100 Years of War?

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Grappling with global terror conundrum

The world's anti-terrorism experts met for a conference in Stockholm this week and, as Roger Hardy, the BBC's Islamic Affairs Analyst, found, optimism was in short supply.

As the event began - at a conference centre overlooking the famous Stockholm waterfront - we stood in silent commemoration of the victims of the Madrid train bombings of 2004.

It was a sign, had we needed one, that we were gathered in the Swedish capital to discuss one of the most important and difficult issues of our time.

The participants came at the topic from every angle.

There were senior soldiers and policemen, intelligence professionals, diplomats, think-tank experts, a handful of journalists - and, on the fringes, salesmen eager to explain the latest gadgets, designed to make us feel safer in a dangerous world.

Counter insurgency

Our common concern was how do you defeat an insurgency - and the phrase invoked more than once was T E Lawrence's dictum that it is like eating soup with a knife.

He, after all, was in a position to know, having led a much-romanticised Arab insurgency against the Turks in the First World War.

Insurgencies of course are not new.

At one point, delegates trooped off to see that classic Sixties film The Battle of Algiers - the moral of which is that a Western country, however powerful (and even one that is ready to resort to torture) will fail to crush an insurgency if it faces determined popular resistance.

Now the West and its allies are trying to adapt the lessons drawn from past insurgencies to help them fight a new kind of war.

Even defining the conflict is problematic. US President George W Bush dubbed it the "war on terror".

Others now prefer to call it a "global insurgency". Still others think that term is not quite right either.

Ideological struggle

But whatever it is, it is posing a whole host of dilemmas for those who are fighting it.

Above all, this new war is being fought, not just on the battlefield, but in the mind.

The West and its Islamist adversaries are competing for Muslim opinion - and that means Muslim opinion in Birmingham and Jakarta, as well as Baghdad and Kabul.

So in this battle for hearts and minds, how do you protect law-abiding Muslims, while continuing to capture or kill the violent ones?

And can you be sure you can tell the difference?

One British defence expert remarked: "We're not looking for a needle in a haystack - we're looking for a piece of straw in a haystack."

Everyone is having to reinvent their traditional role.

Soldiers are no longer just fighters but nation-builders.

Policemen must visit mosques and explain what they do to sceptical Muslim congregations.

Intelligence people are trying to get into the minds of an enemy they only dimly understand.

Government departments can no longer operate as "stovepipes" - the favourite jargon nowadays for agencies which do not co-operate with one another and sometimes do not even speak to one another.

It is clear there are still significant differences of approach - not least between the Americans, who tend to see terrorism as a form of war, and the Europeans, who tend to see it as a form of crime.

And, as the conference made plain, Europeans are far from being united in their perception of Muslim radicalism in Europe - and how their governments and societies should respond to it.

Pessimistic predictions

There is an abiding fear of social division.

The Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad polarised Muslim and non-Muslim opinion in Europe - and now there are fears that a film about the Koran, made by a right-wing Dutch politician, could do the same.

As for those salesmen for whom the conference was essentially a marketing opportunity, I had to confess to being technically challenged.

I never did master "predictive analytics" - and my favourite bit of gobbledy-gook was "open computer forensics architecture" - or OCFA for short.

And if, like me, you do an internet search for it, you may not end up much the wiser.

What struck me most, in three days of debate, was the degree of pessimism about the task at hand.

Yes, there has been a learning curve.

It is now widely recognised that Muslim hearts and minds matter and that military successes mean little if the battle of ideas is being lost.

But there is still a long way to go.

This came home to me when I spoke to an American military man who had helped produce the US Counter-Insurgency Manual.

How long did he think the "long war" - as many now call it - would last?

It is the kind of question journalists ask, and I did not expect that he would put a number on it.

But he did. "Thirty years if we get it right," he said. "A hundred years if we get it wrong."

