America has killed al-Qaeda’s head, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was living in a wealthy Kabul suburb under the noses of the Taliban leadership. Al-Zawahiri living and working in Afghanistan is an echo of the safe harbour the Taliban gave his former boss, Osama bin Laden, to plan and conduct the horrific September 11 attacks. That continued until the Taliban were ousted at the start of the 20-year Afghan war. So, there’s a symmetry to the Taliban again harbouring an al-Qaeda head while America hunts him.

Al-Zawahiri’s death comes 11 years after bin Laden was killed in May 2011, at his home near a major Pakistani military base. It’s 21 years since al-Zawahiri played a role in planning the 9/11 attacks, but he’s been a capable and canny organiser and leader who has kept al-Qaeda viable. Unlike bin Laden, he didn’t need a special forces team conducting an extended high-risk night raid to kill him—al-Zawahiri died from two small but lethal Hellfire missiles fired by a drone operated remotely by the CIA.

His death has narrow and broad messages and results.

One clear message is that while the US and NATO forces have withdrawn from Afghanistan, they can still get intelligence about people there to conduct precision attacks.

While the Taliban have ruled Afghanistan since the chaotic withdrawal ordered by US President Joe Biden in August 2021, their control is partial, porous and disputed. Internal Taliban factions, diverse warlords and extremist groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State make it hard for the Taliban to rule.

On top of this, many Afghans don’t want to live under the Taliban’s fundamentalism and brutality. Finding people willing to betray others or to provide intelligence on enemies in this moiling mix of interests, actors and grievances looks to be fertile work. So, any terrorist figures living under Taliban rule must keep looking over their shoulder wondering who they can trust and for how long. This undercuts terrorists’ ability to plan, operate and conduct attacks.

The other message comes from the Taliban’s confused reaction to al-Zawahiri’s death. Spokespeople have simultaneously denied there was any attack, claimed that the house struck in the attack was empty, and expressed outrage that the Americans have done this because it breaks their agreement to withdraw the US military.

This last line is the most important, though not because the Biden administration broke any deal with the Taliban. The strike was a remote one conducted by the CIA and involved no US boots on the ground. It’s important because it shows the Taliban returning to form, saying al-Zawahiri shouldn’t have been killed because he was living under its protection. That’s a very dangerous path, and won’t help the Taliban’s campaign for legitimacy around the world.

Narrowly, it’s a reverse for al-Qaeda as an active and violent international terrorist outfit, and a reversal for the Taliban because it demonstrates their porous control and continued instinct to harbour violent extremist individuals and groups.

More broadly, it’s a further nail in the coffin for the narrative out of places like Moscow and Beijing that the West is failing and lacks the resolve to act in its security interests in the wider world.

The US conducted this strike as Biden leads the broad international coalition supporting President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in their fight against Vladimir Putin, and while showing resolve and support for Taiwan in the face of Beijing’s growing intimidation and aggression there. It turns out that powerful democracies can walk and chew gum.

We are living in a dangerous, fracturing world where violence and force are more present than in recent decades. Old threats like terrorism are still active, while new threats from emboldened, powerful autocrats are obvious.

In that world we should take heart from the damage Biden has caused this week to al-Qaeda and from the resolve he and other leaders—like Zelensky and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen—are demonstrating while facing the challenges from the empowered autocrats in Beijing and Moscow. What happens from here matters to us all.

Welcome back to ASPI suggests for 2017. Boy, what a week…

Our first suggestion of the year has to be The Atlantic’s latest cover story. How to Build an Autocracy, written by one-time George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, imagines how Trump’s temperament and tendencies could presage an erosion of American democracy. Frum looks to how leaders like Venezuela’s Chávez and Hungary’s Orbán have inched their nations towards kleptocracy, and paints a chilling picture of how the 45th President might unfold his reign, abetted by a close circle of advisors, GOP interests and a weak armoury of ‘checks and balances.’ It’s quite a yarn about how one man could wreck the joint by introducing a degree of authoritarianism while enriching himself and his family in the process. A must read.

