Winning the War on Terror?

I have spent the past week in Turkey at a Nato counter-terrorism conference where a number of speakers dealt with the complete failure of the west to win the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world. It is a battle that ought to be easy to win, since as Bassam Tibi, a leading scholar of Islam and International Relations told the conference, Jihad doesn’t actually mean war and the vast majority of Muslims do not support violence. But while we were there, Turkish television showed US troops flattening the house of an Iraqi while laughing and shouting out: “See you in hell mother*******!” As the chairman of my panel, a Turkish professor, said, this footage was not guaranteed to help win hearts and minds. A few days later US troops joined an Iraqi assault on a mosque, in which at least 16 people were killed. 

So I was heartened to hear earlier this week that Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, had told students at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, many of them officers who have commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the US was losing the “battle of ideas” with al-Qaeda. "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as a country as to how well we’re doing in the battle of ideas that’s taking place in the world today. And I’m not going to suggest that it’s easy, but we have not found the formula as a country."

I thought for a moment that Rumsfeld had finally got it. But sadly he was talking about the continuing row in the US over the way in which the Pentagon was paying Iraqi journalists to publish “good news” about what was going on in Iraq. His views on what the US troops should actually do on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are somewhat less promising. A few weeks ago, I interviewed a US general about attempts by a number of senior US officers to introduce a more nuanced view of how to deal with the situation in Iraq.

You may remember the interest sparked in the US when a British staff college paper, written by a British Army brigadier, Nigel Aylwin-Foster, was published in the US Army’s house journal, Military Review. This was apparently part of a campaign by a growing number of US officers to push the need to win “hearts and minds” among the local population. Rumsfeld’s view of this is best summed up by an American who was at the conference who asked me angrily: “What are we supposed to do? Give the terrorists coffee and cake?”

That of course misses the point as most readers will understand but just in case there are any others with the same views as my American friend, we are not talking about winning the “hearts and minds” of the terrorists, we are talking about winning the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim populations whose anger at incidents like the raid on the mosque – which idiot decided it was a good idea to let US troops take part in that one? – allows the terrorists to feed off them like parasites. If we can get the Muslim communities on our side, then the terrorists have no support and are seen by everyone as the bunch of thugs they really are.

We aren’t just managing a D-minus in that Mr Rumsfeld. We are in triple-F mode. Thanks to incidents like the assault on the mosque we are not even in the game. All of which is a somewhat long-winded introduction to the talk I gave to the conference, a synopsis of a 10,000-word paper so count yourselves lucky to get the short version!

The Nature and Dimensions of Contemporary Terrorism

Synopsis of Paper by Michael Smith to the Nato conference on Global Terrorism and International Cooperation, Ankara 23-24 March 2006

The emergence of a number of Islamist terrorist groups during the 1980s is now widely regarded as representing a sea change in terrorist rationale. The terrorists of the 1970s - whether the self-proclaimed freedom fighters such as the PLO and its associated groups, the IRA or the Basque group ETA, or the urban terrorists like the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction - were relatively easy to understand and even to identify with.

These terrorists were unhappy with specific aspects of the society in which they lived and were using violence to force the changes they required. The aim was not to kill per se, but to extract the maximum publicity, to publicise the cause, and to wear down resistance to their demands. Excessive violence was regarded as counter-productive. When it occurred - often because the cellular structure adopted by such groups led to a temporary loss of control over maverick individuals - it tended to alienate their supporters and even many within the groups themselves.

But the new types of Islamist terrorists epitomised initially by Islamic Jihad and later by al-Qaeda do not  operate under the same set of assumptions.

They do not see themselves as part of society as it currently exists. Anyone – even fellow Muslims - is seen as expendable, making mass indiscriminate violence not only morally acceptable but in fact compulsory - a divine duty incumbent on any true believer. A further problem for western counter-terrorist agencies is the lack of any identification with western society and aspirations, which makes Islamist terrorism far less easy to understand and predict.

Domestically across Europe in particular, al-Qaeda infiltrates the Muslim community, exploiting any issue that divides that community from the rest of society, the most obvious being the Palestinian issue, but arguably the most effective being the Iraq War and the often racist attitudes displayed towards them by other elements of society.

Al-Qaeda’s recruitment campaign was inadvertently provided with a massive boost by the immediate reaction of the Bush administration and a number of European governments to the 9/11 attacks, and by the Iraq War, all of which were easily portrayed as anti-Muslim. 

