Costs of War: Dodging Security Bullets

The successful rescue of American merchant ship Captain Richard Phillips by US Special Operations Forces has been hailed by some analysts as the Obama administration passing an early test in the national security arena. But in reality, the successful operation was an easy victory; the real test - in Afghanistan - is still to come.

“Hillary Clinton warned there would be days like this,” read the headline of one analysis of events off the Somali coast over the weekend: a reference to her notorious campaign commercial last year about the “3 am phone call” to the White House in which she sought to suggest that Barack Obama - at that time her rival for the Democratic nomination - was unprepared to deal with possible national security crises.

Other commentators, like Michael Shear of the Washington Post, agreed that the sniper operation authorized by Obama last week was “an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.”

It is true that Obama dodged a bullet when Phillips was rescued. Much could have gone wrong. Though the lifeboat in which Phillips was held by the pirates - who had allowed themselves to be towed to less choppy seas - was only 75 feet from the USS Bainbridge, the motion of both vessels and the darkness made the shots tricky ones, according to military veterans interviewed by the New York Times.

The comparison with the failed small military missions conducted by his Democratic predecessors - Bill Clinton in Haiti and Jimmy Carter in Iran - was irresistible to commentators. And it is undoubtedly true that Obama would have been blamed by his Republican opponents had anything gone awry - which probably accounts for the president’s low public profile on the incident until it was successfully resolved.

"One can easily imagine all the different ways the rescue of Captain Phillips might have been screwed up - and the political firestorm that would have resulted,” wrote Joe Klein of Time Magazine.

But in reality, though the operation - and perhaps especially the killing of the pirates who were holding Phillips - may prove a deterrent to future attacks on US vessels, it will not solve the piracy problem in the region, which is driven by the absence of law and order in Somalia itself.

The International Maritime Bureau says more than 200 crew members on more than a dozen hijacked ships are being held off the coast of Somalia.

While the US has shown commendable multilateralism in gathering an international naval coalition to try and protect merchant traffic off the Somali coast, the efforts to by the US military provide an excellent illustration of the principle that, to a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. This is a problem which is not susceptible to a military solution and is likely to persist. The only real answer, experts agree, lies in the hard work of building state institutions in Somalia and strengthening the naval and coast guard capacities of its neighbors.

Moreover, while Somali piracy is a menace to one of the world’s key shipping lanes and a problem for the US in a broad sense, the attacks - even if they continue - do not pose a real threat to US security.

The same cannot be said of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan, which - unless it can be defeated - poses the risk that al-Qaida and other terror groups committed to striking the US homeland will once again enjoy a sanctuary from where they can plot and launch attacks.

New poll data this week of Afghan views and attitudes towards the insurgency and international military forces offers scant comfort to the Obama administration.

The data - an analysis of the latest poll in a series conducted by ABC News, the BBC, German broadcaster ARD and USA Today - for the first time breaks down Afghan views regionally, showing the differing attitudes that prevail in different parts of the country.

“Like politics, ‘all insurgency is local,’ and this is particularly true of the key provinces” in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the battle for hearts and mind must be won, writes Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Cordesman cautions that “Such a breakout can only provide a rough indication of Afghan opinion, which … sometimes varies sharply by valley, tribe, or urban area,” noting that there “is no way to fully sample every area of a conflict zone mid-war, and it is a grim fact that it is often the opinion of those with the guns that counts - not the opinion of the population as a whole.”

The regionally broken down data shows that the Afghan government “is often seen as failing in critical areas and as being ineffective or absent in the regions where it needs to be most effective to win.”

In particular, he notes two key factors that bode ill for the US-led counter insurgency effort.

First, foreign aid and reconstruction efforts are not seen as a success nationally. Barely more than a half - 51 percent – say foreign aid groups are making progress in providing a better life for Afghans. And fewer still, only 30 percent, say foreign development aid has benefited them personally.

But as Cordesman notes, these figures are much worse in those areas where the insurgency is most active and where such efforts are the most important to securing the support of the population.

Secondly, the Afghan police - though popular nationally - are seen as largely ineffective in providing an active presence and creating security in the key high-threat, high-combat areas. According to Cordesman, the poll also shows that while there is little support for narcotics trafficking outside the areas where it plays a critical place in the economy, “there is broad national opposition to current eradication efforts.”

Nonetheless, Cordesman - a national security veteran with a long track record of justified skepticism about US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan - concludes that “the war is still winnable at the political level” given that the Taliban, al-Qaida and other Jihadists, “do not have broad support even in the Pashtun areas in the south and east” - the key areas where the insurgency is most active.