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“A Significant Intelligence Failure”
Well, this story has finally hit the front page of The New York Times. Rivals of ISIS Attack U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Group, says the headline. “Rivals.” Any old rivals? No, Nusra — al Qaeda, in other words. As we were discussing on this thread. But here’s the thing I don’t get:
In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure.
While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.
I skimmed through the comments — I shouldn’t have, I’m down enough about all of this already — and saw a number of them to the effect of “This is why we shouldn’t be in the Middle East! It’s all too complicated to sort out!”
All too complicated.
Yes, there are many aspects of the politics of this region that are labyrinthine and confusing. But what would be your instinct about how likely al Qaeda is to welcome US-backed fighters?
What if you knew that Nusra has this track record? Not too much to expect that “senior administration officials” had been briefed about this, is it?
For months, the US-backed Hazzm rebel movement held key areas of the Aleppo countryside, boasted thousands of fighters and scores of tanks, and was led by the former commander of the Free Syrian Army, Salim Idris.Yet over just one weekend, it was defeated by the local al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front, which began an assault on Hazzm to end the influence of its “criminal and corrupt” leadership. …
Nusra has considered all US-backed factions inevitable future enemies, and has set about eliminating them before they become a large well-trained force in the region.
What else does al Qaeda have to do to alert the US that it’s hostile to the United States?
Michael Weiss wrote a good piece about it:
This latest setback to the train-and-equip program has only realized the quiet fears percolating throughout the Pentagon for months that the U.S. was essentially creating cannon fodder—rebels it was not prepared to defend in the likely event they needed defending. The raison d’être of all Syrian rebels, after all, is to overthrow at the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, not fight jihadists. And any inductees of the program were bound to have targets painted on their backs from all other comers in a complicated and gruesome four-year-old civil war with many attendant sideshow conflicts. Pro-Assad forces including Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian-built militias, Nusra, ISIS and even other independent rebels—all were bound to try to kill or capture Sunni Arab proxies of Washington.
“If you wanted to sabotage your strategy, this is a pretty good way to do it,” said one official advising on the process. “None of this is about achieving the objective. It is about going through the motions.
This is not an “intelligence failure.” This is a moral failure.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Never trust anyone over O6. You have to be a politician to get stars.
Uh, this is not a recent problem. Remember the incompetence in the Iraq War? After Afghanistan really started to bog down? Go back even further: Balkan policy, for instance.
The State Department has long been a den of careerist rot, but the spook world and Pentagon have been rotting for years too. Obama may have made the problem worse, but he didn’t make the problem. It probably started after the Gulf War, when the Cold War-trained officers and agents began to retire.
I recall Team W figuring out that the Neocons had blown the call, deciding that American boots on the ground would be needed, and then correcting course to provide said boots and making sure that they did what was needed to protect the backsides of locals who were willing to cooperate with the American vision of a stable and multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Iraq. They achieved real successes.
In fact, the better things got in Iraq, the more distressed the anti-American Leftists became. The last thing they wanted to see was an example of American hegemony bringing peace and stability to a troubled corner of the world, because that went against their narrative.
Obama believes that America should not be a superpower, America should not exert power in the world, and America should be content to be simply just another vote in the UN General Assembly. Team O has been very successful in reducing American influence and the American ability to project power.
I disagree; the material in Michael Weiss’s post stated that at least the military saw this coming:
And if the military saw this coming I doubt our our intelligence community didn’t.
This is the same military and same intelligence that won two wars against Iraq. I cannot see them going down hill to this extent in only six years. The American voters elected the incompetence and malpractice that produced this failure to office when they elected and re-elected Obama.
This is what is meant by the maxim, Elections have consequences.
Recall those “This is your brain on drugs.” public service announcements? Imagine a “This is your foreign policy/military strategy on Obama.” public service announcements.
It would take a meth-head to concoct such a losing strategy. Or someone who didn’t care whether America won or not.
I agree with this. I don’t think our military were at fault here. We needed to create a defensible base in which to train a relatively small number of Syrians who had proven their decency. We didn’t. That’s not because the military can’t, or because there’s a high level of ambiguous feeling about ISIS and AQ. It’s because of the President who sets these policies, and the policies of not striking parades, or during sand storms, and then decides that the problem with the battle of Ramadi was that the US was too assertive.
Obama could fix this by coming to realize that his approach has been mistaken, or America could fix this by replacing Obama. In this respect, even Sec. Clinton would be a dramatic improvement. We don’t need to be good, we just need to be non-awful.
