The Long War: Rethinking American Options in the War on Terror

The United States’ foreign policy aims need to be reformulated and the means to attain those aims need to be reviewed. There is a pressing requirement in the United States to debate the nature of its foreign policy and ask the questions, which would hopefully provide the answers on how to achieve the policy goals of the United States in the post-September 11, 2001 world. As the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack approaches, the United States political thought still has not crystallized the manner in which it hopes to the confront the challenges of the Global War on Terrorism. The reality of the war on terror, which is dawning on the American leadership, is that it going to be a generational affair, which will not lend itself to any quick or easy military solution. The war on terrorism, as any other war, is going to be a political war of attrition and as the conflict rages, the battlefield will eventually shift from a clash of arms to a clash of ideas.

The immediate United States’ response in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, was to resort to the traditional arguments of a military power and in doing so, the United States seemed to have wrongly assumed that this war would be a conventional confrontation of armed might. The war may have started as a test of arms, but it is becoming increasingly clear that military power, as the final arbiter of United States’ political victory, will play a very limited role. The use of raw military power, by the United States, does have the potential to facilitate the final outcome of this war in favor of the United States, but it cannot guarantee the peace which will ultimately decide the costs of this war and answer the question, whether the United States can rightfully claim the laurels of a conqueror in this war. It is the nature of the final peace settlement, which will end this war, which should concern the United States and not the calculus of any military power, because the possibility still exists that United States will win the Global War on Terrorism in a military sense, but lose the war in a political sense.

The United States needs to understand the politics of this war and it needs to understand the psychology of its foe in order to frame the context for its efforts in this war and how to utilize its vast resources in order to defeat the opposition. The foe, which the United States is facing in this war and the reason, for which it is fighting this war, is to defeat the psychology of a politically nihilistic Islam. The United States should harness its resources in this war to the purpose of defeating the political interpretations of a militant and a politically regressive Islam and should avoid getting embroiled in a situational perception, which nourishes the germination of the idea that this war is against Islam per se. In this sense, the United States erred significantly when it allowed the idea, in the early stages of this war, to gain root that war was a moral crusade against the evils of a militant Islam. The inability of the United States to counter this assertion in a timely manner and in a convincing sense meant that the United States lost its diplomatic influence and through the loss of its diplomatic leverage, it lost any moral claims it might have harbored as a justification for fighting this war.

The political failure of the United States to articulate the reason that the war was against the political terrorism of a militant interpretation/version of Islam and not against the religion of Islam itself, stemmed from its own lack of understanding and ignorance about Islam. Not only did the United States failed to comprehend the nature of Islam; as a religion; as a political idea; as a sense of a cultural identification and as code of ethics for the vast majority of the Muslims, but it also did not truly grasp the ideological reasons for the attacks of September 11, 2001. The surprise terrorist attacks on a September morning in 2001 was not the declaration of a war between the United States and Islam and neither was it an embodiment of Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations, but it was rather what the French statesman, Charles DeGaulle, used refer to as “the strength of the weak”. The attacks on the Pentagon in Washington, D. C. and on the World Trade Centers, in New York, were symbolic in the sense that they were not designed to dent the economic or the military power of the United States, but to draw attention of the United States, and the world, towards the Muslim nations’ own political and economic failures to cater to the needs of its own citizens and to blame this injustice on the United States’ economic foreign policy in the greater Middle East.

The political purpose of the September 11, 2001 attacks was not to, as originally claimed by the Bush administration, to seek the destruction of the United States, because such an endeavor would have been highly unrealistic. Hence, the nature of the attacks was to vent a sense of frustration by the attackers on the inability of the United States to offer them justice, because the salient point to this logic was to hold the United States accountable for its lack of political and economic justice in its policies towards the Muslims and Muslim nations. The nature of the attack was also to blame the political and economically westernized elites in the Arab and Muslim world for their failure to effectively present the case of the Muslim plight in the court of world opinion. The westernized Muslim elites were blamed for not advocating the cause of Muslim injustices in the world and their failure to do so, suggested they were more interested in preserving their own political and economic privileges than they were in standing up for the rights of the down trodden in Muslim countries. The United States’ mea culpa in this affair was indirectly attributed in as much as it politically and militarily supported the infrastructures of despotism in Arab and Muslim nations, but it was not directly held responsible for the misery of the Muslims in the world.

