[shadow.foreignpolicy.com] Peter Bergen has a new piece up on CNN's website that argues the United States can declare victory over al Qaeda and wind down the war against the group. Reading through his article, I found several places where I profoundly disagreed with his analysis and therefore with his overall conclusion that al Qaeda has been defeated.Every once in awhile some "national security analyst" will decide it's time to end the WoT because... ummm... well, because they're against war and stuff. This is one of those occasions...
First, Bergen begins with a false analogy by arguing that the current war is nothing like World War II, and that therefore there can be no culminating peace as was signed between the Allies and Nazi Germany. This argument implies that a definitive victory over al Qaeda, one on the model and scale of the victory over the Nazis, is impossible.
Bergen's not big on the oderint dum metuant idea, it seems...
The current war is indeed nothing like WWII -- it's an irregular conflict being fought against a non-state actor something like the Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, while WWII (for the most part), was a regular conflict fought against recognizable nation-states. It might therefore be impossible to sign a peace treaty on the decks of a battleship when this war ends, but it is entirely possible to win irregular wars and to win them as definitively and recognizably as WWII was won, as the examples of multiple conflicts throughout the twentieth century show. It does take a certain amount of ruthlessness, however...
For instance, from 1898-1954, the U.S. absolutely defeated three separate insurgencies in the Philippines, including a nationalist insurgency, an insurgency by local Mohammedans, and a communist insurgency. The British took on and repeatedly defeated insurgencies (the Boers, the Malay communists, and the Kenyan Mau-Mau, for instance), and it is actually difficult to find, beyond the Sandinistas and Castro's group, an insurgency that has succeeded in Latin America.
The Malay war was for a time the "handbook" on guerrilla warfare. The Brits weren't particularly gentle, though, so HRW and Oxfam and similar groups would no doubt be hissy fitting if it was going on now. We won't even discuss the Mau Mau war, which made the Malay war look downright friendly. And then there's the Sri Lankan war against the Tamil Tigers, which is still causing hissy fits and should be being mined as the new handbook on successful counterinsurgency.
Second, Bergen argues that the war against al Qaeda is not an "essential challenge" to the U.S. and thus can be safely relegated to some level of effort short of war. It is true that the death of 3,000 Americans in the first attack on the U.S. homeland since WWII was not an existential threat to the U.S., nor have the pinpricks that al Qaeda has managed since 9-11 posed a serious challenge to the continued existence of the United States. On the other hand, this assessment fails to take into consideration the global growth of al Qaeda, its absorption of every other major jihadist group on the planet, and its ability to take and control territory throughout the Mohammedan-majority world.
I don't agree that they've shown they can take and hold territory, even in the Moslem world. Unless the state is failed on the order of Somalia or Mali they always fold when opposed by even a half-trained military. Saleh let AQAP grow in Yemen for his internal political purposes, but Hadi -- with one foot still in the Saleh bucket -- has been able to rout them from Abyan and is apparently in the process of chasing them into Oman. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist version of the Somali warlord, and her neighbors are systematically ejecting them. They're not as hard to get rid of as, for example, DR Congo rebel commanders.
While I have heard some deride this spread as only threatening the 'garden-spots' of the world, we need to remind ourselves that it was from just this sort of uncontrolled territory that 9-11 was carried out, and once the 'garden-spots' are taken, our vital lines of communications and territories that we (apparently) care more about will be threatened. In addition, I would note that it has only been through our wartime footing that we have managed to keep al Qaeda in even this loose net. If we downgrade our effort, al Qaeda will be able to grow even faster and push its control even further.
Afghanistan's an exception to the Qaeda suppression rule because the actual nerve center of the the operation is in Pakistain. As in the case of Saleh, they've got their own reasons for keeping Afghanistan in Islamic turmoil. The fact that most of the country's leadership would qualify for straight jackets if they lived anywhere else is beside the point: the Pak government thinks al-Qaeda, the concept of takfir wal-hijra, and Islam in general are all tools of state policy.
Third and fourth, the article goes on to conclude that it is possible to "declare victory" and move on because 1) al Qaeda's offensive capabilities are "puny" and 2) U.S. defenses are strong. The first of these assessments is based on an assumption about al Qaeda that is unwarranted; that is, that al Qaeda's main objective and goal is to attack the United States. The recent release of documents from Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
make it clear that attacking the United States was (and is) but the first step in a staged strategic plan, a plan that begins by attriting the United States, and weakening it so much that the United States will be forced out of all Mohammedan-majority countries.
So what we're actually looking at is the "clash of cultures" that keeps being deprecated. Arabian culture is different from Western culture at a more fundamental level than is, for example, Han Chinese culture. It's more on the order of the antagonism between the West and Japan in 1936, only with a lot more population. We face a culture that would be, but for oil money, weak and non-productive but with a colossal inferiority complex. As a matter of religious principle they take half of the potential productiveness of society and reduce it to breeding stock. We can "declare victory" over that kind of system when there's no further need for Arabian oil anywhere. At that point the Arabian-descended cultures will revert to what they were 150 years ago, to whit: not much and no threat to anyone but the occasional shipping company.