Thank you, Claire, for a powerful, if heartbreaking, post.
Also, in talking to intelligence analysts and soldiers about this stuff, it has been my impression that most of them were aware that AQ has not historically and does not now view the US with affection and that that sentiment is broadly returned. I don’t think it’s fair to accuse them of not knowing. As a members of the military or high ranking civil servants, they have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, which includes obeying even the most stupid of the legal orders of the CinC.
Huzzah! James is back.
*Happy Dance*
*cough*
As I was saying. I largely agree with this, but I think to some extent Obama is also reacting to those commenters in the thread Claire linked -“This is too tough! We shouldn’t even be there.”
Which is the source of my crack about Raymond of Toulouse. He could figure out how to navigate a bunch of mutually hostile enemies in the Middle East, but we, somehow, can’t. Of course, Raymond and Godfrey were special people. We’re acting far more like the imbeciles who conducted the Second Crusade -allying with our enemies to attack our allies. At least they had the excuse that they though Damascus would be an easy conquest that would refill their coffers. I’m not sure what our excuse is.
I’m starting to think that the coalition can defeat Islamists and achieve some level of stability in Syria, or (perhaps) the coalition can defeat Assad and achieve some sort of stability in Syria, but it’s starting to look like it isn’t possible to defeat Islamists and defeat Assad and achieve some sort of stability in Syria. We have to choose – and continued instability is certainly one option.
With some relevance, the Atlantic has suggested this nifty board game….
Almost anything about this story could be true. The leaders of Division 30 and their 8-20 soldiers may have defected to Nusra or have been Nusra from the beginning. The soldiers of Division 30 may not exist but are just a scam their “leaders”have been using to bilk the US government. Division 30 may have been a CIA fiction used to cover the embarrassment of our withdrawal from participation in the Syrian conflict. Taking anything reported about Syria at face value is probably a mistake.
That’s what John Kerry is going to say when the nuke goes off in Tel Aviv.
I’m willing to accept that, and I didn’t say “blinkered ideologues,” although others on this thread did. But can you explain, can you even imagine theoretical circumstances, in which the failure to plan for the possibility that al Qaeda might behave as it always has would not be properly described — at least — as foolish?
There may be (and in fact surely is, obviouly) more to this story, but note that no one is trying to leak that idea or hint at it or even spin it as anything more than, “We’re idiots, whoops.” This suggests they believe the US public won’t care or even find this notion all that strange or demand that heads roll; and also that they don’t realize that it’s not just the US public that reads the NYT. That’s what I don’t get. They’re casting themselves and our public as fools. And they’re doing so to the gross detriment of our national security, because who on earth would want to cooperate with us if they have good reason to think we’re the stupidest creatures to have roamed the planet since the dinosaurs?
While I’m not saying that the people involved in this disaster were following an unlawful order — at all — I think it’s important to say that as far a I know, we don’t permit any kind of Nuremberg Defense. I’m not by any means knowledgable about US military law (and would love to see a discussion on the Member Feed from someone who is, by the way — that would be a great topic of a post. I’m really ignorant of it, and I’d love a primer about the principles of military jurisprudence.)
But this part of the UCMJ is clear, and seems to make a Nuremberg-style Defense difficult, although the way it’s framed is interesting:
I don’t know much about the history of the interpretation of this law (Member Feed anyone? It would be a fascinating post from someone who does?) And it does not affirmatively demand disobedience to laws contrary to the Constitution, laws of the United States, lawful superior orders or “for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it.” But it sure sounds as if this allows a robust prospect of defense to someone who realizes something is illegal or constitutional and says, “No, I can’t follow this order.”
The wording “for some other reason is beyond the authority of the official issuing it” is fascinatingly vague, and I assume deliberately so. I’d love to learn how that’s been interpreted (Expert? Member Feed? If you know the answer and you’re tempted just to reply in a comment, that’s great too, but you’re sitting a post that would interest a lot of people.)
But two interpretations of “for some other reason” seem possible. The first is the obvious — the person who ordered it doesn’t have authority within the chain of command. But the second is a lot more interesting: Has it ever been successfully used to defend someone who refused an order because it was against the highest authority of all, so to speak? Whatever laws we pass, some orders would never pass muster with God. The original Nuremberg Defense properly failed.
FWIW, we’ve also signed but not ratified the Rome Treaty, and the juridical interpretations of the Rome Treaty vary, from what I can tell, but it seems designed to affirm Nuremberg Principle IV — i.e., that “just following orders” is not a defense of a criminal act.
