Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
I want to comment on President Obama’s recent speech declaring an end to the War on Terror but affirming that the fighting against terrorists will go on. Since 9/11, the challenge of ending terrorism against us has been a consuming national issue.
I welcome what the president said, though he was not as clear in what he was trying to do as he should have been. Back in 2001 President George W. Bush and his advisers made a great mistake in thinking about Islamic terrorism as a “war.” It was simplistic and not really on point — a bad choice of words. But like all powerful images and metaphors, it channeled our emotions in a certain
direction and drove our actions in one direction and away from alternate, preferable courses of response.
Since it was the wrong way of thinking about those who seek to do us harm, it misled us into adopting inadequate measures as a response to a real threat.
There is a Chinese strategic insight which advises that if you are off by only a degree at the start, you will nonetheless be miles off course at the end of your journey. That is what has happened to our war on terror. By wrongly conceptualizing our strategy, we did not come to know enough about our enemy; we turned many influencers away from cooperation with our goals and our operations; and we have not eliminated terrorism after 12 years of expensive global effort.
A better metaphor would have been “pirates.”
Not Johnny Depp’s feckless and amusing Captain Jack Sparrow, but real pirates who kill and rob without conscience and pose a threat to civilization.
Wars are fought between states; pirates are individuals killing, thieving, and pillaging without any color of state authority. They fly their own flag, not a national one. They answer to no government.
Going after pirates is more like going after criminals than it is going to war against massed legions of soldiers, lines of tanks, and batteries of artillery. It is more like spy-craft than it is like landing on the beaches of Normandy.
It is a cunning and selective use of informants, intelligence, and focused violence. On the defensive side, it demands patrolling and guarding vast spaces. It is law enforcement against those who have no respect for the law.
By categorizing terrorists as modern day “pirates,” we take from them any pretense of legitimacy. We morally isolate them from all humanity. We set the stage for their friends and relatives to disown them and run from their nefarious plots.
The terrorists we face today fight for no government. Theirs is a personal struggle based on belief and conviction about cleansing the world of those who, in their minds, do evil or refuse to respect their religious extremism. While the origins of their ideology lie in human interpretations of divine truth, their resort to violence as a means of social redemption replicates the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th century, who killed to bring on a social revolution that would end capitalism.
Then the anarchists were treated as a police problem, not as a rival state authority. President Obama is therefore right to reject the concept of war in our struggle to eliminate Islamic terrorism. He is also right in suggesting that we replace the “war” metaphor with a more correct understanding of how best to turn the tide of history against them.
The more appropriate grounds for counter-terrorism is to think of the terrorists and their networks as hostis humani generis — “enemies of all mankind.” This is a term of international law that Justice Breyer of the US Supreme Court used last April 17 in a dissenting opinion in seeking to bring violators of human rights to justice in our courts.
The case before the Supreme Court was Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, wherein a foreign plaintiff sought to bring a foreign corporation before an American court for alleged complicity in abuses of human rights in Nigeria. A majority of the justices held that under an old statute, American courts have no jurisdiction over such distant events. Justice Breyer, while agreeing with that result in the case before the court, suggested that an exception could be made if the proposed defendant was a hostis humani generis.
In short, if the actions of an individual so thoroughly violate the conscience of humanity, he or she becomes an enemy to all civilized peoples — as an individual, not as the agent of any state. It is therefore legitimate to go after them as individuals and to ask all nations in the world to render assistance in the chase.
This is roughly the case with pirates: All nations are to seek out and capture pirates on the sea and in the air. Nations are not to render them any assistance or give them sanctuary. Such individuals are outlaws everywhere.
I would argue that today’s terrorists are such creatures. By their acts of terror do we know them — and by virtue of such acts, we are justified in seeking a united front of all nations in helping us put them out of business.
If this is the proper approach to take, we should give command of counter-terrorism not to the military, but to civilian agencies such as the CIA and the State Department. We might even create a special police force to seek out and arrest all who are hostis humani generis. In so doing, we would be serving as agents for world justice.
But — and this point is most important — those of whatever nationality or faith who are not hostis humani generis merit our favor and respect under the norm of equity and reciprocity. They are not our enemies — or anyone’s — due to their national origin or religious belief.
When I served in the rural development, counter-insurgency program in South Vietnam seeking to end the Viet Cong insurgency, this individualist understanding of who was an enemy of justice was essentially the approach taken. A special organization — Civilian Operations Rural Development Support or CORDS — was created under the Military Assistance Command Vietnam or MACV. CORDS blended economic development, local elections, land reform, police and village militias to weed out individuals working for the Viet Cong from local communities, successfully encouraging South Vietnamese to turn their backs on the Communists.
The program was a huge success, with the Viet Cong effectively eliminated by the summer of 1972. In I972 the Viet Cong was no longer a force in the war and Hanoi was reduced to massive escalation by sending its entire regular army on an invasion of South Vietnam. The invasion was defeated by South Vietnamese armed forces on the ground with air support from the United States in An Loc, Kontum, and Quang Tri.
Sadly, the CORDS effort was betrayed by Henry Kissinger in his secret Paris negotiations with Hanoi, leading to the conquest of South Vietnam by Hanoi’s army in 1975, but that is another story yet to be told to the American people.
The effort to defeat terrorists and insurgencies was called political-military or “pol-mil” in my day. It spanned a scope of activity lying between regular warfare on one end and legal politics on the other.
The grand master of war-making strategy in the West — Clausewitz — pointed to the proper place of counter-terrorism. War, he wrote, was a continuation of politics by other means. In other words, responses to threats and opposition come in many flavors and varieties, some in the form of traditional massed unit maneuvers and others in the forms of espionage, policing, diplomacy, economic sanctions, propaganda, and forging political alliance with individuals, tribes, and governments.
To defeat an enemy, the specific response or set of responses appropriate to the tactics and strategy thrown against us must be chosen. A bad choice of strategy or tactics will not lead to success in the struggle.
This last point is most important, for the goal at the “war” end of the conflict-resolution spectrum is to force the collapse of will on the part of an organized government and its standing army — while the goal in counter-terrorism is to force a collapse of will on the part of individuals. Different goals require different means.
When we seek to terminate individual terrorists and terrorism, we must come to grips with individual motivation and the reasons why individuals seek to kill and destroy. We have to attack the roots of their sense of calling and expose them to self-doubt and regret.
We only fitfully applied appropriate strategy and tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan and so came up short in vindication of our war aims.
Thus, while President Obama is right to give up the conceit of fighting a “war” against terror, I am not so sure he and his advisors have figured out how to defeat the current terrorist threat.