The caveat to this rationalization is that militant Islam is antithetically opposed to the existence of groups of economically and politically privileged leadership in Muslim and Arab nations, which compromises the interests of its own compatriots in order to secure its own niche in the society. Militant Islam, then by definition is not so much a revolutionary movement dedicated to an armed struggle against the world to achieve its aims, as much as it is a reflection of the failure of democratic and pluralistic politics in the nations, where Islam is practiced as a religion. The militancy in Islam, which the architects of the United States policy did not understand, but are now gradually crediting as a viable reason, comes from a reality of deprivation that exists within the Muslim societies themselves, where minority groups exercise a political, economic and cultural monopoly over the majority of the populations. Even though, this sense of Islamic militancy can be categorized as an attempt to realize fair and just balance of rights and opportunities for the majority populations in Muslim countries, the reality is that as a political concept and idea; this logic must be confronted, resisted and eventually defeated because it is, itself, anti-democratic since it supports resolving political disputes via armed violence instead of through peaceful dialogue.

In a crucial sense, what the United States needs to understand is that the philosophy of the groups, such as Al-Qaeda and its various splinter groups, which argue for the existence of militancy as a solution to their political problems, is not to defeat the United States in a military sense, but in a political sense by removing its influence from the Arab and Muslim nation. These groups cannot hope to match the military and economic power or the technological superiority of the United States as barometers of waging and sustaining a modern war and realistically speaking are very cognizant of the fact that they cannot defeat the United States politically, economically or culturally or ideologically. The only hope, which such groups might have of evicting the influence of the United States, is to discredit the United States’ policies and its allies in arena of public opinion and to offer them selves as the most viable substitute to replace the United States’ influence and those of its allies. The only working thesis; or a guiding political philosophy/strength such groups might have in order to gain political power and influence is to simply claim of being a better alternative to the United States’ influence and role or those of its allies and not necessarily being the better alternative in any empirical sense.

It is at this juncture of the debate, in the United States, of how to successfully wage the Global War on Terrorism or as it is now being called more realistically “the long war” that the United States needs to decide on how best to fight and win this war. The United States can be successful in this war if and when it succeeds in convincing the majority of the people in the Muslim and Arab nations of the inherent superiority and universality of its ideas over those espoused by militant Islamic groups and is successful in equating its ideals of political constitutionalism and social equality, for example, with the ideals of egalitarianism, which exist within Islam, as a religion, itself. This idea of proving the commitment of the United States towards the welfare of the people in Arab and Muslim nations explicitly suggests that the United States needs to create and adopt a consensual policy, whose strategic objective should be nothing less than to politically, culturally and ethically discredit the arguments, that exist within political Islam by seeking to disassociate those political ideals from the religious ideals of Islam itself. This policy, should it be created, must be implemented expressively and specifically to reject the ideas of political violence and instead, should adopt a policy, which politically and economically and culturally and even educationally supports the ideals of cultural, social and political and economic pluralism in Muslim societies in an institutionalized manner.

The existence, and the continuance, of such a strategic policy, or a doctrine, with the aim of achieving a systematic reform, renewal and renovation in the Islamic world on a political, social, cultural, economical and educational scale suggests that such a policy would need to be institutionalized into the framework of the strategic interests of the United States’ foreign policy goals. Therefore, for this policy to be successful, it will require the long term political support of all major United States’ political parties, groups and NGOs and such a policy will have to be consistent, which would suggest that this emerging policy rubric should be guided by considerations of politics and not by the necessity of military ad hocism, which presently characterizes and influences the United States’ war against the forces of militant Islam. The creation, existence and eventual implementation of such an over arching policy will need a political consensus because the United States will have to combat the menace of a militant Islam on a systematic scale, if it wishes to triumph over it and such a systematic approach would require the utilization of the entire gambit of political, economic, technological, cultural, educational and financial resources at the disposal of the United States’ government.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon the political process in the United States to favor such a policy and adopt it by removing from such a future policy any ambiguity of any particular political ideology, which might be ascribed to it. This policy cannot be subjected to the whims of partisan politics in the United States, and both the Democratic and Republican parties must support a consensual agreement on this policy rubric, which represents the sovereign interests of the United States, against the political ideology of Islamic militancy. The underlying rational and need behind such a political requirement is that as the “long war” endures, the scope and the frequency of military actions will give way to an increased political influence, because given the duration of this conflict, if this war is to be successful, would argue that military force will be used resist militant Islam occasionally while the war would be fought generally on a political battlefield. In a significant sense, with far reaching consequences, the role and influence of politics and military power will have to be reversed and instead of the military logic dictating the politics of fighting this war, as it is presently happening; politics must dictate the logic of using military power in fighting this war.

