Ir Paper #2: Offense, Defense, Or Negotiation In The Long War Against Terrorism

VICTOR BENJAMIN TURNER MSFS-510 VICTOR CHA

OFFENSE, DEFENSE,

OR

NEGOTIATION

IN THE

(1,984

LONG WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

WORDS)

President Bush adopted a new eponymous doctrine after 9/11, laid out in a speech to West Point graduates in June, 2002. In it, he said, "Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror [GWoT] will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge."1 This speech was a foreign policy shift from what had previously in Bush's Administration been a realist, conservative, defensive outlook to an offensive, pro-active viewpoint. Yet over four years later with little success to show for the policy, Bush would fire Donald Rumsfeld for Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, and George Casey for David Petraeus as commander of Multinational Forces - Iraq. These moves were a specific admission not that defense and offense were unnecessary in the long war of GWoT, but that cutting deals, negotiation, and diplomacy were severely lacking in the equation and that his two new employees would help to change that.2 To understand how to strike the enemy's heart, one must understand what he cares about most. What is it that Al-Qaeda, the organization particularly targeted by GWoT, wants? Osama bin Laden, 1

White House, “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point”, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html (accessed December 9, 2007). 2 Tomdispatch.com, “Tomgram: Klare, Bush Goes Over to Imperial Defense,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/140248/klare_bush_goes_over_to_imperial_defense (accessed December 9, 2007).

in laying out his vision for Al-Qaeda, desires to lash out at American interests to shrink its hegemonic footprint in Muslim territories. Another key component is the jihadist desire for an independent caliphate, perhaps to be implemented in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia. But again, primarily Al-Qaeda as an umbrella group for a diverse crowd of angstful terrorist groups seeks mainly to eject external imperial influence from Muslim territories. This would qualify Al-Qaeda as more of an insurgent entity that employs terrorist methods to achieve its political goals, than as a straight terrorist group. According to the Department of Defense, terrorists use "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological." The US Army Field Manual 100-20 elaborates: "Acts such as bombing public places of assembly and shooting into crowded restaurants heighten public anxiety. This is the terrorists' immediate objective. ... The terrorist needs to publicize his attack. If no one knows about it, it will not produce fear. The need for publicity often drives target selection; the greater the symbolic value of the target, the more publicity the attack brings to the terrorists and the more fear it generates."3 It is more important to terrorists to hit symbolic, public targets than to attack strategic targets, since it is impossible for terrorists to win a pitched battle against a state's military. It is also arguably more important to hit targets in highly-networked democratic societies that are more sensitive to external shocks.4 What goals do terrorists hope to achieve? Goals vary a lot but they are almost always political and rarely random. The Irish Republican Army's terrorist campaigns were born out of extreme 3

Terrorism Research Center, “The Basics: Combatting Terrorism,” http://www.terrorism.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=5671&mode=thread (accessed December 9, 2007). 4 F. Gregory Gause III, “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 5 (September/October 2005), pp. 62-76.

dissatisfaction with the British presence in Ireland. Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan states its goals as challenging the Indian influence in Kashmir but also it seeks restoration of Islamic rule in its associated areas. Timothy McVeigh, in executing the largest home-grown terrorist attack on US soil, sought revenge for what he saw as illegal totalitarian governmental acts carried out at both Waco and Ruby Ridge against free American citizens. Political goals would almost imply directly that they must be dealt with politically in response. Offensive strategies have not panned out as well as was hoped by an Administration brimming with confidence in its military to solve all ills. Al-Qaeda loyalists safely re-locate themselves to pockets of the world where the US, for one reason or another, won't go into, such as the western provinces of Pakistan, or the remote regions of Iraq. Dozens of Al-Qaeda emirs have been captured or killed in many different countries, temporarily slowing down the movement's physical operations, but the underlying dissatisfaction and alienation within Salafism, Wahhabism, and anti-imperialism are more powerful, influential, and widespread than ever before. The United States cannot employ a solely defensive mode of attack either, because modern terrorism is diffuse. The US also cannot control movement of people worldwide (as it has at home with the Transportation Safety Agency's lockdown at airports), examine every shipping container, and maintain worldwide standards for security both because of the stress it puts on a system and because other sovereign governments won't stand for it. The United States and the international community have made great gains in securing some systematic vulnerabilities but there exist huge gaps: countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the chief breeding grounds for jihadism, are controlled by corrupt governments with many internal enemies. AlQaeda in particular has expanded its operations and spheres of

influence to many more countries since 9/11. The US is having trouble securing even its own physical borders. What the US can do in fighting terrorism is tailor a strategy to its historical strengths. The US has been known as the ultimate dealmaker, or at the very least, the deal-facilitator. With a promise of economic and political success upon negotiating a deal, countries stand to gain a lot by hitching their carriage to the US horse. The leverage the US has traditionally held in negotiations has allowed it the ability to get what it wants. Another strength of the US has been its appeal as a role model. By defending protection of individual freedom, habeas corpus rights for the accused, and the promise of a better tomorrow, the US has traditionally been an inspiration to the rational and oppressed worldwide. But the US has lost much of its moral and inspirational credibility as a result of post-9/11 policies undertaken by the Bush administration. Al-Qaeda, which suffers from being in a peculiar position of having some sympathy of people worldwide but not their loyalty, is only helped by events like Abu Ghraib and massacres of the populace, as it justifies their very public suspicions of American intentions. To a mujahed living in a small encampment in the cold mountains of the federally-administered provinces of Pakistan, it warms his heart to pursue extremism when he sees another innocent Muslim fall prey to American kafiruun. It reinforces his will when he sees American citizens complaining about being spied on by their own government in an effort to catch him, their own government consuming itself. American moral standard can be recovered quickly, however, through a revised, humble (yet realpolitik) GWoT policy. Apology is not likely to be felt by the international community if it comes from Bush -his charisma is less successful abroad than it is at home. But the next president can apologize very publicly for the human rights violations

