One of the best ways that academics can be policy relevant is to poke holes in dumb ideas. Every academic I know (bar one, and he was Canadian of all things) thought the invasion of Iraq was a dumb idea. They knew this based on their knowledge of the history of preventive war, positive theories about preventive war, and long thought about the normative implications of the use of force to make the world a better place. This is all stuff that gets downplayed in "policy circles," but if it was taken more seriously might at least prevent us from making the worst mistakes over and over again.

Intelligence Sharing: Comparing the US and the EU

The Markle Foundation has issued another in a series of reports on how the United States can improve information sharing among its intelligence agencies and senior policymakers.

Improved intelligence sharing was, of course, a major objective of the intelligence reforms instituted since 9/11. The most prominent of these reforms was the creation of the Office of Director of National Intelligence. Many argued that the creation of the ODNI was a shell game, since the Director had little authority to change agencies' budgets, reassign personnel, and so on.

Implicit in this criticism is the assumption that governments operate as effective hierarchies, with leaders (ODNI) ordering subordinates (CIA, NSA, etc.) around. Of course this is sometimes the case. But it's not a realistic model for the intelligence community. Many intelligence agencies have corporate cultures that resist outside interference, and others are parts of cabinet agencies that themselves do not answer to the ODNI (State, Energy, etc.), and most of the rest are part of the Department of Defense and thus can draw on its bureaucratic and budgetary influence to ignore a meddling ODNI.

The Markle report is interesting becuase it recognizes this reality. Instead of arguing that the ODNI needs much more authority to carry out its' goals, the report suggests more modest changes that would encourage each intelligence agency to see sharing as in its interest. These include technological changes that would make sharing easier, the expansion of social networks that facilitate collaboration by lower-level intelligence people across agency lines, keeping intelligence sharing decentralized so no agency feels like the others can take advantage of it, and encourage common training regimes across agencies.

This agenda is certainly less ambitious than, say, pretending to again reorganizing the intelligence community from top to bottom. A more hierarchical system might work in some contexts (i.e. the military seems to do pretty well with it outside of intelligence), but our intelligence community is too decentralized and has interests and cultures that are too divergent to make it cost-effective. The Markle report recognizes that such reorganizations often do not address the root causes of failure, and impose costs in terms of time, money, and attention.

Indeed I argue in a paper I'm presenting next week at the meeting of the European Union Studies Association that similiar changes could improve intelligence sharing in the European Union. Sure, the US is a single country and the EU is not. So the barriers to a hierarchical intelligence sharing system in the European Union are likely higher than they are in the US. Nonetheless, the dynamics are remarkably similiar--the national intelligence services in the EU, like agencies in the US intelligence community, do not fully trust each other to treat intelligence securely, worry that they would send more intelligence than they would recieve, and fear a central authority that does not understand their corporate culture and technical needs.

AfPak Stategy: A contradiction in terms?

This is troubling. It's a summary of a memo written to troops in Afghanistan by General David D. McKiernan, commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in the country.

Here are the punchlines:

• The focus should be on "governance, development and security concurrently" because "success in Afghanistan will not come from the sole pursuit of a security line of operations by military forces."
• "Do not clear an area unless GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] and the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are able to hold it."
• "facilitate solutions . . . that reinforce the rule of law and GIRoA's legitimacy," taking care "not to strengthen local powerbrokers working outside governance structures."

This is all well and good, and reflects the new (although it's not really new) conventional wisdom about effective counterinsurgency. But is there any chance that the western forces in Afghanistan can possibly achieve these goals in much of the country?

No one expects that there will ever be many more than 100,000 western troops in Afghanistan. We know from earlier conflicts, including those analyzed in James Dobbins' book on the topic, that this is far too few to undertake an effective counterinsurgency campaign along the lines that McKiernan suggests. And it's not even clear that a military-led counterinsurgency campaign with sufficient resources can achieve all the objectives laid out here, including fighting the enemy, promoting development, and also developing a functioning local government. After all, in most cases where such state building has been successful, the builder did not also have to fight a major insurgency (think of west Germany or Japan). And in many cases without an insurgency the results have not been that great (think of Kosovo).

Why Don't All Terrorists Brag?

Brian Jenkins semi-famously wrote decades ago that "terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." The second part of this has been questioned by work on the "new" terrorists, which holds that terrorist do want to wreak mass destruction.

But what about the first part? Convention wisdom holds that terrorism is a political tactic, not a military one. Terrorists are too weak to inflict much direct harm on their opponents. Instead they use violence to communicate through their message to supporters, opponents, and fence-sitters.

