Mission Accomplished? The American Conservative on the War on Terror

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:36:58 -0700



Mission Accomplished? The American Conservative on the War on Terror
Eric Garris, May 26, 2011

On May 2, Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The American Conservative asks six foreign-policy experts to consider the implications for the War on Terror. xxx

War on Terror Is a Fraud
By Andrew J. Bacevich | May 24, 2011

The killing of Osama bin Laden settles nothing, decides nothing, and repairs nothing. Yet the passing of the al-Qaeda leader just might serve an important purpose. We confront a moment of revelation: Coming across bin Laden comfortably ensconced in a purpose-built compound in the middle of a Pakistani city down the street from the nation’s premier military academy should demolish once and for all any illusions that Americans retain about their so-called Global War on Terror. The needle, it turns out, was not in the haystack but tucked safely away in our neighbor’s purse­the very same neighbor who professed to be searching high and low to locate that needle. Think we’ve been had?

Bin Laden was an indubitably evil figure. Yet the historical drama in which he played a role is not a morality play. Its central theme is not good vs. evil. It is instead the pursuit of power and advantage by whatever means necessary. In short, the theme is politics­dirty, cutthroat, no holds barred.

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush and more than a few other Americans insisted otherwise. The issue, they asserted, was freedom vs. oppression; civilization vs. barbarism; tolerance vs. bigotry; the law-abiding vs. the law-defiling; peacemakers vs. those who engaged in wanton slaughter; those committed to serving God’s purposes vs. those who twisted God’s words to serve their own malevolent ends.

As in the early days of the Cold War, Washington divided the world into two neatly defined opposing camps. “You are either with us,” Bush declared ten days after 9/11, “or you are with the terrorists.” There was no third alternative, no in-between, and no opting out.

The government of Pakistan, hesitating briefly, chose to be “with us.” Overnight, it became a valued partner. Pakistani interests and U.S. interests now aligned, bonded by the paramount importance of eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda. America’s enemies were now Pakistan’s enemies and vice versa­this at least was the prevailing assumption.

From the outset, that assumption was utterly false.

During the decades prior to 9/11, Washington’s relations with Islamabad had suffered through many ups and downs, the United States embracing Pakistan as an ally when it was convenient to do so and otherwise giving Pakistan the back of its hand. Neither the Pakistani elite nor the man in the street had any reason to trust Washington.

So despite constant cajoling and complaint, with generous U.S. military and economic subsidies thrown in, Pakistani efforts to snuff out Islamic radicalism have been, at best, half-hearted. Indeed, Pakistan is itself a state supporter of terrorism (directed against its archenemy, India) and in all likelihood would like to see the Taliban restored to power in Afghanistan (again as a curb against Indian influence).

Dissatisfied with Pakistani efforts to clean out Taliban sanctuaries inside its borders, the United States has taken matters into its own hands, expanding the use of missile-firing drones within Pakistan itself. Unwilling to acknowledge that they allow U.S. forces routinely to disregard their country’s sovereignty, senior Pakistani officials profess shock and dismay, thereby encouraging Pakistani anti-Americanism. Based on all- but-irrefutable evidence, it turns out that they have for years been harboring America’s public enemy number one.

Already in crisis, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan now stands on the brink of collapse. Diplomats will attempt to paper over the differences, with one side offering lies that the other side may pretend to believe. Their efforts may succeed in creating some semblance of normality. Yet it will be no more than a semblance.

More important is this: restoring even the appearance of purposefulness to the enterprise once known as the Global War on Terror has now become impossible. That war is a fraud. It exists only as a figment of American imagination. At great cost to itself and others, the United States has been playing the wrong game, falling prey to the tricks of its erstwhile friends, unable to recognize who its enemies actually are.

xxx

Fighting the Last War
By David Rieff | May 25, 2011

Closure is always a mirage, but at least sometimes victory is not. Whatever else they showed, the impromptu demonstrations in Washington, at Ground Zero, and in many other cities and towns across America, and the depth of the satisfaction but also of the near universal relief that followed President Obama’s announcement that the SEALs had killed bin Laden, proved how profoundly the country thirsted for a settling of accounts with the man behind the atrocities of 9/11. I see nothing wrong with such an act of vengeance, but please, let’s not confuse it with a strategy for the global war against the jihadis.