We once joked about making this Friday feature a Trump-free zone, but quickly chose submission over a safe-space. We continue on that road, so here are some useful reads now that we’re really getting a taste of Trumpian policy. A great piece over at Lawfare casts the “Muslim ban” as ‘malevolence tempered by incompetence,’ while Nicholas Kristof at the NYT and Julia Ioffe in The Atlantic offer some affecting personal stories about America and the refugee experience. This Foreign Policy piece has a stab at reconciling Trump and grand strategy, a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. Any fellow travellers who get a kick out of copyediting shouldn’t miss this New Yorker video that takes a hacksaw/2B pencil to Mr Trump’s remarks to the CIA—a most gratifying 18 minutes. And one to keep handy in your bookmarks: www.alternativefacts.com (go on, click!) As Obama once said, ‘Four more years.’

There’s plenty to choose from if you’re after some fresh research after the break. Two regional pieces stand out: the first is from Sasakawa USA, which dissects the US–Japan alliance and its future challenges, and the second is from the ever-impressive Bonnie Glaser, who offers some recommendations to the Trump administration on how to balance relations with Beijing and Taipei following the ‘One China” policy bungle. Over the break, the World Policy Journal teamed up with the dynamos over at Foreign Policy Interrupted to produce ‘World Policy Interrupted’, an all-female edition of the Journal which gave women from across the globe a platform to voice insights on foreign policy and national security issues (check out the accompanying podcast here). Foreign Policy launched a new blog, ‘Shadow Government’, where you’ll be able to keep up with foreign policy musings of Democratic policymakers, academics and practitioners over the course of the Trump administration. And if you’ve still got some time on your hands, earlier this month, the CIA released its largest collection of declassified records ever—totalling a whopping 930,000 documents. Have a browse at the Agency’s Electronic Reading Room.

If you’re already tearing your hair out at 2017, Team Strategist has the perfect stress relief—check it out here. (Although, it may be too late for a handful of people across the Pacific… To catch up with some of them and what they’re thinking, the fantastic @Trump_Regrets Twitter account is certainly worth a follow.)

Podcast

If you thought War on the Rocks couldn’t up their game any further, you were wrong. Cue Bombshell, a brand new offering from the Washington DC outfit, hosted by Loren DeJonge Schulman, Radha Iyengar Plumb and Erin Simpson. The new series will ‘talk military strategy, White House mayhem, and the best cocktails known to (wo)man’. The first episode (48 mins) is out now, check it out for great analysis on Trump’s first week in office, the immigration order, Chelsea Manning and more.

Video

CSIS’s Smart Women, Smart Power initiative this week hosted Madeleine Albright for a Q&A moderated by Nina Easton. Catch the former Secretary of State’s insights on technology, diplomacy, trade, Russia, Brexit, the post-truth world and a stack of other areas (65 mins).

Director of the NYU Center on International Cooperation, Sarah Cliffe, and Director of Multilateral Affairs of the international Crisis Group, Richard Atwood, recently gave a stellar presentation (1hr 10 mins) at the Council on Foreign Relations on… *drumroll* …what the world needs to worry about in 2017. (‘sif 2016 wasn’t enough…) CFR’s annual Preventive Priorities Survey ranks the top potential conflicts for the upcoming year, and is a great primer for the video.

Events

Canberra: Head along to the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World next Tuesday for the launch of Anthony McMichael’s final book, Climate Change and the Health of Nations. Let ‘em know you’re coming.

Also in the capital, join Peter Dean and ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre on Monday 13 February for a fascinating installation to the War Studies Seminar Series. This next session will unpack Australia’s strategic culture, and the extent to which it’s influenced by the ANZUS alliance. Check out the event details here.

Today is the golden age of intelligence. It’s a great time to be an intelligence officer. If our intelligence services were for-profit enterprises, investors would want to make long-term investments in them. Business is that good.

Why is this the case? It’s the coming together of two important developments. The first is that the number of critical national security issues facing US senior policymakers has never been greater than it is today. There have been times of greater danger—the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example—but there has never been a time in when the sheer number of issues has been so large.

