The Enlightened Despot

What with never writing anything here and all, I haven’t posted this yet, though it’s a few weeks old now. But it is glorious, and deserves recognition.

Jeffrey Toobin, the only remotely sensible person allowed to speak on television about the news on a regular basis, has a crazy idea: we shouldn’t torture Najibullah Zazi. TNR’s Michael Crowley finds this scheme tempting, but he has his reservations:

It’s a well-argued case, and I think I agree. But, let’s play Devil’s Advocate

If it were up to me, I don’t know what I would do; I would need to know more facts. I am not a proponent of torture, which I think has done enormous harm to America’s image abroad and moral fiber at home. But I ride the subways these guys may have been planning to attack and I would like to be quite sure we’ve found all of them. At a minimum, this is a  good opportunity to stress-test* the debate about interrogation techniques, because it may be that life can imitate 24 after all.

I would genuinely like to know: what does “I am not a proponent of torture” even mean here? It seems clear to me that he isn’t using a euphemism screen here (real torture is inexcusable, of course, but what’s a little waterboarding between friends?). But at the same time, he is obviously on the fence about something, and I don’t know how to interpret this such that that something isn’t the question of whether Zazi should be tortured. But if that’s right, why does he so confidently assert that he isn’t a proponent?

The most likely interpretation I can come up with is that Crowley is saying he isn’t enthusiastic about torture, and thinks we’ve done far too much of it in the recent past, but that he isn’t willing to rule it out altogether. This is a much more honest framing of the pro-torture position than one generally sees, but it is the pro-torture position. It’s not as if there are lots of people saying with a straight face “I think we should torture whomever we can, whenever we can.” Willingness to resort to torture in extreme cases to prevent major acts of mass murder is the most pro-torture position that’s on the table.

Now, not being a crazy person, Crowley disagrees with the Dick Cheney about just how often that situation comes up. That speaks well of him. But - whatever some neocons might feel in their hearts - no one* has embraced a more stridently pro-torture philosophy than the one Crowley appears to be leaning toward here.

* No, commenters on Michelle Malkin’s blog don’t count.

Three things that neocons and right-wing hawks in general (though perhaps not the To Hell With Them Hawks) seem to feel pretty strongly about:

1.) They’re all in it together. Phrases like ‘the Global War on Terror’ and ‘the Axis of Evil’ are not just fluff. Sure, there are differences between our enemies, and indeed they have fought against each other in the past, but they represent a single, unified threat. It’s important to use the word ‘proxies’ a lot when talking about Hamas and Hezbullah. Talk of nuance, or of understanding and exploiting the differences between our enemies, is really just a manifestation of a naive refusal to see evil for what it is.

2.) It’s the Muslims, stupid. Whenever people mention the terrorist threat without explicitly mentioning that it is Islamic terrorism that we’re up against, they are obscuring an important fact about the enemy for the sake of craven political correctness. The unified threat we face is inherently an Islamist menace, and that has serious implications for how we should combat it.

3.) North Korea is a sponsor of terrorism and a member of the Axis of Evil. The one doesn’t take much explaining. North Korea’s Muslim population is generally estimated to hover around 0%.

I’m not wild about any of these propositions, but surely one can’t believe all of them. But they do, don’t they?

Some catch-up to attend to after two missed installments, so, without further ado, the links:

