Know Your Enemy: How to Defeat Al-Qaeda
“Know your Enemy as You Know Yourself and You Can Fight A
Thousand Battles Without Disaster.” – Sun Tzu
To
understand how to defeat Al-Qaeda, we must see our enemy as more than just some
Arab fanatics, but grasp its ideology, its methodology, its grand strategy and
its tactics. It is clear
that Al-Qaeda’s end game is an Islamic Caliphate uniting the entire Islamic
world under strict Sharia law and traditional Muslim codes. Its methodology is to sow chaos across
the middle east, prompting ethnic conflicts and civil wars that weaken regional
regimes and at times, use America and its vast military capabilities to take
down mutual foes with the intent to take power as American resolve weakens. It seems our enemies grand
strategy is to terrify the populace and drain the resources of Western
Civilization into collapse. The sad reality is that with all of our military successes, with all of
our progress in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and everywhere, they still have fight
left in them while divisive election year politics, rampant conspiracy theories
and economic woes have severely weakened domestic support for our fight against
Al-Qaeda. So as Al-Qaeda
slithers through North Africa and adopts “low-cost bleeding” strategies,
America will need to be more effective at isolating Al-Qaeda from the
frustrated Muslim youths that field potential recruits while finding cost
neutral means of carrying out its fight and raising the standard of living in the
Middle East. To defeat
Al-Qaeda in the long-term, America is going to have to actively engage itself
in the development of Middle Eastern micro-economies while investing heavily in
the education and training of tomorrow’s youths, while aggressively responding
to attacks and combating efforts in part by bolstering regional
security forces, but often by making use of our own.
The domestic populace has
learned to tune out the bombings and stylized propaganda, as an increasingly
fiscally conservative peace movement within the Republican Party threatens the
budgets necessary to effectively combat Al-Qaeda. This means that like Al-Qaeda, America is going to have to
learn to fight Al-Qaeda on a budget. We are going to have to do more with less and push the
young democratic regimes across North Africa and the Middle East to take these
issues seriously and stand independently while increasing coordination with
Russia, China, India and other traditional competitors. With both history and long-term
strategic interests in jeopardy, America must use combating Al-Qaeda as an
opportunity to repair and strengthen security ties with these strategic
partners that have been damaged by Libya and Syria. Nato verse the world will not be sustainable in the future
as an awakened and rising co-op of BRIC economies, Arab and Islamic states
along with Venezuela have sought to form a counter-balance to America and the
West. The commitment and trust
among these groups, however is unclear, and by bold leadership and genuine
diplomacy a bandwagon effect behind America can win out.
In today’s
culture, we love the excitement of explosions and bombs. We love the challenge of military
conflict and with so much money flooding into military technologies and
weaponry it is easy to sell complex communications and defense systems to a
public that demands a response and legitimately needs to feel secure. The problem is that the more
bombs we drop, the more bullets we fire, the stronger our enemy becomes in the
hearts and minds of the Middle East populace. We have to be conservative in our usage of force, appearing
to exhaust diplomatic options while decisively and at times unilaterally using
force to combat terrorism.
We cannot halt all
of our operations, but we have to be more stealth in our utilization of
force. The CIA is going to have to
have an increased role, running spy rings, penetrating the inner circles of
Al-Qaeda cells and covertly coordinating with Seal Teams, Marines and regional
forces to viciously enact justice when Al-Qaeda affiliation is clear. America needs to monitor the WMD
and nuclear arsenals of the Middle East closely, with carefully planned
operations to extract caches when the time comes that action is necessary. The reality is that America
cannot afford a full-scale invasion of Iran right now and if it can be avoided
with Iran halting uranium enrichment while complying with UN regulations than we
should consider it a needed victory without a fight.
Sadly, Al-Qaeda
across the Middle East and the Taliban in south east Afghanistan have shown
increasingly rapid evolutions in tactics compared to US troops which are
beginning to give them an advantage.
COIN has shown itself to be a tremendous asset in fighting insurgencies
but we need to allow a means for it to adapt quicker based on the events on the
ground within the theater of war.
We need to allow the troops on the ground wider tactical experimentation
and a means of sharing the results and examining the results in a quantifiable
way that can verify increased effectiveness. We need to fight fire with fire and as Al-Qaeda learns from
the backlashes of gross civilian casualties in Iraq it has adapted to wage
psychological attacks such as the lighting of fires in Russian forests while
increasing its humanitarian outreach in vulnerable locations such as
Somalia. We need to deny Al-Qaeda
the legitimacy it desires, finding regional alternatives to provide the
stability, rule of law and humanitarian relief Al-Qaeda (and Hamas in Gaza)
provides for neglected and vulnerable populaces trapped in the destitution of
what they perceive as neo-colonial wars.
