"Wanted Dead or Alive" at Boston University

Apparently my talk the other week at Boston University's International History Institute was rebroadcast last night on WBUR Radio's World of Ideas show.  

I haven't listened to the show yet, but from what I recall, the talk itself went very well.  I just hope my voice didn't come off too nasally on air, although the engineer said I had a perfect face for radio . . .

Operation Cobalt Blue

Sean Naylor has an interesting article in the new Army Times on a Navy SEAL operation in November 2003 to plant hidden hi-tech cameras along the Somali coastline to monitor al-Qa'ida activity in that country.  For you purveyors SEAL porn (and you know who you are), the description of "a long swim though some of the most shark-infested waters in the world" alone makes this worthwhile. 

For policy mavens, however, the article comes to a much more frustrating conclusion:

To save battery power, the cameras were set to take photographs every 12 hours, too long a gap to be of value in the hunt for individuals.  Consequently, the pictures relayed were "less really good intelligence and more really good atmospherics," said the senior intelligence official.  (The devices' batteries likely expired several years ago, sources said). . . .
Asked what the secret camera missions achieved, the intel source with long experience on the Horn answered bluntly: "Nothing."

Naylor's sources (and damn, he has some good ones!) are not anti-technology.  In fact, they lament the lack of Predator drones available to the military and CIA officials charged with tracking down al-Qa'ida operatives in Somalia in 2003.  But besides showing what general bad-asses the SEALs can be even on recon missions (did I mention the swim through shark-infested waters?), Naylor provides a case-study about how bureaucracies can oversell the utility of specific technologies in the targeting of individuals.

Headline of the Day

From The Washington Post: U.S. Air Force Secretly Flying Armed Missions From Drone Base in Ethiopia.

Well, thanks to the WaPo, it is not secret anymore.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Mr. Vizzini, Senior Editor at the Washington Post

On HUMINT and the Mexican Cartels

When I was speaking at the Naval War College last week, a Mexican Fellow at the NWC asked whether I thought the U.S. would start targeting leaders of the Mexican drug cartels in strategic manhunts.  I said "No," but relied more upon the definitional distinction that Mexican law prohibits U.S. military personnel from overtly operating on Mexican soil in way necessary to meet the standards of a strategic manhunt.  I consciously avoided the question of whether our law enforcement agencies were targeting the cartel leaders, partly because it falls out of the purview of my work, and -- to be honest -- partly because I just don't know that much about the topic.

Coincidentally, on Monday The New York Times had an interesting article on how U.S. agencies are infiltrating the Mexican drug cartels.  Specifically, the Times reports that by building up large networks of Mexican informants, U.S. law enforcement agencies "have helped Mexican authorities capture or kill about two dozen high-ranking and midlevel drug traffickers."  The article cites Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution, who says that even in an age of high-tech surveillance there is no substitute for human sources' feeding authorities everything from what targeted traffickers like to eat to where they sleep most nights.

In other words, even if these operations don't meet my definition of a strategic manhunt (i.e. there is no overt deployment of U.S. military personnel targeting one individual), this appears to support the conclusions of my book, namely that HUMINT still trumps technical surveillance in kill/capture operations, and that the "human terrain" is key (i.e. cooperation of indigenous forces and the local population/members of the target's network).

Two Qaddafi Post-Scripts

Well, with Moammar Qaddafi buried in a secret location, it's time to clean out my inbox of some articles that I never got around to posting.

First, a Reuters piece from September 20  in which the fugitive dictator taunts NATO, saying "The bombs of NATO planes won't last."  I'm just waiting for a NATO spokesperson to respond by simply saying: "SCOREBOARD!"  (Okay, I suppose Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comment, "We came, we saw, he died" made the same indelicate point).

Second, an interesting piece from The Daily Caller (via The Economist) posing the critical question: "Is (Was) Qaddafi Jewish?"  And if so, where should we send the bagels and lox (or a fruit basket, perhaps)to whomever is sitting shiva for him?

Qaddafi's Killer?

A Libyan fighter, Senad el Sadik el Ureybi, has told a Russian television network that he personally killed Qaddafi, shooting "him twice, in the head and in the chest.

The video is available here.

Again, I have absolutely no way to verify these claims, but pass them along for your information.  (Incidentally, it is ironic that this network interviews Professor Benjamin Barber, who before Qaddafi's overthrow received payments from the Libyan government (through an American PR firm) for positive public relations on behalf of the dictator).

Seif al-Islam Captured?

Last night NBC reported that Libyan rebels claimed to have captured Seif al-Islam Qaddafi had been captured.  I haven't seen any confirmation of this yet, but will keep checking the wires throughout the day.

A sad irony of the Arab Spring is that many of the heir apparents of some autocrats, i.e. Gamal Mubarak and Seif al-Islam, were genuine reformists who advocated the modernization of their countries' economies and increased freedoms for their populations.  But when the revolution came, at least in Seif al-Islam's case -- to the best of my knowledge Gamal hasn't been implicated in any crimes -- family loyalty trumped his other principles and he may have been an accomplice to the massacre of civilian demonstrators.