• Terrorists were arrested for attempting to blow up a synagogue a few blocks away from my childhood home. I assume the punishment is especially severe for that sort of thing. Unfortunately for them, they were using fake bombs sold to them by the FBI. The men had been under investigation for almost a year.
• The NYT reported the other day that ammunition sent to the Afghan government by the US and its allies had been discovered in Taliban hands. No one was under any illusions about the existence of ties between the Taliban and elements within the government so, in a sense, this isn’t news at all. It would be surprising if some of our ammo weren’t being used against us. But this sort of concrete discovery can sometimes focus thinking on an issue we already knew about.
• California is facing bankruptcy, and not just the moral kind. Voters rejected five out of six ballot measures introduced to address the fiscal crisis in a special election on Tuesday. The good news is that there has been a surge in public support for overhauling California’s constitution. Just about everyone who has even briefly thought about it agrees that the requirement for a supermajority on all matters budgetary is a complete disaster.
• CATO’s Jerry Taylor is apparently still not afraid to get jerrytaylored.
• The boy who hacked Sarah Palin’s email during the campaign has asked that the case against him be thrown out on the grounds that her emails were public records.
• Peter Kirsanow thinks that despite Dick Cheney’s unpopularity, Americans would want him in charge of any effort to defend the earth from destruction via asteroid. That is, to the extent that Peter Kirsanow thinks.
• Felix Salmon says there is nothing to worry about in the possibility of a downgrading of US debt, because the ratings agencies are now irrelevant. I hope he’s right, and there have certainly been some positive signs, but I think some more concrete steps need to be taken to make the ratings system in its present form as irrelevant as it deserves to be.

The quote of the day is this beautiful piece of understatement from Ben Smith:

The Palin family media strategy can be hard to figure.

You don’t say. He’s reacting in particular to the magazine cover above, which, in case you missed it, includes this equally quotable gem from Bristol Palin:

If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.

Ah, Bristol. Ah, humanity.

Finally, apropos of nothing in particular, here’s Nino Brown’s defense of his murderous - though fictional - reign as a crack kingpin:

In response to my post on Harry Reid’s Guantanamo bumbling, commenter Chuck said the following:

It would seem to me that the folks chickening out on closing gitmo have aided the enemy in their main goal.

The goal of a terrorist is ‘terror’ and the the folks who are legitimizing being too afraid of *captured terrorists* to keep them in a *prison* are doing the terrorists work for them.

This is true about hawkish views on terrorism more broadly. It’s an often made, but even more often ignored, point that the utility - such as it is - of terrorist strikes has much more to do with the reaction to them than with the harm they cause directly. Killing a few Americans civilians does not do anything directly to advance, say, the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The payoff is always in the reaction - whether by creating pressure to yield to terrorist demands, or more indirectly, by - to take a crazy, purely hypothetical example - goading us into unpopular wars in the Middle-East.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t try to stop terrorists from killing us. For one thing, letting people get away with mass murder is always a bad precedent. For another, terrorists are crazy people, so even if we had a history of Zen-like calm in reaction to attacks, rendering their efforts futile, there’s little reason to think they wouldn’t give it the old college try anyway.

But, yes, it is certainly worth noting that being too terrified to deal with captive terrorists in the most efficacious manner available is Letting the Terrorists Win 101. This is why worries about WMDs in the hands of terrorists is so central to the terrorist hawk’s view of the issue. If you think of terrorism mainly through the lens of what terrorists have ever actually done, you can’t think of it as anything remotely like an existential threat. I don’t mean to be callous to the victims of terrorism, but in the second week of September, 2001 alone, Al Qaeda killed fewer Americans than tobacco (though, of course, Al Qaeda did a lot more property damage). And we have lost more lives in subsequent wars than in the attacks. I was and am a supporter of invading Afghanistan, but between the strategy we have actually embarked on, including Iraq, GITMO, the Patriot Act, and all the rest, and doing absolutely nothing, the latter would be a more rational response even if we knew we would suffer a 9-11 scale attack every 8 years.

So to the extent that the Neocon position makes any sense at all, it’s justification lies almost entirely on the possibility of terrorists acquiring and using WMDs. Which is to say that it’s not about terror at all. But if that’s what you’re worried about - and the Neocons are right, it’s what you should be worried about - then it makes very little sense to go around fighting terrorists wherever they might be. Rather, we should be securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs wherever they might be. Whoops.

On Thursday, Barack Obama will announce the details of his plan to shut down GITMO by January 22. In the meantime, Senate majority leader Harry Reid is doing his best to make that process more difficult, joining with other Democrats to withdraw the $80 million for closing the prison from the defense spending bill. This money had already been removed from the version of the bill passed by the House, however, so the real damage was done by Reid’s bumbling attempts to explain himself:

“Guantánamo makes us less safe,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said at a news conference where he laid out the party’s rationale for its decision, which is expected to be voted on this week. “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

…

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said the majority leader had not intended to suggest that detainees could never be transferred to American prisons, but only to say that the Senate would not provide money for closing Guantánamo until a task force created by Mr. Obama presented a report on detainee policy in July.