The stark truth is that while killing bin Laden may have left us happier the day after than we were the day before, our strategy, to the extent that we have one, remains the same contradictory mess it has been ever since it became clear that the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 had been only one battle in a very long war. Ten years later, U.S. forces are killing and dying to prop up a government far more corrupt than Mubarak’s in Egypt or Ben Ali’s in Tunisia­a government whose officials, or their relatives, seem more adept at vote-rigging than nation-building, at drug-trafficking than education, and at war crimes than at the rule of law.

All that blood and suffering and money, for what, exactly? It would be one thing if the center of gravity of the Long War were still in Afghanistan. But it hasn’t been for years. The country is a sanguinary sideshow, not worth a single American life, let alone the 858 members of the U.S. armed forces who have died in Afghanistan since Obama took office­60 percent of all American military deaths there since the invasion began on October 7, 2001.

It is in Pakistan­and indeed further afield in countries like Mali and Mauretania, in Yemen, Mindanao in the Philippines, and of course in the radical mosques of Western Europe and among the embittered young men they attract­that the war against the jihadis will be won or lost.

Bin Laden was a charismatic leader in the strict sense of the word. But he was no Hitler, no Mao. Killing those men probably would have led to the end of the regimes they had created, or at the very least moderated them enormously. It is true that among the jihadis there was a cult of personality around bin Laden, but jihadism does not depend on this veneration of the leader for its coherence, as both Nazism and Maoism did. To the contrary, it is a formidable political movement, an effective and above all adaptive terrorist network, and an ideology immensely appealing to many Muslims, even if that number is small in the context of the entire Ummah of over a billion men and women.

In killing bin Laden, we were fighting the last battle of the last war, while the new jihadi networks, as Marc Sageman has shown so brilliantly, are fighting the next war­the one from which the commitment to staying on in Afghanistan has distracted us. In this sense, the most useful effect of bin Laden’s death should be that we forget about him, draw down to a skeleton force in Afghanistan­or better yet, withdraw entirely­and instead focus on fighting the enemy that now poses the real danger to us.

David Rieff is a regular contributor to The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine.

xxx

Death of the Bush Doctrine
By Jacob Heilbrunn | May 25, 2011

Better late than never: thanks to the audacity of President Obama, who accomplished what George W. Bush could have back at Tora Bora in 2001, bin Laden has been condignly dumped into the ocean. His death has sent many Europeans into fresh spasms of moral superiority, prompting them to allege that America committed a war crime in polishing off the would-be Mr. Big of international terrorism. A Hamburg judge has even launched a criminal complaint against Chancellor Angela Merkel for having the temerity to announce that she was “glad” that he was dead. Meanwhile, America’s friends in Pakistan turn out to have been harboring its greatest enemy­and al-Qaeda has been thrown into turmoil.

Surely it’s time, then, to take a fresh look at the War on Terror? The fervor with which the claque of Bush supporters are championing torture and waterboarding as the true keys to the death of bin Laden suggests that they know the jig is up. The War on Terror, that ungainly phrase, has always been about the domestic as much as the foreign-policy front. The Bush administration deployed it to try to bludgeon the public into submission­the terror alerts, the warnings to the press to fall in line, and so on.

Now neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz are championing “the virtues of boldness”­more wars. Instead, Obama’s defanging of Al Qaeda­for that is what he may accomplish with the capture of information from bin Laden’s hideout­should signify a return to normalcy. No, terrorism won’t disappear. But a more sober, judicious approach, one that shuns the chest-thumping, the empty bluff and bombast of the Bush era, is clearly what Obama is pursuing.

He set the right tone with his restrained announcement of bin Laden’s demise. Refusing to release photos was sensible as well. The videos of a narcissistic bin Laden watching himself on television do far more to puncture the myth of the sage and virtuous leader than any photo of his death could achieve. Indeed, as the Arab Spring turns into summer, bin Laden is being revealed for what he was­a deluded windbag, droning on about the return of the medieval Caliphate.