A lot of people knew — as Michael’s article points out, and as many warned well before this hit the news — that we were just sending those men in to die. I also said it well before this happened, and while I don’t have access to all the information they had in making this decision, I cannot imagine what information they could have had that would countermand common sense here.
Perhaps there was some intriguing game-theoretic analysis or a Nusra informant who said, “Don’t worry, we”ll cooperate with you this time,” but all common sense says, “Well, maybe they might cooperate. That would be great — and a welcome 100-percent reversal of their entire pattern of behavior since 1988, their core ideology, and their deeply-held religious convictions, for which they’ve been fighting, dying and killing Americans and those who truck with them for more a quarter of a century, not to mention against human nature, since we’ve also been killing them and their families, including their most beloved heroes such as Osama bin Laden, for decades. But we’d best at least prepare for the possibility they will not.”
If the thinking was as dumb as the scenario I sketched out above, I hope I would have had had the guts not to follow the order. I would have resigned had the program been a civilian one (I’ve resigned jobs rather than follow far less consequential, but in my view unethical, requests — I mean, I’ve resigned jobs over being asked to fudge a footnote). I hope I would have had the courage to refuse to carry it out had it been a military order, and if needed, taken my punishment. I hope I would have had the courage to do that. Because sending people to their deaths at the hands of al Qaeda — while saying, “Trust us, we’re Americans” is wrong, and not just in a “You’ll have to answer to the law” way, but in a “You have to answer to God” way. And in a “One day, you’ll have to answer to the American people, way.” Because if you’ve sworn to defend the United States and its Constitution, it’s pretty clear how much damage something like this does to America’s reputation — and thus its security.
Going through the motions is a standard ploy of the administrative state and the Left in general. It demonstrates that while you don’t agree with policy X, you’ve tried it, albeit with preconditions that make success impossible. It failed, and you are now able to marginalize anybody who supported that policy. You then do what you wanted to all along.
Claire,
Coming back from Shabbos I got lost between all your Turkish posts. I made this comment about 45 mins ago but on another post. I think it might be relevant here also.
James Gawron:
BDB,
Yes, I concur. The big rat is in the White House. I have been trying to limit myself to things that I can be sure of. First, you do not create a partisan fighting force. The absurdity of announcing that you are sending under 100 trained?! fighters anywhere is stunning. If you are not sending a full scale army then you are looking for real partisans that can be your ally. Partisans are naturally occurring groups like Peshmerga. They already know the territory and know how to survive. By giving them some critical aid they can win battles and be a huge pain in the ass to who you are trying to fight. The idea that you would insert a small number of “trained” non-indigenous soldiers into a full scale battle zone is so stupid that it can’t be believed. This is a White House tactic to run away as fast as it can.
Unfortunately, this would correspond to Claire’s version of the Erdogan deal. Erdogan may be serious about his ISIS free zone but no more than that. We can use the air base and he wins the snap elections and is dictator for life. I hate this kind of scenario because with some real talent and real leadership we could be doing so much better both for Turkish democracy and for a full scale blitz of ISIS. Unfortunately, the big rat is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Regards,
Jim
I would like this comment a thousand times if I could.
Americans do very hard things. We send spacecraft to Pluto for a little look-see, and broadcast the images instantly to people around the world for them to consult on tiny, hand-held devices that are now possessed by two billion people — and growing — and increasingly affordable even to people in rural Bihar. A lot of the skills involved in doing that are “complicated.” And “hard.”
And this one isn’t complicated, either. As I think any person of normal intelligence, over maybe the age of ten, could figure out, and as you said:
Maybe I’ll live long enough to look through the archives and try to figure out what they could have been thinking. I mean, even if your idea is that Obama’s the Manchurian Candidate whose been despatched to destroy America, why would so many people involved in this have gone along with this?
Look I’ll say this now, so no one can say, “no one could have seen it coming.” The “advisers” — US military — we’ve sent into Iraq seem to me at risk of being taken hostage or killed. They’re there in insufficient numbers, under insane and incomprehensible rules of engagement, and we don’t seem serious about providing air support or making common-sense intelligence assessments.
It seems to me that this is so, yes.
Perhaps Obama’s thinking is like this: President Roosevelt knew that there would be casualties at Normandy, but the strategic goal was so important that he was willing to accept the casualties.
I know that the establishment of Iranian hegemony and justice for the Palestinian people are critical steps in undoing the malign historical influence of the US in the region, and the humanity-threatening global warming consequences of the US economy. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Deal with it.