Mr. Reid in his comments, however, was unequivocal in insisting that the terrorism suspects never reach American shores.

“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them,” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

That’s sufficiently incoherent that he is now certain to be accused of flip-flopping regardless of what position he ends up taking. But he is doing everyone a serious disservice by dignifying concerns about terrorists in American prisons. There are actual difficult questions to be dealt with here, but the idea that our prison system can’t be trusted to hold members of Al Qaeda is laughable. Being evil does not grant you super powers. The whole thing is a canard.

On the subject of prisoners who will be released, though, it’s worth noting that the New York Times gets Reid wrong twice in the few paragraphs I reprinted. Reid did not say - at least not in the quotes printed by the Times - that Democrats would never allow Guantanamo prisoners to be released into the US. Rather, he said that they wouldn’t allow terrorists to be released into the US. This isn’t just semantics. There are almost certainly plenty of non-terrorists in custody at GITMO right now, and, more importantly, there is zero chance that the administration was planning to say of any prisoner, “Yes, he’s clearly a terrorist, but we have nothing on him, and we’re thinking Lower Manhattan would be a good place to resettle him.

So, no gold stars for either Harry Reid or the New York Times today.

For the most part, the battle over the future of the defense budget will take place out of the public eye - people care a lot about broad rhetoric on national defense, but they don’t know anything about the details that matter. Still, to the extent that marshalling public opinion matters, it’s important not to underestimate the primitive appeal of neat weapons. If you explain to someone that the F-22 Raptor is the snazziest, most fearsome fighter jet ever made, they want to believe that it’s important for us to have a lot of them. We want to have much cooler toys than the Russians.

In light of that fact, it’s worth emphasizing that a leaner military, geared more toward counterinsurgency, would also have cool toys. In fact, I’d argue that a lot of these tools are cooler than fighter jets, on top of being orders of magnitude less expensive. And on top of all that, unlike the fighters, we actually get to use them.

Take, for example, the unfortunately named Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), pictured above. Drones are getting something of a bad rap these days, perhaps because of fears that they will enslave us all, but more likely because of their use in controversial strikes in Pakistan. This is crazy. Reasonable men may differ on the wisdom of going after the Taliban in Warizistan, but there is no question that these strikes would be much more unpopular with the Pakistanis if life human beings were crossing the border. And none of that has any bearing on the overall utility of drones.

People also object to the indiscriminate nature of anti-terrorism via Hellfire missiles. Enter the ARSS (they really need to do something about that name):

The Army’s solution is the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), a small, unmanned helicopter equipped with a powerful .338-caliber rifle. An autopilot system handles the tricky business of flying while the operator lines up the kill shot on a remote monitor.

The Army ground-tested the rifle’s turret on a Vigilante unmanned helicopter to evaluate its accuracy. The turret-control hardware and flight-control algorithms will be refined to make shots more accurate before airborne testing begins in July. The program’s heads say the airborne robo-sniper idea was put forward five years ago, but only became practical when Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory designed a lightweight, stabilized turret. Users control it with an adapted Xbox 360 controller. The same turret could be used on unmanned fixed-wing aircraft such as the Predator or Reaper and could also allow ground robots to fire on the move.

An Xbox controller! Flying a stealth jets might be a good subject for a video game, but real-life deployment of the flying robo-sniper actually doubles as a video game. And unlike winning dogfights, firing bullets rapidly and accurately at people surrounded by civilians is something we actually need to do in the fight against the Taliban. And it works against pirates, too!

The VDH Watch is back. There are a million dishonest lunatics out there in the blogosphere, but for some reason this guy really gets to me. There is a depth of propaganda in his writing that really rewards a sentence-by-sentence treatment. So I promise I’ll (try to) lay off for a while after this, but, for now, here we go again, Victor:

Under Obama we are obliterating, by Predator-missile attack, suspected jihadists (and anyone in the general vicinity near them) in Waziristan — the last time I looked, it was a foreign country — something a little bit more discomforting to them than rendition.

