The Danger of Conflation: AQ through Intel eyes

[Bob's World]

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/20...sm_riedel.aspx

In the course of researching the current strategy for Afghanistan I decided to research the leader of the team that developed it, Bruce Reidel.

I frankly find the excessive reliance on both nation building development on one hand, and ramped up drone strikes on the other as difficult to rationalize. I assumed that the inclusion of the (to my knowledge wholly unsubstantiated) belief nation building will resolve an insurgency came from the CNAS/COINdinista crowd. After reading some of Mr. Reidel's work, I'm pretty sure I know where the CT focus came from as well.

This article is actually pretty good in how it lays out the fact that AQ is a larger problem today than they were 9 years ago (there's a metric for regime change and COIN right there, BTW); and also in how it lays out what Mr. Reidel describes as the "Five Faces of AQ."

Here is my quibble as a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about insurgency (both violent and non-violent) and the many related operations (UW, COIN, FID, IDAD): I would argue that only 2 of 5 are actually AQ and that those two are the only ones we should wage aggressive CT against; that the rest are all targets/tools of AQ's UW operations and should be thought of and dealt with very differently with approaches that are much more indirect.

The Five Faces he lays out are:
1. The Core group around bin Laden
2. The syndicate of terror networks
3. The regional franchises around the Islamic world
4. The self-starting Jihadists with no formal linkage to AQ, and
5. The idea, the narrative and Ideology of AQ.

Mr. Reidel then conflates all of this as AQ. All as the threat that we must "isolate, disrupt and defeat" in AFPAK and elsewhere.

I would argue 1 and 2 are AQ and its UW network. We should quietly, ruthlessly and persistently capture/kill 1 and disrupt 2.

I would argue that 3 are all nationalist insurgent movements. That the best course is to engage with the governments where those movements thrive in rich conditions of insurgency, focus not on CT or even enabling CT, but rather on more neutral approaches to address the conditions of insurgency these groups feed upon. (For the nodes of AQ's UW network in these same areas see the paragraph above). When we attack these insurgencies directly we validate number 5 and contribute to this growth of AQ that Mr Reidel describes.

As to 4, I believe many of these are as "radicalized" by the approaches promoted by experts like Mr. Reidel that Western governments have taken in going after group 3 as they are by message 5. By changing our approach to group 3 I believe that group 4 is largely mitigated as well.

As to 5, sending the president out to "attack the idea of AQ" is probably the wrong approach. Better to co-opt what aspects of those ideas we can and make them our own, and then out-compete AQ with a better idea.

I believe that so long as we continue to conflate this threat, we will continue to have these strategic effects that are the opposite of what we seek. This is one reason why I find the CT component of the new AFPAK strategy odd. The author recognizes the threat grows stronger in the face of what we have done, so he recommends that we continue with the same things, except even more vigorously.