Just think about the national security and foreign policy issues that President Obama and the senior leadership of our allies, including Prime Minister Turnbull, face every day—international terrorism; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; cyber warfare, espionage, and crime; drug trafficking and human trafficking; the crisis of governance in the Middle East and North Africa; Iran’s pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East; the saber rattling of North Korea; the aggressiveness of Russia, the rise of China, and on and on.

The second is that, for the vast majority of these issues, policymakers cannot understand them, they cannot make policy with regard to them, and they cannot implement that policy without first-rate intelligence.

Think about it this way: it’s possible, even easy, to find experts outside of intelligence services who can provide real insights on Japanese politics, Chinese foreign policy, or the economic, national and security implications of Brexit. But only an intelligence officer, only an intelligence service, can provide real insight into Iran’s nuclear warhead weaponisation work; the status of North Korea’s long-range missile program; and the plans, intentions, and capabilities of terrorist groups to attack us in our homelands. No, for those kinds of issues, intelligence, and in particular the collection of information that our adversaries don’t want us to know, is an absolutely necessity for senior leaders.

Here’s a second way to think about it—the way Mike Hayden, a former director of both CIA and NSA, likes to put it. Hayden says that during the Cold War, the enemy—say a Soviet tank battalion in Eastern Europe—was easy to find but hard to kill. You could see it from the ground or from space but you couldn’t destroy it without starting World War III. Today, just the opposite is the true: the enemy—say a terrorist in an internet café in Yemen—is easy to kill but very hard to find. Intelligence is all about finding. Intelligence specialises in the hard to find.

To me, there are three implications of the importance of intelligence. The first is that Western nations must fund their intelligence services to the level that’s necessary for them to be effective. Yes, intelligence services need to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s money, but they must receive what they need.

It’s my view that, in the US, we’re short-changing our Intelligence Community. In fiscal year 2010, ending 30 September 2011, the US IC received $80.1 billion in funding. In this current fiscal year, which ends on 30 September 2016, the US IC is operating on only $67.9 billion—a 15% decline in only six years in a world that’s placing more demands on intelligence than it did in 2010.

Second, intelligence services worldwide need to work closely together. The issues facing us all are simply too numerous and too complicated for one intelligence service to deal with on its own. A big part of my job as deputy director of the CIA was to build those relationships. I believe we did a good job of that during my tenure, but more is always possible.

And, third and finally, western intelligence services have a responsibility to work to enhance the capabilities of their partners who are the front lines of the toughest issues we face—those services in the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia. We need to expand our understanding of the threats and challenges we face by expanding the intelligence capabilities of all our allies and partners.

Publicly, leaders often only talk about their militaries when discussing the critical tools of national security. It’s time to add intelligence to that discussion.

The late edition of ASPI Suggests kicks off with US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s announcement on Thursday that all combat roles were now open to women. The US military has 30 days to enact the decision with no exceptions. Secretary Carter overruled a last ditch effort by the US Marine Corps to exempt women from infantry and armour positions. According to The New York Times, it’s seen positively by some serving members:

‘I’m overjoyed,’ said Katelyn van Dam, an attack helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps who has deployed to Afghanistan. ‘Now if there is some little girl who wants to be a tanker, no one can tell her she can’t.’

Turning to our region, the US Studies Centre has released a report on Vietnam as part of its new series (PDF), Emerging US Security Partnerships in Southeast Asia. Authored by Bill Hayton, the report examines Vietnams relationships with both the US and China as well as its balancing strategies.

Australia security and business communities are often seen as out of touch with another when it comes to China. For better insight into the private sector, check out this new joint Australia China Relations Institute–National Australia Bank report that polled 580 Australia and 1,000 Chinese business leaders on their attitudes to bilateral trade, free trade agreements, focal points for investments and more. Fun fact: 94% of Chinese business leaders are favourable towards business with Oz, but only 54% of Australian businesses are favourable about business with China. Download the report here.

