Americans can be brutally effective against another nation that relies on conventional military power. The Confederacy, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union all found this out. They “fought fair,” so the United States was able to out-spend them all and eventually win. But Americans are not so adept against enemies that do not fight fair, whether dispersed, amorphous organizations not easily crushed through military action, hostile ideologies or cultures, or systemic instability. Impatient for quick results when none are available, the United States gravitates to short-term problem solving, teetering from crisis to crisis. That is where we are today. Critics [...]
Nearly 1,000 people died in military detention in Nigeria in the first half of 2013, Amnesty International reported Tuesday, citing a senior officer in the Nigerian army. The detainees’ deaths occurred in the context of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s offensive against the Islamist movement Boko Haram, which is waging a violent insurgency in the country’s north. In May, Jonathan declared a state of emergency in several northeastern provinces, authorizing security forces to round up hundreds of prisoners, many of whom were shot or suffocated in detention, according to Amnesty. Nigeria has employed similarly heavy-handed tactics against Boko Haram since the [...]
Last weekend’s dispatch of U.S. special operations units on missions into Tripoli, Libya, and Barawe, Somalia, to capture leading terrorist figures, building on earlier operations such as the 2011 mission that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, reflects an ongoing shift in the Obama administration’s willingness to risk U.S. casualties as well as deal with possible diplomatic incidents in order to go after high-value targets in the war on terror. It is a marked contrast to the unwillingness during the Clinton administration, prior to 9/11, to countenance possible losses or to insert American operatives on the ground in [...]
