[Peace-discuss] Losing the War on Terrorism

[Paul Patton]

*Losing the War on Terrorism *
  *by Michael T. Klare*


President Bush has lost the support of most Americans when it comes to the
economy, the environment, and the war in Iraq, but he continues to enjoy
majority support in one key area: his handling of the war on terrorism.
Indeed, many analysts believe that Bush won the 2004 election largely
because swing voters concluded that he would do a better job at this than
John Kerry. In fact, with his overall opinion-poll approval ratings so low,
Bush's purported proficiency in fighting terror represents something close
to his last claim to public legitimacy. But has he truly been effective in
combating terror? As the war on terrorism drags on -- with no signs of
victory in sight -- there are good reasons to doubt his competency at this,
the most critical of all his presidential responsibilities.

Consider, for a moment, the President's view of the global war on terror.
While the White House keeps trying to stretch this term to include
everything from the war in Iraq to the protection of oil pipelines in
Colombia, most Americans wisely view it in more narrow terms, as a global
struggle against Muslim zealots who seek to punish the United States for its
perceived anti-Islamic behavior and to free the Middle East of Western
influence through desperate acts of violence. These zealots -- or
"jihadists" as they are often termed -- include the original members of Al
Qaeda along with other groups that claim allegiance to Osama bin Laden's
dogmas but are not necessarily in direct contact with his lieutenants. It is
in fighting *these* adversaries that the public wants Bush to succeed, and
it is in *this* contest that he is failing.

Why is this so? Consider the nature of the commander-in-chief's primary
responsibilities in wartime. Surely, his overarching task is to devise (with
the help of senior advisers) a winning strategy to defeat, or at least
pummel, the enemy and to mobilize the forces and resources needed to
successfully implement this framework. Choosing the tactics of battle -- the
day-by-day management of combat operations -- should not, on the other hand,
fall under the commander-in-chief's responsibility, but rather be delegated
to professionals recruited for this purpose. Bush has failed on both counts,
embracing a deeply flawed blueprint for the war on terror and then meddling
disastrously in the tactics employed to carry it out.

*Finding Terrorism's Center of Gravity*

As all the great masters of strategy have taught us, devising a winning
strategy requires, first and foremost, understanding one's opponent and
correctly identifying his strengths and weaknesses. Once that has been
accomplished, it is necessary to craft a mode of attack that exploits the
enemy's weaknesses and undermines or overpowers his strengths. In modern
military parlance, this task is often described as locating and destroying
the enemy's "center of gravity."

For example, in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
American war planners correctly identified the Iraqi center of gravity as
the highly centralized, top-down command structure of the Saddam Hussein
regime; once this structure was crippled early in the fighting, the Iraqi
combat units in the field -- however capable and dedicated -- were unable to
perform effectively, and so were easily routed. In the current war in Iraq,
by contrast, American commanders have been unable to locate the enemy's
center of gravity, and so have been incapable of crafting an effective
strategy for defeating the insurgents.

What, then, is the enemy's center of gravity in the war on terror? This is
the critical question that President Bush and his top advisers have been
unable to answer correctly. According to Bush, the terrorists' center of
gravity has been the support and sanctuary they receive from "rogue" regimes
like the Taliban in Afghanistan and, supposedly, Saddam Hussein in Iraq as
well as the mullahs in Iran. If these regimes were all swept away, the White
House has long argued, the terrorists would find themselves weakened,
isolated, and ultimately defeated. "The very day of the [9-11]
attacks," Condoleezza
Rice later recalled<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040228-1.html>,
"[Bush] told us, his advisers, that the United States faced a new kind of
war and that the strategy of our government would be to take the fight to
the terrorists. That night, he announced to the world that the United States
would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor
them." From this basic proposition, all else has followed: the war in
Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the current
planning<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050801/klare>for a war in
Iran.