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Grappling with global terror conundrum

 

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Toxic world fallout from Iraq invasion

By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent BBC News website

The war in Iraq was supposed to be over long before now.

It was not supposed to provoke a conflict between Sunni and Shia or stir up an al-Qaeda hornet's nest.

Nor was it supposed to alienate much of the rest of the world from US foreign policy, which post 9/11 was on the crest of a wave of sympathy.

It was intended, its proponents argued, to remove a threat to world peace and to plant the flag of freedom in a Middle East democratic desert.

The critics countered that the threat was an illusion, that the US was invading illegally and sought control over the region and Iraq's oil.

Bush doctrine

The Iraq invasion was also part of President Bush's doctrine of pre-emption and of his hopes for what he called the "advance of freedom".

In a speech in November 2003 he declared: "Iraqi democracy will succeed - and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran - that freedom can be the future of every nation."

His doctrine, under which a pre-emptive attack is justified even if the threat is not critical, has been another casualty of the war.

Dr Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said: "All three candidates in the US presidential election will move away from it in significant ways.

"To a significant extent the experience in Iraq has discredited the doctrine of pre-emption, though it has not killed it off. But the US will not naively invade again and simply hope everything will turn out OK, as seems to have happened in Iraq."

Hopes rise again

The last chapter on Iraq of course has not been written. After the recent improvements, there are claims that it will still all work out, not unlike the Korean War, which went through its own disastrous phase.

The former White House economist Lawrence Lindsey, who believes the financial cost of the Iraq war is "relatively minor in budgetary terms", still hopes for the best.

He wrote in Fortune magazine: "A stable Iraqi government selected by its own people would be a first in the Arab world. It would suggest that there is a third alternative to the current choice between repressive regimes and Islamic fundamentalism."

One of those who called in 2006, not for a withdrawal but the surge, was Washington writer Frederick Kagan. In the neo-conservative bible, the Weekly Standard, he says it has worked and credits the American commander General David Petraeus and his subordinate General Raymond Odierno:

"When General Odierno relinquished command of MNC-I [Multi-National Corps Iraq] on February 14, 2008, the civil war was over. Civilian casualties were down 60%, as were weekly attacks. AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] had been driven from its safe havens in and around Baghdad and throughout Anbar and Diyala. The situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed."

The cost

However, even if the war turns out to be "winnable", its critics dismiss any suggestion that it was "worth it".

David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and now with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, said: "Declaring this to be a success based on recent improvements is like saying that a person badly disabled by gunshots has seen his wounds heal. The damage has been done.

"Bush's foreign policy has been a failure and it will be judged on Iraq. He will bear responsibility for an unnecessary and costly war that violated international law, alienated allies and distracted us from the core issues of terrorism, Afghanistan and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

"This has to be the worst managed foreign policy of any president since the Second World War. Even if in the medium term Iraq becomes comparatively peaceful, would it be worth the cost? I do not think so."

The diplomatic fallout

As for America's standing around the world, the war alienated some major American allies, France and Germany most notably. Others did send troops after the invasion - Spain and Italy among them - but then left as public opinions at home turned hostile.

On the other hand, a number of smaller countries, many of them from the former Soviet block, saw an opportunity to show their loyalty to the US and sent contingents - the Czech Republic, Poland, Georgia and others. For them, a strong and active United States bodes well for their future security.


In turn, Britain's support for the United States has led to further divisions within Europe. These had an impact in the Lisbon treaty talks about a future foreign policy for the EU, strengthening the British determination to keep it firmly in the hands of individual governments.

The invasion of Iraq also caused alarm bells to ring in Russia. There, a new mood of hostility to the West has developed and the Russians have become wary of American power.

Nor has Iraq sparked the democratic revolution in the Middle East that Mr Bush hoped for. And the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains unresolved.

Ironically it is Iran, with which the US shares a mutual hostility, that has emerged with greater strength, to the concern of the Gulf Arab states.

The fallout continues.