Obama’s mission will now be to stay out of the way. He needs, and wants, to extricate America from Afghanistan. So he will press Pakistan to cooperate in Afghanistan. The loss of bin Laden is a catastrophe for Pakistan, which has been extorting billions from America. Now Islamabad has lost its trump card. And Obama has won breathing space from the welter of charges that he lacks the cojones to battle the bad guys.

Jacob Heilbrunn is senior editor at The National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.

xxx

Reform the Reforms
By Adam Garfinkle | May 25, 2011

Bin Laden’s death is an important inflection point in what used to be called the War on Terror. In a part of the world where politics are sharply polarized as “us against them” and highly personalized as well, leaders cum symbols mean a great deal in terms of recruitment and morale. Moreover, replacing bin Laden at the head of al-Qaeda will not be easy. He had charisma, the capacity to raise large sums of money, and the ability to unify an under-institutionalized organization made up of fanatics from many countries. The factionalism that has characterized al-Qaeda all along could now tear it apart.

Bin Laden’s death does not end the struggle with Salafi terrorism, however. There has been a certain decentralization of terror operations in recent years, what some refer to as the franchising of al-Qaeda. The security implications of this remain unclear, so we must remain vigilant. Beyond that, however, the psychological closure afforded by bin Laden’s death can enable us to change several policy directions that have gone astray in the last ten years.

First, we should shut down jihadi websites whose servers are based in the United States. Many will be amazed to learn that we allow such sites to function, but thanks to wrongheaded Justice Department policies, we do. As we turn the volume down on jihadi messages, we need to turn the volume up on our own counter-messaging to the Muslim world. Both phases of communications competition will require focused leadership, which is precisely what we have lacked in this area for the past decade.

Second, we should rethink the major reforms of the post-9/11 era: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Directorate of National Intelligence. Both “reforms” were poorly conceived and implemented. Both have introduced gratuitous layers of bureaucracy that do nothing to enhance the relevant organizations but instead slow everything down.

Third, we must roll back the institutionalized paranoia that has overtaken us since 9/11. Obviously our security procedures were too lax before 9/11, but we have really overdone it since. Having to take off our shoes before boarding airplanes; frisking elderly Irish nuns to prove we’re not profiling; messages above our highways reading “report suspicious activity”­all such nonsense communicates to would-be attackers that it is easy and economical to terrorize Americans. These self-inflicted wounds do not deter attack; they invite it, even as they sap the optimist spirit that is one of America’s greatest assets.

Finally, we need to examine unsentimentally the pattern of failures at the CIA. That it took the abundantly resourced American intelligence community nearly a decade to find this horrible man is an embarrassing case in point­one among many. Hopefully, the trove of documents and hard drives taken from bin Laden’s compound will help us reconstruct his movements since the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, and we will use the opportunity to rigorously uncover and repair the flaws in CIA sources and methods. That would be not a moment too soon.

Adam Garfinkle is editor of The American Interest.

xxx

How Much Does Osama Matter?
By Michael C. Desch | May 25, 2011

While Osama bin Laden remained the poster child for the Global War on Terror, he had become in recent years less central to it. Therefore his killing represents less of a watershed than many would think.

Bin Laden began with a bit part in the international brigades that fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After the Gulf War of 1991, he turned against the Mujahadeen’s allies the United States and the conservative regimes of the Gulf and launched a series of increasingly spectacular terrorist operations against U.S. embassies in Africa, the U.S.S. Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, and culminating in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite these successes, bin Laden quickly became irrelevant. The Bush administration crafted a brilliant campaign in Afghanistan to overthrow bin Laden’s Taliban hosts by combining the U.S. military’s most high-tech equipment with an extremely low-tech coalition of anti-Taliban Afghan militia forces known as the Northern Alliance. The iconic image of that phase of the Afghan War was of a bearded U.S. Special Forces operative riding an Afghan horse into battle carrying a laser target illuminator to steer precision-guided munitions to Taliban forces manning World War I–style trenches.

But even before the Taliban had been run out of Dodge … err, Kabul, there were signs that the Bush administration was taking its eye off the al-Qaeda ball. Planning for the second front in the War on Terror in Iraq was already underway in the fall of 2001 and hindered our hunt for the architect of 9/11.