that occurred and state that they are not representative of the American moral compass. The US can pursue open talks with many different parties linked to the GWoT, like Al-Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq, and so on. What the US can gain from offering to communicate, even if it ultimately gives nothing up, is the support of Muslim people, those who determine the degree of intermingling of insurgents with their communities, as they pick the strongest horse to follow. The Muslim community wants what anyone else wants -- security and prosperity and family -- but the US has not been showing itself to be supportive of those lately. Another spillover benefit from negotiation is public scrutiny. Modern-day terrorism has no qualms about killing innocent civilians to achieve a goal, and it can maintain deniability if the attack fails. Yet this is only an advantage in the short-run, in selecting targets and initially shocking a society. What has happened to Al-Qaeda however was that it overstretched in its indiscriminate killing of civilians. After a long series of dramatic bombings of markets involving many children, funerals, mosques, and popular sheiks, an otherwise politically indifferent population began to see Al-Qaeda in Iraq less as mere interlopers and more as destructive outsiders, and General Petraeus took this opportunity to cut a deal with them for security. As the US communicates with different parties, it can exert pressure on them to change their behaviors publicly, as murder of innocents and acts of violence are universally abhorred. Sadly, the US has not seized on its media savvy to expose the fallacies and poor moral standing of terrorist groups to its advantage. As a recent example of what could have been done, one of the benefits of the Hamas movement being elected into power in the Palestine, despite the US's undermining of its legitimacy, was Hamas would then be accountable to the will of the people.

Terrorists' ultimate goals are usually not in anyone's wildest dreams attainable. For Al-Qaeda, its ultimate goal is to establish a caliphate, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, where it can enforce strict Muslim law without external influences. It would be hard to galvanize support, even among the Muslim population, for a region where this existed. Most Muslims do not want to live under strict laws, certainly not under a terrorist group's. Plus, Muslims enjoy many of the benefits of being networked with the rest of the world. Therefore, publicly speaking with Al-Qaeda, publicizing them as much as possible, knowing its long-term goals are unattainable, counter-intuitively will show them to be ineffective and inert to potential recruits.5 This is essentially a counter-insurgency strategy What feeds insurgencies and terrorist groups ultimately is their ability to deliver their goals.6 Recruiting is easy because one is guaranteed to receive training and have a chance to kill sitting-duck coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But were the American presence to be removed from the Middle East in favor of Muslim security interests, short-term terrorist recruitment would plummet. What's left then is the ability to terrorize Iraqi and Afghani civilians, already catatonic from violence, into granting them their caliphate, and this is extremely unlikely to happen. Long-term recruitment and excitement for jihadist ideas will suffer then also. These benefits spring from a basis of negotiation and diplomacy and openness, the core strengths of American values. If the core assumption is that we must talk to our enemies, allies, and those standing on the side, that we have "expectations of peace"7, then our 5

Peter R. Neumann, “Negotiating with Terrorists”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 1 (January/February 2007), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070101faessay86110/peter-r-neumann/negotiating-withterrorists.html (accessed December 9, 2007). 6 Philip H. Gordon, “Can the War on Terror Be Won?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 6 (November/December 2007), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20071101faessay86604/philip-h-gordon/canthe-war-on-terror-be-won.html (accessed December 9, 2007). 7 Robert Jervis, “The Era of Leading Power Peace”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 96, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. 1-14.

options are more numerous, and our ability to play to our advantages of propaganda, human rights promotion, economic success, and international security will be exploited. From that basis, the benefits of tactics on offense or defense can be argued as the kindling for the fire of terrorism is extinguished. Otherwise the GWoT only addresses symptoms of increased terrorism and not its causes. In talking to Iran, the US can hope to reconnect with a historical ally and can achieve some guarantees for cooperation on how to handle Iraq, once the US pulls out. Iran is key to the security of Iraq and it has an actual interest to do so that it's actively pursued since the US invaded Iraq. What jihadists respond most to is dedication to one's ideals. They are radicals and they are idealists. They are often not stupid. They consider us, their enemy, to be weak morally. But the US has the moral high ground in promoting openness, universal human rights, and a better tomorrow. Jihadists and terrorists only gain when the US and other countries hypocritically betray their own value systems by violating international standards of law or by not being as righteous in their values as the jihadists are in theirs. Should America strengthen its links with other nations, encourage interpenetration of cultures so that the world's citizens see that they're all alike, and re-commit to ensuring the success of all individuals, all as a role model and not as an imperialist, then the fires of terrorist ideology will be extinguished, not for good, but reduced substantially.