Five fraught and futile years
Five fraught and futile years
By Edward Alden
Published: September 10 2006 19:05 | Last updated: September 10 2006 19:05
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Five years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US had defeated and occupied its adversaries in both Asia and Europe.
Five years after Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, that warned of the coming cold war, the US had built the Nato alliance, established the defence department and Central Intelligence Agency and devised a strategy for containing and defeating the Soviet Union.
But five years into the war against Islamist extremists, the US – in spite of dismantling the al-Qaeda network that launched the assault of September 11 2001 – finds itself bogged down in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and engaged in a desperate military, police and intelligence struggle with an adversary that appears to be growing.
“Although America and its allies have made undeniable progress in reducing al-Qaeda’s operational capabilities, we have not dented the determination of the jihadists, nor have we blunted the appeal of al-Qaeda’s ideology,” says Brian Jenkins of Rand Corporation, an expert on terrorism. “Al-Qaeda’s message continues to inspire angry young men to prepare and carry out violent attacks on civilian populations. The terrorist threat is more dispersed but still lethal.”
Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says: “For all its counterterrorism accomplishments, the US faces the unnerving fact that the ideology of jihad is spreading. A new generation of terrorists is emerging with few ties to al-Qaeda but a world view that derives from Osama bin Laden’s vision of an unending war against the west.”
The foiled UK plot to destroy US-bound airliners and the escalating violence in Iraq and Afghanistan are signs of an adversary that has lost none of its ambition to inflict harm on the US and its allies. A poll taken last month by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg found that just 23 per cent of Americans thought the US was winning the war on terrorism and 57 per cent said it was too soon to tell.
In that light, today’s fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks may come to be seen as the point at which much of America’s foreign policy elite – if not yet the administration of President George W. Bush – finally recognised that the country must stop reacting and start planning for what promises to be a long and uncertain struggle. The US has yet to devise a strategy for sustaining a generational battle with Islamist radicals.
Mr Bush, in the latest of a series of speeches designed to shore up flagging American support for the war in Iraq, last month called it “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”. He has increasingly taken to labelling Islamist militants as totalitarian, likening the conflict to the 20th century’s epic battles against fascism and communism.
But other than urging his country to stay the course, he has not outlined how that struggle might be won. Thus the US and its allies enter the next half-decade of the war on terror with only a vague idea of what the strategy, and the costs, might be.
John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent historian of the cold war, defined strategy as “the process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, objectives to resources”. Looked at this way, al-Qaeda and like-minded groups have employed a strategy of the weak. Not remotely able to match the US in military muscle or economic resources, they have sought through random dramatic violence to impose unacceptable costs on the US and allies in an effort to force them to withdraw forces from Muslim countries.
Mr Bin Laden, the still uncaptured al-Qaeda leader whose mythical status grows with each video-tape, was candid about his strategy in his 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” and subsequent manifestos, where he repeatedly scoffed at America’s low threshold for pain. In mocking tones, he dismissed the “disgraceful case” of Somalia, where the US pulled troops out in 1993 in the face of al-Qaeda-backed attacks. “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he wrote. “The extent of your impotence and weakness became very clear.”
By many measures, al-Qaeda’s strategy appears to be succeeding. Since that morning when suicide operatives left 2,996 bodies in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers, United flight 93 and the outer ring of the Pentagon, nearly 3,000 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The civilian dead in those two countries is thought to total well over 50,000. In Madrid, London, Bali, Riyadh and elsewhere, hundreds have died in terrorist attacks engineered or inspired by al-Qaeda since 9/11.
The Congressional Research Service in June put the cumulative cost to the US government of the “global war on terrorism” at close to $500bn (£268bn, €395bn), not including homeland security spending, which totalled more than $200bn.
