Social Networks

Last year when I first wrote "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary", I listed the four major reasons we went to war in Iraq:

• WMDs (which, we now know, Hussein had the institutional knowledge to re-build very quickly)
• Repeated violations of UN resolutions
• Human rights outrages
• LInks to terrorism (as opposed to "imminent threat of immediate attack)

According to Belmont Club, we need to add a big fringe benefit.

The linked piece is about social networks. Our CIA/Special Forces operators have made great advances against terror networks - including nabbing Hussein himself - by examining the terrorists' social networks.

In so doing, they've learned a lot about how terrorists' organizations work.

One huge point - terrorist organizations can get much bigger, and much more effective, when they have entire nations in which to organize, train, and run their operations.

Wretchard quotes Vladis Krebs:

Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger ... when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. Physical proximity allowed al Qaeda to operate as a hierarchy along military lines, complete with middle management (or at least a mix of a hierarchy in Afghanistan and a distributed network outside of Afghanistan). Once those camps were broken apart, the factors listed above were likely to have caused the fragmentation we see today (lots of references to this in the news).

[Krebs'] last paragraph is crucial to understanding why the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the toppling of Saddam Hussein may have cripped global terrorism so badly. Without the infrastrastructure of a state sponsor, terrorism is limited to cells of about 100 members in size in order to maintain security. In the context of the current campaign in Iraq, the strategic importance of places like Falluja or "holy places" is that their enclave nature allows terrorists to grow out their networks to a larger and more potent size. Without those sanctuaries, they would be small, clandestine hunted bands. The argument that dismantling terrorist enclaves makes "America less safe than it should be in a dangerous world" inverts the logic. It is allowing the growth of terrorist enclaves that puts everyone at risk in an otherwise safe world.

The US strategery - remove terrorists' safe havens, whether by direct military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, or by support of surrogates in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines - thus performs an invaluable service; it makes it extremely difficult for terrorists to operate far enough "in the open" to spend less time on their own self-preservation than on planning actual observations.

Which is the right strategy in the right place at the right time.

Posted by Mitch at September 27, 2004 06:33 AM | TrackBack