The War on Terror is Over; We Won

That is what James Fallows argues in an interesting and provocative article in The Atlantic Monthly (subscription only). The gist of his long article is two-fold: first, although the threat of terrorism has not and will not go away, and the United States is going to remain vulnerable to more attacks, they will likely not be of the magnitude of 9/11. Why? Because there is no friendly place for terrorists to openly meet, plan, train, and carry out attacks. In addition, the United States and other countries have significantly ratched up their surveillance of communications, financial, and arms transactions. Here is how one intelligence expert explained it to Fallows:

Brian Michael Jenkins, a veteran terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, recently published a book called Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves. It includes a fictional briefing, in Osama bin Laden’s mountain stronghold, by an al-Qaeda strategist assigned to sum up the state of world jihad five years after the 9/11 attacks. “Any al-Qaeda briefer would have to acknowledge that the past five years have been difficult,” Jenkins says. His fictional briefer summarizes for bin Laden what happened after 9/11: “The Taliban were dispersed, and al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were dismantled.” Al-Qaeda operatives by the thousands have been arrested, detained, or killed. So have many members of the crucial al-Qaeda leadership circle around bin Laden and his chief strategist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Moreover, Jenkins’s briefer warns, it has become harder for the remaining al-Qaeda leaders to carry out the organization’s most basic functions: “Because of increased intelligence efforts by the United States and its allies, transactions of any type—communications, travel, money transfers—have become more dangerous for the jihadists. Training and operations have been decentralized, raising the risk of fragmentation and loss of unity. Jihadists everywhere face the threat of capture or martyrdom.”

Because of this fragmentation, sympathetic terrorists must form self-starter cells and essentially work from the ground up with no opportunity for coordination. They can, and likely will, carry out attacks, but it won't be easy for them to collect the resources or escape notice if they want to do something big.

The real danger going forward, according to Fallows, is not that we will suffer a major attack, but that we will overreact to the threats and attacks that do come (and this was written before Israel's massive response to Hezbollah's rocket attacks and capture of soldiers):

In its past military encounters, the United States was mainly concerned about the damage an enemy could do directly—the Soviet Union with nuclear missiles, Axis-era Germany or Japan with shock troops. In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

The longer we stay in Iraq, the more Abu Ghraib type incidents, the more we do the terrorists work for them. On regaining our moral authority, Fallows says:

The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.” “America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,” he said. A senior army officer from a country whose forces are fighting alongside America’s in Iraq similarly told me that America “simply has to recapture its moral authority.” His reasoning:

The United States is so powerful militarily that by its very nature it represents a threat to every other nation on earth. The only country that could theoretically destroy every single other country is the United States. The only way we can say that the U.S. is not a threat is by looking at intent, and that depends on moral authority. If you’re not sure the United States is going to do the right thing, you can’t trust it with that power, so you begin thinking, How can I balance it off and find other alliances to protect myself?

America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now. “We are slowly changing their way of life,” Michael Scheuer’s fictional adviser to bin Laden says in his briefing. The Americans’ capital city is more bunkerlike than it was during World War II, he comments; the people live as if terrified, and watch passively as elementary-school children go through metal detectors before entering museums.

So the time has come to declare victory in the war on terror:

Very simply: by declaring that the “global war on terror” is over, and that we have won. “The wartime approach made sense for a while,” Dearlove says. “But as time passes and the situation changes, so must the strategy.”

We need to keep war for short-term focused and major military efforts against enemies, where all the nations resources are focused on winning, and where universal sacrifice is necessary and expected from the American public.

In addition, maintaining a wartime mentality keeps us in a heightened state of anxiety that saps our energy and morale. It also predisposes us to look at all threats through the lens of a military response. And it makes it likely that at some point we will suffer a "defeat."

The time has come, Fallows, says for a long-term approach that emphasizes our non-military strengths: our high moral standing in the world as a practitioner of democracy and protector of freedom, and our economic engine of growth and transformation.

It is difficult for me to argue with anything Fallows says. But it will never happen until we have a new administration in place. For one thing, Fallows doesn't address in this article the way the Bush administration has intentionally used the war-time mentality as a political tool for partisan victory at home and as an excuse for using the military abroad. For another, can anyone imagine the response Bush would get if he stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier or in the Oval Office and declared victory in the war on terror? He would be ridiculed out of office; he has the lost the moral intregity to be able to make those kinds of announcements. And finally, it's just not going to happen until Bush is gone because it is beyond his capabilities as a leader to take this country through this kind of transformation.

But after Bush, we can hope for leadership that takes us in the direction that Fallows suggests we need to go.