The intangible costs have also been high. The sympathy for the US evident in the aftermath of 9/11 has evaporated. The invasion of Iraq, the images of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widely documented abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other US detention facilities has left the US reviled not only in the Arab world but even by many of its European allies, undercutting the moral authority that was an important part of the cold war triumph. Only last week did Mr Bush belatedly acknowledge the existence of secret CIA prisons for holding suspected terrorists.
In the second world war, the US matched ambitious aims (total victory over Japan and Germany) with virtually unlimited means (more than one-third of US gross domestic product was dedicated to the war effort). In the cold war, Washington combined limited ends (containing the expansion of Soviet communism) with still generous means (US defence budgets averaged 7.5 per cent of GDP, compared with less than 4 per cent in 2005 even after the post-9/11 build-up).
But in the fight against Islamist extremism, the US has lurched towards a strategy of highly ambitious aims backed by extremely limited means.
Initially, Washington appeared to define its objectives fairly narrowly. Four days after the attacks, Mr Bush promised “a series of decisive actions against terrorist organisations and those who harbour and support them”. The overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan followed soon after, as did the capture of senior al-Qaeda leaders and a crippling of terrorist groups’ financial networks. Those blows largely neutralised the organisation that carried out the 9/11 attacks.
But by his January 2002 State of the Union speech, Mr Bush had vastly expanded his original aims, promising “to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction”. The 2002 White House National Security Strategy – which laid out a rationale for the invasion of Iraq – said the US would counter the WMD danger through military force, using pre-emptive strikes to “act against emerging threats before they are fully formed”. Yet the US carried out that mission with a military force that never had the capacity to secure Iraq after the invasion. Administration dissenters who suggested the war could not be won on the cheap were summarily ousted.
The pre-emption strategy – so radical in its dismissal of long-standing international norms against preventive wars – has not outlived the unresolved conflict in Iraq, which has acted as a fertile recruiting and training ground for terrorists. This year, the White House revised its National Security Strategy, playing down the cleansing role of military force and insisting that the battle against Islamist extremists could be won only by supporting “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”. Mr Bush said last week: “The experience of September 11 made clear, in the long run, the only way to secure our nation is to change the course of the Middle East.”
While less reliant on military means, such an approach is even more ambitious than the pre-emption strategy, insisting that American security can be achieved only through the transformation of a region the US scarcely understands. Yet apart from small boosts to the state department’s meagre budget for “democracy promotion”, the administration has not mobilised anything like the resources needed, even assuming such an objective is attainable.
That lack of coherence has left much of the focus on the question of American “will” – exactly the grounds on which Mr Bin Laden believes the US is weakest. In July, Mr Bush said that in dealing with “the murderous ideology” of its adversaries, “there is only one effective response: we will never back down, we will never give in”. But Mr Bush has not asked the US public for tangible sacrifices in support of such lofty rhetoric. And with declining public backing for the war in Iraq, it is far from clear that he can make good on the boast.
As the war on terrorism lumbers on, foreign policy analysts are trying to address how ends and means can be brought into balance in a way that offers the west a hope of winning.
There seems little appetite in the US for ramping up the effort in order to match Mr Bush’s goals. The neo-conservative Weekly Standard last week called the war on terrorism a “quasi-war”, saying “there is no serious effort to mobilise the general public to support our efforts in the fight”. But its ideas for expanding that fight went no further than wider racial profiling and increased surveillance.
If the means are not to be expanded, the question is how to bring the ends in line with what Americans are willing to sacrifice. James Fallows, writing in Atlantic magazine, says there is a growing consensus among terrorism experts that the US should simply declare victory in the war on terror – having achieved much of what it set out to in weakening al-Qaeda – and “shift its operations to a long-term, non-emergency basis”.
That would mean treating Islamist extremists not as an existential threat on the scale of fascism or communism but as a dangerous adversary that can be managed using ordinary military, diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence means.
But five years after 9/11, the Bush administration does not appear ready to adopt a more modest, realistic posture for a struggle that shows no sign of ending soon. “We’re on the offence against the terrorists on every battlefront,” Mr Bush again insisted last week. “And we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”
By Edward Alden
Published: September 10 2006 19:05 | Last updated: September 10 2006 19:05
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Five years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US had defeated and occupied its adversaries in both Asia and Europe.