The last time I looked, Waziristan wasn’t a country at all, but never mind the details. One can argue about the merits of the drone campaign in Pakistan, but only hard-core pacifists deny that there is a time and a place for firing missiles at people to kill them. Meanwhile, it isn’t rendition simpliciter that the Obama administration has rejected, but rather turning detainees over to other countries for the purpose of torture. Are there people who would rather be tortured than blown up by a missile? Sure. But that isn’t a very interesting point. Over thousands of years of human civilization, people have periodically resigned themselves to the necessity of doing their best to kill other people. Yet most civilizations have maintained that it was a moral imperative to treat their surviving enemies with some degree of restraint. If Hanson wants to argue that humanity has had this one wrong all along, he should say so. Pretending it is a novel hypocrisy of the Obama administration isn’t a serious option.

And blowing the brains out of suspected piratical kidnappers in international waters might be seen, in the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence, as something a little more extreme than bringing detainees out of their Koran- and Mediterranean-food-stocked Guantànamo jail cells for interrogations.

Victor, you’re doing it again! Whatever ‘extreme’ is supposed to mean here, it isn’t relevant. Forget getting shot, I’d choose a few minutes on the rack over life in prison without a second thought. Yet the former has been considered legally and morally impermissable since long before ‘the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence’. (Try saying that five times fast!). Also, that bit about interrogations? Also dishonest. No one has ever suggested we not interrogate prisoners. That would be crazy. What bothers people is when the interrogations look like this:

It is possible to ask people questions without resorting to this sort of evil.

I know I’d prefer to be shown some upsetting nudie magazines as humiliation to make me talk than have a bullet take apart my skull.

I’m glad you like porn more than sudden death. Me too. But, on top of repeating the confusion and hand-waving from above, you are side-stepping the fact that this sort of humiliation is designed for devout Muslims, and doesn’t really apply to you. It’s more akin to someone forcing you to read a science textbook.

Once Team Obama chose to trash Bush as a Constitution-shredder, while blinking and nodding at Spanish theatrics — all the while either not changing, or, in fact, stepping up Bush-era anti-terrorism measures — it put itself in a soon-to-be untenable position that even a fawning media won’t long be able to ignore.

Well, it sort of depends on the measures, doesn’t it? The idea wasn’t to stop counter-terrorism altogether, just the evil, illegal, and ineffective kinds. There is nothing untenable about condemning certain means of fighting terrorism while continuing to fight terrorism. That’s not all that complicated.

Who knows what’s in our future — a Spanish indictment of “judge-and-jury” Barack Obama for ordering the executions of Pashtun and Somali suspects in foreign or international territories, without an arrest warrant, habeas corpus, rights to counsel, and recourse to appeal?

I’m actually in Spain at the moment, so I asked around, and no, it turns out that Spain isn’t planning to outlaw warfare. I’ll let you know if there’s any movement on that though.

Freedom, as we all know, isn’t free. Fortunately, you can defend it from the comfort of your own home:

In her small, one-chair home office in Montana, I sit beside Rossmiller on a little tiled table normally reserved for a lamp. Outside, the vistas stretch across Big Sky Country to the Elk Horn Ridge Mountains. Inside, Rossmiller shows me what she does as perhaps America’s most accomplished amateur terrorist hunter.

We’re monitoring jihadist chatter, and she has warned me that we’re not likely to come across anything too dangerous. Home-brew cyber-counterterrorism, it turns out, is a lot like most police work — weeks of tedious beat patrols punctuated by occasional bursts of excitement. And the section of the Internet populated by terrorists is a lot like the rest of the Internet — only instead of commenting on, say, a video of 1,500 prison inmates performing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” everyone’s chatting about the death of Americans.

Rossmiller hopes to find some people discussing an actual upcoming plot and then join the conversation. But it’s mostly just idle banter today. We come upon a thread in which participants are discussing a Baghdad sniper who has been killing US soldiers. “They call him Juba,” Rossmiller says. She suspects there isn’t a single sniper but rather a cell, and that the thread is designed to create an identity for Juba, a hero who might attract others to the cause.

