29Oct03-David Isenberg-Rumsfeld and the 'long, hard slog'
By David Isenberg
As just about everyone now knows, on October 16 US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a short memo - a longstanding practice of his - to four of his closest subordinates, Generals Dick Meyers and Peter Pace, the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, deputy secretary of defense and undersecretary of defense for policy.
The subject was the global "war on terrorism" and the questions, in typical Rumsfeld style, were direct and to the point. Are we winning or losing? Is the Department of Defense changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the United States government changing fast enough?
Considering that Rumsfeld has been virtually a one man band dragging a frequently kicking and screaming Pentagon towards the promised land, ie, the bright, shiny, "Revolution in Military Affairs" which advocates claim will enable the US, with a transformed, "net-centric" military, to defeat opponents with little fuss or muss. These are remarkable questions; both for their candor and the tacit acknowledgement that perhaps there are other, better ways to do things.
A case in point is Rumsfeld's almost plaintive question, "Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?"
As many commentators have noted, if former defense secretary Robert McNamara had asked similar questions back in the 1960s, the US war in Vietnam might have ended far differently. For example, by 1967 McNamara believed that the US would not win in Vietnam, yet he said nothing. The war lasted eight more years and cost tens of thousands more lives. It was not until 1995 that he admitted that his public certitude was a veneer, that architects of the war policy "were wrong, terribly wrong".
In any event, Rumsfeld's memo was promptly leaked to USA Today and published on October 22. Much of the ensuing commentary has focused on the memo as an example that things are getting worse in Iraq, and around the world, in the war against al-Qaeda - more than the Bush administration claims. And, to be sure, the memo does put a speed bump in the path of the Bush administration's public relations campaign that postwar Iraq is progressing nicely and that the media are exaggerating the setbacks.
But Rumsfeld has asked some important questions, and policymakers should seek to provide some honest answers.
Rumsfeld wrote: "Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global 'war on terror'. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [religious schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
The short answer to that is that we do not, in fact, lack the metrics. The metric is in the daily news reports of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bombings Sunday and Monday in Baghdad at the International Committee of the Red Cross and Iraqi police stations were the latest sign that terrorists are in plentiful supply.
One might argue that this is just one country, albeit exceptionally militarized and strife-ridden and doesn't reflect the overall picture. But consider some numbers from a new paper released by the Cato Institute. According to the State Department, in 1998 there were 274 total terrorist incidents worldwide, 111 (41 percent of which were anti-US). In 2001, there were 355 total terrorist incidents worldwide, 220 (62 percent) of which were anti-US.
"Clearly, the United States was a lightening rod for terrorism even before September 11. Given that fact and given that even [Osama] bin Laden's hatred of the United States is largely driven by US policies, a vital component of US national security policy must be to stem the tide of vehement anti-American sentiment. That is especially true in the Middle East, which is an incubator and recruiting pool for radical Islamic terrorists."
It follows from this that if terrorists attack the US for what it does, as opposed to what is stands for, then the "war on terror" is as much a matter of diplomacy and foreign policy as war fighting. Thus, the State Department should assume a far bigger role. Or, as the New York Times editorialized on October 24, "We have also challenged the wisdom of giving the Pentagon a leading role in matters it knows little about, like nation-building and setting foreign policy. It was Mr Rumsfeld who aggressively seized much of that turf and who brushed aside doubts about rushing into a war of choice with Iraq when so much remained to be done on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now he appears to be acknowledging some of the same concerns. Better late than never."
Another useful metric can be found in public opinion. On that front, the 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Project found that less than one-quarter of respondents in Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan said they support the "war on terrorism".
Perhaps the most striking language in the memo was its sense of a prolonged war. Rumsfeld wrote, "Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' cost of millions."
Toward the end of the memo he wrote, "It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."
For a defense secretary who has been somewhat obsessed with transforming a Cold War military into one that fights quick, decisive wars, this is an admission that the US is fighting a war of attrition. And for a society accustomed to instant gratification, that isn't a welcome message.
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