Washington Post Adds to Report on US Pursuing Force Options Against AQIM in Africa

Bobby posted a day ago about an important Wall Street Journal news story talking about the US government considering options for pursuing an increasing active and dangerous branch-franchise-affiliate of Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). They include drone strikes, increased cooperation with local governments, and peacekeeping missions.  It is a very important story, because it focuses attention on something that hasn't been sufficiently appreciated in all the debate over drones and targeted killing - viz., that perhaps the real story over time of US counterterrorism is a story a little about drones and targeted killing and technology, and a lot about military-intelligence advisers to local governments trying to fight off AQIM, AQAP, and other regional jihadist groups from setting up shop and taking over some, or ever all, of a country's territory. The real strategic game here is the US military and intel community's growing understanding that the rising threats include a high value personality target aspect, which can be dealt with best by drones and targeted killing.  But two additional considerations.  One is that as has been shown in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan, the effectiveness of drones and targeted killing depends in considerable part on intelligence gathering on the ground - stuff that requires networks of ground level, human intelligence.  Second, if the old model of counterterrorism ran "through" US boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency, through territory and populations, the Obama administration's "light footprint" new model emphasizes working with local forces, local governments, and in some cases - presumably Afghanistan - through proxy forces. Those of us who were around for the Central American wars of the 1980s will see similarities here. Why this second model's emphasis on security advisers and proxy forces?  The answer is that denial of safe havens is as important as ever - and the current political climate tends to produce instability that invites local AQ franchises to seize territory, govern it with an eye to internal Islamist purification, and also use it as a staging platform for attacks transnationally.  We can't invade everywhere; conventional war is useful primarily for toppling regimes that harbor transnational terrorist groups, but it's not very useful for pursuing the terrorists directly, which is a large reason for drones and targeted killing.  On the other hand, denial of territory and safe havens remains as important as ever, so the US needs a mechanism for addressing the seizure of territory.  A lightfootprint way of pursuing that is to set up local partnerships with governments at risk of losing control of territory - providing them with training, weapons, intelligence, and perhaps in some cases - such as Yemen currently - air power, which is essentially what the so-called "signature strikes" against groups rather than individualized targets is about in Yemen. Which is to say (as Bobby has also discussed some in earlier posts), the US, in pursuit of its overall grand counterterrorism strategy, has "personality strikes" to address identified individuals; it also has "signature strikes" to attack groups.  But attacking groups is probably most often and best understood as acting as the air arm of the Yemen government in its civil war - a conventional, as distinguished from counterterrorism, war, with control of territory and defeating an insurgent ground force, as its goal.  The difficulty is that the Obama administration does not want to go to the admission that it is, in pursuit of a grand strategy for counterterrorism, not just targeting AQAP individually as terrorists, it is taking a side in the civil war in pursuit of a sub-part of the grand strategy - denial of territory and safe havens. I think it is a good strategy.  But I also think it risks de-legitimacy if the Obama administration is not clear on the role of signature strikes against groups - because otherwise it looks, and is often portrayed in the press, as though this were merely a "relaxed" and perhaps therefore an (even more) immoral or illegal version of more tightly controlled "personality strikes."  The two are legitimate to different purposes, and as components of a single overall strategy.  It would be helpful if the Obama administration said this more clearly than it has - John Brennan walked up to this in his Yemen remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations a couple of months ago, but it needs to be clearer than that. With regards to the legal-legitimacy of the strategy, I cannot recommend highly enough Bobby's new paper.  It raises crucial issues of what happens when it is simply not possible to link to the AUMF as the authority for going after a particular terrorist group.  I often give this hypothetical as one involving something obviously entirely unrelated to AQ and the AUMF - a resurgence of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, for example - in order to make clear that there is no connection in that case.  But Bobby points out that it won't work that way - it will be, and becoming in some ways today, a gradual and incremental de-coupling, and I suppose the question is, apres le AUMF?  At any rate, the essay is going into Michigan Law Review, which speaks to its quality - but journalists and pundits, policy makers and think tankers, ought to read it and take it on board.  It's somewhat misplaced in a law review - it has far greater immediacy than that. Meanwhile, today's Washington Post has a good front page article, by Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock, on approximately the same themes as the WSJ piece that Bobby mentioned:

The [White House] deliberations reflect concern that al-Qaeda’s African affiliate has become more dangerous since gaining control of large pockets of territory in Mali and acquiring weapons from post-revolution Libya. The discussions predate the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. compounds in Libya but gained urgency after the assaults there were linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. U.S. officials said the discussions have focused on ways to help regional militaries confront al-Qaeda but have also explored the possibility of direct U.S. intervention if the terrorist group continues unchecked. “Right now, we’re not in position to do much about it,” said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official involved in the talks. As a result, he said, officials have begun to consider contingencies, including the question of “do we or don’t we” deploy drones. The effort has been led by White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan and involves top officials from the CIA, State Department and Pentagon. At the same time, the U.S. military commander for Africa has crisscrossed the region in recent weeks, making stops in Mauritania, Algeria and other countries that could become part of a peacekeeping force for Mali ... Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, chief of U.S. Africa Command, said Friday during a visit to Morocco that there “are no plans for U.S. direct military intervention” in Mali. But he and others have made clear that the United States is prepared to support counterterrorism or peacekeeping operations by other countries. In addition, the U.S. military has launched a series of clandestine intelligence missions, including the use of civilian aircraft to conduct surveillance flights and monitor communications over the Sahara Desert and the arid region to the south, known as the Sahel.

Notice something in this squib that hasn't been much discussed - even apart from proxy forces, military advisers, etc.  It is the hope that UN peacekeeping forces could help to maintain peace and security in Mali - in part the usual international agendas, but also serving collaterally, so to speak, to serve US overlapping security interests.  I've talk in my UN book about ways in which the US is able to utilize particular functions of the UN to further its interests as well as its values - and peacekeeping is one of them.