America deserves credit for taking
chances in Egypt and Libya, to allow for democracy at the risk of increased
instability within which Al-Qaeda has traditionally benefited. America cannot neglect these young republics, even as security and public support is minimal. There is too much to gain by action,
and too much to lose by inaction.
The politically motivated criticisms in the management of these situations
lose sight of the real issues we face. The people showed their power, they stood up to
autocratic military rule and demanded a voice in their futures. The Muslim Brotherhood, with its
checkered history and role in extremist ideology well known, must be isolated
from that of Al-Qaeda, as must the Taliban in Afghanistan while America and the
west must simultaneously hedge against the potential for attacks on
Israel. This involves better
management of the propaganda matrix of those nations and aggressive efforts
to show that democracy and economic liberalism are better choices than Islamic
extremism or Communism with the continued fostering of strong diplomatic
relations with the new leaders of these nations. America needs to align its realities with its ideals and
have the patience to help these young democracies develop democratic
institutions as opposed to heralding strongmen for the exigent of security. Ultimately, however, “Debates about
democracy, military rule are for us.
For the elite. All most
people down there care about is their daily rice, while they take refuge in the
saints. If the military
keeps the port running, keeps the buses and factories running, they are
content. The real struggle is not
who rules, but to make people care about who rules (“Monsoon” by Kaplan,
p.150).” We need to stabilize the nations of the Middle East, while showing the
capacity for peaceful transitions of power so that that private and public
capital is comfortable investing in real economic development.
While it is likely that America
will have occasional military actions in the Middle East and across the greater
Islamic world, its primary mission over the next ten years will be one of
education and economic development.
While the probabilities of US action in Syria and Iran remain high, and
the risk of a greater Muslim response resulting, avoiding full-scale war in
favor of increased investment in economic development and education will do
more to stop the spread of Al-Qaeda. Simple programs like guns for livestock and farming
equipment, peasant micro-finance, irrigation and infrastructure projects, along
with better education and schooling in basic rudimentary trade fields such as
construction and blacksmithing will do wonders to improve both quality of life
and security. Send in the
technocrats and economists to help develop the rural marketplaces with
sustainable traditional economies and future recruits will drop the fight for
work. America has educated
thousands of Middle Easterners, its time to develop more aggressive coordinated
programs with regional governments to send them to their home nations and
develop economic and political activities. Let outside finance and management build jobs for the local
populace, but lets not forget the need for developing the internal capacity of
vulnerable nations to do construction and infrastructure projects. As Robert Kaplan notes, “Realpolitik
with a conscience is what India, and the West, too, require, for in the broader
competition with China, the power with the most benign and cosmopolitan vision will
ultimately have the upper hand. (Kaplan)“ If we work with the population’s
natural leaders to set achievable and realistic economic standards from the
national, provincial to village level the situation on the ground will change
momentously for the better.
The
recent gains of Al-Qaeda in Mali and amongst the chaos of Syria and the Arab
spring should be kept in perspective treated as rule of law issues that the
young democracies of north Africa can rise to address with minimal outside
help. Mali needs outside
intervention, Syria will need outside stabilizing forces when Assad’s regime
finally collapses. The west cannot
run in the face of electoral politics and economic struggles from their
responsibilities to defend the democratic aspirations of these capable
societies freed from the oppression of long-lasting dictatorships. Islam is as equally compatible
with democracy as evangelical Christianity. 500 million Muslims live in the democracies of south East
Asia, and there is no reason that the majority of Muslims in the Arab world and
North Africa cannot embrace democracy. While western civilizations need to wrestle with the
balance of their ideals and interests, the Islamic and Western worlds alike needs
to define their struggle less as a clash of civilizations and more as a battle
within humanity; a struggle between beliefs structures that are relics of
ancient times, and the realities of modernity and ways of the future. Indonesia poses the model for the future
of Islam majority nations where “although 85% of the country is Muslim, 85
percent of Indonesians reject the notion that the state should be formally
based on Islam, preferring instead the puralist- and democracy-affirming
principles of Pancasila, the moderate nationalist ideology enshrined in the
1945 constitution, with its five principles of belief in God, nationalism,
humanism, democracy and social justice (Kaplan, p. 256).” In the end, the labels and ideologies
used to divide humanity will cease to be strong enough to oppress our shared
humanity. When America considers
that “Al-Qaeda’s strategic sin was
arrogance; the jihadist group had the power to tear society apart but was not
strong enough to pull it back together again in its own image,” America needs
to be weary not to allow partisan politics to do the same to our nation.
posted by Mi vida en libros @ 1:30 PM
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