FARC Leader Alfonso Cano Killed

Shortly after midnight Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leader Alfonso Cano (the nom de guerre for Guillermo Saenz Vargas) was killed in a commando operation outside the town of Suarez. 

This is the first time Colombian security forces had ever killed the supreme commander of the FARC.  Although an air strike killed the FARC's legendary military commander Victor Julio Suarez in 2008, Manuel Marulanda (who founded the insurgent group in 1964) died of a heart attack in 2008. 

Although the FARC's fortunes have been on the wane in the last decade as Colombia's military becomes more effective (in part because of the roughly $700 million in military aid they receive from the United States), the group will likely survive.  It still has as many as 9,000 fighters, and has evolved into more of a narco-terrorist group than a Communist insurgency, and these ties to the cocaine trade will likely sustain it for the foreseeable future. 

The key, as it usually is in combating such groups, is a sustained counterinsurgency campaign that targets the FARC's broader leadership network.  The Colombians have been consistently improving in this regards, and the commandos recovered seven computers and 39 thumb drives from Cano's headquarters.

Alfonso Cano, now-former leader of the FARC

"SEAL Target Geronimo"

The Daily Telegraph previews a forthcoming book on the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden by former SEAL Team Six commander Chuck Pfarrer.  Understandably, the book is being sold as a groundbreaking account of the operation that contradicts previous claims by the Obama administration, specifically:

•  Pfarrer says the SEALs did fast rope on to the compound's roof before Black Hawk crashed, whereas every previous account says it crashed inside the compound and then disgorged the commandos; and
• Pfarrer claims bin Laden was killed 90 seconds into the raid, not after a lengthy firefight.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the latter revelation is supposed to be contradicting, as almost every account I've seen says bin Laden was killed early in the raid, and that site exploitation (i.e. removing all the computers and files) was responsible for the length of the raid -- although 90 seconds does seem really fast. 

The problem with books such as Pfarrer's is that there is virtually no way to either verify or disprove his claims.  Pfarrer says he has talked to DevGru operators who were on the mission, and I have no reason to doubt him.  But because of their non-disclosure forms, there is no way to confirm any details with the two dozen SEALs who executed the mission.  Consequently, whether accurate or not Pfarrer's account can never rise above the level of hearsay. [Although if he did talk to SEAL Team 6 members, than his hearsay is at least better than Nicholas Schmidle's New Yorker piece, which while possibly accurate, was still based on second-hand reports rather than interviews with the SEALs themselves].

Oh, and yes, this critique aside, I have already pre-ordered my copy, and will hopefully publish a review of "SEAL Team Geronimo" when it arrives.

Joseph Kony's Place in Manhunting History

CommandPosts.com, an excellent web blog on military history, posted a piece I wrote on the historical precedents for deploying U.S. forces to train/advise indigenous forces hunting an individual. 

By my count, Joseph Kony is officially the twelfth target of a U.S. strategic manhunt, although I argue that the campaigns targeting Che Guevara and Pablo Escobar are better precedents for this operation than Task Force Ranger's hunt for Muhammad Farah Aideed.

On "Wet Work," Assassinations, and Olivia Wilde

StrategyPage.com has a brief post noting the apparent prevalence of assassinations against individuals who could potentially embarrass the Russian government, suggesting that the old Soviet "wet work" teams are back in action.  This piece is instructive in demonstrating the difference between strategic manhunts (the overt deployment of uniformed personnel to kill or capture an individual) versus assassinations (the deployment of covert personnel during peacetime to kill an individual), the presumed actions being an example of the latter.

Remembering these definitional distinctions is important when considering the op-ed by Andrew Cockburn in today's Los Angeles Times arguing that the U.S. "assassination" campaign is "unequivocally" ineffective.  Cockburn, whom I respect as an on-the-ground reporter, intentionally (but incorrectly) conflates assassinations with targeted killings, which is the systematic targeting of individuals in a network or command structure that is already in a declared state of war against U.S. forces.  Cockburn's argumentation is really weak, relying on one piece of data from a study on IEDs in Iraq.  Yes, it is true that IED incidents increased in the immediate aftermath of an IED-cell leader's killing in 2008, but he says nothing of the long-term effects of such operations, as IED attacks undeniably declined in Iraq over the course of the Surge.  Moreover, a statistical anecdote about combating IED cells in Iraq in 2008 is not necessarily applicable to the hunt for bin Laden, the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki, or various other Pakistani Taliban leaders that Cockburn cites at the beginning of his essay.  Cockburn also ignores evidence that special operations raids in Afghanistan have had a demonstrable effect on the Taliban's operational capability, which has consequently shifted towards assassinations and IEDs rather than occupying territory.  Whether that will be enough to win strategically is a separate issue, and one that in the long-run depends more upon Afghan governance capability and Pakistani safe havens than our operational successes or failures.  But Cockburn is horrifically select in his use of evidence to fit his preconceived conclusions.

So why bother to post about such a poorly argued, badly biased article?  Simple.  It gives me an excuse to post pictures of Mr. Cockburn's daughter, the lovely and talented actress Olivia Wilde.  (Don't worry, all images are SFW.  This is an intellectual blog, after all!)

No, really, this DOES have something to do with strategic manhunts, I swear!

British Raid in Somalia?

The Daily Mail reports that British Royal Marines launched an amphibious raid in July to snatch an unnamed Somali tribal leader. 

Although the article includes some interesting details (i.e. he was taken to "a very important meeting" with MI6 and the Foreign Office), I'm skeptical about this for several reasons.  Why the Royal Marines conduct an amphibious assault, rather than using the SAS in much more dexterous helicopters?  Why would the Foreign Office be interested in meeting with him via snatch operation rather than through more traditional protocols?

I obviously have no way to confirm or deny this story, and it might simply be misreported in some small details.  But something doesn't pass the smell test to me.

"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.