Stratfor:

We believe that any realistic analysis of al Qaeda’s strength must assess more than a basic head count of militants willing and able to conduct attacks. As we have noted previously, there are two battlespaces in the war against jihadism: the physical and the ideological. Although the campaign against al Qaeda has caused the core group to become essentially marginalized in the physical battlespace, the core has undertaken great effort to remain engaged in the ideological battlespace.

Sometimes, things that emerge in the ideological battlespace can provide indications of important developments in the physical battlespace.

Al Qaeda and the Tale of Two Battlespaces

Dexter Filkins:

That American and Pakistani soldiers are fighting one another along what was meant to be a border between allies highlights the extraordinarily chaotic situation unfolding inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban, along with Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, enjoy freedom from American attacks.

But the incident also raises one of the more fundamental questions of the long war against Islamic militancy, and one that looms larger as the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates: Whose side is Pakistan really on?

... What happens when the militants you have been encouraging grow too strong and set their sights on Pakistan itself? What happens when the bluff no longer works?

... The more Pakistanis I talked to, the more I came to believe that the most reasonable explanations were not necessarily the most plausible ones.

...

What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?

“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,” he said.

Right at the Edge

John Nagl:

There are two things we must do and one thing we must not do. First, we must adopt a policy of strategic conditionality at the presidential level. Second, we must exploit our still-significant leverage over Iraq’s security forces. Last, it is vital that the next president not send a signal that he hopes to establish an enduring Korea-style presence in Iraq.

How to Exit Iraq

Martin Amis:

Al Qaedaism is an epiphenomenon -- a secondary effect. It is the dark child of globalization. It is the mimic of modernity: devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced and networked. According to Mr. Bobbitt, rather more doubtfully, Al Qaeda not only reflects the market state: it is a market state ("a virtual market state"). Globalization created great wealth and also great vulnerability; it created a space, or a dimension. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion; it is about human opportunism and the will to power.

Terrorism's New Structure

Fusion cell teams have helped collect and analyze intelligence not only against AQI and Sunni insurgents but also against Shiite militias and foreign fighters, say U.S. military officials.

Headquartered in an old concrete hangar on the Balad Air Base, which once housed Saddam Hussein's fighter aircraft, about 45 miles north of Baghdad, the Joint Task Force in Iraq runs fusion cells in the north, west and south and in Baghdad, U.S. officials said.

The headquarters bustles like the New York Stock Exchange, with long-haired computer experts working alongside wizened intelligence agents and crisply clad military officers, say officials who have worked there or visited.

"The capabilities for high-end special joint operations that exist now only existed in Hollywood in 2001," said David Kilcullen, a terrorism expert and adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Data gathered in a raid at midnight -- collected by helmet-mounted cameras that can scan rooms, people, documents and cellphone entries and relay the pictures back to headquarters -- often lead to a second or third raid before dawn, according to U.S. officials.

"To me, it's not just war-fighting now but in the future," Mullen said. "It's been the synergy, it's been the integration that has had such an impact."

U.S. Teams Weaken Insurgency In Iraq

A gold star for this preview of The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, due out next month, which appears in the Sunday NYT magazine.

Often it was the dogs that saved me.

Running at night — it was madness. I was courting death or at least a kidnapping. The capital was a free-for-all; it was in a state of nature. There was no law anymore, no courts, nothing — there was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now; they killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible ecosystem. One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up in a car and beat me and gagged me, and I could have screamed like a crazy person, but I doubt anyone would have done anything. Not even the guards. They weren’t bad people, the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the middle of a kidnapping?

From the archive, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy:

What was that?
I didn't hear anything.
Listen.
I don't hear anything.
They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark. He turned and looked toward the darkening town. It's a dog, he said.
A dog?
Yes.
Where did it come from?
I don't know.
We're not going to kill it, are we Papa?
No. We're not going to kill it.
He looked down at the boy. Shivering in his coats. He bent over and kissed him on his gritty brow. We won't hurt the dog, he said. I promise.

About the production of the film adaptation:

The producers chose Pennsylvania because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.

From the recent archive:

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives. Among the tribe, it was, therefore, women, children and the elderly who most often became infected.