It’s upsetting, but it’s less upsetting to me when they call themselves idiots than when they respond to one of the more traumatic weeks for the Iraqi army since liberation, (Ramadi falling, with 20 Oklahoma City style truck bombs taking out city blocks, US air cover deciding not to show up, hundreds murdered, the shame of defeat, ISIS being able to have a victory parade in the open because they were that confident that the US would leave them unmolested), by essentially sneering and saying [coc] those guys, they’re pretty worthless anyway.
For some reason, terrorism seems to bring out an unbelievably apathetic and inhuman streak in the Obama administration. At least when they face Putin they don’t promise our allies that they’ll help. They don’t make things worse. With Goodluck in Nigeria, they promised him support and he relied on that promise, and they used Boko Haram as leverage for him to improve on civil rights, ultimately failing to provide the support that they promised and briefly, trivially, implemented.
With the FSA, they induced the reliance of Syrians and then betrayed them by not actually doing what they were promising all the way back in 2011. Same with the Iraqis. Once ISIS started killing politically popular Kurds, the US started making some genuine token efforts, but if you listen to them speak in long form, they still talk about the importance of civilian reforms. They still use the deaths and rapes and dehumanization of innocents as leverage.
It’s not that they don’t have people who’ve spent time out there. They do. They have really smart people who have. From what I can tell, they just think that politics is really, really, important, and that refers both to domestic elections and foreign de jure civil rights.
Have you read Stern and Berger’s ISIS: State of Terror? It’s by far the best book on ISIS (at least of those I’ve read, but I’m a keen on the subject), with fantastic, richly informed, descriptions of the theological and sociological motivations for institutionalizing child rape and such, explaining how the mind boggling evil promotes ISIS’ aims. Then, at the end, it recommends, in all seriousness, that the US not fight ISIS with bullets (because that’s what they want). Rather, we should up our twitter game, because ISIS depends on social media for recruitment.
Jonathan Haidt talks about conservatives knowing how liberals think because it’s in the media culture; we all watch Cheers and Friends etc., and all went to university. In general, I think that I’m better than the average guy at getting them; I got a dozen years of college, read feminist and socialist literature, have left wing friends, etc.. I hate that I can’t do better in explaining this than a really strong sense that they think of this as all being like university politics, with the body count and broken lives being a less important metric than all of the stakeholders they care about (meaning, those who, at a minimum, speak fluent English, or French or Spanish). I can’t though.
While I was working out, the treadmill was replaying an old SNL episode that relied on knowledge of this stuff. Tina’s Palin wasn’t on that episode, but if they’d had her making the mistake that the real Obama team made, we’d have been disgusted at their hyperbole, and rightfully so.
You think he thinks that Ottoman dominance over Persia was America’s fault? To the extent that there was any involvement, America supported Persian greatness, while the Arabs were mostly Soviet leaning. Eventually, the Soviet leaners in America withdrew their support from Persia and it fell to barbarism, but I can’t see a way in which Obama’s support of Iranian influence over Arabs rights an American, or even Western wrong. There was a preference for Saddam over Khomeini, but that didn’t turn into meaningful substantive support; it was kind of like our supporting Sanders over Clinton, or vice versa.
I don’t take the NYT’s reporting at face value at all, but I take reporters I trust who’ve recently spent a lot of time in Syria very seriously. Mike does make mistakes from time to time, as we all do, but his reporting — and that of a huge number of other reporters and sources from MENA who tend to report accurately — make me strongly suspect that what he wrote is highly plausible. For a number of reasons, it seems unlikely that they defected to Nusra or were Nusra from the beginning; if you look up who these guys were, you’ll see why.
I actually completely agree that this is something we must push, stress, and stand for. The problem is that — at least in Turkey, I’ll stick to that because I can document it so extensively — we do not.
They wouldn’t be wrong if they thought that. It is. But even that doesn’t seem to be something we grasp.
As for this:
It’s upsetting in different ways. You’re absolutely right that this is a much bigger deal in terms of callousness and betrayal and credibility.
What put the knife in my gut was that they said this to The New York Times confident in the knowledge that no, it won’t cause Americans to say, “You did what?”
It’s that there’s an element of this that should be so simple, so obvious, so astonishing, to every American old enough to remember September 11. That’s not “complicated foreign policy stuff that happens far away.” And yet somehow they seem pretty confident that everyone will say, “Gee, anyone could make that mistake; this won’t change what I think about this Adminstration come election time.”
“Current and former and senior officials” are pretty savvy about how they leak. That’s what they think of Americans. And God help us, they may be right.
