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Changing the Paradigm of the War by Steven E. Daskal
DNI Editor's note: Steve Daskal is a former
intelligence officer with considerable experience observing the Middle
East. In this paper, he makes several observations on the nature
of fourth generation warfare and the form it may take in that region.
Whether you agree or not, I trust you will find them challenging and
provocative. Like all contributions to DNI, the opinions he expresses
are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of DNI or of our other
contributors.
Changing the Paradigm of the War
Steven E. Daskal
November 7, 2003
Republished with permission of the author.
WHAT THE ENEMY ISN'T
To best explain the current conflict, it is important
to begin by recognizing that by calling it a "global war on terrorism,"
we confuse ourselves, annoy most of our potential allies, and still
alienate not only our enemies but many of the "undecideds" in between—including
many of our Cold War era allies. Terrorism is a tactic of the economically,
technologically, and militarily weak against the strong. Terrorism is
not an enemy, any more than one can say that "tanks" or "automatic weapons"
or "submarines" are the enemy. They are weapons, with associated tactics
and concepts of operation that can be used by different actors to implement
various strategies.
WHO THE ENEMY IS
It is impossible to win a war if one either cannot
identify the adversary, or so thoroughly mis-identifies it as to be
unable to effectively recognize it, understand it, and engage it at
a point or points that exploit its weaknesses and our strengths. To
characterize the enemy, it is best to characterize those who are using
or supporting the use of terrorism against the American people and the
United States.
I think it is fair and reasonable to identify the
enemy as Islamist extremism. To render that as something more than a
slogan, let me begin by noting that the Islamist ideology is not Islam.
Not all Muslims are Islamists, but it has become the dominant application
of Islam in the overly politicized modern age.
The Islamist ideology is an outgrowth of Islam,
and both major branches of Islam—Sunni and Shi'a—have fostered Islamist
ideologies. The Sunni Islamists trace back to the salafi movement
in South Asia and the related Wahhabi movement in the Arabian peninsula.
Their roots go back to the 18th century AD, and are a reaction to the
decline of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing politico-economic and
military power of the non-Muslim world. Islamist ideology developed
much later among the Shi'ites, developing as a late 19th-early 20th
century ideology, and one more tightly connected to Persian/Iranian
nationalism than the original Sunni salafi'ist thought. The Wahhabi
movement was a more direct offshoot of salafi thought, but became
tied to a traditionalist/tribalist but pan-Arab nationalism as exemplified
by ibn Saud [note: nickname of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who
died in 1953]. Whatever the particulars of its religious roots, Islamist
ideology works on two assumptions. First, that if Islam were purified
of corruption and decadence, and the umma (body of Muslims) were
wholly dedicated to Islam, then Islam would be strengthened and protected
by Allah and able to beat back the increasingly powerful West. From
this assumption, the second was a logical progression: the only appropriate
government for a predominantly Muslim society is a quasi-theocratic
state governed in accordance with the Qur'an and the sharia law—a
caliphate. An Islamist society does not need a legislature—the Qur'an
and the sharia is its fundamental law and its criminal and civil code,
respectively. An Islamist society needs an executive (whether monarchial/tribal
or—later—republican) to implement and enforce Qur'anic law and raise
a military, and a court system drawn from the ulema—the learned
scholars (mostly clergy)—to apply and to a limited degree interpret
the Qur'an and sharia based upon the generally accepted hadith
(the recorded sayings of the Prophet Mohammed) and the ijtihad
(the recorded interpretations of the inspired leading scholars prior
to the 16th century). The hadith functions for Islamic political
and legal thought somewhat like the Federalist Papers functions in the
US—it provides additional insights into the thought processes of the
framers of the fundamental law (in the Muslim case, Mohammed and, to
a lesser degree, his earliest and closest followers).