The overthrow of the Taliban did eliminate an important sanctuary and
training base for Al Qaeda. But were "rogue" regimes ever truly the center
of gravity for the terrorist threat? The events of the past few years
unequivocally demonstrate that such has not been the case, then or now. (In
fact, we know that there were no links between Saddam Hussein's regime and
Al Qaeda.) The Taliban and the Hussein regime are, of course, long gone, but
Al Qaeda continues to mount assaults on Western interests around the world
and new manifestations of jihadism continue to erupt all the time.

"Al Qaeda has clearly shown itself to be nimble, flexible, and adaptive,"
observed terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation in *Current
History* magazine. "Because of the group's remarkable durability, the loss
of Afghanistan does not appear to have affected Al Qaeda's ability to mount
terrorist attacks to the extent that the United States hoped." Afghanistan
did provide bin Laden with training facilities, supply dumps, and the like,
"but these camps and bases...are mostly irrelevant to the prosecution of an
international terrorist campaign -- as events since 9-11 have repeatedly
demonstrated."

Far from impeding Al Qaeda and its offshoots, the overthrow of the Taliban
and, especially, the Hussein regime have been a boon to their efforts. War
and chaos in the Middle East, with American forces serving as an occupying
power, have proved to be the ideal conditions in which to nurture a
multinational jihadist movement aimed at punishing the West. As noted in a
recent CIA report, would-be jihadists from all over the world are flocking
to Iraq<http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/consequences/2005/0622prime.htm>to
bloody the Americans and acquire critical combat skills that can later
be
applied in their own countries. According to a summary of a CIA report in
the *New York Times*, the Agency has concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an
even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan
was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world
laboratory" for militants to improve their skills in urban combat. It
follows from this that the longer American troops remain in Iraq, the
greater will be the potential advantage to international terrorism. Indeed,
senior CIA officials have reportedly told Congressional leaders that the war
in Iraq is "likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other
countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than
they were before the conflict."

This prediction has been confirmed in recent months by terror attacks in
Jordan and Afghanistan that bear the distinctive trademark of Iraqi-style
combat, including the use of both suicide bombers in urban areas and
improvised roadside explosive devices, or IEDs. For example, the deadly
bombings in Amman, Jordan on November 9 have been described by American
intelligence officials<http://rempost.blogspot.com/2005/11/iraq-based-jihad-appears-to-seek.html>as
representing an effort by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the
self-styled Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, to apply combat techniques perfected in
Iraq to other countries led by pro-American regimes. Likewise, in
Afghanistan, U.S.
officials<http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=4610>have
told reporters that "militants are increasingly taking a page from the
insurgent playbook in Iraq and using more roadside bombs and suicide
attacks."

European officials are particularly worried by this phenomenon, fearing the
return to Europe of Islamic militants who have slipped off to Iraq for
first-hand combat experience. "We consider these people dangerous because
those who go will come back once their mission is accomplished," said a senior
French intelligence officer <http://www.religionnewsblog.com/9095> in late
2004. "Then they can use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe, or
the United States. It's the same as those who went to Afghanistan or
Chechnya."

*Botching the War on Terrorism*

Clearly, Bush's identification of rogue regimes as the center of gravity of
the terrorist enemy has proven faulty; nor, in light of this failure, has he
been able to correctly identify the true center. As suggested by most
serious scholars of Islamic extremism, the real crux of the jihadists'
strength lies in their ability to articulate and propagate a message of
radical struggle that inspires and activates thousands of disaffected young
Muslims around the world. As summarized by Hoffman of RAND, Al Qaeda has
evolved into "an amorphous movement tenuously held together by a loosely
networked constituency rather than a monolithic, international organization
with an identifiable command and control apparatus.... It has become a vast
enterprise -- an international movement or franchise operation with
like-minded local representatives, loosely connected to a central
ideological or motivational base but advancing its goals independently."

