Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and Rutland Herald.]

Years ago it was said that, “The United States does not have a Middle East policy. That is probably a good thing, because if it did, it would be the wrong one.” That reality has not changed much in the last half century, which underlies the politically partisan difficulties involved in constructing a precise definition of our national interests. Nevertheless, it is impossible to talk about solutions to our problems in the Muslim world without first broadly defining those interests. That said, it is probably safe to settle on the following generalities:

1. Stability or the absence of armed conflict.
2. The maintenance of U.S. commercial interests
3. An end to being viewed as the enemy of the Muslims.
4. Realizing our national security interests, i.e. inhibiting the growth of terrorism by marginalizing secular and religious extremists and supporting Muslim moderates.

After 9/11, the Bush administration established fundamentalist Muslim terrorism as our primary concern in the Muslim world. The Obama administration appears to be following that Bush program and for the last eight years, we have chosen military confrontation as our primary tool for dealing with terrorism.

Much is made of the necessity for us to pay attention to and “do something” about failed and failing states. Taking Taliban Afghanistan in the pre-9/11 period as our national model, we have apparently decided that the elimination of failed states is the answer to our problems with terrorism.

In the real world, that does not compute, a fact that is perfectly illustrated by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber whose terrorist odyssey was focused largely on the United Kingdom, hardly a failed state. Other al-Qaida-affiliated operations have been planned in the United Kingdom, Spain and other non-failed states.

All an enterprising terrorist organization needs to carry out a shoe or underwear bombing is a reasonably secure safe house in a country where not too much attention is paid to people who mind their own business and thus do not come to the attention of local internal security authorities. The 9/11 attacks could easily have been planned in New York City itself and, significantly, required that its participants get their flight training in America.

Such conditions exist all over the world and provide al-Qaida affiliates with all the options they could need to plan their operations. However, even if it were not the case, the issue of dealing with failed or failing states presents an entirely different set of problems and pitfalls for American policy makers.

The Muslim world is comprised of a number of “nation states” that were more the creation of Western imperialist powers than the result of natural cultural, political, and economic evolution. The result can be seen in Iraq where there are two major interpretations of Islam, Shia and Sunni, plus two major ethnic groups, Arabs and Kurds. In Iraq, as in all the other “failed and failing states”, those divisions and conflicts are at the root of our difficulties in trying to find solutions to problems there and that are in keeping with our goals and values.

How can we solve our problems with Al Qaida when the host governments of countries where we have tangible military goals are not sufficiently helpful? They are either uninterested in our problems, as in Somalia, so busy trying to deal with their own that they have no time for our issues, as in the Yemen, or actually have reasons of their own not to help us out, as in Pakistan with the Taliban.

In effect, we are left competing for the time and attention of the reluctant or incompetent governments on which our own policies have forced us to rely. That is not a good formula for success.

At the same time, largely because of our choice of military confrontation, the nature of the threat we have faced has changed. Iraq was never a terrorist problem before our 2003 invasion. It became one solely because we were there militarily. We provided Al Qaida with an opportunity for first-rate live training, a target-rich environment and excellent prospects for recruiting and fund raising. They moved in under the cover of the Iraq insurgency against our troops.

The Afghanistan situation began as a struggle with terrorism and has since morphed into a counterinsurgency. Today, there are few if any Al Qaida fighters left. Again, we are dealing with an insurgency. Unlike terrorist movements, which are often overcome, insurgencies are extremely difficult to snuff out.

So, we start out with a major contradiction. We want to fight terrorism, but we are fighting insurgencies. The nature of the Muslim world is such that virtually any time we choose to go after Al Qaida militarily, we will end up fighting insurgencies, whether in Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria or Pakistan. All of those countries, like much of the Muslim world, have built into them the kinds of internal ethnic, tribal, religious and political contradictions that make general civil strife a perpetual nightmare waiting to happen. All it takes to push it over the edge into insurgency is something foreign, like American military involvement.

It would be nice, however irrational, to believe that one day we could actually conquer or somehow defeat Al Qaida and bring an end to the terrorism that has plagued us for over a decade. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. If we are ultimately to rid ourselves of this terrorist phenomenon, it will be because the terrorist movement itself dies, as has been the case with most of the terrorist organizations that have not survived during the past half-century.

According to a 2006 Rand Corporation study, in the past fifty years, the tactic least likely to succeed against terrorism is military confrontation. The Rand finding is supported by Israeli experience, which says that military operations against terrorism invariably turn into extended counterinsurgency operations which are seldom won.

Our goal in this ongoing struggle with terrorism is clearly to figure out how to help Al Qaida die a peaceful death.