It’s hard for me to pay attention to Rossmiller. I’m distracted by a little GIF that pops up at the end of one person’s posts. It’s a 1.5-second cartoon of an American GI poking up from the hatch of a tank, getting shot in the head, and slumping over dead. Rossmiller is rushing to the next page, but I ask her to scroll back so I can stare at the clip again. The little GIF’s repetition has an adolescent playfulness to it, so loopy and horrifyingly goofy, so Internet-y, I can’t stop staring. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump.

Note: A lot of what follows is covered in earlier posts, in a few instances word-for-word. But some of it is new, and I had to write this up for something else (thus the lack of links, but take my word for it, it’s all true), so I figured I’d post it here as well.

President Obama has taken his first concrete steps toward fulfilling one of the key foreign policy promises of his campaign: improving America’s military efforts in Afghanistan. Over the next few months, 17,000 additional troops will be deployed to the region. This is welcome news, coming on the heels of news that over 2000 civilians were killed there in 2008. 39% of these casualties were inflicted by pro-government forces (that is, NATO and the Karzai government itself), and of those, two-thirds were killed in air strikes. Simply put, we do not have enough boots on the ground, and as a result, we have been forced to over-rely on air power, which is necessarily less precise.
As badly as these troops are needed, however, their chances of enabling us to defeat the Taliban and stabilize the region are vanishingly slim unless we radically reshape our strategy in Afghanistan, particularly with respect to its primary industry, opium. It is widely understood how central the opium issue is to the war effort. As National Security Advisor Jim Jones put it, “It is not the resurgence of the Taliban but the linkage of the economy to drug production, crime, corruption and black market activities which poses the greatest danger for Afghanistan.” Despite this, there is hardly any mainstream discussion of what our approach to the opium trade should be. Rather, debate is focused on the narrow tactical question of how best to dismantle the drug trade; the desirability of dismantling it simply goes without saying.
But like so many things that go without saying, this strategy is in fact too stupid for words. While the data is - naturally enough - spotty, opium production most likely accounts for around a third of Afghanistan’s GDP. This figure fluctuates a good deal from year to year, but the trade has been a major part of the country’s economy for over a quarter of a century. More than 10% of the population is directly employed in the production effort.
It can therefore be instructive - though of course somewhat hyperbolic - to substitute ‘the economy’ for ‘the drug trade’ in statements about our strategy for the region. So when Joe Klein, for instance, says that for success to be even conceivable “[t]he Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade”, he is saying something disturbingly close to “the Karzai government will have to shut down the economy.” Destroying the source of a population’s livelihood goes against the core of any sane counterinsurgency strategy. If we are working to win the hearts and minds (remember those?) of people who are growing a profitable crop, and if our enemy offers to purchase that crop for export while we offer to destroy it and shoot anyone who makes too much of a fuss, we are always going to come up short.
There is at least some indication that General Jones recognizes this, having assured a reporter that we “will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields.” And this is technically true: the bulk of the eradication effort involves Afghan soldiers destroying plants by hand, though there is enthusiasm amongst many in the U.S. military for greater reliance on a program of poisoning fields via aircraft. All of which has had a fairly typical degree of success for a supply-side drug reduction effort: opium output over the past few years has been higher than at any point in history.
Drug trafficking has proven time again to be something we simply can’t beat, and we all know what you’re supposed to do when you can’t beat ‘em. Which is not to say that we need to start supplying street corners worldwide. There are severe codeine and morphine shortages in many parts of the world. Due to extensive international regulation, the supply of legal opium is kept artificially low, and reforms would be needed before countries would be allowed to import the medication they need even once they were able to afford it. But creating a program for licit poppy growing on a significant portion of Afghanistan’s farmland would dramatically change the dynamic between pro-government forces and the Afghan people. We would have to overpay for the scheme to work; the price of opium on the legal market is far below its price in the heroin trade. But Afghanistan’s entire GDP is $10 billion. Pricing the Taliban out of the market for Afghan crops simply isn’t that expensive a proposition. As an added benefit, raising the country’s major industry out of the black market and into the daylight would remove the major cause of the government’s widespread corruption.
We have a war on drugs. We desperately need to get it off them and into recovery. There is simply no chance of succeeding in Afghanistan until our war kicks its opium habit.

