It's time to reconsider the U.S. 'war on terror' policy

By Jay McDonough

The horrifying, 60 hour long siege on Mumbai has ended.  Ten gunman were responsible for at least 195 deaths and 300 wounded.  From an earlier report from the NY Times:

Bodies were extracted from the ruins of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel in the hours after the standoff with militants there ended on Saturday in a gunfight fire. At the main city hospital morgue, relatives came, clutching one another in grief, to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to at least 172. Funerals, among them ceremonies for two policemen and a lawyer, went on throughout the day.

Recent U.S. State Department report indicates terrorist attacks have been increasing every year, 25% in 2006 alone.  By any objective measure, the "war on terror" has been an abject failure.  Gary Kamiya has an interesting essay in Salon arguing it's the opportune time for a new U.S president to develop an alternative; a more effective approach to addressing terrorism.

(The war on terror) is unwinnable. Terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic as old as humanity, and until the lion lies down with the lamb, it will continue to exist. Waging a war on terror is a category violation, like waging a war on violence. Second, it is self-defeating. By invading Iraq to preempt an alleged terrorist threat, the U.S. greatly increased that threat. And by elevating terrorist groups, which pose no existential threat to America, to the status of state actors, the Bush administration enhanced their prestige. The number of terror attacks around the world has risen greatly since Bush started his "war," and hatred of the U.S. in the Arab-Muslim world has metastasized.

In a subtler way, the "war on terror" has degraded our national psyche. It encourages the U.S. to remain in a psychological state that is simultaneously fearful and aggressive -- an infantile state, one that prevents us from thinking clearly about how to address our real foreign policy challenges. The U.S. is too powerful and self-confident to act like a three-year-old having a permanent tantrum. One successful terrorist attack, no matter how horrific, should never have led to a fundamental change in America's geopolitical strategy.

Of course, Obama should not abandon the fight against international terrorism, but adopt more effective tactics. He should treat al-Qaida and its ilk as criminals rather than armies. Quiet intelligence work, coordination with allies and law enforcement should be used as much as possible. There may be times when military action is needed, but it should be minimized because of its negative effects. Obama should make it a top priority to address the conditions that fuel anti-American hatred. In Afghanistan, this means rebuilding the country; in Pakistan, not propping up unpopular despots like Musharraf; in Israel and the Palestinian territories, throwing the full weight of American diplomacy behind a two-state solution. When it comes to fighting terrorism, America's most powerful weapon is not its army, it is its brain.

In all endeavors, results matter.  Good intentions and big efforts are just great, but at the end of the day it's the score that determines the winner.  An objective look at the quantifiable metrics clearly indicate we are falling way behind here, and any reasonable cost vs. benefit analysis of the current war on terror strategy would dictate new thinking is in order.

The real shame here is that even calling for a objective look at the policy's effectiveness will be considered by some as raising the white flag, or soft on terrorism, or anti-military or even unpatriotic.  How dumb is that?

Comments

[zenpundit]

"He should treat al-Qaida and its ilk as criminals rather than armies. Quiet intelligence work, coordination with allies and law enforcement should be used as much as possible."

We have been down that road and it led directly to 9/11.

The law enforcement paradigm, while appropriate for organized crime or small, underfunded, localized, wannabe terrorists, is entirely inadequate for dealing with foreign groups of transnational reach, capable of fielding reasonably to well-trained paramilitary armies.

The law enforement model also de jure prohibits effective employment of intelligence agencies against terror groups. Countless posts on this blog, for example, have lobbied against using SIGINT capabilities in terror investigations even during the "war model" of conflict. I can only assume that the anti-SIGINT position heard here at Newshoggers would be even more adamant if we classified Osama bin Laden as a kind of Arab mafia don.

While the FBI, Scotland Yard, the NYPD can play an important and at times vital role in fighting terrorism, consigning them to tackling al Qaida or, say, Hezbollah, is a task beyond their capabilities, resources and training, even if fighting terrorism was their sole mission, which it is not.

[Immilioft]

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