Updating the "global struggle on extremism": less Leviathan, more SysAdmin
thomaspmbarnett.com
¦"New Name for 'War on Terror' Reflects Wider U.S. Campaign," by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, New York Times, 26 July 2005, p. A9.
¦"Plan Of Attack: The Pentagon has a secret new strategy for taking on terrorists-and taking them down," by Linda Robinson, U.S. News & World Report, 1 August 2005.
¦"Taliban on the run but far from vanquished: Afghan successes eclipsed by Iraq," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 26 July 2005, p. 1A.
¦"Sunni Arabs rejoin constitution committee with list of demands," by Associated Press, USA Today, 26 July 2005, p. 8A.
¦"Shiites: Better Safe Than Sorry; Makeshift Militias Are Formed to Thwart Sectarian Attacks in Iraq," by Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2005, p. A10.
¦"New U.S. Envoy Will Prress Iraqis On Their Charter," by Dexter Filkins and James Glanz, New York Times, 26 July 2005, p. A1.
¦"Security Forces Of Palestinians Are Found Unfit: A Legacy of Yasir Arafat; Independent Study Calls Units Badly Motivated, Disorganized, Weak," by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 26 July 2005, p. A1.
¦"Groups Worry Attacks in Egypt May Slow Changes: Mubarek Critics Also Fear Red Sea Resort Bombings Will Lead to a Crackdown," by Karby Leggett and Yasmine El-Rashidi, Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2005, p. A10.
The Bush Administration is moving off the phrase "global war on terrorism" and toward the "global struggle against extremism" in an effort to describe what it has come to understand as the larger context of defeating the global Salafi jihadist movement. This is good and right, and in some ways represents the mea culpa of the neocons (Doug Feith is now a loud cheerleader for this broader view as he departs the Pentagon) for their tendency to define the GWOT almost exclusively in terms of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Still, progress is progress.
Question for me as Putnam inputs all the edits to the unbound galley copy that Mark Warren and I worked over in late June and early July: do I seek to capture this shift in my own use of the phrase "global war on terrorism" in the text? I don't use it that much, and largely give it up after the first hundred pages (the Pentagon likewise disappears after the first hundred or so pages), so it's a real question.
Thing is, that phrase will be a beyond-the-Pentagon phrase by and large, as demonstrated by the new Joint Staff-issued "National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism," a document I helped shape in the most marginal sense through consultations I had with Central Command's J-5 (plans and policy), the Joint Staff's J-5, and Special Operations Command's current commander General Doug Brown through my participation in SOCOM's "strategists panel" last summer (all of these interactions are described in Blueprint for Action). Naturally, all three elements interacted with a host of thinkers and strategists, so I will claim no great influence-just the repeatedly demonstrated capacity of PNM to take me into these discussions.
There's a great piece in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report on that strategic plan. Here are the key excerpts I drew from it:
On March 3, with little fanfare, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, signed a comprehensive new plan for the war on terrorism. Senior defense officials briefed U.S. News on the contents of the still-secret document, which is to be released soon in an unclassified form. Officially titled the "National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism," the document is the culmination of 18 months of work and is a significant evolution from the approach adopted after the 9/11 attacks, which was to focus on capturing or killing the top al Qaeda leaders.
For the first time since then, Pentagon officials say, they have a strategy that examines the nature of the antiterror war in depth, lays out a detailed road map for prosecuting it, and establishes a score card to determine where and whether progress is being made.
The origins of the new plan lie in an October 2003 "snowflake," as Rumsfeld's numerous memoranda to his staff are called. Was the United States really winning the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld asked his commanders, and how could we know if more terrorists were being killed or captured than were being recruited into the ranks? …
The initial result was a 70-page draft report, which subsequently went through over 40 revisions as it was shared with Rumsfeld's inner circle, then a larger group, called the senior-level review group ("Slurg," in Pentagon-speak), and then regional commanders and other agencies. The president was briefed on the report last January and presented with recommendations for presidential-level initiatives to be included in a government wide review of counterterrorism policy, which is still being conducted by the National Security Council. In March, the final 25-page report, plus 13 annexes, was signed and became formal Pentagon policy. Key features of the new plan:
The terrorist threat against the United States is now defined as "Islamist extremism" --not just al Qaeda …
The new approach emphasizes "encouraging" and "enabling" foreign partners, especially in countries where the United States is not at war …
The Pentagon will use a new set of metrics twice a year to measure its progress in the war against terrorism. Commanders are to report, for example, on successes in locating and dismantling terrorist safe havens, financial assets, communications networks, and planning cells for each of the target groups.
The Pentagon's Special Operations Command is designated in the new plan as the global "synchronizer" in the war on terrorism for all the military commands and is responsible for designing a new global counterterrorism campaign plan and conducting preparatory reconnaissance missions against terrorist organizations around the world …
The final product reflects changes of profound significance, Pentagon officials say. First, the enemy is now defined more broadly than just al Qaeda. Second, the Pentagon has now officially moved away from what has been widely seen as a unilateral American approach. "It's not a military project alone," Feith explained, "and the United States cannot do it by itself alone."
Going global.
The new strategy, for the first time, formally directs military commanders to go after a list of eight pressure points at which terrorist groups could be vulnerable: ideological support, weapons, funds, communications and movement, safe havens, foot soldiers, access to targets, and leadership. Each U.S. geographic command is to follow a systematic approach, first collecting intelligence on any of the two dozen target groups that are operating in its area of responsibility and then developing a plan to attack all eight nodes for each of those groups.
Going after high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, his emir in Iraq, is still a big part of the strategy but only a part. Three less direct approaches will now receive much greater emphasis: helping partner nations confront terrorism, going after supporters of terrorist organizations, and helping the State Department-led campaign to reduce the ideological appeal of terrorism.