If the paramount motive is publicity, why is it so difficult to identify the attackers in many cases? Why, for example, Al Qaeda often not claim responsibility for attacks it carries out? Why is it that so many attacks summarized in databases such as the Global Terrorist Database, Iterate, and WITS cannot be attributed to particular groups?

This puzzle raises important questions about how we think about terrorism. If terrorists are really not that into communication, what does that say about their motives and strategies? What else do they want?

Let me suggest some answers. Some are pretty straightforward, such as measurement error. But others raise interesting possibilities for re-thinking the strategic calculus that underlie terrorist attacks. In particular, they might lead us to think more seriously about the varied audiences to which terrorists appeal, and how they use different techniques to reach each audience:

1. Some terrorists are dumb, and don't understand the importance of communication. So they don't call the TV stations after blowing something up. This is certainly possible, but probably won't take our understandingo of the logic of credit claiming very far since, as Stephen Krasner pointed out some time ago, "stupidity is not a very interesting analytical category".
2. Some are just into it for the violence, and political demands are just a justification for this.
3. My colleague Jim Piazza points out that many unattributed attacks cause few or no causalities. Perhaps terrorists see these as failed attacks, and don't want to claim credit for them.
4. Piazza also notes that many are in countries that experience a large number of attacks, so it might be attributable to measurement error brought on by the chaos of frequent terrorism. For example, a bank robbery may be counted as a criminal act in a country with little terrorism, but as a terrorist attack in a country where real terrorists regularly rob banks.
5. My other colleague John Szmer is an American politics scholar, and suggest that some groups may have as their true audience not the general public for specific supporters or potential supporters. They might be able to communicate their responsiblity for an attack to such supporters directly, rather than through the mass media.
6. Different people have different definitions of terrorism. This includes the terrorists themselves. Say terrorists attack a military outpost. The victims might see this as "terrorism". But the perpretrators might view it as legitimate military action, for which they do not want to brag to the newspapers.
7. It might depend on the political goals or ideology of the group. Religious terrorist groups, for example, face the problem that most major religions frown on killing innocent civilians. So a religiously-motivated terrorist group could engage in attacks, but not claim all of them so as to avoid alienating some co-religionists.

Evaluating many of these logics (and others you might think of) raises that always tricky chicken and egg problem. It's difficult to explain why terrorist group x did not claim credit for its attack, since we don't know that it was terrorist group x that committed the attack, since terrorist group x did not claim credit for the attack.

It might be possible, though, to develop other observable implications for each rationale for not claiming an attack. To take a simple example of this, point 4 above suggest that countries with lots of political violence have more unattributed attacks. Point 7 suggests, perhaps, that countries characterized by much religious terrorism would have more unattributed attacks. Point 5 might imply that the larger social network of a terrorist group influences its credit-claiming strategy, so countries with terrorist groups that are able to communicate with audiences in ways other than the media might have more attacks.

Books End

The University of Michigan Press plans to release most new books in electronic format. This makes a lot of sense. Kindle, netbooks, and Iphones give us more and better ways to read digital text. And I cannot remember the last time I read a journal article in a physical journal--instead it's much more convenient to download the article from JSTOR or some other database. And the Press saves the costs of paper, ink, etc. so might be able to produce more or cheaper books (or "books" if you thing this is a bad idea).

If I had a manuscript in preparation, though, I'm not sure I would be very excited about this. In many fields, publishing a book is essentially a requirement for tenure and promotion. But academics are very conservative about things like this, and I suspect many would devalue a book/"book" that is not published in the traditional format. Michigan will review these books the same way it always has, so actual quality should not decline, but percieved quality might.

Eventually books (and journals) printed in the traditional manner will go the way of the 8 track, and in the long run presses and authors can benefit from this. But there is a real coordination problem involved in getting from here to there. Many presses and authors are reluctant to be the first to move in this direction because they want to maintain percieved quality. Once some of the more prestigious presses begin to do so, though, the others may follow quite quickly. If Cambridge and especially Princeton (at least in political science) moved in this direction, they could mitigate some of the concerns about the quality of electronic books, since they have a very strong reputation for producing must-read scholarly work. Their shift to electronic publishing could quickly wipe out the quality issue, and lead to a cascade of other presses following their lead.

AfPak: It's Complicated

The New York Times provides new details on how Pakistan's intelligence service provides funds, equipment and advice to the Taliban forces that the United States and its allies are fighting in Afghanistan. Much of the new info in the piece comes from American spies and electronic eavesdropping on Pakistani officials.