In late November and early December of that year, bin Laden and a couple of hundred of his hardcore al-Qaeda followers holed up in a bunker complex in the White Mountains on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, ready to make their last stand. Rather than commit U.S. forces to finishing off bin Laden at Tora Bora, Bush instead left the job to a ragtag “Eastern Alliance” of Afghan forces who had not played much of a role in the defeat of the Taliban. The result was predictable: bin Laden escaped.

In retrospect, 9/11 may have been the acme of al-Qaeda’s effectiveness. Bin Laden had little presence in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, and what foothold al-Qaeda had was ironically in those areas where Saddam’s writ did not extend due to our no-fly zones. The secular Ba’athist regime and the Salafist al-Qaeda had little in common.

Following the U.S. overthrow of Saddam, al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq grew, and there was some evidence that the Sunni resistance for a time made common cause with al-Qaeda against the U.S. occupation. But bin Laden’s followers soon made themselves odious to their allies with their heavy-handed efforts to advance a political-religious agenda that went beyond fighting the occupation and preserving some semblance of Sunni power in a majority-Shia Iraq. The vaunted Anbar Awakening of Sunni tribes was driven as much by growing weariness with al-Qaeda as by the tribes’ fear of Shia hegemony in Baghdad.

The dirty secret in Afghanistan today is that al-Qaeda is now a miniscule part of the insurgency the United States faces. To be sure, many parts of the Taliban have more sympathy for the al-Qaeda theocratic agenda than the Iraqi resistance did. But the core of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Afghanistan is a nationalist backlash against our presence and our meddling in Afghanistan’s ethnic civil war. Given that, bin Laden’s elimination is likely to have little impact on our war there.

None of this is to deny that bin Laden was, as we used to say in Texas, “someone who needed killing,” or to gainsay the impressive tactical success of the counter-terrorism operation that brought him to justice. But bin Laden and al-Qaeda had become in recent years the least of our problems in the larger War on Terror, most of which were the result of our misguided response to them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michael C. Desch is a professor of political science and fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

xxx

Declare Victory and Come Home
By Ivan Eland | May 25, 2011

Now that President Obama has killed Osama bin Laden, he should declare the equivalent of V-J or V-E day and completely withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Obama also needs to assess whether a much-publicized worldwide “War on Terror” is really effective.

Statistics show that such publicity and the invasion of Muslim countries merely spiked retaliatory terrorism. The extremist threat is best fought with law-enforcement methods, using military force only as a last resort. Even then, force should be used only in the shadows by CIA and Special Forces operatives, to prevent the further radicalization of the Islamic world.

Obama should take an honest look at what caused bin Laden and al-Qaeda to target the United States­something the Bush administration never did. An introspective examination, absent nationalistic goggles, would show that bin Laden attacked the U.S. because of its profligate military and political meddling in the Middle East and Muslim lands.

There is no need for such meddling. The two pillars of U.S. policy in the Middle East are support for Israel and the use of U.S. military power to control oil. But Israel has grown into a prosperous nation, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and can defend itself against weak enemies without U.S. aid. Oil is a valuable commodity that will be produced and exported to the world market even absent American policing of the region. The United States realistically can reduce its military footprint in the Middle East and quit coddling odious autocrats such as the Saudis. Doing so would save lives­those of Muslims and U.S. military personnel alike. Ironically and tragically, American deaths from fighting the War on Terror long ago topped the number killed on 9/11.

At a time of record federal deficits, a more restrained military policy in Muslim lands could also save large amounts of cash, which could be returned to more productive uses in the private sector. Using Special Forces to conduct covert raids against terrorists, such as the one that killed bin Laden, is much cheaper than launching major military interventions in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya. The direct costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will top $1.4 trillion by the end of 2012. When all expenses are added, the Iraq War alone will cost $3 trillion. Not only are such invasions and occupations expensive, they are strategically counterproductive. They undoubtedly delayed the finding of bin Laden by diverting intelligence attention and assets from the task.

Let’s declare victory and come home.

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute.


http://www.amconmag.com/blog/mission-accomplished/

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