Five years after Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, that warned of the coming cold war, the US had built the Nato alliance, established the defence department and Central Intelligence Agency and devised a strategy for containing and defeating the Soviet Union.
But five years into the war against Islamist extremists, the US – in spite of dismantling the al-Qaeda network that launched the assault of September 11 2001 – finds itself bogged down in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and engaged in a desperate military, police and intelligence struggle with an adversary that appears to be growing.
“Although America and its allies have made undeniable progress in reducing al-Qaeda’s operational capabilities, we have not dented the determination of the jihadists, nor have we blunted the appeal of al-Qaeda’s ideology,” says Brian Jenkins of Rand Corporation, an expert on terrorism. “Al-Qaeda’s message continues to inspire angry young men to prepare and carry out violent attacks on civilian populations. The terrorist threat is more dispersed but still lethal.”
Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says: “For all its counterterrorism accomplishments, the US faces the unnerving fact that the ideology of jihad is spreading. A new generation of terrorists is emerging with few ties to al-Qaeda but a world view that derives from Osama bin Laden’s vision of an unending war against the west.”
The foiled UK plot to destroy US-bound airliners and the escalating violence in Iraq and Afghanistan are signs of an adversary that has lost none of its ambition to inflict harm on the US and its allies. A poll taken last month by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg found that just 23 per cent of Americans thought the US was winning the war on terrorism and 57 per cent said it was too soon to tell.
In that light, today’s fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks may come to be seen as the point at which much of America’s foreign policy elite – if not yet the administration of President George W. Bush – finally recognised that the country must stop reacting and start planning for what promises to be a long and uncertain struggle. The US has yet to devise a strategy for sustaining a generational battle with Islamist radicals.
Mr Bush, in the latest of a series of speeches designed to shore up flagging American support for the war in Iraq, last month called it “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”. He has increasingly taken to labelling Islamist militants as totalitarian, likening the conflict to the 20th century’s epic battles against fascism and communism.
But other than urging his country to stay the course, he has not outlined how that struggle might be won. Thus the US and its allies enter the next half-decade of the war on terror with only a vague idea of what the strategy, and the costs, might be.
John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent historian of the cold war, defined strategy as “the process by which ends are related to means, intentions to capabilities, objectives to resources”. Looked at this way, al-Qaeda and like-minded groups have employed a strategy of the weak. Not remotely able to match the US in military muscle or economic resources, they have sought through random dramatic violence to impose unacceptable costs on the US and allies in an effort to force them to withdraw forces from Muslim countries.
Mr Bin Laden, the still uncaptured al-Qaeda leader whose mythical status grows with each video-tape, was candid about his strategy in his 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” and subsequent manifestos, where he repeatedly scoffed at America’s low threshold for pain. In mocking tones, he dismissed the “disgraceful case” of Somalia, where the US pulled troops out in 1993 in the face of al-Qaeda-backed attacks. “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he wrote. “The extent of your impotence and weakness became very clear.”
By many measures, al-Qaeda’s strategy appears to be succeeding. Since that morning when suicide operatives left 2,996 bodies in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers, United flight 93 and the outer ring of the Pentagon, nearly 3,000 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The civilian dead in those two countries is thought to total well over 50,000. In Madrid, London, Bali, Riyadh and elsewhere, hundreds have died in terrorist attacks engineered or inspired by al-Qaeda since 9/11.
The Congressional Research Service in June put the cumulative cost to the US government of the “global war on terrorism” at close to $500bn (£268bn, €395bn), not including homeland security spending, which totalled more than $200bn.
The intangible costs have also been high. The sympathy for the US evident in the aftermath of 9/11 has evaporated. The invasion of Iraq, the images of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widely documented abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other US detention facilities has left the US reviled not only in the Arab world but even by many of its European allies, undercutting the moral authority that was an important part of the cold war triumph. Only last week did Mr Bush belatedly acknowledge the existence of secret CIA prisons for holding suspected terrorists.
