April, 2011

Better oversight is needed to close loopholes in the military’s growing use of contractors. In current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, local sources provide everything from food to ammunition, freeing up troops while less critical tasks are taken care of by local businesses.

The use of contractors has proven invaluable amid a tightening militarybudget, as it relieves the United States of massive costs otherwise spent shipping supplies into remote areas. Yet, while growing reliance on services is increasing the number of providers, those in charge of oversight are getting more work than they can handle—a factor leaving gaps for corruption and waste.

The need for better oversight was among the leading themes in an April 25 hearing by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The commission is gearing up to release a final report to Congress in July with recommendations to address current problems with contracting.

An interim report issued in February stated, “When government agencies lack experienced and qualified workers to provide oversight, the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse in contract performance increases exponentially.”

Its 32 recommendations to repair the system included the creation of an inspector general’s office for contingency operations, positions of oversight at multiple levels, and a certification program for troops sent to hire contractors.

A key problem is that while contractors constitute half of the total force in Iraq and Afghanistan, “The Army had been treating it as a side issue rather than a core capability,” stated to Jacques Gansler, chairman of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Improvement to Services Contracting, in a prepared statement read to the commission.

Gansler added that troops sent to acquire contractors are “understaffed, overworked, undertrained, undersupported, and, I would argue, most importantly, undervalued.”

While use of contractors is growing, management positions are being reduced. Gansler pointed out that in the 1990s the Army had five slots and four joint slots for general officer contracting management positions. That number dropped to no Army slots and just one joint slot.

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Turning the tide in Libya could require more than the US is willing to shoulder

Armed with outdated, barely functioning weapons, it seems Libyan rebels will be unable to overthrow Col. Gadhafi without additional support—support on top of what they’ve been given by NATO already. While the United States is wary of igniting a third protracted war in the region, the reality of the situation is beginning to sink in on Capitol Hill.

U.S. involvement in the war escalated on April 21 with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to take outtargets, while still keeping boots off the ground.

The following day, during a visit to Benghazi, Libya, Sen. John McCain called on the United States to take this a step further. McCain called for “close air-support and precision strike assets—such as A-10s and AC-130s,” as well as giving “command and control support, battlefield intelligence, training, and weapons” to rebels, according to a statement.

Arming the rebels may be a necessary step if they are going to win the war, but doing so carries concern of where the weapons will end up—and what they’ll be used for—when all is said and done.

The United States has a rocky history with this: Weapons given to the Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets are now used by the Taliban; weapons given to Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s wound up being used to kill civilians; and similar cases happened elsewhere.

The take-home lesson for the United States and NATO is that if they do not help Libya have a soft landing into democracy through nation-building efforts—a costly endeavor all coalition countries would rather avoid—then weapons given in good faith could become oppressive tools of yet another regime.

“I think you’ve got to be careful when you start arming people because the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend,” said Drew Berquist, former U.S. intelligence officer, and author of “The Maverick Experiment,” by phone.

Typically, when the United States has armed groups in the past, it was done with “very strategic plans as to who we’re arming, when, and why,” Berquist said.

Because of the way the Libyan rebellion started—taking its lead from Egypt’s Facebook and Twitter revolution—organizations are being formed as they go. And the end goal is now being arranged though The Interim Transitional National Council, steering the country toward elections and writing a constitution.

U.S. and NATO involvement in the conflict, likewise, was a quick decision meant to prevent a humanitarian disaster. “A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful—yet fragile—transitions in Egypt and Tunisia,” President Barack Obama said in a March 28 speech.

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The Taliban prison escape on April 25 served a tough blow to the Afghan government, with the nearly 500 escaped inmates compounding a history of poor security at the Saraposa prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

A stigma hangs over the prison run by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Justice. It is a place that “has in recent years been chronically vulnerable and a symbol of the [Afghan] government’s ineffectiveness,” stated Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins in a Feb. 10 Department of Defense video conference, according to a Pentagon transcript.

The area was known for corruption. “Assassinations of investigators, bribery of prosecutors, intimidation of justices, and attacks upon witnesses have corrupted the system and obscured both evidence and law,” Martins said.

