Is the war on Terrorism still necessary? – Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Centre for Civil-Military Relations. He is also a senior editor of The Middle East Quarterly. Between 2002-04, Rubin  worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in OSD/ISA/NESA at the Pentagon, in which capacity he was seconded to Iraq. On a visit to Australia, Michael Rubin addressed The Sydney on Monday 27 June 2011.

IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM STILL NECESSARY?

MICHAEL RUBIN

On 2 May 2 2011, a U.S. Navy SEAL team ended a manhunt which had lasted almost a decade.  In a hastily assembled press conference, President Barack Obama declared:

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

As important as what Obama said, however, was what he did not say. His speech focused on the past and the effort that culminated in Bin Laden’s death. The future occupied just three sentences. “His death does not mark the end of our effort,” Obama said, adding, “We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

Vigilance, however, is not the same as pursuit of the war on terrorism. While Obama has increased the American troop commitment in Afghanistan and used unmanned predators against militants in six different countries, Obama has long perceived the war on terrorism to be narrow, focused more on Al Qaeda than on the wide variety of other terrorist groups, their state sponsors, or Islamist radicalism. As the United States prepared to go to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example, Obama lambasted the war as a needless distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden.  Obama declared:

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars. Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

As he prepared to launch his presidential run, Obama staked out a distinctly anti-war position. “The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close,” he declared on the Senate floor in January 2007. While he declared, having completed his first Afghan review as president, “I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future,” just nine months later he announced a timeline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan over Pentagon objections. Simply put, the president long differentiated between the hunt for Bin Laden, which he saw as legitimate, and the wider war on terrorism which he saw as not.

Accordingly, Bin Laden’s death provided a decision point about whether or not to continue the war on terrorism. For those who perceived the war on terrorism narrowly as the manhunt for Bin Laden or, at most, a fight against Al Qaeda, Bin Laden’s death provided natural closure. Immediately after Obama concluded his news conference, former New Republic editor Peter Beinart declared “The war on terror is over” and his New America Foundation colleague Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst, likewise declared, “Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror… It’s time to move on.”  The day after Bin Laden’s death, former president Jimmy Carter told CNN, “I would hope that this could expedite our exit from Afghanistan.” Democrats in Congress echoed his call. “This is our moment to drawdown. I urge the president to make a swift, safe withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan,” Mike Honda, a Democratic congressman from California, declared. “I’m in belief that timetable [to withdrawal from Afghanistan] should be tomorrow,” former New Mexico governor and Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson declared.

Nothing could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory faster than unilateral disengagement from the war on terror. Even if, as some analysts claim, fewer than 100 hardcore Al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan, those who believe Bin Laden’s death ends the war fundamentally misunderstand the ideology which motivates both jihadist terrorism and Islamist antipathy toward the West in general and the United States in particular.

Influential scholars and analysts consciously deny the importance of Islamist ideology in their quest to address the root causes of terrorism. University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has made a cottage industry downplaying Islamist ideology. In an article entitled, “It’s the occupation, stupid,” he explained that “suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance.” If only the United States removed American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, brought the American navy home from the Persian Gulf, and joined Islamic countries in demanding an end to Israel’s presence on land claimed by Palestinians and India’s presence on land claimed by Pakistan, then anti-Western terrorism would end, his argument goes.

This, of course, is nonsense. Suicide bombing has not been ever present, however, but has grown alongside Saudi Arabia’s and revolutionary Iran’s export of their own radical interpretations of Islam. While non-Muslim terrorists – Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, for example -have also engaged in suicide operations, they are the exception which proves the rule, as they also embrace philosophies which honor martyrdom. While occupation may provide a motivation to commit terrorism, ideology is a more important factor.