It is important to note that not all Islamists are
inherently aggressive, bellicose, or seeking confrontation with "the
West" or the US. However, most Islamists view the West as inherently
hostile, corrupting, and anti-Islamic, not just because of politico-military
actions, but because of the dominance of Western market-oriented, global-trade-oriented
economics and the ceaseless torrent of cultural and entertainment products
flowing in through every form of media. While most appreciate Western
technology and material wealth, they have a very ambivalent response
to Western ideas of freedom and leisure pursuits—the idea of "ordered
liberty" tends to be incomprehensible, so what they see is a mixture
of license (sexual and otherwise) and independence, a mix that is both
extremely tempting and, according to Islam, damning. As a result there
is a tendency to be overtly and formally hostile and prohibitionist,
while not infrequently indulging secretly.
This cultural conflict as well as the politico-military
contest and the evident incompetence and corruption of most of the nominally
Western-style republics in the Muslim world as well as the traditional
or tribally-based monarchies led to a growing strand of extremism in
the Islamist movement. The Islamist extremists went beyond strident
but generally non-violent advocacy of Islamist views to an absolutist
posture, asserting that unless Islam rises up, it will be overwhelmed
by the West, and thus a defensive jihad (struggle) is both warranted
and necessary. [It is important to note that the original concept of
jihad was not necessarily violent—it could mean a moral struggle within
the individual to overcome temptation and ignorance and achieve a higher
level of conformity to Islam and understanding of Allah, as it still
does for the Sufis, but this more philosophical and introspective understanding
of jihad has been increasingly peripheralized in the past half century.]
This extremist minority among the Islamists views confrontation with
the non-Muslim world as unavoidable to protect Muslims from worldly
temptation, to carry out the Qur'anic injunction to regain lands and
wealth "taken" from Muslims by non-Muslims, and to protect Islam from
the multi-faceted onslaught (cultural, religious, economic, social,
political, military) of the West.
While some Islamists have urged that the primary
target be to push out or overthrow brittle, corrupt Muslim leaders and
replace them with Islamist regimes (as was ostensibly done in Iran,
Afghanistan, Sudan, and Mauretania), others assert that no Islamic state
can be secure, either from overt attack or from socio-economic subversion,
unless the outside world—the dar al-harb (realm of rebellion
or chaos) can be forced into retreat from the dar al-Islam (realm in
submission). For both, but especially the former group, all who do not
accept what they view as orthodox Islam, including those viewed as moderates
by non-Muslims but as "backslidden" or "apostate" by Islamists, are
the enemy. This is why the Islamists who are willing to acknowledge
their involvement in the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist attacks that
kill Muslims are not especially concerned about the Muslims who have
died in these actions. To the Islamist extremists, these people were
nominal Muslims who had thrown in their lot with the non-Muslim world.
For those Islamists who wish to strike out at those they view as the
aggressors who threaten the survival and integrity of Islam, the United
States stands out as the primary threat, with Israel, India, the Philippines,
and other states viewed as fighting at the direction of, or only through
the support of, the US.
HOW BIG IS THE ENEMY
Islamist views are held by a substantial portion
of the world's roughly one billion Muslims, perhaps even a majority
of Muslims worldwide. For argument's sake, let us be conservative and
say that a third of the world's Muslims are Islamists. Out of that 330
million, probably less than one percent are extremists who in some way
are directly involved in Islamist extremism, either as armed fighters,
as couriers or suppliers, as recruiters or trainers, or as fund-raisers
or procurers. Yet, that still amounts to over three million people!
That is a substantial enemy force. Worse, the war is inevitably having
a polarizing effect on the rest of the Muslim world, dividing it between
those who feel obligated to back (and cheer for) the Islamist extremists
even if they oppose aspects of their agendas or methods; those who feel
obligated to back the US and its allies against the extremists even
if they favor some aspects of the Islamist agenda; those who are simply
trying to stay alive and out of the conflict; and those who are cynically
preoccupied with profiting from the conflict financially or politically.
