The
ongoing discussion of the attempted Times Square bombing in New York has been
unsurprisingly colorful. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg invoked the old
saying that terrorists only need to be lucky once, while their opponents need
to be lucky every time -- and this time, we were "very
lucky." The New Republic's Jonathan Chait and former NYPD Deputy
Commissioner for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan noted the incompetence of
most plotters: Chait with the memorable assertion "terrorists
are basically dolts," Sheehan suggesting that "lone wolves" are generally "as incompetent
as they are disturbed."
Luck
and incompetence are interesting concepts, especially hard on the heels of al Qaeda's
failed underpants bomber, but they're hardly substitutes for good counterterrorism
planning. Indeed, for Sheehan, chance favors the prepared. He lauded the NYPD
for its counterterrorism acumen: "No other city even attempts to do what New
York has accomplished," he wrote, conceding that "money and political risk" limit
how far most cities can go when it comes to preventing what, at the end of the
day, is a marginal phenomenon. But there are some obvious limits to the logic
of Sheehan's point, and as the investigation into the attack deepens and more
of Faisal Shahzad's suspected terrorist associates are rounded up inside and
outside the United States, things start to get murky.
Case
in point: the debate, early in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's tour as top commander
in Afghanistan, over whether violence in Afghanistan is best addressed using counterterrorism
(CT) or counterinsurgency (COIN) methods. Last fall, when the Obama White House
was trying to decide how best to proceed in the region, pundits and
policymakers alike were positively
animated over the two and how they might be combined to mitigate the twinned
challenges of al Qaeda and Afghanistan. Vice President Joe Biden pushed for a
"counterterrorism plus" option, and Obama "dithered," finally settling on a
compromise plan, the principal rationale of which was to neutralize al Qaeda. Michael J. Boyle, a lecturer in international
relations at the University
of St. Andrews, provides
a highly readable account of the deliberations in a recent issue of the journal
International Affairs. The title says
it all: "Do
Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Go Together?"
Boyle's
article is behind a pay wall, but it's worth a close read. He argues that "the
conflation of these two models of warfare stems from an 'intellectual error'
predicated on the assumption that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are a fused threat,
and fused threats require 'joint or blended' CT and COIN measures. Given their
inherent differences, they aren't necessarily mutually reinforcing or even
compatible." The costs, Boyle indicates, are high: combined CT-COIN operations
require an investment of blood, treasure, and attention that's politically
distracting and exhausting; operationally, they lead to "popular backlash,"
"countermobilization of enemy networks," a "legitimacy gap," and "diminished
leverage." The main take-away of the piece is that CT and COIN are now
hopelessly muddled policy concepts, the former essentially collapsed into the
latter -- "global insurgency and counterinsurgency" essentially obsolete
metaphors for how we wage multiple "wars," multiple ways, in multiple
locations.
The
issues that shape domestic and foreign policy often play off each other, but
they're also distinct beasts. Part of the problem is the language we use to
describe what we do. That's not just about how we articulate ideas, some of
which become policy; it's also about how they then translate to real-world
costs and consequences. In New York, the issue is terrorism and how best to
focus intelligence, law enforcement, and prosecution to deal with perpetrators.
Those issues are often mired in partisan debates about security, freedom, and
the nature of democracy, but they're also clear-eyed compared with foreign-policy
discussions about South Asia. As evidence
mounts of a Pakistani Taliban role in last weekend's Times
Square event, it may become increasingly difficult to remember
that messing about in someone else's backyard might not be the wisest approach
to protecting our own.
Michael Innes is a research fellow in the
School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, editor in chief of Current
Intelligence magazine, and a regular contributor to the AfPak Channel.
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