In 1946, the military intelligence division of the U.S. War Department – the predecessor of today’s Defense Intelligence Agency – charged its analysts to consider long-term threats to American security interests. Among the top threats they identified – two years before the creation of the State of Israel and more than two decades before the Six Day War led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – was the rise of Islamism. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was already actively involved in assassinating politicians it considered insufficiently dedicated to creation of an Islamist order. Likewise, today, Islamist radicals terrorising young women in Paris housing projects and bombing nightclubs in Java act not in reaction to occupation, but rather on an embrace of a once radical, but increasingly common strain of Islamic interpretation, one which Obama, for all his reported worldliness and his boyhood in Indonesia, does not understand.

Obama entered office determined to disassociate Islam from Al Qaeda’s terrorism and to launder the image of Islam sullied by those who carry out terrorism in its name. This was apparent during Obama’s 4 June 2009 address to the Muslim world. The president said he came to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” He emphasised the “common principles” which American culture and Islam share, for example, an emphasis on “justice and progress” and “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” and sought to cultivate Muslim pride when he credited Islam, not without reason, for carrying “the light of learning through so many centuries.”

Obama’s Cairo speech reflected his assumption that multiculturalism is always positive. It is the ability to walk into a sushi restaurant and order a mojito. Born to a Kenyan father, schooled in Indonesia and raised in Hawaii, Obama himself embodies multiculturalism. But for Islamist radicals, multiculturalism is the problem. While Obama’s Cairo address was meant to ameliorate conflict, for radical Islamists, his attempt to enunciate partnership and commonality between Islam and the West was a shot across the bow.

Within the Middle East studies community and Muslim advocacy groups, many scholars argue that the West misconstrues jihad. Both John Esposito, a prolific author and founding director of the (Saudi-funded) Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and, in Australia, Amin Saikal espouse this view.  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also promotes this view, and influences Obama’s worldview of Islam and that of his administration. CAIR, for example, declares, “Jihad means to strive, struggle and exert effort… There is no such thing as ‘holy war’ in Islam.” Esposito is more nuanced, but still obfuscates. “Jihad in Islam means the struggle to be a good Muslim,” he told PBS. Any military component is limited, he argued. “Jihad also means the right, indeed the obligation, of a Muslim to defend himself,” Esposito explained.

Both claims mischaracterise traditional Islamic jurisprudence. During the Golden Age of Islam between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, the very time which both Saudi and Pakistani extremists seek to replicate, most theologians understood jihad to be military. Moreover, the ninth century Islamic scholar Muhammad bin Isma‘il al-Bukhari, compiler of the most authoritative collection of reports about the Prophet Muhammad’s life and sayings, dedicated one-third of a volume to jihad as holy war.

The key to understanding why so many terrorists believe Islam justifies their actions and indeed holy war lies, like so many malignant ideological strains, is in Saudi Arabia.  In the 1970s, against the backdrop of the oil boom and concurrent influx of luxury goods into the newly-affluent Saudi society, Saudi theologians started promoting the idea that Western goods – color televisions, VCRs, Cadillac, and designer clothes – represented an assault against Islam as menacing as any military threat. They described a deliberate Western “cultural attack” which aimed to undermine Muslim faith in order to ready Muslim society for conversion to Christianity.  To these paranoid preachers, the Hawaii Five-O television series posed as much a threat as an Air Force bomber over Mecca.

Into this xenophobic tinderbox came a spark in the form of a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood adherent named Abdullah Azzam. After completing a doctorate in Islamic law in Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Azzam taught briefly at the University of Jordan, but was fired because of his Muslim Brotherhood ties, He landed a new job at ‘Abd al-‘Aziz University in the Saudi port city of Jeddah. It was here that a young Osama Bin Laden first met the man that would become his theological mentor.