So the US is actively spying on one of its closest collaborators in the struggle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. No surprise there. And it's also no surprise that this info came out when CIA director Leon Panetta was in the region--no doubt this leak was designed to put additional pressure on the Pakistani ISI and government. What might be a surprise is that it comes out the very same weak that the Obama administration announces its new AfPak strategy, which includes closer collaboration with, you guessed it, Pakistan.

Why the US wants to collaborate with Pakistan is straightforward enough--Pakistan controls (on paper) the territory from which the bad things originate and is best positioned to develop useful intelligence and to take action on the ground. But how the US can imagine such collaboration with an unreliable partner will succeed is less clear.

One solution might be for the US to insist that its intelligence agencies be allowed to closely monitor and to direct some of their Pakistani counterparts' actions. Such supervision, if sufficiently intrusive, would allow the US to, for example, investigate the background of ISI liaison officers, detail personnel to Pakistani intel and defense offices, mandate on the ground training. All of these could give the US a heads up on any unwanted Pakistani communication or coordination with the bad people.

The US has a lot of leverage to insist on such supervision, too. It's been giving the Pakistani's billions of counterterror dollars with no strings attached since 9/11. One string that could be attached is implementing such supervision. Interestingly, the new AfPak strategy includes benchmarks that would tie aid to improved performance. Most of the attention has focused on benchmarks for Afghan steps in the right direction, but this could be (and perhaps has been) quietly be extended to Pakistani intel activities.

Two cautions, though. First, it's not clear if the Pakistani's would put themselves in such a subordinate position. No doubt some in the military would see this as a threat to Pakistan's desire to secure some "strategic depth" against India. And if the public got wind of such an arrangement, expect criticisms of intrusions on Pakistani "sovereignty". (Ironic since there does not seem to be much sovereingty going on in many areas of Pakistan).

Second, supervision implies responsibility. What if the Pakistani military or intelligence agencies do things that some in the US don't like, such as take big bribes or violate human rights? Then the US administration is implicated in such abuses. Nothing is easy or simple for US policy in the region, and the pressure to get some traction against the Taliban may lead the US to collaborate with some organizations doing bad things.

GWOT, RIP

The Obama administration has decided to stop using the term "Global War on Terror," replacing it with the ambiguous and less 24-ish "overseas contingency operations".

How come? I suspect (although no one cited in the article linked above mentions this) that one motive is to de-link these operations (see, I'm already using the new frame) from the Bush administration's not so successful foreign policy record.

Perhaps another reason is the recent criticism leveled by the International Committee of Jurists against GWOT-speak. The ICJ's states that description of the conflicts as a war gave "spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations" committed by the United States since 9/11. Since the ICJ likes human rights, it sees this as a bad thing.

There's another reason, though, to drop the war language that has not received much attention. The war language justified human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism. But it turns out that such violations actually fuel terrorism. My colleague Jim Piazza and I have a paper forthcoming at Comparative Political Studies that makes this argument. Violating human rights makes it more difficult to gather intellignece on terrorist groups from a population that fears the authorities. It complicates the government's counterterror effort by arousing domestic and international opposition to its violation of rights. In the empirics of the paper, we find that the relationship between abusing rights and more terror is robust to a bunch of control variables and statistical specifications, and that the substantive size of the effect is pretty large.

There is a policy lesson here for those who argue that we must trade off some rights for security from terrorism. Many have argued that this trade-off morally problematic. But even if you reject this line of thinking, and are fine with abusing rights to counter terror, it turns out that this is exactly the wrong strategy to pursue. Better to respect rights, which will weaken (or at least not strengthen) your terrorist opponents.

Terrorism is so 2004

How big a deal is terrorism today? After 9/11, of course, it was huge. But is it becoming passé? Are other problems more pressing for policymakers and academics interested in international affairs? One might think so. The Director of National Intelligence tells us that the number one threat to the United States, at least, is the ongoing economic drama. In a recent survey of international relations faculty, only one percent identified terrorism as likely to be a major problem for the next ten years. Attacks in Iraq are down. Attacks may be down around the world as well. Osama bin Laden may doubt his continued relevance.

It would be a good thing if this were the case, of course. But it might not be. There is considerable controversy about the last claim that attacks around the world have declined. The conflict in Iraq continues, and one can pretty easily imagine developments that lead to more terror there. And did you know that there were 581 terrorist attacks in India alone last year? We all remember Mumbai, but who even heard about the remaining 500+ attacks? (Not me--I had to look it up in WITS).

