What is Hamas?

For John, BLUF:  To discuss the problem between Israel and Gaza one must understand the positions of the participants.  Believe what they tell you.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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What Is Hamas?  What to Know About the Militant Group Fighting Israel

Here is the sub-headline:

Iran-backed faction has triggered the biggest crisis in Israel in decades

From The Wall Street Journal, by Reporter James Hookway, 16 October 2023, 1:20 pm ET.

Here is the lede plus one:

Hamas, an Arab acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in 1987 after an eruption of protests and riots over Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  Founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s initial aim was to create an Islamic state on the land now comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, a goal later reaffirmed in the Hamas Charter a year later.

Hamas subsequently signaled it was willing to accept a two-state solution based on Israel’s borders as they were before 1967, but the group continues to reject Israel’s right to exist and opposed the Oslo Accords negotiated by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s.  It maintains a powerful military wing in addition to its political and social-welfare arms.  The U.S., European Union and Israel deem it to be a terrorist organization.

After Hamas won legislative elections in Gaza in 2006, the following year it forcibly removed officials from the more moderate Fatah group in a week of fighting.  More than 100 people were killed in the conflict, which separated the Palestinian territories into Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

A good overal article discussing Hamas.

When we think about Hamas we should keep in mind that there is the political organization, a military wing and, in addition, a concept.  While the political and military wings can be killed, the idea could continue to exist in the minds of the larger population.  While such ideas will always exist, the question is if Israel can offer the People of Palistine a different vision for their future.  That is a core issue for any counter-insurgency effort.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Afghan Future

For John, BLUF:  We keep an eye on Afghanistan or problems will brew up again.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The President has sent a message to President Hamid Karzai that since President Karzai is unwilling to sign a mutually beneficial Bilateral Security Agreement, we are planning on how best to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan.  The White House Press Release says, in part:

With regard to the Bilateral Security Agreement, in advance of the NATO Defense Ministerial, President Obama told President Karzai that because he has demonstrated that it is unlikely that he will sign the BSA, the United States is moving forward with additional contingency planning.  Specifically, President Obama has asked the Pentagon to ensure that it has adequate plans in place to accomplish an orderly withdrawal by the end of the year should the United States not keep any troops in Afghanistan after 2014.  At the same time, should we have a BSA and a willing and committed partner in the Afghan government, a limited post-2014 mission focused on training, advising, and assisting Afghan forces and going after the remnants of core Al Qaeda could be in the interests of the United States and Afghanistan.  Therefore, we will leave open the possibility of concluding a BSA with Afghanistan later this year.  However, the longer we go without a BSA, the more challenging it will be to plan and execute any U.S. mission.  Furthermore, the longer we go without a BSA, the more likely it will be that any post-2014 U.S. mission will be smaller in scale and ambition.

On the other hand, Representative Howard P "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee for the 113th Congress, talked to the issue at the National Press Club, in Washington, DC, on Monday, the 24th of February.  Fox News put up the speech under the title "A safe, secure Afghanistan is within our grasp -- don’t let it slip away".

Representative McKeon throws a compliment at President Obama

The president has sustained international support for this new democracy.  He went out and found billions in aid to help lift them out of despair.  He kept the coalition of countries willing to send troops to fight with us.  And as a direct result of his military strategy, Afghanistan is freer and America is safer.

But, he is making the point that we have to be in for the long term if we are not allow our success to slide into long term failure.

These fights can be won.  But they take time, patience, and treasure – and all those things usually come in short supply with voters.

So, are these conflicting views, or is the Administration and the House of Representatives double teaming President Karzai, so he will be motivated to sign the BSA?

Regards  —  Cliff

Nigeria Troops Raid Kano Suicide Vest Factory

For John, BLUF:  We need to "fix" society so there is less unrest, if that is possible.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From Reuters we have a news report on Nigeria troops raiding an Islamist bomb-making factory on Wednesday, seizing guns, fertilizer and equipment for assembling suicide vests.

The raid was just outside the biggest city in the Nigerian north, Kano.  The city is on the southern boundary of the Sahel, the strip between the Sahara Desert, to the north and the grasslands to the south that runs some 3360 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.  The Sahel tends to run from several hundred to 620 miles wide (north to south).

Nigeria is one of those nations that falls along the tenth parallel and has a population divided by that parallel, half Muslim and half Christian.  In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, it tends to be Muslim to the north and Christian to the south.

The focus of this effort has been on the insurgent (terrorist) group Boko Haram.♠  From the article.

Nigerian soldiers raided an Islamist bomb-making factory just outside the north's biggest city of Kano on Wednesday, seizing guns, fertilizer and equipment for assembling suicide vests, the military said.

Kano has been relatively quiet for much of this year, as Islamist sect Boko Haram focuses its fight for an Islamic state on its heartland in the northeast.

However, Kano, historically a hub for trade across the Sahara, has been periodically attacked by the sect. A bomb blast in a bus park, in an area predominantly inhabited by Igbo Christians from the south, killed at least 15 in July.

Brigadier General Ilyasu Abbah, a Nigerian army commander in Kano, told journalists Boko Haram fighters had fled by the time his troops arrived at a house in the village of Gunduwawa.

I like to this article because it show that jobs are disappearing not just here in the US, but also elsewhere.  The local "suicide vest factory" has been shut down.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  The group is officially The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad, but it is better known by its local Hausa language name, Boko Haram, which means "Western education is sinful".