Immigrant Muslim communities in western Europe tend to live in the most socially deprived inner city areas. Young Muslim men angry at the West’s reaction to 9/11 and frustrated by lack of work; a perceived lack of opportunity; and racism exhibited by their counterparts in the local white communities are easy cannon fodder for al-Qaeda recruiters and trainers.

Al-Qaeda and associated Islamist radical groups use the Internet to talent spot and recruit potential terrorists.  They set up or monitor innocuous Muslim forums or weblogs. A typical website might for example explain why Muslims should not marry non-Muslims or why Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. The idea is to elicit a response that will give the recruiter a way to build up a relationship with those that seem most susceptible to recruitment, pliable young men who want to know more.

These recruits are steered away from the weblog to private one-to-one e-mail conversations in which they are groomed for roles within a group initially portrayed as innocuous. For the most promising, trips to Pakistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are likely to follow. There they will receive "Jihadi" training before being sent back as part of the terror network. 

The swift production, in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, of a video featuring one of the bombers criticizing the West over Iraq suggests that such videos are a routine part of the training, whether or not a specific event is planned at the time of training, and that this recruitment is relatively extensive and formulated on the basis that the more trained operatives there are on the ground in a target country the greater the potential success rate. Many may never be used at all and begin to feel that they ought to do something, which could explain the second apparently copy-cat attempted bombings in London two weeks after the original blasts.

On the military front, al-Qaeda fighting doctrine mirrors that of classic guerrilla and special operations missions. They use classic asymmetric warfare. They advocate operating in small groups in vehicles that merge into the local environment – the Toyota Corolla is a favourite vehicle because it is a very basic car, very robust and marketed widely throughout the world, making its appearance unexceptional.

They advocate the creation of a number of logistics cells supporting each military team, made up of local members and sympathisers able to tap into the locally available resources and material. These teams, who are most vulnerable to detection, are kept ignorant of each other to ensure that if one is penetrated by hostile forces, the others keep operating. Again a classic cellular structure.

Al-Qaeda military tacticians openly urge al-Qaeda affiliates to cut the size of their mission units arguing that “small groups with good administrative capabilities will spare us big losses”. They advocate that such groups should be between six and ten-men strong, allowing them to carry out a number of missions –ambushes; small-scale hit-and-run raids; surveillance; kidnapping - while at the same time making them difficult for opposition forces to identify. They have a predilection for well-tried Soviet weaponry, the ever-reliable Kalashnikov AK47 in preference to the Armalite. The RPG7 rocket-propelled anti-tank grenade launcher rather than the Stinger surface-to-air missile.

Modern military aircraft have sophisticated defensive aids suites that can easily identify and deflect or destroy heat-seeking missiles. This is particularly true of special operations aircraft. But the RPG7, developed more than 50 years ago, has proved astonishingly effective against US Black Hawk special operations helicopters and even an RAF Special Forces C130 transport aircraft.

The Black Hawks brings us to another key strength of the al-Qaeda military forces. They conduct after-action reviews just like Nato forces. They pick over what happened after the event. They learn from their mistakes and they learn from their successes. There is some doubt as to al-Qaeda’s precise involvement in the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993 when US Rangers and special mission units had their helicopters brought down by RPG7 grenades. But they certainly claim involvement and whatever the level of their involvement they certainly learned lessons from the success, both in the use of the RPG7 rockets against sophisticated military aircraft and the unwillingness of US politicians, at the time certainly, to persevere with an operation at the expense of relatively small losses of personnel.   

At the heart of al-Qaeda, among the relatively small group of people who surround bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, there are relatively sophisticated operational security and counter-intelligence procedures, which have ensured that both men have managed to stay alive despite a very active operation to hunt them down, by US, UK and Australian special operations forces and other US agencies working with a specially created Pakistani police unit on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The most obvious example of this is in the great care they take in their use of electronic equipment, particularly since the exposure in the US media in 1998 that al-Zawahiri and leaders of other al-Qaeda affiliates telephoned bin Laden in the wake of the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran two years earlier. The then head of the NSA Michael Hayden told a congressional committee that this was "a setback of inestimable consequences in the war on terrorism". 

There have been some, particularly in the US, who have argued that since the current generation of Islamist terrorists are different from their predecessors in the scale of the murder and mayhem they are prepared to perpetrate, traditional counter-terrorist measures are redundant. This is a dangerous fallacy.

