Last week,
Washington roiled in revelations about the war on terror with reports of drone
strikes in Pakistan secretly approved by that government; NSA tapping of the
German Chancellor’s and French President’s phone calls along with dozens of
other heads of state; and what to do once the 2001 Authorization to Use
Military Force ends with the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Sadly, the
contradiction for the Obama administration as for George W. Bush is embedded in
the misguided phrase “global war on terror.” The concept of a war on
terror is not only flawed. Worse, it cannot work.
Americans have long
been subjected to many wars declared against drugs, poverty, crime, illiteracy,
racism and, of course, terror. None has worked. The reason is that
none of these scourges is a war and treating them as such usually produces solutions
directed at symptoms and not correcting actual causes.
Terror is a tactic,
ploy and tool to achieve larger ends. Lenin understood that. The
purpose of terror he asserted was to terrorize.
When adversaries do
not need nor possess armies, navies and air forces, terror is a highly
effective, less costly and more relevant alternative. As the United
States learned in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the most powerful military in the
world cannot defeat an enemy that owns no army, navy or air force when other instruments
required to overcome the fundamental causes that produce insurgencies and
terrorism are missing in action.
Further, the
vocabulary to define properly the “terrorist” adversary along with the
associated syntax and grammar to defang this threat is absent. Terms such
as Islamic violent extremism or radicalism; Jihadism; and other invented
phrases confuse not clarify the real issue which is not the acts of terror
however dire but the underlying causes that produce such violence and
contribute to the ability of these groups to attract followers.
In one sense,
creating a conceptual underpinning for waging what has been mistakenly called
the war on terror is simple. The issue is recognizing that these acts of
violence represent political revolutions albeit ones that incorporate larger
religious characteristics and perhaps share more in common with the religious
wars of the Middle Ages or the Crusades than 1789, 1848, 1917 and the Cold War
but must be dealt with in a broader context.
Geographically, the
centroid for today’s political revolutions lies between the eastern
Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal. Obviously, the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflamed the passions of Sunni and Shia
alike as well as given the more radical groups nearly unlimited ammunition in
pursuing their aims. Wahabism and Salafism remain affiliated to what the
West views as radicalism. Iranian Shia fundamentalism combined with
Persian arrogance vies with Saudi Arabia for influence in the Persian Gulf and
beyond. And the civil war in Syria is a microcosm of these competing
religious rivalries and hatreds.
A more effective
way of responding to these political revolutions is emulating treatment of
disease. Cures are directed at causes with the stricture to do no
harm. Both defensive and preventative actions to contain the spread of
infection are essential to treatment. Put differently, no matter how much
the specter of another September 11th tortures the American
psyche, at this stage these outbreaks are not existential as an epidemic of an
untreatable and highly contagious superbug might be. That does not mean
however, these revolutions could not metastasize into far greater threats.
And, in treatment,
the root causes and sources of potential contagion must be treated. Nor can the
toughest issues including confronting both friends and adversaries who are
inextricably entwined in these political revolutions be avoided and must be
part of any solution. This will require great political courage, as
neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia will react well to “tough love solutions” that
are based on protecting U.S. interests and not captured by the thrall of U.S.
domestic politics or oil wealth.
As this column has
noted, it is also inconceivable that the U.S. has not put in place an effective
public diplomacy campaign that supports moderate and peaceful Islam and
attacks, discredits and delegitimizes radicalism and extremism. During
World War II and the Cold War, propaganda was a powerful and effective weapon
that was put to good use by the allies. This needs to be repeated across
the full spectrum of black, gray and white propaganda and public diplomacy.
But the most
important first step is ridding ourselves of this promiscuous use of the term
war on terror and concentrate on dealing with the pathology of the political
revolutions that rely, not on microbes, viruses and germs to spread disease,
but on terror, violence and ideological rationale for achieving specific
aims. If we are incapable of this understanding, the road ahead will
neither be safe nor navigable.
Harlan Ullman is
Chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business
and Senior Advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council.
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