The GWOT: Yer doin it wrong
According the Rand Corporation, there are a number of things wrong with the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror, including it's name and how it's being done. Rand has just released a study on the topic, "How Terrorist Groups End", which can be found here. Their conclusions? Among them, that calling it a war elevates terrorists to the level of "warriors" in the public mind. That the use of military force in the Middle East causes recruiting to jump for terrorist groups. That terrorists are criminals and should be referred to and treated as such. That military force should be downplayed and intelligence activities ramped up to deal with terrorism. And that our current tactics haven't hurt Al Quaeda so much as, well, strengthened it.
Let's see... Which side of the debate does that sound like? And Rand is not exactly a mamby-pamby liberal think-tank, but a very well-respected non-partisan one. Another fail for the Bush Administration - in fact, maybe it's biggest one, considering the GWOT is the centerpiece of it's foreign policy.
What does this mean for counterterrorism efforts against al Qa'ida? After September 11, 2001, U.S. strategy against al Qa'ida concentrated on the use of military force. Although the United States has employed nonmilitary instruments — cutting off terrorist financing or providing foreign assistance, for example — U.S. policymakers continue to refer to the strategy as a “war on terrorism.”But military force has not undermined al Qa'ida. As of 2008, al Qa'ida has remained a strong and competent organization. Its goal is intact: to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by uniting Muslims to fight infidels and overthrow West-friendly regimes. It continues to employ terrorism and has been involved in more terrorist attacks around the world in the years since September 11, 2001, than in prior years, though engaging in no successful attacks of a comparable magnitude to the attacks on New York and Washington.
Al Qa'ida's resilience should trigger a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy. Its goal of a pan-Islamic caliphate leaves little room for a negotiated political settlement with governments in the Middle East. A more effective U.S. approach would involve a two-front strategy:
* Make policing and intelligence the backbone of U.S. efforts. Al Qa'ida consists of a network of individuals who need to be tracked and arrested. This requires careful involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their cooperation with foreign police and intelligence agencies.
* Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa'ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.Key to this strategy is replacing the war-on-terrorism orientation with the kind of counterterrorism approach that is employed by most governments facing significant terrorist threats today. Calling the efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations — both in the United States and elsewhere — that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists' view that they are conducting a jihad (holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived as criminals, not holy warriors.
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
You can't declare war on a tactic. Well, you can DECLARE it all you like, but the concept is ridiculous.
Armies kill and break people and things, and you can't kill or break a tactic.
No matter how many terrorists you kill, someone can always pick up a grenade and toss it at civilians.
The joke is that Rand is acting as if winning the War on Terror is the primary objective.
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MaverickDago wrote:
Thats a nice way to poke at the Bush admin, but the bottom line is our gov is focused on combating terrorist groups, and the conditions that spawn them.
And they're doing it in the least effective way possible. That's the point of this study.
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You mean AFTER they cause those conditions in the first place, of course.
Theirs a massive problem with this study, its from 1968-2006, so the groups that ended, for a massive percentage, come out of the cold war, or consolidation. Groups like Red Brigade, Shining Path, Red Army Faction, October 22 Group, all communist based who broke up after the USSR failed, which arguably was a political action. Irish Peoples Liberation Organization, Loyalist Volunteer Force, are examples of groups that disbanded out of the Troubles. The Khmer Rouge were classified a terrorist group and they failed. The problem we face is conventional political methods don't work as well in the Mid East as they did with communist and right/leftists organizations.
Now you're gonna make me buy the thing. Have you read it, MD? I'm not sure what might be a better timeframe for such a study, since it seems to me they picked a decent starting point, with the first actions of the PFLP on the world scene. And is it fair to say they all "came out of" the Cold War? I don't think for example that the anti-Israeli terror groups are particularly tied to the East-West ideological differences, unlike Soviet catpaws like Brigatisti Rossi or Baader-Meinhof. I think in order to do the survey, they needed to look at the whole spectrum, and from the interview I heard, they did. And what stood out was that groups that did *not* have a definable goal and which were driven by non-political goals tended to last longer than those that met their goal or political ends, or were defeated in the process.
Their conclusion seems to be that Al Quaeda is not something we can wipe out with military force as the primary effector. Do you disagree?
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
I'll get a digital copy of it sometime this week. I just wish they narrowed down geo-poli regions a bit. I would love to see a report taking apart Asian terror orgs and this dismantlement vs Eastern European ones
See, my issue with Al Queda is that its not so much a terror group, as its a movement. Their tentacles don't extend into one region, like a Red Brigade, or a Hamas, or a IRA. We have to engage Al Quada on every front. Military, we have to hunt them, but we need to be on them economically. They are kicking our ass in North Africa because they bring in money and medicine, and sneak in their wacko ideology. A law enforcement/ military effort could work, but we need to be, as they said in Nam, winning hearts and minds.
So the fact that it covers a scope up to and including two years ago is a problem? Regardless,
It would seem to me that that's a pretty good ratio of ended to active to do a feasible study. It also makes sense that the groups you mentioned ended when their political goals were met (to varying degrees)... which is exactly what the report brief said. Also note that those groups the ended due to politics were only 43 percent of the total. Almost as many - 40 percent - ended through police and intelligence efforts... which is the method recommended in the portion that Robear quoted in his first post.
So if I understand correctly, you counter the argument of "we should focus on policing and intelligence" with "conventional political methods don't work as well in the Mid East"? It's a good thing that wasn't the recommendation, then.