Azzam added a new dimension to the discussion of the Western cultural assault: He argued that every Muslim had a duty to defend Islamic lands against the penetration of infidels, be they in the form of armies – as the Soviets in Afghanistan or over the airwaves, as American culture so often manifested itself. The Muslims’ obligation to fight was not optional, but rather was as mandatory as the Ramadan fast or daily prayer. Iranian officials developed a corollary to this argument. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, senior Iranian religious leaders, and the state-controlled Iranian press, for example, often describe a “cultural NATO” which seeks to undercut Islamic values by promoting everything from pop-music to McDonalds to feminism.  For example, on September 20, 2008, for example, Ayatollah Alam al-Hoda, the chief religious figure in Iran’s second largest city Mashhad warned against “soft threats” and “cultural NATO” and argued that the Iranian nation must resist any manifestation of Western culture.

Bin Laden was not the only jihadist to embrace Azzam’s notions, even if he is the best known. Western politicians and policymakers profess that Islam allows only a defensive fight and, indeed, professors like Pape can conclude, therefore, that a physical American presence in Islamic lands is the irritant that sparks terrorism. Such conclusions, however, project Western assumptions about what is aggressive and defensive upon Islamist radicals. The fact of the matter is that many Islamists believe that the United States, Europe, and Australia are on offense no matter what their foreign or military policy may be. The fact that we embrace Western norms and liberal values is for Azzam’s followers, a casus belli.

Washington’s refusal to understand that radicals like Bin Laden see America on the offensive and Islam under siege has long undercut American counter-terrorism policy. President Bill Clinton, for example, prioritised diplomacy over military strategies to because he sought to avoid cycles of retaliation. Neither the 1993 World Trade Center attack nor Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war on America led Clinton to order military reprisals.

American passivity did not convince Al Qaeda to cease targeting American interests, however. On 7 August 1998, Al Qaeda bombers struck the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 and wounding more than 4,000. Clinton ordered a retaliatory strike two weeks later, on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant suspected of making nerve gas and four Afghanistan terror training camps. The strike was more symbolic than real, however: Clinton timed the assault for the middle of the night in order to minimise casualties, destroying buildings but not terrorists. That the Afghan training camps were four of many long known to intelligence underscored Clinton’s hands-off approach.

Operation Infinite Reach did not signal a fundamental shift in White House policy, however. In 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the USS Cole as it pulled into Aden to refuel. Rather than lead Bin Laden to call off the 9/11 attack then being planned, Clinton’s refusal to retaliate simply emboldened Bin Laden, who famously lambasted America as a weak horse, and himself as the strong one.

Bin Laden’s death may be a major triumph, but he long ago ceased being more than the symbolic leader of global terrorism. The long manhunt forced him into isolation, cut off from his network save for messages passed to and from by courier, his ultimate undoing. Leaks regarding the cache of intelligence recovered from his Pakistani compound suggest he had grown increasingly frustrated at his inability to know, let alone control, the newer Al Qaeda generation. Because Bin Laden was effectively off-the-grid, jihadists actively debated how Al Qaeda should operate into the future. While some jihadist theoreticians like Abu Musab as-Suri, emphasized the need for a decentralized structure in order to defeat American surveillance and counter-terror efforts, others like Abu Bakr Naji emphasize the necessity to seek security through possession of territory.

Al Qaeda has spawned four major subunits: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); Al-Qaeda in Iraq; al-Shabaab in Somalia; and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a group spanning Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya and Chad. In addition, various Al-Qaeda affiliates and terrorist groups operate from Pakistan: the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda groups are entrenching themselves in Pakistan’s Punjab province, a densely-populated plain that is home to more than half Pakistan’s population. While this fracturing of command fulfills in part as-Suri’s recommendations, in each case al-Qaeda thrives in places with weak government. Hence, Al-Qaeda still has free reign in its Somali, Saharan, Yemeni, and Pakistani safe-havens to plan attacks against Western targets.

Bin Laden might be dead, but American failure to deal with the existence of these safe-havens suggests the same lack of American seriousness about counterterrorism that marked US policy through the 1990s and likely foreshadows deadly attacks on American soil in the future. There certainly have been attempts in the last two years. AQAP planned a Christmas Day bombing of Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009, averted only when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian engineer, failed to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear. Likewise, Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American born in Pakistan who sought to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on 1 May 2010, trained with the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas of Waziristan.