Its poor standing was totally shattered by a 2008 attack in broad daylight that freed up to 900 inmates, including almost 390 Taliban prisoners. Among them were high-ranking field commanders in charge of organizing suicide attacks, according to a report from the Refugee Documentation Centre, through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Mending the tarnished image of Saraposa prison and the surrounding area became a focus over the years. Barracks were set up for guards to be on station 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Western trainers and advisers were assigned there, and coalition forces nearby were on-call with Afghan National Police.

The area was placed under a rule-of-law green zone secured by “projecting criminal justice, as well as mediation and civil-dispute resolution, to outlying districts,” Martins said.

Three years later, efforts were finally beginning to pay off. On Feb. 10, Martins stated firmly, that Saraposa “has now become a hard-won symbol of government strength now under the rule of law.”

He added that the prison set a model “we’re seeking to help replicate in other areas around Afghanistan.”

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The military’s new cyberstrategy is expected to be unveiled soon. It will not only lay out a comprehensive plan to secure military computers networks, but will also designate cyberspace as a battleground comparable to air, land, and sea.

The strategy’s contents were outlined by Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn last year, but little has been revealed since. It was announced in September 2009 just after Iran revealed its Bushehr nuclear power plant was hit by Stuxnet, a cyberweapon that was able to destroy several nuclear centrifuges.

Lynn stated that the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security were developing an international cyberstrategy that would include “various initiatives to defend the United States in the digital age.” He stated that military and civilian networks are being probed “thousands of times and scanned millions of times,” each day, and “Adversaries have acquired thousands of files from U.S. networks” including weapons blueprints and operations plans.

He gave a clearer view of the strategy during an Oct. 1, 2009, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) event. The strategy will include five pillars, including active cybersdefense, protection of critical infrastructure, and using “a Cold War concept” to share information with allies.

It is possible the strategy ties closely with what was announced at the NATO Lisbon Summit in December 2010, particularly the formation of coalitions mentioned by both Lynn and by NATO reports. Although details on both strategies remain vague, as they are still being developed, the outlines are similar.

The NATO strategy, likewise, will include “bringing all NATO bodies under centralized cyberprotection, and better integrating NATO cyber-awareness, warning, and response with member nations,” stated NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in a press release. It will also focus on protecting critical infrastructure.

The final U.S. strategy may be different from what was originally discussed, and the full breadth of what’s to come may or may not be completely revealed to the public. What is certain, however, is that cyberwarfare will play a major role in future military conflict, and the new strategy will be more of a trumpet ushering in a new era of warfare.

Even without a major, public strategy, the U.S. military has already taken a strong stance in the digital world. As far back as 1994, the United States was discussing cyberwarfare and cyberdefense in a conference on “information war,” according to John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent research institute on cyber-attacks.

“The U.S. isn’t just entering the cyberwar arena, they’re just announcing their intentions publicly.” Bumgarner said in a phone interview.

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Business espionage and cybercriminals listening in on potential deals makes the business landscape a place where digital security can make or break a company. With 15 years under his belt consulting or running his own businesses, Stephen Carnes, president of Kryptos Communications Inc., knows this well.

While working on big deals, clients would often ask to meet in person, flying halfway across the country to relay sensitive information rather than tell it over the phone. Carnes said, “So many times it can be just a two-minute part of the conversation they just didn’t want anybody to hear. So I thought, well gee, shouldn’t there be a better way of doing this?”

A quick look at the market was all it took to reveal a need. Options are limited for anyone wanting secure phone calls—typically falling to specialized phones costing more than $1,000 that only work after users exchange secure serial numbers. The problem is, not everyone owns one of these phones and most companies would rather not have a business deal hanging on the post office delivering a special phone.

The idea was simple and would not rely on special equipment. Growing use of smartphones opens new doors—particularly their ability to download software at the press of a button. So Carnes decided to build an app that he dubbed Kryptos.

Put simply, when a cell phone calls another phone, it wraps the audio information into a packet and bounces it off a cellular tower to reach its target. The problem is that while the towers check to make sure cell phones are from paying clients, the phones themselves have no way to tell if a tower is real or not. Criminals thus set up fake towers to steal data as it is transferred.

