Can the War on Terror Be Won?

How to Fight the Right War

Philip H. Gordon

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  It can, but only if U.S. officials start to think clearly about what success in the war on terror would actually look like. Victory will come only when Washington succeeds in discrediting the terrorists' ideology and undermining their support. These achievements, in turn, will require accepting that the terrorist threat can never be eradicated completely and that acting as though it can will only make it worse.

PHILIP H. GORDON is Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World (Times Books, 2007), from which this essay is drawn.

After the war on terror, the nation's priorities will come back into balance. Preventing terrorism will remain an important goal, but it will no longer be the main driver of U.S. foreign policy. It will take its place as just one of several concerns, alongside health care, the environment, education, the economy. Budgets, speeches, elections, and policies will no longer revolve around the war on terror to the exclusion of other critical issues on which the nation's welfare depends.

That world is a long way off. The political and economic stagnation in the Middle East, the war in Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other conflicts from Kashmir to Chechnya continue to produce the frustration and humiliation that cause terrorism, and with the right conditions, it only takes a small number of extremists to pose a serious threat. But although the end of the war on terror will not come tomorrow, the paths that could lead to it can already be seen. The destruction of the al Qaeda organization, for example, is already under way, and with determination and the right policies, it can be completed. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are now living like fugitives in caves rather than like presidents or military commanders in compounds in Afghanistan. Other al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured, and the organization's ability to communicate globally and to finance major operations has been significantly reduced. Al Qaeda is trying to reconstitute itself along the Afghan-Pakistani border, but with so much of the world -- now including the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan -- sharing an interest in suppressing the group, it will have great difficulty becoming once again the global terrorist enterprise that was able to take the United States by surprise on 9/11.

There are also signs of a Muslim backlash against al Qaeda's use of wanton violence as a political tool -- exactly the sort of development that will be critical in the long-term effort to discredit jihadism. After al Qaeda's suicide attacks at two hotels in Jordan in November 2005 -- which killed some 60 civilians, including 38 at a wedding party -- Jordanians poured out into the streets to protest in record numbers. Subsequent public opinion polls showed that the proportion of Jordanian respondents who believed that violence against civilian targets to defend Islam is never justified jumped from 11 percent to 43 percent, while those expressing a lot of confidence in bin Laden to "do the right thing" plunged from 25 percent to less than one percent. Similar Muslim reactions have followed al Qaeda attacks in Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. In Iraq's Anbar Province, there are also signs that locals are getting fed up with Islamist terrorists and turning against them. Sunni tribes from that region who once battled U.S. troops have now joined forces with the United States to challenge al Qaeda militants. Tribes that once welcomed al Qaeda support in the insurgency against U.S. forces are now battling al Qaeda with thousands of fighters and significant local support.

This is why Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer who has studied Islamist terrorist movements, argues that support for jihadists will eventually erode just as it did for previous terrorist groups, such as the anarchists of nineteenth-century Europe. In the long term, Sageman argues, "the militants will keep pushing the envelope and committing more atrocities to the point that the dream will no longer be attractive to young people." The terrorism analyst Peter Bergen believes that violence that kills other Muslims will ultimately prove to be al Qaeda's Achilles' heel. Killing Muslims, he argues, is "doubly problematic for Al Qaeda, as the Koran forbids killing both civilians and fellow Muslims." After the 9/11 attacks, wide segments of the Arab public and the Arab media expressed sympathy with the victims, and prominent clerics (including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamist firebrand with a wide following on satellite television) issued fatwas condemning the attacks as contrary to Islam and calling for the apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators. That type of response is what will have to happen if Islamist terrorism is to be discredited and discarded -- and it is what will happen when the terrorists overreach and fail.

Fundamentalist Islamism also has poor long-term prospects as a broader political ideology. Indeed, far from representing a political system likely to attract increasing numbers of adherents, fundamentalist Islamism has failed everywhere it has been tried. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Iran under the mullahs, in Sudan under the National Islamic Front, different strains of Islamist rule have produced economic failure and public discontent. Indeed, the Taliban and the Iranian clerics are probably responsible for creating two of the most pro-U.S. populations in the greater Middle East. Opinion polls show that there is even less support for the kind of fundamentalist Islamic government proposed by bin Laden. "Many people would like bin Laden ... to hurt America," says the political scientist and pollster Shibley Telhami, "but they do not want bin Laden to rule their children." Asked in Telhami's survey what, if any, aspect of al Qaeda they sympathized with, 33 percent of Muslim respondents said none, 33 percent said its confronting the United States, 14 percent said its support for Muslim causes such as the Palestinian movement, 11 percent said its methods of operation, and just 7 percent said its efforts to create an Islamic state. Fundamentalist Islamism has not yet run its course and cannot be expected to in less than a generation. Communism, after all, was a serious competitor to the capitalist West for more than a century and survived in the Soviet Union for more than 70 years, even after its failings became clear to those who once embraced it. In the long run, fundamentalist Islamism is likely to suffer a similarly slow but certain fate.

Finally, there are good reasons to believe that the forces of globalization and communication that have been unleashed by changing technology will eventually produce positive change in the Middle East. This will especially be true if there is successful promotion of economic development in the region, which would produce the middle classes that in other parts of the world have been the drivers of democratization. Even in the absence of rapid economic change, the increasingly open media environment created by the Internet and other communications technologies will prove to be powerful agents of change. Although only around ten percent of households in the Arab world have access to the Internet, that percentage is growing rapidly, having already risen fivefold since 2000. Even in Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed and conservative societies in the world, there are over 2,000 bloggers.

Cable news stations such as the independent Qatar-based

al Jazeera and the Dubai-based al Arabiya reach tens of millions of households throughout the Arab world, often with information or perspectives the repressive governments in the region would rather not be heard. According to the Arab media expert Marc Lynch, "The conventional wisdom that the Arab media simply parrot the official line of the day no longer holds true. Al Jazeera has infuriated virtually every Arab government at one point or another, and its programming allows for criticism, and even mockery. Commentators regularly dismiss the existing Arab regimes as useless, self-interested, weak, compromised, corrupt, and worse." Lynch points out that one al Jazeera talk show addressed the issue "Have the existing Arab regimes become worse than colonialism?" The host, one of the guests, and 76 percent of callers said yes -- "marking a degree of frustration and inwardly directed anger that presents an opening for progressive change."

That sort of progressive change is unlikely to take place in the near future, and it is true that the region's autocrats seem ever more determined to prevent it. But even if the priority for Middle Eastern leaders remains what it has been -- to keep a grip on power -- at some point it will become clear that the only way to hold on to power is to change. The next generation of leaders in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria might conclude that in the absence of change, their regimes will fall to fundamentalists or their countries will be surpassed by regional rivals. There do not appear to be any Gorbachevs on the horizon at present, but that was also true for the Soviet Union as late as 1984. Gorbachev's two immediate predecessors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, did not seem to be harbingers of radical change when they passed through the Kremlin, but that is exactly what they were. A new, dynamic, and determined leader of a major Arab country who opens up political space and embraces economic reform can -- by providing prosperity, respect, and opportunity for his or her citizens -- strike a greater blow in the fight against terrorism than anything the United States could ever do.

THE RIGHT WAR