Fortunately, the Islamists, and even the extremists,
are far from a unified monolithic force. Though they agree on a general
set of goals and agree that ultimately they will face a final confrontation
with the US in which they expect Allah to directly intervene on their
side, they differ on much else. The theological disputes between Sunni
and Shi'ite, the ethnic differences between Arabs, Persians (all of
the Farsi/Dari speakers), and other groups within the Islamic world,
organizational structure disputes, and personality clashes all work
against unity. However, over the past decade, observers have noted an
increasingly common tendency for mutual cooperation between groups that
once were hostile towards each other. Shi'ite Iran and its Hizb'allah
overseas insurgent/terror arm is actively supporting and cooperating
with Sunni HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and other non-Shi'ite groups. Nominally
independent and Sunni-dominated Lebanon is hosting Hizb'allah's world
headquarters as well as the bases of several Sunni Islamist and secular
pan-Arab nationalist groups. Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs and Persians are
cooperating with the Chechens; the largely Pashtun Harekat-i-Islami,
Laskar-i-Islam and other Islamist extremists operating in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Kashmir; the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf
in the southern Philippines; Islamist extremists fighting a genocidal
war against Christians in central Indonesia; and Islamist groups seeking
to wipe out or drive out non-Muslims across much of Africa from West
Africa across to Kenya and southwards along the Indian Ocean coast.
PARADIGMS OF WAR
The war between the US and its allies and the forces
of Islamist extremism is in some ways a new phenomenon, and in some
ways a variation on an older one. To get a better handle on the nature
of this war, let's start from a familiar paradigm of global conflict,
and then evolve it into what we are now facing through a process of
subtraction and addition.
I will start by summarizing the paradigms and understandings
of the comparatively recent and familiar Cold War, rather than harking
back to the Crusades or the inter-communal religious wars of pre-modern
Europe, both obscured by the passage time and the fundamental changes
in European or Western society since the mid-17th century. At the ideological
core was the conflict between Soviet Marxism-Leninism and Western social
democratic/mixed economy capitalism. This conflict manifested itself
in a central confrontation between the USSR and the US, in which the
key factor was the correlation of nuclear forces. A fundamental rule
of the conflict was that short of an all-out, Armageddon-like "World
War III," the national homelands and domestic civilian populations were
"off limits." The martial aspects of the conflict were played out in
proxy wars, covert operations, clandestine actions, and skirmishes along
national peripheries between air and naval units. The strategic confrontation
had stabilized in a stalemate—both sides had overwhelming pre-emptive
and retaliatory nuclear weaponry, and both had massive and capable conventional
forces—the Soviets' more massive but less agile, far-reaching, and precise
than the Americans'.
To find a way out of the deadlock, each side adopted
an irregular or asymmetric alternate strategy. The Soviets developed
theirs early on. It emphasized the use—either directly or by manipulation—of
the Communist International and all of the various revolutionary entities
affiliated with it, directly or otherwise, including a vast array of
propaganda and united front programs (including the so-called Euro-Communists,
the "peace movement," etc.) as well as overtly anti-Western national
revolutionaries like Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and even non-Communists like
Nasser and Qadhafi, and of course the more-or-less stateless revolutionary
terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof, Brigatta Rosso, Japanese Red Army
Faction, etc. The goal of this effort was to undermine, isolate, and
over-stretch the US through an ever-expanding series of costly, painful,
humiliating, and inconclusive counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism
campaigns.
The US-UK alliance for its part did not really settle
upon an effective countering alternative or asymmetric strategy until
the early 1980s, when the Reagan and Thatcher administrations formulated
the idea of maintaining such a rapid pace of technological and economic
development, and of translating those advances into advanced weaponry,
that the USSR was lured into bankrupting itself trying to maintain the
parity it had achieved as huge socio-economic cost during the 1960s-1970s.
Complemented by a few tools cribbed from the Soviets—reinvigorated propaganda
and selective support to anti-Soviet insurgencies in Soviet-occupied
territories, this strategy played upon the internal contradictions of
the Soviets' overly centralized, KGB-dominated political structure,
its dysfunctional command economy, and its lack of market mechanisms
to balance demand with supply and cost. As a result, the Warsaw Pact
and then the USSR collapsed largely due to their own internal contradictions,
growing cynicism, endemic corruption, and the obvious failure of the
Soviet system to progress towards its stated socio-economic goals.