Also:

antrophagus: It’s only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth

My Long War

Ronald Dworkin:

Boumediene v. Bush is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in recent years. American law has never before recognized that aliens imprisoned by the United States abroad have such rights. The disgrace of Guantánamo has produced a landmark change in our constitutional practice.

The Bush administration, as part of its so-called "war on terror," created a unique category of prisoners that it claims have no such right because they are aliens, not citizens, and because they are held not in an American prison but in foreign territory. The administration labels them enemy combatants but refuses to treat them as prisoners of war with the protection that status gives. It calls them outlaws but refuses them the rights of anyone else accused of a crime. It keeps them locked up behind barbed wire and interrogates them under torture. The Supreme Court has now declared that this shameful episode in our history must end.

Senator John McCain called the decision "one of the worst" in the country's history. The conservative press was horrified: The Wall Street Journal said that Kennedy had turned the Constitution into a "suicide pact." No one explained why it would destroy America to allow people who claim innocence of any crime, or threat, a chance to defend that claim before an American judge who is presumably just as worried about his family's security as the president is. Why would it be suicidal to allow them the same opportunity for defense that we allow people indicted as serial killers?

Senator Barack Obama, on the other hand, welcomed the decision, so the Court's action may well become an important issue in the coming presidential election. McCain has already promised that if elected he will appoint more justices like Roberts and Alito. It would take only one such appointment to make further decisions like Boumediene impossible, and probably reverse that decision itself.

From the archive:

The government has provided no evidence to the public, to any court, or to Boumediene that he has ever supported terrorism in any way.

Boumediene v. Bush, U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument, Wednesday, December 5, 2007

The Supreme Court has ruled that Habeas applies in Gitmo ...

The immediate impact of the Boumediene decision is that detainees at Guantanamo may petition a federal district court for habeas review of the circumstances of their detention.

Why It Was a Great Victory

Jane Mayer:

Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

Bush: first of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world.

Senator John McCain captured the essence of the issue eloquently in a simple declaration in 2005 that "it's not about them; it's about us." Yet in a nod to the conservative base of his party, even McCain has feinted to the right.

She tells me she's ready. She may be small, she says, but she's mean. She outlines her plans for fending off terrorists. She says, "I kind of hope something happens, you know?"

She wears an American flag pin on the lapel of her blazer. She sits on the jump seat, waiting for her life to change.

By the measure that matters most, the Bush administration can point to its record in fighting terrorism as a success. There have been no terrorist attacks in America since September 11, 2001. No rival wants to be accused of breaking this streak.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.

In a sworn statement in the spring of 2008, for example, the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions disclosed that the Pentagon had pressured him to time "sexy" prosecutions for political advantage, and to use evidence against the detainees that he considered tainted by torture. After resigning in protest, the prosecutor, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, also disclosed that when he suggested to William Haynes, the general counsel at the Pentagon, that a few acquittals might enhance Guantánamo's reputation for fair treatment, as had been true of the war crimes trials of the Nazis in Nuremburg, Haynes was horrified. "We can't have acquittals! We've got to have convictions!" Davis quoted the top Pentagon lawyer as saying. "If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?"

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists.

"Nooooo!" the audience roared.

Phillip Zelikow, the director of the 9/11 Commission, who returned to teaching history at the University of Virginia, tried to take stock. In time, he predicted, the Bush administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."

The Battle for a Country's Soul

Steve Coll:

There is, of course, empirical evidence of declining violence in Iraq, which has coincided with Petraeus’s command. The additional troops he requested have certainly been a factor, but not even Petraeus can say how much of one. At best, during the past year he has helped to piece together a stalemate of heavily armed, bloodstained, conspiracy-minded, ambiguously motivated Iraqi militias. Nobody knows how long this gridlock will hold.

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”)

Military Conflict

Yet Another Yoo Memo ...

In the memo (part 1, part 2) released today, John Yoo writes:“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The memo goes on to say, “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

The 81-page memo and an earlier one issued to guide the CIA have since been withdrawn, but they show how sweeping the Justice Department viewed presidential power to be after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

From last month, President Bush:

Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.

Unfortunately, Congress recently sent me an intelligence authorization bill that would diminish these vital tools. So today, I vetoed it.

Errol Morris's latest film opens April 25.

2003 Memo Allowed 'Enhanced' Interrogation