It's unlikely that terrorism is going away. But the attention we give to terrorism seems to vary far more than do the number or scale of attacks. How come? As Cass Sunstein, Donald Kettl, and many others have pointed out, terrorism tends to attract either too little attention or too much. Before 9/11, for example, it was on few political leaders' radar screens. And after, everything was connected to terrorism for a while. This underattentiveness and over-attentiveness to terror is a result of the fact that people and institutions have difficulty thinking clearly about rare events, such as major terrorist attacks. Individuals underestimate the (already small danger) of terrorism when it is not on their radar screens, but a salient attack such as 9/11 or Mumbai leads them to immediately and greatly overestimate the threat that they face. Conflicting interests and different organizational cultures always make it difficult for government agencies to effectively coordinate their response to a policy problem. The difficultly of accurately assessing the true threat from terrorism compounds these problems substantially, making it even harder for the relevant bureaucracies to achieve on consensus estimate of the risks of terorrism and the most effective responses. Political leaders, who already face short time horizons and many competing demands for their attention and resources, will pay little attention to terrorism until a salient attack occurs; after this, their political survival may depend on their ability to be seen as doing everything possible to prevent another attack.

The point of all this is that the actual risk posed by terrorism may diverge quite substantially from the perceived risk. A rational policy would not be driven in major ways by a salient attack or attacks. Instead, it would treat terrorism as a risk or threat that always exists, but that cannot be predicted with much accuracy. It would also assume that the overall trend in terrorism likely is moving more slowly that the pace of salient attacks would suggest.

What does this imply for people that study terrorism (like, say, me)? Is the study of terrorism a fad, soon to be replaced by global warming, global economic contagion, or something else in the minds of scholars of international politics? It might be. I imagine that the attention academics devote to an issue is driven in part by the same biases that influence individual and governmental attention. So if terrorism is perceived to be on the decline, those that analyze it might expect fewer resources and attention.

Any such effect, though, is likely to be smaller for academics studying terrorism. Interest in this area surged after 9/11. But it took a few years at least to result in good work. Academics shifting to this area needed to school themselves on the literature, develop new ideas, test these in a sophisticated way, submit them to journals or presses (which can take a long time to accept submissions and an even longer time to actually publish them). So this cumulative work is not going to disappear soon. Also, there are important economies of scale in the production of scholarship--once you become knowledgeable about terrorism (or anything else), it's easier to generate good ideas and to write them up than it would be to switch to the new hot area of inquiry. So even if popular and government attention to terror declines, we're likely to see a lot of work on the topic continue to make its way into journals and books. And this stream of scholarship might be really good, since there's been a large body of researchers working on this topic for the last eight years who are starting to generate really novel ideas.

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SWOTT 2009

Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism

The University of Oklahoma announces the fifth annual Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism (SWOTT). The workshop will be held July 9-16, 2009 at the University of Oklahoma. Professors and advanced graduate students from all disciplines are eligible to apply.

Applications can now be submitted online at http://www.swott.com/apply09.html through Friday, April 3, 2009. Seats are limited and participants are selected on a competitive basis, based on our desire to have a group with a mixture of experience, interests, and professional goals.

SWOTT was developed to: 1) offer an intensive short-course on understanding the fundamentals of terrorism; 2) introduce professors and graduate students to new and innovative techniques utilized to conduct research and teach about terrorism; and 3) strengthen the community of terrorism scholars. The workshop seeks to not only acquaint participants with the current issues that dominate US foreign policy and much of the world's attention (e.g. weapons of mass destruction, suicide terrorism, and state sponsorship of terrorism), but also promises a greater appreciation of the classic literature in the field.

Several speakers have verbally committed for this summer, including:

* Victor Asal, State University of New York-Albany
* Erica Chenoweth, Wesleyan University
* Kelly Damphousse, University of Oklahoma
* Lewis Griffith, Air Command and Staff College
* Jennifer Holmes, University of Texas-Dallas
* David McIntyre, Texas A&M
* Brigitte Nacos, Columbia University
* Dan O'Hair, University of Oklahoma
* Ami Pedhazur, University of Texas-Austin
* David Rapoport, University of CA-Los Angeles
* Todd Sandler, University of Texas-Dallas
* Stephen Sloan, University of Central Florida
* Chris Taylor, Mission EP
* Fred Wehling, Monterey Institute for International Studies
* Leonard Weinberg, University of Nevada-Reno

Additional speakers have been invited and we are still waiting to hear back from them. Check the website at http://www.swott.com for updates as we confirm additional speakers.

The workshop fee is:
* $1200 for graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty
* $2000 for tenure-track and tenured faculty.

This fee includes: lodging for 7 nights at a hotel near campus; workshop materials (including a program, thumb drive with readings, and t-shirt); local transportation; a field trip to the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial and the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism; staff and speaker fees and expenses; and several meals (in addition to breakfasts, snacks, and drinks available throughout the day, we host a meet-and-greet, welcome reception, one informal group dinner, and a closing banquet). This fee does not include transportation to Oklahoma, lunches, the remaining dinners, and incidental expenses.