FROM ANTI-COMMUNISM TO WAR VS ISLAMIST EXTREMISM
There are some substantial differences between the
Cold War and the War against Islamist Extremism.
First, the Islamists do not have a single, overt
core state comparable to the USSR. Rather, they have several states
that provide them varying types and degrees of support. States such
as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan all profess opposition to
Islamist extremism and even claim a desire to eradicate it, while within
their ruling elites powerful actors provide arms, funds, and intelligence
to various Islamist extremist groups, and provide political cover for
large-scale indoctrination of their already alienated and disaffected
populations, recruiting and training of fighters and support personnel,
and fundraising. This has two significant impacts: there is no clearly
visible force-on-force conventional or nuclear deterrent balance to
stabilize the scale and extent of the conflict; and the Islamists are
not only willing but eager to attack the American people and the American
homeland, while the US is constrained by ethical, humanitarian, diplomatic,
and strategic concerns from targeting the states whose elites are supporting
the Islamist extremists. Thus, unlike the Cold War, there is no central
stalemate and the resulting stability—no "mutually assured destruction."
This puts the US at a serious disadvantage despite its enormous economic
and military superiority. America cannot effectively deter the Islamists
from attacking whenever, wherever, and however they can. This cannot
be a cold war like the US-Soviet struggle or like today's unacknowledged
(at least by most Americans) cold war between the Peoples Republic of
China and the US. The US does not want to unify hundreds of millions
of Islamist moderates and moderate Muslims behind the extremists, and
so decisive American action is deterred. Only peripheral targets like
Afghanistan and Iraq can be targeted, not core targets that are really
providing most of the support to the Islamists such as Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Pakistan, and Syria-Lebanon.
Second, the Islamist extremist groups, such as al-Qaeda
and its many affiliates and partners around the world and Hizb'allah
are analogous to the various insurgent/terrorist groups of, or influenced
by, the Communist Third International during the Soviet-US confrontation.
Even as the US never effectively wiped out most of these Marxist-Leninist
terrorist or insurgent groups, the US is facing a very serious challenge
trying to defeat their Islamist extremist successors.
Third, while the US came up with solutions to counter
the Soviet nuclear and conventional forces, and countered the subversive
threat of the Soviet-backed "peace," "anti-nuclear," and "disarmament"
united front movements by hitting at the inherent contradictions and
vulnerabilities of the Soviet system inside the USSR, in its Warsaw
Pact empire, and among its client states, it has not yet come up with
a comparable strategy or strategies to isolate, much less defeat, Islamist
extremism and its supporters. There has been a great deal of talk about
promoting democratization, individualism, and consumerist prosperity,
but the realities of the Muslim world are such that democratization
is likely to accelerate the rise of Islamists who sympathize with the
goals if not the methods of the extremists, individualism is seen as
corrosive to both Islamic values and the brittle authoritarian regimes
of the Islamic world, and consumerist prosperity is beyond reach of
these deeply dysfunctional and under-productive societies except for
the small Gulf oil monarchies, because of a lack of capital, a lack
of non-petroleum resources, social hostility to banking and to foreign
direct investment, a worldwide glut of manufacturing capacity, dysfunctional
educational and social mobilization/training structures (especially
for women, minorities, and exurban populations, weak infrastructures,
and stubbornly entrenched elites who realize that change along the lines
promoted by the US will either marginalize and impoverish them, or lead
to their expulsion into exile.