The most effective means of dealing with terrorists remains removing the conditions which provide them with a support base, whether that be on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan or among the Muslim communities of Europe. Fortunately, this appears to be a view shared by an increasing number of influential commanders within the US Army. Despite the recent upsurge in violence that followed the destruction of a Shi-ite Muslim shrine in Samarra, there are grounds for cautious hope in Iraq. If the Sunni insurgents can be persuaded, like much-better established terrorist organizations before them, that their future is best served in government, then the population in the Sunni triangle is likely to turn against foreign insurgents like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There are already signs that this is happening.

The eventual withdrawal of allied troops from Iraq will focus al-Qaeda on the apostate states which it sees as its main enemy, forcing these states to act more convincingly against the movement than they currently do and the tensions around al-Zarqawi and his psychopathic willingness to attack other Muslims are also likely to undermine the al-Qaeda support base. Al-Qaeda is in fact far more fragile and vulnerable than the politicians and the media would sometimes have us believe. It can certainly be beaten but it will take a concerted effort to win over the “hearts and minds” of those in the Muslim world who currently see violence as the only effective way to wear down western resolve, particularly over the Palestinian issue, something that could take a very, long time. The new attitude within the US military on how to fight the so-called Long War is a good start.

Comments

[john - Germany]

Excellent as your analysis is I think you are mixing two aspects of terrorism that are like oil and water. First you deal with the military tactics and strategy of Islamic based terror and demonstrate that there is nothing new or extraordinary in the methods they use. You can trace these methods back to the anarchists of the 19th century. A study of anarchism in Europe from the 1840s to the First World War would be instructive. In comparison to modern day terrorism the anarchists would have to be judged as more successful than their Muslim counterparts: they at least managed to assassinate one American president and several crowned heads of Europe, as well as initiate the First World War.
Then you move on to what you regard as the most effective way of dealing with terrorism, and that is to remove the ‘conditions which provide their support’. In other words invite them to become part of the parliamentary process. This has nothing to do with fighting terror, and indeed you cannot run both methods concurrently. You cannot fight an enemy and at the same time invite that enemy to the forum. It sounds good in theory and we have heard this over and over again in Northern Ireland for more than thirty years. It didn’t work there and it won’t work with Islamic terrorists. Terror is Northern Ireland ended when the terrorists decided to end it. And the reasons were nothing to do with the light of democratic reason, but their own loss of favour in the United States where people saw them suddenly as no better than Islamic terrorists. Anarchism ended in Europe for the same reasons, they were no longer in tune with the times and lost support. This had nothing to do with anarchists becoming parliamentarians or potential recruits being given a better standard of living. Like a virus it came, it destroyed, it disappeared. But one thing is certain it will return.
Your American commander actually has a good point. You cannot offer cake and coffee to an enemy. You either engage in a war or you engage in winning the battle of ideas. You cannot do both. I chanced to visit a history museum in Zambia. An uncomfortable experience for an European white man. We are portrayed as oppressors and the most telling image is a mural of a white hunter with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.
You cannot kill and convert at the same time.
Take another example. The American War of Independence. Would Lord North have won the day if first he had known where the Americas lay, and secondly parleyed with the Yanks and said surely we can reach some sensible agreement that benefits everybody and no sensible person would gainsay – or any Blair-like anodyne statement of recent years you care to use.
The Yank answer would have been get lost, get out of our country, leave us alone.
This is what the Islamics are saying and until we leave there will always be terrorism.
Or how would it have been if the French monarch had told the mobs of Paris that all they had to be was reasonable and everything would be magically sorted out. Dream on.
You are right to say that most Muslims do not believe in violence or terror. So Muslims are the only ones who can end it, not us. It is Muslim leaders who have to win the hearts and minds of their own people, first by getting the Americans and British to leave and then allowing Muslims to create and manage their own destiny. We may not like the result, but who are we the West to impose our ideals on others? It really flies in the face of history to suggest than democracy and human rights are God given universal principles and all the rest is heathen and savage.
Even the Puritans failed to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land after they had despatched the violent and cruel and licenteous decades from Elizabeth to Charles to the scaffold.