More details about the workshop as well as an FAQ are available on the SWOTT website or you may contact the workshop staff at info@swott.com if you have any questions.

Fundamentalism and Terror

I participated in a couple of panels on terrorism at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in New York last month, and want to highlight some of the more interesting papers presented there; most should be available from the ISA's online archive.

The first paper, "One God For All: Fundamentalist Religious Groups and Terorrism" by Johanna Birnir and Nil Seda Satana, takes on the contention that religion drives terror. As the authors' point out there is an important stream of literature which argues that the "new terrorism" of today is driven primarily by religous groups, particularly Islamic religious groups.

The new terrorism argument is certainly in line with popular, and much policy, thinking about the causes of terrorism today. But empirical support for this idea is not iron-clad. Birnir and Satana, for exmaple, show that the religious identity of a country alone does not produce consistently more or less terrorism. Instead, they argue, it is the existence of fundamentalist religious groups that drive terror. Such fundamentalist groups exist in any world religion, and are dedicated to changing the religious worldviews of others. Fundamentalist movements that are in a majority in their country use terror to intimidate the minority into changing its beliefs; those in the minority use it to strike out at what they percieve as an oppressive majority. The empirics in the papare provide strong support for this argument--countries with fundamentalist movements do seem to experience more terror.

The paper is especially interesting because it both disconfirms the conventional wisdom about religion and terorrism, but extracts from this CW the novel and more specific argument about fundamentalism. In this sense it marks a potentially very important advance in thinking about the confessional bases of terror. Unlike much of existing literature on this topic, it is usefully self-concious about data (and its limitations) and method. At the same time, there do seem to be at least two fundamental (ha ha) issues that could be addressed. The first is that specific operationalization of fundamentalism employed here suggests that the resort to political violence is at least part of what makes a group fundamentalist in the first place. In other words, it might be arguing that fundamentalism leads to terror, when in fact the definition of fundamentalism is resorting to terrorism. The authors did discuss this in their presentaiton and promised more and better data in the future. Second, I wonder if the paper overstates the difference between what it finds and the conclusions of the "new terrorism" literature. While I have not resurveyed this literature, it does strike me that at least some of the new terrorism work might actually agree about the importance of fundamentalism rather than religous difference which what the authors argue here. Even if this is the case, however, the paper is a real advance because it makes this distinction more clear, and generalizes it to many cases.

The Year in Hate

The Southern Poverty Law Center has just released its annual report on hate groups in the United States. It includes a searchable database of reported hate incidents and an interactive map of known hate groups.

Transnational Terror and Human Rights

An article with this title I wrote with Jim Piazza just appeared in International Studies Quarterly. We found, to general surprise, that countries attacked by transnational terror groups generally do not respond by restricting human rights. You can read the full article here (gated free issue) or here (ungated). Below is the abstract if you want more details before clicking a link:

Do terrorist attacks by transnational groups lead governments to restrict human rights? Conventional wisdom holds that governments restrict rights to forestall additional attacks, to more effectively pursue suspected terrorists, and as an excuse to suppress their political opponents. But the logic connecting terrorist attacks to subsequent repression and the empirical research that addresses this issue suffer from important flaws. We analyze pooled data on the human rights behavior of governments from 1981 to 2003. Our key independent variable of interest is transnational terrorist attacks, and the analysis also controls for factors that existing studies have found influence respect for human rights. Repeated terrorist attacks lead governments to engage in more extrajudicial killings and disappearances, but have no discernible influence on government use of torture and of political imprisonment or on empowerment rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. This finding has important implications for how we think about the effects of terrorism and the policy responses of states, non-governmental organizations, and international institutions interested in protecting human rights.

Initial Post

Welcome to "Back Channels." I use this blog to write about how social scientists understand the sources and consequences of political violence. I'm particularly interested in causes of terrorism, how governments do and should respond to political violence, and why states abuse human rights and the consequences of such abuse.

I'll mostly be using this blog to highlight and comment on books and papers that address these issues from a social science angle. I imagine I'll spend less time dealing with immediate policy issues, since I don't really live in the policy world. I do think, though, that good social science can improve discussions of policy issues. This is especially true in areas such as counterterrorism, intelligence, and human rights, which get less social scientific attention that they should.

Those are my goals at this stage. I hope they will evolve based on your feedback, so do let me know what I'm doing well and poorly. I would especially welcome suggestions about new and interesting takes on the issues laid out above, so if you know of something along these lines (or have written something along these lines), please do pass it along.