Also in the Indo-Pacific, Miha Hribernik has a new short East-West Center report on using the Japanese coast guard as a foreign policy tool. Hribernik gives a good overview of the coast guard’s role, size and budget and highlights its centrality to growing partnerships with Southeast Asian countries in light of more acute Sino-Japanese strategic tensions.

For those into intelligence, check out snippets of interviews with 12 former CIA directors including James Woolsey, David Petraeus and John Brennan as part a new documentary called The Spymasters: CIA in the crosshairs by Showtime. For more on the themes that emerged during the film, listen to this NPR interview with the makers, Chris Whipple and Jules Naudet, on how the directors responded to questions on so-called ‘black sites’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ (36mins). The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti takes a closer look at the documentary here.

Two IR professors Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro on Monkey Cage blog argue only containment of the organisation is possible; the ensuing chaos after tearing down an ISIS flag will not be in US interests, local allies have antithetical goals and taking the ISIS territory would require at least 100,000 troops. Keep reading here.

Also worth reading on ISIS is Clint Watts’ new piece on War On The Rocks that reworks Burce Hoffmans’ research positing a spectrum approach for analysing al-Qaeda affiliates. Watts applies it to a post-Charlie Hebdo ISIS.

Islamist groups are also an issue in areas like the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this week’s cartography selection, the Congo Research Group has produced a map of some parts of the DRC showing no less than 69 armed groups in the area, including the (unfortunately named) ADF (short for Allied Democratic Forces) allied with Al-Shabaab and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The map accompanies a short essay on the weaknesses of the Congolese state apparatuses, notably the Army, and a lack of synergy between the government and donor partners. Keep reading here.

This week’s technology pick is a new report by CSBA that argues that the US military is losing its edge in electromagnetic spectrum capabilities. Authors Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger point to a lack of sustained investment but argue the trend can be reversed by developing new operations concepts and technologies. Read more here.

Podcast

For a different view on Afghanistan’s ground truth, listen to the ABC ClassicFM interview with war artist and filmmaker George Gittoes who was recently awarded the Sydney Peace Price. Gittoes currently resides in Jalalabad with his partner, and shares some fascinating insights on destruction vs creation, his movies about Afghan communities (including one in which he enlists a local ‘criminal mastermind’ aged 9 to act in one of his films), the security situation in the province and why the Taliban are they last hope of keeping out ISIS. Enjoy the music too!(43mins) Here’s a recent ABC video interview of Gittoes aka ‘Baba George’ with his young Afghan apprentices, one of whom escaped from ISIS. (7mins)

Video

For a more scholarly look at the region, experts Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin discuss the re-emergence of the Taliban and its rivalry with ISIS in both Afghanistan and Pakistan at a recent Carnegie Council event (1hr).

Welcome back to our weekly round-up of new reports, podcasts and other news in the defence, security and strategy world.

Today’s headlining item is a timely exploration by Usman Hamid on New Mandala of the human rights record of Indonesia’s presidential candidates Prabowo Subianto and, somewhat surprisingly given his clean reputation, Joko Widodo (Jokowi). On the Prabowo front, Hamid delves into unresolved cases of abduction and torture of democracy activists around 1997–98. For Jokowi, Hamid draws attention not to his personal record (because frankly, he’s pretty clean), rather the implications of his association with generals of questionable human rights backgrounds. It’s a recommended read for those interested in the finer details of Indonesia’s future leadership, particularly in light of Australia’s position on human rights.

War, huh, what is it good for? Quite a bit argues historian Ian Morris in his new book of that title. Here’s a thoughtful review from The Spectator. To give you a sense of the argument, the review begins with this challenging thought:

At the heart of this work is a startling and improbable statistic and the equally surprising and counterintuitive thesis that flows out of it. We are used to looking back on the 20th century as comfortably the most violent in all human history — the silver medal usually goes to the 14th — but if Ian Morris (a fellow at Stanford University) is to be believed, the century that could wipe out perhaps 50 million to 100 million in two world wars and throw in the gulags, the Cultural Revolution, civil wars, government-orchestrated famine, trench-stewed pandemics and any number of genocides for good measure was, in fact, the safest there has ever been.

Read more