Either I'm just misunderstanding your point or your missing theirs.
Edit: It looks like we were cross-typing.
Movement, ideology, call it what you will. Just because they're not localized to one region, the recommendations don't hold true? It just means that we require the local assistance of more than one national force to apply the solutions. We shouldn't be dragging our military around the globe hunting them; we should be bringing in money and medicine of our own and getting the local militaries to root them out... as was recommended in the report.
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You're confusing tactics and strategy. Of course we have to be taking some kind of action to appear to be doing something, but there is no "winning" the War on Terror. It's a fantasy, a phantasm, the best kind of enemy because it is both nebulous and easily redefined. What are the objectives of the war? What are the victory conditions? There are none, and there cannot be. It's the closest the world has ever come to the perfect unendable war.
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MaverickDago wrote:
Almost true - but then, it looks like Barney Franks might end the War on Drugs.
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
This kind of article is pointless. People who are against the war will say, "See? More evidence!" People who are for the war will trot out the same old excuses as always (it's unscientific, statistics can say anything, this war is somehow different, liberal bias, cherrypicking, it still works 7% of the time and America is #1 so we're gonna make it 8%, etc.). In the end no one is convinced of anything except that they're right and the other side is deluded and naive.
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That's funny, because exactly what they're doing is creating the best kind of conditions TO spawn them.
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Yeah, the US government's efforts to combat the conditions that lead to terrorism are kind of like punching a guy in the face while shouting, "stop bleeding!"
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Spore
It will work, eventually.
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Ha! Maybe with the bleeding, it will.
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Paradoxically, if we continue this disasterous policy of bombing the hell out of uninvolved countries, we will eventually run out of money, power, and influence. The resultant contraction of American power projection will result in our retreating to our borders -- which will lead to an end of anti-American terrorism.
Sort of the "we had to destroy the village to save it" school of neoconservative thought.
This is the internet! In our natural environment, atheists run in packs and have dictionaries! --- JoeBeDurndurn
We might be a lot closer to that point than we think. I'm amazed the way people assume that the U.S. is rich enough to fund wars all over the place while funding economic development programs for soft power, maintain bases 100 or more different countries, etc. when we have so much national debt and no clear way of how we'll return to creditor status versus the rest of the world.
We could still erase the debt by selling off various parts of the country, but that's a short term solution. That's the kind of thing you only do on the way down.
Can we sell Florida and Texas first?
I think people think the US can just keep borrowing because the global economy has a lot to lose if the US goes down the tubes. Foreign nations keep buying up our debt because they'd take a massive, perhaps fatal hit if the US fell. As our economy (and dollar) weakens, the less of an impact a collapse would have globally. Eventually nations like China are going to decide they'd rather have the money than the security and call in their debts.
Naturally we won't repay them and it'll all come down to war. Don't worry though, we still have a few good decades of economic and social decline to suffer through before that icing's put on the cake.
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Spore
Robear tosses verbal hand grenades at me every time I mention this, but I really think that Donald Rumsfeld could very well have been a pretty good SecDef under almost any other administration but this one for precisely the reasons you mentioned above.
If you look at the Rumsfeld plan prior to the Debacle in the Desert, the emphasis was on downsizing "heavy" units, increasing the capabilities of rapid reaction forces, reducing the footprint of foreign bases or eliminating them altogether, and establishing smaller, faster, more capable quick military responses to area crises that affect American interest. It would, ironically, have been precisely the correct military for the Bill Clinton administration. It was precisely the wrong one for the 19th century foreign policy of George W. Bush.
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I dunno. China is now purchasing baskets of currency to hedge their bets.
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I hear the walls of the new Olympic buildings are insulated with US T-Bills.
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
Really? I heard it was orphans.
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Spore
Nah. The orphans they send to America. The mortgages for the parents' houses are what they use to soundproof the new Beijing natatorium.
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I don't think it will take that long, Lobster. You're right about the outcome, but it's going to happen a lot sooner than that.
As soon as foreign citizens realize that propping us up by sending us all their wealth is hurting them more than it's helping them, game over. That's a hard thing to grasp, so it may take awhile yet, but it's fundamentally not sustainable, and is already causing havoc.
We've already been THROUGH a few good decades of economic and social decline. We are a sad shell of what we were thirty years ago.
And we'll accelerate that decline as long as we continue to throw money that we don't have at neverending, vaporous "wars." Imagine where we'd be at if we had dumped $6 billion a month into alternative energy research over the past five years instead of shipping it to Iraq.
I just don't see that as true. What benchmarks are you using to judge economic and social decline?
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.
The roads. The schools. Our illiteracy rates. Our poverty rates. Our government's fiscal policy. Our level of personal indebtedness. Our trade imbalance.
What's left in 2008 is a facade; we maintain our standard of living by borrowing it from foreigners and our kids. We don't pay for what we consume. We have no way to pay back the debts we've incurred.
So, yeah, sad shell of what we once were, back before wishful thinking replaced fiscal reality.
Our literacy rate is much higher now then it was? what are you talking about
Same thing with roads, schools, poverty rates - I'm willing to be those were worse in the 70's (roads probably depend on geography and whether you're in a red or blue state).
"Sometimes I go around saying, 'Kommisar Paulson has seized the commanding heights of the economy!'" - Paul Krugman, asked if recent changes to banking are socialistic.