Deploying to Afghanistan

For John, BLUF:  We are still sending people to Afghanistan.

When I was young we used to refer to the Umpteenth Messkit Repair Battalion to characterize a unit with no obvious front line contribution.  The number of the unit was whatever you thought was sufficiently derisive.

Now we have deploying to Afghanistan the3-49th Agribusiness Development Team.  But wait, this isn't some minor litte effort:

"I'm proud of the accomplishments of our Agribusiness Development Teams and the outstanding precedence they've established in Afghanistan," said Maj. Gen. Robert E. Livingston, Jr., State Adjutant General and head of the 11,000-member Guard.

This kind of thing has been going on since 2008, and has included units from nine states.  The job of these Guardsmen is to work with Afghan farmers, helping them grow crops other than the poppie, which becomes drugs in the US and Europe and helps finance the Taliban. As Blogger and National Guard member Greg Page noted to me,

Those sorts of units don't sound STRAC but they often wind up doing tons of outside-the-wire missions.

The war we are fighting in Afghanistan isn't just about patrolling and firefights.  Often it is about engaging the local People, setting good examples, and sometimes fighting when ambushed. And, if you go to the link above you will see a typical National Guard family saying goodbye to a spouse—in this case Captain Michael Haley, and his wife Nikki, the Guard Adjudent General's boss, and the two Haley children. Regards  —  Cliff

America Flunks Sun Tzu

US Army Colonel Gian Gentile, writing in The Jerusalem Post, says "American strategy in Afghanistan flunks Sun Tzu".  Sun Tzu being the author of the 2,500 year old text, The Art of War.  The lede:

American-style counterinsurgency does not work.  It has failed in Iraq and it is currently failing in Afghanistan.  In war, strategy should look to policy—which gives war its direction—and then apply the tools of war, like military tactics, to achieve policy aims in the most cost effective way in blood and treasure.

Getting to the heart of the issue, Colonel Gentile gives us the quick review:

IN AFGHANISTAN today, American strategy has flunked Sun Tzu. America’s core policy goal from the start of the war in 2001 up to the present—remembering that policy gives war its overall direction and purpose—is focused on disrupting, disabling and eventually defeating al-Qaida.  It is actually a quite limited core policy goal that makes infinite sense since it was al-Qaida that attacked America on 9/11.  But in order to achieve that core policy objective, American strategy has sought to use a maximalist operational method of counterinsurgency—armed nation-building—to achieve it.  It is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail through a soft piece of pine wood when a carpenter’s hammer would do the trick.

So to outline it, we have:

• Policy, leading
• Strategy, leading
• Tactics

There is an Operational level in there between Strategy and Tactics, but it doesn't illuminate anything in this discussion.

With that background, here is the heart of the issue:

There is the idea that emerges from the American Progressive Era during the first years of the 20th century that human reason carried out by experts empowered by governments can fix any problem that society confronts.  For example, back then Progressives thought that poverty could be tackled by experts in social engineering and human behavior who could tweak attitudes among the working classes.

There is also the idea that emerges after the American experience in World War II that never again in the future could the US supposedly “isolate” itself as it had in the 1930s from the rest of the world’s problems—thus resulting in the rise of Nazism.  Yet the US was never truly isolated from the rest of the world during the years between World War I and World War II.  Still, this line of thinking has resonated forcefully over the years because it assumes that American power, if applied correctly by smart people throughout the world is limitless.

This leads to the last causative factor in American history that has helped shape the current impulse to “change an entire society” in Afghanistan.  After World War II, throughout the Cold War and persisting through the 9/11 era is the rock solid assumption that whatever America does in the world is, by rule, morally righteous.  This hardened assumption of moral righteousness has combined with another rock solid assumption:  that American war of whatever kind works in foreign lands, that if the United States just gets the tactics of war correct and puts the right general in charge then anything can be accomplished with military force.

There you have the critique.

The question is, do we need a new Policy, a new Foreign Policy?

Regards  —  Cliff

Statistics vs Crime

Over at the magazine Nature is an article on the use of analytic techniques to help reduce crime.  The laboratory is Springfield, Massachusetts, described in the article as "one of the most dangerous cities in the United States".

The article talks about the application of approaches from the US military's Counter-Insurgency (COIN) doctrine to the problems of crime in Springfield.  This terminology, this talking of relating COIN doctrine to civilian policing, causes concerns for Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Lieutenant John Sullivan, who believes it "convolutes the discussions".  If Lieutenant John Sullivan, a recognized expert in this area, shows caution, I think caution is in order.  Given our form of Government, we should avoid the "militarization" of the conversation, while still being open to all lessons we can apply within our own understanding of democracy and the relationship of the People and their government.

On the other hand, the view of George Mason University anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, "that the idea of applying a counter-insurgency approach in domestic law enforcement, however it is labelled, risks casting local communities as hostile populations" ignores the idea that in COIN the local community is not a hostile population, but a population in need of help due to crime perpetrated by a group hostile to the People and their government.♠

The article is short and interesting.  It makes the point that statistics can be very helpful in understanding what is going on in a community and that hidden in reams of data is knowledge that can be used to make things better.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Sometimes one wonders if the anthropology community, which, in the United States has appeared hostile to the military's use of social science insights to dealing with civilian populations, would rather adopt the line that the military should just kill their way to victory.  They wouldn't say that directly, but that is what their approach amounts to.  That is a short-sighted view.