Sorry, but there is no remotely possible U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11. If avoiding military action after an attack on that scale is your standard for a "smart about risk" society, you'll be waiting a long, long time.
The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building.
If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.
Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.
Overthrowing the Taliban was almost a prerequisite for those types of strikes. The initial strikes and action in Afghanistan by special forces and CIA were almost completely reliant on assistance from the Northern Alliance - for which over throwing the Taliban was always the goal.
The initial air strikes (unguided from the ground) were totally useless. It wasn't until they got SF/CIA on the ground working with the Northern Alliance that they could get it working.
In any case, it would never have been as simple as 'leave it to the local forces'.
The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building.
This is more or less our current counterterrorism strategy in the wilds of Pakistan or Yemen. While I'm skeptical that such a strategy could have seriously damaged 2001-era AQ's ability to operate inside Afghanistan, I also don't think I'm qualified to debate its merits today. But that's not my point.
My point is that if another 9/11-scale attack occurred and the bad guys were in Yemen and the Yemeni government was not extremely helpful in bringing those responsible to heel, that "drones and spies" strategy could never be the limit of our response. It's just not politically practical, not even close. When Schneier talks about the "waste" of a war in Afghanistan, he should remember that the entire time Bush was sticking around trying to nation build, the Democrats were making political hay that Iraq was a sideshow and that we weren't spending enough attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. And indeed when a Democratic president was elected, he proceeded to spend more attention/money/troops on Afghanistan.
Once it was established that AQ was responsible for 9/11 and that the Taliban were not going to give them up on our terms, a major military incursion was politically inevitable. It's a little more dicey just how inevitable a long-term occupation was: President Gore presumably doesn't have to deal with an Afghani-Hawks-By-Convenience wing of his own party, and maybe gets out quick. But Schneier doesn't make this distinction: He seems to be imagining a world in which the war never happens at all because we properly measured its risks. I happen to think he's wrong about the risk/reward tradeoff of aggressively rolling up AQ and their support networks, but I'm sure he's being Utopian if he thinks he's in anything but a tiny minority who would be against a massive military response to another 9/11-like event.
If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.
If it were so easy, they would probably have done that anyway as an opener. But it isn't.
In 1984, the US funded IRA bombed the entire UK government, nearly killed them all. The UK did not invade Northern Ireland or Ireland. The police investigated, made arrests and people were convicted.
It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The UK didn't have to invade Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland was (and is) UK territory and there was already a substantial active military presence. For about 25 years the British army sent fresh soldiers off to do a tour in NI to toughen them up.
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Sounds like you think the IRA were freedom fighters. Did you donate?
So, what is your definition of "nearly". The cabinet were in a hotel that had the holy crap blown out of it. What injuries would be good enough for you for "nearly"? We they not hurt enough for your definition? Or was it soem sort of collateral damage?
As it happens, I despised that Thatcher Tory government with a passion and always will. Trouble is, I tend to think targeting and NEARLY killing an entire government is probably worse.
On the other hand, two of my close relatives got hit by Harrods building materials as that blew up, and I was personally 15 mins off being blown up in the Guildford pub bombing. I experienced what US funded IRA were capable of.
Incidentally, to really mess with your head, I sort of support the idea of a united Ireland. Problem is, neither mainland Uk or Ireland actually wanted Northern Ireland... Glad we got the solution of self governance. It was always my logical solution. Govern yourself, and if you still want to blow each other up, well, go for it. Or, govern.
Buy yes my friend, I know a thing or two about Northern Ireland. And I will never ever forget, especially in this US age of "Terror", that the IRA were funded by American dollars, freely given by American people, not in any way frustrated by the US government.
I really liked how the US responded in Afghanistan in September-November 2001: sending in CIA and special operations forces to ally with anti-AQ and anti-Taliban forces, on a hundreds of millions of dollars total budget. That had almost all of the upside and virtually none of the downside of a big invasion.
A very good account of that part of the war is "First in: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan " by Schroen, Gary. He was the chief of the first CIA team to operate inside Afghanistan. A great read, just not what you´ll expect of a CIA operation, everything is donne in a much more "common sense" way than you may think.
Eric Blehm's "The Only Thing Worth Dying For" covers the same time from the perspective of the ODAs rather than CIA.
(The thing I still don't understand is what moron at Group decided to let the battalion leadership deploy to the field, rather than remaining behind. They caused a bunch of friendly fire incidents and generally lost the initiative CIA and the ODA/ODBs had gained. It seems like it was just a bunch of useless 1990s-military senior officers who wanted to have cool stories to tell.)
There's also no risk of the US being invaded by Afghanistan. The risk to the US was and is always very minor, akin to a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by cars or going to be killed by climate change. The US didn't have to spend trillions mitigating that risk, even if you assume those trillions did mitigate the risk.