The worst thing Western leaders can do in the wake of Bin Laden’s death is to declare victory and come home or, as Bush-era former Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Blackwill has suggested, to talk to the Taliban and perhaps even cede control over Pashto-areas of Afghanistan to them. Not only did Taliban leaders prove themselves insincere during previous bouts of engagement (See “Taking Tea with the Taliban,” Commentary, February 2010), but there is also precedent demonstrating how territorial concessions backfire.

When Russia withdrew its forces from Chechnya after the first Chechen War in 1996, Islamist forces simply regrouped, enabling the 1999 invasion of Daghestan. Likewise, Israel’s withdrawal first from southern Lebanon and, five years later, from the Gaza Strip simply enabled Hezbollah and Hamas respectively to fill the vacuum, ushering in further instability and, in 2006, war.

The same has held true in South Asia. In April 2009, the Pakistani army scrambled to counter a Taliban push on Buner, a district just 60 miles from Islamabad. The back story to the Taliban offensive, however, dated to a 15 February 2009 agreement in which Pakistan authorities in the North West Frontier Province signed effectively handed the Malakand District over to a local Taliban group. Rather than end their struggle, however, the Taliban used the territory as a springboard to expansion. With their safe-haven established, the Taliban doubled the number of forces in the Swat Valley to at least six thousand, enabling their march southward.  Violence in Pakistan declined only after the Pakistani Army recaptured key Taliban strongholds of Swat Valley, Bajaur Agency and South Waziristan.

The war on terrorism is far from over. On an ideological level, the theological exegesis which the extremists embrace means that it is a war from which the West cannot disengage. The ideological battle will be to the death. If Washington, Brussels and Canberra walk away, Al Qaeda will simply find fewer obstacles to overcome as they plot attacks against the United States, Europe, or Australia.

More tactically, the West must conceive the battle against Al Qaeda as a global insurgency. Terrorists thrive in a vacuum. Just as the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan aimed to seize territory, hold it, and build on it, the West must also seize, hold, and build on territory now claimed by Islamist militants.  Basing abroad is essential. Not only do Western forces force Islamist radicals to retreat, but they also enable Western soldiers to gather the actionable intelligence which make snatch-and-grab operations possible. Knowing where a master terrorist slept last night is far less helpful than getting a tip where he will sleep tomorrow. Tactically, the Americans could not have killed Bin Laden if they did not have bases from which their helicopters could operate. Rather than walk away from Afghanistan, the United States and Australia should secure it and use it as a bulwark to move against other terrorist safe havens.  Engaging the Taliban would be like spraying gasoline over a log cabin, while trusting Pakistan as a partner to stabilise Afghanistan in a post-American order would be like housing an arsonist there.

To win the war on terrorism, the United States must leverage the territory it has denied extremists to quarantine and shrink other terror safe-havens. It should use Afghanistan, India, and the Central Asian Republics to quarantine Pakistan while pressuring Pakistanis relentlessly to eradicate the terrorist groups it currently shelters. If American and Australian forces must withdraw and the Afghan National Army is not yet capable of monopolizing the use of force in their country, then American and Australian diplomats must work with allied forces like India to fill the gap in Afghanistan. Better India exerts its influence in Afghanistan than let that country be ceded as strategic depth to an increasingly hostile and irredeemable Pakistan.

Predators and special teams must keep Al Qaeda groups on the run in Somalia, Yemen, and the Maghreb, but they are not enough to defeat the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. Ultimately, Western states must remain engaged to deny any safe-haven. This requires not only military action, but also building basic capabilities in failed states. Enabling any failed or failing state to become a safe-haven for terrorists has severe national security implications.

While all Westerners can celebrate Bin Laden’s death as a promise fulfilled, should any official in Washington, Canberra, or elsewhere see his death as the conclusion of a war rather than simply the end of a battle, historians will remember him as little more than twenty-first century Neville Chamberlain.