Military and security analysts react to proposed 'paradigmatic shift'
By Seth Mandel
Experts are weighing in on a new report by the RAND Corp. that recommends a "paradigmatic shift" in the
RAND, a nonprofit research and analysis organization headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., released How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al-Qaeda, which analyzed 648 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, how those groups ended, and what the results indicate would be the best course of action against al-Qaeda.
"Based on our analysis of how terrorist groups end, a more effective approach would be adopting a two-front strategy," the report states. "First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of
Careful police work, not military force, was responsible for the capturing or killing of al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, and Abu Zubeida, according to the report.
"Second, military forces, but not necessarily
But the keystone of this two-front strategy, the report asserts, must be "changing the symbols" associated with the conflict, such as removing terms like "war."
"This change might seem pedantic but would have significant symbolic importance," the report states. "Moving away from military references would indicate that there was no battlefield solution to countering terrorism."
According to the report, figures like Osama bin Laden should be considered criminals, not holy warriors.
"I actually think it's a fairly sophisticated argument to make, because 'jihad' has, under certain circumstances, positive connotations, and so if you're interested in discrediting the people that practice it, you want to call them something else," Ilan Berman, vice president for policy of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) in Washington, D.C. told The Jewish State.
Murder, not holy war
Berman said that some of the discussion is beside the point, and changing the terminology can never be a cure-all for a foreign policy issue. But, he added, there is value in using terms such as hirabah, meaning murder, instead of jihad.
"It's not sufficient to just explain how bad they are to us, it's necessary to explain how bad they are to their own population in language that makes the population sympathetic to what we're trying to do," Berman said.
Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), based in CFR's
"The administration clearly wanted to be seen as very energetic and very aggressive vis-à-vis the terrorist threat in the immediate aftermath of 2001," Biddle told The Jewish State. "So they deliberately chose rhetoric that would fit that orientation."
Biddle said that some believe that such bellicosity had a negative effect on the Bush administration's counterterrorism efforts in
"The key issue in calling it a war, in pursuing it as a war or not, largely has to do with how you behave toward state governments that you believe may sponsor or harbor terrorists," Biddle said. "A lot of the implications of approaching this as a war -- not as a rhetorical war, like the war on crime or the war on drugs, but a real war -- was that the administration made a decision that to re-engineer the Middle East politically required that Saddam Hussein be unseated in Baghdad. And that that actual war -- the toppling of a foreign government -- would, they believed back in 2003, bring about a domino effect in the
Attempts at creating a new rhetorical formulation for the fight against al-Qaeda, Biddle said, included "the struggle against violent extremism," and "the long war," which was resurrected to suggest the conflict's connection with the Cold War.
The political rhetoric, Biddle said, garners so much attention because it's not at all obvious how to precisely categorize our counterterrorism tactics.
The limits of 'semantical exercises'
And attempts at rhetorical classification can be counterproductive to action, according to both Tim Connors and Michael Ledeen.
Connors, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and partner at PJ Sage, Inc. said such "semantical exercises" might not be as useful in recognizing the current operating environment as in the past.
"I don't think that you can separate policing and national security anymore into some sort of neat box," Connors told The Jewish State. "And I think that the threats that we're facing are what's driving that. So to sit there and say it's either 'this' or 'that,' I think, is not a practical exercise. Those two worlds are merging and we need to figure out how to deal with it."
Ledeen, freedom scholar and
"Political reconciliation is conflict-resolutionspeak for: One side wins, the other comes to terms," Ledeen said in an email to The Jewish State. "The main thing is to defeat the terrorists, which has happened many times in many places, using many different tactics. Both the Italians [against such groups as the Red Brigades] and West Germans [against the Baader-Meinhof Gang] used military force and military intelligence extensively, which for me takes them out of the category of 'policing.' They weren't just domestic groups -- they had international support, mainly from the Communist bloc, which provided training and funding, etc. And there was plenty of help from the PLO as well."
Biddle said that prior to the 1950s, "war" meant something pretty much unequivocal: someone attacks you, the president calls a joint session of Congress to declare war, you mobilize the army, you defeat the enemy, you demobilize the army, you have a ticker tape parade. That version of "war" is not nearly as common today.
"They occur from time to time," Biddle said. "But there's just this huge category of lesser forms of state violence that have been around for generations now that constitutes most of what the
Because of this, and because of the lack of regular direct communication between the White House and soldiers on the battlefield, Biddle said, how the
"In an ideal world, you'd like to have the government making a decision about what are we actually going to do" on the battlefield, Biddle said. "We've got one set of decisions on what we want to do. Now we've got to describe to the public what we're doing. And do we use adjectives that sound carnivorous or vegetarian? Use adjectives that sound energetic or patient? And you'd like those to be done in that order."
Berman agreed, saying that if the terminology is too granular, those in the field will not know precisely how to weaponize the strategy. Repackaging the message could have great value if done properly, he said.
"Because right now, our message to al-Qaeda, or to the Muslim world generally, is: We're not trying to kill all of you, we're just trying to kill some of you," Berman said. "And that's not a really appealing message on a number of levels. So I think the message has to be to shift the focus away from us and what we're doing, and put the focus on, for example al-Qaeda, and to essentially explain [to their supporters that] this is an unsustainable political structure that al-Qaeda has laid out for itself. They killed 3,000 Americans and they lost their country. They supported 300 Chechen separatists and they lost any chances for a caliphate in the
Actions and words in concert
Connors said that moving beyond the simple categorization of the threat requires an understanding that the various features of our national defense must work in tandem, blurring the lines that used to separate them both in action and in the minds of the public.
"The operating environment being driven by the threat is a mixture of the institutions that we've built to deal with public safety and national security -- national defense," Connors said. "We need to figure out how we're going to deal with threats that appear in the gap between those two."
Berman said that the larger significance of this discussion is that public discourse and administrative strategizing are less restrained now by terms like "war." For a long time, Berman said, "war" meant "military," end of story.
"That was the water's edge," Berman said. "But now we're thinking a little bit more creatively, a little bit deeper, getting into the semantics of how these guys talk to each other. And we may throw ideas at a wall and they won't necessarily all stick, but we should be throwing those ideas against the wall."
But, Berman warned, without a clear picture of what the threat represents, the wordplay is an ineffective exercise.
"You can call [the terrorists] whatever you want to call them," Berman said. "We can call them 'Wal-Mart greeters,' but if we don't treat them seriously, it's not going to make a difference, because we don't know what they want -- we don't know what we're trying to tell them."