As mentioned earlier, the United States will have to create a cordon of containment around the Muslim nations, along the “arc of instability”, from Morocco in the east to Pakistan in the west and not allow Islamic militancy to break this cordon of containment. The best way to guarantee the sanctity of such a zone of political quarantine of the Muslim world would be by applying a consistent political pressure on it and if the situation warrants, to employ military force to keep Islamic militancy and agitation bottled up inside the nations of the “arc of instability” and not allow them to infect the nations outside of this area of containment. The key to the success of such a policy of containment and defeating Islamic militancy and its ideological philosophies, would be not to allow it to expand beyond the cordon of containment by keeping it under a political and military pressure, and once that is done, the internal contradictions in political Islam will start fissuring and the political threat of an Islamic militancy will collapse on the account of its own internal weaknesses. The most salient flaw in militant Islamic philosophy, which the United States must exploit, is that Islamic militancy draws its ideological inspiration from politics and not from Islam itself and this exploitation can be achieved through the application of military power and political influence designed to identify and discredit the political message of militant Islam by exposing the hypocrisy of its ideologically religious claims and showing them to be non-Islamic.

Once the United States adopts such a policy and it is articulated and implemented as the expression of the United States’ foreign policy objectives, it would mean that the United States will have to pay a more detailed and nuanced attention into the domestic dynamics of the Arab and Muslim societies. In this sense, the United States’ policy makers and its political leadership will have to understand and learn to appreciate the reality that Islam is not a monolithic religion, but has many political, cultural, social and ethnical variances, which allows for the existence of a plurality of antagonist opinions in Muslim nations. The sub-textual reality of this fact is that whereas, the Muslims might agree on the holistic message of Islam itself, they might not necessarily agree on its interpretative explanation. The experience of Islam, as a religion and as a cultural and social motif of life in Muslim societies differs accordingly and therefore, this difference is the sum of an evolutionary process of how Islam has been able to develop and fuse itself into the cultural, historic, social and political milieus of the lands and societies, where it developed its religious roots. It is imperative that the United States’ policy decision-makers understand this distinction, because the realization of this distinction will allow the United States to tailor its policies in a subtle manner and it would also impress upon them the futility of using military power as a “skeleton key” solution to their political problems.

As mentioned earlier, this struggle which the United States is waging against militant Islam will be a political struggle, because the United States will have to understand the myriad opinions of disagreement that exist in Muslim societies. The first logical step in this process will be for the United States to review its military policies, because the continued use of American military power, against an asymmetrically weak opponent, will be self-defeating for the United States in a strategic sense. The asymmetrical military superiority of the United States actually helps to foster a sense of grievance in the Arab and Muslim societies, which groups like Al-Qaeda employ to continually justify their armed struggle against the United States. Ironically, the overwhelming application of United States’ military power in pursuit of a political goal, is actually fermenting a sense of injustice amongst the Arab and Muslim populations and the failure of the United States to perceive this policy flaw has only helped in legitimizing a perceptional analysis in the Islamic world that the United States’ policies are against Islam and even more worse, that the United States is using its military power to destroy Islam as a religion.

Consequently, the continued use of military power by the United States will simply reinforce this perception in the minds of the Muslims and the strengthening of this perception; will only confer upon Islamic militant groups, such as Al-Qaeda, legitimacy for justifying their ideas of an armed struggle against the United States. Therefore, the bitter experience of the last five years of an armed struggle against militant Islam, in Afghanistan, Iraq and in Pakistan, concludes that United States needs to review its policy options, because it is in the interests of militant Islam to seek a prolonged military confrontation with the United States; not in hopes of defeating it, but using it as an raison d’etre to validate its own political cohesion and importance as the flag-bearer of the Muslims’ struggle for justice and respect in the world. The United States must be willing to accept the fact that militant Islam cannot, and will not, be defeated in a military sense but only though a political sense. Only a political approach towards fighting militant Islam offers the best option of removing the sense of injustice and victimization, which exists in Muslim and Arab nations due to the use of United States’ military power or the employment of such a power by the allies of the United States in the “global war on terrorism”.