Fourth, the US and its potential allies against
Islamist extremism are just that—potential allies. The US is still clinging
to its obsolete anti-Soviet alliances and bilateral partners, even though
most of them are irrelevant to the new conflict. Most of EUrope, to
the continued astonishment of most Americans, is far more comfortable
appeasing the Islamic world than confronting it. EUropeans have anesthetized
themselves to the problem and the threat by assuming that so long as
they are anti-Israeli and anti-American, and sell the Muslims whatever
they want (including weapons and dual-use advanced technology), they
will not be attacked. The reality is that EUrope has a much larger Muslim
minority population than the US, and it is growing daily, and EUrope
is also far more dependent upon trade with the Islamic world than is
the US. The reality is that NATO is not only useless in this war, it
is a dangerously distracting waste of politico-diplomatic, military,
capital, and technological resources. Similarly, the PRC, which needed
the US as an ally against the Soviet empire even more than the US needed
Red China, is now Russia's largest non-EU trading partner, its major
market for advanced arms, and sees the US as a rival for dominance in
East Asia and the Western Pacific if not an outright enemy. Meanwhile,
Japan and the RoK have their own security concerns totally unrelated
to what to them is an irrelevant Islamist extremist threat. Of all of
the US' Cold War era allies, the only ones that are genuinely relevant
(and bring more to the fight than liabilities) are the UK, Australia,
and to a lesser degree some of the newly liberated states in central
and eastern Europe.
Most of the US's real potential allies are those
states already under attack by the forces of Islamist extremism, or
are imminent potential targets who, unlike the foolish EUropeans, realize
that appeasement will only delay the inevitable conflict, not prevent
it. Those potential allies include Israel, Turkey, India, Russia—all
of which the US has been either keeping at arm's length to avoid alienating
Islamist-supporting regimes, or which have kept the US at arm's length
because of what they see as the confused and ambivalent policies of
the past quarter century.
HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN LIKE THIS
This is NOT a new war. It did not start on 11 September
2001. It did not even start with the attack on the USS COLE in Aden
or the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia (which were classic irregular
warfare/guerrilla attacks against military targets in a declared war,
not terrorism). Part of the war began with Osama bin-Laden's fatwa on
behalf of the Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda against the United States for
its "occupation" and "defilement" of Saudi Arabia back in 1994 (later
expanded to condemning the US for its presence throughout the Islamic
world including "Crusader kingdoms" such as Israel. Part of the war
began back in 1982, with the truck bombing of the US Embassy and the
Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon by Shi'ite Islamists affiliated with
Hizb'allah (which was also the most likely force behind the Khobar Towers
attack). But the first formal stage of the war was the fatwa issued
by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on behalf of the Shi'ite Islamic Republic
of Iran in 1979, where for the first time the US was condemned as the
"Great Satan" and marked for perpetual armed struggle until it was destroyed
or had at least totally withdrawn from involvement in the Islamic world.
Thus, this war has been going on for a quarter century. Think of Iran
as playing the role of Imperial Japan in World War II—the first state
to attack the US in the war—with the far more dispersed but numerous
and better placed Sunni Islamists playing the role of Nazi Germany.
The analogy is very limited, but also applies in another sense. Despite
the Axis pact between Tokyo and Berlin, effective cooperation between
the two anti-American powers was quite limited by geography and each
regime's belief that it was ethnically and militarily superior. Finally,
consider Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a more bloodthirsty, longer-lived
equivalent of Fascist Italy—the first part of the wider threat knocked
out of the war by resurgent Anglo-American power. But the analogy ends
because the Axis' fortunes rested entirely upon its military capabilities—it
never was an economic, political, or social match for the Anglo-Saxon
allies, nor was it ever able to mobilize substantial subversive or revolutionary
elements against the Anglo-Saxon countries. Thus, the US-led answer
to the Axis threat was primarily a conventional force-on-force military
campaign—not easier or less painful, to be sure, than the Cold War,
but certainly simpler.
CONCLUSION
This latest global conflict between the US and the
forces of totalitarianism and extremism is not a minor conflict, and
will not be easily or quickly won. It is a conflict with some interesting
and troubling parallels to the Cold War. Last but not least, it is a
war that will finally force the US to develop reliable, affordable,
and reasonably prompt means for defeating insurgent/terrorist warfare,
countering subversion of disaffected groups in the homeland population
and in neutral states, and pre-empting the development and/or use of
WMD against the US homeland.
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