Why we're losing the war on terror.
Counter-terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman has a real eye-opener on al Qaeda in the current issue of the National Interest. The piece really casts doubt on the wisdom of waging a huge counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Hoffman notes how al Qaeda is getting increasingly better at reaching into the U.S. to find and radicalize individuals to carry out attacks. While we focus on one theater - first Iraq, then Afghanistan - al Qaeda retains resiliency by keeping a global footprint. The administration's touting of drone strikes is also misguided, Hoffman writes:
The operable assumption, like the infamous body counts that masqueraded as progress during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, is that we can kill our way to victory. Long ago, David Galula, a French army officer and arguably still today the worldâ??s preeminent expert on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, wrote about the fallacy of a strategy that relies primarily on decapitation. In Pacification in Algeria, 1956â??1958, first published by the RAND Corporation in 1963, Galula explains how the capture in 1957 of the top-five leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front, the terrorist-cum-guerrilla group that the French battled for eight long years before giving up in exhaustion, â??had little effect on the direction of the rebellion, because the movement was too loosely organized to crumble under such a blow.â? Half a century later, he could just as easily be talking about al-Qaeda...The above examples are not meant to imply that killing and capturing terrorists should not be a top priority in any war on terrorism. Only that such measuresâ??without accompanying or attendant efforts to stanch the flow of new recruits into a terrorist organizationâ??amount to a tactical holding operation at best. That is not the genuinely game-changing strategic reversal that attrition of terrorist leaders in tandem with concerted counter-radicalization efforts to hamper recruitment can ultimately achieve.
Unfortunately, while Hoffman acknowledges the need to stem the supply of recruits, there aren't many specifics about how that should actually be done. What Hoffman does make clear is that reforming the Karzai kleptocracy is not going to impede al Qaeda to any great extent.
