Death by 1,000 Tweets

As the youths attack Cairo embassy on 9/11/2012, PR experts within fend them
 off with a fury of tweets praising Islam

US “Counter Violent Extremist” strategy’s “public messaging” focus is no match for reality

(Published at The Daily Caller)

As Republicans conclude questioning of the Obama administration’s narrative of the anti-U.S. Libyan violence that culminated in the fatal diplomatic compound attack of September 11, 2012, the most disturbing question remaining is perhaps the least cynical: “What if the Obama administration actually believes its own narrative?”

In other words, what if, from day one of NATO’s Libya intervention, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon really did believe in the primacy of a “strong counter-narrative” (or as Sidney Blumenthal put it in an email to Secretary Clinton, his “babbling rhetoric about ‘narratives’”)?

What if the aloof requests by Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ Washington task-masters for “public messaging” solutions in the months before the Benghazi attack were sincere?

What if US Embassy Cairo was simply taking the White House’s “theory of change” to its logical conclusion when it took time out of its lively morning on September  11, 2012, to tweet, “We consistently stand up for Muslims around the world and talk abt how Islam is a wonderful religion”?

What if, by National Security Council (NSC) standards, Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s time really was best spent on September 12, 2012, calling a Florida pastor to request he adjust his messaging to the Muslim world?

And what if the NSC Brain Trust really does believe that Islamist violence can be countered by “supporting alternatives to extremist messaging and greater economic opportunities for women and disaffected youth,” as the 2015 National Security Strategy defines its primary counter-terrorism objective?

Such would provide a coherent explanation for the perennial tragedy of the US fight against Islamist violence from Libya to Nigeria to Iraq to the “gradual progress” (reported for the nth time) of US efforts in Afghanistan. The narrative of stock villains exploiting the woes of would-be model citizens is the Panglossian formula of every front of the White House’s global war with “extremists.” Indeed, the name of the strategy alone – Countering Violent Extremism – is a nod to the philosophy of seeing problems not as they are but as one wishes them to be.

The NSC sums up this narrative-centric strategy with the motto, “Don’t do stupid sh*t,” as if the US is the problem, and the solution is a re-branding campaign. Unfortunately the NSC spends billions of dollars on refraining from doing stupid sh*t in precisely the kind of fundamentalist Islamic societies that would most benefit from adopting the NSC’s motto themselves. 

For example, complicating the US’ post-Qaddafi messaging push in Libya was the fact that 41 percent of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa support executing the messenger if the messenger is someone who left Islam. The “opportunities for women” message, in particular, has limited mileage: 87 percent of the region’s Muslims believe a woman must obey her husband, and 60 percent of Muslims in Egypt favor stoning as a punishment for adultery. To support women’s rights in this region, in other words, is to be extremist.  Yet even with the UN reporting in August that “the scale of human suffering [in Libya] is staggering,” the Obama administration refuses to follow Europe in recognizing the anti-Islamist government in Libya, content with tweeting, “International community stands ready to support Libyan people, the leaders they choose.”

Likewise, complicating the US strategy to tweet its way to the rescue of the school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria in April of 2014 is the fact that nearly 20 percent of the region’s population supports Boko Haram’s ideology. For those who do not, US messaging rings hollow: since April 2014, hundreds have been abducted and thousands killed.  Meanwhile, as the US frets over the “legitimate concerns of the people” that fuel “Boko Haram’s appeal,” Boko Harm exploits the illegitimate concerns of the people, such as outrage over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And for every statement the NSC releases about Boko Haram denying Nigerians “unfettered access to education, health care, and economic development,” Boko Haram has a more compelling beheading video.

As for Iraq, recall the Sunni Awakening of 2007, which Obama administration officials ascribe not to the problematic US troop surge, but to solution-oriented Iraqi elders getting fed up with “extremism.” The Islamic State’s massacres since the fall of Mosul in 2014 exceed even Zarqawi’s “extremism,” but where are those fed up elders now? Is it possible that their criteria for a legitimate grievance (indeed, their definition of “stupid sh*t”) differs from ours? As we narrate our concern for Iraqis’ grievances, the Islamic State expands its legitimacy with every public school Islamified, child marriage notarized, and infidel death certificate printed.

But nowhere is the US faith in the power of the narrative more tragic than in Afghanistan, where the United Nations reported a record level of civilian casualties in the first eight months of 2015. Last month, amidst the deadly tug-of-war for the key city of Kunduz and more American fatalities, the US Army rejected the appeal of a soldier who is being kicked out for beating an Afghan official who laughed off concerns about his child sex slave. As one US Army officer put it, the soldier’s fault lay in risking “a catastrophic loss of rapport” with the Afghan officials. At some point, the price of rapport exceeds its value, and the white lies of narrative-crafters outlive their utility.