The direct military risk was small. The risk to global stability and the markets via the risk to the price of oil as part of a complex of destabilizing elements was much larger than that, though whether you judge it as large or small itself depends on various opinions and definitions. However, if you're the sort of person who's going to talk about risks in terms of things like "killed by cars", it should be pointed out that taking action to protect the price of oil is not immediately obviously wrong. Raising the price of oil substantially affects millions, if not billions, of poorer people a lot, and could prevent entire economies from raising themselves out of poverty.
Which suggests that if you want to end the US's involvement in the Middle East, you should probably be vigorously supporting shale oil, even if you believe it may have some negative environmental impacts. If they no longer have a knife to the jugular of civilization as we know it, it's a lot easier to ignore them.
And did that invasion change anything? Were the Taliban or al Qaeda eliminated by that invasion? Did you notice that the exact same justification was used to attack neighboring Iraq?
Sorry, but I happen to have lived through that year and the years following, and I know that given an America that lived up to its own hype, an invasion was easily avoidable. It's just that such an America doesn't exist. Too bad for us all.
Even if the invasion was required, nothing required us to occupy the place for a decade and counting, turning it into a perpetual war.
Hook up with the Northern Alliance, bomb the hell out of their enemies, set them up, leave. They can't hold on to power? Oh well. The point has been made. The country returns to dictatorship and chaos? Well, that happened anyway.
You may recall the last time something like that happened to Afghanistan, it led to the whole civil war that resulted in the rise of the Taliban and AQ in the first place.
Yes "adverse" consequences always occur in countries we don't understand and don't particularly care about, no matter what awful things we do to them. (Next door in Iran, how did that Mosaddegh coup turn out?) The only real argument is over how much wealth will be transferred to our military-industrial complex, and how many Senators will get to go on another junket as a result? On those questions, I vote "less" and "fewer".
The interesting question is to turn this point on its head.
The conventional wisdom (before 9/11) was it was "too risky" to fight back against hostage takers on an airplane. That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier when trained pilots turned civivian aircraft into cruise missles.
So, the origins of 9/11 have to do with mis-understanding the real risks we face. The opposite of ignorance is education, however. Its not per-se a totalalitarian police state. Which is where we seemed to have ended up.
"That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier"
Its possible to use this technique to predict the next set of attacks:
1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me.
2) Whats the prevailing wisdom for suspected violence in a school? Lockdown, shelter in place, sometimes for hours. Perfect target conditions for a poison gas attack and/or arson. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. The safest armor against a weapon is being well out of its range, not a cheap door lock.
I would predict the odds of both of the above as near 100% in the near future. Its just logical. The next step would be to identify the perpetrators as mostly Saudi citizens (yet again) and therefore invade Iran. Or Syria. Or whoever else needs an excuse right now, while the bubbas back home wave flags to support the troops.
1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me.
This isn't going to happen because a bunch of people in line at an airport isn't a high-value target. I mean it would suck, of course, but 'bunch of people get blown up at an airport' isn't nearly as worrying as 'large plane falls/is steered out of the sky and into downtown.' It doesn't have much value to terrorists because it's not as scary and it won't generate vast numbers of photographs.
Yeah, it seems obvious, but it's wrong. Because killing people is not the whole goal on terrorism. Making people panic is. We have lots of mass shooting incidents in the US, but there's relatively little political will to change the gun culture here because people are rarely (ie never) confronted with pictures of the aftermath. Similarly, if a line of people at an airport were killed, all the public would see would be ambulances and body bags. They would feel sorry for you but would not actually care that much on an emotional level. What made the 9-11 attack so clever, and devastating, was that the attacks were staggered in time so that you had people flying planes into some of the world's most famous buildings on live television. The last time anyone saw large amounts of stuff getting blown up for real on TV was during the first Gulf War.
Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling.
We have enough school shootings that we have some data on this. If you are running around trying to escape then a) you're an easily noticeable target and b) you're probably going to be in the way of law enforcement firing back at the shooter. I don't find your approach any more sensible than suggestions that everyone should be armed and that the possibility of a gun battle will be a sufficient deterrent. Given the number of people who engage in shootouts with the police, this is plainly not the case. Looking to sneak out makes sense, departing in a disordered GTFO fashion is just panic.
At risk of never flying unmolested again--you do realize that you've identified the lacking qualities in the aforementioned attack plan, and that those can be readily addressed by such simple actions as hitting more places at once over a longer period of time?
The entire point of the article is that that sort of a analysis is ongoing, is that when you try to deal with an opponent you are dealing with something actively exploring a solution space.
That's what makes the security theater so annoying--it's clear that there are a dozen ways to stage a successful attack were one so inclined, none of which would be stopped or even slowed by our current (or any forseeable) measure.
I think people need to realize that the number of Bad People in the world is really small, and that they shouldn't give up freedoms in hopes of somehow decreasing their exposure. Large state and private groups are much more harmful, especially because they turn Not Bad People into Annoyingly Inconvenient And Impersonally Malicious People.
That's what makes the security theater so annoying--it's clear that there are a dozen ways to stage a successful attack were one so inclined, none of which would be stopped or even slowed by our current (or any forseeable) measure.