The big question that comes immediately to my mind is: are these failures the result of incompetence of the political appointees, who are silencing the career intelligence officers and military, or is the incompetence pervasive of both the politicos and the careerists? God help us if it’s the second, and God help us if it’s the first and a Democrat wins the next election.
My second thought is that such blindness mirrors the administration’s naive expectation that Iran will refrain from further empowering itself with nuclear weapons for any extended period of time once sanctions are lifted and it gets its $150 billion, and that a nuclear arms race is not on the horizon in the Middle East as a direct result of the boneheaded “agreement” Kerry capitulated on.
Are there any similarities with this attitude and the way various Western coalitions dealt with state and non-state actors in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1979 to the present? I guess I don’t see this Administration as the first one to treat foreigners as expendable cannon fodder while being confident that it would not have a big impact on the domestic opinion or votes. In a lot of ways that’s a default setting for empires, not an aberration.
Not the Ottomans. The unjust overthrow of Mossadegh and support of the Shah. Persian greatness under the Shah? Colonialism; the Shah was a puppet and besides, SAVAK. The Revolution took care of that, and now it’s time to help Iran to become a successful regional power under an indigenous form of government owing nothing to colonialism. Well, non-Muslim colonialism, which is totally different from Muslim colonialism.
And it hasn’t been just for the USA to hamstring the Iranian economy. It’s kept them from properly upgrading Hizbollah’s defensive missiles, for example.
Look how the Turks and Iranians are both operating against the Kurds now. They’re practically on the same side already!
Sadly, unlike Iran, Egypt and most of the the Gulf States don’t have popularly elected governments. Actually, the Egyptian government is illegitimate. The Brotherhood won that election.
Please, don’t. It’s a bad situation, but turning morbid makes it seem like there’s enjoyment in catastrophe, because we get to tell the other side, I told you so!
Tell me all about it! Expendable cannon fodder is the kind of redundancy that bespeaks passion. So far as I know, fodder is supposed to serve a purpose. One feeds people to cannons for some strategic purpose, inhuman as it is. Which purposes do you have in mind? Reagan’s intervention in the war in Afghanistan? Mr. W. Bush’s war in Afghanistan? What?
Yes, cannon fodder is a very emotive term.
Let us say, rather, that Pakistan proved to be an expendable polity in the struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan – Pakistan served as the base for the US support of the Afghan Mujahideen (some of who morphed into the Taliban), but was then itself in turn engulfed by blowback: refugees that altered the demographics of Pakistan’s commercial centre; a rise in firearms and a decrease in the rule of law first in the border areas and then across the country; most importantly financially and militarily empowered offshoots of those same religious militias (Taliban > things like Jaish e Mohammed or Sipaha e Sahaba) which strangled Pakistan’s already struggling secular side – both by a ‘long march’ in the organs of government and the intimidation of remaining institutions.
So there was certainly a clear (and important) strategic purpose – but one of the things that was sacrificed to achieve it was Pakistan’s stability and civil institutions. Not as an objective, but as a side effect.
I think Titus’s point was that there was, at least, a strategic purpose. We weren’t just doing this to satisfy public demand that we do the impossible, that is, “Get rid of ISIS, but don’t do what you’d really have to do to achieve that, because that’s unpleasant.”
Yeah, the war was serious–the consequences terrible: But unforeseen. Cannon fodder means sending people to die on purpose. Emotive my foot! Pakistan fell unplanned, as we agree…
The M.E. is too complicated for us to manage, fine tune, control, predict; like an economy, it’s best left alone. But we advise leaving economies alone in very particular ways under rules of law. All countries in the M.E., or Russia or China, for that matter, are also complex chaotic systems best left to sort themselves out as best they can, but that good advice doesn’t tell us anything about what to do when they become threats or disintegrate in ways that threaten us and our allies. Moreover, the international system does not enjoy the rule of law unless we alone or in concert do something that sort of creates it. Since it’s an open chaotic system and a dangerous one, it’s really not an easy responsibility, but it is infinitely more difficult if we are without a moral, analytical historical foundation of some sort; if we create vacuums by withdrawal, indecision, indifference or if the guidance we give our embassies is based on domestic fads and media cycles, political correct themes and not on US interests, historical roles or notions with some grasp on reality of what we’d like to see or not see and what is actually within our capabilities. It seems this administration is doing everything within its power to get it all exactly backwards. Not exercise power because it isn’t legitimate in their minds but fine tune the unfathomable or pretend to.