Obviously, defeating this "movement" requires a very different strategy than
the one now employed by the United States. Instead of military assaults on
rogue states, it requires a capacity to identify and apprehend the often
self-appointed "local representatives" of Al Qaeda, to disable the
movement's propaganda apparatus, and, most of all, to discredit its prime
messages. On a grand scale, this requires positioning the United States with
progressive forces in the Middle East, withdrawing from Iraq, and ending U.S.
support for repressive, regressive regimes like those in Egypt and Saudi
Arabia. On a purely tactical level, it means developing harmonious relations
with professional intelligence officials in other countries and developing a
communications strategy aimed at delegitimizing the jihadists' violent
appeals within the Islamic world -- an effort that can only be successful if
it enjoys the assistance of moderate Muslims willing to cooperate with the
United States.

The need for a strategy of this sort has been voiced by at least some
terrorism experts in the U.S. and by many knowledgeable officials in Europe.
But even those American experts who have advocated such an approach have
been repeatedly stymied by the President's unswerving commitment to his own,
demonstrably failed approach. No divergence from the official White House
blueprint has been permitted. To make matters worse, Bush and his top
advisers have insisted on micro-managing the war on terror, choosing tactics
that amplify the damage caused by their defective strategy.

The greatest damage has been caused by decisions made by top administration
officials, including the President, Vice President, and Secretary of
Defense, regarding the methods used to apprehend, confine, and extract
information from terrorist suspects and those associated with them. Most
significantly, this includes decisions to permit the abduction of suspects
on the territory of friendly nations, to use Europe as a stopover point for
the transport or "rendition" of suspects to Asian and Middle Eastern
countries where torture is routinely employed to extract confessions, to
allow U.S. interrogators to use methods that by any reasonable definition
constitute torture, and to tolerate the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners in
U.S. custody (whether at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or in secret CIA-run
prisons in Afghanistan, Europe, and elsewhere). Separately and together,
these decisions have severely alienated the very governments and religious
figures whose assistance is desperately needed to mount an effective
campaign against Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

To give just one example of the problems this has caused the United States:
On December 24, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA
operatives who abducted an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003 and "rendered"
him to Egypt, where he was subsequently tortured by Egyptian security
officers. This case has caused a major uproar in Italy, forcing even Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi, normally a reliable White House ally, to
distance himself from U.S. policies -- hardly the way to hold on to, no less
gain, allies in the war against terror.

Equally worrisome is the growing anti-Americanism espoused by supposedly
"mainstream" Islamic clerics in Europe. Prompted by what they view as an
unrelenting American campaign against the Islamic world -- the abuses
uncovered at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere providing but the most
recent confirmations of this outlook -- these clerics are promulgating a
militant message that, European intelligence officers contend, is inspiring
young Muslim men to volunteer for combat in Iraq or to form their own,
homegrown Al Qaeda-type organizations. It was a group of this sort, experts
believe, that staged the bombings in the London Underground on July 7 that
killed 52 people.

It is impossible to exaggerate the damage caused by the President's
improvident decisions. Yes, these tactics are immoral. Yes, they violate
American norms and values. Yes, they are in many respects illegal. All this,
by itself, is enough to warrant condemnation by Congress and the public. But
it is the lethal effect of these decisions on America's capacity for success
in the war on terrorism that most concerns us here. By employing tactics
that only serve to heighten the destructive consequences of a failing
strategy, President Bush has essentially guaranteed America's failure. In
the final analysis, the President's incompetent management of the war on
terror has helped the jihadists take better advantage of their strengths
while exploiting America's weaknesses. This does not bode well for the
future of global peace and stability.

For too long, the American public has accepted the myth of presidential
effectiveness in the war on terrorism. But as the practical implications of
Bush's incompetence become ever more apparent -- lamentably, through the
continued spread and potency of radical jihadism -- this last, crucial prop
of the President's support could soon fall away. As 2005 was the year in
which Bush's fatal incompetence in domestic affairs was revealed to all
through the tragedy of Katrina and New Orleans, 2006 could prove to be the
year in which his failed leadership in the war on terror finally comes back
to haunt him.

*Michael Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at
Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The
Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported
Petroleum<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805073132/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>(Owl
Books) as well as Resource
Wars, The New Landscape of Global
Conflict<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805055762/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>
*.

(c) 2006 Tom Engelhardt
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