Rise of Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Hamas has been quiet, but Islamic Jihad has stepped up to the plate with attacks on Israel. Is HISH becoming IHIJ?

The intrepid Eli Lake has a report asking whether Hamas is moderating. Strictly speaking, no. But they are pragmatic. The Gaza faction is now finding itself running a mini-state and clashing with Israel is expensive. The Shalit deal is an incentive to kidnap more Israeli soldiers, but it also may buy Hamas some breathing space to begin working with Fatah again. Lake’s report focuses on Khaled Mashal, Hamas’ Damascus-based leader. The Damascus faction, recipient of Baathist largesse, usually spearheaded the toughest line against Israel. But Lake notes that the Syrian turmoil may be influencing Mashal’s outlook.

Again, Hamas is not suddenly becoming the Quacker Friends! But they may be seeking a modus vivendi like Hezbollah in Lebanon has achieved. They don’t love Israel, but they have other commitments that make open warfare expensive.

Islamic Jihad has no identity other then violence. Although smaller then Hamas, it has always focused on high-quality terror attacks. It also has been heavily sponsored by Iran – unlike Hamas and Hezbollah it does not have a broad social base of its own. An uptick of Islamic Jihad violence is likely as members of Hamas’ armed wing join up looking for action.

Meanwhile, Iran may be losing its most valuable ally in Syria and Hamas may have other fish to fry. But Iran still needs a stake in the conflict with Israel, thus Islamic Jihad fits the bill.

Meanwhile, turmoil in Sinai continues and the possibility of loose weapons of Qaddhafi’s arsenal ending up in Gaza remains – the spark to Gaza’s gasoline.

Simple Idea for Background Reading

I wandered by the UMD library today and picked up The American Presidency: An Analytical Approach, by UMD prof Irwin Morris (who I don't know.)

Writing about the VP, I need a decent foundation on the study of the president and the presidency. There are endless volumes devoted to the topic. But Morris' book, which is designed as a good undergrad textbook, provides a strong overview of theories and the state of the field.

For background reading, an up to date textbook is a good idea - I wish I had thought of it a few years ago - would have saved me a lot of time trolling around in back issues of Presidential Studies Quarterly.

Gaming LeT

The TerrorWonk has been busy lately, so I haven’t been blogging much (although I am going to try to turn that around for NaBloPoMo . One of the things I was busy with was a pair of papers on Lashkar-e-Taiba that were presented at EISIC/OSINT conference in Athens in September. One paper used SOMA to analyze the behavior of LeT. SOMA is a modeling system developed at UMD, we’ve gotten some interesting findings from it looking at other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah. I’ve written a fair amount about SOMA and more is coming on LeT.

The other paper was a game theoretic analysis of LeT. This was a new area for yours truly and as the subject matter expert I developed the scenarios and payoff matrix (ie what are the different combinations of moves the different players could make and how happy (or unhappy) in each combination is each player. Basically the study found that situations where LeT’s best option was to disband its armed wing were situations in which the US and India double-teamed Pakistan so that the military cracked down hard on LeT. Several papers in India interviewed us and discussed our work (see the LCCD homepage for links), but of them The Telegraph of Calcutta article included this very nice graphic that nicely encapsulates the project.


Two particularly interesting things struck me (as a novice to game theory) about this project. First, in game theory the players seek the Nash equilibrium (named for the Nobel prize winning mathematician) in which no actor can increase their payoff without causing a decrease in some other player’s payoff. But our work included “mixed equilibria” in which players did not simply adopt one strategy but shifted between strategies. This better reflects how nations act. Sometimes, nations systematically switch between policy options. In other cases different components of the state pursue different strategies – some elements of the Pakistani military crackdown on LeT while others continue to provide support.

The other point is that one criticism is that it did not include several key players such as China or Pakistani public opinion. True enough – but in some regards that only strengthens the overall concept. That is, with five actors and 13 possible actions between them there were hundreds of possible combinations. More players and actions means even more combinations – more than a person can systematically analyze.

So, as I’ve written before, models can’t necessarily replace human judgments but by systematically analyzing enormous combinations of data and scenarios they can identify possibilities that humans might miss.

Implications of VPs as a punchline

I like the funnies, and Frazz is a good one. But I was a little bummed to see them go for the easy laugh here. Sure memorizing vice presidents is pointless, but strictly speaking so is memorizing presidents, state capitols, mythological deities. Multiplication tables and poetry may, in fairness, make some sense. But on the off-chance one finds themselves in a profession that requires knowledge of the 50 state capitols (or the VPs like yours truly) pick it up in on-the-job-training.

My different selves are caught on this. The academic in me wants to right the wrong of VP inconsequence mostly to expand my own academic micro-niche. But the small government conservative says, it is a good thing that government officials are not taken too seriously - government should matter less, not more. But the policywonk in me has a deep respect for people who, as Teddy Roosevelt says "is in the arena." Full quote is here:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Geriatric Terror?

