Wrong Way Warriors
Bush & Co. have failing strategy in terror battle, says former White House adviser
By Richard A. Clarke
New York Daily News
April 30, 2006
We have the terrorists "on the run." "Two-thirds of known Al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed." "Freedom is on the march."
The Bush administration, from the Decider on down, regularly repeat these kinds of assertions to convince the American people that things are going well in the war on terror that the President belatedly discovered on Sept. 11, 2001.
On Friday, the administration added a new one to the list: "Al Qaeda is not the organization it was four years ago." That statement came from the State Department's annual report on worldwide terrorism.
What the report does not say is that this is bad news. The organization itself may be less relevant, but the terrorists are as potent as ever. Because of the Bush administration's wrongheaded strategy, we are not moving closer to victory. In fact, we may be slipping further away.
Al Qaeda has morphed from a command- and-control organization into a movement — a many-headed hydra that is just as deadly and far harder to slay. According to the State Department report, in 2005, there were 11,000 terrorist attacks around the world resulting in nearly 15,000 deaths. Of these, 3,500 attacks occurred in Iraq, taking 8,300 lives. This is almost four times as many attacks as occurred in 2004. The administration says this is largely due to a new method of counting — but there's no way to paper over the deeply distressing trend.
Estimates of the number of terrorists and their supporters paint an equally troubling picture. The International Institute for Strategic Studies reported last year that there may be 18,000 Al Qaeda fighters at large (and growing). Opinion polls in predominantly Islamic nations generally show significant increases since 2003 in those who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda and/or hostile to the United States.
As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused in a leaked 2003 memo that expressed uncommon candor, "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting?"
Sadly, this is where the strategies of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld have put us: treading water as the tide rises.
Rent the 1966 movie "The Battle of Algiers" to gain some insight. It tells the story of elite French counterterrorism forces trying to stop terrorists who set off bombs in soda shops. The French start by putting up the terrorist group's organizational chart on the wall. Upon learning the identities of the "terrorist managers," they seek them out, torture them and kill them. Then they cross their names off with big red Xs.
Eventually they get them all. Then the French lose.
Why? The tactics they used alienated the population and helped spawn new terrorists by the day.
No matter how brilliant our law enforcement and intelligence agencies may some day become, the Bush administration's core strategy of simply capturing and killing the leaders and other terrorists will fuel the very same phenomenon.
Such actions, necessary at the tactical level, fail to address the reasons people are becoming terrorists. In fact, often the tactics used (such as torture and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib) generate more enemies.
It is past time our leaders developed a strategy that understands terrorism is not amenable to Harvard Business School organizational charts. British intelligence reports suggest that those who bombed the London subway on July 7, 2005, were not linked to any terrorist leaders or groups. They acted on their own because of what they believed was a Western war on Islam.
So, what should the Bush administration do? A little listening, to start.
The independent, bipartisan 9/11 commission called for a "Battle of Ideas" to dry up support for terrorist movements. So far, our leaders have reacted with a Madison Avenue-style pitch. They created U.S. government-owned and operated satellite television channel in Arabic to counter "lies" aired by channels like Al Jazeera. But almost no one watches our multimillion-dollar channel because American credibility in the Islamic world is at an all-time low.
The problem is not our messaging, it's our message. By invading and occupying Iraq when it was not threatening us, by letting abuses at Guantanamo and elsewhere go unchecked, the Bush administration has convinced the majority in the Islamic world that we are engaged in a "crusade" against them. It has also failed to work with our Islamic friends to create a counterweight to the ideological and religious appeal of radical imams.
So, as 9/11 commission chairman Tom Keane said late last year regarding the next attack on American soil, "It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when."
Clarke served in the White House under three Presidents and was counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council on Sept. 11, 2001. He is the author of "Against All Enemies."
By Richard A. Clarke
New York Daily News
April 30, 2006
We have the terrorists "on the run." "Two-thirds of known Al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed." "Freedom is on the march."
The Bush administration, from the Decider on down, regularly repeat these kinds of assertions to convince the American people that things are going well in the war on terror that the President belatedly discovered on Sept. 11, 2001.
On Friday, the administration added a new one to the list: "Al Qaeda is not the organization it was four years ago." That statement came from the State Department's annual report on worldwide terrorism.
What the report does not say is that this is bad news. The organization itself may be less relevant, but the terrorists are as potent as ever. Because of the Bush administration's wrongheaded strategy, we are not moving closer to victory. In fact, we may be slipping further away.
Al Qaeda has morphed from a command- and-control organization into a movement — a many-headed hydra that is just as deadly and far harder to slay. According to the State Department report, in 2005, there were 11,000 terrorist attacks around the world resulting in nearly 15,000 deaths. Of these, 3,500 attacks occurred in Iraq, taking 8,300 lives. This is almost four times as many attacks as occurred in 2004. The administration says this is largely due to a new method of counting — but there's no way to paper over the deeply distressing trend.
Estimates of the number of terrorists and their supporters paint an equally troubling picture. The International Institute for Strategic Studies reported last year that there may be 18,000 Al Qaeda fighters at large (and growing). Opinion polls in predominantly Islamic nations generally show significant increases since 2003 in those who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda and/or hostile to the United States.
As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused in a leaked 2003 memo that expressed uncommon candor, "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting?"
Sadly, this is where the strategies of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld have put us: treading water as the tide rises.
Rent the 1966 movie "The Battle of Algiers" to gain some insight. It tells the story of elite French counterterrorism forces trying to stop terrorists who set off bombs in soda shops. The French start by putting up the terrorist group's organizational chart on the wall. Upon learning the identities of the "terrorist managers," they seek them out, torture them and kill them. Then they cross their names off with big red Xs.
Eventually they get them all. Then the French lose.
Why? The tactics they used alienated the population and helped spawn new terrorists by the day.
No matter how brilliant our law enforcement and intelligence agencies may some day become, the Bush administration's core strategy of simply capturing and killing the leaders and other terrorists will fuel the very same phenomenon.
Such actions, necessary at the tactical level, fail to address the reasons people are becoming terrorists. In fact, often the tactics used (such as torture and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib) generate more enemies.
It is past time our leaders developed a strategy that understands terrorism is not amenable to Harvard Business School organizational charts. British intelligence reports suggest that those who bombed the London subway on July 7, 2005, were not linked to any terrorist leaders or groups. They acted on their own because of what they believed was a Western war on Islam.
So, what should the Bush administration do? A little listening, to start.
The independent, bipartisan 9/11 commission called for a "Battle of Ideas" to dry up support for terrorist movements. So far, our leaders have reacted with a Madison Avenue-style pitch. They created U.S. government-owned and operated satellite television channel in Arabic to counter "lies" aired by channels like Al Jazeera. But almost no one watches our multimillion-dollar channel because American credibility in the Islamic world is at an all-time low.
The problem is not our messaging, it's our message. By invading and occupying Iraq when it was not threatening us, by letting abuses at Guantanamo and elsewhere go unchecked, the Bush administration has convinced the majority in the Islamic world that we are engaged in a "crusade" against them. It has also failed to work with our Islamic friends to create a counterweight to the ideological and religious appeal of radical imams.
So, as 9/11 commission chairman Tom Keane said late last year regarding the next attack on American soil, "It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when."
Clarke served in the White House under three Presidents and was counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council on Sept. 11, 2001. He is the author of "Against All Enemies."
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 1:17 PM
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