By Charles V. Peña
The following is an excerpt from "Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism" published March 2006 by Potomac Books Inc.
Readers can order the book from Potomac Books or from Amazon.
Because we use the shorthand phrase “war on terrorism” to describe the U.S. response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it is easy to believe that this war – like all previous wars – can be won by killing the enemy. Given that suicide terrorists are, by definition, undeterrable, it seems that we have no choice except to kill them before they kill us.
But the struggle the United States is engaged in is not war in the traditional sense, i.e., armed conflict between two or more nations. Ironically, we must take Clausewitz's admonition to know “the kind of war on which [we] are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature” to heart, but at the same time realize that his seminal manual for war is not a suitable guide because he wrote about war between political leaders of nation states. The war on terrorism is not against another nation state and thus not “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Indeed, the war on terrorism is not “merely the continuation of policy by other means.”
The war on terrorism is the “un-war” because it is unlike any previous war we have fought – which was acknowledged by President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but seems to have been forgotten because of Iraq. Our enemy does not wear uniforms or command military forces. They do not operate in or emanate from a specific geographic region. So U.S. forces with overwhelming military superiority and advanced technology will not be the appropriate instruments to wage this war. Precision guided smart bombs and cruise missiles are not smart enough to know who the enemy is and where they are.
This is a different kind of war that requires a different paradigm. We must shed conventional Western thinking conditioned by the European wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and more recently, Iraq. Instead of Clausewitz’s On War, the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu’s 2,300 year-old The Art of War is more applicable. War for Sun Tzu meant conflict as it occurs throughout all aspects of life. And the art of war is how to conquer without aggression: “Subduing the other’s military without battle is the most skillful.” The lesson for the war on terrorism is not that aggression is unnecessary or should be avoided. In war, aggression is inevitable and this conflict is no different. But the weapons and skills for the un-war will be different. Special forces rather than armor or infantry divisions will be the norm. Unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling expanses of desert or inaccessible mountain regions will often replace fighter pilots and foot soldiers. Arabic and Islam will be part of the syllabus for un-warriors.
More importantly, our enemy – the al Qaeda terrorist network – is more than just an organizational entity. So it is not a simply a matter of destroying it. Al Qaeda has grown from a relatively small group of radical Muslim extremists to a larger ideological movement in the Muslim world. The threat now goes beyond the al Qaeda that existed on September 11, 2001 to include a growing number of radical Muslim groups who share at least some of al Qaeda’s ideology, but many are not directly connected to or formally affiliated with al Qaeda. The core issue is the question raised by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in his now famous October 2003 leaked memo: “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?” With over a billion Muslims in the world, a strategy that focuses only on the former without addressing the latter is a losing strategy.
So what is a winning strategy?
The day after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush said: “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil.” And three days later in a radio address he said: “We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate the evil of terrorism.” The notion that evil is at the root of terrorism and that the course of action for the United States should be to eradicate evil is echoed by David Frum (former special assistant to President Bush and the person credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil” used by Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address) and Richard Perle (former chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush): “Terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win – to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.”
But terrorism is simply a tactic, not an enemy. As Eliot Cohen, a member of the Defense Policy Board in the current Bush administration, said, a war on terrorism “makes as much sense as if Americans had responded to Pearl Harbor by declaring a global war on dive bombers.” Moreover, terrorism can trace its roots back at least 2,000 years. Trying to eradicate it is a quixotic quest that does not focus on the actual group responsible for the September 11 attacks. It is exactly this kind of logic that led the Bush administration to wage a war against Iraq, even though the White House has conceded that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and its allegations of linkages between the former regime in Baghdad and al Qaeda remain unproven.
Fighting the un-war requires discarding the state-sponsored terrorism paradigm, which is traditionally defined as nations using “terrorism as a means of political expression.” This is exactly the wrong approach because al Qaeda's terrorism is not state-sponsored; it is privatized terrorism, independent of any one nation-state. To be sure, U.S. military action deprived al Qaeda of the sanctuary granted by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. While – thankfully – the United States has not been attacked again, the bombings of the Marriott in Bali, the HSBC bank headquarters in Istanbul, the train network in Madrid, and the London tube system have all been attributed to al Qaeda, which is indicative that the terrorist network is not dependent on state-sponsorship to be active.
The popular belief is that al Qaeda attacked America for “who we are” and because they hate us. But such thinking demonstrates an unwillingness to recognize the importance of “what we do” in motivating acts of terrorism. This is not to say that 9/11 was America's fault or that the United States deserved to be attacked. Nothing could be further from the truth. All acts of terrorism perpetuated against innocent victims are deplorable, unconscionable, and inexcusable. But we cannot afford to be blind to the effects of our own actions and policies. If we misdiagnose the motivations for al Qaeda's terrorism against the United States, then we cannot craft a proper solution to the problem.
We also tend to think of al Qaeda in organizational terms as a centralized hierarchy, much like an organized crime family. The popular belief is that if we can decapitate the leadership, e.g., capture or kill bin Laden and his top lieutenants, that we can collapse the organization. This may have been true for regime change in Iraq, but it is the wrong conceptual approach for al Qaeda, which is a distributed and cellular network. As such, while bin Laden and al Qaeda's senior leadership remain important targets, the organization itself must be painstakingly dismantled piece by piece until it is no longer operationally effective. This will not happen overnight, so we must be prepared for a long conflict.
But al Qaeda is more than just an organization. It is an ideology that has taken on a life of its own. The extent to which al Qaeda's radicalism has taken hold throughout the Muslim world is unknown, but certainly the U.S. preoccupation with Iraq for more than three years after September 11 (starting with President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” state of the union address in January 2002) has given time for the radical Islamic message to spread, as well as providing a rallying cry to recruit more Muslims to al Qaeda's radical cause.
Finally, we too easily assume that al Qaeda attacked the United States because they want to destroy America. While there is certainly some element of truth to this, it misses the fundamental fact that al Qaeda's struggle is first and foremost a battle for the soul of Islam. Thus, it is an internal struggle where the United States is, by and large, an external player. As such, the United States may not be able to win the war on terrorism in the conventional sense, but its actions and policies could lose the war if the effect is to incline the Muslim world to sympathize and take sides with the radicals.
Instead of embarking on another Iraq (Frum and Perle specifically name North Korea, Iran, and Syria as targets – as do retired generals and Fox News analysts Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely in their book, Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), a strategy for the war on terrorism must focus on the real threat to the United States: al Qaeda. Such a strategy would consist of three central elements: dismantling and degrading the al Qaeda terrorist network, a new U.S. foreign policy that does not needlessly create new al Qaeda terrorists, and homeland security against future terrorist attacks.