The Evolving Terror Threat. By Walter Russell Mead. Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013.
Mead:
As
France announces plans to stand down in Mali and the United States builds a new
drone base in neighboring Niger, the conflict formerly known as the global war
on terror is spreading and intensifying. Many in Washington would like to talk
about other things, but while the West might be tired of the war on terror, the
war on terror isn’t tired of the West. America and its allies face an “existential threat,” as British Prime Minister David Cameron recently said, and the
conflict may last for decades. So it is worth stepping back to see where
matters stand.
On
9/11, it became clear that all was not well in the post-Cold War,
post-historical world. The war on terror has since gone through several phases.
The
first was Osama bin Laden's attempt to launch a true “clash of civilizations”
between the West and the world of Islam. His strategy for achieving this goal
was a series of spectacular blows against the citadels of Western power that
would weaken the West and vest his movement with the prestige to draw Muslims
world-wide to his banner.
Bin
Laden failed. In phase two of the war, effective counterterrorism blocked his
efforts to mount repeated attacks on the scale of 9/11. The war in Iraq
(however misguided some consider it) forced al Qaeda in Iraq into a contest
that it lost politically as much as militarily. When the chips were down, Iraq’s
Sunni Muslims chose the Americans over al Qaeda.
The
awakening in Iraq was part of a much larger tide of opinion among Muslims
around the world: The more they saw of al Qaeda, the less they liked it, and
the less they thought it had anything to do with the Islam they learned from
the Quran. By the end of the George W. Bush administration, the effort to
launch a grand war against the West under the flag of al Qaeda had decisively
failed.
The
Obama administration hoped to complete the marginalization and destruction of
al Qaeda, extending Mr. Bush’s military strategy and developing a more
effective political counterstrategy that would further sideline radicalism by
building deeper ties between the U.S. and the moderate Muslim majority. The
military strategy worked reasonably well. The campaign in Afghanistan and
Pakistan that included the death of bin Laden continues to degrade the
capabilities and prestige of the original al Qaeda network, even if the
American exit strategy from this difficult conflict remains unclear.
The
political strategy to reach out to Muslims has had less success. Failed
American attempts to broker a peace between Israel and Palestinians undermined
many Muslims’ faith in the Obama administration’s intentions (or capacity). The
Arab Spring caught the administration off balance, and Washington has struggled
to maintain its priorities as the Middle East has drifted away from liberal
democratic protest toward a darker agenda. American efforts to build bridges to
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have alienated Egyptian liberals without
establishing strong bonds with the Islamists. The U.S. failure to support
effective humanitarian intervention in Syria (even if prudent in terms of
American domestic politics) has dramatically undermined the administration’s
effort to portray the new U.S. as a pro-democracy, humanitarian power guided by
the responsibility to protect.
Meanwhile,
even a weakened and ideologically marginalized al Qaeda has found ways to
assert itself as a credible and sometimes powerful force. The emerging
sectarian war in the Middle East between Muslim Sunnis and Shiites makes al
Qaeda’s fanatical fighters valuable once again to the powers of the Persian
Gulf. The ultramilitants are emerging as significant forces on the Sunni side
in Syria and Iraq, and as a result they are regaining lost credibility and
access to funding from affluent sympathizers in the region. They have also
found fertile ground in the weak states of North Africa.
The
question that confronts the U.S. and its allies now is twofold. How to counter
the explosive growth of radical jihadist organizations and networks in Libya’s
post-Gadhafi vacuum and in surrounding states? And what to do about the
integration of terrorist groups into the sectarian Sunni-Shiite war that spans
the region and to some degree overlaps with America's own struggle to stop the
Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon?
At this
stage, the terrain favors America's enemies. In places like the wide swath of
Africa’s Sahel region, and in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, it is difficult to
establish strong states that can keep the extremists in check. The
free-floating nature of the new jihadist movement also poses problems: At any
given moment, from Afghanistan to Mauritania, dozens of groups are competing
for funds and followers, moving swiftly in response to perceived opportunities.
Yet
this is war: One side makes a move, the other counters it, and so it goes until
one side finds a strategy that the other cannot overcome—or until the exhausted
combatants accept a compromise peace. In the first phase of the war, al Qaeda
tried to lead the world’s Muslims on a grand jihad. In the second phase the
U.S. and its allies (including Muslim religious and civic leaders around the
world) dealt effectively with that threat. Now al Qaeda has developed a way to
remain relevant even without the broad support it once hoped for.
The
fourth stage of war, one hopes, will see the U.S. and its allies once again
push al Qaeda and its allies to the margins, relegating them permanently to the
nuisance fringe. At present al Qaeda appears to have only a limited capacity to
attack the U.S. and its principal European allies. But that could change
quickly if the terrorists succeed in establishing havens in North Africa. This
war isn't over, and the danger isn’t past.