[Ian Mccarthy]

I am no fan of the US involvement in Iraq but Mr Smith reveals his bias when he states that the US killed 16 Iraquis in a mosque. Firstly, according to the news reports the attack was led by Iraqui special forces not by US troops. Secondly, the authorities have vehemently denied that it was a mosque and have claimed to have evidence that the combatants involved had been kidnapping and killing Sunnis. Surely Mr Smith should at least have pointed out that there are two sides to the argument.

[Chuck Unsworth]

All sorts of confusions here....

One can indeed fight enemies and simultaneously invite them to the forum. Military history is crammed full of instances of opposing Generals talking to each other, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

The secret negotiation/dialogue with the IRA is but one recent example. Admittedly it took many years for the IRA to 'lay down its arms' (whatever that actually means), but eventually direct hostilities ceased. Maybe another more prolonged example would have been the Hundred Years War....

What might be observed here is that terrorists or subversives or enemies may eventually change their minds, but equally it may take many years for this to happen. In most cases these conflicts cease when both sides come to the conclusion that it is in their own best interests to stop fighting and start formally (not clandestinely) talking.

Without those informal approaches nothing happens. The parlay, or temporary cessation of hostilities are part of the process. Of course wars may continue after such brief respites, but eventually they end.

The art of war is to place one's opponent in the position where he/she believes it is better to cease fighting - for whatever reason. And the skill of the General is to know how best and most rapidly to get one's opponent to that point. If that involves dialogue then so be it.

Leaders ('leaders', advisedly) of most countries, religions, even interest groups are often credited with having more power than they actually do. It's unlikely that many of them would continue to be leaders if they did not retain the support of those who put them there. Thus the current regime in Iraq is supported on two pillars, the vote of the indigenous population and the will of the American-led coalition. If either of those two groups no longer supports the leaders the whole edifice will collapse.

As to the reports on the raid on the 'mosque'; well, the crux of the matter is that there is/was a belief that the building was a mosque and that the US military led an attack on it - truth being the first casualty. So it's unwise to say more than now - some time post the event - there appear to be two different versions of what happened.

The problem for all of us is to establish whether this second version is the reality, or whether this is another example of Washington's news management process. Often, though, myth is more attractive and powerful than truth - and many wars have been fought on the basis of myth, not least the current Iraq conflict.

[john - Germany]

Let us not confuse war with revolution. War is between nations. It is a matter of foreign policy. Revolution or insurgency is inspired by an idea or a belief that takes hold among a group of people. The Hundred Years War ended with England exhausted and broke – the country no longer had the men to fight nor the money. The loss of practically all our French possessions, the backlash at home, the peasants revolts, the repression by the monarchy, were all consequences of this disastrous war.
We did not offer the Germans negotiations to end the Second World War. This was the total destruction of a country, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by allied bombing for no other purpose than the mistaken belief they would rise up against Hitler to end their own suffering. Lubeck was bombed not because it was a military target but to see how many innocent civilians could be killed in one night – it was terror tactics.
War has little to do with winning hearts and minds. Did Napoleon see it our way and stop fighting? Did the Boers? Did the Spanish? The Americans?
The point of war as Genghis Khan said is to destroy your enemy, steal his gold and rape his women. The Americans in Iraq using indiscriminate firepower, the theft of Iraqi wealth and torture have come pretty close to siding with Genghis Khan.
Blair is right to talk about the battle of ideas, but then he and Bush should never have invaded Iraq if they wanted any credence given to Blair’s (now new) dialogue with Muslims. I cannot see how it is possible to win over Muslims with a doctrine of pre-emptive strike.
Destroy dictators and free the people with democracy. This mantra sounds fine so long as one forgets the thousands who are killed by the invading democratic armies.
To put this simply, why is it that democracy currently can only be spread by war?
Why is it that democracy outside Europe has to be imposed?
And even here we are dealing with a vague definition of democracy. Indonesian democracy is nothing like British democracy.
If democracy is a burning torch of freedom, an idea that grips people and persuades them to sacrifice their lives in its attainment, then we have no need for invading countries. The people themselves with overthrow the repressors. According to Blair and Bush the universality of democracy is self evident. Yet it isn’t is it. Their answer is that we have to help these people, they can’t do it on their own.
But history does indicate that no successful revolution has been imposed from outside. Synthetically engineered government/democracy does not take roots. Revolutions come from within – the French , Russian, American, and English revolutions are all examples of this. The Communists were right to fear ideas, for they themselves knew that ideas once they take hold are impossible to eradicate.
Democracy came to Eastern Europe with hardly a shot being fired and under the tutelage of Michael Gorbatschow and Helmut Kohl. It happened without western leaders doing anything. Bush the elder wisely refused all neo-con pressure to crow over the ‘victory’ of democratic ideals and Thatcher couldn’t make up her mind whether she was for it or not – because she hated the idea of a united Germany.