In the second world war, the US matched ambitious aims (total victory over Japan and Germany) with virtually unlimited means (more than one-third of US gross domestic product was dedicated to the war effort). In the cold war, Washington combined limited ends (containing the expansion of Soviet communism) with still generous means (US defence budgets averaged 7.5 per cent of GDP, compared with less than 4 per cent in 2005 even after the post-9/11 build-up).
But in the fight against Islamist extremism, the US has lurched towards a strategy of highly ambitious aims backed by extremely limited means.
Initially, Washington appeared to define its objectives fairly narrowly. Four days after the attacks, Mr Bush promised “a series of decisive actions against terrorist organisations and those who harbour and support them”. The overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan followed soon after, as did the capture of senior al-Qaeda leaders and a crippling of terrorist groups’ financial networks. Those blows largely neutralised the organisation that carried out the 9/11 attacks.
But by his January 2002 State of the Union speech, Mr Bush had vastly expanded his original aims, promising “to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction”. The 2002 White House National Security Strategy – which laid out a rationale for the invasion of Iraq – said the US would counter the WMD danger through military force, using pre-emptive strikes to “act against emerging threats before they are fully formed”. Yet the US carried out that mission with a military force that never had the capacity to secure Iraq after the invasion. Administration dissenters who suggested the war could not be won on the cheap were summarily ousted.
The pre-emption strategy – so radical in its dismissal of long-standing international norms against preventive wars – has not outlived the unresolved conflict in Iraq, which has acted as a fertile recruiting and training ground for terrorists. This year, the White House revised its National Security Strategy, playing down the cleansing role of military force and insisting that the battle against Islamist extremists could be won only by supporting “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”. Mr Bush said last week: “The experience of September 11 made clear, in the long run, the only way to secure our nation is to change the course of the Middle East.”
While less reliant on military means, such an approach is even more ambitious than the pre-emption strategy, insisting that American security can be achieved only through the transformation of a region the US scarcely understands. Yet apart from small boosts to the state department’s meagre budget for “democracy promotion”, the administration has not mobilised anything like the resources needed, even assuming such an objective is attainable.
That lack of coherence has left much of the focus on the question of American “will” – exactly the grounds on which Mr Bin Laden believes the US is weakest. In July, Mr Bush said that in dealing with “the murderous ideology” of its adversaries, “there is only one effective response: we will never back down, we will never give in”. But Mr Bush has not asked the US public for tangible sacrifices in support of such lofty rhetoric. And with declining public backing for the war in Iraq, it is far from clear that he can make good on the boast.
As the war on terrorism lumbers on, foreign policy analysts are trying to address how ends and means can be brought into balance in a way that offers the west a hope of winning.
There seems little appetite in the US for ramping up the effort in order to match Mr Bush’s goals. The neo-conservative Weekly Standard last week called the war on terrorism a “quasi-war”, saying “there is no serious effort to mobilise the general public to support our efforts in the fight”. But its ideas for expanding that fight went no further than wider racial profiling and increased surveillance.
If the means are not to be expanded, the question is how to bring the ends in line with what Americans are willing to sacrifice. James Fallows, writing in Atlantic magazine, says there is a growing consensus among terrorism experts that the US should simply declare victory in the war on terror – having achieved much of what it set out to in weakening al-Qaeda – and “shift its operations to a long-term, non-emergency basis”.
That would mean treating Islamist extremists not as an existential threat on the scale of fascism or communism but as a dangerous adversary that can be managed using ordinary military, diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence means.
But five years after 9/11, the Bush administration does not appear ready to adopt a more modest, realistic posture for a struggle that shows no sign of ending soon. “We’re on the offence against the terrorists on every battlefront,” Mr Bush again insisted last week. “And we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”
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