Pentagon plans for 'long war' on terror
By Peter Spiegel
Published: August 24 2005
news.ft.com
The obstinacy of the Iraqi insurgency and the sudden surge in violence in Afghanistan may make it appear that the US military in the region is spending all of its time fighting a war on two fronts.
But senior officers within US Central Command, the Pentagon body responsible for the Middle East and surrounding regions, have already begun planning for what one top commander terms “the long war”: the battle that will come once Iraq and Afghanistan are finally pacified.
According to Major General Douglas Lute, who as director of operations for Centcom is responsible for near-term planning, the long war amounts to an offensive from the Horn of Africa to the borders of Afghanistan to ensure that al-Qaeda and its affiliated terror organisations do not find a safe haven once they are forced out of their current bases.
To Maj Gen Lute and his Centcom counterparts, the Iraqi insurgency which he argues is 90 per cent home-grown may prove a short-term challenge, but the growing threat from a loosely affiliated network of extremists runs the risk of causing more damage in the region, indeed worldwide.
“The broader fight for Central Command, while we deal with both those insurgencies, is against the extremist network,” he said. “This is the cellular, franchised, network-like structure where al-Qaeda holds the ideological standard bin Laden, al-Zawahiri are still the standard-bearers for the ideology but increasingly, we've seen beneath the umbrella of that ideology a loose, not-at-all hierarchical network of franchises, if you will, crop up that we believe constitute a regional and even global threat. “We call that the long war.”
On the most basic level, Maj Gen Lute said, that offensive was likely to include tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has emerged as a leader of the Iraqi insurgency, once the war in Iraq is over. To Centcom, Mr Zarqawi is not in Iraq to die for the cause, but rather to build on his network and take the fight to the entire region.
“We're concerned in our area of operations about what happens to Zarqawi when Iraq is stabilised, which we believe it eventually will be, and the path of least resistance takes Zarqawi somewhere else,” Maj Gen Lute said. “It is clear that even a network as I've described, which is not fundamentally state-based or state-sponsored, still requires some sort of physical sanctuary where they can organise themselves, train themselves, marshal forces, marshal assets, and then proceed from there.”
For Centcom planners, those safe havens are both physical and virtual. On the physical side, the main concerns lie in the Horn of Africa, where vast ungovernable spaces would provide ideal homes for Mr Zarqawi and his associates.
From Yemen across the Arabian Sea into Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, local forces have already seen stepped-up US efforts to train and strengthen elite counter-terrorist units to combat any al-Qaeda affiliate that might emerge. Their efforts also include work with border control and immigration agencies to modernise their approaches to tracking those moving across their borders.
But perhaps more interestingly, Maj Gen Lute noted that Centcom was increasingly looking to fight its campaign on the internet, where Islamic radicals have found ways to recruit, train, and raise funds for their cause. He said terror networks had become so sophisticated that they had begun to use otherwise prosaic commercial applications such as PayPal, the internet payment system, to collect donations to their cause.
“These guys are sophisticated in their use of what we call the virtual safe haven, the virtual sanctuary,” he said.
“One of the things that we are hot on right now is how to contest that virtually safe haven.” |