Kryptos gets around this by bypassing regular cell signals altogether and goes through wireless Internet 3G, 4G, or WiFi networks. It also uses peer-to-peer communications, speaking directly to another cell phone without needing a server in the middle, as “the server would be vulnerable to attack and eavesdroppers,” Carnes said.

To top it off, even if the data is intercepted, Kryptos scrambles it with military grade encryption. If a criminal gets their hands on it, the data will just be an unusable mess nearly impossible to decipher.

Criminal Eavesdropping

Although it stands as one of the lesser-acknowledged evils of cybercrime, intercepting cell phone calls is about as easy as it gets. Most cell phones use GSM, a mobile phone network designed in 1982 that is riddled with security holes.

By intercepting cell phone calls, criminals can grab not only the contents of a call, but also data about a user.

The vulnerabilities have been exposed, but many cell phones still run on the GSM network. The problem is that in order to close the gap, cellular providers would need to redesign the GSM system, change every phone, change every cell tower, and change every network behind them, according to ethical hacker Chris Paget.

Using a laptop and a $1,500 homemade device, Paget intercepted 30 cell phone signals from a live audience during a July 2010 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas in an attempt to raise concern around the problem. His hack worked on both GSM and 2G signals.

“I can sit here for the next 20 minutes, half an hour, and every AT&T cell phone in the room will gradually hand over to my network, gradually start giving me all your traffic,” Paget said in a Defcon recording of his speech, after he set his computer to pose as an AT&T cellular tower.

Read the full story here.

After the rebellion, building a new nation carries the threat of a third war

Supporting the Libyan opposition in their quest for democracy is becoming a task more involved than the West originally thought. Overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi could be just the first step down a longer road of building a new nation in Libya.

A difficult fact stands: Libya has been under the incredibly odd rule of Gadhafi since 1979, and establishing a new government will require a new system from top to bottom.

Gadhafi has no official position, yet he has ruled the country. His sons, likewise, have no titles yet are still granted authority. Also, “Gadhafi makes the key decisions, but there are no formal institutions through which he makes them,” states a report from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington.

The country’s political system is a loose mishmash of socialist and Islamic theories written in Gadhafi’s “Green Book,” and its structure includes frequent shifting roles of his lieutenants. This likewise, “makes it difficult for outsiders to understand Libyan politics,” according to the Department of State (DOS) description of Libya.

Nation-building in Libya will mean not only reconstructing its political, social, legal, and economic systems; but also creating “for the first time of the kinds of rules, mutual obligations, and checks-and-balances that mark modern states and how they interact with their societies,” said Dirk Vandewalle, of Dartmouth College in an April 6 testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, according to a transcript.

Since 95 percent of the country’s income rests in oil and natural gas, distributing this economy and preventing it from falling into a single base of power will be necessary in order to prevent another dictator from rising, according to Vandewalle, author of “Libya Since 1969.”

Experience gained from nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan could prove invaluable to Libya, but the undertaking is one the United States is wary to shoulder. The responsibility could fall on NATO, yet the reverberations of a changed focus could result in troops being shifted from efforts in Afghanistan—a move that would also impact U.S. operations there.

Libya does show promise, however, as its interim government, The Interim Transitional National Council, says it’s ready to steer the country into elections and writing a constitution.

The council states on its website that the country is faced with two choices: “Either we achieve freedom and race to catch up with humanity and world developments, or we are shackled and enslaved under the feet of the tyrant Moammar Gadhafi where we shall live in the midst of history.”

A main concern is whether fighting will continue after Gadhafi is gone. This factor will mark the difference between requiring a military occupation to guard civilians from insurgent forces, or simply assisting building a system of governance.

Read the full story here.

Tribal wars and ancient values at the heart of the Afghan conflict

As the ancient kings of Afghanistan, the Pashtun today constitute nearly the full ranks of the Taliban while also holding a majority in the Afghan government. The war in Afghanistan is no simple religious war. For the Pashtun, it is an ethnic war and a war of revenge; one of foreign invasion and plots by warring tribes.