Hence, the question confronting the United States, in order to defeat the philosophy of militant Islam is not how to use its military and political and economic power to defeat militant Islam, but rather how to use these advantages in offering leadership and guidance to the Muslim world. The greatest misfortune of the politics in the Arab and Muslim lands has been its inability to offer any leadership or a future to its people and historically speaking, there has been no leadership in the Arab-Muslim world capable of voicing the sentiments of its populations and nor has it been historically successful in realizing them in the last hundred years. This is not to suggest that the United States embark upon the utopian notions of creating civil societies in the Arab and Muslim nations, but what it does suggest is that the United States will have to engage the Islamic world politically, diplomatically, educationally and culturally and it will have to end its isolationist policy of remaining aloof from the Islamic world and seeking engagement with it and wishing to reform it only through the leverage of American military power. The United States should realize that its greatest advantage over militant Islam is, and has been, its’ historic traditions of tolerance of differences; innovation of idealism; acceptance of unpopular dissent and the evolutionary nature of its political, economic and social structures, which thrive and prosper in times of difficulty and do not wilt under adversity.

This is the secret for the eventual triumph of the United States over militant Islam. Instead of forcing a reform in Muslim societies from outside, the United States should devote its resources to bring about changes from within the Muslim societies themselves.
The United States should use its advantages and it should draw strength from the fact that it is an open society and it will be in a position to bring about a systematic series of reform in the Islamic world by opening itself to the Islamic world and not closing its doors to it. The United States will lose this war, if it plays according to the dictates of militant Islam and closes itself from the outside world and believes that it will be secure and safe within “Festung Amerika”. Militant Islam knows, fully well, that it cannot defeat the United States, and is thus, hoping that the United States will vacate the field of battle itself and allow militant Islam to claim it and it is incumbent upon the United States not to allow this possibility from becoming a reality. The United States has to stay engaged in this war, because it must facilitate the creation of a moderate Islamic political philosophy and it should not pay coin to the arguments that moderation exists within political Islam and only needs to be re-discovered; because it does not.

The ideals of political moderation will have to be created within Islam and this would imply that the United States will have to re-order its policy priorities, which place a premium on security issues and instead, it will have to balance its security needs within a spectrum of policies which cater to the creation of political, educational, economic, cultural-social and legal institutionalism in Arab-Muslim lands and thus, will allow the United States decision makers the flexibility of policy options. The creation and implementation of independent institutionalism will mean that the United States will not have to rely on autocratic political personalities in the Islamic world to secure its existence, whose illegal monopolies of power have historically only helped in diminishing United States’ options instead of enhancing them. In doing so, the United States will offer an alternative sense of hope and betterment to the people in Arab and Muslim lands and in the process, would be quite successful in weaning them away from the militant nihilism of Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda. The United States should realize that the attraction of religion, in the eyes of the people, only increases in times of uncertainties and by supporting institutionalism policies over the policies of personalities in the Islamic world, the United States will be able to create a vision for future for the Muslims. This future will be better than the present reality of the vast number of Muslims, because it will be more tangible as it will be based on the idea of certainty and stability instead of being based on promise of instability and suffering, which is what the Islamic leadership is promising its people.

The point, which the United States must remember and if possible implement in its policy towards the Islamic world is that, contrary to the popular imagination, the Muslims are a rational people and if confronted with this choice, will favor stability and over instability in their lives; prosperity over deprivation and hope over despair. Therefore, the United States should allow the Islamic world to see and experience what a tolerant, democratic and progressive society and free peoples of the world are capable of and it should let them experience this option. It should allow them choice after giving them the options of experiencing progress with the rest of the world or regressing back into an isolationist medievalism and should trust their judgment in making the right decision. The ultimate conclusion to this process of exposing the Muslim thought and practices to the modern world, would be that the United States would be offering the Muslims the chance to learn from its experiences and once these experiences would be taken back to the Islamic world, the existence of institutions in those lands would allow the process of reform to gain a momentum of criticality. This momentum will finally enable the existence of a political, social, economic and cultural environment in the Islamic world that rejects the philosophy of militant Islam and in its place will be encouraged to adopt the idealism of a universal humanism and egalitarianism as its guiding philosophy.

Thus, the United States needs to review its policy in the Global War on Terrorism and it needs to decide, what policy offers the best options for itself, the world and for the Muslims in how this war is to be fought and prosecuted and won. It is hoped that the United States will follow a policy option, which will in the words of President John F. Kennedy prevent the fruits of victory from turning into ashes.