The next stage of al Qaeda's strategic plan is to take over and control territory, declaring "emirates" that will be able to spread safely because the United States will be too weak to intervene.
This is what they're finding is easier than in theory than in practice, but it'll become easier if we suddenly become uninvolved in the process...
This means that the affiliates are not just dangerous when they attack the United States (which Bergen implies in his article), but are a threat to our security when they overthrow local governments and set up local emirates that have greater, global ambitions. I would also note that while polling data is important for understanding how well we are doing in our fight against al Qaeda -- and here the indications are positive -- it is a fact that insurgencies need only a tiny percentage of active support in order to be self-sustaining (usually defined as 5 percent of the populace). Al Qaeda would like the consent of the governed, but they are perfectly happy to violently enforce obedience to their rule when necessary.
They have no trouble with oderint dum metuant. In fact, I might go so far as to disagree with the idea that they would like the consent of the governed. As a matter of Islamic principle that's irrelevant...
And by the way: No al Qaeda affiliate or partner (including the Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Shabaab) has been deposed from power by an uprising of the local population alone. They have needed outside intervention in order to expel the myrmidons, even when the people have hated al Qaeda's often brutal rule.
You have to think twice about rebelling if you're liable to have your head chopped off.
On Bergen's second point, I agree that U.S. defenses are strong, but disagree profoundly with the current mission of Special Operation Forces as the right method to defeat al Qaeda. This counter-terrorism mission is based on killing al Qaeda members, i.e. attrition, a strategy that assumes that al Qaeda is still a terrorist group as it was in the 1990s. This is simply not true. Even then, the group's leadership aspired to bigger things, and al Qaeda has now succeeded in becoming an myrmidon group, one that takes and holds territory, recruits far more soldiers than we can kill, sets up shadow governance and attempts to overthrow governments around the Mohammedan-majority world.
I keep saying that they're a lot more like Fu Manchu than they are like, for instance, Communism. The idea sounds so stoopid on its face that it's easy to discount unless you actually sit down and read a few Sax Rohmer novels followed immediately by the newspaper. Especially a Pak newspaper.
While attrition can succeed as a strategy against terrorist groups (see i.e. the Spanish and French fight against ETA), it is absolutely counterproductive against an insurgency, which simply uses the killings to recruit more members and to fuel its propaganda.
Except that it did work for the Lankans. And for the Brits in Malaysia and in Kenya. However, brute attrition went out at 11 o'clock on 11-11-1918. Counterterror (and counterinsurgency operations in general) have to be intel-driven and the intel has to keep targeting the upper echelons of the enemy. Decapitation's a lot different from attrition, and it's more effective.
Fifth, some part of Bergen's declaration of victory is based on wishful thinking. He argues, for instance, that killing or capturing AQAP's bomb-maker will 'likely' cause the threat from AQAP to recede. This assumes that 1) the bomb-maker never trained replacements and 2) that AQAP is incapable of thinking up other ways to attack us. It also ignores the real threat from AQAP if it manages to overthrow the government in Sana'a and push on into Soddy Arabia.
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in their national face...
... but it looks like it's going to have to be through Oman...
Finally, the last sentence of his article is a straw man.
These "declare victory" epistles are usually attacking them from start to finish.
The objective of the Allied war on the Nazis was the same as every other regular war: To break the enemy's will to resist. It was simply not necessary to kill every Nazi in order to achieve this objective. The objective of irregular wars is rather different, however: to secure the population by clearing out the myrmidons; then holding the territory through persistent presence; and finally creating the political conditions necessary to prevent any further appeal by the remaining myrmidons.
It's that last area where we fell down in Afghanistan...
In this view, winning against al Qaeda does not depend on body counts,
Counterinsurgency never does. Didn't work for us in Vietnam, didn't work for the Sovs in Afghanistan...
but rather would look very much like victories against other myrmidons: the spreading of security for populations in Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and elsewhere; the prevention of a return of al-Qaeda to these cleared areas; and the empowerment of legitimate governments that can control and police their own territories. By these standards, we have not yet defeated al Qaeda; in fact, beyond Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, we have hardly engaged the enemy at all.
We've been ignoring the propaganda war. Qaeda should be an object of derision and contempt after eleven years of war and we still give Islam and especially Islamism too much respect. They spend their time posing and waving guns and blowing themselves up, almost as often unintentionally as intentionally. They're good at chopping the heads, hands, feet and probably other appurtenances off civilians but crummy at facing real soldiers. As a matter of national policy we should harp on those points every day. Instead we get "national security analysts" telling us to hang it up because they're tired of being at war.