Boneheads at Rand
The press is excited about the new Rand study that says that military intervention isn't the best way to fight terrorism.
"In most cases, military force isn't the best instrument," said Jones, a terrorism expert and the report's lead author.
...
The authors call for a strategy that includes a greater reliance on law enforcement and intelligence agencies in disrupting the group's networks and in arresting its leaders. They say that when military forces are needed, the emphasis should be on local troops, which understand the terrain and culture and tend to have greater legitimacy.In Muslim countries in particular, there should be a "light U.S. military footprint or none at all," the report contends.
"The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity," it said, "but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment."
I'd just like to make a few points that I believe will immediately show how useless these recommendations are:
- Military intervention doesn't preclude law enforcement and intelligence agency activities. In fact, the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., have been working with local law enforcement and with international agencies to fight terrorism.
- Military intervention isn't conducted in a vacuum - it's employed when law enforcement can go no further. Take, for instance, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. All the law enforcement in the world could do nothing to stop the source of the attacks. When terrorists enjoy the support of a state sponsor, law enforcement can't touch them.
- The Rand study looked at over 600 groups, but weighted them all the same. So you have Al Qaeda, an international network of thousands of jihadis with an annual budget in the tens of millions of dollars, given the same importance as much smaller groups, who actually dominated the survey:
Most groups are small. Our data showed that nearly two-thirds of all terrorist groups active since 1968 have fewer than 100 members, making it difficult to engage them with large, conventional forces.
- Here's a crtical point:
Of the 648 groups that were active at some point between 1968 and 2006, a total of 268 ended during that period. Another 136 groups splintered, and 244 remained active.
The lesson here, overlooked by pretty much everybody, is that most terrorist groups don't end. Only 41% of the groups studied ended without splintering into other groups. That's not a particularly strong endorsement for the effectiveness of law enforcement, who only eliminated 16.4% of the groups studied. And Rand also points out that 10% of the cases where groups ended were because the terrorists won. - The fact that military intervention only worked in 7% of the cases where the groups ended says absolutely nothing about whether military intervention works well or not. You need to know how many times military intervention was tried, a statistic omitted from the report. Also, note this excerpt from the report (p. 30):
Seven percent of terrorist groups that have ended since 1968 have done so because of military force. When they became strong enough to conduct insurgencies, however, terrorist groups ended because of military force 25 percent of the time.
Perhaps the increase was because when they became strong enough to conduct insurgencies, the military was used more often? - The study derides the military for failing to impair Al Qaeda's ability to conduct attacks. But isn't that as much a failure of law enforcement as it is the military? In fact, one could argue that because Al Qaeda is operating in Pakistan, beyond the reach of the military, it is law enforcement's fault that Al Qaeda continues to operate. Not to mention that in Iraq, the military certainly has had great success in disrupting Al Qaeda.
- The study also claims that Clinton's cruise missile attacks were representative of the failure of the military to impact Al Qaeda. But the cruise missile attacks were based on intelligence information, and it was the intelligence agencies who misidentified the pharmaceuticals plant.
- Finally, the report suggests that we use local armies whenever military force is required. Brilliant. I guess we should have just told the Taliban to go ahead and attack themselves. Or tried to persuade Iran or Pakistan to invade them for us.
You don't go to war with the local Islamic army you want, you go to war with the western army you have.
Read more objectively, the report serves as an indictment of intelligence agencies and law enforcement for failing to eliminate 85% of terrorist groups. But I doubt there will be many objective readers.
[Cross-posted at Uncommon Misconceptions]