"War"On Terrorism

Today at TPMCafe Senator John Kerry discussed ways our response to extremism and terrorism should be changed. As so many well informed people have been saying all along about the "War on Terror," everything about the way our government approaches the subject needs to be rethought from the bottom up. The basic strategy of Communist guerrilla recruiters, which was highly successful in so many places, was always to swell the ranks by winning over the hearts and minds of the local population. Terrorist organizations have adopted roughly the same strategy. The militaristic approach our nation has employed during the Bush years plays right into the hands of the recruiters.

The Rand Corporation, a conservative institution dedicated to research, analysis and planning, released a report describing our "War on Terror" as a failure. Today Dan Kovalik presented some of the information contained in the report. It's not surprising that the report concluded military action simply doesn't prove effective against terrorism. The extremely low percentage of successes enjoyed under a militaristic approach, 7%, exceeds the number I would have guessed.

The report goes into detail about the dangers of combating terrorism militarily. Military buffs could have given the same details free of charge. In any military action civilian casualties are bound to take place. This plays right into the hands of recruiters for covert organizations, because they are counting on an outraged populace to provide them with the fodder they need for the conflict. Che Guevara brilliantly exploited general outrage among Latin Americans in a conflict against, as he termed it, capitalistic imperial oppression. The United States has created a similar atmosphere of outrage among Muslims by brazenly bombing the hell out of wedding parties on numerous occasions in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan has been counterproductive to anti-terrorist goals, over the long haul, serving to galvanize Islamic extremists throughout Africa, the Middle East, Southern Asia and eastward.

Senator Kerry outlines a much different strategy, one that actually makes sense. The war we need to be fighting is an information war. We need to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world before our opponents do so instead. Engaging the people in discussions and permeating their world with knowledge would do more for our cause than a hundred years of war. We could keep soldiers in their countries for a century, and the only thing that would change would be the faces of the occupiers and the faces of the insurrection, as generations came and went. Information, discussion, knowledge, diplomacy: These are all things that could have made George Bush a great president, but were absent from the proceedings.

Imagine how much could have been accomplished to end terrorism with all of the money that has been squandered in Iraq. The humanitarian projects that could have been provided would have helped show the Muslim world that Uncle Sam is not the Great Satan. Three trillion dollars could dig a lot of wells, buy a lot of pumps, and supply many moor Muslims with running water, in those places where they have none. Imagine the schools that could have been built to teach Western philosophy. Reaching out with dollars in our hands would have gone far to changing the atmosphere of hatred for the "infidels." Luckily the struggle against hatred continues, and as long as we have hope for new leadership here there is still a chance of success in Islamic areas.

The brilliant views Senator Kerry expressed today again leads to the question of what voters could possibly have been thinking in 2004. The third point in his outline describes our need for legitimacy in the world. Clandestine torturing, indefinite detentions and covert attempts to destabilize sovereign nations have all left the United States with a credibility issue which isn't likely to go away anytime soon. Many people fear the United States because of our long history of secretly committing heinous acts against people in foreign nations. Witness our support of Augusto Pinochet and the dictatorial regime in Guatemala during the Reagan years. The world still has not forgotten the depths to which our government will stoop to achieve its perceived goals.

The fourth and fifth points complement each other nicely. The idea of knowing your enemy would have come in very handy before we invaded Iraq. The extremely robust group of people required to deal with a problem such as Islamic extremism needs to speak the language, be well versed in the religion, and very familiar with local customs. This sort of education needs to be expanded beyond the members of the intelligence community. Certainly intelligence operatives need to know these things, but members of the State Department and people involved with non-covert operations on the ground should also be educated in such a fashion. It's really not that difficult to learn their language. We should have 20,000 people in Afghanistan with such an education right now. The only thing keeping that from happening has been an essential flaw in our approach to the problem. The fifth point, be nimble, closely correlates with the fourth, because without deep knowledge of the language and culture, adaptation would be next to impossible.

The upcoming presidential election may very well be the most crucial day in the history of our nation. Should John McCain get elected all hope for a new approach to our problems will be lost. Currently Barack Obama shows an inclination to continue the militaristic approach to counter-terrorism, but in his case the idea of change doesn't seem impossible. In fact, should he receive the advice to change our strategy from the highly qualified people who would be in such a position to deliver it to him, it seems highly likely that he would listen to them. That is the sincere hope of this writer, anyway.