British anti-terrorist strategy failing
A new report from the RAND Corporation, Rethinking Counter Insurgency, states the global war against terrorism has become a stalemate. It is hard to be sure that the West is winning. The British strategy neither understands nor engages what is attacking the West. As genuine strategy, it fails
The report's authors, John Mackinlay and Alison Al-Baddawy, say the West has reached a security plateau where it protects itself more reliably, but beyond its reach and observation the jihad continues to multiply and operate. Despite the energy of the Western effort and that effort's enormous cost, it is hard to be sure that the West is winning.
Lists of achievements describing elections held, towns secured, amenities restored, and terrorists killed continue to appear, but the campaign has become too complicated to understand. There are too many perspectives, too many actors, and too many front lines to allow for the measurement of success or failure.
Nevertheless, global jihad has altered Western lives, impinged on Western freedoms, restricted Western movement, and substantially raised the cost of Western security.
Winning cannot be measured in fragile democracies installed, armies returned home, and access restored to countries where Westerners now fear to travel. It must also include the frame of mind of affected Muslim populations that are spread among Muslim states as well as immigrant minorities from the Philippines, Niger, and beyond.
"Winning" therefore means a Muslim world that lives more easily with itself, with non-Muslim states, and as minority communities within Western states.
The objectives of the British campaign against terrorism were reaffirmed by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in an address to the Royal United Services Institute, London, in which he ticked the following homeland-security boxes: police, security forces, fire, ambulance, frontier controls, identification cards, attacking terror finances, etc.
This plan probably satisfies some elements of his domestic constituency, but it neither understands nor engages what is attacking the West. As genuine strategy, it fails.
Since 2002 a growing torrent of analysis has pointed out both the danger of dismissing the jihadist phenomenon merely as "terrorism" and the limitations of believing that the problem can therefore be solved by "counterterrorism."
From a Western perspective, a jihadist bomber seems like a mad dog and it is therefore reasonable to destroy him and dismiss his motives. But in traditional Muslim communities in Britain and Europe, the actions of a violent extremist, however disturbing, reflect the very real grievances of those communities.
The British concept of Muslim interlocutors, whom they hope will bravely refute terrorist attacks on British society, presupposes a plentiful supply of British Muslims who will routinely volunteer for the role of government spokesperson. It also assumes that these spokespeople, should any credible ones be found, would not immediately lose their credibility as Muslims in the very communities they seek to win over.
Adopting a counterterrorist strategy assumes a degree of knowledge the West does not have about the communication paths by which extremist ideology reaches its targets, about the size of the of European minorities, and, more importantly, about the percentages of these minorities that are vaguely or strongly sympathetic to jihadist views. Without this knowledge it seems risky to embark on a "do-something" campaign that is largely kinetic and does not seem to address the linkage between Muslim sympathy and the impetus of the jihadist minority.
In national anti-terrorist campaigns, government and security forces had (still have) the luxury of editing and obfuscating the statistics of success and failure to present the best gloss on their operations. In a multinational campaign, the leader of the alliance is denied this option for many reasons; above all, the proliferation of independent observers connected to a proliferation of independent means of communication makes the concealment of bad news almost impossible.
In future campaigns it is therefore important for the Western coalition and concerned states to identify a single, universally recognized authority to measure the success of an intervention on a regular basis. This requirement imposes a change of approach at the outset regarding the transparent handling of all negative information vis-à-vis the virtual dimension and the use of spin by the coalition leadership. It also requires a more educated home constituency and media. Success or failure is seldom a knock-down victory.
Leaders will have to alter the short-term expectations of their political constituencies because the struggle against terrorism continues to be a long journey of discovery in which there are very few shortcuts to what ultimately may become a negotiated settlement.
www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG595.5.pdf
