IT'S MORE THAN A WAR

To defeat terrorism we must think beyond bureaucratic reform and even beyond military force. What we need is a new global strategy

 Artículo de Fareed Zakaria en “Newsweek International” del 2-8-04

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

Aug. 2 issue - You know that the 9/11 commission report has had a real impact because Congress has decided to meet in sweltering August to act on its recommendations. In fact, the report is fast achieving Biblical status. Both left and right cite its arguments to vindicate their claims. The Wall Street Journal editorial page believes that it confirms the Bush administration's version of events. Liberal columnists say it amply demonstrates Clinton's strong focus on Al Qaeda. This is in some part because the report is vast and detailed. If you search hard, you will find in it what you want.

But mostly the near-universal approval reflects the report's quality. It is that rare thing in Washington, a genuinely bipartisan product. It is thorough and fair, with a sense of history and of the breadth of its mandate. Because of extraordinary, almost unprecedented access to classified documents, it provides a unique bird's-eye view into decision making at the highest levels of government. It is also well written, rare for work that is the product of a committee. All of this makes for the most important report by an independent commission in decades.

And what does it say? The press has focused on its administrative recommendations: a new intelligence czar, new systems for congressional oversight of intelligence, homeland security and so on. Bureaucratic reforms are important. But all this attention on organization charts misses the big picture. What we need first and foremost is a grand strategy. The absence of such a comprehensive, long-term approach is the crucial gap in American policy. And it won't be solved by a better bureaucratic structure for intelligence.

The obsessive focus on bureaucratic reform is a product of a very American search for a simple solution. There's a problem; create a new government position to fix it. But what the 9/11 Commission report really does is take us back to basics, back to 9/12. The United States was attacked brutally by a new enemy, militant Islamic terror. How should we handle this threat? The commission puts forward a series of ideas and approaches in the first of two chapters of recommendations. This chapter ("What to Do?") precedes the one on organizational changes ("How to Do It"), which only makes sense. What the commission suggests doing is important, persuasive and a substantial departure from current policy.

The conclusion takes on the central organizing idea of the post-9/11 strategy—that we are at war—and is deeply skeptical of it. The report notes that the use of the metaphor of a war accurately describes the effort to kill terrorists in the field, as in Afghanistan. It also properly evokes the need for large-scale mobilization. But the report points out that after Afghanistan, the scope for military action is quite limited. "Long-term success," it concludes, "demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense." Even when it speaks of preventive action it suggests "a preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political as it is military."

The report describes the struggle as "more than a war," but what the conclusions make plain is that it really means that it is different from war. Of the 27 recommendations in this chapter, only one can be seen as advocating the use of military force: attacking "terrorists and their organizations." And even that one, on closer inspection, is more complicated. The sanctuaries identified are in places like Pakistan, Thailand, and Nigeria and in Central and Eastern European cities with lax border controls. What are we to do, invade these countries? The only way that we will apprehend or kill suspected terrorists and disrupt their organizations is by cooperating with these governments.

It is increasingly clear that the conflict in Afghanistan falsely fed the idea that the war against terrorism was a real war. In fact, Afghanistan was an exception. The reality of this threat, the very reason it is so difficult to tackle, is precisely that it cannot be addressed by conventional military means. Yet the prism of war has distorted the vision of important segments of Washington, especially within the Bush administration. This has produced bad strategy. The Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written on the Bush administration's strategy and describes its three pillars as hegemony, preemption and unilateralism. All three approaches seem justifiable if you believe that we are in a war that can be won militarily. All are counterproductive in a struggle that seeks to modernize alien societies, win over Muslim moderates and sustain cooperation on intelligence and law enforcement across the world.

The issue of Iraq highlighted these choices. If you believed that this was truly a war, all that mattered was defeating the enemy. If you believed that a broader political struggle was key, then creating a new and modern Iraq was in many ways more important than defeating Saddam Hussein. The administration showed its colors with a brilliant war plan and no postwar planning. Even in Afghanistan, where the war succeeded and the postwar settlement is working (though fragile), the administration's superhawks (such as Donald Rumsfeld) were continually opposed to greater efforts at nation-building. It doesn't help the war on terror, they argued. But it does help the struggle against Islamic extremism. And there is no war on terror that is not fundamentally an ideological struggle.

The most surprisingly negative picture that emerges from the report is of the Pentagon. Throughout the 1990s, it simply did not want to take on the role of defending America against this foe. (Nor, to be fair, did the White House order it to do so, either under Clinton or Bush, pre-9/11.) In 1998, a group of midlevel officials argued that the Pentagon should be the lead agency in this battle against terrorists; their report went nowhere. That year Richard Clarke chaired an exercise that imagined that terrorists would hijack a jet plane, fill it with explosives and head toward a target in Washington. He asked the Pentagon what it could do about such a situation. The answer was, pretty much nothing. Condoleezza Rice, who was asked in June 2001 to draw up plans to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban, recalled to the commission that "the military didn't particularly want this mission." And before and after 9/11 the civilian leadership of the Pentagon—Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—was utterly obsessed with Iraq. They dismissed the need for a response to the attack on the USS Cole, which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz claimed was now "stale." (In fact, it had taken place four months earlier.)

The bulk of the commission's substantive recommendations are for a broad political and economic strategy toward the Muslim and Arab world. The report argues that the United States should "offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors." It recommends substantial resources being devoted to scholarship, exchange and library programs in the Muslim world, and has a specific, excellent recommendation to fund public education in these countries. Madrassas and other such religious schools have grown in the Muslim world because the secular educational system has collapsed under the weight of poverty and population growth.

The report's conclusion repeatedly stresses multilateralism and recognizes that the civilized world will need a common and coordinated approach to fighting this long struggle. It will need common standards on sharing intelligence, treating suspects, tracking money and handling proliferation problems. Without a global—or at least wide, multilateral—system, there are simply too many nooks and crannies for terrorists to exploit. American security requires global cooperation.

A commission staffer told me that many on the panel thought their recommendations could have been titled "Bringing Foreign Policy Back In." What their report also does, however, is bring homeland security back in. It urges new screening procedures, biometric identification systems, better watch lists and more emergency-response training. All this sounds less sexy than the politics of diplomacy but it might well prove more important. The patchwork of local, city and state systems—all different, some incompatible—must give way to national standards for national defense.

In the past three years the United States has added almost $200 billion to its spending on international affairs and homeland security, a 50 percent increase. It has put the battle against terrorism at the top of the global agenda. There has not been such a mobilization of resources since the Korean War. That analogy is worth pursuing. As that war broke, the Truman administration's first impulse was simply to mobilize all American resources and throw them at the problem. Only later did it begin stepping back and asking itself what was the best strategy to deal with the broader phenomenon of Soviet and Chinese communism. Truman's team initiated a debate among its leading thinkers—George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen—that framed policy choices for decades. The Eisenhower administration came into office and also forced such a reexamination, focusing on a long-term, fiscally sustainable strategy—in keeping with Eisenhower's own concerns. It was in these few years that America's basic cold-war strategy was set.

Our period of mobilization is now over. Some of what has happened in the heat of these past years was necessary, some grossly overdone. What is important now is to step back, reflect, reason and construct a longer-term, sustainable strategy. It is a pivotal moment for whoever occupies the White House in the next four years. He has the opportunity to act not as a crisis manager but a strategist, shaping American policy not for the next few years but for the next few decades. And if he does it right, it could even mean success.