[dave]

As USMC(ret) General Zinni said a few days ago , interviewed by Tim Russert on MSNBC, and I paraphrase --- " the mother (Rumsfeld) should have been fired."

My name is KNUT, and I have grounds for cautious hope.

[Anthony Cormack]

On the issue of "good news" being planted in Iraqi papers, for me that's a competence issue rather than an ethical one (I know others will feel differently). Media manipulation has long been a staple of successful counterinsurgency, from British ops in the withdrawal from Empire to Ed Lansdale in the Philippines. For my money we're in 11th commandment territory - thou shalt not get caught!

I think on the whole hearts and minds question it's worth noting the sheer awfulness of our public diplomacy. American public diplomacy in particular has been dire - they're losing arguments it should be relatively easy to win. They need to put more money into it, de-militarise much of it and frankly bite the bullet and do some stuff they don't want to do. First among these is probably to get some people with the right language and cultural skills and get them on al-Jazeera. Pronto. Join and shape the debate, actually talk to people. As things stand we're whingeing about indigenous news media while basically handing them control of the playing field. We have to accept that they are here to stay and that they largely corner the market. It's all very well setting up our own broadcast stations in Iraq, but if nobody listens to them (and they don't - apart from the already converted) we need to get real. This really isn't rocket science and, although things have improved during the course of President Bush's second term, it's frankly shameful and scandalous that a better fist hasn't been made of it. I also know hardly anyone who doesn't think our psyops (both British and American) have been pretty lamentable up to this point.

On the issue of hearts and minds and whatnot, I'd first of all refer back to Mick's point that it's more about treating with the population at large than the terrorists. On the matter of the terrorists themselves, I think we need to recognise that there are some we can break bread with and some for whom the only cure is quite frankly a bullet of a very, very long time behind bars. If we look at Iraq as a case study, for example, I'd argue that the Sunni insurgents are in the first camp and the foreign jihadists the second. The aims of AQ and its ilk are maximalist and it seems to me the case that in terms of reaching settlements there simply have to be certain key value based compromises which we simply can't make. We just can't - and shouldn't. But that's really not the point. The point is to target the fence sitters and the waverers. Successfully done this can help create the conditions in which the hardcore can be eliminated (in a more or less messy fashion). That's not to say it's either easy or painless, of course.

[Julian Williams]

I was heartened to read your article because it reflects much of what I think; this problem is about getting the moderate Muslim on our side. It is only the Muslims who can deal with Muslim fundamentalist doctrines. The fundamentalists have to be isolated in their own communities.

Many of the young Muslims, and their parents, must want to integrate and live modern lifestyles. They must be using the web, installing central heating and setting up businesses, just like we do. These people have an interest in peace and must be annoyed to find the fundamentalists giving their religion a bad name.

I enjoy a blog dedicated to news about the EU, it is well written, researched and ahead of the MSM. When discussing the Islamic problem I have put the above views down and got rank hostility to idea that moderate Muslims even exist and I have found myself isolated.

The biggest hatred comes from people living close to the Muslims, but there is clearly an undercurrent of Islamphobia, a deepening polarisation inside western society; Otherwise well spoken people with broad interests go mad when discussing the Muslim communities and are arguing that there is no way the Muslim communities can live with Western culture.

I ask them what is their solution? The reply seems to be give no ground (The site very quickly put up the cartoons to defend free speech)and ethnic cleansing!

I am aware that anti-EU is broadly associated with the far right, but actually it is also the stomping ground for thinking people who want to see accountability and a return to liberal democracy. This site is a good mix, so I am really alarmed that my views fell on arid ground and there was almost no sympathy for a course of action that seems so obvious to me.

Polarisation is not an answer. Western society is quite fragile and a protracted cultural civil war is very bad news and certainly not a way out of this mess.

[Chuck Unsworth]

Interesting that the BBC today reports some 'discussions' between the US and the 'insurgent' groups -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4885874.stm

Possibly the US has decided that it actually can talk to (negotiate with?) its stated enemies whilst fighting a 'war on terror' or a 'battle of ideas' (whatever either phrase may really mean).