Complicated tribal dynamics in Afghanistan are not given their due weight by coalition leaders, but they will have a big impact on how things play out in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

There is a pervading suspicion among the Pashtun that rival tribes are colluding with U.S. forces to destroy them. According to author Jere Van Dyk, he has heard this belief voiced by Pashtun from the lowest ranks all the way to high-level government officials.

“The Pashtuns feel that they are under attack,” said Van Dyk in a phone interview.

Van Dyk lived alongside the mujahedeen, Muslim fighters, in the 1980s and maintains contact with high-ranking Afghan officials to this day. In 2008, he attempted to disappear into Pashtun culture and infiltrate the Taliban, but was captured. He recounted the experience in his book, “Captive, My Time As A Prisoner Of The Taliban.”

The Pashtun are the largest tribe in Afghanistan, comprising 42 percent of the population.

Aside from coalition forces, there are three main players in the Afghan conflict: The Tajiks in northern Afghanistan, the Punjabis in Pakistan, and the Pashtun whose tribal region is mostly in the south and then stretches 80 miles east into Pakistan.

While nearly all Taliban insurgents are Pashtun, the officer core of the Afghan army is primarily Tajik, and nearly 80 percent of the Pakistan army is Punjabi.

Thus, it is impossible to consider Afghanistan in isolation from Pakistan. “This in many ways is an ethnic war, between the Punjabis which control the bureaucracy and military in Pakistan, and the Pashtuns of the tribal areas and across the area into Pakistan,” says Van Dyk.

“Pakistan is going to try to control this until the very end,” he said.

“If you talk to any Pashtun along the tribal belt on both sides of the border, they will tell you that Pakistan is trying to create chaos, or the image of chaos, in order to get money from the U.S.,” says Van Dyk.

The Tajiks aligned themselves successfully with the northern alliance—a loose coalition of mostly non-Pashtun groups united to defeat the Taliban—and with the United States at the very beginning, explains Van Dyk.

The United States is also making a common mistake in operations in the Pashtun Afghan south, by giving the operations names in the Tajik language, a Persian dialect called Dari.

“This is telling every single Pashtun that the United States has allied itself with the Tajiks,” he said.

The Pashtun believe they are caught in the middle of a conflict meant to crush them.

Read the full story here.

Photo Credit: Haji Abdul Manaf, the district governor of Nawa, addresses a crowd of elders during a shura, in Trek Nawa, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Jan. 19. Trek Nawa, a relatively ungoverned region between the Marjah and Nawa districts, is home to approximately 200 families from three Pashtun clans, the Alizai, Hasanzai and Barakzai. (U.S. Marine Corps)

The ongoing duel between the law and the lawless

Border agents are playing a game of cat and mouse with Mexican cartels that incessantly search for new tricks to get drugs across the U.S. border. Their tricks have ranged from the elaborate to the downright absurd, yet by keeping pressure on the cartels, the United States believes the drug war ravaging Mexico will eventually diminish.

Ranks on both sides of the conflict are by no means small. The United States has more than 20,700 border patrol agents scanning for smugglers, while more than 7,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents attempt to root out drug operations both within the United States and around the world.

The drug cartels on the other hand leverage the ambient glow of a multibillion-dollar industry to recruit on both sides of the border. For them, the war on drugs is a multipronged battle, as they vie over territory with rival gangs, attempt to fight and bribe the Mexican army, and duck U.S. agents armed with sophisticated equipment.

“Over the past two years, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has dedicated historic levels of personnel, technology, and resources to the Southwest border,” said Donna Bucella, assistant commissioner of the office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in a transcript of a March 31 Senate hearing.

Facing growing opposition, the cartels are resorting to all means of keeping their operations moving.

Two massive, elaborate tunnels were found in November 2010, complete with railways, lighting, and ventilation systems. Smugglers use vehicles ranging from aircraft, to fishing vessels, to submarines. In January, agents even found smugglers using a medieval-style catapult to launch drugs over the border into Arizona.

According to Bucella, given to increased detection of land and air operations, “Trafficking organizations are increasingly turning to maritime smuggling routes to transport their illegal cargo into the United States.”

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