Robert Maguire's Library tagged exum → View Popular

Filter:
All
Annotated

30 Dec 09

Matthew Yglesias » Onward to Yemen!

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...onward-to-yemen.php - Preview

US politics counterterrorism waronterror terrorism yemen war lieberman exum underbomber

here’s Joe Lieberman:
“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war,” Lieberman said, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”. “That’s the danger we face.”
3 more annotations...
- At any rate, Glenn Greenwald had an actual Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen on the Christmas Eve edition of his podcast if you want to learn about the subject.
- I think this point from the brief on Yemen that Andrew Exum and Richard Fontaine did last month is basically on those same lines:
  
  Since 2001, U.S. policy toward Yemen has focused mostly – and, at times, overwhelmingly – on counterterrorism. This is understandable, but problematic. When the perceived terrorist threat in Yemen retreated in 2003, U.S. policymakers lost interest, abandoning or curtailing development projects in the country.
- Such a relationship would include a counterterrorism component, but not be defined by counterterrorism alone. American officials should make clear, both publicly and privately, that the United States seeks an enduring relationship with the people of Yemen.

31 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » Rory Stewart and Skepticism

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...ory-stewart-and-skepticism.php - Preview

rory stewart exum politics US waronterror afghanistan

On the one hand, he argues that the Afghan central government lacks the strength or legitimacy to actually run the country, nor does he have much faith in the ability of the United States to help it on those counts.
“I have some friends in Afghanistan who will say, ‘If the U.S. government is infinitely flexible, capable, superbly informed, able to deliver programs precisely in every rural area, and its soldiers are able to avoid killing anybody and can identify exactly which tribal chief at the sub-district level to deal with, everything will be fine,’”
2 more annotations...
- Andrew Exum a
- Exum believes that the Pentagon has developed powerful new operational doctrines about counterinsurgency that make it possible to achieve things via U.S. military intervention that U.S. military intervention hasn’t traditionally achieved. I read Stewart as being skeptical about that idea—apparently he’s running for parliament as a Conservative in the United Kingdom and as you would expect from a right-of-center politician (but rarely see in the United States) his skepticism about ambitious bureaucratic endeavors extends to skepticism about ambitious bureaucratic endeavors conducted by the United States Department of Defense.

27 Oct 09

Where "rural" is too "urban" | Center for a New American Security

www.cnas.org/...where-rural-too-urban.html - Preview

resignation zabul afghanistan poverty illiteracy statistics reference waronterror counterinsurgency politics exum

The people of Zabul are isolated, remote, and enjoy no known natural resources
The literacy rate is around 11% -- 1% for women.
2 more annotations...
- All of this is worth keeping in mind when you read the resignation letter of the senior U.S. civilian official in Zabul Province (.pdf). These are the words of a man beaten down by the realities of the mission. I'm a pretty optimistic, cheerful guy, but even I would have a tough, tough time pulling a year's duty in Zabul.
- (The population is spread out over the province, too, making population-centric counterinsurgency difficult if not impossible.)

23 Oct 09

On Drones | Center for a New American Security

www.cnas.org/...drones.html - Preview

drones afghanistan war culture military exum politics waronterror

I really think drone strike can be part of an effective, integrated CT and COIN strategy, but they cannot substitute for such a strategy, and I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it's been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it's trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.
My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.
2 more annotations...
- We are all slaves to culture, and I worry that a combination of a background in the light infantry, an upbringing in East Tennessee, and a classical education leaves me repulsed by the very idea of remote-controlled war. Mayer mangled another quote of mine (again, insignificantly), when I said, “As a classics major, I have a classical sense of what it means to be a warrior.” As I recall, I asked that more as a question and included a "maybe" somewhere in there. But maybe I do in fact have a cultural predisposition against drones. I know that undermines my other arguments somewhat, but I feel I should be honest with the readership about my own potential biases here.
- our enemy like the humans in the Terminator movies, hiding below ground for fear of our technology.
  
  "Yeah," Pete wisely asks, "but weren't the humans the heroes of those movies?"