Torture has now officially cost our country the ability to prosecute a man almost certainly guilty of terrorism:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

The torture is of course awful, but we knew that already. Not being able to prosecute Qahtani is also pretty bad, and the problem of what to do with him instead is the sort of thing that will make closing Gitmo harder, which is terrible.

On the other hand, having this flat declaration come from a member of the Bush administration will make this issue harder for people to ignore or blow-off as partisan posturing. This is very good. It will also put a little more political pressure on Obama to set up a special investigator, truth comission, or something along those lines, which is also good. Hopefully, such a process will help us restore some standing in the world, which would be great, but in the meantime, it’s just about guarunteed to generate a lot of headlines and images that will help make Arabs hate us even more, which is absolutely terrible.

So rejoice, or weep, or, you know, whatever seems appropriate. In any case, these jerks will be gone a week from now. That is fantastic.

This is bad news:

Israel on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court.

…

Parliament spokesman Giora Pordes said the election committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motion, accusing the country’s Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to some of Israel’s staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria.

Obviously this is not good news about the relationship between Arab-Israelis and the rest of Israel, though, sadly, there’s nothing surprising there. It’s also just a bad thing in its own right. It’s worth remembering - and being thankful for - the fact that even after the Patriot Act and all the rest, we have some deeply rooted freedoms here that many other western-style democracies don’t. Spain and Germany, for instance, have banned political parties in the recent past for supporting ETA and and being Neo-Nazis, respectively. In about fifteen European countries it is illegal to condone, deny, or downplay the Holocaust. That would be a total non-starter here. If Bush tried to ban saying nice things about Al Qaeda, even if he’d tried it on September 12, 2001, not even John Kerrey could have lost an election against him. That sort of thing used to give me a warm feeling of superiority over our European allies - maybe, if we can go a few years without torturing or illegally wiretapping anyone, I’ll get that feeling back again.

Bad news from Ambinder:

The other big news of the day is the release of the Commission on the Prevention
of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism’s report on the most pressing problem facing the next American president.  Clinton-era defense official Graham Allison was on the panel; Mr. Allison is famous in national security circles for putting the odds of a nuclear explosion in an American city at 50% over ten years. The panel concurs: “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013. The Commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon.”

You can read the report here.

Lisa Schiffren thinks we are all too quick to buy the official line on the hotel bombing in Pakistan:

The truck bombing at the Islamabad Marriot which has killed at least 60 people, and is said to have been targeted against senior CIA officials visiting the Pakistani capital, has been universally attributed to Al Qaeda. That is entirely possible, and even likely. But this is a good time to maintain skepticism. We — the U.S. — are neck deep in a conflict with a significant, powerful rogue element of the Pakistani state: their military intelligence unit — ISI (InterServices Intelligence). ISI has spent much of the past seven years playing the U.S. off against the Taliban/Al Qaeda factions in Afghanistan, with which it has an incestuous relationship.

The underlying premise - that the ISI plays the U.S. and militant groups within Pakistan off each other - is uncontroversial. And a healthy dose of skepticism is always good. The problem with her conspiracy theory isn’t that it’s too paranoid, but rather that it doesn’t make any sense. Not only is there no good reason for us to suspect the ISI of the bombing, there is actually pretty good reason for the ISI to suspect us.

Pakistanis, in my limited experience, do not enjoy having bombs go off in their cities. When bombs do go off in their cities, this hurts the approval ratings of the ostensive perpetrators. In the war for the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people, this has been a pretty bad week for Al Qaeda, and thus a pretty good one for the United States. And while Al Qaeda is very much in the business of doing things that hurt their popularity, the ISI is more or less a rational agent - if they’re bombing hotels in Islamabad, it’s to help us, not Al Qaeda.