Yes, but not a very large-scale one. You might like to consider that stuff like the NSA is also part of the security theater; the ambiguity over just what it is listening to, combined with the perception that it has a universal reach, primarily benefits the US in that it keeps antagonists awake at night worrying about the security of their own networks.
I think people need to realize that the number of Bad People in the world is really small, and that they shouldn't give up freedoms in hopes of somehow decreasing their exposure.
True, but it's also unrealistic to be indifferent to an obvious danger. I neither want nor intend to use the fire extinguisher in the corner of my kitchen, but I don't consider its purchase to be a waste of money.
Large state and private groups are much more harmful, especially because they turn Not Bad People into Annoyingly Inconvenient And Impersonally Malicious People.
I don't really agree with this - it's a retread of Rousseau's 'noble savage' theory. Of course, some people get radicalized is response to western actions, but some people are bigoted assholes to start with. Recall that one of Bin Laden's primary beefs was that the US had a military base on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia (by Islamic standards), and this was just intolerable. Disapproving of US military installations on your non-US soil is entirely reasonable, blowing people up over it is not. Although the US had hand tangles with AQ before 9-11 (eg the USS Cole bombing, among others), the western response had been quite restrained, indeed proportionate. I don't think it's the inherent fault of the west that AQ is built upon an a reactionary and quite absolutist religious viewpoint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qutbism).
Now, I do think that when you consider Islam is ~1400 years old and look at where Christianity was at a similar stage in its history, it might well be that schisms, reformation, and sectarian violence are just stages that you would expect Islamic society to go through; but that doesn't impose any obligation on us to accept the role of punching bag.
I don't share your belief that scale is the problem, and if we just keep everything local and avoid the formation of large states or corporations we'd have peace.
Did that make any great change in public consciousness? Obviously not.
It was Russia, not the US. If you aren't russian you are unlikely to have any idea how it went over.
But more generally, "small" terrorist attacks happen way more frequently than the big ones, I expect that is because they are easier to pull off. White power types kill a handful of people each year in the US but you don't hear about them if you aren't tuned in because (a) they aren't brown (b) they are small events.
You're making my point for me. There are a fair number of small scale terror attacks, and they don't change things that much because they are small. I grew up in Ireland and the UK, I have had plenty of occasion to consider small-scale terrorism since it was a very frequent occurrence at that time.
The problem with both of those plans is that they involve attacking humans, in crowded places where heavily armed forces will rapidly respond and probably kill you as an attacker.
Terrorism now is focused more on systems disruption. Buy a $300 bomb, go to any one of bazillions of miles of pipeline, blow it up, cost the USG/Shell Corporation millions. Buy a cheaper bomb, go to any power substation, blow it up, cost the economy however much it loses and as a bonus, cost the government a bit of legitimacy as its denied the opportunity to provide services to its citizens.
If you truly are that confident, I'll put some money on the table at good odds (for me, since you're almost certain of winning). But if you're not truly 100% confident and can still be convinced, I recommend reading Brave New War, by John Robb. It's a fantastic overview of the tactics, strategies, and organization of modern (post Iraq occupation) terrorists. It comes very highly reviewed from higher-ups in the MEND insurgency.
Prior to 9/11, at least in the U.S., hijackers typically "simply" wanted money or to be flown elsewhere. As long as those demands were met, there were no casualties. So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. The original reactions on 9/11 were not due solely to "social engineering", but to prior experience.
That high-pitched noise you heard was the point, zinging swiftly over your head. All the pre-9/11 "experts" who told us to bend over and let the goat enthusiasts have their wicked way with us, didn't do so in a nuanced, situationally-aware fashion. They said, "always cooperate with hijackers." The fact that organizations existed the purposes of which were to kill Americans and destroy American resources, was blithely ignored by the "experts". Only through long conditioning did they cow the general public enough that four or five dudes with really short knives could hijack a plane. While the last plane was still in the air, the general public realized what bullshit that had been.
When "experts" talk about "risk", it's never "things are pretty good and getting better". (I.e., it's never the truth.) They always want us to fear more, and as a result pay more. It's not different now.
No, didn't miss the point - just didn't agree. Pre 9/11, we didn't have a plethora of "risk" experts telling us what to do. Most people listened to news - good, bad, or indifferent - parsed it for themselves and acted accordingly - not according to what the seldom-heard-from experts said.
How old are you? How long ago did you start watching the news? Because your rosy description of news media in times past does not accord with my recollection. Keep in mind that CNN started in 1980, and has always been a parade of blustery talking heads, in between the on-scene disaster reports. A particularly vivid memory of "expert" opinion (of risks to children), much hyped in the media, later debunked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse#Investigat... Earlier in the last century "yellow journalism" featured the same sort of media output, but the reason that term fell out of use was not because Hearst died but because all journalism changed to that color. I mean, how was our war with Iraq different from our war with Spain?
It's tempting to see 9/11 as some sort of watershed, especially if it had a personal impact. In fact, it was just a bit more of the same. What the "experts" are telling us now, is also that.
