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Terrorism: Are we winning? |
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Written by McClatchy-Tribune
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Wednesday, 26 July 2006 |
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We are at war. Sometimes in the middle of summer, away from the bustle and unspoken fears that linger in Washington and New York, it is difficult to remember the battles that rage, not just in the harsh light of Iraq and Afghanistan but also in the shadows of a long, campaign to blot out terrorism.
But how are we doing? How is this war against global terrorism faring now, five years after the devastating attacks on Sept. 11? How can we judge it, debate it, clarify it? How can we come to grips with a war fought on many fronts, fought through the careful collection of computerized bits of data and human intelligence but also at the point of a gun?
Three books make compelling cases that we’ve bungled the war on terror, that we have made mistakes in the opening years of this long conflict, mistakes that, in some cases, have worsened the threat.
The three works, taken as a whole, provide a terrifying picture that is based on digging and newsgathering instead of the name-calling that so often characterizes what passes for a national debate in the war on terror:
 “The One Percent Doctrine”
by Ron Suskind
Suskind’s book is the slimmest yet, in many ways, the most ambitious — a doomsday tale masked as a John le Carre thriller. The former Pulitzer Prize winning reporter from The Wall Street Journal tells a story of the “notables” — President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the other leaders — and the “invisibles,” the agents and other figures who fight the war.
“The One Percent Doctrine” is the strategy voiced by Cheney, that, Suskind writes, “even if there’s just one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it’s a certainty. It’s not about ‘our analysis,’ as Cheney said. It’s about ‘our response.’ ’’
The doctrine changed everything. It separated analysis from action. For better or worse, misguided or not, it unleashed American power in the war on terror.
 “The Assassins’ Gate”
by George Packer
This takes on the second front in the war on terror — Iraq, a country now sliding toward civil war.
Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, deals with the philosophical underpinnings of the Iraq war, how the neoconservatives’ long drive to oust Saddam Hussein and change the equation in the Middle East was matched up with the war on terror.
It’s a complex tale, moving, too; one in which Packer has a great deal of sympathy for those who wanted to free Iraq from the yoke of a murderous dictator.
But the dream of a free Iraq, in Packer’s view, was transformed into a needless nightmare through slipshod planning and poor decision-making. America had a plan to win the war but no coherent plan to win the peace.
 “Cobra II”
by Michael R. Gordon
and Bernard E. Trainor
“Cobra II” is blow-by-blow account of the Iraq campaign from its conception to execution. It is the war under a microscope, a war that will likely be taught in military classrooms, a story told brilliantly by Michael Gordon, a New York Times reporter, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine general.
What’s fascinating about this account of the war is that the authors delve into the motivations of the other side, discovering, for instance, that before the conflict began, Hussein alerted his generals that the country had no store of weapons of mass destruction to use on the battlefield. The generals were stunned.
The authors conclude that the insurgency that erupted in Iraq “was aided by military and political blunders in Washington.”
Even after reading the books — a heavy summer reading list — how else can we assess how well we are fighting the war on terror?
Can the story be told through death counts, as gruesome a metric as exists? The Iraq war has cost the lives of more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Thousands of insurgents and terrorists, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have also been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
High-value targets such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives have been captured. But Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri remain at large.
Can winning and losing be determined in money? Congress has appropriated about $437 billion “for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veterans’ health care for the three operations initiated since the 9-11 attacks,” according to the Congressional Research Service.
How about measuring America’s standing in the world as the war on terror goes on?
“America’s global image has again slipped, and support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies like Japan,” reports the Pew Global Attitudes Project. “The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well.”
But that all has to be weighed by this: Zero domestic attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
That is a very big deal. But it may not be permanent.
Listen to three voices, three views, on the war on terror.
“I think the chances of a terrorist attack inside the United States, let’s say over the next 10 years, is close to 100 percent, and the chance of it happening over the next five years is 65 to 75 percent,” said former Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In Graham’s view, the war in Iraq has been a “very destructive distraction” from the wider war on terror, degrading “our capability to deal with the people who killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11.”
Graham fears that al-Qaeda is stronger now then it was before Sept. 11, more decentralized, with tentacles in 60 or more countries. Hezbollah and Hamas, two militant organizations now lobbing missiles at Israel, also gathered strength in recent years, Graham said.
“Under the direction this administration is taking, I don’t see anything that is light at the end of the tunnel of victory,” Graham said.
Graham Allison, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and who currently directs Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, offers a balanced assessment, toting up positives and negatives.
“Before 9-11, they declared war on us and we hadn’t noticed,” he said. “But after 9-11, everyone is awake. Secondly, the elimination of the terrorist sanctuaries and training camps in Afghanistan, that was a big deal. And then third, the capture or killing or intimidating of lots of the al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-trained terrorists.”
Among the failures, Allison said, was the inability to hunt down bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and waging the war in Iraq, which he called a “strategic blunder” in which America is “sowing a whirlwind.”
America’s standing in the world has also taken a hit.
Finally, Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a former director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council under Clinton, said what is needed is “a strategic approach” to separate moderates from radicals in the Arab world so that the struggle “becomes a question of crunching down the hard core of the terrorists.”
But what would a victory in the war on terror look like?
“It is ultimately about sorting out what Islam is going to be in the 21st century, and what the test of the faith will be and what its posture, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, will be,” Benjamin said.
“That seems to me a pretty good kind of victory. I don’t think we’ll ever be entirely safe from non-state actors’ violence again.”
Benjamin has voiced his opinions about altering the course of the war in a book he co-authored with Steven Simon.
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