Inside Defense
Nov. 25, 2009 -- The transience of Afghan extremist networks involved in the making and emplacing of improvised explosive devices is posing new challenges for the cadre of U.S. military officials charged with disabling these groups, a Defense Department official told InsideDefense.com today.
Unlike in Iraq, where officials had identified “five or six” national-level extremist groups attacking coalition forces with IEDs, in Afghanistan clearly defining and counting such groups is “impossible,” said Kenneth Comer, who is director of the Operations Research Systems Analysis Division at the Joint IED Defeat Organization. He is also JIEDDO's incoming deputy director for intelligence.
As part of JIEDDO's efforts to attack the network of extremists involved in roadside bomb attacks, organization officials use a so-called social network analysis, or SNA, approach. The idea is to understand how networks form, grow, change and learn -- and what causes them to “collapse,” Comer said.
Collapse, he added, can mean killing or jailing hard-core extremists who have no intention of making or keeping peace. But it also means helping those Afghans who became involved in IED attacks only through Taliban intimidation or enticement to resume their “normal lives,” he said.
“The ideas is you want to change the underlying cultural landscape so that people are doing something other than emplacing IEDs,” Comer said.
Gaining an understanding of the relevant social networks in Afghanistan is a “work in progress,” according to Comer. “Our ability to sense the right time to apply the right type of intervention differs almost village by village, mile by mile,” he said. “There is a lot more heterogeneous behavior in Afghanistan than there is in Iraq.”
In that environment, intelligence insights into the networks of bomb makers -- for example, by tracing the origin of explosives and other materials used -- are short-lived because relationships are constantly changing.
“I can map . . . the topology of the network as we envision it today, a Wednesday,” he explained. “By Sunday, the topology of that network is going to change substantially.”
Comer told InsideDefense.com he is fairly sure this kind of fluidity will remain. He also does not believe there is a “Taliban command center” that intelligence analysts simply have not yet found.
“There are almost certainly no emergent centralized nodes, which is what makes this problem so difficult,” he said.
Afghan extremist networks carrying out IED attacks receive “critical” help from groups outside the country, according to Comer. But these ties are not so vital that survival depends on them, he said.
Comer said the fight against what he called a “leaderless adversary” in Afghanistan forebodes the kinds of conflicts America will face in the future. “Afghanistan has a character that I believe we will see again, and we will have to deal with it,” he said. -- Sebastian Sprenger
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