The latter category includes such things as military-provided humanitarian aid. U.S. aid to tsunami victims, for example …
For a Pentagon that has been seen as primarily championing pre-emptive attacks against terrorist threats, the new strategy's enthusiastic embrace of foreign partners is a real sea change …
For whatever opposition they encounter, Pentagon brass know they must now rely more than ever on foreign partners; the insurgency in Iraq and the continuing violence in Afghanistan have stretched U.S. forces, simply precluding go-it-alone missions …
The new Pentagon strategy gives several new responsibilities to the Special Operations Command, which oversees all American special operations forces …
Gen. Doug Brown, the head of the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, said his command was selected for the new mission "because, quite frankly, we are a global command. We've always been oriented around the world." In June, Brown convened a meeting of special operations forces from 59 foreign countries in Tampa, where SOCOM is based [I spoke at the follow-on CENTCOM special ops symposium that hosted the same officers]
Traditionally, the geographic commands have been reluctant to yield to SOCOM on counterterrorism issues, but that's no longer an option. While Brown's command is now in charge of the planning effort in the war on terrorism, it will lead actual operations only when directed to do so by the president or Rumsfeld …
The Pentagon is floating one proposal that is sure to cause a stir in Congress and, probably, the State Department. Feith says there are good reasons to consider remaking the entire apparatus for aid and training for foreign troops, police, and other security forces. It was set up during the Cold War, he says, "more for building relationships and less for developing capabilities for partners to contribute to our military purposes." He cites the headache encountered when the Pentagon proposed to train and equip the Georgian Army in Central Asia after 9/11. "We had to tap five or six different pots of money," Feith says, "and it took over half a year."
Changing the system won't be easy. Congress has a long history of attaching all kinds of conditions to foreign aid. While the State Department administers most foreign security programs, its capability is small, and the Pentagon is restricted in training police forces abroad. A senior administration official declined to comment on the substance of the Pentagon strategy because it is still classified but said that it had been "invaluable to our government-wide strategic thinking." At the White House, the official said, the National Security Council has focused its approach on "an ever growing number of willing partners . . . to address violent extremists operating within their borders"
When I get the usual question of whether or not my vision is taking root in the Bush Administration/U.S. Government at large, I simply beg off. The question is never one of influence, as I have so often said, but of accuracy. The U.S. Government is simply too big and too complex for the single George Kennan-like "X Article" to move everything down a rather distinct path anymore. Too many players, too many offices, too many budgets. Any strategic visionary has to see him- or herself as a very tiny rudder on a very large ship: incremental change is the norm. Bits and pieces appear, none of it because of your ideas per se, but simply because the growing consensus emerges and-if you're successful-you help a lot of players and offices order themselves around a set of simple rules you've helped to enunciate and popularize. As always, the best compliments you receive are: "This is exactly the same things I've been arguing for over the last several years!" Such bureaucratic momentum is not a single-player sport, but closer to a massive, multiplayer online game.
Still, you see an article like this and you feel a lot of optimism in the course of change that's being pursued in the Pentagon.
And damn it, we need a lot of that optimism as we forge ahead in this war on terrorism or struggle against extremism or tussle about disconnectedness or whatever the hell you want to call it. Lots of similar names all suggesting the same thing isn't chaos, but the gelling of a national consensus.
And this is good.
Consensus gives us a chance to sport real successes, like the SysAdmin effort in Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas and with a population not that much smaller than Iraq. Somehow we make do there with a U.S. contingent of 18k and 2k of coalition troops. Somehow there the Americans specialize in Leviathan efforts against the Taliban while the NATO partners focus more on the SysAdmin stuff of nation-building and security generation across the society. Somehow the militias are disbanding there more and more often, rather than growing like they do in Iraq-especially among the Shiites.
Is Afghanistan the model? Beats Iraq. Doesn't quite beat Kosovo and Bosnia in terms of follow-on economic integration with the global economy, unless you count all that heroin exporting. But overall it's pretty good, with plenty of important lessons learned.
Iraq remains no picnic, but it's good to see the Sunnis rejoin the constitution-drafting process. Lotsa demands? Sure. But demands are good if reasonable pursued.
We should have some demands of our own, some key principles we argue for in our role as mentor to this process. The positive connection here is the shift of Zalmay Khalilzad from ambassador to Afghanistan to ambassador to Iraq. I know, I know. Many wish to vilify the man for his "nefarious" connections to oil companies (Imagine that! A guy with lots of connectivity in Central Asia is sought out by Western energy companies for advice! Can I get a "duh"?) and his perceived role as water-carrier-du-jour for the neocons, but the man is smart, practical, and gets things done.
Khalilzad says the Iraq constitution must provide equal rights for women and dampen demands by sectarian groups for excessive protection from one another.
This guy is wise enough to see the possibility of serious civil war that will serve no one's purposes but al Qaeda's. Eventually these peoples all have to come together in a larger economic and political understanding. Cramming in a lengthy, blood-feuding civil war between today's A and that inevitable Z will just make things harder. Khalilzad is practicing preventive SysAdmin work, which is the best type possible.
The U.S. needed to be making similar efforts in both Palestine and Egypt, where serious backsliding on political reforms may well ensue primarily for security reasons. In the Gaza and West Bank, it's Arafat's legacy of deep corruption that yields security forces trusted by no one-a huge potential showstopper in the Israeli pullout process. In Egypt, it's the fear that 9/11-like strikes will be used by Mubarek as a pretext to extend his decades-long "emergency rule."
Much SysAdmin work to be done in the region. Our effort gets no more or less complicated. We just continue to move the pile and-hopefully judging by the new terminology of the Bush Administration-keep our eyes on the larger prize of ending the disconnectedness that defines danger in our globalized world." |