A quartet of senior citizens in Georgia (the state) were recently arrested for plotting massive terror attacks. They were pseudo-militia types, concerned about the expansion of the US government into a tyranny and inspired by Tim McVeigh. They had a bucket-list of officials they hoped to target.

In some regards they followed the typical profile for far-right terror in the US -that is expansive and violent goals - with limited capability. By comparison leftist terrorists in the US (say ALF/ELF) tend to be well educated, disciplined, and focused in their targeting and operations. As one analyst who has studied domestic terrorists, the rightwingers are dumb but unstable and violent.

The prospects for their plots' success, including making a WMD from ricin (which has proven pretty much undoable even for nation states), were very low. The FBI spent months infiltrating their meetings at the Waffle House and their homes. One is forced it wonder exactly how the FBI came to be aware of this cell of geezers.

Overall, terrorism appears to be a young man's game. The leaders may be older, but the actual operatives tend to be young. There is no obvious reason for this (unless the plan is specifically for fedayeen attacks). Elderly operatives should be less suspicious when reconnoitering targets or planting explosives. But there are few cases of this occurring.

The image of an angry young men spouting nihilistic radicalism is common, and even a bit sympathetic. The same anger coming from someone forty years older seems only pathetic.

Response to WaPo on VP Selection

A few weeks ago The Washington Post Outlook section ran a lengthy article arguing that party conventions should select the vice president, rather then the presidential nominee. The key was that the office was too important to leave to presidential whim and the convention delegates would select stronger candidates more fit for the presidency.

I dashed off a letter to the editor disagreeing, but it was not printed. So, here goes:

Mr. Leahy's recent Outlook feature argued that party conventions should select the vice president. This idea appeals to political journalists because it would make conventions interesting. But it would not result in better vice presidents. The conventions selected some vice presidents of great ability such as Teddy Roosevelt, but also many non-entities and a few scoundrels (consider Aaron Burr or Schuyler Colfax.)

More importantly, the era of party selected vice presidents was characterized by poor relationships between the two nationally elected officials. Coolidge's Vice President Charles Dawes’ refusal to attend cabinet meetings illuminates this situation. Dawes (an outstanding figure who won the Nobel Peace Prize, was a WWI hero, and popular composer - but an utter failure as vice president), did not want to set a precedent of vice presidential attendance because, he wrote, the relationship between a President and his advisors “…is a confidential one, and the selection of a confidant belongs to him who would be injured by the abuse of confidence-however unintentional. Suppose, in the future, some President, with this precedent fixed, must face the alternative of inviting a loquacious publicity seeker into his private councils, or affronting him in the public eye by denying him what has come to be considered as his right-how embarrassing it would be!”

Presidents should continue to choose their running mates because a President that does not have complete confidence in the
vice president’s discretion and loyalty will exclude the vice president from the decision-making process. In the modern complex world the United States cannot afford an ill-informed vice president ascending to the nation’s highest office.

Light Footprint/Right Footprint in Counter-Terror Deployments

Walter Pincus’ national security column today ended on an oddly discordant note. Overall the column discussed the challenges the military will face maintaining skilled personnel in the face of likely budget cuts. This is particularly challenging because top-level NCOs and mid-level officers take a long time to train and really bring up to speed. Fifteen years (at least) go into developing a Major, even more into training a ship commander. Capable individuals who will flourish in these roles will also do well in the civilian world.

These are excellent points that should be of real concern to defense policy wonks. But then he veers off to criticize the recent deployment of 100 special forces troops to Uganda to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army. Pincus concludes:

Step back for a moment. A small group of concerned Americans teamed up with members of Congress to pass the bill that authorized the anti-LRA deployment. The Pentagon had prepared specially trained units to carry out what is now designed as a narrowly focused training mission. How many other ungoverned parts of the world exist where leaders can say their enemies represent a terrorist threat and they need U.S. military assistance?

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent the 82nd Airborne into the Dominican Republic to prevent what he called a second Cuba. He told Sen. J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.) that if he hadn’t had the deployment-ready military units, he would have had to rely on diplomacy to solve the problem.

Fulbright later told me that both nations would have been better off had the 82nd Airborne not been there to make the military solution easy when diplomacy appeared more difficult. It’s a lesson remembered and reinforced by the last 10 years of warfare.

That comparison does not quite hold. The deployment of the 82nd Airborne was a large-scale use of military force, sending 100 special forces on a training mission is a much less extensive and expensive endeavor. It is true that the US military cannot make even small such small deployments to every ungoverned space on earth, but if a relatively modest commitment can help an ally (Uganda is a playing a useful role in Somalia) then it seems reasonable.

Of terrorist groups and insurgencies around the world the LRA is one of the very, very nastiest and is destabilizing a region of the world that has suffered so much in the past few decades. Quite frankly, diplomatic solutions for the LRA are probably not realistic.

It is fair to say the US diplomacy has become overly militarized in the past decade. But deploying small numbers to Special Forces trainers to strengthen local capabilities seems like exactly the strategy the United States should be pursuing (it was the US strategy in the Philippines among other places). It is repositioning the military to support diplomatic efforts – righting the past decades unbalance in State-Defense operations.