The White House’s public messaging approach to dealing with Islamists is premised on a profound concern for what the Islamic world thinks of the US. It is time for the Islamic world to express a similar concern for how the world thinks of it.

Where Warlords Fear to Tread

The late Matiullah Khan coneals his infamous bare hands.

Afghanistan’s complexity refuses to fade as quickly as its strategic importance (Published at The Diplomat)

Among the greatest hits of a popular wedding singer in Tarin Kot, the capital city of the Afghan province that has produced such specimens as Mullah Omar and the man who cut off the nose of the girl on the 2010 Time cover, is a ditty about an illiterate former taxi driver, set to rebab and accordion. “Across the mountains all the people know you / For you have killed many Talibs with your bare hands / God has saved you every time / You are Matiullah Khan.”

But if you believe the reports of Afghan security officials, God did not save Matiullah Khan – a warlord and longtime US patron in the Afghanistan War – from a cross-dressing suicide bomber that lured him into the backstreets of Kabul’s police district 6 one night last March. The assassination, and the demure reaction of US and Afghan officials, suggests Afghanistan is moving beyond the days when American counter-insurgents channeled tens of millions of dollars to anti-Taliban strongmen, and is thus in line with the White House’s February National Security Strategy declaration that “we have moved beyond the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that defined so much of American foreign policy over the past decade.” 

Yet war has not yet moved beyond the elders of Uruzgan, where Matiullah’s replacement as police chief was shot dead by a suspected Taliban infiltrator last Sunday.  They remain suspicious of the circumstances and contradictory official reports of the death of Matiullah, a man as infamous for his security precautions as he was for his summary executions of alleged Talibs. They wonder how he was seen exiting his downtown hotel on his cell phone during a rare visit to Kabul one moment, only to be blown up across town the next. Being quite familiar with the various compositions of corpses of suicide bombings, they wonder how his remained intact. Not having received any public condolences from President Ashraf Ghani, they have led protests of thousands in Tarin Kot, threatening to renounce a government that has moved beyond them.

War has not yet moved beyond the 9,800 US troops that President Obama decided last month would stay in Afghanistan through the end of 2015, either. That decision reversed plans to close a US base in Jalalabad, where a US soldier was killed two weeks later, and where a suicide bomber killed 35 Afghans a week after that.  Initial reports that the suicide bombing was the work of the Islamic State have since been disputed by U.S. officials, giving way to familiar reports of Taliban and Pakistani involvement, which cohere less conveniently with joint US-Afghan calls in March for “reconciliation” with the Taliban and “dialogue” with Pakistan.

Afghanistan, in other words, is refusing to fade in complexity as quickly as it fades in strategic importance. After all, it is the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi – and not Pakistan-based al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri nor Taliban leader Mullah Omar (an “ignorant, illiterate warlord, unworthy of spiritual or political respect,” says Baghdadi) – who governs the caliphate that meanders from the mosques of Mosul to the forests of Nigeria to the gates of the US consulate in Benghazi, and who inspired the killing of cartoonists in France last January.

It is tempting, then, for Americans to dismiss Afghanistan’s complexity – to include its Matiullah Khans –as Baghdadi dismisses Mullah Omar: no longer worthy of our strategic respect.  Yet while the strategy-fatigued American people have pronounced the counterinsurgency manual, like its architect General Petraeus, guilty, they have refused to completely wash their hands of Afghanistan’s problems, and instead fantasize that they can solve the same problems of Pakistani-fueled religious violence with ten percent of the solution.

Indeed, last December US troop levels dropped from their 2010 peak of 98,000 to 9,800, even as the United Nations reported a 22 percent increase in civilian casualties in 2014, making it the war’s deadliest year. The year also marked a record yield of Afghan opium, a resource whose abundance will spell prosperity for the country’s criminal and terrorist networks for as long as it remains illegal. Meanwhile, even the cultural metrics disappoint: for all the cups of tea shared between US “Religious Support Teams” and Afghans, Kabul in 2015 remains a city in which one faces public lynching for being accused of burning a Koran.

Such is the riddle that Matiullah Khan and his forlorn fellow warlords bequeath to the US troops and diplomats who remain. A recent Washington Post article chronicled how the waning U.S. support for Afghanistan’s warlords has pitted them in a “defining fight” for relevance, quoting one Afghan who scoffed at the naïve “Western” dismissal of warlords: “[T]hey have to be respected.” Yet for the White House, which cites “reconciliation” with the Taliban as “the surest way to achieve the full retrograde of U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan[,]” the anti-Taliban warlords have outlived their usefulness. Years ago, when they were still useful, one U.S. Army Colonel in Uruzgan with guarded respect for Matiullah Khan asked himself, “At what point is a person too gray and approaching black and just too bad to be tolerated?” It is time for Americans to ask the same question of Afghanistan.